Making Nice (11 page)

I kicked him harder the second time, and without looking he felt around with his left hand, discovered my right shoe, patted around the laces, and untied the knot. I found it strangely endearing, his refusal to behave in spite of his vulnerability.

“Let me drive you home,” I said.

He rolled onto his back and squinted at me, looked a little like Joe Cocker having a fit on stage. “No.”

“Donny. You need to get your mailman rest in your mailman bed.”

“You’re a raging asshole,” he said. “A royal son of a bitch.”

“Maybe,” I said, and looked out over the bay and watched the moonlight do its shiny thing on the water. Then I sat on the log and lit a cigarette and considered my options. After a few drags I patted him on the shoulder. “Let me give you a ride home, Donny,” I said. “Let me help you out.”

“Fine,” he said.

I grabbed his arm with my left hand and his armpit with my right and helped him up and over and into my beat-up Camry, a hand-me-down from my mother that I’d hated for years. After she died I just half-hated it. The radio only picked up WBAB, an easy-listening station that she always liked but I didn’t, and when I turned it on a man was singing something awful about love so I turned it off.

We drove in silence for a while, and just after crossing the Snapper Inn Bridge he started dry heaving so I signaled and pulled over. He had some trouble with the seat belt and then with the door handle, but eventually he managed both and fell out of the car, then crawled toward the little bit of salt marsh that remained after the giant houses with sump pumps in always-wet basements got built. I stepped out and leaned on the hood, and a streetlight humming a little bit down the road shut off. Sometimes I think they do that just for me—shut off when I approach.

I looked up at the stars while Donny retched and spit, inhaled and spit, on and on until he stopped. Then he started again, and I listened again, and when it seemed like he was finished I walked over and asked him if he was all right. “I’m great,” he said. “Real good.” Then the streetlamp clicked once and hummed back on and I saw orange-colored strings of vomit dangling from his mouth and his nostrils. I pointed to the cattails at first, then let my hand drop to what looked like it might be poison ivy and told him to wipe his face with the leaves. He wiped with his shiny shirtsleeve.

“Should’ve used the cattails,” I said.

“Cattails?”

“You know,” I said. “The pussy willows.”

He told me that he was terrified of his brother.

“He’ll be waiting up for me, man. Once, when I came in around this time, he head-butted me and broke my nose. He’s really strong. He’s only thirteen, but he’s like a man already.”

“Everybody’s scared of something.”

I turned and walked around the car and climbed back in, started it up, looked at him standing there swaying in the just-a-little breeze, looked past him at the cattails swaying in the just-a-little breeze, rolled down the passenger-side window with the driver’s-side button.

“You gonna get in?”

“No.”

“Get in,” I said.

“No.”

“Get in the fucking car, Donny.”

He said no a third time and started hissing at me like a swan, or cat, or moron. I told him to quit hissing but he kept at it for a while, then got in the car and refused to wear his seat belt. I said, OK, whatever you like, then signaled and pulled onto the road. As I was getting up to speed he leaned forward and turned the radio on. Another man was singing something awful about love, and—as I reached to shut it off—Donny punched me right in the temple. My head bounced off the driver’s-side window and everything whited out, like an overhead projector had been turned on inside my skull. I felt myself slouch forward and my left hand loosen on the steering wheel, my right foot ease off the gas. I heard possible and impossible things: the car engine winding down, the tires humming lower on the road, Donny breathing, my breathing, grass breathing, crickets cricketing in the night like
I’m-a-cricket, I’m-a-cricket … I’m-a-cricket-too …
cattails and pussy willows swaying in the just-a-little breeze. I heard my mother’s voice say my name, just once, but it hung there, suspended in the ether around me before fading out. Then I heard and thought and felt nothing at all, just black and quiet, like before you’re born.

Sometime later, like
blip
, I came back on. I knew before I opened my eyes that I was in the passenger seat of my car, that my car was parked in front my house, and that it was Donny’s hand on my shoulder, gently shaking me, him saying, “Wake up, Alby. Alby. Alby. Alby, wake up.”

R
EST
S
TOP

I stuck around a few months after my brother and sister abandoned ship—supposedly to keep an eye on him but really because I couldn’t do much of anything except sit around wondering what my mother’s body looked like rotting in an expensive box under the ground; also ’cause he had a big TV—and one Sunday morning I came downstairs to find him at the kitchen table staring at a crossword puzzle through lopsided, one-armed reading glasses on the end of his nose. In front of him were six or seven crushed-up Bud cans, one un-crushed, a bag of oatmeal cookies, and he had a giant scab down the left side of his face, and parts of it were still bleeding.

“Good morning, Dad,” I said, filling up the kettle.

“Morning,” he said.

The stove clicked three times before flaming, same as always, and I went and got a coffee cup out of the coffee cup cabinet and leaned against the counter.

“King of bread,” he said. “Three letters. Third is
e
.”

I thought about bread for a while.

“I don’t know,” I said, because I didn’t, then walked over and looked at the crossword over his shoulder, then at his still-bleeding face some more, then at the crossword some more. “No idea.”

I turned around and stared out the window at two squirrels hanging off a wooden bird feeder. There was no seed in the feeder, hadn’t been any for years. They were chewing on the wood roof.

“We should get some birdseed,” I said. “For the squirrels.”

“Tijuana Brass trumpeter Herb. Six letters. Fourth is
e
.”

“You could misspell parsley,” I said. “Add a couple
e
’s to weed.
Weeeed
.”

“He’s not a fuckin’ plant,” he said. “He’s a musician. His first name is Herb.”

“Avore. Herb Avore.”

He shook his head. “Stupid.”

When the water started boiling I poured it into my coffee cup, added a tea bag, watched the brown billow and went to the fridge for half-and-half.

“Mae and Nathaniel, five letters.”

“Wests,” I said. “What happened to your face?”

“I fell off my bike.”

It made sense as far as explanations go. This was summer, festival season on Long Island—Lobsterfest, Clamfest, Oysterfest, some Indian powwow thing, and an antique boat show—and in order to avoid driving drunk he had taken to riding my sister’s bike to some of these, drinking till he was asked or made to leave, then trying to pedal home.

“That your breakfast?”

He flashed me some kind of look and stuffed a whole cookie into his mouth and began chewing it in what I think was supposed to be an aggressive manner. He resembled a giant, unhappy five year old, and it unsettled me.

“I tried to eat a hard-boiled egg,” he said, “but the shell wouldn’t come off easy.”

“Want me to get you somethin’ from the deli?”

“No,” he said to a spot on the floor near my feet.

“Thinkin’ about mopping?”

“No.”

“Jealous I have ten toes?”

“No.”

“Are you smart?”

He stuffed another cookie in his mouth and stood up and stalked off to finish his crossword in front of the big television. I gave the back of his head the middle finger, rinsed a few dishes in the sink, and placed them in the dishwasher. Then I raided his pills. He’d somehow managed to convince an idiot at the VA that he had ADHD, when really he was just depressed after the chemo killed my mother, which for some reason I imagine is like little tiny nuclear bombs going off inside you till you’re dead and then some. Maybe moths can hear the explosions.

*   *   *

To be fair, the Ritalin did help him get out of bed and through his day, but the way me and my siblings saw it, side effects included anxiety, irritability, patriotism, one night in the Sayville Modern Diner he asked, “What’s broccoli?” and another night he ate two Beef Merlot Lean Cuisines and a loaf of pumpernickel bread, then threatened to commit suicide with the butter knife. My brother had, the week before, returned to graduate school, so it was left to me to wrestle the butter knife from him, and we fell to the kitchen floor and knocked over Sparkles’s water dish and rolled around in the puddle for a while, which had swollen-up dog-food crumbs in it and smelled. After she got bored with watching from the doorway, my sister walked over and yanked his artificial leg off and ran out of the house with it. This stunned him, and he quit struggling long enough for me to make a proposal:

“Stop being an asshole.”

“No.”

I thought about that, then counterproposed to get his leg for him if he promised not to try to kill himself again. He thought about that, then agreed and added, “Now get the fuck off me.”

“Promise first.”

“I fuckin’ promise!”

“You fuckin’ promise what?”

“I fuckin’ promise not to try to kill myself!”

“Good!” I said. “It fuckin’ pleases me to hear you say that, Dad!”

Then I rolled off him onto my back, and together the two of us lay there in the puddle staring up at the dead bug silhouettes in the fluorescent lights trying to catch our breath. Eventually I hit him lightly on the chest with the back of my open hand. Eventually he reached across himself and shook it.

The batteries in the orange flashlight were dead, so I went to the battery drawer and spent a minute putting in and taking out dead batteries. Eventually I found a combination that worked, but barely, and as soon as I got outside the light went dim and died, so I shook it a little before throwing it at a tree. When it hit the trunk it flashed bright for half a second, then fell to the ground where I left it. Then I walked a lap around the outside of the house in the dark.

Halfway into lap two I spotted my sister across the street at the end of the dock, staring down into the brown water of the Connetquot River, while I walked out to the end of the dock and stood next to her and didn’t say anything, just stared down into the brown water of the Connetquot River. She didn’t say anything either. I patted my pockets and found my cigarettes, patted them again and found my lighter, lit two and handed her one. Neither of us said anything. We just smoked and stared down into the brown water of the Connetquot River, while I wondered if turtles can get hepatitis. Clams can—Isabella Rossellini did a PSA-thing about it once, I saw the billboard for it on the westbound platform of the Babylon train station. Standing there on the end of the dock with my sister I suddenly felt very tired.

“Where is it?” I said.

“I threw it in the bushes,” she said, then turned and pointed.

I followed the tip of her finger out with my eyes and, squinting, was just able to make out a foot with a black sneaker on it protruding from the top of one of the shrubs bordering the property.

The two of us turned and stared down into the water again, and after what seemed like a long time, I crushed my cigarette out on the bottom of an upside-down bucket placed over one of the rotting pilings of the dock and said, “Poor turtles,” but more mumbled than pronounced, like, “Prtrtles.” Then I patted my sister’s shoulder awkwardly, retrieved the leg out of the bush, and headed into the house with it under my arm like a gift.

My father was at the kitchen table reading a days-old newspaper, stuffing handfuls of croutons into his face. When he saw me he wiped his left hand down his denim shirt twice, then reached out for the leg like,
Gimme
. I handed it to him, and he immediately started picking small branches and bits of shrub out of the stump socket and dropping them on the floor, then turned the whole thing upside down and shook it. When satisfied, he placed the leg on the floor in front of him, rolled up his pants leg to just above the knee, pushed his stump into the stump socket with both hands, then stood up and shifted his weight from right to left to right again, like a junior high school dancer. Then he bent down and pulled the neoprene stump sleeve up over the knee, rolled his pants leg down, sat back in the chair, and resumed reading the days-old newspaper. I told him I was going to bed.

He turned to look at the stove clock. “It’s only eight thirty,” he said.

I didn’t answer him, just wiped a piece of swollen-up dog food off his shoulder and went upstairs to my room and fell asleep and didn’t get up till three the next day. My sister was packing.

*   *   *

A festival or two later I came home around ten or eleven to find a running pickup truck in front of the house, the taillights tinting the exhaust red, tinting the bushes and the mailbox red, the guy struggling to unload my sister’s bicycle from the back of the truck red. I parked and hurried over to help, and as I got closer I saw that my father was also in the back of the truck, on his back, tugging at the front wheel. When he noticed me there he yelled, “Hey kid!” then just lay there smiling and blinking, like he was genuinely happy to see me.

“Hey Dad,” I said. That’s all it took. Something in my voice must have betrayed some sense of disappointment, or concern, or just wasn’t enthusiastic enough, because the smile slowly came off his face and his eyes went vague and unfocused, as if he just at that moment remembered something unpleasant. He turned and looked out over the lawn.

“You gotta leave me here,” he said. “Just fuckin’ leave me here.”

A week later, I did.

*   *   *

I’d probably eaten four or five Ritalin and snorted another off a paperback with a rolled-up oil-change receipt, plus I’d downed a lukewarm cup of burnt gas station coffee a few miles back, so my heart felt like it might bust right out of my chest and float there over the steering wheel all shiny-style like Jesus’s or Mary’s or Whoever’s that was by the time I pulled into the rest stop—one of those generic-looking ones, a sand-colored single-story with the men’s room on one side and the women’s on the other, the vending machines in the middle, a picnic table or two off to the right. I had to go so bad I power-walked up the path and was unzipped and dick out five feet from the men’s-room door. Once inside I saw that both urinals were stopped up with paper towels so I hobbled then hopped into the first of two stalls and saw what looked like a murder scene only browner and with spinach. I hopped into the handicapped stall and fired at will, shuffled my way closer and was peeing and staring at the ceiling and then at the wall and then at the toilet and then at the floor and then at a grasshopper on the floor to the right. At first I’d just given the grasshopper a quick look, but then I gave it another because it seemed, in its absolute stillness, to be staring at me.