Sons of the 613 (29 page)

Which is when Eric Weinberg makes his grand entrance: shirtless, red faced, teetering out of the TV room to join our merry group. One by one we fall silent, gaping at the new arrival. Even Joey the dog stops yapping.

“Hi,” Eric says to us, wobbling on his feet, “what's going on?”

Then he throws up everywhere.

We all take a moment to grasp the impressive volume of material that he just deposited on the walls and floor.

“Jesus,” says my dad, “can't this kid keep anything down?”

It's remarkable how loud the world is when you're sitting in a room with your father, neither of you speaking for a long time. I can hear the air molecules themselves, knocking around against each other.

We're in his den. It's Saturday afternoon, the day after all the fun. Why are they home a day early with no warning?

“I was concerned about a patient.”

Of course.

 

Patrick and Terri departed midmorning in his beater Camry. Josh, whose face is all lumpy and purple, has been cleaning the house all day under the unsympathetic supervision of my mother. Lisa is resting, already on the penicillin that my dad picked up from the pharmacy. He briefly switched duties with my mom at midday so she could deliver a very hung-over Eric back to his house. As far as his parents knew, he was just sleeping over.

“Please don't tell my mom,” Eric begged as they were leaving.

“Eric,” said my mom, “do you think I'm a goddamned retard?”

When my mom got back, my dad took me into his den and asked me to sit down. He was very quiet and formal when he did it, and I imagined it's how he talks to his patients. “Isaac, can you come in here for a moment? I'd like to speak with you.”

“Isaac,” he said after we'd both settled, “I'd like you to tell me what happened over these past two weeks.”

I thought for a while, then said, “Actually, I'd prefer not to talk about it.”

 

Right after Eric threw up, my dad went into triage mode. I could see it happen: He flipped a switch, sent whatever personal feelings he had on a minivacation, and became Dr. Kaplan in the trauma ward. It was completely cool, actually.
Boom:
“Judy, take Eric to the bathroom and clean him up.”
Boom:
“Josh, get off your ass, get paper towels and the mop, and take care of the vomit.” Josh, still crying, complied. Incredible.
Boom:
“You, come here.” He got down on a knee and examined my face, turning my head from side to side.

“The window!” wailed my mom from the bathroom. My dad looked accusingly at Josh, who had just returned with a roll of paper towels.

“No, that one's on me,” I said. “I broke the window.”

“We are going to need to talk,” said my dad.

 

He sent Josh and me downstairs to their bathroom while he checked on Lisa.

“Strep?” I said when he came in.

“Yes.”

I raised an eyebrow at Josh.

“You were right,” said Josh. “Isaac was right, Dad.”

Because Lisa is his daughter, my dad keeps strep tests on hand. Because Josh is his son, he also has a supply of stitches and anesthetic. My dad ended up giving me three stitches in my eyebrow. He gave Josh six—two on his forehead and four over his right cheekbone. He wasn't particularly gentle with Josh as he scrubbed his face and cleaned out the wounds.

My dad was silent as he worked, expressionless, still in doctor mode. He'd been shaking with anger before, and looked exhausted and jet-lagged, and must have been overwhelmed by all the chaos that greeted him on arrival. But I couldn't see any of that. All I could see was pure focus. And I thought, my dad can't ride a motorcycle or throw a punch or shoot a gun, but he could take the bullet out of you, and he could do it while the house was on fire around him. I liked him a lot right then.

Afterward there was some contention as our mom and dad huddled and discussed what should happen next, what to do with Lisa, what to do with Eric, and whether to boot out Patrick and Terri.

This conversation was interrupted by a brief visit from our friends Officers Thomke and Federson, responding an hour late to a noise complaint (Thomke to my dad: “Boy, I feel like we've been here a lot this week! Well, good night!” leaving my dad with an expression somewhere between stunned and resigned).

When the fuzz left, my parents restarted their discussion/argument, even more heatedly. This time I interjected.

“Listen: Here's what's going to happen. Leave Terri and Patrick in my room, because I told them they could use it. I'll sleep on the sofa. Eric sleeps on the downstairs sofa. We can deal with everything and clean up in the morning.”

And you know what? They actually listened to me.

 

So now here we are in his den, my dad trying to make sense of the past two weeks.

“What do you mean, you prefer not to talk about it?” he asks.

“I'd just rather not talk about it.”

“Isaac, I'm sorry, but that's unacceptable. I'd like to know what happened, and what happened between you and Josh.”

I don't answer.

“Isaac, did he threaten you?”

I snort. I can't help it. It just slips out. Josh has threatened me so many times it's like background noise.

“What? What does that mean? Has he told you not to talk? Are you afraid of him?”

I think about that. Am I afraid of him? Not anymore. I'm not sure what else he could really do to me.

“Isaac?” says my dad.

“No. I just don't feel like talking about it.”

“I guess we can just wait until you do,” says my dad.

It takes some effort not to smile. It's what he used to say when I was a child and didn't want to cooperate: We'll just wait until you do. No yelling, no grabbing me and forcing me to do something. He would just out-patience me until I caved. But I'm not a child anymore. It makes me feel proud and sad all at once, and like I want to give my father a consolation hug, because he doesn't know that era is gone. Instead we both lapse back into our current silence. We've been sitting like this for several minutes now.

He sighs. “Isaac . . .” he says. He's given up, the first time that has ever happened. “Will you at least explain to me why you won't tell me?”

“Because,” I say, “it's between me and Josh. It's between me and my brother.”

He doesn't say anything, but he nods. He doesn't like the explanation, but he doesn't press me any further.

“Okay,” he says, and gets up, the process labored, like he's exhausted. He rubs his face. “I'm really sorry, Isaac. This is my fault. I shouldn't have left you at home with Josh. You were right.”

“It's okay.”

“Sounds like it was quite a time.”

My hand goes up to the stitches on my eyebrow. I reconsider what I said in the car to Josh last night, about it all being bullshit.

“Worst two weeks of my life,” I say. “And the best.”

M
ERIT
B
ADGE
: S
LAYING THE
M
INOTAUR

Friday morning. One day left until my bar mitzvah. I'm on my bike, but I'm not heading to school. I'm skipping again, a fugitive for the final time.

I've spent the week making up homework and tests. I've also been studying my haphtarah on my own and going for solitary runs in the morning. I rescued the tent from the creek and dried it out, and I've been sleeping in it, even though Patrick and Terri have moved on and my room is available. My mom wrinkled her nose but didn't say much about it.

I've barely seen Josh. He met with a judge this week, an accelerated hearing so that he could hurry up and join the Marines. He pled guilty to a fifth-degree misdemeanor assault and received a stay of adjudication and was placed on administrative probation, which basically meant he had to stay out of trouble or they'd toss him in the can. There was also a one-thousand-dollar fine that the judge waived, in light of the fact that Josh was heading off to serve his country.

During one of my morning runs I got an idea and went to Nystrom's house and rang the doorbell. When he finally answered, glaring at me suspiciously from behind the screen door, I could barely hear him over the racket the dogs were making, bunched up on the side of the house where the fenced-in area extended almost to the front.

“Is this the Brown residence?” I asked.

“Who?” he said.

“I'm sorry, I guess I made a mistake.”

The dogs were still there on the side of the house when I jogged away.

 

I lock my bike to a street sign in front of the apartment building. No one answers the buzzer after the first few stabs, so I lean on it until Lesley's voice finally crackles from the speaker, her tone irritated: “Hello? Who is this?”

“It's me. Isaac.”

She buzzes me in without another word. She opens her apartment door before I even raise my hand to knock, and she stands just inside the foot-wide gap and regards me, her eyes sleepy.

“I need your help,” I say.

 

An hour later. I'm hiding in the brush that overlooks Nystrom's backyard. All four dogs are there, lazing about in the morning sunlight.

“Can you still hear me?” says Lesley quietly. She's speaking to me through the wireless earpiece of her cell phone to the wireless earpiece of mine, the new one my parents bought me to replace the one Josh chucked into the creek.

“I can hear you.”

When I got to her apartment in the morning, I told her my plan. She stood silently for a few moments, then said, “Okay.”

We left my bike there and rode on her Vespa. We barely spoke, just going over the details a few times. We didn't talk about the party, about her and Josh, nothing. She let me off early so I could cut through the woods, while she continued on to Nystrom's.

“You ready?” she says.

“I'm ready.”

“You sure you want to do this?” she says. “It's pretty stupid.”

“I'm sure.”

“All right, then,” she says. “I can't believe I agreed to this. Okay. I'm going to ring the doorbell now.”

She rings it, and I watch the dogs do exactly what I was hoping they would—they sprint around the side of the building toward the front and start barking insanely at Lesley.

I'm up instantly, running down the short hill toward the fence.

“Hi there,” Lesley is saying in my ear, except she's talking to Mr. Nystrom, who must have answered the door. “I'm with a film crew, and I'm scouting locations for a shoot,” she says. I reach the fence and start climbing as quietly as I can. “No, a film crew. Right. Like a movie.”

I drop down from the fence into enemy territory, pulse pounding, managing to score a direct hit with my right foot on a fresh pile of rottweiler crap. That's the least of my worries, though. The dogs are still out of sight, barking at her, but they're just around the corner, and if they lose interest in her and return to the backyard I'll soon be in several of their stomachs.

“Wait, please wait. Could I just show you the shot we'd like to get? No? Please? Pretty please? Your house is perfect. We'd pay you, also.”

I'm sure Patrick would have agreed to help me out, but I think most people would call the police if Patrick showed up at their door. Terri would have probably volunteered, too, but God knows what sort of chaos would have resulted. I really don't know any other adultlike people I could have asked. It had to be Lesley. Because, well, Lesley is Lesley. She's beautiful and engaging, and I figured even Nystrom wouldn't be able to resist her charms. Plus she has those official-looking laminated film-crew badges.

“Well, there really
is
no better spot,” she's saying. I can hear the smile in her voice. “It's just here along the side of the building, where your . . .
lovely
dogs are. Can I just show you?”

It's working. The dogs are getting louder in the earpiece, meaning she's moving closer to them, closer to the fence, meaning hopefully they'll keep paying attention to her while I slay the minotaur.

The minotaur stares back at me cherubically. It turns out to be heavier than I expected. I won't be able to just throw the statue over the fence. But I'm prepared for that: I have my backpack. I lay the bag on the ground, roll the statue into it, zip it up as much as I can, hoist it on my back, struggle not to fall over.

“These really are lovely dogs,” Lesley is saying now. “Although I feel like
someone
told me they were poodles.”

In a harsh whisper she says, “Isaac, you are so gonna get it . . .”

Okay, I wasn't entirely honest with Lesley when I described the mission, figuring she might balk if she knew the dogs might actually kill me if things went bad.

“Oh, nothing,” she says to Nystrom. “Just talking to myself. So, what are their names?” Pause. “How wonderful! Which one is Adolf?”

It's a lot harder climbing back up the fence with the backpack pulling me down, the straps cutting into my neck and shoulders, the chicken wire painful on my fingers. I'm running out of time. My heart is pumping hard, and I'm trying to hide the sound of my breathing. Nearly there. Then it happens. My foot slips, scraping down the fence, making a huge rattle. I freeze.

“Wait, where's that one going?” Lesley says, loud, warning me. “Where's he going?”

I twist around just as the dog clears the corner.

There's a moment when monster dog and statue thief regard each other.

Then it's game on. The dog doesn't even bother to bark—he just charges, hurtling at me. I feel a burst of adrenaline such as I've never felt in my life. I don't so much climb as launch myself over the fence, somehow landing unhurt on the other side just as the rottweiler slams into the barrier, and I'm up the slope and into the brush, pausing just long enough to give Adolf the finger.