When My Brother Was an Aztec (5 page)

S
ISYPHUS AND
M
Y
B
ROTHER

The phone rings—my brother was arrested again.

Dad hangs up, gets his old blue Chevy going, and heads to the police station.

It's not the first time. It's not even the second.

No one is surprised my brother was arrested again.

The guy fell on my knife,
was his one-phone-call explanation.

(
He stabbed a man five times in the back
is the official accusation.)

My brother is arrested again and again. And again

our dad, our Sisyphus, pushes his old blue heart up to the station.

G
OD
, L
IONEL
R
ICHIE, AND
M
Y
B
ROTHER

Ring, ring, ring at 2 a.m. means meth's got my brother in the slammer again.

God told him,
Break into Grandma's house,
and Lionel Richie gave him that feeling of dancing on the ceiling.

My dad said,
At 2 a.m., God and Lionel Richie don't make good friends.

Ring, ring, ring at 2 a.m. means meth's got my brother by the balls again.

With God in one ear and Lionel in the other, who can win?

Not my brother, so he made a meth pipe from the lightbulb and smoked himself reeling.

Ring, ring, ring at 2 a.m. means my brother's tweaked himself into jail again.

It wasn't his fault, not with God guiding his foot through the door and honey-voiced Lionel whispering,
Hard to keep your feet on the ground with such a smooth-ass ceiling.

T
RIBAL
C
OPS
, G
ERONIMO
, J
IMI
H
ENDRIX, AND
M
Y
B
ROTHER

The tribal cops are in our front yard calling in on a little black radio:
I got a 10-15 for 2-6-7 and 4-15.

The 10-15 they got is my brother, a Geronimo wannabe who thinks he's holding out. In his mind he's playing backup for Jimi—

he is an itching, bopping head full of “Fire.” Mom cried,
Stop acting so crazy,
but he kept banging air drums against the windows and ripped out all the screens.

This time,
we
called the cops, and when they came we just watched—we have been here before and we know 2-6-7 and 4-15 will get him 10-15.

His eyes are escape caves torchlit by his 2-6-7 of choice: crystal methamphetamine.

Finally, he's in the back of the cop car, hands in handcuffs shiny and shaped like infinity.

Now that he's 10-15, he's kicking at the doors and security screen, a 2-6-7 fiend saying,
I got desires that burn and make me wanna 4-15.

His tongue is flashing around his mouth like a world's fair Ferris wheel—but he's no Geronimo, Geronimo would find a way out instead of giving in so easily.

—my parents live without light, groping,

never reading, never saying,
You are lovely.

A broken Borges and a gouged Saint Lucia, hand in hand,

shuffling from the kitchen linoleum to the living room rug.

—my father's pants are wobbling silhouettes.

My mother is bluer than her nightgown.

One says rosaries to become a candle.

The other tries hard to be a Coleman fishing lantern

on the bank of a river twenty years away, watching

a boy he loves stab a hook through a worm.

—my parents eat matches like there's no tomorrow,

but just because they choke on today doesn't mean they aren't

proactive: They're building a funeral pyre out of their house.

— it's hard to visit.

—we are always digging each other out from an intimate

sort of rubble—I recognize some things: my brother's

high school football helmet, First Communion pin,

ceramic handprint, green plastic army men with noses

and arms chopped off, a handheld propane torch…

…so much more has been disguised by being dismantled

and fiendishly reassembled at 2 a.m.—lives, guitar amps,

the electric Virgin Mary picture with a corona that changes color,

deals with gods, the Electrolux canister vac.

—Mom and Dad snap matchsticks between their tender teeth

and I taste a green clock at the back of my throat.

The ticking is cold or sour or really a pickax.

Worry tastes so dirty when it's spread out like a banquet.

—my brother the myrrh-eater—lost fucked-up Magus,

followed the wrong star—licking his sequined lips,

which can't shine in the shade of this growing pyre.

—my dad sips gasoline through a green garden hose.

Siphons it from his own work truck so my brother can't steal it.

—my mom tries to dress the place up: riddled doilies,

the burning-heart Jesus with eyes that used to follow us

around the room until someone plucked out each bright circle.

Now my fingers slip down into the slick holes in Jesus's face.

—my mom can't wash the windows because my brother ate them.

—she knots ribbons on the wood stack,

hangs blackened spoons like wind chimes and says,

What can you expect from a pyre but a pyre?

—when I visit, I hate searching for the door—usually

my brother's boot print on my dad's ribs, once it was

a hole in my mom's chest that changed her into a sad guitar

for three years—these are more like exits than doors.

They are difficult to get through.

—the walls have been mortared with grief, dark enough

to make blindness a gift—we don't have to look each other in the eyes.

—it's crazy how loud it is inside a funeral pyre.

We don't talk much. We can't hear each other

over so much stumbling.

—when I do hear, the only thing my mom says is,

How much longer?
I prefer that to what she wrote

in fluorescent paint on the ceiling last weekend:

What does he do with all the lightbulbs?

—we don't talk about crystal meth in my parents' house, particularly

since it's been converted to a funeral pyre.

—my dad quit speaking long ago. He only sings these days,

not with words, rather with small strikes and sparks.

Those quick flashes of fire that seem to satisfy

my mother's questions.

1. aka speed bumps

In the middle of Highway 95 I stopped my car

an ebony lake of legs, black vessels launched to retrieve

in the wrong direction. Maybe sideways is up,

Then a semi passed me on the left.

2. aka crank bugs

Don't tell my brother. Even though

there really are things skittering, creeping

wounds that won't let us go home.

3. aka delusional parasitosis

Dope is what my dad calls it. He never says meth.

My dad once took us to the railroad tracks,

Because it's hard to turn a firstborn son away, he got it,

his heels squeaked against the metal, arm stretched

4. aka sensation on the nerve endings

When my brother steals my dad's truck,

stray dogs, hungry accordions, the dirty-faced

after my brother's crumbs.

5. aka meth sores

We are too weak to say the word
intervention
.

You shouldn't embarrass him,
my mom says,

I can't understand. Why are we all just standing here

Thaïs has burst my shirt to flames, you say,

that kerosene cunt,
chingadera.

I remind you again, you are shirtless,

sin camisa, sin vergüenza, sin, sin,
sin.

Brother, I am ashamed.
Me muero de vergüenza.

Your toothlessness. Your caved lips.

You march behind Thaïs anyway,

mad Macedonian prince,
Príncipe de Coger,

with only one flip-flop clapping.

Jeers echo the alleyway,
Calle de los Perros.

Stop this fool parade.
Estoy suplicando,

Mother's wet dresses,
los trajes vacíos,

strung from the clotheslines above.
Un collar de fantasmas.

How you laugh, Brother.
Ríete.

You say, They are raining, the ladies are raining.

It is clearly midnight. In the sky a stampede. Elephants

licking their tusks.
Cielo de dientes.

This hour is your temple. The waxing moon your altar.

Hermano de flautas y pipas.
Rats are wild

at work building your shadow armor.

Thaïs kisses like an ember, you whisper,

already hard, with thoughts of what you will love

into blaze tonight—
que amas
—

already ash. Come morning the fields too will go

to smoke. Now, the lamp-lit moths tremble,

no longer themselves, gleaming with sex. You,

your bare foot, slicing through the city

My brother's shadow flutters from his shoulders, a magician's cape.

My personal charlatan glittering in woofle dust and loaded

with gimmicks and gaffs.

A train of dirty cabooses, of once-beautiful girls,

follows my magus man like a chewed tail

helping him perform his tricks.

He calls them his
Beloveds,
his
Sim Sala Bimbos,
juggles them,

shoves them into pipes packed hot hard as cannons and
Wham Bam

Ala-Kazam!
whirls them to smoke.

Sometimes he vanishes their teeth then points his broken wand up

into the starry desert sky, says,
Voilà! There they are!

and the girls giggle, revealing neon gums and purple throats.

My brother. My
mago
.

The consummate professional, he is dependable—performs daily,

nightly, in the living room, a forever-matinee, an always-late-shaman-show:

Come one, come all! Behold the spectacle

of the Prince of Prestidigitators
.

As the main attraction (
drumroll please
) he pulls animals from a hole

in his crotch—

you thought I'd say
hat,
but you don't know my black magic brother—

and those animals love him like the first animals loved God

when He gave them names.

My brother. Our perpetual encore—

he riddles my father with red silk scarves before sawing him in half

with a steak knife. Now we have two fathers,

one who weeps anytime he hears the word
Presto!

The other who drags his feet down the hall at night.

Neither has the stomach for steak anymore.

My mother, too, is gone somewhere

in one of the pockets of my brother's bluest tuxedo:

Abracadabrantesque!

The audience is we—we have the stubs to prove it—

and we have been here for years, in velvet chairs the color of wounds,

waiting for something to fall,

maybe the curtain, maybe the crucifix on the wall,

or, maybe the pretty white doves my brother made disappear—

Now we see them, now we don't
—

will fall from his sleeves like angels—

right before our very eyes.