Fearless (4 page)

When the contract ended in Colorado, the closest job to home Larry qualified for was a six-month position in Missoula, Montana. Even on a shoestring budget they could barely pay their bills, so Larry began to entertain the idea of selling or renting out their house in Hot Springs and taking the family on the road. He leased a small house in Missoula, left his Bronco in its driveway, and on April Fools’ Day—fifteen years to the day after his first date with Janice—flew back to Hot Springs to drive his family to Montana.

Be strong
, Janice thought, fighting tears as their house—with a For Sale or Rent sign in the front yard—shrank behind them in the rearview mirror.
We’re together. That’s what’s important
.

Crammed into the front seat of a U-Haul truck, the Browns traveled light: a stack
of mattresses, a wooden porch glider, their television set, and a few boxes of kitchen items, toys, and clothes. They rolled into Missoula the day before Easter, taking less than an hour to unload their belongings. Setting up their bedrooms, which meant plopping mattresses on the floor, could have been a depressing start to their new life, but Janice and Larry were determined to make it business as usual. The next day three delighted kids woke up to find a dusting of snow outside and a trail of candy and Easter baskets hidden throughout the house.

By the following week, Shawn, Manda, and Adam were back in school and playing sports, Larry was in his new job putting in as much overtime as he could, and Janice was holding them all to a schedule.

Larry’s contract ended, and the Browns stuck around Missoula long enough for Shawn to finish his baseball season. Then they hitched a horse trailer—loaded with their meager belongings—to the Bronco and headed for Lake Charles, Louisiana. When Larry called his mother, Rosa, to tell her luck was with them and he’d gotten a job at a powerhouse there, she replied that it wasn’t by luck but rather “by God’s grace.” Though Rosa didn’t often thump the Bible at her son, she was quietly concerned for him, his young family, and the road they were on. He hadn’t read the Bible since he’d returned from Vietnam, and her grandchildren had rarely, if ever, seen the inside of a church. As such, finding a church was not an issue for the Browns, whose priorities upon arriving in Lake Charles were renting a cheap house and enrolling the kids in school.

By now it was football season, and Adam was old enough for the youngest division. Manda signed up for the pep squad, and Shawn joined Pop Warner. Whenever Shawn came home from practice, Adam would ambush him in the living room, trying to tackle his older brother, who at eleven was twice the size of the six-year-old. No matter how many times Shawn pushed him away, Adam would come right back at him. Eventually, Shawn would sit on him to get him to stop.

Adam’s relentlessness crossed over onto the football field, where he was the star tackler and earned the defensive player of the year award before the Browns moved again, this time to Indian Springs, Nevada. Another job, another school, another sport, and in another blink of an eye, Nevada was a memory, and it was on to Loveland, Colorado. The twins continued to decorate the blank walls of their new rooms
with prized art projects from various schools—the backs of which were marked with names, dates, and locations—and Janice and Larry marveled at how well their children had taken to life on the road. Their imaginations blossomed, transforming blank corners in rooms into castles, a tree stump into the plank of a pirate ship, or a scraggly backyard into the perfectly manicured football field of their dreams, with an end zone that begged for game-winning catches.

One snowy Sunday morning in December, the Browns trudged out into the woods and cut down a small evergreen for their living room. They spent the day making ornaments and strings of popcorn, then decorated its boughs to the smell of hot cider with cinnamon sticks simmering on the stove.

“We had pretty much nothing but homemade gifts that year,” says Janice, “but it was so, so much fun. We loved that little tree, and how we dolled it all up with paper ornaments, a tinfoil star, and whatever the kids wanted to hang on it.

“It was lovely. It was … Christmas.”

After two years of bouncing from state to state, Janice and Larry bought a used thirty-five-foot trailer to live in. From campgrounds to trailer parks—and sometimes Grandma Smith’s driveway in Hot Springs—the family continued a nomadic existence, following work around the country and never maintaining an address for more than six months, sometimes as little as two. Larry built bunk beds for Shawn and
Adam in a tiny room at the trailer’s rear, while Manda had a cubbyhole within the cabinetry the size of her little mattress, and a curtain for a door. Their parents slept on the foldout couch in the ten-by-ten space that also served as the living/dining/do-everything room.

Six-year-old Adam insisted on wearing his “Arkansas” T-shirt on picture day.

Another two years had passed when Shawn got into a fight at school in Tucson, Arizona. Now fourteen, he had been a trouper through all the moves, but Janice and Larry knew it was time to settle down. It was easier for Adam and Manda, being younger, to make new friends, while Shawn was the quiet kid who was the add-on at the end of every teacher’s roll call and every coach’s roster. As a solid catcher and power hitter in baseball, and a talent in almost any position on the football field, he eventually made friends and a name for himself, but then the family would move and he’d have to start again. His eighth-grade year alone, he went to six different schools—fifteen schools in all over the years.

“Shawn is miserable,” Janice told Larry. “He won’t complain, but he’s miserable.”

Shawn wasn’t the only one worn out by life on the road and the constant struggle to make ends meet. “Well,” said Larry, “if we’re going to starve, let’s do it at home. Let’s go home to Hot Springs.”

The Browns moved back to their house in Arkansas in time for Shawn to enter the ninth grade and Manda and Adam to begin fifth. Janice and Larry started a new business out of the garage—All Service Electric—with any and all jobs welcomed. Janice answered the phone and kept the books: in those nascent months, literally
a
book. Slowly, as they pinned their business cards on bulletin boards, tucked them under windshield wipers, and handed them out at the local grocery store, the book filled with work orders, each one a celebration.

And for every month spent at the same address, the family sank its roots deeper into the Arkansas soil, which was particularly rich in Hot Springs, a small city of some thirty-five thousand located in the scenic Ouachita Mountains and known for the natural thermal waters that flow from forty-seven springs on Hot Springs Mountain.

The kids reentered the local school system, where Adam’s protective nature began to shine. Each weekday, the twins were dropped off with Shawn and had to make their way past the middle school handball courts in order to get to the elementary school. Any smaller kids within range would be bombarded with tennis balls hucked—and
hucked hard—by older kids playing wall ball. “Adam would spread his arms out and side shuffle, guarding me, keeping me in close to him, so the balls couldn’t hit me,” says Manda. “He’d get hit a lot, but he wouldn’t flinch till he got me to safety.”

Adam and Manda, age three, with their big brother, Shawn, age seven.

That first fall back home, Adam joined the YMCA’s peewee tackle football program—assigned to the fifth-and-sixth-grade team, the Lake Hamilton Wolf Pack. Toward the end of their first practice with pads and helmets, Coach Mike Glisson, known as Coach Nitro, gathered the team, marked off a thirty-by-ten-yard lane, and asked for volunteers for a blocking-tackling drill called Blood Alley. The first kid to raise his hand was Adam Brown, whom Coach Nitro describes as being “not much bigger than a number two pencil.” Deeming Adam either suicidal or “too big for his britches,” he chose a more size-equitable boy, and when practice ended, Adam still hadn’t gotten a turn.

At home Adam said to his mom, “That coach won’t even let me play; he thinks I’m too little.”

“Well, Adam, you know how to make somebody notice you,” Janice replied. “You go back in there and keep trying. They’ll let you play.”

From then on, Adam made it his mission to take on the biggest players of the team every chance he got. “He just wouldn’t quit,” Glisson says.

Coach Nitro wasn’t the only one to notice Adam’s guts and reckless abandon on the field.

“Guess what my teammates called me today,” Adam told his parents proudly one evening after practice. “Psycho!”

In sixth grade Adam was playing touch football on the school playground and, because Adam Brown didn’t do anything half speed, the casual game became rough touch, and then
really
rough touch. Adam dived for a pass that “Superman himself couldn’t have caught,” says his friend Ryan Whited, and hit the ground chin first.

He got up and ran over to Ryan, mumbling something incoherently, blood dripping from the corners of his mouth. When he opened it and the blood poured out, Ryan could see that Adam had bitten most of his tongue off—all the way through, except for a little flesh on one side. “I’m going to the nurse” was what he was trying to say.

“Anybody else would have been on the ground wailing,” says Ryan, “but Adam didn’t even cry. He just walked to the nurse, went home, and got it sewn back on.”

Every day after school, Manda and Adam would walk from their middle school over to the high school and watch Shawn at football practice.

At Lake Hamilton High School, with around seven hundred students in grades ten through twelve, “Big Bad Shawn Brown” was a star athlete whose ability to crush adversaries both on and off the field was legendary. Shawn played defensive lineman for the Lake Hamilton Wolves—the nose guard—and Adam would say, in his best Mr. T. impersonation, “I pity the fool who tries to run up the middle against my brother.”

Adam was such a die-hard fan of his brother and his brother’s team that the coaches made him the ball boy and gave him a team jersey. “You couldn’t have slapped the smile off his face,” says Shawn. “As far as Adam was concerned, he was hanging out with the NFL.”

One afternoon Adam showed up to help with practice, eyes red from crying.
“What happened?” Shawn asked. Adam explained how a junior varsity player had cornered him in the locker room and given him a swirly—shoved his head into a toilet bowl and flushed. “It was disrespectful,” Adam said, staring at the ground.

Lifting Adam’s chin up with his hand, Shawn said, “We’ll see what we can do about that later.”

After practice, Shawn was driving them home when he noticed the JV player’s car parked outside the Busy B’s Café. He pulled over and, with Adam in tow, walked up to the booth where the kid was eating a burger with a buddy. Glancing up, the kid saw Adam and Shawn, and like a deer in the headlights, he froze. Shawn leaned in and stared him in the eye.

“If you
ever
touch my little brother again,” said Shawn, loud enough for every patron in the restaurant to hear, “I will break both of your legs.” He stepped away and said again, “Both of them.”

The café was silent. Avoiding Shawn’s ferocious gaze, the JV player nodded his head. Outside in the parking lot, Shawn put his arm around his little brother, who was still grinning. If Adam had looked up to Shawn before, from that day forward he was a giant.

During the summer of 1987 a new kid showed up in Hot Springs. His name was Jeff Buschmann, and he was a football player and a Navy brat who’d been born in Italy, lived at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and bounced around the United States from San Diego and Washington on the West Coast to Florida and Maine on the East. He’d attended six schools, the last in South Carolina, before his father—Commander Roger Buschmann—took command of the Navy recruiting district based in Little Rock.

Janice had met Jeff’s mother after a football practice and suggested to Adam that he do something with the new kid to make him feel welcome in Hot Springs. But instead of Adam showing Jeff around, Jeff took Adam to the monster of a rope swing he’d discovered by the pylons of the I-70 West bridge over Lake Hamilton. The rope was long, frayed, knotted, and affixed somehow to the underside of the bridge some forty feet above them. Even the intrepid Adam Brown eyed the thing and muttered “I don’t know.” while Jeff dove into the warm water, grabbed the string trailing from the rope, and swam with it to the nearest pylon. “It looks like quite a ride,” he said to Adam as he climbed to the starting point atop the fifteen-foot pylon. “I’ll go first.”