Best Boy (21 page)

“Kirby is a lover,” said Beth and smiled at me as Cam led the animal on a leash around a corner and into the living room where I was standing. The dog looked at me and strained against the leash panting while its teeth gleamed and its pink tongue fell out its mouth. The hot, sick fear shot across my belly and I screamed, “No!”

Then I turned and ran back up the stairs and into my room while behind me I heard loud noises including Kirby roaring
and people yelling. I lay in bed and made myself as rigid as I could and put the pillow over my head and strained my jaw just as I had after Daddy took my pants down and whipped the burning stripes into me with his belt.

When we were boys together and Nate got tired of torturing me in other ways he used a dog. My parents let him have a dog even though they knew I was afraid of them because Daddy believed it would “toughen you up.” But the dog named Peppy frightened me as much when he was a tiny puppy as when he became a large, full-grown animal with a shouting bark and eyes that followed you around a room. Nate knew how scared I was and he waited patiently until one day when my parents were watching TV in the basement and I was standing inside my room looking out the windows.

I often spent time looking out the windows. On this particular afternoon my eyes watched a cord of water shivering in the bottom of ditch alongside the house. At the very same time a corner of sun shrank and shrank on the edge of the driveway as dusk began. A car breathed in the street as it went by below. A bird flew diagonally across the view. My door clicked open and I turned around in time to watch Nate push Peppy into the room while giving the dog a violent hit with a rolled-up newspaper. The dog lunged at me as Nate slammed shut the door and then jammed it shut from the outside with a screwdriver. By the time Daddy broke down the door I had peed and done a number two in my pants. I'd also spilled blood all over the floor from biting my hand almost down to the bone.

Now I felt a hand on my shoulder and heard the deep, grown-up voice of my brother in my ear saying:

“Oh, Tubes. I'm a total idiot. I thought maybe after all this time you'd gotten over it, yes, I did. But why did I think that?”

I didn't say anything and just lay there silent.

“You have no idea,” he said, “how sorry I really and truly am. Todd?”

I made myself sit up in bed. He was standing in front of me and slowly shaking his head. “I'm a moron,” he said. “We'll keep the dog in the basement, okay?”

“And the cat?” I said.

“She's about twenty years old and ready to croak. But whatever, the cat too.”

Slowly I got out of bed and stood back up. He grabbed me by the elbows where he liked to grab me and he brought a fatter, redder version of his childhood face close to mine.

“You're here,” he said quietly, “because we love you. Okay?”

I didn't say anything.

“Now let's go downstairs and get some lunch.”

I followed him back downstairs. The dog hadn't been put in the basement but in the backyard from where it was looking at me through the windows. It was a large white dog. The boys were sitting at the table quietly staring into their plates. My brother's wife was looking at him.

“Well, hello, genius,” she said to my brother.

He cleared his throat. “Beth made a lunch of spaghetti for us with her special Bolognese sauce,” he said.

I said in a loud voice, “I
love
spaghetti,” and immediately the dog started barking.

“Boys,” said Nate quickly, “will one of you go and put Kirby in his house, please?”

“Dogs know when you're scared,” Steve said. “Kirby knows you're afraid of him and it makes him want to bark even more.”

“Enough with the teaching moment, PBS,” said my brother. “Just scoot!”

“My Daddy calls him PBS,” said Cam, “because he's boring.”

“It's not that,” said Beth and laughed. “It's because your brother is serious all the time and likes explaining things.”

Cam said nothing as Nate leaned over and took the big tongs and dragged spaghetti out of the wooden bowl in front of us and put it on my plate. Then he poured tomato sauce on it.

“Cheese?” he said.

“Yes, please.”

Beth had hair which she often put her index finger in and dialed the way people used to do on telephones when I was a boy. She dialed her hair and said, “So, Todd, it just seems like so much stuff has been happening to you recently that I don't know where to begin.”

“Lots of stuff,” I said.

“He's in,” said Steve, rushing back to the table.

“Thank you,” said my brother.

“Dogs actually like being in enclosed spaces,” said Steve.

“Like for example that poor girl,” Beth said.

“Greta Deane,” I said.

“Because it makes them feel calm,” said Steve.

“She was only what, twenty-eight?” asked Beth.

“Yes,” I said.

“What happened to her?” said Cam.

My brother looked at his wife for a second and made a face.

“Actually,” said Beth, “maybe we should talk about this later.”

“What happened?” Cam said again, more loudly.

“Well,” said his wife, “when some people get very unhappy in life, it can lead to them doing things that they definitely, absolutely wouldn't do if they were feeling better.”

“Did she off herself?” said Steve. He was eating his spaghetti
very quickly and some of the Bolognese sauce had spilled on his shirt.

“Steve, I told you to wait,” Beth said and made a face.

“What does that mean, ‘off herself'?” said Cam.

My brother was grating cheese on his wife's spaghetti and he looked at her and said, “Who's the genius now?”

His wife said nothing for a moment. Then suddenly she cried, “Let's say grace!”

“Good idea,” said my brother. “Todd, we sometimes hold hands and say grace in our family. I just kind of make something up. I know it's kind of corny, but we like it. Do you mind?”

“No.”

“Boys?”

Each of them silently stuck their arms out on either side of them and all of us held hands while the heaps of spaghetti steamed on the table in front of us. Then my brother said, “We are blessed today to eat this food taken from Mother Earth, that endless source of gobs of green goodness.”

“‘Gobs of green goodness'?” Beth said.

“Whatever. And we are blessed as well to live in a beautiful country filled with good people who are doing their best to pull together. But we are especially and most of all blessed to have among us my brother Todd who hasn't made it out here enough. Amen.”

He looked at me. “Not my strong suit, but that was pretty painless, wasn't it, Tubes?”

“Yes,” I said. We started eating. The food was very good. I think maybe the children kept talking but I stopped noticing. Then I very clearly heard my brother say, “He was always like that. Our Dad used to say, ‘Todd eats like the storm troopers are coming over the wall.' Hey, Todd?”

I stopped moving my fork and looked up.

“Slow down, will ya, bro? You'll live longer.”

“Cows,” said Steve, “have seven stomachs including a special one called a rumen to digest their food. That's why the family of animals is called ruminants.”

“You're boring,” said his brother.

“No, I'm not.”

“Yes, you are.”

“Boys,” said my brother, “if you wanna sit at the adult table you're gonna have to behave like adults.”

“See?” said Steve.

“He was talking to you too,” said Cam.

“No, he wasn't. You don't even know what words mean. You're just a baby.”

“Who ever thought,” said Beth to me with a smile, “I'd end up nostalgic for the peeing and pooping phase?”

“You're saying bad things about me again,” said Cam and suddenly started crying. Over the crying Steve yelled, “You're putting me with him again. Don't put me with him!”

My brother and Beth looked at each other.

“Guys,” they said together.

“You
know
I don't like when you do that,” said Steve. “I told you I don't like when you do that.”

“Enough,” said my brother.

“I told you like so many times!”

Steve's voice was going up and up.

“This is simply not cool,” my brother said.

“I told you!” Steve shouted.

“Honey?” my brother said to his wife and motioned with his head to one side. Beth nodded and got up and said simply, “Okay, we're not going to do this again today.”

She pulled Steve gently to his feet and put a hand in his back and said, “We're going for a walk, you and I, and we're going to talk about manners and the difference between being a child and adult.”

“Big difference,” said Cam to his brother's back, and then in a loud voice he repeated, “
very
big difference.” Steve started to turn back around towards him but Beth pushed him forward and said, “You're older than that.” They left the room and a moment later we heard the front door open and shut.

My brother looked at me and blew air through his mouth like he was suddenly tired. “Sometimes I wonder,” he said.

“What?” I said.

“Do you know what genes are?” he said.

“Sort of,” I said.

“I wonder about our family's genes sometimes, and get nervous. Remember Grandpa Sam?”

Grandpa Sam lived alone a long time ago in a place called Pilgrim State Hospital that I once visited with my Momma when I was a very little boy. It had many tall gray buildings and in one of those buildings was a little room. Grandpa Sam was alone in that room. Drugs made him unable to talk. He sat in a chair and smiled constantly. Momma told me afterwards that he believed there was a mirror world that projected down from our world and that for every step we took there was a person attached downwards to our feet invisibly taking the exact same step.

“Yes,” I said, “I remember Grandpa Sam.”

My brother looked at me for a while, saying nothing. Then he took a long swallow of his iced tea and said, “Anyway! Just thrilled, Todd. Just thrilled to have you here. And not only me, by the way. Us.
We're
thrilled, all four of us.”

“Me too,” I said.

We returned to eating our food and then maybe I was tired from the flight or the dog or something else because suddenly I felt that if I didn't take a nap right then that very second I would fall asleep at the table.

“Can I go take a nap?” I asked my brother.

“Hell, yeah, and for as long as you want. Go upstairs and bury yourself, Todd. Sleep for a thousand years. You're home.”

THIRTY

T
HAT EVENING WE ATE WHAT
N
ATE CALLS “AL
fresco.” This means outside on the deck. The deck was on the second floor and stuck out into air. Because it was the very end of the day the light made everything look like it was leaning sideways. Nate and I were alone on the deck for a few minutes with the air cooling. He had a drink in his hand and I had an O'Doul's and we were “just being bro's together,” he said as he winked and clinked my bottle with his glass. We heard his sons yelling at each other downstairs and he smiled and said, “It's funny how when you have kids of your own, you begin measuring what they have against what you had at their age, and the thing is that them having more doesn't bother you, it actually makes you happy, you know what I mean?”

“No,” I said.

Beth came out with a tray of things to grill. She was wearing an apron and had pulled her hair back off her head. On the tray were shrimp and also hamburgers and there were zucchini
and some potatoes and onions. When she set the tray down she turned to me and put her hands on her hips. The light was now almost gone completely.

“I just want you to know how happy we are to have you here, Todd,” she said.

“Thank you.”

“For children like ours, who have practically everything in life dumped into their lap, it's just so important that they get to see something else, another experience, a person like you, who happens to be their uncle but who had to deal with some challenges in life other than, you know, where to find his next video game. I want these visits of yours to become a regular thing.”

“Honey,” said Nate, “do you realize that I lit the grill twenty minutes ago and it's already about six hundred degrees?”

“Well then turn it down.” Beth cleared her throat and smiled at me. “I don't wanna sound like a Sunday school teacher here, but before you arrived I had some conversation with the boys on your . . . issues, and I think Cameron wants to do a report on you for school. I guess this is just my long-winded way of saying that I'm glad that we finally got you in our home again. God knows I've been trying.”

“Excuse me,” said Nate, “but the boys are here and they wanna sing their song.”

“What?” said Beth.

“We do?” said the boys, who were now standing in the doorway.

“Yes, you do. Remember? Sing the rap song for your Uncle Todd we rehearsed.”

The boys looked at each other and shrugged their shoulders.

“Sing it,” Nate said again.

The boys sang their song. They didn't seem to care that much
about it and I wasn't really listening either but Beth was very excited afterwards and talked for a long time about their music teacher and how they'd inherited my Momma's “ear.” It was nice to listen to her talk about Momma. Then we ate and the rest of night fell finally and Nate lit the lights and the boys did charades which I couldn't really follow but it was also very nice and fun and I slept a lot in bed afterwards and didn't have any nightmares at all.

The next morning when breakfast was over I walked into town with Nate. He had drunk a lot of vodka the night before and ended the evening mostly silent and grumbling to himself but now he was back to being the other nondrinking brother who talked very quickly about a lot of things. We were moving down the little Main Street with its parked cars and the shiny, repeating fronts of shops. Sometimes there was another person walking but mostly we were alone. Nate was interested in pointing out the shops but mainly I wanted to know about the house where I grew up. He told me the house was now owned by people called the Salomons. They were nice people who were a retired couple. They didn't go out much. My brother said: