Mr. Mercedes

  One night, before taking Deborah Ann out to dinner, the boyfriend told Brady, Your mother's a charmer and so are you. Brady smiled and said thank you and hoped the boyfriend would get in a car accident and die. As long as his mother wasn't with him, that was. The boyfriend with the scary teeth had no right to take his father's place.

  That was Brady's job.

  Frankie choked on the apple during The Blues Brothers. It was supposed to be a funny movie. Brady didn't see what was so funny about it, but his mother and Frankie laughed fit to split. His mother was happy and all dressed up because she was going out with her boyfriend. In a little while the sitter would come in. The sitter was a stupid greedyguts who always looked in the refrigerator to see what was good to eat as soon as Deborah Ann left, bending over so her fat ass stuck out.

  There were two snack-bowls on the coffee table; one contained popcorn, the other apple slices dusted with cinnamon. In one part of the movie people sang in church and one of the Blues Brothers did flips all the way up the center aisle. Frankie was sitting on the floor and laughed hard when the fat Blues Brother did his flips. When he drew in breath to laugh some more, he sucked a piece of cinnamon-dusted apple slice down his throat. That made him stop laughing. He began to jerk around and claw at his neck instead.

  Brady's mother screamed and grabbed him in her arms. She squeezed him, trying to make the piece of apple come out. It didn't. Frankie's face went red. She reached into his mouth and down his throat, trying to get at the piece of apple. She couldn't. Frankie started to lose the red color.

  "Oh-my-dear-Jesus," Deborah Ann cried, and ran for the phone. As she picked it up she shouted at Brady, "Don't just sit there like an asshole! Pound him on the back!"

  Brady didn't like to be shouted at, and his mother had never called him an asshole before, but he pounded Frankie on the back. He pounded hard. The piece of apple slice did not come out. Now Frankie's face was turning blue. Brady had an idea. He picked Frankie up by his ankles so Frankie's head hung down and his hair brushed the rug. The apple slice did not come out.

  "Stop being a brat, Frankie," Brady said.

  Frankie continued to breathe--sort of, he was making little breezy whistling noises, anyway--almost until the ambulance got there. Then he stopped. The ambulance men came in. They were wearing black clothes with yellow patches on the jackets. They made Brady go into the kitchen, so Brady didn't see what they did, but his mother screamed and later he saw drops of blood on the carpet.

  No apple slice, though.

  Then everyone except Brady went away in the ambulance. He sat on the couch and ate popcorn and watched TV. Not The Blues Brothers; The Blues Brothers was stupid, just a bunch of singing and running around. He found a movie about a crazy guy who kidnapped a bunch of kids who were on their schoolbus. That was pretty exciting.

  When the fat sitter showed up, Brady said, "Frankie choked on an apple slice. There's ice cream in the refrigerator. Vanilla Crunch. Have as much as you want." Maybe, he thought, if she ate enough ice cream, she'd have a heart attack and he could call 911.

  Or just let the stupid bitch lay there. That would probably be better. He could watch her.

  Deborah Ann finally came home at eleven o'clock. The fat sitter had made Brady go to bed, but he wasn't asleep, and when he came downstairs in his pj's, his mother hugged him to her. The fat babysitter asked how Frankie was. The fat babysitter was full of fake concern. The reason Brady knew it was fake was because he wasn't concerned, so why would the fat babysitter care?

  "He's going to be fine," Deborah Ann said, with a big smile. Then, when the fat babysitter was gone, she started crying like crazy. She got her wine out of the refrigerator, but instead of pouring it into a glass, she drank straight from the neck of the bottle.

  "He might not be," she told Brady, wiping wine from her chin. "He's in a coma. Do you know what that is?"

  "Sure. Like in a doctor show."

  "That's right." She got down on one knee, so they were face-to-face. Having her so close--smelling the perfume she'd put on for the date that never happened--gave him a feeling in his stomach. It was funny but good. He kept looking at the blue stuff on her eyelids. It was weird but good.

  "He stopped breathing for a long time before the EMTs could make some room for the air to go down. The doctor at the hospital said that even if he comes out of his coma, there might be brain damage."

  Brady thought Frankie was already brain-damaged--he was awful stupid, carrying around that fire truck all the time--but said nothing. His mother was wearing a blouse that showed the tops of her titties. That gave him a funny feeling in his stomach, too.

  "If I tell you something, do you promise never to tell anyone? Not another living soul?"

  Brady promised. He was good at keeping secrets.

  "It might be better if he does die. Because if he wakes up and he's brain-damaged, I don't know what we'll do."

  Then she clasped him to her and her hair tickled the side of his face and the smell of her perfume was very strong. She said: "Thank God it wasn't you, honeyboy. Thank God for that."

  Brady hugged her back, pressing his chest against her titties. He had a boner.

  Frankie did wake up, and sure enough, he was brain-damaged. He had never been smart ("Takes after his father," Deborah Ann said once), but compared to the way he was now, he had been a genius in those pre-apple slice days. He had toilet-trained late, not until he was almost three and a half, and now he was back in diapers. His vocabulary had been reduced to no more than a dozen words. Instead of walking he made his way around the house in a limping shuffle. Sometimes he fell abruptly and profoundly asleep, but that was only in the daytime. At night, he had a tendency to wander, and before he started out on these nocturnal safaris, he usually stripped off his Pampers. Sometimes he got into bed with his mother. More often he got in with Brady, who would awake to find the bed soaked and Frankie staring at him with goofy, creepy love.

  Frankie had to keep going to the doctor. His breathing was never right. At its best it was a wet wheeze, at its worst, when he had one of his frequent colds, a rattling bark. He could no longer eat solid food; his meals had to be pureed in the blender and he ate them in a highchair. Drinking from a glass was out of the question, so it was back to sippy cups.

  The boyfriend from the bank was long gone, and the fat babysitter didn't last, either. She said she was sorry, but she just couldn't cope with Frankie the way he was now. For awhile Deborah Ann got a fulltime home care lady to come in, but the home care lady ended up getting more money than Deborah Ann made at the beauty shop, so she let the home care lady go and quit her job. Now they were living off savings. She began to drink more, switching from wine to vodka, which she called a more efficient delivery system. Brady would sit with her on the couch, drinking Pepsi. They would watch Frankie crawl around on the carpet with his fire truck in one hand and his blue sippy cup, also filled with Pepsi, in the other.

  "It's shrinking like the icecaps," Deborah Ann would say, and Brady no longer had to ask her what it was. "And when it's gone, we'll be out on the street."

  She went to see a lawyer (in the same strip mall where Brady would years later flick an annoying goofy-boy in the throat) and paid a hundred dollars for a consultation. She took Brady with her. The lawyer's name was Greensmith. He wore a cheap suit and kept sneaking glances at Deborah Ann's titties.

  "I can tell you what happened," he said. "Seen it before. That piece of apple left just enough space around his windpipe to let him keep breathing. It's too bad you reached down his throat, that's all."

  "I was trying to get it out!" Deborah Ann said indignantly.

  "I know, any good mother would do the same, but you pushed it deeper instead, and blocked his windpipe entirely. If one of the EMTs had done that, you'd have a case. Worth a few hundred thousand at least. Maybe a million-five. Seen it before. But it was you. And you told them what you did. Didn't you?"

  Deborah Ann admitted she had.

  "Did they in
tubate him?"

  Deborah Ann said they did.

  "Okay, that's your case. They got an airway into him, but in doing so, they pushed that bad apple in even deeper." He sat back, spread his fingers on his slightly yellowed white shirt, and peeped at Deborah Ann's titties again, maybe just to make sure they hadn't slipped out of her bra and run away. "Hence, brain damage."

  "So you'll take the case?"

  "Happy to, if you can pay for the five years it'll drag through the courts. Because the hospital and their insurance providers will fight you every step of the way. Seen it before."

  "How much?"

  Greensmith named a figure, and Deborah Ann left the office, holding Brady's hand. They sat in her Honda (then new) and she cried. When that part was over, she told him to play the radio while she ran another errand. Brady knew what the other errand entailed: a bottle of efficient delivery system.

  She relived her meeting with Greensmith many times over the years, always ending with the same bitter pronouncement: "I paid a hundred dollars I couldn't afford to a lawyer in a suit from Men's Wearhouse, and all I found out was I couldn't afford to fight the big insurance companies and get what was coming to me."

  The year that followed was five years long. There was a life-sucking monster in the house, and the monster's name was Frankie. Sometimes when he knocked something over or woke Deborah Ann up from a nap, she spanked him. Once she lost it completely and punched him in the side of the head, sending him to the floor in a twitching, eye-rolling daze. She picked him up and hugged him and cried and said she was sorry, but there was only so much a woman could take.

  She went into Hair Today as a sub whenever she could. On these occasions she called Brady in sick at school so he could babysit his little brother. Sometimes Brady would catch Frankie reaching for stuff he wasn't supposed to have (or stuff that belonged to Brady, like his Atari Arcade handheld), and then he would slap Frankie's hands until Frankie cried. When the wails started, Brady would remind himself that it wasn't Frankie's fault, he had brain damage from that damn, no, that fucking apple slice, and he would be overcome by a mixture of guilt, rage, and sorrow. He would take Frankie on his lap and rock him and tell him he was sorry, but there was only so much a man could take. And he was a man, Mom said so: the man of the house. He got good at changing Frankie's diapers, but when there was poo (no, it was shit, not poo but shit), he would sometimes pinch Frankie's legs and shout at him to lay still, damn you, lay still. Even if Frankie was laying still. Laying there with Sammy the Fire Truck clutched to his chest and looking up at the ceiling with his big stupid brain-damaged eyes.

  That year was full of sometimes.

  Sometimes he loved Frankie up and kissed him.

  Sometimes he'd shake him and say This is your fault, we're going to have to live in the street and it's your fault.

  Sometimes, putting Frankie to bed after a day at the beauty parlor, Deborah Ann would see bruises on the boy's arms and legs. Once on his throat, which was scarred from the tracheotomy the EMTs had performed. She never commented on these.

  Sometimes Brady loved Frankie. Sometimes he hated him. Usually he felt both things at the same time, and it gave him headaches.

  Sometimes (mostly when she was drunk), Deborah Ann would rail at the train-wreck of her life. "I can't get assistance from the city, the state, or the goddam federal government, and why? Because we still have too much from the insurance and the settlement, that's why. Does anyone care that everything's going out and nothing's coming in? No. When the money's gone and we're living in a homeless shelter on Lowbriar Avenue, then I'll be eligible for assistance, and isn't that just ducky."

  Sometimes Brady would look at Frankie and think, You're in the way. You're in the way, Frankie, you're in the fucking goddam shitass waaay.

  Sometimes--often--Brady hated the whole fucking goddam shitass world. If there was a God, like the Sunday guys said on TV, wouldn't He take Frankie up to heaven, so his mother could go back to work fulltime and they wouldn't have to be out on the street? Or living on Lowbriar Avenue, where his mother said there was nothing but nigger drug addicts with guns? If there was a God, why had He let Frankie choke on that fucking apple slice in the first place? And then letting him wake up brain-damaged afterward, that was going from bad to fucking goddam shitass worse. There was no God. You only had to watch Frankie crawling around the floor with goddam Sammy in one hand, then getting up and limping for awhile before giving that up and crawling again, to know that the idea of God was fucking ridiculous.

  Finally Frankie died. It happened fast. In a way it was like running down those people at City Center. There was no forethought, only the looming reality that something had to be done. You could almost call it an accident. Or fate. Brady didn't believe in God, but he did believe in fate, and sometimes the man of the house had to be fate's right hand.

  His mother was making pancakes for supper. Frankie was playing with Sammy. The basement door was standing open because Deborah Ann had bought two cartons of cheap off-brand toilet paper at Chapter 11 and they kept it down there. The bathrooms needed re-stocking, so she sent Brady down to get some. His hands had been full when he came back up, so he left the basement door open. He thought Mom would shut it, but when he came down from putting the toilet paper in the two upstairs bathrooms, it was still open. Frankie was on the floor, pushing Sammy across the linoleum and making rrr-rrr sounds. He was wearing red pants that bulged with his triple-thick diapers. He was working ever closer to the open door and the steep stairs beyond, but Deborah Ann still made no move to close the door. Nor did she ask Brady, now setting the table, to do it.

  "Rrr-rrr," said Frankie. "Rrr-rrr."

  He pushed the fire truck. Sammy rolled to the edge of the basement doorway, bumped against the jamb, and there he stopped.

  Deborah Ann left the stove. She walked over to the basement door. Brady thought she would bend down and hand Frankie's fire truck back to him, but she didn't. She kicked it instead. There was a small clacking sound as it tumbled down the steps, all the way to the bottom.

  "Oops," she said. "Sammy faw down go boom." Her voice was very flat.

  Brady walked over. This was interesting.

  "Why'd you do that, Mom?"

  Deborah Ann put her hands on her hips, the spatula jutting from one of them. She said, "Because I'm just so sick of listening to him make that sound."

  Frankie opened his mouth and began to blat.

  "Quit it, Frankie," Brady said, but Frankie didn't. What Frankie did was crawl onto the top step and peer down into the darkness.

  In that same flat voice Deborah Ann said, "Turn on the light, Brady. So he can see Sammy."

  Brady turned on the light and peered over his blatting brother.

  "Yup," he said. "There he is. Right down at the bottom. See him, Frankie?"

  Frankie crawled a little farther, still blatting. He looked down. Brady looked at his mother. Deborah Ann Hartsfield gave the smallest, most imperceptible nod. Brady didn't think. He simply kicked Frankie's triple-diapered butt and down Frankie went in a series of clumsy somersaults that made Brady think of the fat Blues Brother flipping his way along the church aisle. On the first somersault Frankie kept on blatting, but the second time around, his head connected with one of the stair risers and the blatting stopped all at once, as if Frankie were a radio and someone had turned him off. That was horrible, but had its funny side. He went over again, legs flying out limply to either side in a Y shape. Then he slammed headfirst into the basement floor.

  "Oh my God, Frankie fell!" Deborah Ann cried. She dropped the spatula and ran down the stairs. Brady followed her.

  Frankie's neck was broken, even Brady could tell that, because it was all croggled in the back, but he was still alive. He was breathing in little snorts. Blood was coming out of his nose. More was coming from the side of his head. His eyes moved back and forth, but nothing else did. Poor Frankie. Brady started to cry. His mother was crying, too.

  "What should we do?" B
rady asked. "What should we do, Mom?"

  "Go upstairs and get me a pillow off the sofa."

  He did as she said. When he came back down, Sammy the Fire Truck was lying on Frankie's chest. "I tried to get him to hold it, but he can't," Deborah Ann said.

  "Yeah," Brady said. "He's prob'ly paralyzed. Poor Frankie."

  Frankie looked up, first at his mother and then his brother. "Brady," he said.

  "It'll be okay, Frankie," Brady said, and held out the pillow.

  Deborah Ann took it and put it over Frankie's face. It didn't take long. Then she sent Brady upstairs again to put the sofa pillow back and get a wet washcloth. "Turn off the stove while you're up there," she said. "The pancakes are burning. I can smell them."

  She washed Frankie's face to get rid of the blood. Brady thought that was very sweet and motherly. Years later he realized she'd also been making sure there would be no threads or fibers from the pillow on Frankie's face.

  When Frankie was clean (although there was still blood in his hair), Brady and his mother sat on the basement steps, looking at him. Deborah Ann had her arm around Brady's shoulders. "I better call nine-one-one," she said.

  "Okay."

  "He pushed Sammy too hard and Sammy fell downstairs. Then he tried to go after him and lost his balance. I was making the pancakes and you were putting toilet paper in the bathrooms upstairs. You didn't see anything. When you got down to the basement, he was already dead."

  "Okay."

  "Say it back to me."

  Brady did. He was an A student in school, and good at remembering things.

  "No matter what anybody asks you, never say more than that. Don't add anything, and don't change anything."

  "Okay, but can I say you were crying?"

  She smiled. She kissed his forehead and cheek. Then she kissed him full on the lips. "Yes, honeyboy, you can say that."