The Life We Bury

by Allen Eskens

  “Joey you gotta—”

  “Dammit, Mom,” I yelled my whisper, “tell him I said please.”

  A moment of silence, and then, “fine!” My mom turned the phone away so that I could barely hear her. “Joey says please.”

  There was a long pause, but then the officer got on the phone. “Hello.”

  I spoke quickly and quietly. “Officer, I'm sorry about all this, but I have a brother who's autistic. He lives with my mom. I need to know if my mom's getting released today because if she's not, I gotta go take care of my brother.”

  “Well, here's the deal. Your mother's been arrested for DUI.” I could hear my mother cursing and wailing in the background. “I have her at the Mower County Law Enforcement Center to give a breath test. She invoked her right to call an attorney before taking the test, so she's supposed to be using this time to contact an attorney, not calling you to come get her out.”

  “I understand,” I said. “I just need to know if she's getting released tonight.”

  “That would be no.” The officer limited his response in a way that my mother would not hear what was in store for her. I played along.

  “Is she going to detox?”

  “Yes.”

  “How many days?”

  “Between two and three.”

  “Then she'll be released?” I asked.

  “No.”

  I thought for a moment. “From detox to jail?”

  “That is correct, until she makes her first appearance in court.”

  Mom heard the word “court” and began to yell again. In her inebriation and exhaustion, her words swung and lurched like a decrepit rope bridge. “Dammit Joey…get down here. You don't love me…you ungrateful…I'm your mother. Joey, they…they…get down here. Get me out.”

  “Thanks,” I said to the officer. “I really appreciate the help. And good luck dealing with my mom.”

  “Good luck to you, too,” he said.

  I ended the call and turned back around to see Janet and Mrs. Lorngren looking at me like I was a toddler who had just learned that dogs can bite. “I'm sorry about that,” I said. “My mother…she's…not well. I'm not going to be able to meet Carl—uh, Mr. Iverson—today. I have to take care of something.”

  Mrs. Lorngren's eyes softened, her stern expression dissolving into sympathy. “That's fine,” she said. “I'll talk to Mr. Iverson about you. Leave your name and number with Janet and I'll let you know if he is agreeable to meet with you.”

  “I really appreciate that,” I said. I wrote my information on a piece of paper. “I might have my phone turned off for a while, so if I don't answer, just leave a message and let me know what Mr. Iverson says.”

  “I will,” Mrs. Lorngren said.

  A block away from Hillview, I pulled into a parking lot, gripped the steering wheel with all my strength, and shook it violently. “God dammit!” I yelled. “Dammit! Dammit! Dammit! Why can't you just leave me alone!” My knuckles turned white, and I trembled as the wave of anger passed through me. I took a deep breath and waited for the throbbing in my throat to subside, for my eyes to clear. Then, once I had calmed down, I called Molly to let her know that I wouldn't be able to work the door. She wasn't happy, but she understood. After I hung up, I tossed the phone on the passenger seat and began the long drive south to get my brother.

  Most people have never heard of Austin, Minnesota, and those that have heard of it know it because of Spam, a salted pork product that never rots and feeds soldiers and refugees all over the world. It's the crown jewel of the Hormel Foods Corporation and the nickname-sake of my home town—Spam Town. They even have a museum in Austin devoted to the greatness of Spam. And if that didn't stamp Austin with the equivalent of a prison tattoo, there was the strike.

  It happened four years before I was born, but kids growing up in Austin learn about the strike the way some children learn about Lewis and Clark or the Declaration of Independence. A recession in the early 1980s had taken a chunk out of the meat-packing industry, so Hormel asked the union to take a big pay cut. Of course, that went over like a kick to the nuts, and the strike began. Pushing and shoving on the picket line led to riots. The violence attracted the networks, and one television crew clocked out by crashing a helicopter into a cornfield up near Ellendale. The governor finally sent in the National Guard, but by then the violence and animosity had left a mark on the town that some would say gave it character. I just saw it as an ugly scar.

  Like any town, Austin had its good points, too, although most people don't see the skin beside the pimples. It had parks, a pool, a decent hospital, a Carmelite monastery, its own municipal airport, and it was only a hop away from the famous Mayo Clinic in Rochester. It had a community college where I had been taking classes while, at the same time, working two part-time jobs. In three years, I had saved up enough money and racked up enough credits to allow me to transfer to the U of M as a junior.

  Austin also had thirteen bars, not counting hotel bars and service clubs, and with a population of twenty-three thousand—give or take—Austin had one of the highest bar-to-citizen ratios in greater Minnesota. I knew the bars well, having been in every one of them at one point or another. I stepped into my first bar when I was a mere nub of a kid, probably no more than ten years old. My mother left me at home to keep an eye on Jeremy while she went out for a drink or two. Being two years older than my brother and him being autistic—making him such a quiet kid and all—Mom felt that I was plenty old enough to babysit.

  That night, Jeremy sat in an arm chair in the living room watching his favorite video, The Lion King. I had geography homework to do, so I locked myself in the tiny bedroom he and I shared. I don't remember most of the rooms we shared over the years, but I remember that one: walls as thin as crackers, painted the same bright blue that coats the bottom of every public swimming pool in the world. You could hear the slightest sound from one room to the next, including the songs of The Lion King, which Jeremy played over and over and over. I sat atop our bunk bed—a second-hand piece of crap with springs so useless that our mattresses had to rest on sheets of plywood—covering my ears to try and block out the noise. But it did little to muffle the incessant, repetitive music kicking through the porous wall of my concentration. I'm not sure if this next part is true or an embellishment of my memory born of guilt, but I asked Jeremy to turn down the volume, and I swear he turned it up instead. A guy can only take so much.

  I stomped into the living room and pushed Jeremy out of his chair, causing him to fall hard against the wall. The impact knocked loose a picture above his head, a picture of me holding him when I was three and he was a baby. The picture popped off of its nail, fell down the wall, and crashed into the top of Jeremy's blonde head, the glass shattering into a hundred spikes.

  After Jeremy brushed the debris off of his arms and legs, he looked at me. A wedge of glass stuck out of the top of his head like an oversized coin jammed in an undersized piggy-bank slot. His eyes narrowed, not in anger, but in confusion. Jeremy rarely looked me in the eye, but that day he stared at me like he was on the verge of solving some great riddle. Then, abruptly, as if he'd found his answer, his eyes softened and his gaze shifted to the blood drops accumulating on his arm.

  I grabbed a towel from the bathroom, carefully removed the glass from his head, which hadn't penetrated as deep as I had feared, and wrapped the towel around him like a turban. I used a washcloth to wipe the blood off his arm and waited for the bleeding to stop. After ten minutes, blood still trickled from the cut, and the white towel had become blotched with large, bright-red patches. I rewrapped the towel around Jeremy's head, put his hand on the end of the towel to hold it in place, and ran out the door to find our mother.

  Mom didn't need to leave a trail of bread crumbs for me to find her. Our car sat in the driveway of the duplex with two flat tires, which meant that Mom had to be within walking distance. This limited my options to a couple bars. It didn't strike me as odd at the time that my mother left
me alone to look after an autistic brother and never bothered to mention where she was going, or that I automatically knew to look for her in the bars. Then again, a lot of what I considered normal in my childhood appears so completely messed up when I look back now. I found her on my first try, at the Odyssey Bar.

  The emptiness of the place caught me by surprise. I'd always envisioned my mother stalking off to join an army of beautiful people who joked, laughed, and danced like they did on the TV commercials. But this place had bad country music crackling through cheap speakers, uneven floors, and reeked of feckless mediocrity. I saw my mother right away, chatting with the bartender. At first, I couldn't tell if the look on her face showed anger or concern. But she answered that question by grabbing my arm with a blood-cutting grip and dragging me out of the bar. We walked at a brisk pace back to the apartment and found Jeremy watching his movie, his hand still on the towel where I'd left it. When Mom saw the bloody towel, she lost a hinge.

  “What in the hell did you do! Jesus Christ. Look at this mess!” She pulled the towel off his head and lifted Jeremy off the floor by his arm, dragging him into the bathroom and lifting him into the empty bath tub. Blood matted his fine blonde hair. She threw the bloody towel into the sink and went to the living room to scrub three tiny spots of blood from the rust-brown carpeting.

  “You had to use my good towel,” she yelled. “You couldn't just grab a rag. Look at this blood in the carpet. We could lose our damage deposit. Did you ever stop to think about that? No. You never think. You just make the goddamn mess, and I have to clean it up.”

  I went into the bathroom, half to get away from my mother and half to be with Jeremy in case he got scared. He didn't get scared though; he never got scared. Or if he did, he never showed it. He looked at me with a face that, to the rest of the world, would appear expressionless, but I could see the shadow of my betrayal behind his eyes. No matter how much I have tried to put that night behind me, to bury it someplace deep inside and let it die, the memory of Jeremy looking up at me continues to breathe.

  Jeremy was eighteen now, old enough to stay alone in the apartment for a few hours, but not for a few days. As I pulled into the driveway of Mom's apartment that night, the Twins and the Indians were all tied up at one run apiece in the third inning. I let myself in with my spare key and found Jeremy watching Pirates of the Caribbean, his new favorite movie. He looked surprised for only a second, then he looked at the floor between us.

  “Hey Buddy,” I said. “How's my little bro?”

  “Hello Joe,” he said.

  When Jeremy started middle school, the district assigned him a teaching assistant named Helen Bollinger. She knew about autism, understood Jeremy's need for patterns and routines, his preference for solitude, his aversion to touching or being touched, and his inability to understand much beyond primal needs and black-and-white instruction. While Mrs. Bollinger struggled to bring Jeremy out of his darkness, my mother encouraged him to be seen and not heard. That wrestling match went on for seven years, with Mrs. Bollinger winning more than she lost. By the time he graduated from high school, I had a brother who could carry on something akin to a conversation, even if he had to struggle to look at me when we talked.

  “Maybe I thought you were at the college,” Jeremy said, speaking in a strict staccato cadence, as if he were placing each word in careful order upon a conveyor belt.

  “I came back to see you,” I said.

  “Oh, okay.” Jeremy turned back to watch his movie.

  “Mom called me,” I said. “She's got a meeting, and she's not gonna be home for a while.”

  It was easy to lie to Jeremy, his trusting temperament being incapable of understanding deceit. I didn't lie to him to be mean. It was just my way of explaining things to him without the complexity or nuance that came with the truth. The first time that my mother found her way to detox, I came up with the lie that she was at a meeting. After that, I told Jeremy that Mom had a meeting every time she ran off to one of the Indian casinos or flopped at some guy's house for the night. Jeremy never asked about the meeting, never wondered why some meetings lasted a few hours and others lasted a few days, never wondered why these meetings happened so suddenly.

  “This meeting is one of those long meetings,” I said. “So you get to stay with me for a few days.”

  Jeremy stopped watching TV and began looking around the floor, a thin furrow forming above his eyebrows. I could tell that he was building up to making eye contact with me, a task that did not come naturally to him. “Maybe I will stay here and wait for Mom,” he said.

  “You can't stay here. I have to go to my classes tomorrow. I gotta take you with me, to my apartment.”

  My answer wasn't what he wanted to hear. I could tell because he stopped trying to look me in the eye, a clue that his anxiety was on the rise. “Maybe you can stay here and go to your classes in the morning.”

  “My classes are at the college. That's a couple hours away from here. I can't stay here, Buddy.” I remained calm but firm.

  “Maybe I will stay here by myself.”

  “You can't stay here, Jeremy. Mom told me to come get you. You can stay at my apartment at college.”

  Jeremy began to rub his left thumb across the knuckles of his right hand. He did this when his world made the least sense. “Maybe I can wait here.”

  I sat on the couch next to Jeremy. “This'll be fun,” I said. “It'll just be you and me. I'll bring the DVD player, and you can watch any movie you want. You can pack a whole bag of nothing but movies.”

  Jeremy smiled.

  “But Mom's not gonna be back for a few days, and I need you to come to my apartment. Okay?”

  Jeremy thought hard for a bit then said, “Maybe I can bring Pirates of the Caribbean?”

  “Sure,” I said. “It'll be fun. We'll make it an adventure. You can be Captain Jack Sparrow, and I'll be Will Turner. What do you say?”

  Jeremy looked up at me and did his favorite imitation of Captain Jack, saying, “This is the day you'll always remember as the day you almost caught Captain Jack Sparrow.” Then Jeremy laughed until his cheeks turned red, and I laughed with him, the way that I always laughed when Jeremy cracked a joke. I grabbed some garbage bags and gave one of them to Jeremy to fill with DVDs and clothes, making sure that he packed enough to last a while, just in case Mom didn't make bail.

  As I pulled out of the driveway, I contemplated my work and class schedules, trying to find gaps that would allow me to keep an eye on Jeremy. On top of that, distracting questions tripped through my brain. How would Jeremy get along in the unfamiliar world of my apartment? Where would I find the time or the money to bail my mother out of jail? And how the hell did I become the parent in this wreck of a family?

  On the drive back to the Twin Cities, I watched the anxiety pace back and forth behind my brother's eyes, his brow and forehead creasing and relaxing as he processed what was happening. As the miles fell behind my tires, Jeremy grew more comfortable with our adventure until finally he relaxed with a deep exhale, the way I've seen dogs sigh in that moment when vigilance surrenders to sleep. Jeremy—the boy who laid his head on the bottom level of our bunk bed and shared my room, my closet, and my dresser drawers for eighteen years—was with me again. We had never been apart for more than a night or two in all our lives until a month ago, when I moved to campus, leaving him behind with a woman who swam in chaos.

  As far back as I could remember, my mom had been prone to wild mood swings—laughing and dancing across the living room one minute, throwing dishes around the kitchen the next—classic bipolar from what I understand. Of course that diagnosis was never made official because my mother refused to get professional help. Instead, she lived her life with her fingers in her ears, as though the truth would not exist if she never heard the words spoken aloud. Add to that cauldron an ever increasing measure of cheap vodka—a form of self-medication that quelled the inner scream but amplified the outer crazy—and you get a picture of the mot
her I left behind.

  She hadn't always been that bad though. In the early years, my mother's moods used to have a ceiling and a floor that kept the neighbors, and Child Protective Services, out of our lives. We even had some good times. I can remember the three of us going to the Science Museum, the Renaissance Festival, and the Valley Fair Amusement Park. I can remember her helping me with my math homework when I struggled to multiply double digits. I could sometimes find a crack in the wall that had grown between us and remember her laughing with us and even loving us. When I tried, I could remember a mother who could be warm and soft on those days when the world stayed off her back.

  That all changed the day my Grandpa Bill died. A feral restlessness descended upon our little trio that day, as though his death severed the one tether that gave my mother stability. After his death she let go of what little restraint she possessed and simply floated on the wave of her moods. She cried more, yelled more, and lashed out whenever the world overwhelmed her. She seemed determined to find the darker edges of her life and embrace them as some kind of new normal.

  Hitting was her first rule change. It started gradually, but eventually she took to slapping me across the face whenever her tea-kettle brain started to boil. As I got older and less sensitive to the slaps, she adjusted her aim to hit me in the ear. I hated that. Sometimes she would use implements like wooden spoons or wire flyswatter handles to make her point. Once, in seventh grade, I had to miss a wrestling tournament because the welts on my thighs were visible around my wrestling uniform and she forced me to stay home. For years she left Jeremy out of our battles, preferring to take all of her frustrations out on me. But as time went by, she began to lose control with him, too, yelling and cursing at him.

  Then, one day she went too far.

  When I was eighteen and out of high school, I came home to find my mother particularly drunk and angry and hitting Jeremy in the head with a tennis shoe. I dragged her into her bedroom and threw her down on the bed. She got up and tried to hit me. I grabbed her wrists, spun her around, and tossed her back onto the bed. She tried twice more to come at me and ended each attempt face down on her mattress. After the last attempt, she paused to catch her breath and ended up passing out. The next morning, she acted like nothing had happened, like she had no memory of her craziness, like our little family unit wasn't on the brink of its inevitable collapse. I played along, but I knew—I knew that she had reached a point where she could justify hitting Jeremy. I also knew that once I left for college it would likely get worse. Those thoughts made my chest hurt. And so, just as my mother pretended nothing was wrong after her blackout, I buried my thoughts deep inside, hiding them where they would remain undusted.