Fiction
from The Literary Review
| When I was young, I looked up to my
brother. He was my best friend, my playmate, my teacher. He
showed me how to ride a bike without training wheels and how to catch a
ball in a fielder’s mitt. When I broke the front door lock, he helped
me fix it, using the few tools our family owned. The year I was unpopular
at school, he suggested ways to make friends and, more importantly, taught
me how to protect myself in playground fights. Cover up with your
fists, he said, and if you have to, belt him one. Don’t let a bully
get the best of you.
When I was old enough, on slow September evenings, he introduced me to basketball, which had been our father’s favorite sport, although by then our father had been gone for many years. On the court, my brother showed me the best way to shoot, demonstrating the movements repeatedly until I understood the subtle actions which made up the game. Hold the ball gently, he said. Use just your fingertips and put a little back-spin on it so it will fall just so. I learned dribbling and spotting in subsequent weeks. The secret to dribbling, he explained, was sensing the ball’s position: keep your eyes on your opponent, not the ball. Two years later, when I was nine and he fifteen, he showed me how to play man-on-man defense, how to set a screen and how to make a hook shot. Basketball was the most interesting game a person could know, he said in a strange, almost reverent tone, and because of this, I understood it was something my father had told him. Never hit your opponent even if he hits you first, he said, always hold your chin up. Never let another player think you are afraid of him. During that year, my mother and I watched him play, amazed at his ability. Even though he’d injured his knee during his first year in high school, he could still step through air and slam the ball home. He could fake a drive then put such a sweet spin on an outside shot that the ball would almost always find the hoop. When he stood at the free-throw line, his shots never touched the rim: they passed smoothly through the orange hoop of steel, briefly slowed in their descent as they were checked by the loose nylon net. It was here, on the court, that my brother was perfectly at home with himself, only fifteen yet full of grace and power. When he played, I was captivated by him, caught up in the gravity of his performance. In my heart, I was his biggest fan. I was his only sibling, his secret cheerleader. I willed myself, with a ten-year old’s admiration, to be like him. Then, the following year, he stopped amazing me. He began to stay out late, returning after two in the morning, slipping in through our sliding bedroom window, sometimes carrying on him the distinct scent of sex or of pot. Under his mattress I found a two-foot length of chain; in a shoebox I discovered carefully stacked bills, seven-hundred-and-forty-two dollars, most of them crumpled as though they had been wadded up inside his pocket. I saw the growing anger in his eyes, an emotion so comprehensive it effected most aspects of his life, even basketball: his joy in the game lessened, his shots were troubled by a larceny of spirit. He threw sucker punches at members of opposing teams and occasionally fouled out of games. When his team won, he smiled less: victory for him was beginning to lose its pleasure because, I suspected, it did not yield the exact satisfaction he’d wanted. Towards the end of the season, his coach demoted him to second string, where he sat with the underclassmen and the teammates who did not share his coordination or intense love for the game. Even then, at my young age, I understood what he wanted: he wanted someone to stand up to him, to return him to his place, that of a boy who was not yet fully grown, he wanted someone who in that strong and determined way would love him with a man’s love. Within six months, he was arrested twice for shoplifting, totaled my mother’s car, and was temporarily suspended from school for keeping three dime bags of pot in his locker. My mother forced him into counseling and into weekend rehab, she accompanied him to juvenile court, and when he was put on probation, she grounded him for two months, a sentence which after his pleading was shortened to only three weeks. How do you think this makes me feel, my mother asked him one night after his high school principal had invited her to yet another disciplinary conference. Really, she screamed, how do you think this makes me feel? I would really like to know. When he was beyond her control, beyond anyone’s, she sent him to live with my uncle, who owned a farmhouse in Ohio. The rest is not difficult to understand. After he was there for ten days, he ran away. For a while, he sent postcards, favoring those nondescript types which featured panoramic views of a city at night. Chicago, the home of the Bulls, then Orlando, which at that time had no team. He wrote mainly about the different jobs he held, as if he’d found some small satisfaction in them: he was almost always a busboy, and when he was not a busboy he usually worked at a community golf course, being both caddie and assistant greenskeeper. Once he told me in a letter that he would never return home—never, he wrote, underlining the word three times. Another time he wrote, life is too damn short to be unhappy, as if this were the crux of his problem. A year after he was sent to my uncle’s to live, my mother and I sat on the front porch, commemorating this day and the sorrow it had brought us. We looked east which was the direction the taxi had taken him, on route to the airport. The back of my brother’s head had been framed in the taxi’s rear window, his long brown hair hanging in tight curls almost to his shoulders, himself too proud to look at us and betray his sadness. We sat there that night, the first anniversary of his departure, filled with longing and strangely with guilt. Sitting there, staring at that road, I was sure of two things in my life: my father had walked off this porch when I was three, never to return or send word of his location; eight years later he was followed by my brother. I felt the absence of these men in deep internal ways. Recently the emotional landscape of manhood had begun to settle upon me, and I understood that in our family it was a wide open space, unyielding and vast, a dusty and unsettled terrain that I would have to fence off for myself. Sipping ginger-ale and looking out at our street, my mother said, He was always your father’s boy, as though this, the mere act of knowing him, had somehow spoiled my brother for life. Then she turned to me and said, Don’t you even think of turning out like him. I moved closer to my mother then, our chairs’ wooden legs almost touching, and we stared at the vista which was our neighborhood, rows of one-story houses divided by a slender and patched street, furnished with parkway trees and shrubs that were maintained by the city. Gradually the sun became low and wide in the sky, filling our yard with its evening light, until it finally dipped below the horizon, its color darkening to that of a plum. I sat there, almost touching my mother. Almost touching, she sat next to me. We both thought of my brother, and correspondingly, this made us think of my father, the ways we were connected to these two men and what that would mean in our lives. We waited until it was dark, until the cool hand of evening touched our brows, and then silently—ever so silently—we went inside. |