Brotherly Love (36 page)

Peter nods. "Stil1 wired," he says. "I
think maybe he likes it, makes him look scary."

"He ain’t eating, he must of lost some of them
muscles by now."

Peter thinks about it, picturing Leonard Crawley.
"No," he says, "everything he likes, he takes it
through the nose anyway."

Nick is picturing Leonard Crawley too, and he begins
to smile.

"What it reminded me of, you know at the start
of a fight you look across the ring, and you’re always thinkin’
there’s gotta be some mistake? That this guy ain’t the same
weight, you ain’t sure he can even talk? The guy with Michael was
what you always imagined was across the ring, and it turns out he
can’t fight anyway. So what’s the harm in that?"

"They come up here like everything was theirs."

Nick shrugs, looks around
the room. "They didn’t take nothing out but what they brought
in."

* * *

T
he limo is parked outside
Peter’s apartment when he gets back from the gym. The engine is
running and a shallow pool of water collects underneath it, and
spills over into little streams that run from there to the curb,
condensation from the air conditioner.

Peter gets out of his Buick, exhausted and calm. The
bag with his cup and his shoes and his wet clothes hangs from his
hand, dead weight. He stares at the limo and waits.

The dark back window hums and stops, the sun picking
up the blues in the tint. Above it, one third of his cousin’s face
stares out.

"You’re gettin’ harder to find all the
time," Michael says.

Peter walks to the car; the door opens. "Lemme
throw this shit in the trunk, we don’t smell it," he says.

"The trunk’s full."

Michael slides across the back seat, making room, and
Peter takes the spot where he had been.

Leonard is behind the steering wheel, a man Peter has
never seen before is sitting next to him. Another weight lifter.

Peter shuts the door and the limo pulls into the
street. They drive out of town on Broad Street, past the stadiums and
get on I-95.

"You popped the lawyer," Peter says. It is
quiet a moment.

"They’ll be coming for us now."

Michael smiles. "Maybe not," he says.

Peter looks at him, waiting.

"They still want to do business," Michael
says. "We still got something they want."

Peter doesn’t say a word.

"He was gettin’ infected," Michael says.
"He goes delirious at night, making so much noise I can’t
sleep in my own house, what am I supposed to do?"

Peter leans back into the cushioned seat and
positions his legs, one at a time, on the seat in front of him,
beginning to feel stiff. He tries not to picture the man in the
trunk, and in the trying he sees him, lying on the cot in the house.
The man’s eyes are closed, and then, when Peter speaks to him, he
looks up. He says, "
Are you the one that
kills me?
"

"There’s no reason we have to take care of
this ourselves," Peter says to Michael.

Michael says, "The reason is, I want to make
sure it’s done right. I know the place to do this."

"What place?"

"A place Phil showed me."

And it is quiet again before Michael says, "What
we’re saying, if it comes up, the guy was fine when he left the
house."

"If it comes up," Peter says.

It is quiet in the car.

"You did it in the house'?"

Michael shrugs. "Him screaming like that, I
couldn’t see moving him someplace else .... "

The car passes the airport and begins to accelerate.
Peter watches the man sitting next to Leonard, wondering if he was
swinging one of the bats too.

"You haven’t heard from his people?"
Peter says.

"There’s some guys come around a few places,
asking. That’s all."

The limo brakes, coming up behind a van, and Leonard
straightens his whole body against the horn. The van moves to the
shoulder of the road, and the limo goes past. The pitch of the tires
climbs an octave and levels.

"Tell him to slow down," Peter says.

Leonard looks in the rearview mirror; Michael shrugs.
Leonard changes the angle of the mirror to glance at Peter, then puts
it back. The new man watches him, memorizing everything he does.

Michael says, "See, there was a problem with
what you said, for us to explain to them how it happened."

Peter waits for Michael to tell him the problem.

"Time," he says. "The longer we
waited, the worse it looked. The afternoon you come over, it was
already a day, a day and a half. If I turn him over then, it looks
like I decided to do one thing and got scared, tried to do something
else. It makes us look weak."

Peter sits up and looks over Leonard’s shoulder at
the speedometer. Eighty-five.

"He gets a body in back, he thinks he’s an
ambulance," Peter says.

Michael looks into the front seat and says, "Lenny,"
and the car begins to slow. They ride for a while in silence, into
Delaware, the sun low and wide in the west.

"You know," Michael says, a long time
later, "we got a situation here, Pally, and it don’t feel like
you want your part of it."

Peter doesn’t answer.

"Pally?"

Slowly, Peter nods. "That’s it," he says,
"I don’t want my part. "

And it is quiet again. There is a glow in the sky
where the sun has gone down. The state could be on fire. Without
wanting to, he thinks again of the man in the trunk, lying in the
dark with his broken legs, shaking as if he were cold as the tires
vibrate against the road.

Michael directs them off the freeway and then down a
dirt road to a spot behind some trees.
"Right
here," he says, and Leonard stops the car.

Peter steps out and looks around. There is enough
moonlight to cast shadows. Leonard opens the trunk and finds a
shovel, and hands it to the man who has been riding with him in the
front seat.

The new man digs as if this were a job he wanted to
keep. Dirt flies in front of him, over his shoulder, left and right.
Leonard backs out of range, until he is standing at the car with
Michael and Peter. He crosses his arms over his chest and watches.
Once in a while he disappears into the trees and returns with a runny
nose.

It is a quiet place. The kid grunts, Leonard sniffs,
somewhere a long ways off there is a noise that might be a fire
alarm. Except for that, they could all be in the ground themselves.

The quiet grows and the sound of the sniffing grates
on Michael’s nerves. He looks at Leonard and says, "How many
shovels you brought?"

"Two or three, I threw some in there."

Michael stares at him until he understands, and goes
back to the trunk and gets a shovel for himself, jerking it from the
trunk when it catches on something inside. A little piece of the
plastic they used to wrap the man inside comes out with it.

Leonard takes off his shirt and lays it carefully
across the hood of the car before he steps into the shallow hole. The
kid takes off his shirt too; chains dangle in the moonlight.

Peter watches a little longer and then climbs back in
the car and closes his eyes. Time passes, and he hears Leonard’s
voice.

"Michael, how deep you want this fuckin’ hole
anyway?"

"Deep enough, the next time you break some guy’s
legs in my house, you know you fucked up without me sayin’ it."

Later, he hears Leonard again. "Michael, you
mind I ask you a personal question . . . Michael?"

"What?"

"What I want to ask you, I think maybe you used
this hole before. All of a sudden, we’re diggin’ up bones and
shit like that."

Peter sits up in the back seat of the car. Leonard
and the kid are standing chest—high in their hole, Michael is
leaning over them, getting edgy now. "Get out of there," he
says, "that’s deep enough."

Peter stares at his cousin, suspended for a moment in
the thought that his own father could be in the ground here too.

The men climb out, shaking the dirt out of their
pants, and go back to the trunk. There are bumping noises behind
Peter’s seat. The car drops and lifts, and then he sees them
carrying the lawyer, encased in a clear plastic mattress cover, to
the hole. The new man walks backwards, and seems to have the heavy
end.

They walk in short, uneven steps; the mattress cover
sags, the man inside sways as if he were in a hammock.

Michael steps aside, giving them room. The new man
stops, his arms shaking under the weight, waiting for some signal to
let go. Leonard drops his end without ceremony, pulling the new man
off balance.

There is no noise at all as the body hits bottom.

The new man hangs at the edge of the grave,
motionless in that long second between falling and finding his
balance—a tight-rope walker—and then, recovering himself, he is
suddenly staring into the hole.

Leonard goes back to the trunk for the lime. The new
man is still looking into the hole when he comes back carrying the
sack. He sets it down heavily and tears off the top. Then, as he
lifts it shoulder-high to pour, Peter hears the new man’s voice, so
timid it barely carries to the car, even in the quiet.

"He’s in there
crooked."

* * *

T
hey are back on the
interstate to Philadelphia when he thinks of the bones. In the seat
next to him, Michael has made himself a drink.

"I think we’re gonna be all right,"
Michael says. "What do you think?"

He looks at Peter, waiting.

"What do you think?" he says.

"I’m out of it,"
Peter says.

* * *

T
wo weeks pass, and in
that time Peter answers his phone only once.

The Italians again.

"You understand something’s got to happen now,
right?" the man says.

Peter finds himself nodding.

"You still got time," he says, "you
could save yourself. Your brother and the rest of them—today
they’re here, tomorrow they’re not. It’s settled, except you
got a chance to be here when they’re gone. We’re going to need
somebody, you understand? We can’t just walk in and announce the
unions are under new management. "

It is quiet a moment.

"Wait, he ain’t your brother," the man
says, "he’s your cousin. Makes it that much easier, right?"

Peter hangs up.

After the call, he spends every night at the house in
Cape May, and comes into the city only in the afternoon to go to the
gym.

He fights as many rounds as Harry and Nick will give
him.

He does not see or talk to Michael.

He barely talks to Nick. Even after they have boxed,
he finds himself unable to speak more than a few sentences at once.
The relief that comes with exhaustion is gone.

On the way back to Cape May, he calls Grace at her
sister’s house from a pay phone outside a bar on Admiral Wilson.
One night he says to her, "I can’t make up my mind, you like
having me around or not."

She doesn’t answer.

Another night she asks him to masturbate while they
talk.

"Not in a phone booth," he says.

But he does.

The next time he calls, her sister picks up the
phone. "She isn’t home at the present time," she says.
"She’s got a date or something. May I take a message?"

He goes back to the house in Cape May and thinks of
other women. Women who have said they loved him and would search his
face after he had fucked them for things that were familiar or
simple—as if once they saw the stains, they could clean them.

In the end, they couldn’t imagine his stains, and
there was nothing they could give him.

His business is with
Grace.

* * *

M
ichael appears again in
the gym at six o’clock on a Monday afternoon. Peter has not seen
him since the night they buried the lawyer.

He makes no noise coming into the room. Leonard
Crawley is with him, and Monk, and a black man named Eddie Bone, who
was once a promising fighter.

Peter remembers Eddie Bone, a true Philadelphia
middle-weight. He terrified the whole division, and then, before
fighting could make him famous or rich, he killed his girlfriend and
her mother and went away to Graterford.

Eddie Bone looks around the small gym now and smiles.

Peter thinks,
It’s always
the ones who smile at the wrong time
.

Nick looks up from his chair. He is sitting in bare
feet and long pants, reading the newspaper. His son is shadowboxing
in the ring.