Sons from Afar (29 page)

It wasn't being over soon, it was lasting forever.

Sammy twisted in the huge arms. His legs kicked backward, not often connecting and those blows weak, anyway, because he wore sneakers. Deep voices commented on the fight, saying
what
James didn't know, didn't care. Watching, James saw what the chief couldn't see—Sammy's mouth opening to bite down hard on the hairy arm that held him, even while the huge hand twisted at his head.

Don't do that,
James thought and at the same time
Smart move.
He didn't know what he thought.

The teeth—in a time zone that stretched out into slower than slow motion—closed on the flesh of the arm.

“You little bastard,” the chief roared. He was hurt, James saw, glad. But he spun Sammy around and slammed a fist against the boy's ear. Sammy careened backward, and fell down.

That was it then, James thought, relieved. KO, knockout.

But Sammy got up again. His legs started to buckle but he pulled himself up with the help of a chair. He headed back to the man. Sammy just wasn't going to quit.

The chief held his arms out, his fingers motioning Sammy forward, encouraging him—like a father teaching his kid how to walk, James thought. It was all wrong and somebody had to stop Sammy.

“Come on, kid,” the chief coaxed Sammy.

And Sammy came on.

James—trying to slip out from under the barring arm because—it was his brother, it was Sammy—trying to breathe—heard the low voice in his ear reassuring him that Frank used to get the chief going and then he'd slip out of the trouble somehow. He heard the voice urging him to relax, promising it would be over soon—and now James was afraid he'd just burst into tears. He was so useless, so helpless—and he was supposed to be so smart. If he was so smart, what had he been doing letting
Sammy get them into this mess? And what was he going to do? There wasn't anything he could do, for all his useless brains. For all his brainy philosophy about how because life was brief things didn't matter. Sammy mattered.

He couldn't get Sammy out of this. He looked at his brother's battered face. The chief was taking his time now. Everybody was quiet. They were just two kids, and helpless—

“I think you'd better stop this now,” a voice spoke.

James almost looked around to see who it was, speaking, except he didn't want to take his eyes off Sammy. As long as he had his eyes touching Sammy, maybe things might—and besides, it was his own voice anyway—sounding normal almost. Sounding cool and sure, like he was giving the right answer in class.

His voice went on and he knew what it was going to say. “Unless you want to really beat up on him. But I can't imagine any jury being sympathetic about men beating up on a couple of kids.”

He said
men
on purpose, not
man.
He said
men
because he wanted everybody in the room responsible. Because, he knew, as if he'd had time to think it out, if each man thought he'd be held responsible, and arrested, then each man would have something personal invested in ending it. To save his own skin.

“Yeah,” he heard the low voice at his ear, and other voices too. “The kid's right. Hey, Chief? How about a beer? Let the kid go and let's have a beer.”

The chief didn't like that. James couldn't tell if Sammy heard anything: Sammy just stood there, swaying toward his enemy. Getting ready to make his move.

The chief looked around, then back at Sammy. He reached down into his workboot and pulled out something that flashed silver, whether against Sammy or against the now unenthusiastic crowd, James never knew, because when they saw that, the men
around surged into the fight, and Sammy was swallowed up.

Two men moved to hold on to the chief. The man whose arm had been across James's chest left him, to stand or fall there, as other men joined in to pull off the men holding the chief. James heard the sound of breaking glass behind him, smelled the thick, sharp aroma of whiskey; out of the corner of his eye he saw a hand holding up the neck of a broken glass bottle, holding it like a weapon. The room filled with sound—voices and furniture and a rumbling, growling undertone; the room filled with a mass of confused bodies. James slid between legs and hips to grab his brother. He hauled Sammy behind him, out the door. Running, he hauled Sammy down the dark street, away.

It was dark out there, with only one streetlight at the corner, and only little thin lines of light from behind the windows. It was dark and Sammy was just dragging along beside James, and that was wrong. James pulled his brother into an alley. He pulled him back into the dark narrow space, behind a few metal garbage cans that clattered as Sammy stumbled into them. There, they both sank down onto the ground.

The wall was behind James. He leaned his back against it. Sammy was right up next to him. He could hear Sammy breathing and feel the length of his brother's body. It didn't matter if he couldn't see, as long as he could hear and feel. After a couple of minutes, when Sammy's breathing had gotten quieter, and his own had too, James said his brother's name into the darkness. “Sammy?”

No answer. Maybe Sammy couldn't speak, maybe his jaw had been busted, or his windpipe—but his breathing was okay—maybe his brains had been knocked sideways, if that could happen—and James thought: He could have murdered Francis Verricker if he'd had the man there. For what he'd done to them.

Ripples ran along the body next to him, and choking sounds came from it. James turned to Sammy, not getting up—he couldn't have stood up right then if his life depended on it. But his life didn't depend on it. Which was wonderful to know.

“Some fight, hunh?” Sammy's voice, choked with laughter, asked him.

Before James could think of a suitable answer, Sammy burst into tears, choking over them. “I hurt,” he wailed softly. “James? I hurt.”

James kept an arm around Sammy, thinking. Thinking what to do next. He didn't know where they were. He didn't know what time it was. He didn't know what to do.

Sammy's tears were as sudden and brief as the laughter. By the time James realized what happened, he knew that his brother was asleep—with James's arm around him and his head heavy against James's chest. Sammy was sound asleep, his face still washed with his own tears and his own blood.

J
ames couldn't sleep. He sat there, his back to a shingled wall, his legs drawn up, the weight of his sleeping brother against his chest. His eyes adjusted to the dark, but the dark was so complete he could only see his own body, and Sammy's; beyond that, nothing, just the sense of close walls. It was like a cave, but reversed. The outside was the darkness and where he and Sammy were was a small area of visibility.

Street noises, TVs and rock music, came down the alley to him and kept him awake, then the sound of sirens at a distance, growing closer. He couldn't see out into the street, so he had to deduce information from sounds, and the play of flashing lights into the alley. He guessed, from the sounds, that the police had come to settle the fight. He guessed, from a later siren, one that wailed higher and longer than the police, that an ambulance had been called. Lights flashed red, white, blue, and then yellow, too, down into the alley. They'd gotten out just in time. James thought about getting up and going out, to ask the police for help—but didn't have the strength to move, didn't want to wake Sammy, didn't know whether they'd be held somehow responsible and put into cells, as instigators or vagrants. The law, he knew, could be implacable. He didn't know where, under the law, he and his brother would be placed. He wondered—his mind wandering against the sounds of raised voices and commands called out, of
protest and denial—who had called the police. Probably the bartender, especially if he was also Al the owner. Like a rat deserting the sinking sailors.

James would have laughed at that thought, only it was the most he could do to smile to himself. Besides, he might wake up Sammy—who must be exhausted to sleep through this commotion. In the silence that fell after the street emptied, James's memories kept him awake.

He stared at the darkness he couldn't see into, and remembered. The remarkable thing was that he had noticed and registered so much, even while he had felt as if he wasn't functioning at all. While he had been mindlessly getting through the moments, not doing anything, his brain had been storing up pictures. The more minutes that passed by, the more time that lay between him and what had happened, the more vivid his memory grew. He saw faces, saw their expressions—saw in memory Alex's boyish face and the way the opened blue eyes and opened mouth expressed fear when Chief turned to him, the knife blade shining. Hands grabbed for the chief's arm as the memory continued, and James hoped it wasn't Alex the ambulance had come for. He heard that voice low in his ear again, saying he should just lay low, reminding him that Frankie never got caught up into this kind of trap—Yeah, he'd just baited it and set it, James thought. His memory heard Sammy's breathing, heavy—hard work, breathing; a cry of pain—he saw Sammy getting up from the floor to go for the big man again.

His brother, James thought—almost drowning under a feeling that rolled up from inside him, and rolled over him, rolling him over—Sammy. Sammy might be foolish, but he had courage. He had more courage than any other man in that place. Sammy had stood up to the chief in their conversation, while James had been silly with fear. Sammy had stood up to him and stayed standing
up, no matter what. James knew it was because of Sammy that he had himself stood up, at least to some extent, against the man: because he was standing with Sammy. He wanted to wrap his other arm around his brother—he was so grateful to him—and proud of him. He didn't envy Sammy, but he admired him. And loved him, he thought; mostly loved him.

The darkness might be lying thick all around them, but they were all right for now. In the morning, they'd go back to the bus station, however long away morning lay. Until then, James would sit and watch.

Fear remembered was somehow stronger than fear being felt. That kept him awake and almost shivering, even though the night wasn't cold. The street might just as well not have been out there, so thick was the silence. Not even an occasional car motor broke the silence. Not even a bit of light as distant and unilluminating as a star broke the darkness.

James sat the time through, knowing that, being time, being measured into hours, minutes, and seconds, it would tick its way by. Nothing would slow it down, nothing would speed it up. If he could just wait it through, the night would pass by.

The first he knew of dawn wasn't light. There was almost no sky visible where he sat, and it wasn't dawn yet anyway. The first he knew was a lightening of the air. The air lightened—he could see mortar lines on the brick wall he faced; the air lay lighter on his eyeballs. It wasn't what you'd call light—just sight returned to him. But his heart lightened, as if there had really been a question about whether morning would come that day, as if he hadn't known for sure what the end of the night would be.

James spoke his brother's name and brushed the yellow hair with his fingers, to wake Sammy. Sammy raised his head and leaned back against the wall, his eyes closed. James spoke his name and told him it was time to get up. Sammy's mouth moved
as if he were answering, although his swollen lips didn't open, and no words came out.

James almost smiled. Getting Sammy awake had always been a long job. “Let's go,” he said, his voice patient, not urgent. It wasn't even the crack of dawn yet, so there wasn't much danger of meeting up with anybody on the streets. “Sammy?”

Sammy's face looked pretty bad, looked horrible in fact. They'd have to get him washed up, somehow, or everybody who saw him would run screaming. The rest of him wasn't any too presentable either, James thought—and his arm. His left arm. The lower part of it was swollen out as if a balloon had been inflated inside the skin.

James couldn't imagine what had gone on inside that arm to make it look like that. No wonder Sammy, who never complained, said he hurt. James wouldn't have been surprised to see sharp splintered ends of bones sticking out from that arm.

He put his two hands on his brother's upper left arm, just in case, trying to keep the whole arm still. Sammy didn't like that, and his eyelids flew up.

“James,” Sammy said. The puzzled, angry hazel eyes focused on him. “You look terrible.”

James leaned back, still gently restraining Sammy's left arm. “Do I? But nobody even touched me, except the once. I didn't think there was any blood—”

“Your face is dead white—and your eyes . . . you feel all right?”

“I didn't sleep. I was pretty frightened.”

“Yeah,” Sammy said. He closed his eyes, and smiled to himself, causing the crusted blood around his lower lip to crack. “We didn't last too long in there, did we. But you know what?” the eyes opened, and Sammy pulled himself up to sit straighter. James let go of the arm. “He must have been
something
, our father. I mean, however bad he was, he went his own way.
Nobody could make him do anything. So whatever else you have to say about him, you have to admit that.”

James didn't argue. Instead, he asked, “You better look at your arm. The left. Does it hurt?”

Sammy stared. “Cripes, James, what happened?”

“How would I know? I'm not a doctor,” James answered. “I think we ought to get going, though. Can you remember the way?”

“A'course.”

They both stood up. James's muscles, in his legs, his back and shoulders, and his neck, too, his neck was the worst—protested. Hurt. “Maybe we should put a sling around that arm, just in case.”

“Where would we get a sling?” Sammy was just holding his arm in front of him, like a swollen wing, and staring at it.