Brotherly Love - Pete Dexter Read online

  Brotherly Love

  Pete Dexter

  1991

  For

  Dian and Casey

  June 11, 1986

  UNI0N BROTHERS "HIT" 100 MILES APART

  BY WALLACE T. BROOKS

  STAFF Writer

  Three men, including Southeastern Pennsylvania Trade Union Council President Michael Flood and his brother, Peter, were found shot to death yesterday in what police sources have described as a "mob hit".

  Michael Flood, 32, and Leonard Crawley, 29, of Upper Darby, were discovered in the basement of a South Philadelphia row house belonging to William O’Connor, a retired member of the Roofer’s Union. Both men had been shot at close range with a shotgun.

  Earlier in the day, Peter Flood, 33, was found 100 miles away, in the back yard of his vacation home in Cape May, N.J. He was listed as an officer of the Trade Union Council.

  The killings, according to police sources, signal a new chapter in Philadelphia’s crime wars, although the exact nature of the dispute—believed to concern control of lucrative union pension funds—is not clear at this time.

  Police have no suspects in the killing. According to police, O’Connor, 77, suffers from Alzheimer’s disease and has no memory of the shootings. He was questioned and released.

  "It’s probably the reason they didn’t [shoot] him too," said the police source.

  Michael Flood’s father—Phillip—like his son, president of the Trade Union Council, was killed 16 years ago when a bomb rigged to his front door went off as he entered his South Philadelphia home.

  No arrests were ever made in the killing.

  PART ONE

  1961

  Peter Flood is eight years old, dressed in tennis shoes and a jacket that is too light against the cold and the wind. He dresses himself now; his mother is always tired.

  A thin crust of snow lies across the yard, and his sister’s fresh footprints lead from the front steps to the spot where she is standing, studying her mitten. Here and there the grass has broken through, and he notices the patches of damp, bent blades—tired, he thinks, from fighting through to the air. And he understands that, not wanting to be covered.

  His sister moves, pulling his attention. She squats on chubby legs, rocking a moment for balance, and then slowly brings the snow to her face, her mouth opening a long time before the mitten arrives.

  She pulls her hand away, staring at it. Snow sticks to the mitten and it drools down her chin. She looks up at him, her lips are wet and red, and she smiles. He sees dirt in her tiny front teeth, and in a moment it is on her chin too, and then it drips onto the front of her parka.

  "Col," she says.

  She watches him until he returns her smile, waits for it like a signal, and then, when he has given that to her, she closes the mitten around a stone and brings that to her mouth too.

  There is a park across the street; he is not allowed to go there without his father. He has watched other children playing alone in the park—there are some there now—but he understands, without being told, that his life is not like theirs, that he is someone who has to stay in the yard.

  He notices a man now, sitting on his heels, boxing with a boy who can barely walk.

  His sister stands up, rocking as she achieves balance, and then takes a few steps away from him, in the direction of the street. She looks over her shoulder, teasing him, knowing he will chase her now and catch her before she is out of the yard, and carry her back to the steps.

  Her head turns and she begins to run.

  He crosses the yard in a few strides, his tennis shoes breaking holes in the snow. She shrieks as she hears him behind her, and ducks her head into her shoulders, waiting for the feel of his hand on her hood.

  And then he touches it, careful not to take any of the hair underneath, and stops her. He puts his arm around her waist and lifts her off the ground, and feels the sudden change in her as he carries her back to the steps.

  She screams at him, "No!"

  And he feels the heels of her rubber boots kicking against his legs, and understands that in this moment she would kill him if she could.

  And then a moment later, back on her feet in the snow, she smiles at him again and tries to say his name.

  "Peener."

  He sees the dog mess then—that’s what his mother calls it, dog mess, but he knows the real word—lying in a smoking pile as big as the animal’s head on the other side of the driveway. There is no snow on the dog mess, and it glistens in the sun.

  Peter feels a familiar tightening in his legs and looks across the street into the park again, listening for the sound of tags on a collar. He is afraid of dogs, especially this dog, but he keeps it hidden. Somehow he is expected not to be afraid of dogs, just as he is expected to stay in the yard.

  There is nothing as clear to him as what he is expected to be.

  The dog itself is white and has red eyes, crusted black in the corners, and when it looks at Peter, everything inside the animal is in those eyes, all of it held back by a single thread, something he has been taught. And the boy can feel the dog straining against the thread, and knows that nothing the animal has been taught will change what it is.

  The man who owns the dog lives in the house next door. The place smells of garlic, even from the sidewalk, and there is always polka music coming from inside. Peter sees the man pounding the animal’s chest sometimes, and pulling its ears and throwing balls across the street into the park for it to retrieve. Sometimes he invites Peter to touch the dog himself—"C’mon, Paulie, he don’t bite nobody but crooks. He’s trained .... "

  The man calls him Paulie, sometimes Phil. He remembers his father’s name, though.

  Mr. Flood.

  And Peter will walk across the driveway and touch the animal’s head, his fingers in the matted coat, while everything inside the dog is in his eyes, held back by the thread, something he learned from this man who cannot remember his name.

  "See? He don’t bite, he likes you .... "

  Peter looks up the street now, looks for the man’s car. The sound of it will draw the dog from the alleys of the neighborhood, from the hidden places behind the house and the yard where Peter lives. It is a red car with black tires—not whitewalls, he gets his tires from the police garage—and a top that comes down in the summer. An antenna is fastened to the trunk.

  He looks for the car, but it isn’t there.

  His sister falls suddenly, for no reason he can see, and lands on her bottom. There are diapers under her snow pants. She looks at him a moment, waiting to see if she is hurt, and decides she is not.

  "Boom," she says.

  She stands up, her hands flat against the ground as she straightens her legs. The snow has stuck to her bottom and the spit on her chin has turned the color of mud.

  And then he hears the car, distinctly hears it, coming faster than it should and from the wrong direction. As he turns toward the sound, his sister bolts—a hundred disjointed movements collected in a white bundle and headed for the street. He hears her shriek even before he moves to reel her in.

  And as he moves, he sees the dog. It has heard the sound of the car too, and comes from behind the man’s house, tail and chin in the air, half running. The dog spots Peter and stops, lowering its head until Peter can see the bones of its shoulders.

  Peter stops too, unable to move. The animal’s lips pull back, almost a smile, and it fixes its eyes on the boy and forgets the car and the man and everything else. It only bites crooks, the man says, but there is a secret between Peter and the dog the man does not know.

  He sees his sister now, a movement somewhere beyond the dog, crossing the yard toward the street. She squeals, sensing that she’s got
ten away. He tries to go after her, but the dog is waiting for him now, waiting for him to move so that it can move too.

  He tries, but he cannot make his feet do what they will not do. He hears the car again, closer, moving too fast. It crosses his line of vision still in the street, hits ice and skids into Peter’s yard.

  His sister has slowed, is turning to see if he is chasing her, to ask why she has won the game. And she is looking back at him, drooling dirt and smiling, when the car picks her up and throws her into the sky.

  He watches her ride through the air, rolling once as she comes to him, a splash of red on her white parka now, her feet apart and disconnected like one of her dolls. Her eyes are open, looking someplace he cannot see.

  Watch your sister, he thinks.

  The car skids across the lawn, the bumper hitting the single, small tree in the front yard, tearing it out of the ground. The dog moves a step closer and waits.

  She lands at his feet; her eyes are still open, looking beyond him a thousand miles. One of her arms is folded behind her back, hiding the hand. Her other hand lies palm up, an inch or two off the ground, held there by the padding in her coat. A mitten is in the street.

  The boy stands still, understanding that something has happened, not knowing yet what it means, and then the dog is coming across the yard after him, head close to the ground. The boy begins to run, but then stops, before he has even moved, and turns to face the animal, and for a moment everything in the yard is calm and slow. He sees the man’s face as he opens the car door, he sees the muscles in the dog’s chest, the bits of snow its feet throw up behind as it comes across the yard. He thinks perhaps his sister saw things in this slow, calm way as she sailed to him through the air.

  The dog closes and the boy holds the ground over his sister, knowing exactly how the fur and the weight will feel on his face, knowing he cannot leave this spot. He closes his hands into fists and waits.

  The car door is open now, the man has one foot outside. His face behind the windshield is terrified, and Peter sees his expression and is terrified too. The man yells something he cannot understand, and a moment later the dog is there, growling from that place inside his chest where nothing the man has said or taught means anything. Where it is only the dog.

  He steels himself and closes his eyes.

  Nothing.

  The growling changes pitch, nothing else.

  And then Peter opens his eyes, and his sister is in the animal’s mouth. It is holding her at the shoulder and neck, shaking her side to side. It lifts her off the ground and then drops her; it finds a new hold, one of her legs, and lifts her again, shaking her and tearing her snow pants.

  He throws himself into the animal the way he throws himself into the waves at Atlantic City. He closes his eyes and dives, teaching for whatever is beyond the fall. He lands on the animal’s back and feels the bones under the coat, then slides slowly down to the legs. He presses his cheeks into the legs as they jerk, holding them as if they were his sister herself.

  The man is out of the car, running across the snow. Peter sees him or feels him coming—he isn’t sure which—putting his hand inside his coat. He slips and falls to one knee, screaming at the dog, and Peter knows that the dog hears him, he feels the animal change.

  "Oh, Jesus," the man says, right over him now.

  He hears the sound as the man beats the top of the dog’s head With the butt of his gun. With the third sound, the dog drops the boy’s sister and cries out.

  "Fucking God," the man says, and drops over the little girl in a posture that seems to resemble the dog’s.

  Peter sits up and rubs his cheek. He is scratched and bleeding.

  The man begins to rock now, back and forth over his sister, saying the same thing over and over. "Oh, fucking God .... "

  The dog walks back into the other yard and lies down, watching the man, its chin flat against the ground between its paws.

  The man stands up with Peter’s sister in his arms and hurries to the front door, pounding on it with the flat of his hand, looking back over his shoulder at him once as he waits for an answer.

  Peter’s mother comes to the door holding the top of her robe together with one hand. She sees the man first, then what is in his arms. Slowly, her hand comes off the robe and goes to her mouth. Her robe falls open and Peter sees her breasts.

  The man takes Peter’s sister inside, leaving the front door open. Peter stands up, his legs shaking, and moves halfway up the steps.

  The man puts his sister on the davenport and opens her parka. His mother is crying now, he hears her but can’t see her from the steps. The man picks up the telephone on the glass coffee table in front of the davenport and dials a number.

  "Tommy," he says, "I need an ambulance right now . . . my place . . . yes, goddamnit, an ambulance, there’s a fuckin’ kid ain’t breathing .... "

  He hangs up and then, perhaps hearing the words himself, he looks for a long minute out the door, right into Peter’s eyes. The man puts the phone against his ear again and dials another number. His fingers are shaking.

  Peter’s mother comes back into his line of sight. She stops at the davenport, looking down at the motionless child, and then touches her, straightening one of the legs.

  She looks at her own hand and it is bloody.

  The man holds his forehead while he waits for someone to answer the phone, trying to hold himself still. He looks again at Peter, then turns away to speak.

  "Sally," he says, sounding relieved, "it looks like I got a problem here at Charley Flood’s."

  Charley Flood is the boy’s father, although the boy has never heard this man use his first name before.

  "There was an accident in front of his house, his little girl . . .yeah . . . I don’t know. The car slid and there she was .... "

  The boy looks back into the yard where the car is still sitting with its door open.

  "No," the man says, "it’s worst than that."

  There is a long pause while the man listens. "I appreciate that," the man says finally. "If you could come over and wait for him, make sure he don’t do nothing premeditated . . ."

  The man nods into the telephone. He stops for a moment and looks behind him at the davenport.

  "Look," he says, "he ain’t going to like this at all."

  Peter looks at the davenport too, and thinks of his father, who is unhappy for reasons he glimpses in the silences at the dinner table, when they are all forced to sit together in one place. Before dinner and after, he lives in this house without seeing Peter, or his mother. He only notices the little girl.

  Except sometimes in the park. In the park, he is changed, and turns to Peter sometimes, inviting him to share her. Ain’t she something?

  And in this way, Peter knows, the little girl is the connection between them.

  He wishes suddenly that he were lying there with her, that he had been hit by the car too. He understands that the blood on his cheek is not enough to save him, that he hasn’t been hurt badly enough to be forgiven.

  The man hangs up the telephone, and then turns back to Peter, walking toward him as if he were angry. He stands still, aware of the trembling in his legs. The man comes through the door and down the steps, hurrying, as if something outside could still be saved. He reaches into his coat as he passes, and then his hand drops behind his back as he walks away, hiding the gun.

  The man crosses the yard to the dog. Peter sees the animal’s bead come up, the tongue falls out of its mouth.

  There is only one sound from the dog, so close behind the shot that it’s hard to separate one from the other. And then there is another shot, and another, and another.

  9

  The man shoots the dog until there are no more bullets in his gun. The air smells of gunpowder, the shots echo back from the houses on the other side of the park.

  Between the shots, he hears his mother crying in the house. He stands on the steps, watching himself from another place, lost in this moment that collect
s and shapes the small pieces of his life.

  Lost in the surprise of who he is.

  * * *

  Late at night, Peter hears his father in the driveway. He knows the sound of the car, the sounds of all the cars that belong on this street.

  He is sitting at the top of the stairs, his face pressed into the banister railings. There are other men in the house now, men who work with his father and have been here before. They have been coming and going all day. His uncle is sitting at the dining room table with his mother, his arm all the way around her back, his thin fingers, patched with hair, cup her far shoulder and pull her into him.

  Comforting is unnatural to his uncle, but something holds him in this awkward place. He has seen his father held in this same way at funerals; he has seen him disappear into words and manners that were not his.

  He thinks of the thread that held the dog next door.

  His father opens the door, takes a step into the living room and stops. No one in the room speaks, no one is willing to meet his eyes.

  His mother covers her face.

  "What is it?" he says.

  The room is quiet, and then the one named Sally pushes himself off the davenport and touches his father’s arm.

  "Come sit down," he says.

  His father stays where he is, looking around the room now, as if finding the secret in this place can change it. "Charley," the man says, and tugs at his sleeve, a child’s gesture. Peter’s father follows him to the dining room table, where they both sit down.

  The man puts a small glass in front of him and fills it until it spills over the lip.

  "Drink this, and then we talk," he says.

  His father drinks what is in the glass, taking it all at once, and then returns the glass to the same spot, fitting it into the half circle it left on the table when he picked it up.

  His mother is crying into her hands; she cannot lift her eyes to look across the table, and he understands that, understands the weight.

  "It’s the baby," the man says softly.

  From the staircase, he watches his father. Nothing seems to change. He stays exactly where he is, staring across the table. His pulse is in his temple, one of his hands is still wrapped around the small glass.