Brotherly Love - Pete Dexter

by Pete Dexter

  "I brought youse down here to see something, right? To see what happened ’cause you didn’t stay where I told you."

  Peter’s eyes move from his cousin to his uncle to the men in the chairs. The flesh on each side of the wires is beginning to swell. One of the men moans.

  Peter stares at the broken wrists. The man who moaned leans forward, his face pale and damp, and vomits quietly onto the cement floor.

  And seeing that, Peter vomits too.

  His uncle watches, and slowly nods his head.

  "That’s better," he says.

  * * *

  He climbs out of his window that night and sits with his bare feet against the cold side of the house. He studies the yard twenty feet underneath him, the black car parked across the street with the men inside watching.

  The door to his room opens suddenly, and the light catches him on the ledge. He turns and sees his uncle walking in, looking at his empty bed, then, feeling the cold, at the window. It seems to startle him, to find Peter sitting in the window.

  "The fuck you doin’ out there?" he says. "It’s freezing."

  Peter doesn’t answer; he doesn’t know.

  His uncle sits on the bed, looking nervous. He takes a deep breath.

  "You ain’t going to Nick’s no more," he says.

  Peter doesn’t answer. He thinks of the fall last time, of pushing himself off this same edge and the moment afterward, in the air. "You hear what I told you‘?"

  The boy nods, sensing the fear in his uncle. It’s an old, familiar fear, but the boy can’t delineate the threat. Only that it is connected in some way to his father. Beyond that, he doesn’t know what he holds over him, only that without it, he is helpless.

  Except he can fall. The moment is always in his hands.

  "I’m telling Nick the same thing," his uncle says. "You and Michael show up, he throws you out. When you two get out of school, somebody brings you straight home."

  The boy looks back into the room, and his uncle shakes his head and laughs in an uneasy way, as if he had forgotten that he was angry.

  "You like high places," he says.

  He nods again.

  "Even after you jumped out the window, fucked up your legs like that, you ain’t scared. That’s good."

  He is trying to tell him something now, trying to get to that thing between them that is always there, and is always beyond his reach.

  Without moving an inch, the boy pulls away. His uncle’s laugh settles and dies, with nothing in the room to sustain it. It is quiet a long time.

  "I want you stayin’ away from that gym," he says finally.

  Peter begins to shake his head.

  "You two don’t know better than what you did, Nick don’t know better than to let you, after I go up there myself and tell him the situation, then everybody stays home and don’t get in trouble."

  The boy sees the anger rise in his uncle’s face again, and thinks of the two men sitting in the chairs, connected at the wrists with wire.

  "I’ll stay right there at Nick’s . . ." he says.

  His uncle suddenly looks at him as if he might stand up and push him off the ledge himself. "You didn’t hear what I told you?" he says.

  He is angry, and then he is afraid. Peter’s father is always there between them. His uncle thinks a long time.

  "You heard it that I popped Constantine‘?" he says finally.

  The boy nods. His uncle stands up and walks to the door, and stops there to look at the boy again.

  "Anything you hear about it," he says, "it’s bullshit. The thing I’m telling you is this: That was for your father."

  And then he steps into the light of the hallway and closes the door behind him.

  * * *

  Nick turns the corner, carrying a Danish for the old man wrapped in a napkin in his pocket, and sees the black Cadillac parked in the middle of the street. The old man is standing in the door of the garage, holding a broom behind his shoulder, like a baseball bat. His face is red and he is sputtering at the two men in front of him. The men are both wearing casts from their elbows to their fingers. They stand just outside the arc of the old man’s broom, looking at each other as if they don’t know what to do.

  Nick crosses the street and hears one of them talking to the old man. "Listen," he says, "just go in there and tell Nick that Phillip Flood wants to talk to him. That he’s waitin’ in the car . . ."

  The old man listens to that, then steps forward and swings the broom. The swing is slow, the wind taking away what little power he has, and pulls him off balance.

  One of them smiles.

  The old man stumbles and then regains his footing and cocks the broom behind his shoulder again. Nick passes the car, seeing the shadow of Phillip Flood’s head behind the dark glass windows, and then steps onto the sidewalk and pries the broom out of Urban Matthews’s hands. He smells the old man’s excitement.

  "Leave me have it," he says quietly, and the old man lets go and then steps back into the garage and sits on a box of motor oil. Nick holds the broom and looks at the men in casts.

  The back door of the Cadillac opens and Phillip Flood climbs out slowly, looking around as if he had never seen this place before. He looks at Nick without smiling and then walks, uninvited, into the garage. The men with the casts turn to watch the street.

  Nick walks into the garage behind him, his sight adjusting to the dark. The old man follows them with tired eyes. He hacks deep in his throat and then drops his head to spit between his shoes.

  Phillip Flood stops and turns around. Nick puts his hands in his pockets and waits; he feels the old man’s Danish. He thinks of the letter from Iowa, the neat, Catholic-school handwriting. His daughter. He is suddenly sure that the old man has a daughter.

  "I ask you a couple of favors, Nick," Phillip Flood says, building to something. "Teach the kids to take care of themself, watch out for them up here until this thing about Constantine cools off . . ."

  Nick takes the Danish out of his pocket, careful to hold it with the napkin, and hands it that way to the old man. "Go on upstairs," he says.

  The old man looks at him, not moving.

  "It’s all right," Nick says. "You hear shooting down here, get your broom and come on back down."

  He stands up slowly and heads toward the stairs.

  "They’re doing all right," Nick says to Phillip Flood.

  Phillip Flood makes a circle with his fingers and thumb and moves his hand up and down, as if he were whacking himself off.

  "One of them’s coming home every night all bunged up, the other one’s never got a scratch."

  Nick shrugs. "One of them likes to fight," he says, "the other one don’t." He pauses. "You can’t change human nature." He is careful not to say whose human nature he is talking about. Phillip Flood puts the boys together when he talks about them, but they are not the same to him.

  "I’ll tell you about human nature," Phillip Flood says. But he doesn’t. He looks at the ceiling. "I asked you to keep an eye on them two, this Constantine shit going on. The next thing I know, they’re in some shit in West Philly, smacking around some Jewish girl. My human nature is, I am very disappointed."

  Nick stares at him, trying to imagine Peter smacking around a girl. It makes sense to him that the kid is going to have his problems with girls, but not because he smacks them around. Peter is going to be the one doing the ducking; he’ll pick somebody hard to live with.

  He shakes his head, and seeing that, Phillip Flood begins to nod. They stare at each other, holding an argument without words.

  "Bandstand," Phillip Flood says, still nodding, gaining momentum. "That’s where they end up when they’re supposed to be with you. A fucking television show."

  Nick glances at the two men standing in the door. Their casts fill the sleeves of their coats and they watch the street as if violence didn’t matter any more to them than the weather.

  Nick has the passing thought that once you start scaring people to keep them ho
nest, you’ve got to do it all the time. You do it once, nothing else works. He has the passing thought that Phillip Flood had better keep these two scared every minute of their lives.

  Phillip moves a step then, back into his line of sight. He cuts off the direct light from the garage door, and Nick suddenly senses himself being pushed into the back of his own place.

  He doesn’t like that, he doesn’t like the way the two men are standing in the doorway watching the street.

  "What I come over here to tell you," he says, "is I don’t want my boys up here no more. This time, it ain’t a favor. They show up, you throw them out."

  One of the men in the door hears the change in his voice and turns to watch. His jacket is open, and sags to one side with the weight of the gun in the pocket.

  Nick stands still, a foot away from Phillip Flood, studying his face. Watching his intentions change. He sees there is nothing for him now but this moment in this place.

  That is his advantage over Nick, not the two men in the door.

  He pictures Harry coming into the garage after school and finding him on the floor over next to the compressed air tank, and in the same moment he feels the edge of the workbench against his hip. He has backed all the way to the rear of the garage.

  The difference is that he has something to lose.

  "You hear what I told you?" The voice is almost a whisper.

  Nick holds himself still, allows Phillip Flood to inspect him in the dark, allows himself to be insulted.

  "I got work to do," he says finally. "The way I run the place, you decide if you want to come in, I decide if you stay."

  Then he steps forward, brushing past Phillip Flood, and walks to the open hood of the car sitting half in and half out of the garage.

  Phillip Flood doesn’t follow him at first. He stands where he is, still facing the back wall. Nick picks up a wrench lying on a cloth on the car’s fender. The car is twelve years old, and Nick covers the fender before he puts his tools there, not to scratch it. He leans into the engine as if there were no one behind him, as if there were no men standing in the doorway. As if he had nothing to lose either.

  He hears Phillip Flood’s feet on the concrete floor, walking past. Nick feels a chill as he passes: the breeze, or perhaps his shadow cutting off the light from the front door.

  "You got a nice place, Nick," he says.

  The steps move toward the front door, are almost out the door, when the old man appears from the stairwell, holding the broom like an ax, making a noise Nick has never heard before. A terrified noise that seems, when Nick thinks about it later, as if it might have come from the moment in his life when he stopped talking.

  Phillip Flood makes a noise too, a short scream. He falls away from the movement and the noise, stumbling over a jack, and lands on the floor. The old man brings the broom down over his head and hits him in the legs, and then, as fast as he appeared, he is gone, back up the stairs.

  The men help Phillip Flood to his feet. There are grease stains on his coat, and his face is dark. Nick watches him a moment longer, then puts his head back into the engine. Phillip Flood doesn’t say a word. Nick hears a car door open and close, and then two more doors, and then the Cadillac drives up Chadwick Street and disappears.

  A few minutes later, he looks up from the engine and sees the old man standing at the foot of the stairs, still holding the broom.

  "Maybe you ought to go stay somewhere else a few days," he says.

  The old man stares at him, his mouth beginning to move. Nick shakes his head and drops back under the hood.

  "Don’t get excited," he says. "I just mean there could be a problem until they cool off."

  He says this more for himself than the old man. He knows the old man isn’t going anywhere else. He doesn’t have anywhere else, that’s what going after them with the broom was about.

  * * *

  The first people on Chadwick Street in the morning are the old women. They come out of their doors at daybreak, dressed in their robes and slippers, and sweep their sidewalks and steps.

  A long time ago, they swept for their husbands, as their husbands’ mothers had done for their men too. They were out there every morning, before the men went to work, showing their husbands—and each other—that they were good wives. They were out there even on the mornings when their husbands were drinking and hadn’t come home.

  Their husbands are gone now, but the old women are still there, before the paperboy, scolding the sidewalk and the bums who use it, generating movement and heat to hold off the feeling of waking up alone in a cold, empty house.

  There are four of them left on this block of Chadwick Street. Two of them are sisters, and this morning the older one steps out of her door and looks at the cold half-dark sky over the roofline of the buildings across the street, and then at her own breath, coming through the scarf she has wrapped around her mouth to keep from catching cold, and then, as she glances up the street in the direction of her sister’s house, she senses something is out of place.

  She can’t say what at first; the street is quiet and covered with frost. She moves her eyes back to the roofline across the street, and then brings them down to her sister’s house again, and now she sees something moving.

  She crosses the street, being careful to pick her feet straight up and down so as not to slip, and walks to a spot a few feet away from the door that leads to Nick DiMaggio’s gymnasium. The door has been splintered and hangs half off its hinges, the top half moving in the breeze coming from the south. Knifelike pieces of it lie inside on the steps, some of them covered by the body of the old man she has seen coming in and out of the place for months.

  She stands still and stares at him, feeling her breath against the scarf. He is not a bad-looking man, although he needs a haircut. She thinks he must have fallen down the stairs.

  She crosses the street again and knocks on her sister’s door, wishing that she’d invited the old man in for coffee, that she’d known who he was.

  She hears the locks opening on the other side—three of them—and the door opens.

  "Something’s happened," she says. "We better call Nicky."

  * * *

  Nick is standing just outside the door when the police come. The old woman who called him is holding one of his arms.

  "He must have fallen," she says.

  The police get out of their car and stop even with Nick. Urban Matthews is lying with his head in the stairwell, a furious look on his face. One of his eyes is open, the other is missing from the socket. An arm lies across his body, broken in two directions under the shirt.

  One of the cops is named Fowler, and he and Nick have known each other a long time. He looks at Nick and waits. "So?"

  Nick shakes his head. "Just somebody that needed a place to stay for a while," he says.

  The cop smiles. "Another fighter," he says.

  Nick shakes his head. "No," he says, "he wasn’t no fighter."

  It is quiet a moment while they stare at the man at the bottom of the stairs, the strange, uncomfortable angles his body had taken and held. Nick would like to fix his head for him, to straighten it with his neck.

  Another police car arrives, and two men in uniforms get out and begin roping off the front of the garage.

  "He was quite a smart-looking man, wasn’t he?" the old woman says. Nick feels the weight of her hand on his arm. He tries gently to pull himself away—instinctively, he wants his hands free—but she holds on, his jacket bunching under her fingers.

  "He seemed to keep himself clean," she says. "He could use a haircut once in a while, but he always seemed very clean." Nick gets himself loose and goes upstairs with the cop named Fowler. The old man’s mat is laid out flat on the floor, the shirt that he stuffed with dirty clothes and used as a pillow still holds the impression of his head.

  The first drops of blood are at the top of the stairs, next to his broom.

  He got up to meet them.

  "So what do you think?"
the cop says. "Kids?"

  "He kept his stuff hidden up here," Nick says. "I don’t know."

  He steps over the blood and goes farther into the room. Nothing is out of place. Nick squats at the mat on the floor and puts his fingers into a tear in the material along the side, looking for the things he hid. The smell of the old man is in his bed and in the blanket bunched at the foot. Not a bad smell—the old man kept himself clean—just familiar.

  Nick pulls his fingers out of the mat and there is a hundred-dollar bill pinched between them. It is folded neatly in quarters and pressed as if by an iron. He hands it to the cop.

  "Jesus knows what he’s got up here," he says.

  The cop looks around the room. "How long’s he been staying with you?" he says.

  "I don’t know, a few months."

  The cop nods, looking at the mat now where the old man slept.

  He has known Nick a long time. "You leave the heat on for him?" he says.

  "It’s cold," Nick says. "What the fuck am I going to do?"

  He goes back down the stairs, passing the crime scene investigators on the way up. He stops at the bottom, looking out at the neighbors who have accumulated outside the police ropes. He hears the cop named Fowler upstairs.

  "Don’t tear nothing up," he says. "I want it just like it was when you leave."

  Nick walks up to the diner, not wanting to hear them turning the place inside out. It doesn’t matter how they leave it.

  An old man walks in out of the cold, peeved, you can’t understand a word he says, and somehow you agree to that. And then one day you find him in a pile of unhuman angles at the bottom of the stairs, and you’ve got to agree to that too.

  Without wanting to, he thinks for a moment of the letter from Iowa, and then, without wanting to, of Phillip Flood.

  He pushes both those things out of his head, afraid where they will lead.

  He makes up his mind not to think of them again.

  * * *

  In the afternoon, he meets Harry across the street from the school. He looks small next to some of the other boys, as if the books he’s carrying in a strap over his shoulder are as heavy as he is.