Brotherly Love (4 page)

"He don’t belong in this house," his
father says.

Something in that makes the old man smile. "He’s
helped us out a few times, Charley," he says.

His father doesn’t answer.

"And now he says to me, Constantine, I need a
favor too. I got to talk to Charley, set this straight. He says
Constantine, I can’t live next door to this crazy Irish bastard,
he’s thinkin’ these things about me."

His father looks away from the old man, out the
window and then at the men standing in back of him. He looks at
Peter’s uncle.

"I ain’t having him in my house," he
says.

The old man studies his fingers and nods, and when he
speaks again the kindness has gone out of his tone. "Yeah, you
are," he  says. "He’s gonna come in here, say he’s
sorry, and that’s the end of it."

He looks up at Peter’s father, his eyes angry and
wet behind the glasses. "You heard what I said? That’s the end
of it."

His father crosses his arms and stares at the old
man.

"It ain’t just for him," the old man
says. "Something like this, you got to put it away or it affects
you." His finger makes a circular motion in the air near his
ear. "The first thing you know, you’re loco."

His father begins to say something more, but the old
man interrupts him. "You been grieving long enough," he
says. "It ain’t doing nobody any good."

The old man nods at the man who is holding his coat,
and that man walks out the front door and is back in half a minute
with Victor Kopec.

Victor Kopec is wearing a dark, expensive suit, and
he blows on his hands as he walks into the room and rubs them against
his face. Peter wonders how long he has been waiting out there, for
Constantine to tell his father that he wanted him to come in.

Victor Kopec looks around the room, smiles at the boy
sitting at the top of the stairs. "My man," he says.

Peter pushes himself away from the railing, crablike,
using the heels of his hands and feet, until he is out of the line of
sight. He flattens his cheek against the wall, and listens to himself
breathe.

"Mr. Flood," the man says.

There is a long silence, and then the sound of
Constantine’s voice. "Charley," he says, "it can’t
hurt nothing to look at the man when he’s talking to you."

Peter edges his face around the corner until he can
see the living room again. His father is still standing in front of
Constantine, and as the boy watches, he turns and puts a murderous,
black look on Victor Kopec, daring him to speak.

Victor Kopec is not afraid, though; the old man makes
him safe. "Mr. Flood, I want to thank you for allowing me to
express my sympathy for what happened," he says.

Peter hears how easily the words come out of Victor
Kopec’s mouth; he hears the insult.

His father takes a small step closer and Victor Kopec
takes a small step back. There are some things that having
Constantine in the living room does not change.

"I wanted to tell you what happened was I hit
some ice in the street out there, and the car gets sideways where I
can’t steer it, and the next thing you know I’m in the middle of
this. And then the dog, the crazy bastard’s got these instincts . .
."

The man’s confidence grows as he speaks, as if he
cannot see the way Peter’s father is looking at him.

"I shot him right there in the driveway,"
Victor Kopec says.

"I had him seven years, since I left K-9. I eat
with him, watch television with him, sleep with him. So what I’m
saying, I lost something here too .... "

His father stares at the cop until he runs out of
words, and then, when the room is quiet again, he turns back to
Constantine.

"Is that it?" he says.

Constantine looks from his father to Victor Kopec,
perhaps measuring the distance between them. Victor Kopec shrugs,
comfortable, as if the men in the room will be with him forever.

"Is that it?" his father says again.

The old man shakes his head. "That’s what I
was gonna ask you," he says.

His father turns and considers Victor Kopec. Without
another word, he reaches across the space between them and takes the
policeman’s hand. Victor Kopec is startled at first, and then seems
to relax.

"My sincere condolences," he says.

His father shakes the hand and nods.

"Now it’s over," the old man says.

His father looks into Victor Kopec’s eyes.

"Something happens, you got to either forgive
somebody or kill them, it makes you loco the thing ain’t settled,"
the old man says.

The room is quiet again while the words themselves
settle.

"Charley?" the old man says.

"Everything’s settled," he says, still
looking at Victor Kopec. Constantine takes off his glasses and wipes
the corners of his eyes, as if he has been crying. “That’s good,"
he says, the handkerchief still in his eye. "Victor helped us
out a lot of times, and this way, we’re all friends and he ain’t
dead, he can help us out some more."

Victor Kopec begins to nod, but in that same moment
Peter sees him reconsider, as if he realizes something has changed
between himself and the men in this room. That he has been
threatened.

Victor Kopec smiles now, no longer sure of himself,
no longer so comfortable.

"Constantine," he says, "my sincere
appreciation for working this out between us."

The old man stirs in his chair and pushes himself
slowly to his feet and smiles. "You’re neighbors," he
says.

Then one of the men places the coat over his
shoulders, centering it carefully, and another opens the door. On the
way out, the old man suddenly stops and looks up the staircase,
directly into Peter’s eyes.

He holds on to the
banister, frozen. The old man lifts his hand, his thumb comes up,
turning it into a gun, and pretends to fire a shot.

* * *

T
he men leave, the front
door shuts, the house is suddenly quiet. Peter’s father stands at
the door, a moment and then walks into the kitchen.

Peter himself sits on the stairs, thinking of the
pistol the old man had made of his hand. Of his crooked fingers that
could not point up the stairs.

He is thinking of the moment the old man pretended to
shoot when a noise comes from the kitchen, almost a shot itself. He
waits, and in the quiet that swallows the house afterwards, he
suddenly moves, surprised to find himself moving, running down the
stairs, crossing the living room, slowing now as he gets closer, and
finally walking, a step at a time, into the kitchen.

He sees the blood first, it spots his father’s
shirt and his pants and falls in heavy drops on the floor around his
shoes. His father is leaning into the icebox with both hands, as if
he were holding it up, and then Peter sees the spot between his hands
where he has smashed it with his head. The smooth line of the door is
dented, as if someone had dropped it off the truck.

His father turns to him, his eyes are black and his
face is running with blood—the cut is in his hairline—and for one
long moment Peter feels himself in the same place with him, feels
himself in the center of the place, in the center of his father’s
thoughts.

And then it passes.

The blood runs out of his father and the look in his
eyes turns dull, and he is seeing something else.

"Go to bed," he
says.

* * *

I
n the morning, an
ambulance comes for his mother. It is not as surprising to hear the
noise in the hallway, or—after he has climbed out of bed—to see
the men carrying her down the stairs, as it is simply to confront her
appearance. She is a ghost. Her face, framed in a pillow at the top
of the stretcher, is as thin as the bones underneath it, and she is
the color of bones too.

When did she become a ghost?

He stands in his pajamas and watches the men turn the
corner at the landing with his mother between them, stepping
carefully, the man in front going backwards, feeling for the step
behind him with his feet.

His father is at the bottom of the stairs, waiting.
There is dried blood in his hair and in his eyebrows, and his eyes
are as dull as they had been in the kitchen.

His father opens the door for the men when they are
off the stairs, and then follows them outside to the ambulance.

Peter walks down and stands in the doorway, the cold
wind coming up his pajama legs. The men load his mother into the
back. He steps into the yard.

The neighbors are at their windows now, one or two
are standing on their porches in housecoats. They do not leave their
homes, though. A dozen times he has seen these same neighbors gather
in each others’ yards, sometimes in bathrobes, touching those who
are crying on the shoulder, at the same time seeing for themselves if
the person on the stretcher is dead. But no one comes to the driveway
to touch his father now.

Doors close and the ambulance is sealed. Its lights
go on but there is no siren. His father waits on the street until it
is out of sight. Then he turns the other direction, staring at the
house of Victor Kopec. He stares as if there were something to see,
but Peter looks at the house too and there is no light, no sign of
movement inside. Shades are drawn in every window.

His father walks back to the house, crossing the car
tracks that still divide the yard in half, and stops for a moment
when he sees Peter standing in the cold, wet grass in his bare feet
and pajamas.

"Get inside," he says quietly.

Peter turns, without a word, and walks into the
house. He feels his father close behind him, behind him and above,
floating.

"Is she sick?" he says after his father has
closed the door. His feet hurt and he is shaking in the sudden warmth
of the room.

His father begins one direction, then changes his
mind. He sits on the davenport and puts his elbows on his knees and
bends forward to run his fingers through his hair. Tiny bits of dried
blood sift onto the coffee table in front of him.

"What happened to your mother," he says,
"she got scared of things that wasn’t there. First she
wouldn’t go out by herself, then she wouldn’t go out with me with
her, then she got scared to come downstairs in her own house . . ."

Peter thinks of the night the men came to the house,
and of his mother in her room listening.

"Finally . . ." his father says, and then
stops. He shrugs and nods in the direction of the front yard, and in
that gesture is the whole world on the other side of the door, the
one his father knows and the boy has glimpsed just once.

"It scared her so bad she’s afraid to even
move her little finger," his father says. He looks up then and
nods. "She’s afraid that she moves her little finger, it wakes
up and remembers what happened to your sister. She thinks if she just
keeps everything still it don’t hurt."

He stands up and walks to another chair, as if he is
afraid of the opposite thing.

"Did she go to the hospital?"

"It ain’t the kind of hospital you can visit
her," he says.

And then he moves again,
this time to the window, and stares at the house next door.

* * *

H
e wakes up alone in the
house.

He feels the emptiness of the place even before the
sound—a soft thumping—moves from his dreams into the room, and he
opens his eyes, afraid of anything that is not familiar.

He dresses himself, sneakers and pants and his
jacket, and walks into the room where his mother slept. The bed is
unmade, part of a sheet lies on the floor, a nightgown is tossed
across a chair. The room still smells of her skin.

He picks up the nightgown and takes it to a hook on
the open closet door. Then, without knowing why, he goes into the
closet.

He does not belong in the closet, or even in the
room, but he cannot bring himself to leave. He stands in the dark,
the soft press of her dresses against his face and hands, and feels
her absence.

He holds himself—and her—still, his eyes
beginning to pick up shapes of things in the back and on the floor.
He imagines his mother, afraid to move even a finger. He slows and
then stops his breathing, noticing the stillness is more perfect when
he is part of it. Moments pass, every other thing is still.

And then enclosed in stillness, a tiny, passing
moment stalls inside him, and then takes a shape of its own,
billowing like smoke, filling him almost as soon as he first notices
it there, filling him until he is suddenly afraid there is no room
left inside himself to breathe.

He backs out of the closet, taking as much air into
his chest as it will hold, and the moment recedes to the place it had
been before, and passes.

He hears the pounding again, somewhere outside.