Brotherly Love - Pete Dexter Read online

  "She got hit with a car," the man says.

  Hearing this, his mother begins crying out loud. His father does not move. "It wasn’t nobody’s fault," the man says. "The guy hits some ice and he slid . . ."

  A tear appears suddenly in the corner of his father’s eye and runs the length of his face, dropping straight and fast, like sweat on a glass.

  "What guy?" he says.

  One of the men in the living room walks to the dining room table and stands quietly beside the one who is talking.

  "Victor Kopec," says the one named Sally.

  The boy’s father moves then, turning slowly to look at the man who has said the name.

  The man nods. "He slid into the yard . . ." He rubs the back of his neck, looking for the words to say the rest. "He hit her clean, Charley. She didn’t feel a thing. Afterwards, his dog, you know, they get excited, but it didn’t make no difference by then. You can ask the doctors. It wasn’t the dog, it was the car."

  His father stands up and the man steps in front of him and shakes his head no.

  "Ask your brother if what I’m saying ain’t true."

  His father tries to step around the man, but the man moves in front, stopping him. His uncle’s arm moves in a slow arc over Peter’s mother; he pulls a cigarette from his shirt pocket. His face is pale in the kitchen light, and the pockmarks deepen at the movement, throwing a shadow across his face.

  "Charley," he says, "it was his fault, he’d be dead. I’ve got a kid, I’d done it myself .... "

  Peter’s father doesn’t seem to hear him. He puts his hands on the shoulders of the man in front of him, almost gently, and moves him out of the way. The other man——the one who walked in from the living room——grabs him from behind, hugging him around the waist.

  The man holds him, then they are all holding him. Peter’s uncle has the feet. His father turns left and right, kicking, and his strength moves the huddle of men back and forth across the room.

  And all the time, the man named Sally is talking. "You can’t kill him, Charley," he says. "Constantine don’t want him hurt."

  A chair turns over, a lamp falls from a table. The boy hears his father hissing through his teeth as he fights. All the other noises in the room are soft. The boy pictures a neighbor walking past the house on the sidewalk, pausing for a moment to look at the lighted windows, and then walking on.

  "Listen to me, Charley," the man says.

  His father stops struggling and hangs for a moment in the center of the red-faced men holding him, hangs as if he were in his hammock in the back yard.

  "Listen to me," the man says. "Listen to what I’m telling you. She didn’t feel a thing."

  And in that moment, hanging helpless, his father turns his head, as if to remove himself from the one who is talking, and in doing that his eyes move to the corner of the room, and are somehow drawn to the staircase where Peter is sitting with his face pressed into the banister.

  "I want your word," the man says. "I can tell Constantine they ain’t nothing to worry about here now."

  Behind the men, Peter’s mother is crying.

  "Later you want to do something, you can talk to Constantine yourself, right?"

  His father doesn’t answer and his eyes stay fastened to the staircase.

  "All right?" the man says. "Lookit, you got things to take care of right here anyway . . . Charley?"

  His father rolls his head then, slowly, and looks at the man who is talking, and in a movement so small Peter is not sure he sees it, his father nods. His uncle drops his father’s feet and the ones holding his waist and arms set him upright and then step back, wary.

  The men flex their arms and necks, some of them out of breath. His father’s shirt is ripped along two lines that follow the muscles in his back.

  The one named Sally waits a moment and then kisses his father on the cheek and walks out the door. The other men follow him, each of them making some gesture. His uncle is last out of the house.

  "I would of killed him myself, Charley," he says.

  Peter’s father does not answer. He waits until the uncle is gone, then closes the door. He walks up the staircase slowly and pauses for a moment in front of Peter, studying him as if he cannot remember who he is. Then, absently, he reaches out, touches his hair, and walks past him toward the end of the hall.

  He stops before he gets to the end, though, and stares into the pale light of her room, as if memorizing what is inside—a place full of stuffed animals—and then he closes the door.

  * * *

  Certain things come to him without his knowing how. He sees the fragile looks between his mother and father, and understands that in those gestures there is a certain panic.

  It is as if they were tied head to foot with ropes, unable to move an inch, struggling one moment, giving in the next. And they cannot touch each other at all.

  And they cannot touch him.

  That is what he wants now, to be touched.

  The things he knows settle on him with a certainty that precludes mistakes or misunderstanding; he knows them as well as the room where he sleeps or his own face in the mirror.

  He walks into the living room and finds his father sitting in a chair by the window, staring across the front yard, and knows that there is nothing he can say that his father will hear.

  His father sees him, then looks back out the window, silent.

  He was silent before the accident, too, but it was a natural part of the rooms of the house then; now it is unnatural, and the rooms are unnatural too.

  His mother comes downstairs only to cook and to eat. He sits down on the floor next to his father, wanting him to touch his hair again. He thinks of the night the men held him while the one named Sally talked. He wishes he had thrown himself into them, dived on them from the top of the stairs. He judges the distance now, imagining his path through the living room air and the stillness in his chest as he falls, the spot he would land.

  He imagines himself broken and still on the floor, and something in that stirs him. He wonders if they would lay him on the davenport too.

  He looks quickly at his father’s face, then follows his line of sight out into the yard. The tire marks are still in the snow-trampled and dirty and stained with dog urine, but unmistakably there, leading across the sidewalk from the street, up a small rise and stopping at the spot of bare earth where the only tree in the yard was uprooted.

  The boy follows the tracks the other way, back out to the street.

  There is a car there, four doors and green, with a man sitting behind the wheel, eating. A steady white smoke comes from the exhaust pipe. The boy knows this is a policeman too, like the man next door. He is there because the man next door is afraid of his father.

  When his father finally goes into the house next door, though, this policeman in the car will not stop him. Peter knows that when his father goes into the house next door, no one will be able to stop him.

  He looks at his father again and thinks of the men who held him that night, how he fought all of them back and forth across the room. He thinks of his uncle, struggling with the feet, and the bigger men, stumbling with each turn of his father’s body. He wishes he could have that night again and throw himself into them from the top of the stairs.

  In the breaking of his own bones he could mend what had happened.

  * * *

  Peter's uncle comes to the house in the afternoon, smelling of liquor. Uncle Phil. He is smaller than the boy’s father, and older, and smiles when there is no reason to smile. His mother is repulsed by his uncle; he has heard her whisper it in the kitchen, "I skeeves him, Charley."

  She is Italian.

  Peter answers the door eating cereal out of a box. His uncle sways in the doorway, looking inside. "Your dad here?" he says.

  Peter opens the door wider and steps out of the way. When his uncle is far enough in, he closes the door and walks upstairs, down the long hall to the room where his parents sleep. He knocks quietly at the do
or, and then hears his father’s voice on the other

  "What?"

  His mother spends all day in this room now, with the lights off and the shades drawn. Peter does not want to say the uncle’s name out loud and instead opens the door a few inches and puts his head inside.

  The room is dark and still. He smells his mother’s skin. She is lying in bed with her head against the pillow, her neck bent until her chin almost touches her chest, staring at her hands, or perhaps her feet. Something in front of her. His father is sitting in a straight chair beside the shaded window which overlooks the house of Victor Kopec. He turns from the window, still holding the shade slightly away from the glass, and studies the boy a moment.

  He slowly stands up and comes to the door.

  His mother doesn’t move, her eyes do not follow the motion in the room. His father steps into the hallway and closes the door.

  "Uncle Phil’s here."

  His father nods and starts down the hall. Peter follows him a few steps but then his father stops, turning to look at him again, and shakes his head.

  Peter walks into his room and listens to his father on the stairs. His steps are heavier than they were before the accident, and slower. Sometimes he hears them and thinks a stranger has come into the house.

  "Charley," his uncle says.

  His father says nothing that he can hear.

  "I come by to see if there was anything I could do."

  "No," his father says, "there ain’t nothing you can do."

  "You mind if I sit down‘?" He hears the uncle move across the floor. "You got a beer or something?"

  His father walks into the kitchen, slow and heavy. The icebox opens and shuts. "You don’t mind my saying so," his uncle says, raising his voice now so that it will carry into the kitchen, "it wouldn’t hurt nothing, you had one yourself. It wouldn’t hurt you had a beer and put this away."

  The uncle says this while his father is still out of the room; Peter doesn’t think he would say it if his father were there. His father comes back and his uncle says, "What? Are you gonna give me a fuckin’ beer or hit me over the head?"

  His father says a few words; the boy can’t make them out.

  "That don’t do nobody any good," his uncle says.

  "You’re comin’ in here, telling me what I’m gonna do?" his father says. The boy pictures his father now, standing over his uncle, watching him as if the wrong answer to that question could be anywhere in his face.

  "I’m telling you what you ain’t going to do," his uncle says. "Now gimme the fuckin’ beer or brain me and put me out of my misery."

  It is quiet in the house for a few moments; the boy pictures his uncle drinking the beer. He pictures his mother lying in her bed, her eyes wide open. Nothing moves. It seems to him that she has lived in two places a long time, here in this house and somewhere else, and that since the accident she cannot stand to be here at all. She comes back only to eat.

  "l talked to Constantine myself," his uncle says. "He thinks maybe you take little Pete and your wife up into the Poconos a while, stay at his place up there if you want .... "

  "I ain’t going to the Poconos," his father says.

  "The shore then," his uncle says. "Constantine don’t care where you go, except he don’t want you going next door . . ." The living room is quiet again.

  "He’s helpin’ them on some things, Charley, and Constantine don’t want him hurt."

  "There’s a lot of cops helpin’ them on things," his father says. "How come this one’s got to move in next door, into a house a cop can’t afford, drive up and down the street in his big convertible like some center-city pimp.

  "He ain’t so bad."

  "I’ll tell you what he is. He’s one of them guys it ain’t enough he’s got more than he’s supposed to, it ain’t no good to him unless everybody knows he’s got it. And that ain’t enough either so he drives into my yard and takes what I got, him and that fuckin’ dog, and now he’s pissed his pants and cryin’ to both sides for help."

  "He shot the dog," his uncle says. "He done that out of respect."

  "Is that what he said? What are we, fuckin’ Italians—‘Out of respect’?"

  "It was a gesture."

  Peter sits down on the floor of his room, his back against the door, and remembers the look in his sister’s eyes as she came to him through the air.

  "Charley," his uncle says, "the man skid. I got a child too. If it was something else, I’d of taken care of it myself, right there that afternoon .... "

  His father doesn’t answer.

  "Charley? You listening to me here?"

  He hears the icebox door open and shut, his uncle getting himself another beer.

  "I would of got a bat and beat the eyes out of his head," his uncle says, back in the living room. "Family is first with me, and Angela’s my niece. She’s like my own daughter .... "

  A moment later, he hears the front door open. "The long and short of it, Charley," his uncle says before he goes outside, "Constantine don’t want this guy touched right now. There ain’t nothing you can do about what happened, and there ain’t nothing you can do about the cop."

  "First they’re in our business, now they’re in my house," his father says, speaking of the Italians. The boy has heard them talk about the Italians before.

  The front door closes and a moment later his father is on the staircase. He climbs to the top and then walks to the door outside Peter’s room. He stops a moment, his shoes close enough to block out the light, and then walks the rest of the way to the end of the hall without stopping, past the room full of stuffed animals, and into the room beyond that, where the boy’s mother lies in the dark.

  Where he will pull back the shade and watch the house next door from the window.

  * * *

  Peter Flood returns to his school.

  Just as before, he is taken in the morning by his father, and just as before, a man who works for his father is waiting in front of the school at the end of the day to take him home. The man does not speak to him on the ride home and the boy understands he does not like this job.

  And each day when he comes home, the rooms of the house are filled with the accident. The place seems even quieter now, coming in from the movement and noise of the school, than it had in the long weeks he spent inside afterwards, overseeing the motionless panic of the only two people he loved.

  * * *

  Visitors come into the house at night. Often it is only his uncle, but sometimes he brings some of the men who held his father that first night, and kept him from going next door.

  His father accepts his guests, standing to the side as they come in, not offering them a chair or a beer, simply allowing them to take what they Want. The presence of the guests makes no difference to him at all.

  Peter sits in his room or at the top of the stairs, listening to the men talk. They complain that the Italians are trying to take more of the money than before.

  His father rarely speaks—he no longer cares who gets the union’s money—and his mother’s room now is as still as his sister’s.

  His uncle has his opinions about the Italians, though. He says they will get one more cent out of the union than they get now over his dead body.

  * * *

  On a Friday night, Constantine himself comes to visit. Peter has heard the way the man’s name is spoken by his father’s visitors, and he is surprised now at his appearance. A gray-haired old man in a black coat and glasses fogged from the cold, he stands in the center of the room, holding his hat, not moving from the spot until he is offered a place to sit.

  "Sit down," his father says, and Peter hears something in his voice that is not there for the others.

  The old man unbuttons his coat and one of the men who has come here with him lifts it off his shoulders. He takes a wooden chair near the dining room. He crosses his legs carefully and removes his glasses, wiping them clear with his handkerchief.

  "How are you doing with your tragedy, Charl
ey?" the old man says.

  His father shrugs and looks around the room. The old man fits the glasses back on his nose.

  "Who can say?" his father says.

  The old man nods, as if that is an answer. He is soft and slow, and the boy cannot imagine that he can tell them all what to do.

  "That’s what I heard," Constantine says in a sad way, and then he falls silent.

  The boy’s father stands in front of the old man, wordless.

  "What I heard," he says suddenly, "you ain’t let it cool down enough yet that you can see it’s an accident."

  His father shakes his head.

  The old man smiles in a kind way. "What, you think he did it on purpose? He drove up in your yard and hit the little girl on purpose? It was an accident .... "

  "The word don’t mean nothing," his father says, and his voice is hard and clear and stronger than the old man’s. His voice makes Peter afraid.

  The old man holds up his hand. "You know this guy, Charley?"

  He shrugs. "I lived next to him two, three years," he says.

  The old man closes his eyes. "You and me, we ain’t so different from everybody else," he says. "We have accidents too."

  His father turns away and stares at the man holding Constantine’s coat.

  The old man seems to weigh that gesture. "Charley," he says finally, "do me a favor."

  His father turns around to face him again, and one of the other men in the room looks quickly at Peter’s uncle, and there is something between them, something they both know and his father does not. The old man sits patiently in his chair, looking at this Irish Charley Flood, waiting for an answer.

  "Tell me what it is."

  Another look passes between his uncle and the man standing nearest his father. Peter understands that his father has said something just now that his uncle, for all his talk about fighting the Italians, would never say.