My Brother's Keeper (2 page)

. I know I should do something. Or say something. Something serious but not cheesy, something like Thank you except way better than that. The kind of thing my dad would know to do.

Like the manly man’s no-shake handshake, which my dad gave me the day he moved out. He was already done packing stuff like socks and shaving cream and his clock radio, but I was still dragging a Hefty bag around the house filling it up with things. Stuff like his oldies record collection and a picture of me when I had no front teeth and his Pirates beer mug, and pretty much anything I could think of to keep the actual moment of him walking out the door from happening. Until finally he made me stop.

He took my hand, which looked puny and babyish next to his, and closed his hand around mine.-His hand felt as big as a polar bear paw. Then he covered my hand with both of his and just held it there, not shaking it or anything. And I knew then that we both knew what was happening, but that we were going to get through it without getting all emotionally out of control.

I peek out from under the brim of my baseball cap and see Mr. D fumbling around for the handkerchief. I stick out my hand. He puts his hand out. His hand is nothing like my dad’s. It’s lightweight and bony and his skin is soft and smooth, like an old, polished stone. I put my other hand on top of his and just hold it, not shaking it or anything. And I know then that we both know what’s happening, but that we’re going to get through it without getting all emotionally out of control.

Then he thumps me on the back, surprisingly hard for a guy who was wheezing a couple minutes ago, and says I shouldn’t be hanging around with an old guy like him. “You should be out with the other young Turks,” he says, which isn’t like an ethnic group or anything; it’s an old-time expression meaning a person’s friends.

So I say okay. Because now that Mr. D and I have narrowly escaped having to get all emotionally out of control, all I want to do is jump on my skateboard and go out and show the whole world the Stargell.

Well, not technically the whole world. Just my dad. I can just picture him, shaking his head and saying Holy mackerel, which is about the worst language he ever uses. He won’t believe it. He’ll clap me on the back and say how Stargell’s the boss, and how not many kids would realize what it means to have a Stargell rookie card, and how I’m a chip off the old block being a diehard Stargell man. It’ll definitely blow him away.

When he sees it.

When he comes back home and I can show it to him.

In the meantime, though, there’s Jake. Jake, the formerly undisputed king of baseball trivia. Jake, who practically had a complete set of the ‘92 Eastern Division Championship team until he turned mature and quit collecting. Jake, who last year pretty much single-handedly won the division play-offs with a sixth-inning grand slam that even got written up in the actual newspaper—not just the school paper—and got compared to Stargell’s ‘79 pennant winner. Jake, who even though he’s too cool now to personally want a Stargell rookie card, will understand how amazing my having one is.

I can just picture him. He’ll whoop and yelp and holler and call me The Man. Or he’ll give me the high-five—low-five—wrist-clench secret handshake from back in our Little League days. Or he’ll smack me in the back of the head in a way that you can tell means he’s psyched for me. Then he’ll yell out to our mom, who doesn’t know anything about sports, and our eight-year-old brother, Eli—who wears a cowboy hat and calls his bike Tonto and who also could care less about sports—and they’ll get psyched about it. Just because Jake’s psyched about it.

E
xcept that when I get home, Jake just sits on the couch staring at whatever’s for sale on the Home Shopping Network.

Not only is he not in a yelping-hollering-goofing-around kind of mood, which, to tell you the truth, he’s actually never in anymore, he’s in one of those moods when he’s there but not really
there.
When he’s stoned.

Which makes me want to headlock him and wrestle him and maybe even actually sort of hurt him so that he comes back to being his normal self. Or else sneak out of the house before he sees me seeing him that way and maybe come back later when he’s his normal self.

Instead, I stand between him and the TV.

“You’ll never guess what I have,” I say, all out of breath.

He doesn’t say anything.

“C’mon,” I say. “Try to guess.”

He doesn’t try to guess. He just keeps staring at the TV. His eyes are red and itchy-looking.

“You’ll never guess,” I say.

He finally looks at me, except that it’s like he’s sort of looking past me. “If I’ll never guess,” he says, “why don’t you just tell me?”

I don’t exactly know how to respond to that logic, so I set the card down on the rug in front of him.

He doesn’t do anything. He doesn’t whoop or holler or even move a muscle.

“What did it cost you?” he says finally.

I happen to know that it’s technically worth more than two years’of my allowance. But I don’t tell him that. I also don’t tell him that Mr. D
gave
it to me, which is a highly private fact that you don’t tell somebody, especially somebody who doesn’t whoop or holler or thump you on the back when you show him a mint condition Stargell rookie card and who only wants to know what it cost.

I shrug.

He gives me an annoyed look; then he sort of smiles, and I can see the pointy teeth on the side of his mouth—like when our former dog Harriet the Horrible got old and unpredictable and started snapping at little kids in the neighborhood and we had to put her to sleep—and I wonder if he’s going to start laughing like crazy the way he does when he’s like this or if he’s just going to completely forget that I’m even here.

So I pick up the Stargell and leave.

I
cross the front yard where Eli is sitting on Tonto with the kickstand down. He’s wearing his cowboy hat and yelling at Tonto to giddyup, even though technically he’s not even moving. He’s only allowed to ride on the sidewalk and there are no sidewalks here in Colonial. Mews, this cheesy, fake-historic apartment complex where we moved after our dad left.

I grab my skateboard and head out across the yard.

As soon as Eli sees me, he tells Tonto to whoa. “Where you going?” he says.

I look across the parking lot, over toward the highway. Everything good—our old house, Mr. D’s, the park—is on the other side of the highway, which according to our mom is a death trap.

I shrug. “Nowhere.”

“Can I come?”

“Mom says you’re not allowed.”

“Please?”

I don’t know what to say. I feel bad for Eli not being able to actually ride his bike anywhere like a normal kid. But the good thing about Eli is that he isn’t a normal kid; he’s the kind of kid who, if you tell him he can’t do something normal, does something weird, like pretending his bike is a horse right out in the front yard, and isn’t even embarrassed about it.

“It’s okay,” he says after a minute. “Tonto’s pretty tired from the cattle drive, aren’t you, boy?”

Tonto doesn’t let on if he’s tired or not, so I just get on my skateboard and ride across the parking lot, and out to the overpass. I don’t go back to the old neighborhood, though. I just stand up on the overpass and watch the cars whoosh by on the highway underneath until it’s practically dinnertime.

D
inner that night is shrimp cocktail, courtesy of the Food King. The Food King is this giant frozen-food warehouse across from the mall. The Food King is also a person: he’s one of our mom’s clients at the Hairport, a rich guy who owns the Food King, but who always gives her a box of frozen food when she cuts his hair instead of giving her an actual tip. He even stars in his own highly lame TV commercials, which feature him personally, wearing a crown and a fur-trimmed cape. Our mom says he likes it when the other stylists at the Hairport call him Your Highness.

Jake calls him Your Heinie.

“Looks like dinner came from Your Heinie tonight,” says Jake. His voice has a slow-motion sound, but no one notices except me.

Eli, who’s in second grade and who, therefore, thinks any mention of body parts is insanely funny, practically has a spaz attack trying not to laugh. “The food came from your heinie,” he says, crinkling up his nose, which has about 185 million freckles on it, and pointing to his butt, which isn’t much of a butt on account of him being so skinny. “Get it?”

Our mom gives him a look like she has some kind of major, long-term headache. Which is pretty much how she’s looked ever since our dad left, which sometimes makes me think that maybe she might really be sick, maybe even dying, of some rare incurable disease without knowing it. The only time she doesn’t look like maybe she’s secretly, fatally ill is when Jake makes her laugh.

“Methinks His Heinie is wooing our fair mother,” Jake says.

Our mom pretends to be annoyed, but you can tell she’s not.

“Perhaps he wants to make her his Food Queen, courting her with shrimp and wiener.”

At the mention of the word wiener, Eli’s eyes bug out from under his cowboy hat, and he grabs his side like he’s just been shot in the ribs or something. Then he falls off his chair. “Wiener!” he shrieks from the floor, where he’s writhing around like crazy. “Jake said ‘wiener’!”

The aforementioned wiener is a cocktail wiener. Technically, 144 cocktail wieners. That’s the other problem with the Food King. His food comes in bulk, usually a gross of some kind of party food—12 dozen stuffed mushroom caps, 12 dozen crab cakes, or 12 dozen mini-pizzas—appetizers we turn into dinners by eating lots and lots of them.

“Ask His Heinie if he’ll give us ice-cream sandwiches next time,” Jake says.

“Yeah,” says Eli. “Ice-cream sandwiches from his heinie, get it?”

At which point our mom morphs back into her terminal illness self. “Enough,” she says, dead serious. “Enough of this heinie talk.”

Eli climbs back into his chair, and we all lower our eyes and pick at our shrimp cocktail. A split second later, Eli and Jake burst out laughing.

“What?” she says. “What’s so funny?”

Eli falls on the floor again. “You said …” He can’t get the words out. He squirms around like he’s dying. Jake acts innocent.

My mom looks to me to explain.

“You said ‘heinie,'” I say. “It sounds funny when you say it.”

She smiles. Then her shoulders shake. Then she starts laughing. She’s one of those people who laugh until they cry, who quiets down then gets started up all over again. She’s also the kind of person who looks pretty when she laughs, pretty in a Mom kind of way, pretty and maybe not secretly on the verge of death after all.

A
fter dinner my mom’s putting the dishes in the dishwasher, Eli’s out in the front with Tonto, and I’m sitting on the couch watching the Pirates suck. It’s the bottom of the eighth, the Pirates are down by two, and Pokey Reese is on deck when Jake comes in.

“Hey look, Toby.” He points at the TV, which is showing a commercial where an old guy in a tie and a short-sleeved business shirt is combing Just for Men through his hair. “You should ask Mom to buy some of that stuff for you.”

I don’t tell Jake that I already secretly bought some Just for Men at the drugstore a couple of weeks ago, which meant I couldn’t bid on a ‘75 Matty Alou on eBay. And that it didn’t do anything except make my gray hairs look sort of orangish, until the next time I washed my hair, and it all came out in the shower. Instead, I throw a pillow at Jake, which misses him because he ducks just in time and it hits a lamp. Mom comes in and tells us to go outside and find a more appropriate way to burn off our testosterone.

I’m still zipping my sweatshirt up by the time Jake’s out the door. I yell at him to wait up.

“Hey,” says Eli as he sees Jake crossing the front yard. “Where are you guys going?”

Jake cocks his head toward the highway.

“Can I come?” says Eli.

Jake puts his hand on Eli’s shoulder. “They don’t allow horses over there,” he says.

“It’s okay,” says Eli, stroking Tonto’s mane. “We have work to do around the ranch.”

Jake pats Eli on the head and takes off. I yell at him to wait up again. He looks over his shoulder at me, but he doesn’t slow down. He doesn’t speed up, either, so I run till I catch up with him. “Whadya wanna do?” I say.

He’s got his headphones on, so I tap him on the shoulder. I look at him from the side and decide that my mom is right, that Jake does look like Josh Hartnett. He’s got shaggy brown hair that always looks perfectly messed up, crinkly eyes that practically disappear when he laughs, and a potential future manly man’s jawline. He doesn’t notice me tapping him on the shoulder, so I lift one headphone away from his ear.

“Whadya wanna do?” This time I say it loud enough so he can hear me through the music.

“What?” he says.

Obviously, it wasn’t loud enough. “Wanna play Werewolf?” I’m practically shouting.

Werewolf is this game Jake invented back when we lived in the old house. The kid who’s the werewolf chases all the other kids around in the dark until everybody is either home-free behind the McMullens’garage or captured by the werewolf. Jake was always the werewolf on account of him being an expert at coming up with ways to ambush people, like jumping down out of the Nevilles’peach tree or off the roof of the McMullens’toolshed. And I was pretty much always the last one to get caught, on account of me being an expert watcher. Even in the dark, I knew, from the clinking of the chain, when someone bumped into the Dawsons’swing set or from the shushing of branches, when someone was cutting through Mrs. Dunaway’s bushes on their way to make a break for home.