When You Were Older (14 page)

Ben wasn’t laughing. Or taunting me. But he had a satisfied look on his face that I found deeply disturbing.

I treaded water for a minute or two before I heard my father.

‘What the hell just happened?’ he yelled.

I looked over to see him struggle back into the canoe without taking time to rinse the mud off his boots. If I hadn’t been in the water, he would have dangled and swished his boots in the lake, one at a time, while half the canoe was still grounded, to keep all that mud out of the rented boat.

‘He fell in!’ Ben yelled back.

My father said nothing. Just paddled over to me. He couldn’t pull me into his canoe without tipping it over, so instead he handed me the end of a rope, which I held on to as he paddled me over to the shore.

‘Can you stand up now?’ he asked.

I put my feet down, and they sank deeply into the silty mud. When I pulled my right foot up again, it came up bare. The mud kept one of my good sandals. I fell over into the water, hands buried in the silt, popped up blubbering, and pulled out my other foot, careful to bend my foot to grip the sandal. As if it really mattered to hold on to your one remaining sandal once it had lost its mate. My father had the canoe landed by then, and he picked me up by the shirt, much the way Ben had, rinsed me off by dunking me in the lake a few times almost to my neck, and then loaded me in.

He used the paddle to push off from the shore, and it came up with a deep half-moon of mud on the blade. My father looked at me as he paddled on one side only, turning the boat toward camp.

‘Where’s my ultra-light?’ he asked. Quietly.

I pointed straight down, and he nodded. As if he’d known that much already.

‘Sorry,’ I said, miserably.

‘Not your fault,’ he whispered. But he didn’t elaborate. Not at the time.

We paddled the rest of the way in silence.

My mother was waiting for us back in camp, looking artificially cheerful. And Sandy was there, wagging her whole body. She barked once, sharply, as if to insist that Ben and my father paddle faster.

‘You weren’t out very long,’ our mother said. ‘Already catch your limit?’

Ben climbed out of the boat and held up his trout proudly, to show her. He had it on a stringer now. I wondered when he’d put it on the stringer.

My father jumped out of our canoe, stepped up behind Ben. I was behind them, so I couldn’t see his face, but my mother’s face served as a mirror. I saw the trouble reflected in hers, and I know Ben saw it, too. He’d just barely begun to turn when my father smacked him across the back of the head, sending him sprawling into the dirt. The trout landed three or four feet away, and flopped once, weakly. Sandy sniffed it. Oh, dear God, I thought. It’s still alive. How can it still be alive?

‘Heeeey!’ Ben’s voice was whiny, wounded. He struggled to his feet. ‘What was that for?’

‘You think I’m stupid?’ my father roared. Yes,
my
father. So long as we’re being specific about it. ‘I don’t know what pisses me off more: when you torture your little brother, or when you treat me like I’m stupid. If Rusty had fallen out of the canoe, he’d’ve tipped it over. He didn’t fall. Did he, Ben?
Did he?
’

Silence. I still hadn’t gotten out of my father’s canoe. Nobody moved or spoke for a long time. My mother’s eyes fell on me, as if just now noticing I was dripping wet. Sandy slouched into our open tent and lay down, looking guilty.

‘Get your things,’ my father said, more quietly. ‘I’m taking you home.’

‘But, Bert,’ our mother said. ‘We just got here.’

‘Not you,’ he said. ‘You stay here. Rusty stay here. Ben’s going back.’

‘Bert, he can’t stay alone,’ she said, a model of artificial patience. I think, looking back, that she always knew when my father was drunk, and tried to correct his mistakes without mentioning that obvious fact. ‘He’s only twelve.’

‘I’ll ask the Jesperses to look after him, then. But me and Rusty and you, we’re going to have a decent vacation. For a change. We’re not going to let Ben mess it up for us. Not this time.’

Ben said nothing. Just ducked into our tent and began to stuff a few things into his duffel bag. My father stood
by
the tent flap like a prison guard, watching and waiting, arms laced across his chest.

I climbed out of the canoe and stood in front of my mother, and she looked down at me, and noticed I was wearing only one sandal. I could see it register on her face, see the loss of something recorded in her eyes. Sandals cost money. So that was one more expense to add to all the other expenses we boys were constantly wringing out of the family budget.

I hobbled over and picked up the trout by its stringer. Determined that its death would not be in vain. I brought it to my mother. But she was busy watching the drama play out. We watched together as Ben and my father loaded up the truck with Ben’s things. They drove off without further comment.

I stood, holding the stringer, feeling the sun burn the back of my neck and the tops of my ears. I’d already gotten too much sun without realizing it. It seemed to take her for ever, and I didn’t know why, but eventually she broke her statue-like status and took the fish from me.

‘Go get into some dry clothes,’ she said.

I didn’t. I sat in the tent for a while, stroking Sandy’s ears and watching my mother make a fire. She still hadn’t said another word since they’d left.

Suddenly she looked in at me. ‘You don’t want trout, do you?’

I shook my head.

‘I knew that. I knew that once you’d watched it die, you wouldn’t eat it. You’re my sensitive guy.’

I winced inwardly, figuring that was her polite way of saying ‘Wussy Boy’.

‘Hot dogs?’

I nodded.

I climbed out of the tent after a while. When I could smell them. When the smell made me realize how hungry I was. I sat by the fire and watched them sizzle on the iron grate, watched Sandy lick the air, as if the aroma could be stolen.

‘You know he’s just jealous of you,’ my mother said.

I had no idea what she was talking about.

‘Ben?’

‘Yes. Ben.’

‘How
could
he be?’

My mother sighed deeply. Rolled the three hot dogs over with a long barbecue fork, exposing blackened ridges on their undersides. ‘He doesn’t see his father any more, and he probably never will again, and your father isn’t Ben’s father, and Ben knows it … and … I don’t think he ever stops testing that. At least, it doesn’t seem like he does. I think Ben feels like your father … loves you better. You know. Because you’re his.’

‘Does he?’

I looked up at her face for the first time in quite a long while. She had a little bit of gray at the part line of her hair, and I don’t think I’d ever noticed it before. She wasn’t very old.

She sighed again. ‘Oh, Rusty. You ask the hardest … I don’t know … I think he
tries
to love you both the
same.
But Ben makes it so hard. And it just keeps going around in a circle like that.’

I think I didn’t know, at the time, what she meant. I didn’t know
what
kept going around in a circle. I do now. I know for a fact that I didn’t believe her. I didn’t think she was lying to me, I just thought she was wrong. Ben wasn’t jealous of me. That was impossible. He just hated me. For a number of very concrete reasons.

I should note that my father was too drunk to be out on the road, and we both knew it. And that cast a pall over lunch. Well. It was hard to tell what was what inside that pall, but I think drunk-driving was a big part of it. Not that he didn’t go out on the road in that – or an even more advanced – condition pretty regularly. But you still worry every time.

But he made it back. He dropped Ben at the Jesperses’ house and made it back to the lake safely. His drunkenness didn’t come back to bite us.

Not that time.

Later that night, when I couldn’t sleep, I got out of the tent and walked down to the lake shore in the moonlight, Sandy padding along behind me. My feet were bare, and the cool ground felt good. I stripped out of my shirt and pants, and stood at the edge of the lake, in the dark, in just my underpants. When I stepped into the water, the silty mud felt funny but nice squeezing between my toes. The bank was firmer at camp, and I didn’t sink in any deeper than the tops of my feet. The
moon
was full, casting a stream of silver on the water, and I fell forward and swam into it. Sandy barked once, not wanting me to go beyond her reach. I swam back and stumbled to her and gently held her graying muzzle shut for a moment.

I told her, ‘Shhhhh.’

She sank into a down position on the muddy bank, her long muzzle touching one front paw. She still didn’t like the idea. But she wouldn’t question me again. She placed the judgement of her humans ahead of her own, as a matter of courtesy and pride, even if she was always right and we were always wrong. Good dogs are like that.

I swam out into the silver light and paddled in place for a few minutes, treading water. Savoring the feel of the coolness against my skin. Savoring the knowledge that I existed, for that brief moment, in a safe window. There was no one to hold my head under the water just to be mean.

Then I thought of lake monsters creeping up in the dark behind or underneath me, and I scrambled out of the water as fast as I could. Ben had left a mark on me, just the mark he had intended. Whether he was present or not, I would always feel the seeds of fear he had planted in me. I was still only six, and didn’t know how not to be willing soil.

But, anyway, we had a decent vacation. For a change.

I WAS SITTING
on my bed reading a comic book I’d probably already read fifteen times. I couldn’t afford new ones every time I wanted them.

Ben opened my door and stuck his head in.

‘Come ’ere in my room for a minute.’

I reflexively pushed against the bedspread with my feet, pressing my back tighter up against the headboard. This felt like the beginning of a game I was destined to lose.

He noticed.

‘I’m not gonna do anything to you. I promise.’

I tried to swallow, but only half-succeeded. ‘Promise?’

‘I just want to talk to you.’

‘What about?’

‘I want your help with something.’

My help. With something. That didn’t seem to add up right.

‘What?’

‘The one thing you’re really good at. You know the one thing you’re really good at, right?’

I chewed that over for a minute. I could think of a couple of things, but I was pretty sure Ben would disagree with them.

‘Um … No.’

‘Memorizing.’

‘Oh. Memorizing. Right.’

I
was
good at something. Something even Ben couldn’t deny. I jumped off my bed and followed him into his room.

Ben’s room was all but unnavigable. All of his clothes, school books and sporting equipment lived permanently on the floor, along with many other items that not only resisted categorization but identification. But I picked my way through to his little round table and sat, and he sat across from me. Oddly, there was nothing on its surface. Everything that might have sat on the table lived on the floor. It defied logic.

‘I’m going to be a famous actor,’ he said.

‘You are?’

‘I am.’

He spoke as though there was no possibility, not even a remote one, that he could be wrong, that the world would not support him in this endeavor. It was as though he’d already made his dream come true just by declaring it.

‘OK,’ I said.

‘But I need you to help me learn my lines.’

‘For what?’

‘I got a part in the school play. We all have to start somewhere!’ he shouted, as if I had disparaged his announcement between sentences. ‘There’s this one part where I have to take a sword and fight a duel with this guy, and the whole time we’re dueling I have a speech. It’s kind of long. Well … like six sentences, but they’re long sentences, and they don’t make a lot of sense. So I want you to help me learn my lines.’

I looked up into his face, and it was open, unguarded. Nothing hostile or dangerous. It was a look I wasn’t sure I’d seen before.

‘I don’t know if I can help you,’ I said. Stupidly. ‘It’s not like I can memorize it for you.’

I watched the gates slam shut again in his eyes.

‘Well, just go over it with me,’ he said.

He had to read it to me. I was barely eight, and it was a bit beyond my reading level. But it wasn’t beyond my memorization level. Nothing was. When I hear things, or read things, they remain printed on my brain and I can access them again anytime I want. I don’t know why. It’s just always been that way.

Here’s what Ben had to memorize. Note that I’m now twenty-four years old, and I can still recite it word for word. At least one of us learned it that day.

‘ “I come to defend her honor, the honor granted to her by right of her station in the realm. And when I have won my battle she shall reclaim the keys to her kingdom, and all will be put to right again. Did you fancy no one would see, would notice your treachery, your
crimes
against your own fellows, or did you only think no one would be brave enough to fight you for it? I will lay down my life for my country and for its rightful ruler. Though, more likely, I will lay down yours.” And when I say that last bit,’ Ben added, ‘I stab the guy with the sword.’

‘That’s five sentences,’ I said.

‘What?’

‘It’s five sentences.’

‘Fine, it’s five sentences. Who cares?’

‘You said it was six.’

Ben sighed. ‘I guess it just feels like more.’

He got up from the table, rummaged around in his closet, and pulled out two hiking poles. He tossed me one. I wasn’t expecting it, so it just hit my shoulder and fell on to the rubbish heap of the floor.

I stared at it. I had no idea where we were going with this.

‘Who wrote this play?’ I asked, thinking it wasn’t very good.

‘Shakespeare. He was just having a bad day.’

‘Seriously?’

‘No, not seriously, stupid. Ken Friedman. He’s a sophomore. You want to pick up the pole?’ Ben was already fiercely impatient with me.