Brotherly Love

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

P
eter 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 gotten 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
.... "