Bloodroot (4 page)

“Fuck Al Bruno, huh?” he asked.

“I’m beat. I gotta get up early. I go to Al’s, I’ll be there all night.”

Danny and I got out of the car and we crossed paths in the headlights. He shook my hand. His eyes danced. He wasn’t twitching yet, but I could feel the itch building in him through his palm.

“All right, man,” he said. “Happy birthday. It was good to fucking see you again. We oughta hang again soon. Maybe catch a game.”

I backed away from him toward the curb. “Yeah, it was cool.”

He nodded at me. “I’ll call you.”

I started to say something, maybe please, or maybe don’t, but Danny was sliding into his car, in his mind already parked on the first dark street he could find. Standing on my stoop, I watched him get situated in the car. He gave a last wave, pulled away from the curb, made a wide turn around the corner, and was gone.

I SPENT THE NEXT THREE YEARS AFTER THAT NIGHT TRYING TO
lock the door between us. I didn’t see or hear from Danny at all during that time. I didn’t try to forget him; that was impossible. But I tried to stop hoping, on my birthday and on his, at Christmastime, anytime I saw a little blue car drive by, that he would walk out of the ether and back into my life. I tried convincing myself that those hours in the car were the last we’d ever spend together and that somehow, some way, we’d had a simple, good time. That it was a normal and amicable parting.

We were like brothers, I told myself, who lived in different countries, separated only by busy lives and thousands of miles. But Danny haunted me. I should’ve known that he would. I’d always believed his lies more easily than I believed my own.

During the years he was gone, rumors about him trickled under my door like the shadows of passersby. I heard he was clean, and I tried not to hope. I heard that he was alive but rotting from the inside out in a Brooklyn shooting gallery. I heard more than once that he’d died: suicide, murder, OD. When I heard these things, I tried not to despair. When I visited our parents, I told them nothing. I refused to believe anything about him. I couldn’t picture any scenario the rumors described. I had a hard time, in fact, picturing him any way at all. I couldn’t see his life beyond that night in the car.

In my imagination, Danny’s life seemed to stop after his car turned the corner. I hoped it was a failure on my part to let go of him and not that, in my heart somewhere, I knew he had no future. I felt as if that Escort had dropped off the edge of the Earth. Or maybe I just felt Danny had left my life like he had come into it that night, high, lonely, and desperate, lost in some eternal present where the night never ended and tomorrow never came. It seemed, in the depths of his addiction, that the never-ending night was what he both wanted and feared the most.

Then, one warm October night, three years and six months after I last saw him, I walked out of that same apartment building and there he stood on the sidewalk. He seemed shocked to see me. We were both shocked.

He pointed at the intercom beside me. “There are no names. I couldn’t remember which apartment was yours.”

“Three years,” I said. “It’s a long time to remember your brother’s address. You also forgot the phone number. Mom and Dad’s, too?”

He looked so different from the last time I’d seen him. No longer bloated and pimpled from heroin, no longer pale from the nocturnal, nomadic existence it commanded, he looked to me like he always should have. Like a six-foot, deep-chested, wide-shouldered version of the tough, funny, Irish kid I knew when we were boys. He looked like a fit and sturdy young man. Clean and well fed, rested, happy.

Danny wore a black suit jacket over a dark green T-shirt, a new pair of jeans and black motorcycle boots. Gone was the white T-shirt stained with blood, vomit, and iced tea. Gone were the dirty jeans with the black scorch marks from his spoons. His brown hair was no longer sweaty and filthy, clinging in clumps to his forehead. It was cut short and clean, parted in the middle and gelled at the sides. His blue eyes were clear. He looked healthier than I had ever seen him.

My relief at seeing him alive and breathing nearly knocked me on my ass. Seeing him looking that good made me ecstatic. I wanted to leap down the stairs and crush him in a hug, but I held back. I couldn’t make it too easy for him. Easy had never done Danny any good, and I wanted to hang on to my pride for a few more seconds. I looked up and down the block, but there was no sign of the Escort.

He looked up the stairs at me from his spot on the sidewalk. “I owe you a beer.”

It took me a minute to recall what he was referring to; I was surprised he remembered anything about that night. “You owe me more than that.”

“I know, Kev,” Danny said. He opened his arms. “That’s what I’m here to talk about. I got a lot to make up for. I’m back and I’m staying this time.”

“I’ve heard that before,” I said. “It’s gonna be a long walk home.”

Danny stood his ground, arms still spread. “Then let’s get started. You lead.” I didn’t move; my brother didn’t, either. He swallowed hard. “Say the word and I’m outta here. Believe me, I wouldn’t blame you.”

“Three years is a long goddamn time,” I said.

“Would it do any good,” Danny asked, “to make it longer?”

I took a deep breath. He had a point. I could keep talking, I figured, or I could do the right thing. I walked down the stairs and into his arms. Fuck pride. And history. This was my brother back from the dead. He had always been my breaking point. Even as kids, he asked and I gave. That’s just how it was. Maybe he had changed over the past three years. I hadn’t.

He squeezed me hard, lifted me a few inches off the ground. “You are the fucking man. Thank you. I mean it, Kev. I’m off the shit and back for good.”

I stepped back after he released me. “I can see that you’re clean. As for the rest of it, let’s start with that beer and go from there.”

“Good enough for me,” Danny said, waving his hand in the air. “I won’t even ask you to drive.”

Headlights popped on down the street. The car, a black late-model Charger with deeply tinted windows, stopped in front of us. It gleamed and purred, immaculate, under the streetlight. Silently, the driver’s-side window rolled down. I stepped to the car.

“You remember Al Bruno,” Danny said. “From back in the day.”

I did, though he’d lost quite a bit of his hair. What remained was cut short, revealing a prominent widow’s peak. In the blue lights of the dashboard, in his black clothes, Al looked vaguely vampiric. He stuck out his hand across his chest, not turning to look at me.

“How you been, Kev?” he asked, nearly crushing my hand when he shook it. Al had been hitting the weights, either at the gym or at the jailhouse.

“Can’t complain. I’m still teaching, over at the college.”

“Noble,” Al said, sliding a medallion back and forth along the gold chain around his neck.

“What’re you doing these days?” I asked. Parole? Probation? Hardly anything noble, I figured. Definitely not community service.

Al turned to look at me. “Little of this, little of that. I got a few things workin’.”

Those few things working probably wore pricey watches and hung around supermarket parking lots. Danny’s choice of companions wasn’t doing much for my faith in him.

Danny slapped me on the back. “New, different things,” he said. “Right, Al?”

“You gotta change with the times,” Al said.

“Okay then, this is cool and all,” Danny said, “but wouldn’t it be more fun over a beer?”

“Danny,” I said, “talk to me a minute.” I took a few steps away from the car. Danny stayed put. “Over here.”

“I know what you’re gonna say,” Danny said, “and I don’t blame you. But it’s all good. Al and I went through rehab together. The old days are behind us, Kev.”

Al said nothing, just took a toothpick from behind his ear and put it in his mouth, his same old junior gangster act.

Danny opened the back door for me. “Hop in. One beer. Let me pay you back that much.”

I got in the car and Danny climbed in the passenger seat. Al rolled up his window and pulled the car into the street, spinning his tires on the pavement, kicking up a screech and a cloud of smoke as if he needed to announce his departure to the block.

Squeezing between the front seats, I asked Danny where he’d been the past three years. He held up his hand, telling me it was not the time for questions. I thought maybe he didn’t want Al hearing what he told me. Maybe he couldn’t hear me over Kid Rock. But he smiled as he watched the island fly by out the window and I thought maybe he was just enjoying the reunion. He and I in a car again, heading out after dark, this time with a chance to make things right. I had to admit, I liked the feeling, too.

 

 

 

AL EASED THE CHARGER
up to the curb outside the Red Lion, the emerald neon of the bar’s Budweiser shamrock washing over the car’s gleaming black hood, gutter gravel crunching under the fat tires. He kept the engine running. Danny turned in his seat.

“I mean, this was the original plan, right?”

“Works for me,” I said.

We hadn’t even discussed where we were going; Danny had no doubt planned the whole thing. Danny and I climbed out, careful not to catch the door on the high curb. Al stayed in the front seat, his cell phone open in his right hand, the neon striping his lap. He was reading a text message, brows knit, bottom lip puffed out.

“Al, you coming in?” I asked, walking around the front of the car to his window.

He snapped shut the phone, thinking hard about whatever he’d read. “Nah. I got a girl I gotta go see. I’ll catch up.”

“Thanks for the ride,” I said.

Al put the car into drive, nearly running over my feet as he pulled away. Danny stood outside the pub.

“Used to be,” I said, walking over to him, “you couldn’t shut that kid up.”

“That girl’s got him on a short leash,” Danny said. “Anyway, Al never could hold more than one idea in his head at a time. A girl takes up all the room he has. How about that beer?”

He grabbed the brass door handle and pulled. Blurry conversations muddled under Shane McGowan’s singing drifted past us and over the street. “I’ve been looking forward to this for a long time.”

I threw a soft elbow into Danny’s midsection as I passed him. He pretended it hurt.

Inside, the voices and the music got louder. Flushed, heavy-lidded faces rotated in our direction, their mouths still talking in the other direction. Danny pointed out a booth in a back corner, then went to the bar for drinks. I slipped through several sets of hard shoulders and dropped into the booth, sliding into the corner. Waiting for Danny, I picked at the old cigarette burns in the green plastic of the bench and watched the door, hoping our folks would walk in. It was a foolish thought, founded on nothing. I’d been here with Dad a couple times, but Danny had never been with us. Dad and I had talked about him here, though. Maybe that was it.

What was the rush? If Danny really was on the mend, we’d have our reunion eventually. If Danny had kicked junk for good, there was no longer a time bomb ticking underneath our family. Then I thought of our mother. The bomb ticked on, just with someone else holding it now. And there was no defusing Alzheimer’s; it didn’t matter what wire you clipped. There was no kicking it, either.

Danny set a draft Guinness in front of me and sat on the other side of the booth. All he’d gotten for himself was a tall club soda with lime. I decided to hold back on the news about Mom, at least for the night. I didn’t want Danny and me starting over with the taste of bad news in our mouths.

“Totally clean and sober?” I asked.

“I haven’t done heroin in over a year,” he said. “Nothing else, either, no weed, no pills, no coke, no nothing.”

I turned the pint glass round and round on the table. I should’ve asked for a Coke. “I’m waiting for it to settle.”

“Go ahead,” Danny said. “No worries.”

“You sure? I don’t want to fuck anything up.”

“Nobody can fuck me up but me,” Danny said. He sucked down half his soda water. “I have a few drinks now and then, but nothing more than that.” He tilted back the glass, sliding some ice into his mouth. “I’m not supposed to, technically, but considering where I’ve been, I figure I’m doing pretty well.”

I drank my beer, licking the foam off my top lip. “Where
have
you been?”

“No place that matters, but lots of places, I guess,” Danny said. “Nowhere I wanna go back to.”

“How’d you get back here then?” I asked. “From wherever you were.”

“I got a ride,” Danny said.

“C’mon, Danny, not to my house, not
here
here. You know what I mean.”

“I got a ride.” He stabbed at the ice in his glass with his straw. “Ambulance.”

I sat and waited, my stomach going sour, my beer getting warmer by the minute.