Sons From Afar

  “Why?”

  “They want to know. Don’t you, kids?”

  He asked them both but he was looking at Sammy. Sammy didn’t move a muscle.

  “I’m thirty-one. My birthday’s in August, and I’ll be thirty-two then.” Alex was pleased with himself. “Frankie talked to me a lot, and he liked to talk about the islands. He’d take me ashore with him, too, if I wanted to go. And help me—change money and pick out a present my mother would like—because he wanted me to be his friend.” He raised his voice to speak over the others’ mocking responses, but he wasn’t upset by them. “He didn’t have friends but he wanted them.”

  The chief made laughing noises, but he wasn’t laughing. “And how much money did he take off you?” he asked Alex.

  “I gave it to him,” Alex said. “That’s different.” But he didn’t entirely believe himself, and James was sorry for that. He didn’t think the chief should have raised that doubt. You made allowances for someone like Alex, you handled him differently. But these men didn’t. Maybe men didn’t? But Francis Verricker had.

  They had run out of things to say at their table. James noticed then that the rest of the room was pretty quiet too—like an audience sitting ringside, they’d been watching the conversation. He looked around at all the watching faces, and at the unwatched flat face of the TV screen. The bartender was back safe behind his bar again, leaning on it with his elbows.

  There was something wrong about to happen. James knew it in his stomach. He tried to tell Sammy, without words, that it was time for them to get out. Sammy wouldn’t meet his eyes. James didn’t dare do anything more than look at his brother, hard, and will him to realize what was about to get started—whatever that was. James didn’t have the nerve to get up himself and leave; he just felt the blood racing around his body, warning him, scaring him, the blood itself panicky like a mouse cornered by the cat. The proverbial mouse. Or the proverbial rabbit, he thought, his body frozen where it was, not responding to his will, the rabbit mesmerized by the snake. Sammy, he yelled out inside his head, and his brother didn’t answer. He couldn’t tell from the voice whether it was a warning or a cry for help.

  “Now,” the chief leaned forward, practically pushing his face into Sammy’s, “you tell me something. You tell me what your interest is in Frank Verricker. What’s a piece of slime like that got to do with you?”

  Words caught in James’s throat, because fear had cramped up the muscles around his voice box. Say money, he silently urged Sammy. That lie had been given to them. Telling it would put them on the side of these men. Say he owes us money. Pick any number, anything reasonable, two hundred dollars would be good. His heart was being squeezed and the words being pushed up—like toothpaste—but his throat was capped by fear and he couldn’t speak.

  “He’s my father,” Sammy said, quiet and angry.

  The chief smiled, showing his two dead teeth. “Well, well. Imagine that. Frankie Verricker’s your daddy.”

  James couldn’t even think. He could only wait to see what happened next, and hope it would be over soon. “Your daddy too?” the chief asked him.

  James wanted to say no. He wanted to stay clear. He looked at Sammy—Sammy didn’t mind whatever James said, because Sammy was speaking only for himself. James nodded his head, yes. He couldn’t do any more than nod.

  “Really?” Alex asked him. James nodded again. “No kidding?” Alex’s smile was entirely happy. His blue eyes shone. “I didn’t know Frankie had any kids. He never said. Wow.” He reached out to shake James’s hand. Dazed, not thinking, James shook hands with the young man. “I’m really glad,” Alex said, turning to Sammy, shaking Sammy’s hand. Sammy smiled back at him, looking like he meant it. “That’s so great,” Alex said to the rest of the table. “Isn’t it?”

  “I guess,” the chief said, “old Frankie really did take your old lady—”

  Frozen in his seat, riveted down by fear, choked by it, James tried to warn his brother’s face—don’t.

  But Sammy went ahead and interrupted the man. “I’d rather have him for a father than you. Any day.”

  The man lifted his arm and hit Sammy, backhanded him across the face. It happened so fast, James didn’t really see it. Then it was over, and Sammy’s head was back where it had been. Maybe, James hoped, it hadn’t happened. Maybe that would show Sammy they were in over their heads. Maybe the chief wouldn’t remember that he, James, was there and then he, James, would get off without being hurt.

  “Any day,” Sammy repeated. “And twice over.”

  Shut up, Sammy, James thought. Please.

  But Sammy hadn’t, and the big hand returned, and when Sammy’s face was back in place again, there was some blood coming from his lip.

  “Hey,” James protested, squeezing his voice out. Alex laid a hand on his shoulder, to quiet him.

  “I said,” the chief told Sammy, “I’d take my twelve hundred in cash, or in blood.” He was threatening Sammy, menacing him, challenging him. The whole room waited, as if this was what they’d been waiting for.

  Sammy didn’t hurry and he didn’t hesitate. He got up out of his chair and stood clear of the table.

  “Kid,” Nairne protested. “Don’t be a fool. Sit down.”

  Sammy ignored him.

  The chief got up, satisfied. James looked around the room, to see who would help. Grown men didn’t fight a kid; it wasn’t even a fight. Somebody had to stop the chief. The bartender had moved back against the mirror, as far into safety as he could, and his little black eyes watched eagerly. You could almost see his nose twitching over the thin mustache.

  “You’re as dumb as your father,” the chief said to Sammy. The chief was huge, thick chested, thick muscled.

  “He’s just a kid,” James squeezed out the words. “You can’t—”

  The chief looked at him then, and his heart shriveled up inside him, and his voice faded away, slinking back down his throat. “It’s like the good book says,” the chief said, to a round of laughter, “the sins of the fathers shall be visited upon the sons. Until the seventh generation.” He was pleased with himself, at the Bible quote, at the joke.

  James got up then—he didn’t know what he was doing. He moved around toward the space between Sammy and the man, and he talked at the same time. “That’s ridiculous.” He didn’t want to move closer, but he couldn’t stop himself now, any more than he could make himself move just a minute before. “It’s entirely irrelevant.” He could barely hear his own voice, his heart was beating so loudly in his ears. “That has nothing to do with—”

  James thought, in the rush of movement that followed—which he was somehow at the center of although he had no time to figure out what was happening—he thought he heard Sammy’s voice. But he wasn’t sure. He wasn’t sure what was happening. Until he felt his chest slammed into the wooden front of the bar, he didn’t know he couldn’t breathe. Until he could breathe, he didn’t realize that his head was being held down, his ear in some wet smelly unwiped spill, held by hands that were more like rat claws, clawlike fingers digging up his nose and wishing they could dig into his eyeballs. His feet barely touched the floor and he was held there. He’d been tossed across the room, like—like a duffel bag or something.

  Thumping noises behind him. Men’s voices saying things he couldn’t distinguish and didn’t want to. James didn’t fight—he didn’t know how to fight. He didn’t want to—but he couldn’t see. And he couldn’t see his brother.

  He wrenched his body free, which was a mistake. Fear had gone to his legs and he collapsed onto the floor. He wasn’t angry, he was frightened—every cell in his body wanted to curl up and be invisible. He was frightened that he’d be hurt and frightened of fighting and frightened of standing up because he couldn’t and frightened he’d wet his pants and—

  James forced himself up. He saw Sammy sort of catapulted toward a booth, his arms loose and flailing. Sammy crashed into the side of the booth and his arms crashed down. The men nearby backed
away.

  Sammy didn’t even hesitate, he just turned right back—with his head lowered and his nose bleeding too, now, along with his mouth—moving toward the man in the center of the room.

  James pushed his body off from the bar, like pushing a boat away from the dock. An arm went across his chest, pinning him back. He didn’t look to see whose it was. His eyes were on Sammy, on his brother’s yellow head which the big man held now under his arm, choking Sammy’s neck. A voice spoke low in his ear. “Chief’s always mean when he’s lost at cards. He lost a month’s wages in there tonight. It’ll be over soon.”

  It wasn’t being over soon, it was lasting forever.

  Sammy twisted in the huge arms. His legs kicked backward, not often connecting and those blows weak, anyway, because he wore sneakers. Deep voices commented on the fight, saying what James didn’t know, didn’t care. Watching, James saw what the chief couldn’t see—Sammy’s mouth opening to bite down hard on the hairy arm that held him, even while the huge hand twisted at his head.

  Don’t do that, James thought and at the same time Smart move. He didn’t know what he thought.

  The teeth—in a time zone that stretched out into slower than slow motion—closed on the flesh of the arm.

  “You little bastard,” the chief roared. He was hurt, James saw, glad. But he spun Sammy around and slammed a fist against the boy’s ear. Sammy careened backward, and fell down.

  That was it then, James thought, relieved. KO, knockout.

  But Sammy got up again. His legs started to buckle but he pulled himself up with the help of a chair. He headed back to the man. Sammy just wasn’t going to quit.

  The chief held his arms out, his fingers motioning Sammy forward, encouraging him—like a father teaching his kid how to walk, James thought. It was all wrong and somebody had to stop Sammy.

  “Come on, kid,” the chief coaxed Sammy.

  And Sammy came on.

  James—trying to slip out from under the barring arm because—it was his brother, it was Sammy—trying to breathe—heard the low voice in his ear reassuring him that Frank used to get the chief going and then he’d slip out of the trouble somehow. He heard the voice urging him to relax, promising it would be over soon—and now James was afraid he’d just burst into tears. He was so useless, so helpless—and he was supposed to be so smart. If he was so smart, what had he been doing letting Sammy get them into this mess? And what was he going to do? There wasn’t anything he could do, for all his useless brains. For all his brainy philosophy about how because life was brief things didn’t matter. Sammy mattered.

  He couldn’t get Sammy out of this. He looked at his brother’s battered face. The chief was taking his time now. Everybody was quiet. They were just two kids, and helpless—

  “I think you’d better stop this now,” a voice spoke.

  James almost looked around to see who it was, speaking, except he didn’t want to take his eyes off Sammy. As long as he had his eyes touching Sammy, maybe things might—and besides, it was his own voice anyway—sounding normal almost. Sounding cool and sure, like he was giving the right answer in class.

  His voice went on and he knew what it was going to say. “Unless you want to really beat up on him. But I can’t imagine any jury being sympathetic about men beating up on a couple of kids.”

  He said men on purpose, not man. He said men because he wanted everybody in the room responsible. Because, he knew, as if he’d had time to think it out, if each man thought he’d be held responsible, and arrested, then each man would have something personal invested in ending it. To save his own skin.

  “Yeah,” he heard the low voice at his ear, and other voices too. “The kid’s right. Hey, Chief? How about a beer? Let the kid go and let’s have a beer.”

  The chief didn’t like that. James couldn’t tell if Sammy heard anything: Sammy just stood there, swaying toward his enemy. Getting ready to make his move.

  The chief looked around, then back at Sammy. He reached down into his workboot and pulled out something that flashed silver, whether against Sammy or against the now unenthusiastic crowd, James never knew, because when they saw that, the men around surged into the fight, and Sammy was swallowed up.

  Two men moved to hold on to the chief. The man whose arm had been across James’s chest left him, to stand or fall there, as other men joined in to pull off the men holding the chief. James heard the sound of breaking glass behind him, smelled the thick, sharp aroma of whiskey; out of the corner of his eye he saw a hand holding up the neck of a broken glass bottle, holding it like a weapon. The room filled with sound—voices and furniture and a rumbling, growling undertone; the room filled with a mass of confused bodies. James slid between legs and hips to grab his brother. He hauled Sammy behind him, out the door. Running, he hauled Sammy down the dark street, away.

  It was dark out there, with only one streetlight at the corner, and only little thin lines of light from behind the windows. It was dark and Sammy was just dragging along beside James, and that was wrong. James pulled his brother into an alley. He pulled him back into the dark narrow space, behind a few metal garbage cans that clattered as Sammy stumbled into them. There, they both sank down onto the ground.

  The wall was behind James. He leaned his back against it. Sammy was right up next to him. He could hear Sammy breathing and feel the length of his brother’s body. It didn’t matter if he couldn’t see, as long as he could hear and feel. After a couple of minutes, when Sammy’s breathing had gotten quieter, and his own had too, James said his brother’s name into the darkness. “Sammy?”

  No answer. Maybe Sammy couldn’t speak, maybe his jaw had been busted, or his windpipe—but his breathing was okay—maybe his brains had been knocked sideways, if that could happen—and James thought: He could have murdered Francis Verricker if he’d had the man there. For what he’d done to them.

  Ripples ran along the body next to him, and choking sounds came from it. James turned to Sammy, not getting up—he couldn’t have stood up right then if his life depended on it. But his life didn’t depend on it. Which was wonderful to know.

  “Some fight, hunh?” Sammy’s voice, choked with laughter, asked him.

  Before James could think of a suitable answer, Sammy burst into tears, choking over them. “I hurt,” he wailed softly. “James? I hurt.”

  James kept an arm around Sammy, thinking. Thinking what to do next. He didn’t know where they were. He didn’t know what time it was. He didn’t know what to do.

  Sammy’s tears were as sudden and brief as the laughter. By the time James realized what happened, he knew that his brother was asleep—with James’s arm around him and his head heavy against James’s chest. Sammy was sound asleep, his face still washed with his own tears and his own blood.

  CHAPTER 14

  James couldn’t sleep. He sat there, his back to a shingled wall, his legs drawn up, the weight of his sleeping brother against his chest. His eyes adjusted to the dark, but the dark was so complete he could only see his own body, and Sammy’s; beyond that, nothing, just the sense of close walls. It was like a cave, but reversed. The outside was the darkness and where he and Sammy were was a small area of visibility.

  Street noises, TVs and rock music, came down the alley to him and kept him awake, then the sound of sirens at a distance, growing closer. He couldn’t see out into the street, so he had to deduce information from sounds, and the play of flashing lights into the alley. He guessed, from the sounds, that the police had come to settle the fight. He guessed, from a later siren, one that wailed higher and longer than the police, that an ambulance had been called. Lights flashed red, white, blue, and then yellow, too, down into the alley. They’d gotten out just in time. James thought about getting up and going out, to ask the police for help—but didn’t have the strength to move, didn’t want to wake Sammy, didn’t know whether they’d be held somehow responsible and put into cells, as instigators or vagrants. The law, he knew, could be implacable. He didn’t know whe
re, under the law, he and his brother would be placed. He wondered—his mind wandering against the sounds of raised voices and commands called out, of protest and denial—who had called the police. Probably the bartender, especially if he was also Al the owner. Like a rat deserting the sinking sailors.

  James would have laughed at that thought, only it was the most he could do to smile to himself. Besides, he might wake up Sammy—who must be exhausted to sleep through this commotion. In the silence that fell after the street emptied, James’s memories kept him awake.

  He stared at the darkness he couldn’t see into, and remembered. The remarkable thing was that he had noticed and registered so much, even while he had felt as if he wasn’t functioning at all. While he had been mindlessly getting through the moments, not doing anything, his brain had been storing up pictures. The more minutes that passed by, the more time that lay between him and what had happened, the more vivid his memory grew. He saw faces, saw their expressions—saw in memory Alex’s boyish face and the way the opened blue eyes and opened mouth expressed fear when Chief turned to him, the knife blade shining. Hands grabbed for the chief’s arm as the memory continued, and James hoped it wasn’t Alex the ambulance had come for. He heard that voice low in his ear again, saying he should just lay low, reminding him that Frankie never got caught up into this kind of trap—Yeah, he’d just baited it and set it, James thought. His memory heard Sammy’s breathing, heavy—hard work, breathing; a cry of pain—he saw Sammy getting up from the floor to go for the big man again.

  His brother, James thought—almost drowning under a feeling that rolled up from inside him, and rolled over him, rolling him over—Sammy. Sammy might be foolish, but he had courage. He had more courage than any other man in that place. Sammy had stood up to the chief in their conversation, while James had been silly with fear. Sammy had stood up to him and stayed standing up, no matter what. James knew it was because of Sammy that he had himself stood up, at least to some extent, against the man: because he was standing with Sammy. He wanted to wrap his other arm around his brother—he was so grateful to him—and proud of him. He didn’t envy Sammy, but he admired him. And loved him, he thought; mostly loved him.