My Brother's Keeper (3 page)

Jake and I, we were untouchable at Werewolf—until our dad left, and we moved, and Jake got all cool and uninterested in things he considered immature, which is pretty much everything we did at the old house.

“Werewolf,” I say. “One on one.”

I wait for him to mock me. Or squeeze my neck till I cry uncle. Or maybe even just completely ignore me. But he actually says okay. Which makes me think that maybe, at least for the time being, he’s the old Jake after all.

We decide that home base is the bench in ye olde village green, which is actually just this plot of crab-grass in the middle of Colonial Mews. Then Jake, who’s automatically the werewolf without us even discussing it, counts to 100 while I hide.

There aren’t nearly as many good hiding places at Colonial Mews as there were at the old house, but I find ways to keep on the move, crouching behind bushes and dodging behind parked cars, ducking under streetlights and creeping through the little AstroTurf backyards some people have here. After about ten minutes or so I decide that I’ve gotten better than ever at Werewolf.

But after about fifteen minutes I decide that maybe Jake’s gotten bored and walked over to the mall.

Which makes me go from feeling like the James Bond of Colonial Mews, to feeling like some kind of overgrown psycho-toddler loser. The only way to know for sure is to make a break for ye olde village green.

I peek out from the laundry room doorway where I’m hiding, sprint across the grass, then slip behind the Dumpster, Mission Impossible style. Then I twist the toe of my sneaker into the grass—better traction, like Jake taught me—ready to put on the final burst of speed toward ye olde bench when I feel this incredible whack between my shoulder blades.

The air flies out of my lungs in a whoosh, and the next thing I know Jake’s on top of me, and I’m on the ground with my face in the dirt and my legs churning up the grass like one of those jackrabbits on the Nature Channel whose legs keep running even though he’s already being eaten by a cheetah.

Jake pins me within a matter of seconds.

“Give in, Dillweed?”

Dillweed is Jake’s favorite insult for me. Back in her cooking days, our mom had a spice called dillweed which Jake said was named after me. I pretend that I hated being called Dillweed, but to tell you the truth, I actually sort of liked it since he never calls anyone else Dillweed and since he never calls me Dillweed in front of anyone else.

“Nope.” I grit my teeth. “Never!”

Jake shoves my head under his armpit. But I break free, roll over, and get in position to use the Crazy Leg, this wrestling move when you straddle the person and squeeze his legs between your knees.

Jake begs for mercy. I tighten my grip. He promises to take out the garbage when it’s my night. He promises to let me borrow his Discman. But I tighten up even more until he’s squirming and yelping, squirming and laughing, ripping handfuls of grass put of the ground and throwing them in the air at me.

I let up a minute, just to show a little mercy, since this is a historic event, this being the first time on record that I’ve ever pinned him. “How’d you catch me?” I say. “Where were you hiding?”

Jake cocks his elbow to point toward the Dumpster.

“You jumped off the Dumpster?”

Jake smiles; the Dumpster move is one of his best ever.

It’s right about then that we notice Andy Timmons standing there watching us. Andy Timmons—this kid who has an actual goatee and who hangs out in the parking lot before school smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee, and who everyone knows is a drug dealer—is standing in ye olde village green, holding a bottle of some kind of whisky. “How cute,” he says. “A little brotherly love.”

Jake pushes me off him and gets up. Then he puts his arm around Andy Timmons’s shoulders and starts walking away.

I jump up and trot along after them. I remind myself of Harriet the Horrible, who even when you were done playing with her kept trying to give you her slobbery ball, but I don’t know exactly what else to do.

I run ahead and grab the hose next to the Dumpster.

“Wanna drink?” I say. To Jake, not AndyTimmons.

Jake doesn’t answer. He takes the bottle from Andy Timmons and drinks it down almost to the bottom. Then he grabs the hose and wets down his hair. He swings his head back and his hair sticks up like a rock star.

“Now whadya wanna do?” I say.

Jake looks sideways at Andy Timmons. Whatever it is he’s going to do, it doesn’t include me. He drops the hose and walks to the curb with Andy Timmons.

I pick up the hose and wrap it up, making perfect circles one inside the other, like I’m a soldier wrapping up the American flag, all serious, like the future of democracy depends on it. Jake turns back toward me.

“Toby,” he yells over to me. “Tell Mom I’m going over to the park to shoot hoops.”

He’s lying. I can tell because he’s being way too casual, like the time he convinced me to trade him my Cal Ripken for a Ricky Henderson. I also know he’s lying since whenever he tells my mom he’s “shooting hoops,” he comes in after she’s asleep and eats pretty much everything in the pantry, which I know from the videos Mr. Fontaine, the guidance counselor, shows during Freedom from Chemical Dependency Week, is one of the things people do when they’re high. What I don’t know is what you’re supposed to do when it’s your brother and not somebody in a video. What I do is clean everything up afterward so our mom doesn’t find out.

“So, you’ll tell her?” he says.

I go back to the job of wrapping up the hose.

Jake hands the bottle back to Andy Timmons, then walks toward me. Andy Timmons comes along.

“You were tough tonight, Toby,” Jake says, socking me on the shoulder. “You really got me with the Crazy Leg.”

I go from frowning like a U. S. Marine to grinning like ye olde village idiot.

A car horn honks from somewhere down the street. Andy Timmons asks Jake if he’s coming or not.

Jake grabs hold of my arm. “You’ll tell her?”

The horn honks again.

Jake punches me again, hard this time. I jab him back, but my fist just plows through the air, because by then he’s already gone.

W
hen I get back home, my mom’s sitting at the table with our cat, Mr. Furry, curled up in the chair behind her. Mr. Furry’s technically a girl, although we didn’t know that back when we first got her. She’s also technically everyone’s cat, even though the only person she actually ever hangs out with is Eli, and who, if you ask me, is pretty lame and stuck-up as a pet. Especially compared to Harriet the Horrible, who at least was always glad to see you and who thumped her tail on you when she sat next to you on the couch, and who was a great pet, even if she did have bad breath.

My mom’s back is toward me, but I can see she’s paying the bills, because the checkbook is in front of her with the numbers crossed out, scribbled over, and crossed out again. She moves one bill from the have-to-pay to the have-to-wait pile, sniffs, and blows her nose into a paper towel. Mr. Furry jumps off the chair and leaves, her tail in the air.

I picture myself going in and putting my arm around my mom. Or at least getting her a tissue instead of a paper towel. Or maybe making her a baloney-and-mustard sandwich. Or just acting like everything’s okay, which maybe it would be if we just acted like it was. But instead I back out of the room.

I also stop by the front door and check for a letter from my dad or a postcard like the one he sent us from California that had a picture of something called the Lonesome Pine—a supposedly famous tree on a beach in California, but without any
Baywatch-
type
surfers or anything—and a message on the back saying how we’ll all be living out in sunny California as soon as he finds a job. He FedExed us a bunch of amazing presents the first Christmas, but no letters and no money since then. Ever since we moved, and my mom sold most of his stuff at a yard sale, there’s sort of an unspoken rule: we don’t speak about him.

Sometimes I pretend he’s on a long business trip, like the executive dads on TV Sometimes I wonder if maybe he’s in a coma on account of being in an accident on the California freeway and no one knows about him having a family back in Pittsburgh. But mostly I worry that when he comes back, I might not recognize him.

Which is why I saved the picture of all of us at the Implosion. In the picture, we’re all sitting on the grass in the park where we used to watch the fireworks. Our mom, who back then looked more like someone’s big sister than someone’s mom, is smiling, and our dad, who looks like Bruce Springsteen, except with less hair, is holding a beer and looking out of the picture frame at something far away. Jake and I have on our Little League shirts, and Eli’s hiding under his yellow baby blankie.

In the picture, we’re sitting in the park along with pretty much the whole town, looking across the river at the mill where my dad and his buddies used to work, waiting for it to get blown up. Imploded, actually. Which meant that they put dynamite in strategic locations so that the whole thing would collapse in on itself. It was like some weird, science-fiction block party. Old steelworkers and their wives were sitting on picnic blankets listening to polka music, college kids were waving protest banners, and little kids were goofing around on the swing set. When they should’ve been acting serious and respectful like we were at a funeral, which technically we were.

Out of nowhere, the crowd started counting down like it was New Year’s Eve.

“Three! Two! One!”

Eli yelled, “Blast off!” A bunch of people shouted, “Implosion!”

What came next was nothing. People started fidgeting. Someone in the crowd behind us booed.

Then there was a white flash at the base of the plant. People oohed. There was another spark a little way from the first one. People aahhed. Then, finally, there was a chain reaction of sparks all around the base. There was no noise really, just a flimsy sounding
pop
a few seconds after each spark. All of a sudden, the whole building began to fold in on itself, section by section, one after the other. Then there was a groan, a sound I felt—actually felt—in a spot in the middle of my chest. A minute later, the two giant smokestacks in the middle of the plant crumpled and sank to the ground, while a bunch of birds erupted from the stacks and flew off.

After that the steel company was supposed to build a new mill on the same spot, but they didn’t. Which meant my dad got laid off, after which the unemployment ran out, and he had to take a job driving a giant trash—vacuum cleaner truck around the mall at night and drinking beer with his friends during the day. Until finally one day about a year ago he left for California.

My mom stayed in bed for a week straight, crying and smoking cigarettes and not answering the phone and not making us go to school. Which was fun at first since she stayed up in her room sleeping or watching Lifetime TV, and we got to watch the Cartoon Network and eat Pringles and Pop Tarts and pretty much whatever we wanted. But which got to be sort of scary after a while, when she wouldn’t get up even though there was nothing left to eat but peanut butter straight from the jar. Until finally one day, out of nowhere, she got out of bed and suddenly turned really busy, hauling all my dad’s stuff out onto the front lawn for a yard sale and then selling the house and getting a job at the Hairport, after which she’s pretty much looked like she has a terminal headache ever since.

My mom tried to sell the Implosion picture at the yard sale, saying the frame was at least worth something. But I grabbed it off a card table where our entire life was being pawed through by people who asked if you’d take a quarter for something that’s worth a million dollars if it’s yours. I brought it to ye olde condo where I set it up in the den.

My mom keeps turning it facedown when she cleans. I keep putting it back up.

I turn the picture faceup, then I shuffle through the mail, even though I can tell from the feel of it that there’s no letter from him. Nothing personal, just a catalog, which is technically for my mom but which Jake steals so he can look at the pages with women in their underwear, and an American Express bill. I lift the rubber band from around the bundle and pry the credit card bill free, secret-agent style. Then I stand there wondering exactly what it is I was planning to do with it. Eat it?

I slip the envelope into my back pocket and go upstairs, where I lock the bathroom door and count my gray hairs. I quit after I get to thirty-two. Then I sit on the fluffy green thing that covers the toilet seat and wonder if pulling out the eleven hairs I found a couple weeks ago caused twice as many more to grow back like my mom said it would. Then I get up and try 185 different ways of combing my hair so I won’t look like a thirteen-year-old senior citizen, until I finally give up and put my baseball cap on.

Which reminds me that I need to get my mom to sign a permission slip for tryouts stating that
if
I get brain damage on account of getting hit in the head with a line drive, or getting struck by lightning in the outfield and I’m paralyzed for life and have to wear diapers and eat through a straw, that she won’t sue the school. Although it doesn’t technically mention lightning and diapers, it does say that parents agree to buy their kids cleats and to pay for the uniforms to be dry-cleaned at the end of the year.

I decide that’s not something you can ask a mother to think about when she’s blowing her nose on a paper towel because she can’t pay the bills and when she has one son who’s out with a known drug dealer and another son who doesn’t have the guts to come in and make her a baloney-and-mustard sandwich, and when she herself may be suffering from a rare terminal disease.

So I sign it myself and go up to my room and stare at the Stargell.

W
hich I’ve done about 185 thousand times since I got it. Which is probably roughly equal to once every seventeen seconds. Which you would think would get boring but it gets more amazing the more I do it. Even if during the other seventeen seconds when I’m not looking at it, I’m
thinking
about looking at it. And even if when I’m not looking at it or planning on looking at it, I’m thinking about how much my dad’s gonna love looking at it.