Brotherly Love (10 page)

A gesture, nothing else.

The colored kid runs his finger over his nose and
checks it for blood. "Now I gone kick both your asses," he
says. "See what you done?"

He smiles again, showing a slice of pink inside his
lips, as if he had been opened up. The short white boy ducks his head
and bolts. One of them reaches for him, but he is gone. Faster than
he looks. He crosses the street and goes into the alley where Nick
first saw the other four, and is almost to the next block before he
looks back and sees that no one is following. Then he stops, shoeless
and red-faced and out of breath, and screams one long, furious word.

"Niggers."

The word dies in the wind.

"Give them their shoes," Nick says.

The colored boy who is holding the shoes turns to
look at him, but it is the other one—the one Charley’s boy
hit—that Nick is talking to. He is the one who will decide.

He smiles again. "Man, you must be comical,"
he says, and it’s done.

Nick tosses a meaningless slap at the boy’s ear,
bringing up his hands, and then hits him as hard as he can in the
ribs, feeling the bones through his jacket. He stands still, watching
him fall to his knees and then to the sidewalk; he watches him curl.

Nick stares at the kid holding the shoes. The kid
turns and runs, into the wind, the shoes bouncing against his leg.

"Robert ain’t but fifteen," one of them
says, looking at the boy on the sidewalk.

The boy on the ground fights to breathe. Nick thinks
of the feel of his bones underneath the jacket, wonders if he’s
broken his ribs.

Charley’s kid stares at him, as surprised as the
boy on the ground. The other one is still in the alley, watching.

"His brother gone find you, man," the
colored kid says. "He gone kick your ass for sure."

The kid on the sidewalk gets to his knees, his face
still resting on his arm. He holds the other arm motionless and tight
to his body.

"What do you think, everybody in the world’s
going to give up their shoes?" Nick says to the kid on the
ground.

His blood quiets, and he is beginning to feel sorry.
There was no fight. For a little while it felt like one, but it went
away before it started.

He is sorry for what happened and he is sorry for
what didn’t.

From the alley, Phillip Flood’s kid screams again.

"Niggers . . ."

The colored boys look at Nick as if he’d said it
too, all except the one on the ground. He is making small, crying
noises as the air comes in and out of his chest. His breathing is
shallow and quick. A line of spit connects the boy’s mouth to the
sidewalk. It bends in the wind and breaks.

"You got a father?" Nick says.
 
Charley’s boy looks up quickly, as if Nick might
be asking him.

"His father gone whip your ass for sure,"
one of the colored boys says.

The word comes across the alley again, under the
sound of the wind. "Niggers." It is like a howl.

Nick squats next to the kid on the ground and uses
the arm he is resting on to get him to his feet.

The boy stands, bent to his right, holding his ribs.

"Somebody be back to see you," one of them
says, moving farther away; ready to run.

"This is where I am," Nick says, "right
around the corner."

He points behind himself to Chadwick Street.

The colored boys walk into the cold wind, the one
that Nick hit is bent at the waist and stops now and then to catch
his breath.

Charley Flood’s kid watches them, still holding the
compact in his hand.

"You better get home," Nick says.

The kid hears him, but he doesn’t move.

"They ain’t going to bother you anymore,"
he says. He looks across the street to the alley. "Tell your
cousin to watch where he steps; people throw glass in that alley."

The kid puts the compact into his jacket pocket, then
touches it from the outside, through the material, to make sure it is
there, and starts across the street in his socks.

Nick watches him go, and thinks of getting in one of
the old cars sitting in front of the garage and driving the boys
home. That’s what he would want someone to do if it were Harry. But
then, Harry wouldn’t have given up his shoes, not to four of them,
not to all of them in the city. Someday that will get him hurt, but
when you’re hurt that way, it heals. He thinks of Phillip Flood’s
boy, leaving his cousin and running. How long does it take to get
over that?

He walks back to the
garage, feeling unsettled. Wondering if he should have taken the boys
home. In the end, he doesn’t know. In the end, all he knows is that
he doesn’t want the connection.

* * *

P
eter walks home in his
socks. His feet ache from the cold and he steps on small stones when
he crosses streets.

He walks into the pain, accepting it, and then
through it. On the other side, he is an observer, watching himself
make his way up the sidewalk, a few yards ahead of his cousin. It is
a talent he has developed, this removing himself from the moment.

His cousin had cut himself on glass, and Peter hears
him in a distant way—as if he were on the other side of a
door—making crying noises.

He stops and turns around. His cousin stops too and
looks down at his feet. He says, "Jesus Christ . . ."
Whatever else he meant to say is gone. His eyes fill and tears run
from the corners down his round, wind-burned cheeks.

"It isn’t that far," Peter says.

His cousin sits down on the sidewalk. "I can’t
walk no more," he says. He picks up his feet and holds them in
his hands. "They’re froze solid .... " He looks up at
Peter for help. As if he had shoes to give him.

Peter leaves him and walks in the direction of the
house. When he has gone half a block he turns around and sees that
his cousin is still sitting on the sidewalk. He goes back.

"C’mon, Michael. It ain’t far now."

His cousin gets slowly to his feet and then limps a
few steps before he stops again. He looks up the street, then back at
Peter.

"The old man’s going to kill us," he
says.

"C’mon," Peter says, and begins walking
again, and in a moment he hears his cousin behind him, breathing
through his teeth.

"What are we going to tell him?" he says
after a while. Peter doesn’t answer; he isn’t going to tell his
uncle anything. "He’s going to be pissed," his cousin
says.

A cop walks past them, looking quickly at their
shoeless feet, then disappears into a bar on the corner. "Peter?"

"He’s pissed anyway," Peter says.

It is quiet a few minutes as they turn the corner and
head up Twenty-second Street, six blocks from home. "We got to
think of a story," his cousin says.

Peter shakes his head. He isn’t good at stories,
and his uncle thinks everything he hears is bullshit anyways. Peter
wonders what kind of stories he makes up himself, to think everyone
else’s are bullshit.

They walk another block in silence, as his cousin
tries out different explanations in his head.

"The niggers got us," he says finally.

"That isn’t a story, it’s what happened."

"Grown-ups," he says, "and they beat
us up."

His uncle talks about the niggers all the time now,
how they are trying to get into some of the unions. It isn’t the
niggers he is mad at, though, it’s the Italians, telling him what
he’s got to do about it. That he’s got to make it look like the
niggers can work if they want to.

Peter turns and studies his cousin. "He isn’t
going to believe we got beat up by grown-ups," he says.

They walk farther, his cousin forgetting his feet to
think of a story for his father. "He’s going to fuckin’ go
crazy," he says finally.

Peter shrugs.

"He don’t touch you," his cousin says,
and he is close to tears again. "He never touched you in your
life."

True.

He has never come after Peter with a belt. They have
lived in the same house without touching each other from the morning
he stepped into Peter’s bedroom and told him something had happened
to his father. His uncle had moved his family in even before Peter
was out of the emergency room.

He understands that his uncle has been pulled two
directions ever since; wanting to hurt him, wanting to be forgiven.
Natural enemies. He takes Peter and Michael twice a year to Connie
Mack Stadium to watch the Phillies, Christmas Eve they go to church.

He delivers lectures on girls and cops and school,
sending Aunt Theresa into the kitchen for the parts he does not want
her to hear. He tells them, again and again, that they are brothers,
flesh and blood.

And sometimes when he says that he watches Peter’s
face to see if he believes that the words change what is there
between them, if he believes the words can recast events that have
already passed.

It infuriates him that he cannot change what Peter
sees.

"You ain’t got nothing to worry about,"
his cousin says. But Peter has seen the way his uncle looks at
him—has seen the way he looked at his father—and knows that isn’t
true.

The black Cadillac passes them a block from the
house, tires popping on the street. The side of his uncle’s face is
in the back window, looking strained. Peter knows that look; it’s
the Italians.

Phillip Flood is standing in the hallway waiting for
them when they come in. Still in his coat. Peter stops cold, caught
in his uncle’s stare.

He looks at Peter, then at Michael. He looks at their
feet.

Michael sits down just inside the door and peels off
his socks. He feet are pink and tipped white, and one of them is cut.
He holds them in his hands, rocking back and forth on the floor. His
father watches him a moment, then turns back to Peter.

"It was the niggers," Michael says. "Big
ones."

"What niggers?" he says, still looking at
Peter. Peter doesn’t answer. He notices his feet are beginning to
burn in the warmth of the house. He thinks they have been out in the
cold too long to be comfortable now inside.

"The niggers took your shoes‘?" he says.

"There was six of them," Michael says, and
then bends over his feet, as if to cradle them in his arms.

"You ain’t hurt," he says to Michael, and
then looks again at Peter. "So where were these niggers‘?"
he says.

"McKean Street," Michael says. "They
were as big as you . . .bigger."

"Are they still there?" he says.

Michael shakes his head. "A man chased them
off."

It is quiet a long moment. Peter hears his aunt
moving around upstairs. Probably making the beds.

“
They were big," Michael says.

"You didn’t fight them for your shoes?"

"The man came along," Michael says. "An
old guy."

"So how did they get your fucking shoes?"
He whispers that, not wanting Aunt Theresa to hear him use the word
in the house.

"After they got them, then he came,"
Michael says.

Phillip Flood takes one more long look at them and
then climbs the stairs. Aunt Theresa passes him on her way down. She
looks at his face, then at the boys beneath her on the landing.

"Michael," she says, hurrying now, "what
happened to your feet?" She washes down the stairs like a
flooded bathroom.

"He ain’t hurt," Peter’s uncle says
behind her.

She pays no attention. She hurries past Peter,
smelling of onions and garlic, and kneels in front of her son.
"They’re frostbit," she says, and looks up the stairs.
"We got to get them in warm water. "

His uncle stands where he is, looking down. "If
me and Charley ever come home without our shoes when we were kids,
we’d come home without feet."

The house is suddenly quiet. Phillip Flood doesn’t
mention his brother’s name in this house. A rule that no one
realizes is there until it is broken. He is still a moment, hearing
what he has just said, and then he turns suddenly away and walks down
the hallway into the back.

"You see what you’ve done?" Aunt Theresa
says to Michael.

"You’ve upset your
father."

* * *

L
ate in the afternoon Nick
is standing in one of the windows overlooking the street, deciding if
hewants to box. A nice-looking Jewish kid from the neighborhood is
beneath him on the street, practicing dance steps. He uses the street
sign as a partner. The kid calls himself Jimmy Measles, and he is on
television all the time, dancing on the show from West Philadelphia.
Nick can’t remember what they call it.

The kid believes he is a television star, and maybe
he is. The neighborhood girls are around him all the time. He
sometimes sees the kid patting their fannies.