by Brad Felver
“Like what?”
“Like strangers.”
I nod, but I don’t say anything else. I’m feeling numb and good. The light in the terminal is just right and it smells fresh. I start thinking about how I should really get back at Warren. Gut-punch him maybe. “Now we’re even, shitbird!” I’d say.
“I should probably brave security here pretty soon,” Warren says.
“Right,” I say. “Me too. I always put it off till the last minute.”
“We could brave it together.”
“Well,” I say. The bartender comes over. “One more?” I say, thinking that’ll help me get my courage up. Even now Warren’s my big brother.
We drink and avoid eye contact for a while. We’re strangers at a bar. It’s supposed to be easier to talk to strangers in a bar. There are these people all around us, this blurred commotion, and it makes me feel like we have this privacy, like we’re in a tent. Warren’s movements get slower. When he picks up his whiskey, the napkin sticks to the underside, but he doesn’t seem to notice. I get really mad at him for that. Just peel the fucking napkin off! I want to shout. Who wants to go to Aruba with a guy who acts like that? Then he starts talking in a low voice, not quite a whisper, but hushed, private. “I wish we did this more.”
“Me too,” I say.
“Do you? You don’t hate me?”
“You’re my brother.”
“That’s right,” he says. “I am. That’s something, isn’t it?”
“That’s a lot.”
Warren is drunker than I am. His eyes get wide and sad, like a big dumb cow. As much I want to punch him then, there’s a right time and a wrong time to punch your older brother, I do know that. You can’t punch sad people, that’s a rule. He leans toward me more. “I always thought you hated me. You always loved Peter more.”
“Peter and I shared a room,” I say.
He swipes at the air between us. “Don’t be a shit. Why can’t you just admit it?”
“It always seemed like us against you,” I say. “I don’t know why.”
“Peter would be fifty this year,” he says like he didn’t hear me, “did you know that?”
I didn’t, but I lie, Yes, I did, of course I did. Peter and me were awfully close. “It’s been a long time.”
“Fifty fucking years old. Dead for forty-one.” He shakes his head and rattles the ice in his empty glass until the bartender looks over. For a minute I think he might cry. A thousand people around us, coming and going, living their lives next to each other but not really with each other, and my older brother who I always hated, he was right about that, drinking whiskey and crying. It’s sad, but my brother and me can only really talk about three or four different things, and one of them is our dead brother. It’s sad how I can’t punch him either, or maybe how I don’t really want to anymore. I guess I’ve always wanted to know someone else was still miserable about all of it, but now that it’s happening, it’s a nasty business. Big brothers aren’t supposed to cry, but little brothers aren’t supposed to be dead either, I guess.
Warren leans forward into his hands, and I can see the grease stains under his fingernails. I don’t even know what business he’s in now, but I do know what grease under the fingernails means. “Can I tell you a secret?” he says. “I wasn’t as sad at mom’s funeral or at dad’s as I was a Peter’s. Isn’t that awful?” He rubs his face the way you do when you need to shave or when you’re too drunk. His cuff links pop out again, and that’s when I recognize them. They were Dad’s. Dad always wore them to church, which was the only time he ever had to dress up nice.
“No,” I tell him. “I don’t think it’s so bad. Peter was a real sweet kid.”
“Remember how you wouldn’t sleep anywhere else but Peter’s bed? How Dad even took it to the new apartment when he moved out?”
“What do you mean?” I ask, but even as I’m saying it, I do remember. Dad kept the bed for me. There was another person in the room a lot of those nights, too, I remember that. I’m not saying I believe in ghosts or something dumb like that, but I wasn’t alone. I’d call out and look all over the place, but I’d never find him. I needed him to help me against Warren, but he was gone. I guess I gave up on him at some point, and I guess Warren wants me to feel guilty about that. Some people never do change.
“I need to hit the head,” I say, and I get up. “I’ll be right back, and we’ll go through security together.” Warren’s too drunk to notice I don’t have a bag. He staring down at his drink, and I step behind him and raise up my fists, and I’m about ready to get even, one big haymaker right into the curve of his neck, but the bartender looks my way again, that goddamned bartender, and I have to run off and hide.
I go over at the far side of the security lines and stand in the middle of all the strangers and watch my brother. He’s looking down into his glass like it’s a telescope. It’s five minutes, and he doesn’t move. I can’t tell if he’s sleeping or trying to keep from crying or if he’s just thinking real hard. He finally jerks awake when they call his flight, what I think has to be his flight: 2142 to Miami, Florida. Can’t even afford direct. He grabs his bag and takes off toward security. He starts looking around, every direction, but he can’t tell me from all the strangers in line. He stumbles over to the bathroom and then comes out looking real confused. For a minute, I fantasize about stomping out there and tackling him but I don’t. I stay hidden in the crowd, and he eventually moves off, trying to make his flight. The whole time he’s in line, he keeps looking around, but I don’t ever show myself. He’s probably going on vacation alone, which is just sad. I’m sad for him even though he’s always been so horrible to me.
He’ll be fine. We’ll forget about each other for a few years, forget we still have a brother left. And things do have a way of getting better. They did after Peter died; it just took a while. They will now. Pretty soon I’ll be in a new apartment, one with wall-to-wall and a dishwasher. It’ll have laundry, or at least I’ll be close enough to walk to the Laundromat. Lately I’ve been thinking about running for something. School board, maybe. I’d like to help out all those kids. And someday soon I’ll be sitting in a lawn chair in front of my door, like Dad used to, only I’ll be reading the latest polling numbers, and right then some young tart with pouty lips will walk right over to me and say, Hello, there, kitten, I’m Traci.
Country Lepers
My wife moved in with you last month. You, a bald museum docent. Surely you know the story by now.
She comes home from the library at six or so, and I’m still running sausage through the grinder and sheathing them into the casings and twisting them at eight-inch intervals until I get the long sausage trains like in the cartoons. I have the air conditioner cranked up, even though it’s almost November. Gus, our Irish Setter, I have tied up on the sidewalk, and he’s staring at me through the window. I’m just churning out the sausages, hanging lengths from cupboard doors and the refrigerator handle and the backs of chairs. It’s a one-bedroom apartment, so there’s sausage everywhere, even in our bedroom, even hanging from the curtain rod in the bathroom. Everything smells like fresh sausage. I have to do this from home since I let my lease on the shop over in Turtle Bay lapse last month.
Well, this part you’ve probably heard about already, but here’s how it actually happened. Karen walks in with Gus, and they both see these sausages hanging on everything. She can’t even turn on the living room lamp without brushing up against a knackwurst. And Gus starts bucking around, trying to get at anything he can, and his hair is wafting about the whole apartment.
“Marty,” Karen says, “get your sausages out of our bedroom right now!”
And I tell her it can’t be helped but that I will soon. It’s a couple grand worth of sausage hanging around here, and I’ll have it in cold storage by morning. But right now she needs to get the dog out or he’ll have a seizure from too much excitement.
“I’m not sleeping here with this smell tonight,” she says. �
�Get the sausage out!”
“Karen,” I say while I crank on the grinder, “This is my job. I have to. You know that.” Gus is still flailing around, and Karen has to hold his leash up high, above her head, to keep him from getting at all that meat.
She stares at me for a long time. Just stares, this mean, ugly stare that says Marty, I want to pound your face into ground mutton. I’ve never seen this from her before and didn’t know she was capable of it. She’s a librarian, but you know that.
I just keep on grinding out the sausage links, casing them up, twisting, and hanging. I have thirty pounds left, and I’m not wasting it. It’s my job. You have a job, so you understand, I’m sure. I wouldn’t tell you to stop docenting little kids at the museum. I wouldn’t tell her to stop shelving her books.
So she leaves. She puts Gus in my station wagon, and she leaves. In the morning, I find a note taped to the mailbox, detailing the atrocities I’ve inflicted upon her for the past six years: how I always smelled like I’d just rolled around in a bucket of intestines; how we were probably the only people in New York who consistently had pepperoni logs stacked on the nightstand; how I was in our bathroom one time, brushing my teeth while her cousin was showering, and I tripped and fell into the curtain and ripped it off the hook and then had to break my fall, and one of my hands ended up grazing her nipple on the way down. There are others, but you get the idea. She hasn’t been happy for years, our Karen. Apparently I’m like a contagion, and she should have quarantined herself a long time ago. She feels infected by me. And did I realize we haven’t even made love for over a year? It’s as if we just forgot to have kids. Mostly, we’re just a bad fit, always have been. Square peg, rhombus hole. Close, but a little cockeyed. She’s cosmopolitan, I’m rural.
But you, the bald museum docent—you’re quiet and kind, and you make her sizzle with life again. You keep your beard trimmed and watch Charlie Rose. You own a shoe polish kit and never eat fried catfish. She can’t waste any more time being unhappy and childless with me. Sizzle, she says. Do please understand.
And I know what you’re probably wondering: Did her cousin have big nipples? Well, I’m not talking on that.
The apartment is in her name. She makes most of the payments, and I can’t stay. I’d like to help you out, Marty, she says when I call to talk it over, but we’re moving to his place in Gramercy, and we need the equity to expand. Do please understand.
She never used to talk like that—Do please understand—but apparently you bald museum docents talk like snooty assholes, and you’ve already started to rub off on her.
Since you’ve evicted me from my apartment, I scan the Post for a new place, spend an hour calling around. Lots of places have been rented already, which makes me think I should learn how to use the Internet at some point. A studio in Hell’s Kitchen is listed at $1,600 a month, and this is close enough to Gramercy for me to occasionally bump into you in a planned-accidental sort of way.
“Any chance we could negotiate on the price?” I say to the woman. “I’m pretty handy. Can fix leaky pipes and trim you a nice pork shoulder each week.”
“How much were you thinking?”
“I could swing $800 a month,” I say. But even that would be pretty tight. Gus would have to eat squirrels from the park.
Then I try a studio over in Hoboken, but it’s still over $1,000 a month. The first thing I think is, No way I’m paying that much to live in New Jersey. I’d imagine living in Hoboken is a lot like standing on a balcony that overlooks a killer party. And telling people you live there is a lot like telling them you have Ebola. But you know all about the Jersey issue. You live in Gramercy.
Then I find an ad from out in Changewater. Way out in western Jersey, not far from where I grew up. I don’t want to move that far away, but I also didn’t want my wife to drop me and start playing kiss-me-where-I-pee with one of you bald museum docents. This is what the ad reads: Quiet NJ Livestock Farm. No noise, no polutn. One month labor for one room to sleep. No kids, no yap-dogs. I call. I can tell it’s an old man because he speaks slowly and sounds angry that he’s still alive. And he clicks his teeth, adjusting his dentures. It’s an unmistakable sound, like ice clinking into a glass. My father used to do it. “It’s a nice enough piece of land,” he says. “You have to work it with me. That’s the deal.”
Apparently his daughter takes care of him, but she’s a teacher and is leading a group of snot-noses on a trip to Europe for an entire month. He’ll trade a month’s rent for a month’s work.
“Changewater,” I say. “Is that near Califon?”
“No,” he says. “Near Hampton.”
“Oh,” I say. “Near Asbury.”
“No,” he says. “It’s near Hampton.”
And that’s how he talks. Kind of refreshing compared to you bald museum docent types but still kind of enough to make you want to murder his fucking rooster.
Then he tells me I can’t be a city priss, have to be willing to kill hogs and fix fence rails and do other man-type work that you couldn’t even spell. And I tell him that’s why I called, that I grew up nearby, and I run a butcher shop in the city. I can swing an axe and pull nails and hang drywall if he needs it. I can probably even show him a few things about butchering. I’m the perfect tenant for his situation. It’s lucky our paths crossed.
“I don’t like city people,” he says. “You live there long enough you forget how to do anything but eat cheese and talk about paintings.”
“I do have a dog,” I say. “The ad says no pets.”
“No,” he says. “It says no yappy dogs. Is it a real dog or the kind that rides around in a purse?”
His name is Linus Houghton. Have you ever met a Linus? Or are they all Reginalds and Chesterfields at the museum? He walks with a jerky limp and has a splotchy, squished sort of face that looks a lot like a tomato left in the sun for a week. He’s short and wiry and has perfect posture. He rarely speaks, but he sometimes gets this mischievous grin on his face, like he farted on your pillow when you weren’t looking.
His place is tucked way off the main road, halfway up a hill and with thickets all around. Can’t even see there’s a house from the road. Driving up the long lane is like driving through the Holland Tunnel. The trees overhang and actually catch on the roof of my station wagon. Then I emerge into a wide swathe of pasture, hilly and green and muddy, bordered by a rickety split-rail fence. Hogs I can’t see but I can smell. Sheep in the far pen and a few cattle beyond them. And for a moment it’s refreshing, like walking back into my childhood. That smell.
This is the thing, bald museum docent: I slowly became one of those New Yorkers who never left the island. I made jokes about Jersey and sometimes wore a scarf. I stopped eating so much bologna. Thought playing the part might infect my blood somehow, squeeze the rustic out of me, morph me into a better husband somehow. I would have done way worse for our Karen. No such luck. She found you at some point. God knows when, but clearly long before the sausage incident. Probably closer to the nipple incident.
But here I am now, back in the country, breathing air so clear it feels cold as it hits my lungs. It reminds me real air shouldn’t smell like soy sauce and burnt Styrofoam.
Linus stands on the porch. An unlit, hand-rolled cigarette hangs from his lips, and he talks as if he doesn’t even notice it there.
“You New York?”
I nod and reach out my hand to him. “Marty,” I say. He turns around and leads me inside. It’s an original farmhouse: creaky floorboards, cracking wallpaper, that earthy smell that makes me wonder if he keeps a closet full of dirt somewhere.
“Your daughter is gone for a month?” I say.
He points to a bedroom. “Right here,” he says. “Get changed into something you don’t mind smelling like hog guts.” He limps away.
There’s a four-poster twin bed in the middle of the room with crocheted pillowcases and a stack of quilts on the chair in the corner. It reminds me of my old bedroom. We didn’t have so much
land as Linus seems to, but it was fine. I haven’t been back there in ten years, not since my father caught the extra-bad variety of ass cancer and we had to sell it to pay for his treatments. That’s when I moved to the city, met our Karen, and opened a butcher shop. Somewhere in between all of that, I had to move the shop to our apartment, and I also accidentally touched my cousin-in-law’s nipple. But those sorts of details start to blend together now that Karen is knocking boots with you.
I turn Gus loose in the yard, and he bolts off after some critter in the brush, just like he does in the park. He’ll come back after a bit, though. He gets nervous when he hasn’t sniffed me for a while.
Linus has a slaughter pen set up, right next to the hogs. Seems cruel to kill a boar right in front of his cousins, but it’s convenient, and a hog doesn’t know murder from a rusty carburetor choke. They’ll even drink each other’s blood if you don’t separate them.
We stack the wood under the tub and light it and let it start bringing the water to a boil. Then Linus ties the hog off and pops him in the head with a .22 long and we roll him over and jab a knife into the sternum and twist to snag that main artery. We cinch him to the block and tackle, hoist him up over the blood pan, head down. I stop to watch him bleed out for a minute until I feel Linus glaring at me. I haven’t done the actual slaughtering for a long time, and I forgot how much blood there is. The way its mouth hangs open makes it look like it’s trying to squeal or gasp for air. We don’t speak, just work like we ran out of things to say twenty years ago.
Soon we’re scalding him and dragging the bell scrapers over him to rip the hair and scurf off all the way. That’s the dirty work. Nothing like that stringy hog fur stuck to everything, kind of like pubic hair rolled in diarrhea and bacon grease. Probably why I stopped slaughtering them and just did the fine butchering. Once, when I was about seventeen, my father and I slaughtered a sow during the day, and then I took a girl out to the drive-in that night—her name was Brenda—and we were kissing with lots of tongue, and I was working on her bra when she noticed the dark scurf residue stuck under my nails and knuckle creases. I’d showered and used Lava soap and everything, but it’s hard to get rid of that stuff, and naturally, Brenda, who lived in town, screamed every combination of fear and hatred, and I never did get to see her jugs, which was bad enough, but I also had the kind of woody that was so puckered and veiny it actually hurt. You know the kind. You probably get those for our Karen, don’t you? Even now, feeling the scurf on my skin gives me this strange sensation of anger and shame and arousal that I fear Linus will somehow notice.
