Jesus Land (43 page)

He comes up sputtering and laughing as I race away.

“Just you wait, Ju-la-la!” he yells.

I stop swimming and turn to him.

“Wait for what? For Jesus Christ to appear, hovering in the sky?”

I shield my eyes with a hand and scan the sapphire heavens, and when I look back, he’s sharking toward me beneath the waves and then already dunking me.

“Truce,” he says when I rise.

I nod, gasping for air.

“Truce.”

When he turns to wade to the beach, I launch after him again, chasing him amid swells of waves and laughter. I catch him and knock him underwater again before flaring away and running up the sand to flop belly-down on my towel.

He climbs the rise and lies down.

“I let you do that,” he says, putting his glasses on.

“I know you did,” I say.

A marshy breeze blows over us and ruffles the mopheads of the palm trees arched over the shoreline. The fishing boats are trailing out of the bay to the open sea, and the gulls now soar in lazy circles over us.

“It’s like Florida,” David says, taking it all in.

“Better,” I say.

He takes a corner of his towel and wipes his gleaming forehead.

“Remember how we were going to move down there?” he asks.

“Yeah. We talked about it for years.”

“Guess this is as close as we’ll get,” he says, sighing.

I watch a wave rear up celery green and collapse
shhhhhhh
onto the sand before turning to him.

“Let’s pretend this is our Florida. Today.”

He crosses his arms in front of him on the towel and rests his chin on them, smiling.

“Okay,” he says, closing his eyes.

“Let’s pretend that everything turns out fine. We’re living on the beach, and we’re happy.”

“I
am
happy right now,” he says. “I only wish it would stay like this.”

“Shh,” I reply, seeing his forehead crease. “We’re fine.”

I wake when a seagull lands in a flurry a few feet from our heads. David lies facing me, glasses askew, breathing deeply. The beach is dotted with people now, and vendors carrying coolers and baskets move between them. A Dominican shouldering a blue cooler walks toward us. I sit up and nudge David awake. He blinks up at the high noon sun.

The Dominican sets the cooler in the sand and lifts the lid. Inside float cans of Coke, Pepsi,
Presidente
.

I fish out a green can.

“I always did want to try one of these,” I say, grinning at David. “And now we got ourselves a special occasion.”

David peers up and down the beach—no sign of the Madsens—before shrugging and reaching into the cooler to grab a green can as well.

“To Florida,” he says, after the man leaves, tapping his beer against mine.

“To Florida,” I repeat.

As we drink, a young boy lumbers up with a basket of ice and sets it down before us. He plucks a corrugated shell from the ice and cracks it open with a paring knife before holding it out to us.

“Ostras,” the boy says.

“Oysters,” David says.

“Duh,” I say.

The meat is large and slimy in the pearl interior, and the boy squeezes a slice of lemon over it.

“Try,” he says to me. I look at David and he grimaces.

“When in Florida . . .” I say, shrugging and taking the shell from the boy.

As David watches with big eyes, I slide the oyster into my mouth and bite down. It explodes in my mouth, bitter and gritty. Nasty. I swallow it whole, trying not to think too hard about its internal organs, then take a swig of beer.

“Yum-my!” I say, wiping my mouth with my hand.

David wrinkles his nose.

“Serious?”

“Serious. But make sure you chew it up real good before you swallow.”

The boy’s already got one prepared, and David takes it and slides it into his mouth and chomps on it and makes a face.

“Keep chewing!”

He grimaces and keeps chomping and I’m busting up because the oyster exploded on him, too.

“No! No!” the boy says, wagging his finger at David. He says something in Spanish and points to his mouth before lifting an oyster to his lips, slurping it in, and immediately swallowing it.

“Guess you’re not supposed to chew,” I say. “Otherwise the guts squirt out.”

David gives me an impish grin.

“Bet I can eat more than you can,” David says.

“Is that a challenge?”

“It’s a fact.”

We devour oysters as fast as the boy can shuck them, and David beats me fifteen to twelve. Afterward we lie on our backs under the hot sun, groaning, our heads pleasant with alcohol.

“I can feel them swimming inside me,” he says, rubbing his stomach.

“Be quiet.”

In the afternoon we go body surfing, then build a scale model of Escuela Caribe in the sand. As we’re stomping it into oblivion, a merengue trio sets up under a clump of palm trees in the middle of the beach and starts to play.

“Let’s dance!” I shout at David.

He starts to protest, but I grab his wrist and drag him over the sand and he rolls his eyes and lets himself be dragged.

Brown and white bodies move to the two-beat rhythm in the fringed shade, Dominicans and tourists, adults and children. We sprint toward them, and as the music grows louder, I feel a surge of elation at finally being able to join in the dance.

The musicians, three old men, sit in a circle on rickety wooden chairs. One scrapes a fork against a cheese grater, another squeezes the lung of an accordion, a third slaps his palms against a drum made from a rum barrel.

David and I try to mimic the Dominican couples, jerking our hips side to side and keeping our shoulders stiff, but after a while we give up and make up our own moves, spinning and twisting and jumping and laughing at each other.

When he lifts my hand to twirl me like a ballerina, I catch a light in his eyes that’s been missing for months. Impossible not to rejoice in that light, in this moment, in us. Impossible not to feel the sunshine inside and out and notice sparkling ocean and feel the soft sand between our toes. We spin and twist and grin like idiots and don’t give a damn who scrutinizes us.

We are young, and we have our entire lives ahead of us. Together, we have survived racism and religion. Together, we are strong. Together, we can do anything.

Life may not be fair, but when you have someone to believe in, life can be managed, and sometimes, even miraculous.

After everything else falls away, we shall remain brother and sister.
Family
.

The summer we were twenty, David died in a car crash on his way to see me.

A few days earlier, he’d bought a black Plymouth Turismo 2.2 with a red racing stripe down the side, and he wanted to show it off. He took a corner too fast, careening into an empty field, and when he tried to swerve back onto the road, he collided with an oak tree instead.

He died four miles away from home.

David’s death was senseless in too many ways. He was just pulling his life together. After running away from the Marion boarding school two years earlier—complaining of verbal and physical abuse—he’d joined the 113th medical battalion of the Indiana National Guard and was studying to get his GED.

And then there was the accident itself. Between the place he drove off the road and the oak tree there was a hundred yards of open space—if he’d turned the steering wheel a moment earlier, he’d still be alive. Ditto if he’d been wearing a safety belt.

I went to see his car at the junkyard after the crash and found a list of items he was planning to purchase for it in the glove box, including fuzzy dice for the rearview mirror, a pine tree–shaped air freshener. It was his first car, and he was proud of it.

I wasn’t home on his final day, Saturday, August 1, 1987. I was in Indianapolis at a Latin American exposition with my mother and sister Laura, preparing to spend the fall semester of my sophomore year at the University of Costa Rica. Escuela Caribe had inadvertently given me an appreciation for Latin culture— whose passionate exuberance was the welcome antithesis of my Teutonic background—and I was majoring in Spanish.

We were driving back to Lafayette when David crashed into that oak tree, and I immediately knew something terrible had happened. I was sprawled in the backseat of my mother’s car watching cornfields tick by when I was seized by panic. My heart crimped painfully and I sat up to ask my sister Laura the time. She was too busy talking to respond, so I reached over the seat to twist her arm around—over her strident protests—and look at her watch. It was almost 6:30
P.M.
: the time later established by the coroner as the moment of David’s accident.

When we turned into the driveway of our house, a fretful neighbor drove up with a message to call my father’s surgical partner (Dad was out of the country), and as Laura and I stood next to her at the kitchen counter, Mother dialed the number.

She gasped, before turning to us, phone still in hand.

“David’s dead,” she said flatly, before returning the receiver to her ear.

“No, he’s not,” was my scornful reply.

I stood there holding trinkets from the expo—a small Nicaraguan flag, a postcard of a Mayan temple—in my hands. A few days before, we’d talked of him flying to Costa Rica on a
discounted military flight to visit me. We were going to explore the country together.

Even after the preacher and police officer dropped by to make it official, I refused to believe he was dead. Their polite condolences angered me.

“Prove it,” I told them. “Take me to the morgue. Show him to me.”

They wouldn’t, of course.

I still refused to believe it when I saw him in a casket a few days later. The mortician had used gray foundation to hide the disfigurement caused by his head injuries, and the face in the casket looked nothing like my brother’s. Apparently, the funeral home didn’t have the right makeup palette for colored skin, given the limited number of dark-skinned people in our town, and the result was surreal.

Even when I bent to kiss his cold gray forehead, my eyes saw, but my brain refused to believe. The twenty-one-gun salute at the funeral, the bugler playing taps, the friends and acquaintances lining up to squeeze my hand with sheepish pity—none of it seemed real.

David and I were finally starting the part of our lives we’d been so impatient to reach during all those years—decades of adventure awaited us—and in the turn of a steering wheel it was gone. It was unthinkable.

I went on to tell my classmates in Costa Rica all about my twin brother David who was planning to visit. After I returned to the States, I transferred to a new college and told my classmates there the same thing.

“He’s a real goofball,” I’d say. “He’ll crack you up.”

It took me more than a year to admit the truth, which I blurted out to astonished friends in a Valium and peach schnapps–induced haze.

But admitting the truth didn’t mitigate the horror of it. I developed chronic migraines and stomachaches for which I took a host of prescription drugs and followed special diets. At the same time, I dulled my heartache with booze.

All this culminated one icy January night as I sat alone with a pint of cheap scotch and photographs of our childhood, blowing smoke rings and listening to The Smiths’ “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out” (“to die by your side, is such a heavenly way to die”) again and again. I tried to stifle my mental agony for a few moments with physical pain by stamping out a cigarette on my arm.

It didn’t work, of course, and I still bear the scar.

After David’s funeral, I found a green notebook among his things that contained excerpts from his life story. He was writing about growing up black in a white family, about racism and Escuela Caribe.

His notebook has been one of the few constants in my life—I’ve toted it with me from country to country and relationship to relationship. Reading his cramped handwriting on the yellowing pages is by turns both painful and entertaining. David kept his unwhippable sense of humor despite the difficulties in his life, and he loved to spin a good yarn.

Jesus Land
was inspired by his manuscript.

I chose to tell my brother’s story as a memoir because in many ways, our story is the same. David is etched into my earliest and most vivid memories. I remember the first time I saw him, when I was three. I remember the last time I saw him, on a scorching afternoon in late July, a week before he died. Concerned about his diet, I force-fed him a plate of pan-fried zucchini and accidentally poked his tonsils with the fork in my maternal zeal.

“You perforated me!” he hollered, and we laughed so hard we cried. Such horseplay was common between us—it refreshed our souls and renewed our bond. I’ve never laughed harder with anyone else.

It took me ten years to work up the courage to stand over his gravestone, as we’d stood together over so many others, and read the words.

David W. Scheeres
June 2 1967–
Aug. 1 1987