Bruiser (4 page)

I follow the Bruiser in. I have to say, I'm a little disappointed at what I find. It's just a house. Sure, it's kind of run-down and sparsely decorated, but it's still just a house. The one thing about it, though, is that all the colors are off, just like on the outside. The wallpaper is faded, the sofa has stains on the cushions, the blue carpet is mottled purple and brown in spots.
A bruise
, I think,
the entire house is like one big bruise.

I can hear a TV playing somewhere deeper in the house. Beyond the kitchen is an arched doorway, dark except for the flickering light of the TV. There must be a family room back there, but somehow I suspect family has little to do with it. I'm sure it's Uncle Hoyt's lair, complete with a deteriorating recliner, a TV with color issues, and empty beer cans multiplying like dust bunnies.

The Bruiser pours me some lemonade. “I promise it's not poisoned,” he says.

I don't want to touch anything. Not because it's dirty but because it feels unclean. I can't quite explain the difference, although I suspect it has something to do with my own snob factor. Conflicted, I force myself to sit in a chair at the kitchen table. There are dirty dishes in the sink. He notices me noticing.

“Sorry,” he says, “the dishes are
my
job. I usually take care of them when I get home.”

“What does your uncle do?” I asked him.

“Road construction,” Brewster says. “He works nights, driving a steamroller for the Transportation Authority.”

Somehow that doesn't surprise me. I get this image of a maniacal Uncle Hoyt rolling over defenseless wildlife caught in the unset asphalt.

I pick up my glass, and he looks at my knuckles. Four out of five knuckles on my right hand have scabs in various states of healing. “Where'd you get those,” he asks, “beating on band geeks?”

He's trying to push my buttons. I don't let him. “Lacrosse,” I tell him.

“Right,” he says. “Must be a rough sport.”

I shrug. “Good for getting out your aggression.”

He nods. “What do you do in the off-season?”

“I use the stick to smash mailboxes.”

He looks at me like I'm serious.

“I'm kidding,” I tell him, but he doesn't seem entirely convinced. I'm uncomfortable with the conversation being all about me, so I flip it back on him.

“So, your uncle's got a government job; he must pull in a decent salary.”

The question is right there, although I don't ask it directly:
If he's got a decent job, then why do you live like this?

The Bruiser glances back toward the family room. The shifting glow from the TV plays on the arched doorway like lightning, making it look like a portal to another dimension. The gateway to Hoyt-Hell:
Abandon all hope ye who enter.
He turns back to me and speaks softly. “My uncle's got an ex-wife and three kids in Atlanta. The government garnishes his wages.”

“Garnish,” I say. “I thought that was, like, parsley on a dinner plate.”

The Bruiser grins. “So there's something I know that you don't?” He relishes the moment before explaining. “Garnishing means the government takes child support right out of his salary even before he gets the check because they know he won't pay it otherwise.” The Bruiser thinks about it and shakes his head. “Funny—he runs out on his wife and three kids and then he ends up stuck with Cody and me.”

I'm about to ask him how that came to be, but I realize it must not be a pretty story. If they're stuck with a loser uncle,
it means that their parents are gone in one way or another. Dead, incarcerated, or AWOL. No joy in any of the possibilities, so I don't ask.

“You're uncle sounds like quite a guy,” I say, the sarcasm practically pooling around my ankles, adding another stain to the carpet.

“There are worse things,” he says.

Right about now Cody comes out of his room, shirtless.

“My shirt smelled like Tri-tip,” he says, “but I got no clean shirts. It's your fault I got no clean shirts!” he tells his brother.

The Bruiser sighs and says to me, “I do the laundry here, too.”

I wonder if there are any chores he doesn't do.

When I glance at Cody again, I note that the kid's back is nothing like his brother's. No bruises, no scars, no sign that their short-tempered uncle beats him at all. I begin to wonder if maybe I'm wrong in assuming the man is an abuser. Maybe he just blusters, but he's all wind and no weather. Still, it doesn't answer the question about the Bruiser's back. The Bruiser goes to a little laundry room just off the kitchen and mines through a huge pile of clothes on top of the dryer. He pulls out a small T-shirt and tosses it to Cody.

“Is it clean?”

“No, I wiped my butt on it.”

Cody scowls at him, smells the shirt just in case, and
walks away satisfied. He disappears into his room, struggling, Houdini-like, to get his head and arms into the shirt at the same time.

The Bruiser comes back out to join me in the kitchen.

“So, you haven't gotten to the part where you ask me to stay away from your sister. You tried threatening me and that didn't work, so now I figure you're going to try it more respectfully.”

I look away from him. I know it might make me seem guilty, but, really, I'm feeling angry at myself for having bullied him in the first place.

“Brontë makes her own decisions,” I tell him, then add, “but I won't be happy if she comes anywhere near Uncle Hoyt.”

“Neither will I,” he says, “and just in case you're worried, I'm not like my uncle.”

“I can see that.” Then I hold out my hand to him. “So…no hard feelings?”

He looks at my hand for a few moments, and I think that maybe there are hard feelings after all; but then he shakes it with a decisive, confident grasp.

We nod to each other—an understanding has been reached, like a détente between two nations that would otherwise be at war.

Then Uncle Hoyt slinks out from his lair, and Brewster withdraws his hand like he's been caught with it in the cookie
jar. The man looks at us suspiciously, as if we're plotting against him. “What's he still doing here? Didn't I tell you to get rid of Tri-tip?”

The Bruiser opens his mouth to say something, but I speak first. “What is he supposed to do, snap his fingers and make it go away?”

The man grins, and it's something slimy and nasty. All of a sudden I feel unclean again. “Can't expect you to lift the whole animal at once,” he says. “The chain saw's out in the shed.”

When I get home that night, I don't say anything to Brontë about where I was and what I did that afternoon. Even when she comments at dinner that I smell funny, I just tell her I'll take a shower—even though I've already taken two.

I won't get into the details of Tri-tip's disposal. It was not a pretty sight. I can only thank God there are Dumpsters just on the other side of the Bruiser's fence. Now I understand the close-knit nature of the Mafia, because there's something bonding about disposing of a body.

The next day I see the Bruiser during passing, between second and third periods. We nod to each other an unspoken greeting, almost like it's something secret. He raises a hand to hoist his backpack farther up on his shoulder, and that's when I notice the knuckles on his right hand. Four out of five knuckles are all raw and starting to scab. I figure he must have
scraped them up pretty badly during our bull-carving extravaganza yesterday afternoon.

Reflexively I look at my own knuckles and notice right away that my scabs are gone. I tend to heal quickly, so I try to dismiss it. After all, how often do I actually look at my knuckles? I get scraped and bruised so much, I don't notice it anymore.

Except that I
did
notice my scabbed knuckles yesterday. The Bruiser and I both did.

I try to tell myself it's nothing, that it's one of life's simple tricks, just like a stage magician's clever misdirection to keep the audience baffled. Yet deep down I know there's something more going on here. Something truly inexplicable I'm afraid to consider.

My brother's an idiot.

Sure, Tennyson's smart, but he's an idiot in all the other ways that matter. Such as when he forced his way into our miniature golf game and intimidated Brewster just because we went out on a date. It wasn't even an
evening
date; it was a middle-of-the-afternoon date, which as anyone can tell you, is barely a date at all. The problem with Tennyson is that he has to be in control of everything. It's like he's worried the whole world will fall apart if he's not holding it together. He thinks no one can survive without the protection of his iron fist, least of all me.

Well, in spite of what Tennyson might think, I am not entirely void of common sense, thank you very much. I deal with boys far better than he deals with girls. Don't believe me? Then take a nice, long look at his current “relationship”
with Katrina, who has the right name, because she's got natural disaster written all over her.

I, on the other hand, know that with any boy it's important to truly get to know him before the dates get serious. Not that I have all that much experience, but I'm blessed with friends who do. Their lives are like caution signs in the road, warning me against all the ill-advised things they have done.

1) From Carly I learned never to go out on a date with the younger brother of the most popular guy in school…because he thinks he has something to prove, and he'll try to prove it on you.

2) From Wendy I learned that playing ditsy and stupid will only get you boys who are stupider than you're pretending to be.

3) From Jennifer I learned to avoid any boy with an ex-girlfriend who hates him with every fiber of her being…because chances are there's a reason she hates him so much, and you may find out the hard way.

4) From Melanie I learned that, while it's true that guys have one thing on their mind, most are greatly relieved and easier to deal with if you make it emphatically clear right up front that they're not going to get that one thing in the foreseeable future. Or at least not from you. Once that becomes clear, either they go after some girl who never learned the warning signs, or they stick around.

I tried out point number four on a boy last year, and it
worked. His name was Max—my first and only boyfriend before Brew—and we got a whole series of necessary milestones out of the way. First date, first kiss, first conniption fit from my parents for breaking curfew. He got the first suspicious look from my father, and I got the first suspicious look from his mother. With all those firsts out of the way, we were free to live normal lives.

We eventually broke up, of course, because all training-wheel relationships must die if we ever intend to graduate from the sidewalk into the bike lane. We've remained friends, though, which has been very good for him socially (see point #3).

As for me, popularity was never something I worried much about. I've always been as popular as I needed to be with the people I cared about, and fairly well liked, too—if you don't count a handful of evil, insecure Barbies who call me Man-Shoulders because I've got a slightly developed upper body from swim team. I take comfort in knowing that while I often come home with gold around my neck, all the Barbies can ever hope for are rocks on their fingers.

So then, with all that taken into account, I felt I was entirely conscious of the risks, and fully prepared to date Brewster Rawlins.

I was spectacularly wrong.

As much as I hate to admit it, my brother, Tennyson, was right about what first attracted me to Brewster. It was the stray dog thing.

I've always had a dangerously unguarded place in my heart for strays. There was the time when I was ten and brought home a seriously psychotic shih tzu, which proceeded to attack everyone's ankles, drawing more blood than so little a dog should be capable of doing. We named him Piranha and gave him to an animal rescue center that has a no-kill policy, although later I heard that Piranha almost caused them to change their policy.

Regardless, I've discovered that nine out of ten strays have issues that are not life threatening, so I have no desire to change my ways, thank you very much.

When it came to Brewster Rawlins, he might have had a
home, but he was a stray in every other sense of the word.

It all began the day he showed up in the library.

I was a library aide at the time, which involved a lot of hanging around while the librarian tried to come up with busywork for me to do. I didn't mind, because it gave me time to read, and be among the books. Do you know that if you take the books in an average school library and stretched out all those words into a single line, the line would go all the way around the world? Actually, I made that up, but doesn't it sound like it should be true?

Part of my job was to help other kids find books, because not everyone has a keenly organized mind. Some kids could wander the library for hours and still have no idea how to find anything. For them, the Dewey Decimal System might as well be advanced calculus.

I figured that here was one of those kids, because I found him lurking in the poetry section looking like a deer caught in the headlights. A really big deer—maybe a caribou or an ibex.

“Can I help you find something?” I asked as politely as I could, since I've been known to scare off the more timid wildlife.

“Where's the Allen Ginsberg?” he asked.

It took me by surprise. No one came into our school library looking for Allen Ginsberg. I began to scan the poetry shelf alphabetically. “Is it for an assignment?” I was
genuinely curious as to which teacher might assign radical beatnik poetry. Probably Mr. Bellini, who we all secretly believed had his brain fried long ago by various and sundry psychedelic chemicals.

“No assignment,” he said. “I just felt like reading Ginsberg again.”

That stopped me in midscan. In my experience, there are three reasons why a boy will want to take out a book on poetry:

1) to impress a girl 2) for a class assignment 3) to impress a girl.

So, thinking myself oh-so-smart, I smugly said, “What's her name?”

He looked at me, blinking with those ibex eyes. A nice shade of green, I might add.

“Whose name?” he asked.

At this point I felt embarrassed about having to explain my assumption, so I didn't. “Never mind,” I said, then quickly found the book and handed it to him. “Here you go.”

“Yeah, this is the one. Thanks.”

Still, I found it hard to believe. I mean, Allen Ginsberg is not exactly mainstream. His stuff is out there, even by poetry standards. “So…you just want to read it for…pleasure?”

“Something wrong with that?”

“No, no, it's just…” I knew it was time to give up entirely,
as I was truly making a fool of myself. “Forget I said anything. Enjoy the book.”

Then he looked down at the book. “I can't really explain it,” he said. “It makes me feel something, but I don't have to feel it about some
one
, so I get off easy.”

It was an odd thing to say—so odd that it made me laugh. Of course, he didn't appreciate that and turned to leave.

Something inside me didn't want our encounter-among-the-stacks to end like this, so before he reached the end of the aisle, I said, “Did you know Allen Ginsberg tried to levitate the Pentagon?”

He turned back to me. “He did?”

“Yes. He and a whole bunch of Vietnam war protesters encircled the Pentagon, then sat in the lotus position and started meditating on levitating the Pentagon at the same time.”

“Did it work?”

I nodded. “They measured a height change of one point seven millimeters.”

“Really?”

“No, I made that part up. But wouldn't it be wild if it were true?”

He laughed at that, and now seemed like a reasonable time to hold out my hand invitingly and introduce myself. “Hi, I'm Brontë,” I said.

“Yeah, I know.” He shook my hand, which almost disappeared
into his. “Probably named after the writers Charlotte and Emily Brontë. I've never read them, but I know the names.”

Truth be told, I was actually glad he'd never read the Brontës. That would have made him a little
too
odd. “My parents are professors of literature at the university. My brother, Tennyson, is named after a famous poet.”

“He must hate that,” he said, “being a meathead and all.”

“You know him?”

“By reputation.”

Which made sense. My brother's obnoxious reputation precedes him like, oh, say, hail before a tornado. “Actually, he loves his name. It keeps people confused. He likes keeping people confused.”

He still hadn't introduced himself. Since he knew my name, I wanted him to think I knew his name, too.

“I'll need your ID card to check out the book,” I told him.

He handed it to me, and I glanced at the name quickly as we made our way to the circulation desk. “Well, Brewster, if you want my advice on other poets, let me know.”

“I just like the angry ones,” he said. “Know any more?”

“Plenty.” Which was not entirely true, but I knew angry poetry was highly Googleable.

As he left, I tried to size him up in full view. He was large, but not fat, sloppy—not grungy. His clothes seemed worn, but not stylishly so; they were actually worn, and the legs were short enough to prove they'd been around for at least two
inches of growth. And although most boys look pretentious in a distressed leather bomber jacket, it seemed natural on him.

It was then that I made the connection—and made it so powerfully, I almost gasped. Brewster Rawlins. This is the boy they call the Bruiser! Always a little too big to be picked on, a little too mad-creepy to be in anyone's clique. He was always just
there
, through elementary school and middle school, lingering in the background. I'd been in a couple of classes with him over the years, but it had been like we were on different planets.

It was hard to reconcile the memory of that kid with the boy I met that day—but one thing was certain: Brewster was a stray, and someone most definitely needed to take him in.