by Adam Ross
“Sad.”
“Yeah, but here’s the fucked-up thing.” Kevin double-checked that he was out of earshot. “He can’t read.”
“Seriously?”
“He’s completely illiterate. He can add and subtract and do numbers, but words? Forget it.”
Kevin’s office was like every shitty manager’s office he’d ever worked in, with nudie Budweiser posters on the wall, the depressing grid of server schedules, purveyor numbers, a litter box for the mouser, except in this one there was a gaping hole in the Sheetrock in the far corner the size of a door. And on a large card table were some twenty rows of neat piles of bills: ones, fives, tens, twenties, fifties, and hundreds.
“What happened to the wall?”
“Oh.” He grabbed an adding machine from his desk and placed it on the table, removed the rubber band from the first pile, counted it lightning fast by hand, then punched in the amount on the calculator, the ticker making a sound like a sprinkler as the number printed on the register tape. Then he rebanded the wad and dropped it into a brown paper bag. “We got broken into three weeks ago. Fucking morons tried to blow up our drop safe. See this?” He went over to a black metal box the size of a cat carrier that was bolted to the floor with a circle of soot traced around it. He kicked it with his boot, and it gonged like he’d hit the side of an aircraft carrier. “It’s where we put our money every night. You could tape five sticks of dynamite to this thing and it wouldn’t budge. Which our friends the robbers must have figured out, since they didn’t make a dent in it.”
“It’s good that it held.”
“Not really. They managed to fuse the safe’s door. And they vaporized the cat.”
We looked at each other and immediately fell into hysteria about the cat. I don’t know why we found this so funny but we were laughing so hard we were breathless. Wave after wave kept pounding us until Kevin came up for air—I’d just recovered myself—and said, “Puss-in-Boom,” and that paralyzed us all over again.
“Phew,” he said finally.
I wiped my eyes and asked, “So what do you do with the money?”
He shrugged. “I take it home. Make the deposit the next morning.”
I envisioned him going to his apartment in the middle of the night, Ruth Ann asleep, and sitting down in his smelly suit on the couch, maybe pouring himself some vodka, and dumping all that dirty cash on the coffee table. And it was dirty cash. Singles and fives and twenties that had been crumpled in pockets, used as coasters for beers, stuffed under registers, rolled up and stuck into nostrils, folded into stripper’s garters. Then I thought of Ruth Ann waking up in the morning and looking at that pile while Kevin slept. Because he’d want her to see it, just to show her that he was around a lot of money. But she’d think it wasn’t all that much, then pour a cup of coffee and continue to plot her escape.
Traylor came into the office just as Kevin finished the count. He was carrying two register trays in his arms. My brother, it occurred to me, was always surrounded by enormous men.
“What’d you get?” he asked.
“I got”—Kevin looked at the tape—“$56,782.”
Traylor looked at his own tape. “Ditto.”
“Take the money home tonight, would you?”
“Can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Driving to Poughkeepsie with my wife after we close.”
Kevin glanced at me in a moment of telepathy. “What the fuck’s in Poughkeepsie?”
“Mother-in-law.”
“What about Dana?”
“She left an hour ago,” Traylor said.
Kevin sighed. He was about to pull rank. “All right,” he said. “Do the trays.”
We sat silently as Traylor added up the money from the two other registers, cross-checking his totals against the bartender’s, and while he clicked away at the calculator I watched the back of his close-cropped head, his shoulders the width of a bear’s, and I confess that I imagined putting a book in front of his face and a gun to his head and making him tell me what it said on the page.
“Walk me out,” Kevin said to me when he finished, then picked up the grocery bag and we left.
We walked down Seventh Avenue for a while, talking about Mom and Dad, nothing remarkable or profound. It was a pleasant fall night. I checked my watch again. It was just after 1:30, and I thought that the political thing to do would be to return to the office now. But then I thought, Fuck it. I’ll be back at two sharp, no sooner or later. They get enough out of me. That, and I didn’t want to interrupt this moment. Because this seemed about the best Kevin and I could hope for: just passing time together, with a temporary reprieve from the past. Just talk and walk the street as brothers, no big deal. And then emotion got the better of me—that desire I’ve had all my life for his forgiveness. It wasn’t that I thought I could’ve been a better brother. It was that I realized there’d been periods in my life when I hadn’t given him a thought. He was all I had. I’d been hatching schemes for us, things I thought of very early in the morning when I got home, all the places we could go, and I wanted to tell him.
“You got time for a quick drink?” he said.
“Absolutely.”
“There’s a place my friend manages nearby.”
We walked downtown two blocks, then turned west on 16th.
“I really appreciate you coming by tonight.”
“It’s no problem.”
“I think I’m solid enough now that I won’t blow my brains out if I’m alone.”
“Never blow your brains out over a woman. Let alone Ruth Ann.”
“Seriously, though. I appreciate it. I know you’re busy.”
“You’d do the same.” I wasn’t sure of that but I wanted to believe it.
“I would,” he said.
I took his shoulder and stopped him. “You mean that?”
“Yes.”
“Then I have a favor to ask.”
He looked at my hand, then back at me. I could tell I’d suddenly made him nervous, that I’d somehow imposed on his sad time.
“Go on.”
“I want us to start from scratch,” I said. “Erase all grudges. I see brothers all the time and I wonder why we can’t be like that. So why can’t we? Let’s start now. I pick you up, you pick me up. You cover me, I cover you. We’re friends. We make a commitment to becoming friends, from here on out. Everything else, all that’s past, and we just forget about it. We chalk it up to being young. I know I can do it,” I said. “But I want you to do it with me.”
Kevin stared at his shoes while I talked. He even shook his head once. And when he squinted at me, you’d have thought he suspected some kind of trick, that I’d scammed him or was trying to embarrass him. It was an expression that was totally at odds with what he said next.
“Nothing would make me happier.”
He stuck his hand out, and we shook. Then I pulled him close and held him. “Let’s get that drink.”
That’s when the guy hit me. I felt the crack behind my ear and it sent me sprawling into a parked car. I blacked out for a second and came to on all fours, watching blood from my head drip one two three between my fingers onto the pavement. I heard my brother say, “Whoa! Whoa!” Dizzily, I rolled over onto my back and leaned against the car door.
A black kid was pointing a revolver at Kevin, who had both his hands up in the air. The kid wore a bandanna over his nose and mouth and a black hat pulled down over his brow, and between these his eyes were livid.
“Don’t,” I said.
He now pointed the gun at me; I could see the torpedo-glint of the bullet tips in the cylinder. They looked like snakes peering out of a pit.
“Empty your pockets,” he said.
Still woozy, I reached for the wrong jacket pocket. While I was feeling around in it, he cracked me across the bridge of my nose with the grip. Blood immediately poured from my nostrils into my palms, warm and copious.
“Hurry up!” he said.
�
��He’s giving it to you,” Kevin said.
The kid pulled the hammer back and put the gun to Kevin’s forehead, pressing him back with the barrel until he was sprawled on the hood of the car. “Shut the fuck up.”
“Here,” I said. I’d found my wallet and held it out toward him. It shook in my hand.
“The watch,” he said.
It was a Rolex my father had given me for my college graduation.
Kevin sat up, offering his own wallet. “Just take our money.”
The kid pistol-whipped him across the cheek, opening a gash, and Kevin covered his face with his arms.
“Please!” I said, holding out the watch. He took it.
“Motherfucker,” Kevin said.
The guy put the gun to Kevin’s head again. “What’d you say?”
“Nothing.”
“Get on your knees.”
Kevin lowered his arms away from his face. Blood was dribbling down his chin and onto his shirt. “I’m sorry.”
“I said get on your fuckin’ knees.”
Kevin slowly sank to his knees, then dropped his hands at his sides, staring straight ahead like a zombie. A strange silence fell over us, a beat that seemed deliberative, because the kid looked at Kevin as if he’d posed a question, and then, having arrived at the answer, put the gun to my brother’s temple and said, “Close your eyes, bitch”—to Kevin or to me, I wasn’t sure. But Kevin obeyed. “Caleb,” he whispered.
I screamed.
The kid sucker-punched him. The blow sent the grocery bag flying from Kevin’s grip, some of the stacks of bills tumbling out. Stunned by its contents, he squatted down over the bag like it was an animal he had to cajole toward him. Then he stuffed the few stacks back into it and bolted down the street, laughing hideously.
It took the cops several minutes to get to us, and by then the guy was long gone. In the meantime, Kevin and I tended to each other’s wounds. The gash across his face was bad—maybe three inches long—and needed stitches. His lip was split wide open, and two of his teeth were loose.
I got off comparatively easy. The back of my head had already stopped bleeding. My nose was fat and broken—re-broken, I should say. I’d busted it wrestling in high school. It had a hump in the middle and also curved slightly to the left. Now, I thought to myself, I can get it fixed.
The whole process with the police—from going to the station to filing the report—took nearly two hours, and at one point I excused myself to call the office, prepared for another dose of pain from Chucky, but he was surprisingly understanding. I’d lucked into a rare lode of sympathy. “Wife and I got mugged two years ago behind Lincoln Center,” he said. “Guy beat the piss out of me too.” Then I remembered seeing him come into the office with the same black-and-blue raccoon’s mask around his eyes and sinuses that I’d have tomorrow, and I recalled I’d reveled in the story of his beating.
“This is officially the worst twenty-four hours of my life,” Kevin said.
“Let’s get you to a hospital,” I said. The police were finally done with us.
“I’m so fucked.”
“Come on,” I said. “You need your face and mouth looked at.”
“I want to go home.”
“Kevin …”
“I don’t have insurance, all right?” He shook his head and stared at the sky. “Look, I’m sorry you lost your watch and some credit cards, but I just lost fifty grand that wasn’t mine.” He was on the verge of tears. “I fucking want to go home.”
“All right,” I said.
We caught a cab and headed uptown and sat quietly for most of the ride. My nose felt like a balloon slowly filling with water. I leaned my head back and watched the streetlights whip by. Kevin started laughing, and when he smiled his split lower lip opened like a V and exposed the black clots of blood around his teeth.
“What’s so funny?”
“I’ve never seen you so scared in my life. Oh,” he said, “that was almost worth fifty thousand. You had that wallet out and it was shaking like a leaf.”
I started to laugh too.
Then Kevin’s laughter turned into weeping. “What am I going to do?”
“I’ll take care of it. Don’t worry about the money.”
“What does that mean?”
“That I’ll represent you. Cover you. Whatever.”
“You’d do that?”
“Of course.”
I was about to tell him my plan: I wanted him to open a restaurant somewhere upstate. Somewhere quiet. I wanted out of law. I wanted us to be a family.
Then Kevin’s phone rang. He looked at the screen. “Well, well,” he said, flashing the caller ID. “It’s Ruthie.”
I listened as Kevin told her the story of our mugging, without any embellishments or embarrassing details. Would that come later? I wondered, him elaborating on how scared I’d been? I didn’t care. I could still see the cylinder and the bullets.
“My phone’s dying,” Kevin told her. “Ruthie, no, I don’t think you should …” But then the phone went dead, and he sighed.
“She wants to come take care of me.”
“So let her.”
“I don’t know.”
I sat up straight as the world fell forward past my head, then righted itself. I felt something slip in my nostrils, and the blood poured out again in a rush.
“Jesus,” Kevin said. “Should I have this guy take you to a hospital?”
“They’re just going to pack my nose until a specialist can see me.”
“All right.”
“Not all right,” the cabbie protested. “Very not all right! You messing up the seat!”
“Let me come up to your apartment and get a towel or something,” I said.
“Sure. I can get Ruth Ann to stop at the Koreans’. What do you need?”
“Lots of gauze.”
“Give me your phone.”
He called Ruth Ann while I bunched the front of my shirt to my face. I rested my head against the seat and let the blood run down my throat; it was thick as honey and filled my belly until I felt sick.
Ruth Ann met us at the door in a T-shirt and jeans. For 4:00 a.m., she looked perfectly awake.
“Look at you two,” she said. “Y’all have just been beat up.”
I took out my BlackBerry and phone and sat down on the couch, making an effort not to look while Ruth Ann fawned over him and kissed him, something I could never bring myself to watch.
When Kevin went to the bathroom, she slid next to me. “Let me have a look at you, Caleb. Can I touch your face?”
I’d stopped bleeding. “No,” I said, “it hurts too much. Just give me the gauze and I’ll get out of your hair.”
She brought me the gauze and watched while I plugged my nostrils. “Did he tell you?” she asked.
“Yes.”
She was staring at my face. “It’s not a final thing.”
“What does that mean?”
“I love your brother.”
“I do too.”
“But I have to manage him,” she whispered. “I have to mother him. He gets … stuck. I don’t want to do that my whole life.”
“Then don’t,” I said. My eyes were swelling shut. “Just don’t drag it out.”
Kevin had emerged from the bathroom. His shirt was off and his face was clean, but his lip was still bleeding. “Maybe I do need to go to the hospital,” he said, then brightened. “Caleb’s going to help me,” he said to Ruth Ann.
“Help with what, sweet?”
“Legal representation. I mean, if I need it.”
Ruth Ann blinked twice, and looked at him so blankly, I could see her filing away this new fuckup or piece of bad luck for her closing arguments. She had a mug of hot tea in her hands toward which she shifted her attention, sipping it carefully.
“Well, bless his heart,” she said.
I got up. “I’m going home.”
“Here,” Ruth Ann said, “I’ll walk you out.”
She held the
front door open, flipped the switch on the strike plate so that the latch bolt wouldn’t lock automatically, took my arm, and led me to the elevator. I pressed the button, and we watched the car rise floor by floor.
“I’ve been confused,” she said.
“That’s okay.”
“You don’t hate me? You’d be able to forgive me if Kevin and I worked things out?”
“Of course.”
“Why don’t you let us take you to the hospital?”
“I’ll be fine.”
“All right,” she said as the elevator arrived.
I just looked at her.
“I’m going to kiss you,” she said. “I’ll do it gently.” She kissed my cheek and I let her smell envelope me, that alchemy of shampoo, perfume, and the earthy sweetness of her makeup. Strangely, Ruth Ann was the closest thing I had to a woman in my life. I stepped into the car and turned around, and she waved as the doors started to close. “You’re a good man.”
My father’s older brother, Saul, died of colon cancer when he was fifty-two. I met him twice in my life, and both encounters were unmemorable. Divorced, he lived in California near where his three grown children had settled, and we never visited his family there. Like his father, he was afflicted with poor health. He was overweight and suffered early-onset Type II diabetes; he had a heart murmur and, in his late forties, developed chronic stomach pain, which he put off seeing doctors about because he feared them, so he died of a treatable disease. In my view, Saul’s fragility and mismanagement of his body explained my father’s daily exercise regimen, a half-hour set of calisthenics that we called his Jack LaLanne routine, and his dietary rules: one glass of wine at dinner, and no deli food whatsoever. “Pickled meats,” he’d say, “smothered with pickled cabbage, plus a pickle on the side, all of it washed down with a cream soda. As much salt in that meal as there is in the sea.”
There’s a reason I bring up Saul here. My father always said he wanted Kevin and me to be close, which seemed somewhat hypocritical because neither he nor Saul ever made any effort at all; and my father, like Kevin, always portrayed himself as downtrodden. Saul was four years older, and although I didn’t know him much better than I did their parents, who died before I was born, my father’s stories about his brother’s abuse were legion. When my father was eight years old, for example, and had just learned to roller-skate, Uncle Saul took him to the Steuben Street hill, a giant descent in Middle Village—they grew up in Queens—where the big kids raced everything from soapbox derby cars to sleds. They also set up a slalom of soda bottles, which skaters bombed down forward and backward, weaving their legs through magically, and my father, who wanted to try a run, had asked his brother to hold his arm while he got the feel for the turns. But after a few yards Saul let him go. He kept his balance long enough to reach lethal velocity, then crashed into a parked car’s fender and knocked out his two front teeth. And once, playing tag at their house, when my father tapped him “it” through one of the windows opening onto their patio, my uncle slammed the pane shut and broke his hand. On a trip to Ocean City, Maryland, Saul convinced my father to sunbathe with him on their hotel’s roof deck. He lathered him in baby oil and offered him a reflector for his face, which my father obediently tucked under his chin; he said he’d be back with lunch in a few minutes but didn’t return for an hour—a desertion that put my father in the hospital yet again, this time with second-degree burns. I admittedly took a sick joy in these stories. Such casual abuse came easily to me when Kevin and I were younger. To this day he bitterly recalls the time I convinced him to rescue a bee drowning in my cousin’s pool, and, to my delight, it stung him the moment he plucked it from the water. But these stories also helped me make some sense of their characters: both had total recall of every transgression they’d suffered at their brothers’ hands, and their memories, it seemed to me, were their worst enemies. “I’ve a grand memory for forgetting,” says Robert Louis Stevenson. What happiness in that statement! When we were boys, Kevin’s carefully nurtured sense of injustice drove my dad crazy, which conferred on me this bit of wisdom: we are quickest to object to things in others that we don’t wish to recognize in ourselves.
