My Brother Michael

by Janis Owens

  The sound of their footsteps passed, and I waited long enough to give them a good head start, then stepped back on the path and was sneaking down the twisting, cedar-lined hill in strategic retreat when I came upon her quite accidentally, sitting on a little marble bench, a Christmas wreath held to her chest, her eyes on the pointed toes of the cowboy boots she was absently tapping in the sand, her face blank, not in the old way, not dead, but merely tired, oddly disappointed, as if she knew what she was getting for Christmas and was not impressed.

  I stopped as soon as I saw her and looked around for another sidetrack, but there was nowhere to go except back up to the graves where Clayton was, or forward, so I took a breath and said, “Myra?”

  Her eyes were up in one stunned second, her face so white I thought she’d faint.

  “Gabriel?” she whispered, and as soon as she said it, I remembered the one characteristic my brother and I were said to share: we had the same voice.

  I said, quickly, “Damn, Myra, I’m sorry, I didn—”

  She didn’t let me finish, coming off that bench in one gathered spring and hitting me with an embrace of such force that if I hadn’t been such an anchor, it would have sent both of us over backwards. I had already put in two hours worth of sincere crying that morning, so, for once, was able to keep a stiff upper lip, pressing my face to her hair, telling her it was all right.

  “He’s gone, he’s gone—” she cried, with almost exhausting relief, as if she’d been patiently waiting all year long for someone who could properly commiserate with how much she’d lost when she lost her husband Michael.

  “I know,” I whispered back. “I know—” Over and over again. There was just nothing left to say. He was gone and we were left, and when her tears did not abate, I eased her back to the little bench and tried to calm her. “It’s all right. Hush, Myra. It’s all right,” like quieting a frightened child.

  She finally began to slacken off, drawing back and fishing a well-worn handkerchief from her pocket but continuing to clutch my hand, and I was the one who was relieved this time, at her forgiveness, and had a sudden need to apologize for that tornado of viciousness the last time we’d spoken.

  “I was drunk,” I explained, as she wiped her nose and looked at me out of those calm, deep eyes. “I’m an alcoholic.”

  It was a landmark confession, really, one of the first times I’d ever admitted to being an alcoholic when I was actually pursuing sobriety, but she couldn’t have been expected to understand the significance of it, and only nodded slightly and even smiled a little when I added, “But I haven’t had a drink in ten months. Well, nine really. Nine months and eighteen days.”

  “You’re doing better than me,” she murmured, dabbing the mascara under her eyes. “I’m back on meds. Will be till I die, Dr. Williams has anything to do with it.”

  I thought it kind she mention her own emotional shortcomings as I unveiled mine, and smiled as I said, “That’s not the same, though.”

  She finished with her eyes and drew close to me again. “Mama thought so,” she said pensively. “Thought I was a drug addict or something.”

  I had a flash of Cissie Catts outrage. “Damn, your mother was a bitch” I said, and she stirred uneasily at my side.

  “Don’t curse my mother, Gabriel. You always hated her, and you never even knew her.”

  I murmured an apology, not meaning a word of it, and we were quiet again, sitting close for the sheer animal warmth, the distant, hollow whirl of the mower somewhere below, charging the air with a faint, wafting scent of summer, and it was amazing really, how easily we stepped back in stride. For it’d been so long since I’d sat down and spoken with the real Myra Sims—not the skinny one—and here we were, in immediate contact, me defending her, her telling me to hush, me taking it back, but not meaning a word of it.

  “Where’ve you been?” she asked, and I looked at her.

  “New York. Didn’t Michael tell you?”

  “I mean, this year. What took so long? Your Mama’s been worried to death.”

  I was pleased my absence had been a cause for concern among the ladies and lifted an eyebrow. “What about you? You been worried?”

  She looked at me a moment, then a small smile began playing around her mouth, “Oh, I knew you’d turn up. Michael said you would.” She plucked at her handkerchief. “I been pretty busy myself. Got married last week.”

  The effect was so awful I felt it down to my toes, but she didn’t appear bothered at all, that mad, cruel smile still playing on her mouth. “Married your cousin Randell. He come down for the funeral, and we hit it off. He divorced Cynthia, took a job at Sanger—”

  I was sitting there with ice water blood, thinking this woman was, in spirit and in truth, schizophrenic. Worse than schizophrenic: a succubus from hell, the scourge of an otherwise pedestrian life—when she pressed her face to my chest, and I realized she was laughing.

  “I’m teasing, Gabriel. I’m teasing. You should see your face—Gabriel?”

  I tell you what, I didn’t think it was too damn funny after all I’d been through, and when Clayton came back, I was still a little wobbly, not saying much, just standing and shaking his hand, telling him it was nice to meet him.

  When Myra left to put her wreath on the grave, I looked at him. “Your cousin Randell been around here lately?”

  “Who?” he asked, still sniffling.

  “Randell Chaffee. Fat guy with black hair. Wife’s named Cynthia.”

  He shook his head. “Not since the funeral. They were here for that.”

  I nodded, still a little shaken, and when Myra returned, she shook her head at me. “Well, Gabriel? What’s got into you? You used to tease me all the time.”

  “I must have lost my sense of humor,” I murmured, but she just laughed, putting her arm through mine and walking me down the path, Clayton falling in step behind us, and when we got to her car at the bottom of the hill, I remembered I’d left mine on the other side.

  “D’you want me to drive you around?” Myra asked. “I’ve got to take Clay home; him and Curtis are going fishing. You need to go see your Mama. She’s got the Salvation Army out looking for you.”

  It seemed so strange that just as I was regaining them, we were having to part, and while I was still distant from Clayton, unsure of my footing and trying to seem like a regular uncle, I had an odd, bone-deep premonition that if I let Myra out of my sight, I’d never see her again and made some excuse or another to tag along with them.

  “Do you need anything from your car?” she asked. “A suitcase?”

  “No,” I said, getting in the passenger seat. “All my stuff’s in New York.” We were pulling out of the gates when something else occurred to me. “Come to think of it, I might have left the cat in. Remind me to call my landlady when we get to the house.”

  “Gabriel—” Myra laughed, shaking her head.

  Clayton finally spoke up from the back seat, “How long you staying?”

  I couldn’t tell by his tone if he had an opinion in the matter and looked at him in the rearview mirror. “I don’t know. Depends, I guess.”

  He didn’t ask what it depended on, but only nodded and kept his eyes on the town that was tinseled and lighted for Christmas, the stores open early, the parking lots already full of harassed mothers and trailing children.

  I put my arm up on the back of Myra’s seat so I could talk to him over my shoulder. “So where are you going fishing?” I asked.

  His eyes were still on the town when he answered. “Dead Lakes,” he said, then swung his face around in one smooth motion till he met my eyes. “Curtis has a boat.”

  That gesture, the pause before answering, then the full weight of his eyes, was so much like Michael that for a moment I could only blink, then say, quickly, “Oh, yeah, we used to go down there a lot. Daddy and Michael and I. Had to rent a boat.”

  The town was still twinkling and festive around us, but I felt a story begin to develop as I covered my unease. �
��One time, I guess I was eight or nine, Daddy took us down there a whole week.” I smiled at the memory, suddenly comfortable, drawn into the past. “I mean, we never went anywhere, but Daddy got a week off, decided it was time we had a real vacation. Boy, we thought we were special.”

  I laughed aloud and saw that Clayton’s face was very arrested, his eyes dark blue, the same color and texture his mother’s had been over the pig wire fence on Magnolia Hill.

  “Decided to go down to the Dead Lakes. Daddy rented a cabin, and hot? Was it hot? I bet it was a hundred and three in the shade, and the mosquitoes—there were scads of them. You could hold out your arm and count fifty, but there was nothing you could do. There weren’t any air conditioners. Hell, I don’t think the place had screens, just a dirt floor and a refrigerator and a sink, but we didn’t care. Boy, we were living high, we were on vacation.”

  Clayton’s face had lightened a little, and even Myra was smiling, for I was conjuring Michael for them, bringing him back from that cold grave.

  “The first night we caught, I bet, forty pounds of fish. Something was running, I can’t remember what. Maybe reds. Anyway, we filled up the freezer, then slept all day and went out the next night, and they were running again, but there was no place to put ‘em. The freezer was full, there was nobody to give ‘em to, so we had to throw ‘em back, then go back to that hot cabin and try to sleep. Well, I was already forseeing a week of horror, but Daddy knew I was a whiner and made me swear on the Bible I wouldn’t say a word, not a word, so all I could do was scratch and pray for Friday, ‘cause I knew we’d rented that cabin a whole damn week.

  “Well it went on like that for two more days. I bet we were catching sixty pounds of fish a night, then taking them off the hook and pitching them back and trying to sleep in that hot cabin with the mosquitoes. I was about to lose my mind. So was Michael; he looked like he had the measles. But he was a fighter; he didn’t say a word. Then about eleven o’clock one morning, it must have been Wednesday, Daddy sat up on the pallet all of a sudden and looked at his arm—” I stopped, laughing too hard to speak, for Daddy’s bewildered face was so real to me as he sat there in his underwear and looked at the two dozen mosquitoes lighting on his arm. ‘And he said, ‘Boys, if this is vacation, well they can shore have it. Pack up the truck, we’re a-going home.’“

  (Incidentally, this entailed a small revision on my part. What he really murmured was: “Shit on this”—one of the few times I ever remember my father using casual profanity; but anyway, the sentiment was the same.)

  Both Myra and Clayton were laughing as we drove out Thomasville Road, Clayton’s face suddenly young again, as if death had never touched him at all.

  “And the heck of it was, we had to eat them stinking fish for a solid month. Mama was mad we come home early, said we’d lost money on the cabin, so we had to make it up in groceries.”

  I paused as we turned off the highway, looking for the house, beginning to see glimpses of it through the trees, still old and lazy and quietly symmetrical beneath the massive oaks, a truck towing a johnboat parked in the drive.

  “Sorry we’re late,” Myra called, stopping to let Clayton out.

  “Gabriel’s here. Gabriel, do you know Curtis?”

  She was making the introduction through the car window, but Curtis got out with good country manners to shake my hand, saying, “No, I don’t b’lieve so.”

  He was young and thin, somehow very familiar, and I squinted at him. “Do I know your daddy?”

  “Sure you do,” Myra said. “Clyde Simmons. Curtis is his youngest.” Then to Curtis, “Did Lori get that coat I left her at Cissie’s?”

  Curtis was making some reply when I realized Clayton was standing by the car window, looking at me. “You wanna go?” he asked. “There’s plenty of room. Sim usually comes.”

  Myra halted her conversation with Curtis to answer for me. “No, baby, he’s been driving all night. He needs to go to bed. You go on. He’ll be here when you get back.”

  He left without argument, and I followed Myra through the front door and down the long, high hall with a feeling of imminent satisfaction. Clayton liked me, for one thing, and Myra had said something about the bed for another, and I looked around the sunroom that was narrower than I remembered, and infinitely more cluttered, the cold wood floor covered with bright rugs, the walls full of pictures and paintings and dried flowers almost ceiling to floor.

  “Where’s Missy?” I asked, and Myra sat down on the couch, a portable phone in her hands.

  “She went to Helen with the Chapins,” she said. ‘And Simon’s camping on St. Joseph’s with some men from the church.”

  “What’s this?” I asked, as she began punching in numbers. “Who’re you calling?”

  “Your mother,” she said over the receiver. “I’m serious, Gabriel. She’s been worried to death.”

  But she let me take the phone from her, and for a moment, that very real, very palpable relief seemed to wash over her as I pressed my mouth on hers, and it was so sweet for a moment that everything else faded, everything but the woman beneath me, until she pulled back.

  “What are you doing?” she murmured, feeling the front of her blouse.

  What I was doing was unbuttoning her shirt, a seemingly inevitable step in getting to the bed, but when she felt her bra, she shoved me away.

  “I can’t believe you, Gabriel!” she cried, standing and rebuttoning her shirt with angry little jerks of her hands. “D’you think you can just blow into town and hit the hay in half an hour?”

  She seemed to be waiting for an answer, but it was hard to be articulate with the blood pounding in my head. “What about the bed? You told Clayton we were going to bed.”

  “I said you were going to bed. You look awful. I’m going to get your mother, who’s been spending about half her social security check every month calling around Boston looking for you.”

  “I been in New York three years—”

  “I don’t care if you been in hell three years. I’m going over there to get her while you take a nap.”

  “A nap?” I cried, then I rubbed my face and tried to get a grip on myself. “Myra, Myra,” I said, “settle down. Mama’s fine. Here, sit.”

  She sat down, not on the couch, but across the rug on the edge of the coffee table, and I tried to be calm, rubbing my face, thinking it was time we got a few things straight.

  “I love you, Myra,” I said quietly. “I always loved you. I came back as soon as I could, to marry you. You know that, don’t you?”

  Her face softened a little at the sincerity in my voice, and she smiled. “I know that, Gabriel.”

  “Well, do you love me?” I was bold enough to ask, and she met my eyes levelly.

  “You know I do.”

  I put my face in my hands a moment and tried to smile, but I couldn’t help it, there was a scream in me and it had to come out. “Then why the hell aren’t we in bed? I’m thirty-eight years old, too old to be putting up with any more of this shit!”

  She was on her feet in an instant. “I don’t care if you’re a hundred and eight, you can act right or you can hit the door. Who d’you think yu are, coming in here, acting this way?”

  I told her I was Gabriel William Catts as I hit the door with a flourish, but when I got to the edge of the deck, I remembered I’d left my car at the cemetery, and it only made me madder, having to go back and beg aride.

  I hammered on the French door, yelling in her face when she answered it, “I left my sonofabitch car at the cemetery. Gimme a ride to town.”

  She had been crying, maybe—anyway, her eyes were red, but she wasn’t giving an inch, snatching her purse off the couch and stomping out without a word.

  The drive back to town was—how can I put it?—viciously silent, me muttering that yes I knew why they lynched people around here, why all the men drank, it wasn’t any mystery to me, boy—till Myra told me to shut up.

  But she was crying when she said it, feeling around in he
r purse for a Kleenex, and by the time we made the cemetery, I was the one who softened.

  “Myra,” I said, as she idled next to my car, waiting for me to get out. “Here. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to yell at you.”

  She wiped her face without a word, but when I took her hand, she didn’t snatch it back, and I pressed forward gingerly. “It’s just that, see, I love you so much and I’ve waited so long.”

  “I know,” she said softly, and I smiled and kissed her little white hand.

  ‘And listen, I’m an alcoholic. It’s not easy for me to stay celibate and sober, too. I mean, I can handle one or the other, but the combination’s killing me.”

  She only turned and looked at me on that, then took her hand back and wiped her nose and began feeling around in her purse. There was something very deliberate about the way she was going about it, as if she were searching for something to give me, say, a house key, or maybe a motel room key, but as I watched, she only retrieved a fancy leather wallet and fumbled with the change purse, taking out a handful of crumpled dollar bills.

  Then, with a very narrow glint in her eye, she began flipping them into my lap, one at a time.

  “Here’s your liquor money,” she said after the third dollar. ‘And here’s your whore money,” after the fifth. Then she snapped the wallet shut and gave me a brilliant smile. “Welcome home, Gabriel William Catts.”

  Then, before I could even scream, she kicked my door open and hissed, “Now you get the hell out of my car, you manipulating little piece of shit, before I throw you out.”

  And before I knew what happened, I was standing on the gravel drive watching the Mercedes’ brakelights flash at the highway, right back where I’d started at six A.M.:alone, with no one to talk to, not even Michael, because after getting whipped like that, I was ashamed to face him.

  Chapter

  15

  I stood there awhile on that field of bones, then got in the car, congratulating myself on keeping a good, tenure-track job and being lucky enough to get out of this thing before it was too late. All I needed to do now was go see Mama, maybe set her down with a map and explain the geography of the world above Atlanta, and leave a message for Michael’s children, telling them I was there if they ever needed me. But that was all. No more contact with any of those Sims, not if I could help it, for I found I didn’t possess the missionary patience my brother had in dealing with those red-headed pagans, not even the babygirl.