Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules

  William.

  He turned and scowled at corduroys and tube socks, all he could see of his brother. “What?”

  “They’re waiting for you,” William said in an odd voice. “In their bedroom.”

  And then he walked away.

  Before that, of course, were things Charlie didn’t know much about, being eight. He didn’t know about Nixon’s decision to send troops into Cambodia, or how that led to the shootings at Kent State, or how that led, in turn, to the smashed shop windows in his own hometown. He did know a little about the thirteen boys from the agricultural college arrested for rioting, because his father had been their lawyer. But he didn’t know how the trial, which had made the news every night for two weeks, spreading his father’s name across the state like goldenrod, had given his father the idea to run for office. He didn’t know what the Iowa House of Representatives was, or what people did with all those leaflets he left on their porches, or what it meant to win by a landslide. And he didn’t know his father was still riding the high of victory when he decided, a few days before leaving for the state capitol, to have The Talk.

  He didn’t know that’s where William had just come from, he only knew he’d been under the kitchen table, playing with army men, when his brother kicked him.

  It was true: his parents were waiting for him, sitting on the edge of their bed and beaming at him with wet eyes. His father sat him down and explained what adopted meant even though Charlie already knew from school; when you picked on the adopted kid he’d fight and say it was a lie, as if being adopted was the worst thing ever, worse than having no dad at all. Charlie stared at the floor and felt sick to his stomach, waiting for his parents to tell him he was adopted, too. Finally, he had to ask.

  His father leaned forward. He was a big man to begin with and when he leaned forward you couldn’t see anything else, he was it. “Would you be sad if you were?” his father asked.

  Charlie knew what his father wanted to hear—that Charlie wouldn’t give a dog’s fart because he still had the best parents in the world, who would love him forever.

  But all he could do was shrug.

  “Well,” his father said at last. “You’re not adopted, Charlie. You came from your mom and me.” He put his hands on Charlie’s shoulders. “But that doesn’t mean we love you any more or any less than William, or that he’s not your real brother. You understand? You boys will be brothers forever.”

  Charlie understood, but he was so happy not to be adopted he wanted to spread the news, he wanted to put it on a leaflet and hit every porch in the world.

  That night, Charlie sat down to dinner like a kid moving underwater, trying to look normal. William was still in the room the boys shared, no light showing under the door. A January wind was in the seams of the back door, moaning eerily. The house, the whole neighborhood, kept its back to open farmland and bore the first, hardest blows of weather. In the spring, the air was soaked in the smell of soil and manure, and at night you heard the cows bawl, and the horn of the freight trains was to warn them, William said, to stay off the tracks or else.

  Charlie pushed beans around on his plate and hated himself for being glad he wasn’t adopted. He told himself that if anyone ever teased the adopted kid at school again he’d help him fight, he swore to God he would.

  “Hey, baby,” his mother said, and his father lowered his cup of coffee.

  Charlie turned and there was William, hands in his pockets, squinting in the light. He stared at them, and for a second it looked like he might turn and leave, and that’s when Charlie moved. Jumped up and ran to him, locked his arms around him so tightly it was hard for William to get his hands out of his pockets. Finally he did, wiggled them out from under Charlie’s grip, and got his fingers around Charlie’s biceps and moved him, just so, aside. “Lay off, willya?” he said. “I’m hungry.”

  And that was that. The boys sat down, and Charlie didn’t whimper or even rub at the matching dents of pain in his arms where William had sunk his thumbs to the bone.

  Their father bought a second car for his trips to Des Moines, a green Cougar convertible, and one Sunday early in his term he took William and Charlie with him to show them where he sat in the session chamber, and they spent the night with him in the cramped, untidy trailer he rented near the interstate.

  “You think he likes this place more than home?” Charlie asked William that night. Their father had gone to meet someone, and William had his legs stretched out on a nappy brown sofa, studying the pages of a Playboy he’d found under the cushions. The trailer smelled like the inside of leather shoes and shower mildew and old pizza boxes, and Charlie could feel the hum of tractor-trailers through a stiff layer of carpet.

  “Shit, Charlie,” his brother replied, rising and heading for the toilet. “Wouldn’t you?”

  Their father was home for Christmas but then didn’t return for months, and Charlie’s mother told them that it was because he was writing bills and had to work extra hard to get them made into laws. William just stared at her, the same look on his face that always let Charlie know he’d said something really stupid, then walked away. He’d stopped cutting his hair and had begun to smell like cigarettes and car engines. At night when he came in, he’d crash into his bed with superhero exhaustion, as if he’d been pushed to the very limit of his powers. In the mornings Charlie watched him plod across the room in his underwear, his boner out before him like the nose of a German shepherd, and felt so puny he wanted to scream. He checked himself daily for signs of growth, but nothing changed, and he worried that something was wrong with him and that when William was a full-grown man, he would still be the hairless little nothing he was right then.

  William was right about their father preferring a smelly trailer to home, because when his two-year term was over and he went back to his law practice, he moved into another one in their hometown. He picked the boys up on Fridays in the Cougar and the three of them ate pizza and went out for breakfast and saw matinees and sat around the trailer watching TV until Sunday afternoon, when their father would let William, who by now had a driver’s permit, drive them back to the house.

  During the week, when Charlie got home from school he’d find William and his friends strewn in front of the TV like dead men, drinking Cokes and licking potato chip grease from their fingers. The boys called William Billy, and Charlie knew they had all cut school early, if they’d gone at all. William made sure to clear them out by the time their mother got home, but she could count Cokes and read the air with her nose, and she and William would both start yelling and Charlie would shut himself in his room until he heard the front door slam and he knew William had gone out again.

  One night, when she tried to keep William home for dinner, he told her to get off his back and she slapped him. Her handprint spread like a warning light over his face, and for a second Charlie thought he was going to slap her back. “Bitch,” he said, and she took a step back like he’d gone ahead and done it. Then he left, and the word “adopted” rose in Charlie’s throat like vomit, and he wanted to remind her that’s what William was and why he said it, because no real son, no flesh-and-blood son, would ever call his mother that name.

  Later that night, Charlie got up to pee and heard her on the phone. She said “Mason,” their father’s name, with a wobble in her throat, and when he came to get the boys the following Friday, William brought along two pillowcases full of clothes.

  Charlie didn’t miss William until the spring, when he began to hear the cows at night and the moaning trains and he’d remember how he used to fit on William’s bed with a flashlight while William made up stories about a gang of killers, whacked-out hippies forever hopping off trains and shooting people. Somehow the hippies always made their way across the fields right up to the living room window where Mason and Connie Whitford sat watching the news of the killing spree. When he told his stories, William’s eyes grew brilliant, super-blue, and they lit up a place where he and Charlie were equals, where they sna
pped into action at the exact same moment and they never failed.

  That April, after a month with William, Mason gave up trailers for good. He bought a house, a big old one in the middle of town, and when Charlie arrived for his first weekend he was amazed to learn that the upstairs bedroom with the new bed and the matching dresser and desk and the three windows was all for him. William had his own room on the other side of the wall and Mason’s was at the far end of the hall and had its own bathroom. Downstairs, you could reach full speed running from one end of the house to the other, and below that was a basement with a pool table the previous owner had left behind.

  His first night in the new house Charlie lay awake for hours, getting used to the shadows of the room and the drone of traffic outside his window. He was finally drifting off when the horn of a freight train, a single short blast, punched through and jerked him back. Warning bells rang in the streets and the horn sounded again, louder this time, so loud he was sure the train was heading right for the house. But the next blast of the horn was weaker, a deflating balloon, and he heard the clacking of the wheels on the rails and it calmed his heart, that rhythm, and he slept.

  Mason came downstairs the next night stinking of Brut after-shave and wearing blue jeans that made Charlie laugh. He was going out to dinner with a friend, he told them, and William was in charge.

  William stared at the TV. The Six Million Dollar Man was jumping a wall.

  “William,” his father said.

  “Yeah?”

  “I said you’re going to be in charge for a few hours. Can you handle that?”

  “No sweat.”

  Charlie watched his father standing there squeezing his car keys in his fist, his eyes dark, and for the first time in his life Charlie actually wanted him to go, to leave them alone.

  Finally, with a pat to Charlie’s head, he did.

  “Who’s his friend?” Charlie asked when their father was gone.

  “What day of the week is it?”

  Charlie told him but William just smirked and lit a Camel.

  “Dad lets you smoke?”

  “Fuck, no.” He got up and moved to the open window. “Dad’s a fascist.”

  “What’s that?”

  “He’s the guy who ends up full of bullet holes with old ladies pissing on him in the town square.”

  Charlie chewed an already raw fingernail. He couldn’t believe the things a sixteen-year-old knew, especially one who never went to school.

  William eyed him. “You gonna narc on me?”

  Charlie shook his head and William took a studious drag on the cigarette. “How ’bout if I split for a while? You gonna be cool with that?”

  “If you take me with you.”

  “Not a chance.”

  A car horn honked loudly, once, and William flicked his cigarette out the window. Charlie jumped up, but William put a hand on his shoulder, sank his thumb into the flesh above his collarbone. “I can count on you, Charlie, can’t I?” The pressure made Charlie feel like a puppet, like William could make his legs buckle with just the right kind of squeeze.

  “Yes,” he said, refusing to squirm.

  “Promise to God and hope to die?”

  “Yes.”

  William let go. “Outstanding,” he said, then he left, banging the screen door behind him. Charlie watched him climb behind the wheel of a Chevy Impala the color of an army tank. A girl with straight red hair mashed her lips against his for a full minute, her fingers deep in his hair, before he finally gunned the engine and backed out of the drive, leaving tracks.

  Two hours later Mason called, and Charlie picked up.

  Something was coming down the hallway, fast and loud in the middle of the night.

  His bed shook and wood exploded and Charlie flattened himself against the mattress, ready for the floor to drop out from under him. “Get up!” his father yelled.

  Not at Charlie. At William, on the other side of the wall. He was in William’s room. He’d kicked in the door.

  “What for?” William tried to sound tough.

  “Because I told you to.”

  “Christ, Dad. Can’t it—”

  Bedsprings creaked and something hit the floor, and Charlie heard footsteps like two giant kids practicing a dance. “Get! Up!” Mason yelled. “Get up when I tell you!” The dance thudded out into the hall and something, an elbow or a head, bounced against Charlie’s door. “Open the door when I tell you,” his father said. “Watch your brother when I tell you.”

  “He can watch himself! He’s not a baby!”

  “I don’t care.”

  They moved down the hall, and Charlie heard William grunt and his father bark back, “Don’t you—don’t you even try it,” and Charlie’s bed picked up the shock waves of William slamming into a wall. “Whattaya gonna do, Dad?” William’s voice rose and came apart. “Gonna hit me? Go ahead! Hit me! Hit me, Dad!”

  “Don’t test me, William, I warn you.”

  And then the dance moved on, in bursts and thuds, down the stairs and all the way to the opposite end of the house, where it either stopped or merely ceased to distinguish itself, at that distance, from Charlie’s banging heart.

  In the morning, Charlie made an inspection of the door. The jamb was split vertically, and a shard of it lay in the middle of William’s room, the brass strike plate still attached and looking stunned, like a mouth knocked from a face.

  Charlie spent the rest of the day pretending to read comic books or watch TV, waiting to see William. But he never showed up, and Charlie went back to his mother’s thinking William had stayed away because of him—that he never wanted to see Charlie’s ugly little narc face again.

  He didn’t see him again until the following Saturday afternoon. Mason was in the middle of a trial and had gone to the office, so Charlie was alone in the house when William walked in and slugged him in the shoulder. Charlie raised his arms, expecting more, but William was grinning.

  “Get your shoes, Charlie Horse.”

  Outside, Charlie saw the tank-colored Chevy and stopped short. Blood filled his chest. He couldn’t breathe right.

  “What’s with you?” William worked up a gob of spit, sent it flying. “Look,” he said. “I promise you’ll be back before he ever knows you were gone. OK?”

  The car was full of big teenagers with long hair and army jackets like William’s—and the girl Charlie had seen before with the straight red hair. She and one of the boys shifted to let William behind the wheel, and two boys in back made room for Charlie. “Fuckin’A!” a boy with great shining pimples said. “Fresh troops!” He blew smoke in Charlie’s face that didn’t smell like cigarettes. Charlie coughed, and the girl craned around and stunned him with white teeth and the biggest, greenest eyes he’d ever seen. She looked right at him and kept smiling and said, “Happy birthday, Charlie.”

  The girl’s name was Colleen and she was a Foosball wizard. Three times during the game she held the ball in place with one of her men while she put her hand over Charlie’s and moved his men just so. Then, with a snap of her wrist he couldn’t even see, she scored on William and the boy with pimples. William laughed, but the boy with pimples called her a cheater and she told him to grow up, dickweed. The boy glared at Charlie and asked William, out of the side of his mouth as if Charlie wouldn’t hear him that way, “He retarded, or what?”

  William stared hard at the boy, then gave Charlie a grin. “You retarded, Charlie?”

  Charlie was still floating from Colleen’s hand on his, and he couldn’t imagine any idiot thing a dickweed with pimples could say to bring him down, so he just shook his head.

  “He don’t say much, do he,” the boy said, and William said, “No, he don’t. But he’s thinking, man. He thinks more in a day than you do in a year.”

  “Right,” the boy said, and Colleen snapped her wrist and the ball disappeared with a bang.

  When it was time to go, William had to drag Charlie from the pinball machines, but Charlie was twelve, to
o old to make a scene, so he jammed his hands in his pockets and tried to look bored. William hooked an arm around Colleen and dropped his hand on her breast for a quick, secret squeeze. “Back in a flash,” he told her. She smiled at Charlie and it was too much, he had to look away.

  William drove fast, a grim expression on his face, and when they came to the railroad tracks he locked up the brakes and pounded the steering wheel so hard Charlie couldn’t believe it didn’t crack. They were at the end of a line of cars waiting for a train to pass. The central hub of the Rock Island Railway was not far away, and the people who lived here, it sometimes seemed, lived in the spaces between its lines like prisoners. Freighters plowed through day and night, trains without head or tail, and there was nothing you could do but sit and wait.

  William jammed the Chevy into Park and thumbed in the electric lighter. He pushed his hair back from his face, lit a Camel, and dropped the pack on the seat. Charlie breathed in the first cloud of smoke, always the best-smelling one, and picked up the pack. William didn’t seem to notice or care as Charlie pulled out one of the Camels with his lips, the way William did. And he didn’t budge when Charlie pushed in the electric lighter. But when the lighter popped and Charlie steered the red coil toward the tip of the Camel, his brother reached over and plucked the cigarette from his mouth.

  “You gotta do everything I do? You want Mason breaking down your door at two A.M.?”

  Charlie recalled that night and was disgusted with himself—cowering in his room like a pussy while William got the crap beaten out of him, all because Charlie hadn’t been smart enough, or brave enough, to come up with a lie on the phone.

  He’d tell him he was sorry, he decided. Right now.

  He’d tell him before that red boxcar crossed the road…

  Before the end of the train…

  But he didn’t, and the red lights stopped flashing and the Chevy was moving again and Charlie watched his chance slip away with the caboose.