The brothers

Chapter three

He was hungry, real hungry. Danny opened his eyes and looked around. He had fallen asleep beside the road in a field about five miles from Mahon's farm and just about a mile outside of town. The sun was high overhead and beads of sweat covered his face. His arms and sides throbbed where Mike had beaten him with the hoe. His mouth was dry with thirst. He struggled to his feet and tried to roll up his blanket without bending too much. After a few minutes, he was back on his bike. The last mile went by slow, but finally he arrived at the town diner. He went in and sat down at the counter. 

Danny ate his breakfast next to an odd-looking city boy, a tall boy with black hair and a slender olive face. The boy was named John. John had been travelling around for no apparent reason he could explain, and he had tons of questions for Danny. Danny had been talking to him for over an hour. Danny could not remember if he had ever said so much in his entire life, but John had a look he liked and Danny was lonely this morning and was willing to keep talking so he wouldn't have to eat on his own. 

    "Why did you leave?" John said, thrusting a gob of meat and egg into his mouth.

    "I got into a fight with my brother."

    "That's it?"

    "It was a pretty big fight, and besides, I've always wanted to go."

    "Why did you always want to leave?"

    "To find my dad."

    "You don't know your dad?"

    "I grew up with my stepdad. I've never met my real dad." Danny stopped for a moment to consider what to say as he lifted his cup. "I found a letter in a box of my mom's things once. It was from someone named Charles, but that's all it told me."

    "Is that your father's name?" 

    "I don't know. It could be. I asked my stepdad about it once but he just shrugged and said he never knew my dad and never cared to."

    "So, where are you going now?"

    "The letter was sent from a town down south. I'm heading there thinking that's where Charles will be."

    "Do you think you'll find him?"

    "Not really. Even if the guy is my dad, he's probably moved to some other place by now."

    "Then why try?"

    "I don't really have anything better to do and I can't go home right now." 

    Danny stopped and looked around the diner. A crowd had gathered, eaten their fill and then left again, all in the time since he had sat down. It was going on eleven in the morning. 

    "What about you?" Danny asked. "Where are you going?"

    John shrugged. 

    "I don't know. I kind of felt like going for a trip but I haven't figured out where I'm going yet."

    "Don't your parents want their car back?" Danny asked.

    "No. They've got plenty of cars."

    John told Danny that he came from money. His family lived in Boston and all had attended university. They had grand ideas and ran big companies and John was expected to do the same. He was enrolled to go to Harvard in the fall. He had the summer until then to do anything and everything he pleased. "Get it out of your system," his dad told him. His mom told him he was still too young for booze and he would never be old enough to mess around with the hookers. His father had rolled back in his chair, grabbed his stomach with both hands and let out a massive yowl. 

    So, John had been gone for two weeks and it had started to get lonely. He had driven up to Canada, where he got lost and drank bad beer and spoke bad French. He didn't like the Canadians. He said they were all boring and rather snobbish. He said they were like Boston people but without all their money. He said if a person was poor, he should act it and not put on airs. John said he didn't mind that Danny was poor because he acted poor. "A man should always know who he is." Danny nodded, and John said, "It's probably good that I'm rich and I know I'm rich, because that way I don't care about it. I can spend it without a thought. My dad is rich but because he earned it all he can't spend a dime on himself. He still thinks he's poor." Danny didn't know quite what to make of John. He talked so much. Danny wasn't used to so much talk. 

    "Well, where are you going when you get done your breakfast?" Danny asked.

    "It's three thousand miles to California," John said. "I suppose it will take me a week if I drive straight through. But I'm not planning on driving straight through. I plan on seeing some things along the way."

    Danny couldn't fathom three thousand miles. He'd never had three thousand of anything in his entire life. He had had three hundred dollars once and that was the most, and he only got that because his mother's mother died, his last grandparent that lived, and she had kindly left him and Mike three hundred dollars each. That was thirteen years ago when he was five and yet the remainder of that three hundred dollars filled his pocket today. To think of having ten times that amount made his head reel, and to think of traveling one mile for every dollar that would be, seemed to him a little bit more than crazy. 

    "I've never even seen the ocean before," Danny said.

    John's eyes opened. 

    "You've never seen the ocean?" 

    "I've never even driven to the coast."

    After a while, John leaned back, laughed and said, "Good luck finding your dad." He put on his hat, and disappeared out the door. Danny sat for a while longer then finally he stood up too, pulled his bag up onto his shoulder, and went to the register to pay his bill. Out in the lot, he walked past his bike leaving it lying against the side of the diner. He talked for a moment to a truck driver with a feathery beard and the man told him to climb on in.

    The truck left town and continued out onto the interstate. They drove south until they came to the bridge across which was another state. To Danny this might have been a foreign country or some other world. He had never been more than twenty miles from the farm in his whole life. He sat still and felt the ease with which the truck overtook the bridge and entered the new land. The river over which they rode was brilliant and turbulent and followed out to the horizon, it became the whole of everything he saw. For the first time the whole of everything around him was not bound by the firm, knowable ground of dirt, but instead it was fluid, unknown and stretching out farther and more comprehensively than anything he had ever known. He had known about the ocean. He knew about other states, other countries, other peoples, and he knew a list of attributes to describe all that he knew. This was what Mahon called "book knowledge." But now, going over this bridge, he saw that again Mahon had been right. He had known nothing at all of what it would be like. 

    "I've never seen the ocean before," Danny repeated to himself.

    The utter truth of it dawned on Danny even as he said it. Suddenly all the attributes of the ocean he had learned in school began to unshelve themselves from where he had stowed them in his mind. They passed before his memory, checking themselves against the gritty salt reality collecting on his skin, the tumultuous roar of the surf in his ear, the blinding white glare of the sun. When they came off the bridge, what he saw was identical to what he might have seen on the other side of the bridge in his own state, his own country, but now everything was different. 

~

It eventually came to be winter in a slow way that caused all of nature to die then suddenly revive – the grass green one day, then brown the next, then a sudden warm rain and green again – over and over again. Danny was used to nature dying all at once as it had up north where there was compassion in killing. Mahon insisted on the quick death of the slaughtered animals. A useless horse was not given a chance to suffer but was shot in the head. Here in this middle-ground, not north, not south, nature died slowly, through a variety of resuscitations.

    Danny drove on the highway and got off at a town along the Delaware. He went down on the river and watched the dark roiling water through the haze. A boy came walking along the bank, his feet slipping in the mud. He had no coat and his hands were wrapped in rags. He looked at Danny as he walked by but kept moving, slipping then righting himself. Danny noticed details about him not easily forgotten. Spindly legs sticking through a shredded pair of jeans. Pockmarked face. No whites in the eyes, pupils dim black bulbs. Hair singed at the tips, charred as if he'd been sleeping too close to a fire. The boy turned up a path and was gone. 

    Danny blinked and got back in his car. What kept him out in this fog was a promise that he would attend church, a promise that had gotten him room and board. He only had to sit and listen, but then there would be all those smiling people and handshakes and the questions meant to divine the heaven or the hell of Danny's afterlife. 

    "God," he hissed and smelled his own breath, a foul petulant air. 

~

Kids swarmed the entryway. He pushed through toward a rack of toppling coats. He put up his coat and stood behind a boy tip-toeing on a stool, leaning over a water fountain, one hand flat on top, the other wrapped around the side turning the star-shaped knob until the water streamed up.     The boy leaned down and sipped from the top of the iron-smelling curve of water, then Danny took his turn. 

    The auditorium opened through a swinging door and Danny looked up and down the pews. 

    Danny had found the man who wrote the letter still living at the same address after all these years. As it turned out, Charles was a tall, thin, brown-eyed man who could only be accused of fathering Mike. 

When Danny first heard that Mike was not his whole brother, Danny felt a weight leave him. Some boulder he had carried all these years rolled away.     He felt a tear cringe in the corner of his eye.

    As Charles told it, there had been many men prior to Mahon. It was particularly difficult to say who may have sired Danny. Danny had come during a tumultuous time. There had been fights, manly shows of bravado, in which all men seemed to hold reasonable claim to the woman who soon became Danny's mother.

    "You can't possibly know the lure of this girl. Nor was it April's fault—she tried to run," told Charles. "Hell, she fought me even a bit, but only in good show, you see! But there was nothing she could do to stop me. Not even the sight of your little baby eyes looking out at me from the crib. Your mother wouldn't even leave the room when she had us men over. She was afraid to leave you boys alone! Just think how much easier it must have been for that man who fathered you—with no baby eyes watching him all through the night. To think," he went on. "There were two sets of those eyes when Mahon finally won out and married her. And you must know," he said grinning, "what kind of a bad way Mahon must have been in, and what kind of girl was your mom to make such a man as Mahon to fight for a bride with two babies. Oh, your mother – quite a girl!"

    Danny heard many speeches along these lines. Confusing speeches that stirred up every emotion Danny could have about his mother. Sometimes they were short and uttered as a sigh interspersed into other meandering conversations. Other times, the conversation surrounded April herself and no one else. Danny got a sense that even now his mother lured Charles. Her body proved easy to capture, but she had not been confined to her body, and all of her was never had. 

~

Danny spotted Charles in the middle of a pew far up the rows nearing the front. Danny pushed back his hair as if to signify respect. He put his hands in his back pockets and shimmied down the aisle, knocking the old knees like dominoes until he reached the open seat waiting beside Charles. Charles sat in his Sunday pants, a linen shirt, with wet hair smelling like a bar of soap. He smiled crooked at Danny and patted his knee.

    Charles worked in the area as a truck driver delivering produce from farm to grocers and restaurants across the state. He drove nearly three hundred miles a day, sometimes more. He had thin emotionless eyes, accurate hands, calloused and large, yet nimble with all manner of tools and machines. He had a way with objects. 

    He said, "If you are good with your hands, you will have your luck with women, many women, and often. You won't need to talk to em at all. Women see you in your hands, and if you're to ask me, that is the most important thing."

    Danny heard this and saw the truth in it and how it described the difference between himself and Mike. He began to understand a bit more about his brother. Charles moved in long strides and always seemed to be going somewhere definitively. He smoked incessantly. He never cared for sitting at dinner and never sat around the tv. He was always out of chairs, carrying his plate, drinking from bottles. He wore a thin rut in the lawn below the porch where he smoked. When he drove, he leaned far down over the wheel, so even the wheel rested on his chest. He breathed heavy, smiled with all his teeth, and that smile could always be seen in the corner of his eyes, blue and shining. Whatever was Mike in Charles, God had found and submerged and throttled it to the point that Charles now spent every weekend breathing the Sunday morning hymnal air. 

    Beside Charles in the pew sat Charles' three boys. They nodded to Danny as he sat down. 

    "Nice to see you," one said. 

    "Good morning," another said. 

    "Some fog, huh?," said the third. They sank back in their seats as the preacher approached the pulpit. Their faces reflected each other in bizarre symmetries founded by Charles alone, no two boys being from one mother and each boy the same sixteen years of age. 

    When the sermon ended, Danny made a fast path for the door. Along the way, he still received multiple tight hand shakes, and one little lady managed to sneak in a quick, "God bless you, son. I hope you've had a chance to make Jesus your Savior today." Danny smiled, took back his hand, said "I'm fine today," and continued pushing toward the door.

~

The rain woke Danny early in the morning just as the clouds began to brighten into day outside his attic window. The rhythm of rain danced on the roof above him as he lay in bed. Winter remained in purgatory. The rain warmed the air. When it stopped, the temperature dropped, but there still was no snow. 

    The months had passed with Danny working in the kitchen of a small town diner. He made enough to pay his way, to buy and bide his time. He took his dinner at the counter after his hours. He drank coffee with the other men, old men who were unemployed enough to sit in diners. They ate pie and told stories. The old men commented on the rising price of pie. One man kept a bottle of ground garlic behind the counter and dosed his pie with it. 

    "The garlic is my own. They keep it for me here," he explained to Danny. "It's good for my heart and the brain, and I'll be damned if it don't taste good. You ought to try some." 

    "No thanks, sir. I'm all right for now."

    "It's good." 

    "I'm sure."

    The conversation inevitably turned to the weather. With men like this, remarks about the coming and going of rain, the blowing cold, the pushed-back winter are like commerce in a foreign country. Outside the country no one cares for the currency, but within a certain region, it is worth working all the hours in your day to carry a bit of it. 

    "Well winter is finally here. It's gonna be a cold one," said one. 

    "Oh. Certainly. It don't take a rocket-scientist to know that, Joe. Any old fool can see it's been saving itself up."

    "It's not like this every year?" Danny asked. 

    "No, we usually get snow about December."

    "We usually get a howler."

    "But not this year." 

    "No, this year we get it everyday."

    "I hate to think what might come of the crops." 

    "He's right you know."

    "Don't take a fool to see this much moisture and heat will frigg it all up." 

    The voices went on casting speculations upon what was nature's hand. Danny took a piece of pie up on the edge of his knife and held it before his nose. It contained sliced apples and specks of nutmeg. There was sauce of sugary syrup that held the fruit in position beneath a flaky layer of well-baked crust. He chewed and swallowed with distinct pleasure. He had sweat over those hot wet dishes and had been paid and used that money to buy this pie. He owned the pleasure and the privilege to eat. There was no obligation left after eating the pie. He upturned the fork over the edge of the plate. Danny motioned to the waitress. Her eyes were brown. Her skin was not any color at all. She took his money and he told her goodnight. 

     The weather outside had done its trick again; it had turned blistery cold. Danny drove home and crawled into bed in his small cot beneath the eaves. He listened to the wind. He stared up through the tiny dormer overhead at the empty sky until he fell asleep. In the night, Danny opened his eyes. At the foot of his bed he thought he had seen shadows move across the wall. He sat up to look. A blanket smothered him. Arms and hands tackled his thrashing mass and he hollered out for Charles. An arm clamped down on his mouth and a bandana tightened over his eyes and off he was carted. There was a bumpy loud ride in the back of a truck. Eventually, he was pulled out and dragged through a wood. Suddenly his eyes were open and a fire was lighting the night. A circle of boys stood around him, laughing as his eyes darted about like a caged rabbit. 

    "What in God's hell are you thinking?"

    The brothers all laughed, lit up by fire and what smelled like bourbon. 

    "Thought we'd take you camping." 

    "Yeah, nice night like this."

    They all laughed and set to making food. They motioned for him to sit on a log and he did. The boys all had that portion of Charles that made them easy to watch at work. Their hands moved with innate purpose, and each one as much Mike as the other. Danny saw his brother in each of them, but without history. They lacked Mike's silence. They had a few shared characteristics but not those eyes, and there was not the sense in them that things could be better and so they were not mournful and hurtful. They were light-hearted and content. They were not Mike. 

    "Looks like it could snow."

    "Could."

    "Won't hurt nothing, I suppose."

    "Naw. We got a fire and a truck if we get sick of it."

    They stayed close around the fire which had been burning for quite some time. He heard the water not far off and guessed they had taken him near the river. In the center of the clearing was an old wooden lean-to with beds laid out on couches of crates and wooden frames. This was a hunting station very similar to one Mahon kept back home. 

    "You want some food?"

    The tallest stood above him with eyes lit by fire. He took Danny's hand and pulled him up in a quick jerk. They fed Danny hard black steaks and potatoes cooked in the coals. They were good and with the beer it was a feast. 

    Time passed quickly and the body of brothers spoke incessantly in turn, all their voices alike. Danny drank many beers and began to laugh freely. One of the boys asked about Mike. 

    "Well he's back home that's all. I don't really know."

    "Does he know about us?"

    "I haven't talked to him."

    "You left on bad terms?"

    Danny had a long drink. He imagined Mike there with them, and suddenly, he felt a bit lonesome. 

    "Does he look like us?"

    "Yes."

    "What ways?"

    "About all of them, I guess. The eyes, though, you all have the same blue eyes, and somewhere round the mouth there is this thing. I can't explain it." 

    "Well, if he's some cross-breed between you and us, he must be one ugly son of a bitch!"

    The boys all laughed and Danny said it was so. They laughed some more in big bursts of smoke. The sky darkened. The boys decided to walk and hauled Danny up from where he sat drunk and smiling on a log. 

    Danny followed the boys through the woods until they came to a ladder. Each one climbed up and stood on the hunting stand looking off into the dark. One brother pulled up a rifle that Danny had not noticed before and handed it to Danny. 

    "Come on, brother, show us how the northern boys shoot." 

    Danny smiled and cocked it, lifted and fired into the bushes and stumbled drunkenly backward from the pull, laughing with them all. Another brother threw up a bottle and Danny quickly aimed and missed, firing wildly into the night. The shot rattled the branches and the bottle shattered below. 

When the snow started the boys had nearly finished the beer and bullets. Danny took the rifle again, and now barely standing, he leaned forward on one arm. The oldest of the brothers hurled a bottle outward and it tumbled end over end in sparse shuffle with falling snow and catching intermittent holds of moonlight in its opaque green cylinder. Danny fired. Somewhere out beyond the stand registered a hollow thump and there was the awful sound of a moan. The whole lot of boys looked at each other's faces seeing the glistening whites of fearful eyes. They jumped from the stand and ran.     Danny, drunk and confused, reached the body last. He knew what it was immediately, and vomited. 

    It was the scarred face, and what was left of those black eyes, now half-gone in the bloody snow. A face full of shot, the flesh torn away but he even now was still shivering. His long legs quivered bare and naked in the snow. Dying in tremors. Slowly becoming less able to breath, scratching with those rag-bound hands at what had been a face but was now barely bone. 

    "Step back," Danny said. The boys did not move. 

    "Step back, I say. He's already dead. Look at him. Step back."

    The boys receded. Danny saw only the boy. He raised the rifle. The rag-bound hands dropped beside the head. The noise of it slowly reverberated through the trees and over the motionless water telling what story might be told. No one spoke. They rolled the boy up in a sheet. In a desolate part of the woods, a hole was dug and the body dumped and covered. As they walked back, the boys looked older and as their supplies were packed, dragged and pushed into the truck, not a word was spoken among them. As they drove away, their tracks were already disappearing in the cover of new snow. 

    Before the sun rose the next morning, Danny woke and was forced to take the truck as a gift from Charles. He climbed into the driver's seat and the boys came to the window and shook hands. "Goodbye," they all said. Charles came toward the truck, hands in his pockets and said nothing. When the idle of the engine fell to a gentle thrumming and the air in the cab grew warm, Danny backed out the driveway and pulled into the road. In the mirror, he saw them in a row, each with one raised, unmoving, open-palmed left hand. 

    In the unending snow, Danny retraced the road he had first ridden in the hot summer beside the truck driver, rumbling high up off the pavement. Now it was Danny alone crossing back over the bridge. The bridge itself was but an icy black rail lined by hollow points of light coming from hanging lamps. The ocean was nowhere to be seen in the frozen dark. What was at first sight infinite and open proved to be a dark cold box in which Danny had become trapped. It felt like Danny was traveling within the cloud of the Almighty, like some anti-prophet seeing nothing but knowing without doubt what the darkness held. The headlights on his truck filled the vicinity with light but a distinct line of darkness wrapped about him at all times. The thin trail of asphalt possessed him and forced him to recognize the past and future as one, a circle, unending, infinite, a mutual darkness. 

    "Goddammit," he shouted into the cold shell of the truck.

    Like some colors on certain days, there are words that hold entire blocks of time to their own. They come from within. One word is a thousand words in one. Holistic and expansive. Damned is one of those. Not until it is something breathed does damnation's full horror take place. It is one thing to curse circumstances, things that disturb one's plans, that obscure one's path, but it is quite another thing for one to find themselves the brunt of their own curse. What can damned mean but a life so empty of meaning that words do not suffice to describe a vanquished life's untenable void.     Nothingness. 

~

Danny drove back down the dirt road he had pedaled up so long before. Now those same objects that had dissipated behind him one by one, dropping away from him as he pedaled, making his work lighter, easier with each pedal, they now reappeared, gained substance, reformed within him, rebound him with new force. Not the least of these forms was listening as the truck pulled up to the house. 

    Mahon, now thin and gray with bulging eyes, walked onto the porch in his long-johns and barefoot even in the falling snow. Danny killed the engine. Coming back to Mahon, walking up the wooden steps, smelling the odorless winter air, he recognized the hand that led him to be that cold, rectifying, the ephemeral hand of fate, and those long ago shadows he had once managed to pedal away now returned. As he stepped up on the porch it suddenly felt like he had never really gone away in the first place. 

~

They sat at the kitchen table. A florescent circular bulb mounted to the ceiling lit the room. Shadows fell in black and white patterns on the floor and table and walls. Danny saw around him a year's worth of life discarded like refuse on the floor. Unwashed dishes, caked in multiple layers of food, filled the sink and overflowed the counter. A plate beneath the radiator, a fork beneath the table with hair and dust clinging in its teeth, a spoon beneath the counter. Mahon's clothes along the edge of the room leading toward the laundry room—an erupting mass spilling forth from the long rusted washer and dryer. A wilted plant on the dryer. This house, which had once been orderly, was falling apart. 

    "Where have you been?" asked Mahon. His eyes glistened beneath his long white hair hanging down to his chin. His face was pale and riveted by age. He avoided looking directly at Danny as Danny talked, but he was always looking and Danny felt the weight of Mahon's thoughts -- heavy emotional things, uncharterable territories. Danny told Mahon everything. They talked into the night. Afterwards, Danny crawled into bed. In the moonlight, he could see about him the objects of his childhood, all returned to him and with more allure and power than before. It was his blanket that Danny missed the most. He didn't realize what it was until he had it again. The next morning, he woke in his own bed, and it was the comfort of his own blanket worn thin by only him that made him smile. To return to it after such a long absence was revelatory.

    Danny pushed down the blanket and looked around his room. The objects surrounding him reminded him of who he was as a child -- that proud, incoherent, silent and sentimental creature; and who he was now -- this proud, incoherent, silent and sentimental killer. He was shaking visibly in the sunlight, gripping the rim of the blanket when Mahon opened the door.

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