Almost Kings (9 page)

Epilogue.

It’s strange looking back. Almost eight years have gone by, and writing this all now, it feels like someone else’s story. I’ve still got the crown on my back and the boxer’s nose my brother gave me that day, but aside from those two scars, there’s not much to link me to that fourteen-year-old kid, growing up in Jefferson.

After Dad saw the way Truck had messed me up, he didn’t want him around the house anymore, not that Truck wanted to come back anyway. I’m not sure the two of them really talked again, and they were probably both better off for it.

Without Truck helping out with bills, money got tight for a while. Dad and I cut down on some luxuries through the rest of school, and a cousin of his stepped in to help us out a couple of times when money got real bad, but mostly we got by.

As I went through high school, Dad was good about showing up for academic competitions or awards ceremonies, and he did his best to stay sober on those days, or at least to chew gum and pretend.

Later, when I was a Freshman here at Stanford, he called to say he’d been seeing a woman, Amy, and not much later, she moved in. I stopped by the old house for a few days for spring break that year and felt like I was visiting a stranger. The windows were all open, and light poured in on new couches. They’d torn out the mildewed carpets and discovered old hardwood floors underneath. Amy was a good woman and an artist. Pictures of tropical birds occupied most of the walls.

Dad had been sober for months. He was clean-shaven and clear-eyed and seemed to understand the differential equations problems I was working on when I explained them. He kept saying how proud he was and took special pride in drinking too much coffee from the Stanford Dad cup I’d sent him for father’s day.

I guess I should have been happier, seeing Dad cleaned up like that, but I couldn’t help but feel the timing was unfair. Maybe that explains why I wasn’t too upset when he called drunk and ranting a couple of years later to tell me Amy had left him. I was just glad I wasn’t around to watch him break down again.

I made peace with Kallea and Emily in time, but we were never really close again. We were still in most of the same classes and clubs and stuff, but we didn’t hang out after school, and none of us were into parties anymore.

Sometimes, though, Kallea and I would find ourselves alone in a room together and catch ourselves talking like old friends until some passing mention of football or sex or dating or some other loaded topic interrupted our exchange, and we remembered it was too late for us. Whatever sweetness had existed between us with tinged with something darker now that we both wanted to forget.

More and more, I started hanging out with Sam and Joel, who only wanted to hear the good stories about the Kings. There were never girls around, and that was fine with me. Whenever a dance came up, Sam and Joel would obsess over whether they could get dates and chicken out at the last minute. There was a kind of sweetness to it, and I liked watching them play it cool at school then agonize over their heartache as we chatted online.

I would have wished that for myself, if it were possible. When a girl from my Mock Trial team, a little blonde freshman, asked if I’d take her to Prom my junior year, I flinched bad when she put a hand on my arm. For a while, I thought maybe I was gay. But it wasn’t that. I just couldn’t handle people touching me for a while, guys or girls.

When I got my acceptance letter into Stanford I realized that the first person I wanted to tell was Kallea. I guess I wanted her to be proud of me. When I called, she asked if I wanted to get coffee, and we met at a little place near her house downtown.

It had been a few years since I’d really looked at Kallea, though I’d thought about her a lot of nights. I had these fantasies where I floated in a black tub of hot water at night, only my feet knees, face, and penis floating over the surface, and then some cloud would pass over the moon and the water would freeze instantly.

Encased in ice, unable to move, I’d watch as Kallea, naked, would creep over the ice, playing with my toes, stroking my knees, and finally squatting over my genitals. I’d tell her not to, but she always sat on me, riding me until she came. After she was done, she’d stand, looking down at me, smiling at my powerlessness. And then she’d start slamming her heel into the ice, over and over again, until it cracked, except the cracks ran through me as well, and the dream always ended with me broken, my frozen pieces scattered, my crystal blood all over her.

Kallea was six inches taller now than she’d been freshman year, and she’d just cut her hair short. She wore skinny hipster jeans and an old CBGB’s shirt. I imagined she’d fit right in at NYU in the fall.

“So,” she said. “Congratulations.”

“Yeah. Thanks.”

We both ordered coffees and sat in awkward silence for a while. Finally, she asked, “So, you ever hear from your brother anymore?”

“No,” I said. “Doesn’t even come home for holidays.”

“He’s still over there in Iraq?”

“Afghanistan,” I said.

“Can I ask you something,” she said after a while. “I’ve always wondered. How many points was I worth?”

“Six,” I said. “Or twelve, since you were a virgin.”

She smiled.

“Not bad,” she said. “For a little freshman nerd.” She sipped her coffee. “The weird thing is,” she said, “sometimes I wish I had slept with you back then. I liked you. And at least there would have been some purpose behind it. When I finally did lose it, last year. It just felt sort of, I don’t know, incidental. It’s not even a story worth telling.”

I did finally lose my virginity my sophomore year of college. I’d been dating a girl in my dorm for a month or two when she yanked me home from a frat party and started taking my clothes off, but when she unzipped my pants and reached for my penis, I pushed her hand away.

“Wait,” I said. “Don’t.”

“Why not?” she asked. “You like me, right?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“So what’s the big deal?”

She unbuttoned my shirt and put her hands down against my shoulders.

“Hey, what’s this?” she asked. “Turn over.”

I rolled over to reveal the crown branded on my back. She ran her fingers over it.

“Can you feel that?” she asked.

“No.”

“Where’d you get it?”

“You know,” I said. “I’m from out in the country. A lot of guys do stuff like that.”

“Cool. It’s kind of sexy.”

“Thanks.”

She pulled up on my shoulder and rolled me back over. She leaned down and licked my neck. Then she pulled off her dress and her underwear and got back on top of me.

“Like this?” she asked.

“Okay. Like this.”

After everything went down, Truck moved into Hass’s place for the rest of the year. I saw him at school, of course, but we mostly avoided each other. He stuck to his circle, me to mine, probably how it should have been in the first place.

I didn’t find out Truck and Hass had skipped town until after they’d already left for Basic. He never did write or call. But that’s just how Truck was. I was holding a grudge of my own and didn’t try to contact him, even when I got to college.

I wish I knew now what he was thinking in those years. Sometimes I think he blamed me for everything and wanted to forget he had a brother. Other times, I think he blamed himself and wanted to protect me by staying as far away as possible.

I was halfway through my sophomore year when Dad called to say an officer had visited earlier that day. Truck’s unit had come under heavy fire during a patrol and several of them were wounded. Truck and several other soldiers had volunteered to lay down cover fire as the rest of the men recovered the wounded and made a retreat. What could have been a slaughter ended up resulting in only one death: that of my brother, cut down by enemy fire near the end of the fighting.

I hear that Hass is back in Jefferson now, working at his Uncle’s garage. Reggie’s still in town, too, going to community college and studying business. Wood works at the Shell station at the foot of Tollman and volunteer-coaches the football team.

I haven’t been back to Jefferson in two years. There have been research grants over the summers, and I’ve stayed with my roommate Bryce’s family both Christmases. This year, I’m staying back on campus, writing this.

Bryce is the writer, not me. I’m a math guy. But whenever I start telling some old story from back home, his ears perk up, and afterward he’s always telling me I should write it down. He showed me a couple of articles about other contests like the Kings’, some from back in the 90’s, some for this year. I guess it’s something that’s here to stay.

But this didn’t end up being about that contest, not really. It’s about my brother. If you ask anyone back in Jefferson what Truck was like, even the other Kings, they’ll tell you how many girls he slept with, but that’s not all he was.

I remember lying in my room, the covers held tight, listening to my dad slam Truck against a wall ‘cause we’d left the TV on all day on accident and wasted power. When he finally got back into the room Truck was breathing hard, but instead of crawling into bed, he got down on the floor and started doing pushups. After he’d finished a few sets he shook me and asked, “You awake?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“When we get older,” he said. “As soon as we can, we’re getting the hell out of here, you understand?”

I nodded, and he started throwing punches into the night air.

“Getting the
hell
out of here,” he repeated. And we did, but not together.

3