In the Land of the Living (11 page)

There were cicadas everywhere. (They came out every seventeen years, which was too often for Mack.) No matter where you were, they dropped onto your bloodred Red Barn T-shirt with an audible pat and onto your hair, not seeing you with their eyes like orange beads and their black helmet heads. Most days Mack hid from them in the lightless terrarium house, pretending, should anyone enter, to be interested in the fern leaves and the stone-still lizards in glass cases there who waited for nothing. (The lizards were wrapped around branches with a silent endurance and agony entirely of a piece with the agony of a human day camper.) And the huge kid named Onessian with Chiclet teeth would hold cicadas by their translucent wings and stick their beetle legs kicking in your face or he’d hold them close to each other and the bugs would blindly claw at each other’s eyes and pull at the back brims of their beetle helmets and almost separate each other’s heads from their bodies, but never quite.

There were lots of kids who were friends with each other but not with Leo and Leo got into a fight with the younger son of James Helpern, that doctor and friend to their family who had known his father. Near the terrarium, where a tree root grew in the path, Leo tripped and fell and Helpern laughed and so Leo plucked the other boy’s glasses right off his nose. The camp director walked past and looked ashamed of them but didn’t intervene, just went off to write “safety first, last, and always” on a blackboard somewhere probably and then do whatever it was he did with all the spare time afforded by not doing anything besides going around saying “safety first, last, and always.”

They had one overnight that summer where they ate hobo stew (hamburger and corn in a wad of blackened tinfoil roasted right in the coals) and it was surprisingly delicious, and the kid with the gums that were taller than his teeth narrated the whole story of the Melonheads and Mack was afraid of the kid’s gums. In the middle of the night, Mack woke up crying.

“What is it?” Leo said. “Is it your ear? You have an earache?”

Mack couldn’t say anything, couldn’t even nod, he just cried, but that was what it was. Mack was always getting earaches.

“Don’t worry, Mack, I love you, Mack, and I’ll take care of you. Don’t worry.”

Of course Mack had to get an earache right then, the one night of their whole entire lives they were alone in the dark Ohio woods without any grown-ups, with tall shadows around the fires and bats in the dark and people not like them whom fate had chosen for laughter and fulfilled expectations, nobody near that cared a crumb about them, not even a female anywhere who could be made to care. But Leo could take care of it. He had something inside him that was special and terrible, even if he couldn’t remember what it was. He had a duty to the past. He had a destiny.

“I’ll take care of you, Mack, don’t worry,” Leo said again. “It’s just an earache.” He wished his brother would say something, but Mack wouldn’t say anything. He just cried in silence, pushing on his soft, small ear, folding it into itself as if to eliminate the pain by replacing it with another of his own invention.

“I’ll go get someone,” Leo said, and began to try to reach his flip-flops, which were sitting just inside the tent flap.

“Don’t leave me here!” Mack cried. “Not all alone!”

“Okay, Mack,” Leo said. “I won’t leave you. You’ll come with me. Get your flip-flops on so you don’t hurt your feet.”

Leo got his flip-flops on and Mack tried to get his on while he held on to his ear with one hand, but he couldn’t do it with just one hand. Leo helped Mack get the flip-flops on. It felt funny to wear pajamas with flip-flops. Leo and Mack never wore flip-flops at all, but their mom had bought them and packed them because they were on the camp’s mimeographed packing list. Leo’s said
LEO AUBERON
in indelible marker and Mack’s said
MAXWELL AUBERON
. Mack had red flannel pajamas with white trim and Leo had blue checkered ones with a breast pocket.

Leo took Mack by the hand and they crawled out the tent flap together in their pajamas, into the darkness and the rough, high grass. There were some lit flashlights swinging away out there in the darkness and along with them, disembodied voices.

“Wait, I forgot the flashlight,” Leo said.

“Then I’m coming back in with you,” Mack said, holding on to his ear.

“All right.” Leo held open the tent flap and Mack crawled inside again. Leo crawled in after and picked up the red plastic flashlight, which seemed to be running out of batteries already. He shook the batteries around inside it, but that only made the light dimmer and browner than before. He could look straight into the bulb without it even hurting his eyes. They went back out into the dark, where the flashlight illuminated not a single blade of grass. The darkness was awash around them, and while Leo knew that everything was supposed to be same at night as during the day, only you couldn’t see it, that was quite obviously false: what was there at night that was foreign to the day was nothingness, blankness. And it wasn’t just that you couldn’t see anything, but that something from the day was in fact missing, and that was the people who had been in that same space a few hours before—the people and the ornate city of activated parts and relations connecting them—the people who had then decamped from that space like a traveling circus that leaves you behind. Leo felt the air through his pee flap and smoothed it closed.

“Mom asked them to put us next to Josh Helpern,” Leo said. Josh was older than Leo by a couple of years. He hoped Josh’s little brother hadn’t told him about the fight by the terrarium, and about how Leo had snatched the glasses off his face. Josh was twelve. “Josh!” Leo whispered. “Josh, are you in there? We need help!”

There was rustling inside the tent, and laughing, and someone said loudly, “Get off me, dude!” and then Josh stuck his head out. “Who is that? Leo?”

“Yeah. My brother needs help,” Leo said again.

“What’s wrong?”

Mack was still curling up his ear and pinching it hard.

“He has an earache.”

Josh pulled his head inside his tent and a flashlight went on within. He said something in a low, inaudible voice and the shadows of the other boys in the tent began to move around. Josh stuck his head back out and said, “I’m coming out. Let me get my boots on.”

They followed Josh’s flashlight into the darkness until they arrived at a little cabin, where a few counselors were sitting out on a slanted porch. They didn’t see the boys until they were already standing below the porch and when they did see, they shifted suddenly in their seats as though they’d been surprised in the middle of something secret, though Leo couldn’t tell what.

“What’s up, Josh!” one of the older boys on the porch said. “That was a nice goal you scored today.”

“These guys need to go to the infirmary,” Josh said.

One of the counselors went inside the cabin.

“You guys okay?” Josh said.

Leo suddenly felt all swollen inside with forbidden tears.
No, no, no
, he told the tears.

“Yep. Thanks.”

Leo and Mack waited together in the infirmary for two hours. When their mom got there her hair was still matted down on one side from bed and she squinted as though her eyes were still adjusting to light. She said she would bring Mack home and though Leo wanted to go home too, he knew that his mother had expectations and he had expectations of himself, so he didn’t ask.

When Leo went to sleep that night in the tent, alone, he dreamed of an emergency room where doctors were trying to save a man who’d been mortally injured in a car accident. The man’s heart and lungs were on one table and his lower half on another with guts spilling out that looked like a pile of chocolate mousse. The man’s upper body sat upright on a third table with its eyes frozen open and a baby in its arms.

The first time Leo went to a place they called a summer camp, it was 1976, he was four years old, and he had a quarter in his pocket that his great-grandmother had given to him. On the back there was a man playing a drum and a circle of stars. She said it was the bicentennial, which was as good as crap. They had been back in their old house in Cleveland, without his father in it anymore, for a year and a half.

There were daily marches at camp, and bees in the grass.

He didn’t know the songs. He looked up into the trees, which waved their fulsome leaves at him with a swishing like the swishing of his mother’s robe, and the trees had nothing in particular for him to do. The others didn’t think it was a bad place.

His mother stayed somewhere near but he wasn’t sure where; she hid behind the dark building full of pipes and linoleum, maybe.

His fruit punch opened inside his
Six Million Dollar Man
lunch box and soaked the Wonder Bread pink in his peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

There would never be any lunch for him. He sat on his knees and watered the grass with a hundred gallons of tears until he had no more blood. He became a vapor and rose up the tree trunk to commune with its leaves and lie in the clouds.

OFFENSE WAS THE
time when you refused to go down. Defense was the time when you refused to let go.

If he could forget that anything had ever been different in their family, it seemed that Mack wouldn’t even need to forget, since he’d been just a newborn baby when the bad things happened, and nothing had been subtracted from his life but only added to. But Leo’s mom said that Mack looked at Leo as more than a brother because there had been no father there at all for Mack for the first three years of his life. And being more than a brother was both a good and a bad thing, she said, for both of them. Leo and Mack were still best friends, at least Leo thought so, but there was a little worry in the back of his mind that something had changed.

It was a perfect day for a football game, with a Cleveland Browns sky of unbroken gray, leaves as bright red and orange as tulip petals and also as damp, and a novel air of cold and rot. In a football game on a day such as this, and there had been many, when Leo tackled or was tackled, he landed on acorns that had already been stamped into the soft earth, and slid on his shoulder pads through chilled mud and wet leaves. The muddier his Cleveland Browns jersey, the more he felt like #43 Mike Pruitt running the ball through the gray gridiron rain at Cleveland Municipal Stadium or #57 Clay Matthews stopping a run dead in the gray gridiron rain. None of Leo’s friends could bring him down single-handed except Ted, who was almost a year older.

But Leo didn’t play football at Mack’s birthday party that fall of 1982. The last time he’d tackled his brother, Mack had strained his groin, and the time before that there had been blood. Leo and Ted went up to Leo’s room instead and listened to his 45 of “Twelve Days of a Cleveland Browns Christmas” and tried to play with the yellow Lego castle. But Ted didn’t know how to play with Legos like Mack did. Ted imagined at the wrong scale and couldn’t make it into a story. Besides that, he kept looking out the window at the younger boys playing football in the yard. Ted had taught Leo how to throw a football, and why the 1980 Cleveland Browns were called the Kardiac Kids, and what yardage was. (Leo had called it “yardilage,” like cartilage.) The year of the Kardiac Kids, the Browns’ quarterback Brian Sipe won the MVP but the Oakland Raiders beat the Browns in the play-offs because of a disastrous play called Red Right 88. The Oakland Raiders went on to win the Super Bowl that should have been theirs. Boys and men alike understood what a serious thing it was: the eyes of all the nation had been watching Cleveland’s team, and a football team was the best expression of what a people were capable of in one area of the country, and the people of Cleveland had tried and failed. Even places like Pittsburgh and St. Louis that Philip said were smaller than Cleveland managed to produce winners, and while they used to produce winners in Cleveland, they didn’t anymore, not for a long time. Their luck had run out in the sixties, and now men talked about Red Right 88 at Friday-night dinner.

Leo changed the speed on the record player to 33⅓ rpm so that the player ran too slow and it sounded like the singer had had a stroke: “A Rutigliannnno Super Bowwwwwwwwl team.” He didn’t like the name Kardiac Kids, as it made him think of heart attacks and strokes.

“Let’s go out and play football,” Ted said.

“We can’t. We’re too big. My brother will get hurt.”

“Then we’ll coach. Or be official QB. You be on one team and I’ll be on the other.”

They went out to the game in the backyard. Mack was in his #17 Brian Sipe jersey. Mack didn’t like to be tackled, and managed to avoid it by either being the quarterback or catching the ball in the end zone. He could catch anything that came near him, so Leo said he ought to wear #82 Ozzie Newsome’s jersey. Ted coached Mack’s team, since Mack was not going to be bossed around by Leo when his friends were there. Leo didn’t even bother to ask. He just went to the other side. Ted and Mack’s team won the game by a score of 56–21.

Mack made three touchdown catches and four interceptions and every time, Mack would look at Leo with a barely concealed smile of total glee. Leo found it somewhat annoying that for the next two months almost, Mack would be allowed to think of himself as only two years younger instead of three.

Everyone had pizza and watched a pirated Betamax tape of
The Empire Strikes
Back
.

When the Wampa ice-creature clawed Luke Skywalker across the face, Mack said, “I used to be afraid of that part.”

Leo didn’t say: You’re still afraid of it.

“Oh yeah, I used to be afraid of that too,” another kid said seriously, “when I was, like, two years old. I was really afraid of it.”

“The movie came out last year,” Leo said. “So you didn’t see it when you were two. But,” he added generously, “I used to be a little afraid of the Wampa. And of the part where they show Darth Vader without his helmet on.”

“Afraid of
Star Wars
?” another one of the little kids said. “I was never afraid of
Star Wars
.”

Then they debated until cake about whether or not Boba Fett would be a main character in the final episode of the
Star Wars
trilogy. Some said the last movie in the trilogy would be called
Revenge of the Jedi,
someone said
Return of the Jedi
.

“No, it’s
Return of the Jedi Race,
” someone else said.

Leo said, “I don’t know what it is, but it’s definitely not
Return of the Jedi Race
.”

“I heard Boba Fett can fly,” Ted said.

All the kids sat at the dining room table in their Browns jerseys, and Laura brought in the cake. Hough Bakeries had made a football on it in chocolate frosting, and eight football player candles stood around the giant ball like blockers with flames coming out of their heads. The ball read
MACK
across it in cursive orange and brown. Their mother was almost recovered from a virus that had paralyzed half of her face (and had required of Leo’s disease watch list two new medical phrases—“Ramsay Hunt” and “Bell’s palsy”). The half of her face toward Leo looked mean and serious, especially in the candlelight from below, which made her eye socket look deep and dark like the eye of a witch. The other half of her face seemed to be smiling. Philip sang in loud meandering bass notes that weaved just above and below the actual melody of “Happy Birthday” as though he were drunk, even though he wasn’t. (This was the normal manner of singing with Philip’s family, the Zajacs. At Zajac Friday-night dinners when Philip sang with his brothers it sounded a little like someone had dropped a set of bagpipes.)

Mack’s face was nearer to the candles than their mother’s and the many small lights caused his face to glow entirely. It was very nice to see Mack’s face lit up by the candles. The birthday candles illuminated a face that looked almost surprised and grateful, a face of total humility—as if it had been more than likely that no one was even going to remember his birthday. Mack utterly valued every candle, you could just tell, every guest, every gift. A mere football game was something to remember just because it had happened at all.

“Well, how is your birthday party, you think?” Leo said.

“I thought the football game was pretty fun,” Mack said.

“Who are the Browns playing tomorrow?” Philip said. Philip took them to Municipal Stadium sometimes, to a loge where there were free hot dogs and you were safe from drunk people spilling their beer on you. (The stands of that stadium were a place of stagnant clouds of burped-up peanut gas and cigar smoke, where drunks whistled at unnatural volumes and sometimes laughed at you in the sticky bathrooms as you stood on tiptoe, trying to pee with your child-sized penis over the edge of the clogged horse troughs they called urinals.) But Philip didn’t know a thing about football. He usually sat in the back of the loge and read the newspaper. Many other times Leo and Mack just went with Uncle Harvey, and Philip didn’t go. Philip did important things like build buildings, but he also liked silly things, like Inspector Clouseau in the Pink Panther movies. He just didn’t like sports.

“Are we going to win?” Philip said.

“There’s a strike, Dad,” Leo said.

“Oh, yes, the strike,” Philip said, laughing a bit, as he often did about sports—at the idea, maybe, that anyone could patronize him over something so trivial as football, or at himself for not knowing about the strike. Or maybe he was laughing because football could make a ten-year-old aware of a labor dispute. “Yes, there is a strike, after all, isn’t there.…”

“He doesn’t like sports,” Leo explained.

Ted seemed to have a lot of respect for that, sort of like how you respect someone who has cancer or who has only one leg.

When everyone had gone and Leo had helped his mother clean up the wrapping paper from the presents, Leo and Mack played a game of dice baseball at the low cold slab of crannied stone that was their coffee-colored coffee table. Their uncle Ollie had taught them the game. One summer vacation in Amagansett, he’d taught them how to make a grid on notebook paper and score a baseball game on it and how the thirty-six number combinations possible with a roll of two dice could be assigned to mean thirty-six different possible outcomes of an at-bat on a baseball field. A one and a one, for instance, was a home run. A four and a three was a ground out to the second baseman. Leo had then created the DBL (Dice Baseball League), with made-up teams and players, like Douglas Kramer, a reliable extra-base hitter and left fielder for the New York Blazers. In the early days of the league, he’d ask his uncle to make up names: like John Kastelonits—despite high expectations, the dice had withheld their blessing—and like Rocco Fuschetto, an excellent shortstop, and Rope Roubles, the storied catcher for the Boston Shamrocks. Leo was the commissioner of the league, and also an active player (he made himself a pitcher for the Long Island Streakers, whose team name was not, to him, funny), and Leo had named the annual best pitcher award, the equivalent of the Cy Young, the L.A. Award, after himself. It seemed strange, even to Leo, that a pitching award would be named after an active player, especially one with an ERA perennially over 5.00 (the mercurial dice hadn’t deigned to bless him in that way). But Mack accepted such institutional biases in silence. The main thing Leo regretted was giving his father’s name, I. R. Auberon, to the Blazers’ catcher, who struggled every year just to reach the shameful Mendoza line.

That night was the first-ever play-off game between the New York Blazers, whom Leo managed, and the team that Mack both managed and played for, the Boston Shamrocks. The New York Blazers had by then won the World Series three times, so it seemed only fair to both boys that the Shamrocks might break through. But they agreed beforehand there would be no rerolls unless the dice fell on the floor; and Leo was careful not to react with excessive celebration when the Blazers’ batting champion, Wally Pina, cleared the bases with a triple.

As it turned out, those were the Blazers’ only runs anyway, and the Shamrocks rallied against the Blazers’ star closer, Thomas Blue.

The Blazers lost in disgrace.

“That’s awesome, Mack,” Leo said magnanimously, even though it had been a painful, last-minute loss, and damaging to Thomas Blue’s pristine career stats. “And you hit two home runs yourself. Wow.”

Mack tried to cover his great pleasure at winning by actually putting a hand over his mouth.

“Don’t give me that smiley face of yours,” Leo said in what he thought was a friendly voice.

“I didn’t have a smiley,” Mack said calmly, still vaguely smiling. “You’re just mad you lost.”

“But I’m
not
mad,” Leo said.

“Okay,” Mack said.

“Why do you say it like that?” Leo said. “And seriously, give up the smiley. You’ve been doing that all day.”

Mack rolled his eyes with irritation and also evident fear. “You always do this,” he said.

“
You
always do this!” Leo said. “You’re making it a fight, not me. ‘Okay,’ you say, like that. And you just love to win
so
much. I shouldn’t have let you have that reroll. The die wasn’t even on the floor.”

He felt a magma of hot rage boiling up inside him, and things did not seem then the same as they were before. The good times in their lives seemed like a fragile armistice with fate that was soon to crumble. Things had been bad and they would get bad again. They would get worse. Hadn’t he had it worse than his brother, who had never lost anything?

“You
always
get mad at me!” Mack said.

“
You
always make me mad!” Leo said. “I don’t just get mad all by myself, out of the blue, like it’s magic!”

“Oh, really?” Mack said. “That’s not what Aunt Jenny says.”

“Aunt Jenny?” Leo shouted. “You’ve been talking to Aunt Jenny about me?”

“I’m not talking to you anymore,” Mack said, and he turned away.

“Well, you have to!”

“No, I don’t.”

“I’ll make you listen!” Leo shouted, a shout with all his wind that made his voice hoarse. “I always look out for you!” Leo said, coming up very close to his brother, who cowered. “When do you ever do that for me?”

“Boys!” their mother said through the doorway. “Leo, move away from him.”

She entered the room.

Leo turned and looked at his mother’s mean, half-paralyzed face. He heard his mind say,
You used to be beautiful
.

“
What
are you so mad about?” his mother said.

There was never any explaining when it came to Mack. He couldn’t explain it. Mack smiled again and covered his mouth with his hand, and Leo roared and pushed Mack off the ottoman. Mack seemed to fling himself off the ottoman with much melodrama, and then suddenly he was loudly crying.

“Leo!” his mother yelled. “Just get out of here!”

Even before Mack sat up and held out his small hand with a bright ribbon of blood across it, Leo felt doom and criminal banishment from his mother’s affection begin to close over him like a cloud shadow.