One of the Boys Read online

  My thoughts drifted to Kansas. It was an hour later there, an hour closer to sleep, to forgetting about everything for eight hours by just closing my eyes. My mother would sometimes scratch my back before bed, and I’d get a strange tickling sensation that started near my tailbone and would stiffen my muscles all the way to my neck. It was innocent, but I was embarrassed because I was too old, and besides, I was on my father’s team, and I’d ask her to stop and she would. I stayed out on Janice’s porch, calm and alone, until the last light of day faded from the sky, and Albuquerque lit up like a thousand little campfires, and my brother came out to tell me that it was time to eat.

  SEVEN

  More than a month had passed. We hadn’t seen our dad. Not before school, already high, shuffling around the apartment with his slow languid ways. Not after either, sitting down to his desk, pretending to sort papers, pick up the phone, work a pen. Since Janice had given him the check, our only proof of life was at night. Soon after we closed our door to go to bed, we’d listen for his door to creak open, for his padded steps out into the living room, for the low hum of the speakers as he turned on the stereo. He played the same CD on repeat every night until morning, the one he bought from the Spanish guitarist when we’d just moved here.

  At first we weren’t alarmed. But when one week turned to two, my brother had to cash his own paycheck for groceries, gas, school supplies. After the third week we finally knocked on my father’s door. We told him about the bills, the rent, the business line—the red message light on the answering machine had been flashing all this time. He didn’t answer. “What do you want us to do?” my brother asked. “Tell us, Dad, what should we do?” I dropped to my knees, peered through the crack at the foot of his door. A lank shadow crept across the carpet. “Dad?” I said. The shadow kept creeping, deliberate as a sloth. The next morning a blank check was sitting on the kitchen table, and the red message light was dark—though it was blinking again when we got home from school.

  Tonight, headlights from the street outside our window moved across the wall of our bedroom.

  “We need to call Mom,” my brother said.

  He’d been trying to convince me for a week.

  “No,” I said. “No way. We’ll be fine.”

  “We won’t be fine,” he said. “None of this is fine. You know I’m right. Admit it.”

  I beat back his persuasiveness with thoughts of my dad. I imagined him staring out the window to the park, the only light in the room the ember of his cigar, reflecting sadly on the things he’d done, people he’d lost, pushed away. Sometimes in my mind I was my father. After all, weren’t he and I totally beyond forgiveness? Weren’t we the two who had betrayed my mother the worst? And what made my brother think she could help? She’d never stood up to our dad before. Why would she now?

  “Not yet,” I said. “He’ll bounce back. You’ll see.”

  “How much longer do we have to wait?”

  I begged him for more time.

  He went quiet. Then he scooted down in bed, his silence a sign of assent.

  “What the hell is she going to do for us anyway?” I said.

  Before falling asleep we heard his door open, footsteps, a woman’s voice, the opening and closing of the front door, the dead bolt flick, the chain lock latch. My brother was already looking out the window, whispering to me the description of a woman we did not recognize walk out to the street and disappear into the night. We kept our eyes on the parking lot. Nothing came back out of the darkness. The music began a moment later.

  * * *

  There was a soft knock on our bedroom door a week later. She said my name. She’d been back most nights. I’d learned to recognize her voice—the lack of lilt due to the drugs. I climbed from bed, cracked the door, careful not to wake my brother.

  “Be my eyes,” she whispered.

  I nodded, turned to the window.

  “Wait,” she said. “What does it mean? Be my eyes?”

  “It means play lookout,” I told her, my voice hushed. “Keep an eye on the street.”

  “What are you looking for?”

  “Anything suspicious,” I said.

  “Oh?” she said, excited. “Why don’t I be lookout at the back window?”

  My eyes finally adjusted to the darkness. Her eyes were big and encouraging. Her lips thin, puckered. She wanted me to think she was pretty. She was asking for some sort of consent, as if she needed my approval in order to get high with my father. As if she needed my approval in spite of getting high with him.

  I stepped back, said OK.

  Out the window the street was empty, all quiet. I could hear my brother breathing in his sleep. I watched him. When we were young our parents gave us dream catchers as gifts from a trip they’d taken to the Southwest. My brother, unsure how they worked, slept with his on his face that first night. He’d slipped his tiny nose through the web, balanced a feather on the tip of his chin. My mother probably still had the photo of it.

  I tiptoed to the living room. The CD played softly from the stereo. Light leaked out from beneath my father’s door. His friend stood before the window, cigarette smoke twisting up from the ashtray. “You see anything?” she asked.

  I shook my head.

  “Have you ever seen anything?”

  I shrugged.

  “Maybe tonight.”

  “Maybe.”

  I lingered for a moment, wanted to know if my father had said anything else. Maybe she’d forgotten to relay a message. Instead I asked her if he was OK. I said we hadn’t seen him in a while. “I’m worried about him,” I told her.

  She turned to me, the night illuminating half her face.

  “His boys is all he talks about,” she said.

  Though the one in the ashtray still burned, she lit another cigarette. She turned to the window again, resumed her role as lookout, waited for me to go back to bed. I knew she didn’t plan to keep watch after I left. The force inside my father’s bedroom was calling her to return. She would not stay in orbit much longer.

  * * *

  At the grocery store I strolled the movie rentals, the frozen food aisle, the dairy section. I saw my brother’s hands behind the glass, stocking cartons of milk. I opened the door, grabbed his wrist.

  “I’ll give you something to milk,” I said.

  “Motherfucker, you scared me,” he said. “That’s going to cost you.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Three,” he said. “My choice.”

  “No. Shoulder only.”

  “My choice.”

  After his shift my brother socked me in the thigh outside the store.

  I limped away a few feet. “I said shoulder only.”

  He smiled, pulled out a fistful of bills. He’d just cashed his check. He looked to the sky. “Come on, we’re going to miss it.”

  The sun had nearly set when the balloon glow began. Hundreds of hot-air balloons firing up their flames before the dying day. One by one, the sky grown dark, they lifted, weightless and radiant. At highway speeds these balloons would be in flight through the night and for several days after, until a winner, having landed somewhere in Minnesota or thereabouts, had flown farthest from the fairgrounds. My brother pointed at one, way high. As boys we used to lie in our backyard, stare up at the sky together. My brother would locate a cloud, usually a solitary one, and with the force of our gaze we would make it stop drifting. The cloud motionless, we felt the earth rotating beneath us. I got that same giddy feeling in my stomach now—part terror, part anticipation—that at any moment we might slip from the face of the planet.

  The balloons out of sight, the fiesta began. We ate hot dogs and funnel cake, drank pop. We stood in the back of the crowd away from the stage as a band started to play. The whole time, though, I sensed our dad watching us. It was my guilt over spending too much. I felt bad for wasting money. My brother saw me withdrawing into my thoughts.

  “Don’t,” he said. “This is our revenge.”

  I nodd
ed.

  He slapped me on the back. “Come on.”

  I followed him to the carnival games.

  At each new booth he fanned out more cash.

  On our return to the Jeep a man walked out from between two cars, cut us off in the parking lot. My heart raced, senses sharpened. Off in the distance there was the sound of laughter, music, a loud crack in the sky. My brother moved to shield me. But his body suddenly arched like a parenthesis, slammed onto the ground. I was also tackled from behind. My face skidded across the gravel. The man on top of me turned me over, emptied my pockets. There was nothing in them. He snarled, pushed my raw cheek down into the road. When the three of them ran away, I rolled to my side. My brother was hunched over on his knees, holding his stomach, appearing to protect a wound.

  I asked him if he was hurt.

  He grunted.

  “Are you hurt?” I yelled.

  He gasped for air, shook his head.

  “Wind knocked out of you?”

  He nodded.

  I lay back down on the ground.

  Once he caught his breath, we helped each other to our feet. By the light of the fireworks he double-checked his pockets. The money was all gone.

  He used his shirt to wipe my face.

  “You’re all scraped up,” he said.

  “Your lip’s split.”

  He tongued his lip.

  “Mom should see us now,” he said.

  He mentioned her like she’d be waiting for us at home.

  “Why’s that?” I asked.

  “She always said: God help the day one of you comes home with a black eye and the other one doesn’t.”

  I went next, “You both come home with black eyes or don’t come home at all.”

  We continued impersonating her the whole drive back, even though laughing made my face hurt, his ribs ache. I felt close to my brother, which I was thankful for, and as we pulled into the complex, the lights in the apartment off, I felt thankful too for my father’s absence.

  * * *

  She knocked that night as well. My brother woke before me. He answered the door. “Be my eyes,” I heard her say. She used my name again. He nodded. She walked away. He went to the window. I’d never seen my brother play lookout. I didn’t even know he knew about it. I rolled over to watch him. From the streetlight the edges of his profile glowed.

  “How long has it been you?” he asked. “I didn’t know he still did this.”

  I sat up in bed. “Are you jealous?”

  “I thought he’d stopped is all.”

  He turned to me, but his eyes suddenly darted to the door.

  It was the woman, staring silently, looking at one of us and then the other, a confused or curious expression on her face. Then she turned, went to the kitchen. When she came back into our room she placed melting ice cubes in our hands. She waited eagerly for us to put them to our wounds. She stood next to my brother, gazed out the window. He soaked up the attention. He asked her how our dad was. “We need him back,” he said. “Tell him we can’t do this alone.” By the way his voice broke, it was obvious that he was speaking for himself, for both of us, not just for me. I’d thought he’d given up on our father.

  “OK,” she hushed him, “I’ll tell him. Go to sleep now.”

  The next morning the apartment smelled of lemon and cleaning supplies. She’d used bleach on the table, which had stripped the stain. Spot-cleaned the carpet with it too. Wood polish now fogged the windows, the wall hangings. But for these few details the place was immaculate. On the kitchen counter were two brown paper bags, filled up, stapled shut. She’d even packed us lunch.

  * * *

  The day we finally saw him, I returned from school to find my brother sitting on the ground outside the apartment. He said they were fighting inside. “About what?” I asked. He didn’t know. “About us?” He shrugged. I heard their raised voices. I thought she might have been standing up to my father, reminding him that he had kids.

  I knocked on the door, said it was us, his sons.

  The blinds rustled. The window rose.

  “Boys?” my father said.

  “Dad?”

  “Come back later.”

  The door flew open.

  “You fucking thief,” she yelled. She rushed out, ran wildly into the parking lot, a lunatic escaping in daylight. She turned back, flipped us the middle finger. “Fuck you, asshole. Fuck all three of you motherfuckers.”

  My father ushered us in hurriedly, closed the door.

  I didn’t recognize him. His lips were blistered, cracked. He’d thinned—his mustache too big for his face. His pants didn’t fit him anymore. He had to hold them up by the waistband. The frays of his cuffs dragged across the carpet like uprooted plants. His uneasy energy frightened us both, especially with how weak he appeared, how slow moving. He was an electronic device running out of charge. We kept our distance.

  The phone started ringing.

  “Battle stations,” he cried.

  “What happened?” my brother asked. “What’s going on?”

  “That bitch called the cops.” His hands had begun to shake. “You have to bail me out. You can’t leave me in jail. You hear me?”

  “Why’d she call the cops?” my brother asked.

  “You hear me? You can’t leave me in there. That’d be like killing me. My death would be on your hands.”

  “What was the argument about? You stole something from her,” I said.

  “She thought it was all hers.” He said it like a child. “Greedy bitch.”

  “What did she tell the cops?” my brother asked.

  “Nothing. I hung up the phone before she could say anything.”

  “Is that them calling now?” my brother said.

  The phone stopped ringing.

  “Battle stations,” he cried again.

  My brother secured the apartment. He tightened the blinds, locked the windows, bolted the door. I played lookout from our bedroom. My father was in his room straightening up. A police cruiser rolled to a stop outside our building. I ran to tell them.

  In a panic we all crammed together under his desk, my father in the middle.

  The plan was: keep quiet and wait for the cop to leave.

  The officer knocked, announced himself.

  He knocked a second time, harder.

  We saw his shadow behind the blinds of the window next to the front door, his hands cupped over his brow. When his shadow disappeared, I leaned out from beneath the desk to see it arrive at our bedroom window. I pointed to show my brother. My father’s head was buried between his legs. The officer stood there awhile, then was gone again. Moments later we heard him walking on the rocks behind the apartment. He jumped the railing to the back porch. He was right over us. My father shook horribly, his muscles convulsing. I put my arms around him, squeezed as hard as I could to settle his nerves. The officer tested the windows above the desk. They both stuck. He had the same result with the glass porch door. My eyes met my brother’s, and while mine expressed gratitude to him for locking up, for being reliable and doing his job well, I was devastated to find his full of disgust for the scene of me cradling our dad.

  At the front door the cop knocked a last time. Then it sounded like he tried the neighbors. There was no answer there either. The sun was setting, the officer’s shadow no longer detectable in the window, and though we didn’t know if he’d left or not, we remained quiet beneath the desk until darkness was complete and my father had stopped shaking.

  * * *

  There was no music that night. We’d put our dad to bed. In our room I searched for a way to persuade my brother not to contact our mom. The closer he came to calling her, the more certain I was that I never wanted to live with her again. It wasn’t just that she was unreliable, but that in my most private thoughts I feared her forgiveness. The ease with which she’d brush it all under the rug, blame my father, pretend that it was not my fault at all. It couldn’t be real. It wouldn’t last. She’d neve
r be able to hold back her disappointment in me. And what about our father? We would have to leave him behind, betray him, too.

  “What about Dad?” I asked. “He wouldn’t survive. He’d die without us.”

  My brother had made his decision. He’d broken from the boys.

  “Let him,” he said. “I don’t care anymore.”

  “You can’t call her,” I said. “She won’t forgive us.”

  “Yes, she will.”

  “She won’t forgive me.”

  “I bet she already has.”

  My eyes burned with anger. I didn’t know who to blame.

  I went out to the living room to sleep on the couch.

  All night I dreamed in short clips. There was one: a scene from a trip I’d taken with my father to Colorado years ago, except we’d switched roles. I stood watching as he explored a great plateau on the other side of a mountain bridge. It was daytime, autumn. The aspens were yellow and orange, and their wispy leaves flickered in the wind. My father had begun to walk back to me but had veered off the path, away from the bridge, toward a cliff. And at the point when in real life my father had yelled out, redirected me away from the edge, in the dream I was muted, immobile, my expression indifferent, while inside I screamed and flailed and wept—a great wind that would not blow.

  EIGHT

  My father threw open our bedroom door, began to pace about in his underwear like a prisoner obsessed with his own innocence, ranting, “Traitor! Traitor! Traitor!” I sat up in bed, pulled from sleep by his rage. My brother had already left for school. Today was my day to help my father catch up on office work. He had not yet returned to normal from the months-long binge. The comedown had been prolonged. His hands still shook when he held a glass. He was sensitive to sound. He had no control over the swings of his emotions. He reacted with extremes: weepy or angry—sometimes at the same time.

  “My firstborn son,” he cried. “Of all the people in the world.”