The Little Brother (6 page)

So I did, waiting until my co-conspirators were engaged in a fervent whispered conversation so that they wouldn't notice. Looked B. Lester right in the eyes. Told him about my dad and Krone. The only thing I didn't tell him was that I shared my dad's name, but I imagined saying it: “I, too, am Dan Hyde.”

After I spoke he regarded me for a moment, and then he said, “Is that right?”

I gave him a confirming nod.

He coughed into his fist. “Excuse me,” he said, looking at me, and he lodged himself inside the police cruiser with the door cracked. We heard static and intermittent voices on his police radio, and then his mouthpiece chirped and he spoke into it with his head turned for privacy, his tone serious, making sure we couldn't hear. He hung the hand piece back on his dashboard.

For five minutes or more, he didn't speak or move. He sat and stared off toward the horizon, letting out a few lackluster sighs.

His police radio lit up and shot out noises and he answered it. I could barely see his profile; his mouth was set in a firm line. This time he let us hear him say “Yes, sir,” nodding, “Yes, sir,” and one final “Yes, sir,” and then he hung up the hand piece again.

Without a word, he stood before us, the sun silhouetting him, his shadow crossing my legs. He seemed to be contemplating us. He ran a hand through his hair, sighed.

“Well, boys,” he said, “today is your lucky day, because I've decided to cut you a break and let this go with a verbal warning.”

To my embarrassment, Ace and Ice slammed their hands together in a high five, saying “Yes!” as if at a football game.

But B. Lester didn't look at them, and he didn't seem to care, his gaze firmly on me. A direct, pitiless stare, and along with relief, something like shame wrenched deep in my chest.

6.

T
HE FOLLOWING
S
ATURDAY
at Mom's in Cucamonga, I stayed up late with her watching
Caddyshack,
one of her favorite movies. She wore a nightgown and a robe. I sat back on the couch and looked at her pink feet propped on the coffee table next to her mug of white wine, the calluses on her heels and toes from her walking group and the faint veins beneath the skin on her ankles. “We used to be a team, your dad and me,” she said, apropos of nothing. “We shared this small apartment in Fullerton for three hundred a month. I worked, he worked. I cooked spaghetti on Tuesdays, his favorite. Forget about portfolios and investments and lawyers: We didn't even have a credit card!”

“Mom,” I said, “I can't hear the movie.”

“Sorry,” she said. But she kept right on talking. “He used to tell me,” she said, reaching for the remote, “that I couldn't shake my middle-class practicality. What does that mean? If I'd been able to get a personal trainer, some plastic surgery, a bunch of clothes, some fancy car that I didn't need, that would've been better?”

“Mom,” I said. “Please.”

She paused the movie and repositioned herself on the couch so that she faced me. After she took a deep breath, she said, “I want
to apologize,” and then added, “I need to apologize.” Her pastor, she explained, had begun a program to help church members inventory their lives. She hadn't been the best mother, she said, in ways fundamental to the development of children. “You need to build up your kids,” she said, “not tear them down,” and I could hear her pastor saying those exact words to her.

The pit of my stomach whirled, remembering how she used to call me Dr. Strangelove. One night she reprimanded me for taking the skin off my chicken at dinner—“That's the best part!”—alerting me to its existence. I must've been around six. After that I couldn't eat anything that had once had skin. So I became Dr. Strangelove.

“Not a big deal, Mom,” I said. I didn't really want to think about it, much less talk about it.

Her quizzical gaze sought atonement.

“Okay,” I said. “It's okay. I forgive you.”

“Good,” she said. She reached for the remote and unpaused the movie.

After a few minutes, she went to her bedroom and returned with a hairy-looking afghan. She sat next to me on the couch and spread the afghan over our legs. Her hand reached for mine. I held her hand until our palms got sweaty, and then I broke free. Something in the way she kept glancing from the TV screen to me made me feel like a kid again.

Gabe wasn't home yet from hanging out with Kevin and some others, and so she began to worry. Every fifteen minutes or so, she'd try his cell phone again. Her leg kept jiggling under the afghan. She looked old. Up close, I saw that her eyelids sagged.

“Well,” she said, “this has been so hard. All of it. It's been hard on everyone, but especially Gabe.”

After the movie ended, I went to bed, kissing her good night on the cheek. “Get some sleep,” I said. “Don't worry.”

In those days, despite my occasional bouts of insomnia, I could sleep fourteen hours easy, and I liked sleeping in my childhood bed—the shadows, smells, everything known and familiar in a deep sense.

I woke at around two in the morning to Mom shaking me lightly by the shoulders, whispering, “Even. Even, wake up.”

Gabe wasn't back yet, and she was upset.

I made her turn around—I wore only boxers because she kept it so hot in the house, and yet still I sweated—and I put on my jeans and shirt.

“Wait here,” I told her. “I'll find him.”

Earlier I'd heard Gabe talking on his cell phone about meeting at the playground, and I planned to look there first. He kept his cell in his front pocket, and I tried to call him a few times before I left, imagining the phone vibrating and ringing in his jeans, but it just went to his voice mail.

I took my ten-speed bicycle from the garage and started pedaling around my old neighborhood. It felt good to be outside in the cool air.

I circled the playground—in the dark it had a menacing feel, the deserted swings and merry-go-round creaking slightly in the breeze—and then I stopped near the swings, kickstanding my bike. Gabe and I used to play here. Gabe claimed to have saved my life on this playground, and I suppose he had.

One afternoon when we were kids, I had climbed to the peak of the jungle gym and fell. Gabe, on the partition below, grabbed my arm and slowed my fall, perhaps preventing a snapped neck or concussion. He went down with me because he didn't let go.

While I have no memory of the incident, we both have visible scars, mine on my hairline from where I hit my head, his on his arm from where he scraped against a protruding rivet on his way down. Because of the fall, the city installed a rubber cushion as flooring and sanded the rivets.

I listened to the breeze shaking the tree leaves. A car drove past, its headlights lighting up the jungle gym, creating elongated shadows, and then shrinking back to dark.

Before leaving, I pulled my cell phone from my pocket and speed-dialed Gabe.

To my surprise, I heard his ringtone in the distance, the thumping, tinny-sounding beginnings of “Area Codes” by Ludacris. “I've got hoes. I've got hoes, in different area codes, area, area codes. Hoes, hoes, in different area codes, area, area codes, codes.” The song had been popular the year before, but Gabe still loved it.

He didn't answer and the phone went to voice mail. I called once more, following the music to the base of the jungle gym, to a cave-like opening for the largest of the slides, which was in the shape of a huge green snake—as kids it had frightened us, the opening of its mouth. The ringtone echoed inside, and when I looked, I saw the ridged soles of Gabe's Nikes.

I crawled through, leaning forward and pulling him by his calves, sliding him out. He snored and his breath reeked of pot and tequila.

“Gabe,” I said, smacking him on the cheek. “Gabe, wake up.”

He twisted, woke with a start, and sat up. “Faaack,” he said.

I gave him room to regain his composure. It took him a few head-shaking and throat-clearing minutes. Then he squinted at me and said, “Even, what're you doing here?”

“Finding you,” I said. “Mom's worried.”

He shook his head, a hand on his forehead.

“They left you?” I asked.

He shrugged.

“Not cool,” I said. With a rush of gratitude, I thought about Mike. “What kind of friends do that?”

“Do what?” he said, holding his head.

“Leave you passed out in a playground, shoved inside a slide?”

He didn't answer.

We rode double on my ten-speed, Gabe sitting on the bike seat, me standing and pedaling. He put his hands on my waist to steady himself. We took a long detour to a gas station, buying mint gum to camouflage Gabe's breath.

But by the time we got home, Mom had taken a couple of Xanax—the bottle was on the coffee table—and she was sleeping on the couch, her hands folded on her stomach, the afghan slipped to the floor.

7.

T
HE NEXT WEEK
, Gabe called. “Is Dad there?” he asked. “He's not answering at his office.” His tone alarmed me. But more than that, we've always had a shorthand receptivity, whereby we both can tell when the other is in trouble.

I sat in one of the dining room chairs near the kitchen. I had just woken to the phone ringing, wearing my boxers and an undershirt, at about eleven thirty on a Tuesday morning.

The night before, I had pretended to be sick—coughing, complaining about a stomachache, spending noticeable extended amounts of time in the bathroom, where I both masturbated and read books—and Dad, a school fanatic, probably because he'd been a high school dropout, let me sleep late and stay home.

“Not sure,” I said.

“Find out!”

“He's not,” I said, fingering the note he'd left on the dining room table:
Golf with K. Home later.
“He's golfing with Krone and his buddies. I just found his note.”

Gabe groaned and then breathed into the phone. We both knew that Dad turned his cell phone off when he golfed. It was the only
time he did so, saying that it was his “church time.” Church time could last multiple hours, depending on whether he played eighteen holes.

“What is it?” I asked.

“I've been arrested.”

A tingling ran up my neck.

“Public intoxication,” he said. “I'm at the Cucamonga police station.”

“Oh, shit.”

“I don't have my clothes.”

“Why not? What are you wearing?”

“They gave me this scratchy jumpsuit. It's really big on me.”

In the long silence that followed, I could hear a gardener's leaf blower in the distance, Gabe's breathing, and the busy chattering noises of the police station in the background. From the window, a beam of sunlight made the flecks sparkle in the kitchen tiles. I'd detected a note of belligerence in Gabe's tone and wondered if he was still drunk.

“What happened?” I asked, perching the phone in the crook of my shoulder, so that I could pour myself a glass of orange juice from the refrigerator. When I'm scared, I get thirsty.

“I can't call Mom,” he said.

“Gabe, what happened?”

He didn't tell me, but I found out later from the police report that he was arrested at Ralph's grocery store near his high school. On a dare, he slid down the aisle in his socks and boxers, his friends recording him on his Samsung camcorder—the same video camera that would get us in so much trouble later. Dad gave it to
Gabe for his twelfth birthday. Gabe used it to record his and his friends' skateboarding feats.

His friends ran away before the cops arrived, taking Gabe's clothes with them. Even so, Gabe refused to rat them out. Because Gabe fell and hit his head on the edge of the shelf and, I imagine, because he was drunk and slow, the cops caught him.

“What should I do? Can you call the clubhouse?”

“That won't work,” I said.

“Yeah,” he admitted.

“Listen,” I said, “here's what you do.” I told him about my encounter at the beach with the cop B. Lester, and how once I'd mentioned Dad's name and his connection to Sheriff Krone, B. Lester dropped the charges and let me go. I hadn't told anyone about the experience, and it was strange to hear myself speak about it.

Dad's influence, I told him, and Krone's, extended to Cucamonga. “Let them know about Dad.” I said. “It's our Get Out of Jail Free card.”

After a strained and confusing silence, he said, “You're kidding, right?”

“No. I'm not.”

“The problem,” he said, “is that I'm not a coward. I don't hide behind my daddy.”

I was shocked. “You're drunk,” I said.

“Maybe,” he said.

“Now's not the best time,” I suggested, “for you to be a self-righteous prick.”

But he wasn't up for an argument. “I can't do it,” he said in a hushed, sad voice. “I can't. It's so hypocritical. I can't.”