The brothers

Chapter One

They were not Mahon's boys. Mahon had only married their mother. Danny and Mike were leftover from some other man neither of them ever knew. As far as anyone else knew, they were Mahon's boys. 

    Danny rode beside Mike in Mahon's black pick-up. Round chrome lights. A bull's horn mounted on the hood. The thick antenna rod jutted forth mid-roof and bent backwards flaunting a torn American flag. The deer hooves mounted to the wall of the truck's cabin carried two medium gauge shotguns. It was the last day of school and this was Danny's last year. Mike, a year younger, felt nothing of the gravity that the situation held for Danny. He drove the truck off the pot-holed farm road going fifty miles per hour and dove onto the highway, cutting off traffic and throwing loose dirt and stones in a cascading shower over veering cars behind him. He leaned down gaunt over the wheel, bloodshot and barrel-eyed, tempting a turnover. 

    "Roll down your window so I can smoke," Mike said. 

    Danny didn't answer. He was watching the mosquitoes catch against the windshield, their thin translucent bodies tunneling in the wind and exploding on impact. Danny's eyes, which were both the color and shape of small dirt-covered stones, were reflected in the glass. He saw in them the flattened carcasses, and he looked past the bodies at the resurrection of his pale diminutive face. 

    "I said roll down your window so I can smoke." 

    Danny cranked down the handle and reached his hand into the blowing air. He pulled it back and looked at the mosquitoes collected in gritty wads between his fingers. His hand stung in the precise points where the dead were lodged. Mike took a cigarette and held it in his lips as he pressed against it the glowing coils of the car lighter. Bits of ash billowed out and fell over Danny. Danny wiped the black flecks into his jeans. He leaned forward so his forehead rested against the windshield and his chin on the dashboard. The glass vibrating against his head caused a grating sensation, a thrumming in his eardrums. Out of the corner of his eyes, he watched more mosquitoes lose their lives against the windshield. He kept his forehead pressed hard against the glass so when Mike whipped the wheel and spun the truck around the corner of the school drive, Danny's whole weight tipped back and suddenly came smashing back into the glass. Mike parked and slammed the door. Danny laid his head on the dashboard and dizzily eyed the kids crossing the parking lot and walking up toward the brick sprawling building on the hill. 

~

When the final bell rang Danny left his last class. The teacher shook his hand. She smiled wide and said some things Danny could not hear over the din in the halls. Out in the parking lot, Danny found the bed of the truck full of boys chewing tobacco and passing around Mike's flask of whiskey. 

    "Hey Danny." 

    "Hi." 

    "We thought you weren't ever going to come out. It's the last day, you know," one of them said.

    "You want a drink," said another boy holding out the flask. 

    "No thanks," said Danny. 

    He climbed in the front and closed the door. The boys were looking at him through the mirror. The boys did not like Danny. He always refused drink from their flask. 

    Mike drove back out the drive onto the road, driving no less reckless than he had that morning. The boys in back clutched tight to the sides and wedged their fingers anywhere they could hold. The truck leapt over a hill and landed on two wheels. The whole frame rattled as if its every bolt were going to shoot free. The boys tumbled down on each other, Danny's teeth rattled, and the lot of them let out a cheer. Mike's blue eyes shined above a thin smile showing no teeth, a cigarette dangling from his lips. 

~

The table was set with plates and forks and knives. The boys took turns getting their food from the stove and sat down. Mahon laughed looking up at Danny.

    "You're unzipped."

    All the boys laughed.

    "Hey, Danny, keep your meat off the table," someone pled.

    "Yeah, that's what plates are for," Mike chimed in. 

    A chorus of laughter. 

    Mahon chuckled and dabbed spilled milk out of his beard. He tapped his cup and pointed to Danny. Obediently, Danny got up, went to the fridge and filled Mahon's cup with milk. 

    "Here you go, Milkman. Fill me up too," said Mike.

Danny filled his cup too, then sat down and finished his food. 

~

    After dinner, Mike and the boys went out to the woods with their arms full of guns and beer. Mahon and Danny sat on the porch and watched them go. The sun hung still and bright over the trees making silhouettes of the boys that stretched in enormous parallels across the eastern end of the field. Mahon's horses trailed behind them until they disappeared into the trees. Danny eyed the black lip of the mountain where the sky began and the mountain firs plunged forward into the upper lake, only a pale strand of silver along the mountain ridge. Mahon leaned forward in his rocker. He looked like he was going to get up, but remained fixed in that half-cocked position staring at the sky.

    "So what are you plannin' on doing now that school's over?" His weighty eyes lingered on Danny for a moment as if to fix him with a visible notion of his meaning. Danny shook his head. 

    "Don't know." 

    "You gonna stay around the farm and help your old man?"

    Danny tapped his fingers on the arm of the chair. 

    "After all these years," Mahon said, "I think I'm owed that." 

    "I don't know," Danny said. 

    A squirrel ran from beneath the porch, out from the darkness, and skittered into the dusty yard becoming itself a dark shadow in the dusk, as if it had taken on some dim illness while hidden by the porch. Danny watched as it ran forward and backward indecisively then disappeared up a trunk into the dark hold of the trees. 

    Mahon leaned back in his chair studying him in the only fatherly way Mahon knew. 

    "Well where do you aim to go?"

    "I haven't thought it out yet."

    "Well, you better hurry it up. You got to do something and school's already done. You can't live on nuthin'. You need a job." Mahon leaned back and took up his long mahogany pipe, fit his little finger into the nub and twisted loose soot and grit from the bowl. 

    "I said I don't know. I haven't thought it through." 

    "Well I ain't running a hotel. You better figure it out."

    "You know damn well I earn my stay. I'm no charity case." 

    Mahon pulled strands of tobacco from a pouch and began to pack them into his pipe. His facial muscles moved along in concentration with his hands. His eyebrows raised. "Here's what I know about you and your brother. I know you think you work for your stay. But you ain't learned yet about life. You think you have. But you haven't. Life is more than hoein' my fields when you're done with your books. Life and work are all the same and all there is. At least for you and me. That's the truth."

    Mahon finished packing the pipe and, holding it in his lips he lit it up, breathing in deep, losing smoke out the sides of his mouth. 

    "Work isn't for just when it's convenient," he continued. "I gave you and your brother a chance for schooling and learning and books." 

    He took another puff from his pipe. 

    "Now, I suppose that was for your mother's sake. But it's time for that to end and real life to begin. Your brother'll hear the same next year."

     Guns fired out in the trees. The horses jumped out of their standing slumber and trotted back and forth in the moonlight. Mahon looked up. He looked back at Danny with dry dark eyes. "It wouldn't hurt to have a woman on the farm. You could find a good woman, a strong one like your mother was.     Someone who can keep this place and make it a home again. It's hard to raise two boys without a woman. Now I done the best I could, but I suppose I did a poor job of it. It couldn't hurt for you to bring a woman back here to tend to things. I ain't talking about my needs. I'm past old enough to get along without one. But you're young and just startin' out. You should start out right."

    Danny shook his head. 

    "I don't know any women."

    "What do you mean? You'd have to be stupid and blind not to know a girl or two from school." Well," Danny said, "whatever you want to think is fine. I don't have any girls to bring back to you.

~

Mahon's dog, slow near-death overweight and ear-heavy, came out to the porch and lay between Mahon and Danny with his head overhanging the top stair. The three sat listening to the dull thudding hooves intermingled with the gunfire. All night long the gunfire echoed through the trees. They looked out into the blackness trying to catch glimpses of the running horses. Now and then Danny caught them hovering in the half-moonlight flaring their nostrils in wild contortions and rolling their shining black eyes. When the guns finally stopped, the hooves stopped with them. Beyond the porch, silence fell over everything. The trees were quiet. The crickets ceased their chatter. Stillness reigned in the yard, down the pasture, and off through the fields and into the trees. 

    Mahon went inside fell asleep sprawled out on the couch. Danny sat a while longer, taken up by thoughts about his uncertain future. Finally, he too went inside, took up an old blanket and fell asleep in a chair. 

    Just before sunrise Danny woke to find Mahon hovering over him naked but for his underwear and studying something out the window. Danny peered over the sill. Mike and the boys were coming out of the morning mist, up the road by the woods and up through the backfields. They were carrying some long and heavy thing beneath a blanket. The thing was loaded into the back of Mike's truck and the pickup chugged off up the drive.

    Mahon rubbed his eyes, scratched himself, and stumbled to the stove to start the coffee. 

    "Better get up," he said. "You boys got some weeding to do in the back fields today."

~

The first toss of Danny's hoe barely broke soil. Alone in the cold dew of the morning, the weeding went by slow. Mike hadn't shown yet and there were a hundred rows to hoe by noon. Danny thought of what dead thing might be in the process of being buried in some god-forsaken pit or sunk to the grimy floor of some lowland swamp. He sighed and tossed the hoe deep into the soil. Thwack after thwack, Danny was lost in thoughts of the past. 

    A crisp September morning, dew still on the grass. The smell of the moistened fields filled the house and woke Danny. He looked out his window and saw a flood of blackbirds stream across the sky. Back and forth, the trees blew. She came into his room, thin, floating, quiet. She pulled him up, dressed him and brushed his hair and sat him on the floor so she could tie his new shoes. The smell of her, the memory of her legs, her stockings as she bent down, her rumpled dress about her knees, a wafting of the last summer flowers.

    Mother.

    Downstairs, the cold stung through his wool sweater. She stood holding his hand at the end of the driveway and pointed out the rosy white apple blossoms. Down the road beneath the hill, a transmission clunked into low gear and the bus slowly ground its way up over the hill, lumbered toward them, eventually coming to a squeaking stop in front of them. The doors sprung open in front of him. He jumped back into her arms. She squeezed him for a moment then pushed him off.

Up the big stairs, the smell of rubber overwhelmed him. The bus driver said "Are you Danny?" He nodded and reached for the rail and pulled himself up. He looked at all the eyes peering back at him over the seats, and as the bus lurched forward he swung back to catch one last glimpse of her dappled by the shadows of the apple leaves. 

Thwack went the hoe.

He stepped off the porch. Five years old. Mike walked beside him through the snow singing vile lyrics and laughing. The brothers wore matching Mackinaw jackets and thick wool underwear. They walked along stuffing their hands in their pants to itch themselves. Mahon led the way in a stern mood, unmoved by their chatter. His big boots broke the frozen snow, and he told the boys to walk in his footsteps in order to make less noise. The boys tried to tread his footsteps but his stride was too long and they looked like wobbling fawns going after their mother. 

    Inside the cover of trees Mahon hushed them. The snow became soft and their footsteps quiet and their boots much lighter to lift.

    "It's cold in here," Mike whined. "I'm real cold."

    Mahon swung around, his eyes red bulges of tired flesh. 

    "Don't you two say nothin' out here. Keep quiet or I'll send you home."

    Deep in the wood, the white and windless air was not as cold as the open fields. Mahon found a spot he knew and handed Mike his rifle. Mahon paused to examine the clearing. He signed for the boys to come closer and he threw into the circle six film canisters filled with cotton balls soaked in deer urine. He tossed them out so they formed a semi-circle across the glade. Yellow lines in the snow. 

    "That's the most God-awful smell I ever..." Mike began to say but Mahon cut him short. 

    "Not another word," he croaked. He motioned for the boys to follow him to a large oak and pushed the them up one by one. Finally, he gave out a huff and scaled the tree in what appeared to the boys to be a single leap. 

Mahon and the boys hovered over the clearing on the crooked arm of the tree. Mahon looked docile and strange as he dangled in the tree. Danny watched him from the corner of his eye as the cloud shadows slowly crossed the snow. Time passed. Suddenly there was a rustling and ice tinkled all around the clearing like shattering glass. The deer appeared. His black-tipped ears lifted and listened. He turned his head slowly and snuffed the air. His oval eyes opened brown and quick, and he waved his enormous head with thirty bone points sending twisted shadows dancing across the snow. The sunlight climbed up his face with each step he took deeper into the clearing. He sniffed the first canister. He stopped and snorted. The boys held their breath. It was time. Each boy lifted a gun. There was a sound like a bomb going off in Danny's ear. 

    Mahon was the first to the ground. He took the buck from behind, pinned down his head and slit his neck. A red bath of blood streamed into the snow. Mahon motioned to the boys to come closer, one hand smoking with the hot carcass blood. 

    "Come out here and get him," Mahon called. 

    The boys pried up the buck, tied him down on two cedar limbs, and pulled him out of the clearing. Danny could not help but stare at the buck who couldn't help but stare back at him. The deer's gray eyes wobbled dimly in his skull and reflected the sunlight and the boys themselves like two trembling filaments. Danny thought of his mother. The men in white carried her away just like he now dragged this deer, the same position and situation with that identical resignation in her eyes. Now, these dead deer eyes reflect the two self-same shadows.

Thwack went the hoe. 

His mother atop a ladder pounded nails into the chicken house. 

Thwack.

His mother crawled beneath a bed reaching for lost socks. 

Thwack.

She grasped the clothespins above her head. 

Thwack.

Her hands let go the sheet just before she could latch it to the line. The sheet fluttered to the ground like a ghost.

Thwack.

The shot.

Thwack. Thwack. Thwack.

Her head fell into the sheet leaking red into its still wet folds. Danny heard the shot. Mike ran from the basement. Mahon bellowed into the telephone.

Mike dropped to his knees beside the pile of sheets trying to feed her water from a paper cup. Mike touched her hair as they took her, and he ran beneath the stretcher as they carried her away.

Thwack.

He ran with Mike through the trees, stopping, panting, now running and laughing with branches slapping their faces and arms. Mike with a full smile, eyes aglow, jumping underbrush, ducking logs, running as fast as he could. 

Brothers.

They came to the fields and fell into the tall grass with so much grass beneath them that they were able to lay elevated off the ground, floating in the stench of dust and pollen and hot sunlit hay, laughing sputtering off into the big open field. 

    "I saw Anna out behind the school," Mike said, staring up at the sky serious and smiling. "Joe and Nick and me were walking out by the dumpster and there she was."

    "Anna wouldn't be back there."

    "She was too."

    "Well, why was she back there?"

    "Waiting for us is why."

    "And why's that?"

    "Cause I told her to wait behind the school and then I'd come and kiss her."

    "Shut up, Mike. You're a liar," Danny shouted, eyes ablaze. He jumped up and glared down at him. "Why do you always have to say those things? What the hell's wrong with you?"

    "I'm not lying, Danny. Swear to God!" 

Danny ran away. The hay scratched his arms so much he had to start walking. He tried to stamp down the grass as he walked. Mahon saw him coming from where he stood on the porch. The boy was stamping hard and waiving about his arms tantrum-like. Looking up, Danny saw Mahon watching him and waiting. He said nothing to Mahon as he stomped up the stairs, looking down, ashamed, and slammed the screen door behind.

Thwack.

~

There was Mike standing beside him holding a hoe and bucket. It was noontime. He took the row beside Danny and went to work. Neither of them said a word.

    It was late afternoon when the brothers heard a voice calling from the far side of the field. Like two marionettes, they peered to the distance raising their hands over their eyes. The dark unmistakable silhouette of Thomas Hoff, the neighboring cow farmer, a veritable cow himself, loomed in the distance. 

    "Mike. Danny. You two come down here."

One then the other dropped his hoe as if suddenly raptured. They walked down the row until they stood before him. 

    "Boys, I came to see if you've happened to see my hound come by here."

    The boys looked to him like dirt-covered mutes. 

    "He's been gone all night long," he told them. "I was worried about the shooting. All night long I heard those guns going off."

    Mike shook his head. 

    "We ain't seen your dog, Hoff," Mike said. 

    Hoff's eyebrows raised. He looked at Danny. Danny looked away, squinting as if the sun hit his eyes.

    "I suppose you didn't hear any goddamned shooting, either," Hoff growled.

    "I'd be stretching it to say I heard anything," Mike smiled. "We farming folk were sound asleep in bed all last night, getting ready for a long day in the fields."

    "I have to say, boys, I'm surprised..." Hoff began to say, but Mike and Danny had already turned and headed back up the row. 

~

Late in the day when the sun had all but disappeared, the brothers took their hoes and buckets and headed down the field. Danny stopped and picked some vegetables from one of the patches in the field, and Mike stood watching him. Danny came back to the road carrying the vegetables loose in his arms. He was walking slow and thinking. Finally, he stopped again in the road, turned, and asked, "Why did you kill the dog?"

    Mike didn't even look at him. "I didn't shoot no dog," he said.

    "Well who did?" 

    "I don't know anyone who shot any dog."

    Mike pulled a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket and counted them with one finger as he walked up the porch stairs. 

    "I don't have no reason to shoot no dog," he said again. He bent over and lit the cigarette, puffing through his cupped hands.

    Danny stopped with his hand on the door handle and told him, "Mahon and me saw you coming out of the woods this morning, and you weren't carrying a deer."

    Mike's eyes opened into two hot bulbous masses. 

    "It was you. You told Hoff I shot his dog!" Mike turned to face Danny, the whites of his eyes softly glowed. Mike slung the hoe off his shoulder and held it by the head, gently tapping the rod into the palm of his hand. 

    "You told Hoff I shot his dog."

    "I told Hoff what I saw. I made no speculations." 

    "Why? What in hell would make you do that?"

    Why? Why wouldn't he do it. Years of doing the right things, waking up on time, pulling the weeds in the fields, washing dishes, cleaning floors, reading the Bible, praying, getting A's in school, singing in the choir, and on and on. Mike did none of it. Mike did everything he wasn't supposed to do. He lied, cheated, cursed, smoked. What was the point of it all? 

    "Why wouldn't I do it?" Danny growled. "You killed that dog. I know it, and Mahon knows it, and what's more is God knows it. You killed that dog and Hoff deserves to know it."

    Mike had the look about him that he had the time Mahon whipped him as a boy. Only one time Mahon tried to make him his boy, and he had turned on Mahon with that same look. A canopy lifted from him so all that remained was the anger and the fear. Mahon whipped him one lash and that only because it was something he had begun and had to be finished. It never happened again. 

    Mike took a step closer and the hoe came up. Danny stepped back and dropped the vegetables he had gathered for dinner. Cucumbers and potatoes rolled onto the dirt road casting long shadows in the dying daylight. Mike stood in the middle of the road and his eyes danced in his flushed face. He swung the hoe. 

    "Goddamn you," Danny spit, lying in the dirt, the pain shooting through his side like a spear as Mike raised the hoe again.

~

    When Danny came to, bruises and spots of dried blood covered his sides, stomach and back. Holding his stomach he pushed himself up on one arm. He was stiff all over and the pain was numbing as he stumbled to his feet. He staggered slowly down the long dirt road to the house, but he did not go up the porch and in the front door. He didn't want to see Mahon or Mike. He went around back and struggled to pull himself up a tree and clambered through his window. Slumping onto his bed, he fell into a dreamless sleep.

     He woke past midnight. The house was still. He grabbed some stuff, shoved it in a bag, and climbed back out the window. He felt every object on his back like small iron weights attached to him. They were each a piece of the past, and with each step he denied that past so objects he had never cared for before began to appear in his mind and to actually weigh physically against his progress. 

    His heart flooded with blood as he ran across the yard. He could hear the horses in the distance beginning to stomp and snort. He hurried, hoping to get away before they began to whinny. He reached the shed and pulled out his old rusted bicycle. He stood up on the pedal. The corroded chain screeched to life as he lurched forward. He pedaled slowly up the hill beneath the tall spreading trees, and though he was sore all over and each movement burned inside him, he felt himself gathering momentum. Every pedal brought down another object from his back so that only darkness weighed upon him. He pedaled until he could not see anymore, and the weight of the objects of his past fell away, one by one. Now, he was only pedaling and he was only in the road of a long wood and that was all there was. 

    He pedaled free of the farm and later that night when he camped beside the road, he slept the heavy peaceful rest of freedom. 

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