My Brother's Keeper

  Sometimes I pretend he’s on a long business trip, like the executive dads on TV Sometimes I wonder if maybe he’s in a coma on account of being in an accident on the California freeway and no one knows about him having a family back in Pittsburgh. But mostly I worry that when he comes back, I might not recognize him.

  Which is why I saved the picture of all of us at the Implosion. In the picture, we’re all sitting on the grass in the park where we used to watch the fireworks. Our mom, who back then looked more like someone’s big sister than someone’s mom, is smiling, and our dad, who looks like Bruce Springsteen, except with less hair, is holding a beer and looking out of the picture frame at something far away. Jake and I have on our Little League shirts, and Eli’s hiding under his yellow baby blankie.

  In the picture, we’re sitting in the park along with pretty much the whole town, looking across the river at the mill where my dad and his buddies used to work, waiting for it to get blown up. Imploded, actually. Which meant that they put dynamite in strategic locations so that the whole thing would collapse in on itself. It was like some weird, science-fiction block party. Old steelworkers and their wives were sitting on picnic blankets listening to polka music, college kids were waving protest banners, and little kids were goofing around on the swing set. When they should’ve been acting serious and respectful like we were at a funeral, which technically we were.

  Out of nowhere, the crowd started counting down like it was New Year’s Eve.

  “Three! Two! One!”

  Eli yelled, “Blast off!” A bunch of people shouted, “Implosion!”

  What came next was nothing. People started fidgeting. Someone in the crowd behind us booed.

  Then there was a white flash at the base of the plant. People oohed. There was another spark a little way from the first one. People aahhed. Then, finally, there was a chain reaction of sparks all around the base. There was no noise really, just a flimsy sounding pop a few seconds after each spark. All of a sudden, the whole building began to fold in on itself, section by section, one after the other. Then there was a groan, a sound I felt—actually felt—in a spot in the middle of my chest. A minute later, the two giant smokestacks in the middle of the plant crumpled and sank to the ground, while a bunch of birds erupted from the stacks and flew off.

  After that the steel company was supposed to build a new mill on the same spot, but they didn’t. Which meant my dad got laid off, after which the unemployment ran out, and he had to take a job driving a giant trash—vacuum cleaner truck around the mall at night and drinking beer with his friends during the day. Until finally one day about a year ago he left for California.

  My mom stayed in bed for a week straight, crying and smoking cigarettes and not answering the phone and not making us go to school. Which was fun at first since she stayed up in her room sleeping or watching Lifetime TV, and we got to watch the Cartoon Network and eat Pringles and Pop Tarts and pretty much whatever we wanted. But which got to be sort of scary after a while, when she wouldn’t get up even though there was nothing left to eat but peanut butter straight from the jar. Until finally one day, out of nowhere, she got out of bed and suddenly turned really busy, hauling all my dad’s stuff out onto the front lawn for a yard sale and then selling the house and getting a job at the Hairport, after which she’s pretty much looked like she has a terminal headache ever since.

  My mom tried to sell the Implosion picture at the yard sale, saying the frame was at least worth something. But I grabbed it off a card table where our entire life was being pawed through by people who asked if you’d take a quarter for something that’s worth a million dollars if it’s yours. I brought it to ye olde condo where I set it up in the den.

  My mom keeps turning it facedown when she cleans. I keep putting it back up.

  I turn the picture faceup, then I shuffle through the mail, even though I can tell from the feel of it that there’s no letter from him. Nothing personal, just a catalog, which is technically for my mom but which Jake steals so he can look at the pages with women in their underwear, and an American Express bill. I lift the rubber band from around the bundle and pry the credit card bill free, secret-agent style. Then I stand there wondering exactly what it is I was planning to do with it. Eat it?

  I slip the envelope into my back pocket and go upstairs, where I lock the bathroom door and count my gray hairs. I quit after I get to thirty-two. Then I sit on the fluffy green thing that covers the toilet seat and wonder if pulling out the eleven hairs I found a couple weeks ago caused twice as many more to grow back like my mom said it would. Then I get up and try 185 different ways of combing my hair so I won’t look like a thirteen-year-old senior citizen, until I finally give up and put my baseball cap on.

  Which reminds me that I need to get my mom to sign a permission slip for tryouts stating that if I get brain damage on account of getting hit in the head with a line drive, or getting struck by lightning in the outfield and I’m paralyzed for life and have to wear diapers and eat through a straw, that she won’t sue the school. Although it doesn’t technically mention lightning and diapers, it does say that parents agree to buy their kids cleats and to pay for the uniforms to be dry-cleaned at the end of the year.

  I decide that’s not something you can ask a mother to think about when she’s blowing her nose on a paper towel because she can’t pay the bills and when she has one son who’s out with a known drug dealer and another son who doesn’t have the guts to come in and make her a baloney-and-mustard sandwich, and when she herself may be suffering from a rare terminal disease.

  So I sign it myself and go up to my room and stare at the Stargell.

  Which I’ve done about 185 thousand times since I got it. Which is probably roughly equal to once every seventeen seconds. Which you would think would get boring but it gets more amazing the more I do it. Even if during the other seventeen seconds when I’m not looking at it, I’m thinking about looking at it. And even if when I’m not looking at it or planning on looking at it, I’m thinking about how much my dad’s gonna love looking at it.

  At 1:16 in the morning, I’m still staring at the Stargell. Technically, I’m arranging Bill Matlock and Tim Foli and Phil Garner and the rest of the ‘79 World Series team on the same page in my binder and trying to stay awake, when the front door creaks opens.

  Which probably in a normal house is just a normal sound, but which in our house is like a car alarm going whoop, whoop, whoop right inside the front door.

  I jump out of bed and run downstairs.

  Jake’s standing there watching the coat rack, which he just banged into, wobble back and forth. His eyes are squinty and his mouth is hanging open. “Check it out, man,” he says.

  “Shut up,” I say. “You’ll wake Mom.”

  He gives me the look. It’s the same look my dad used to give me at 1:16 or 2:55 or 3:39 in the morning.

  The look that, in my dad’s case, meant he was going to get all emotional and recite the list of people he loved—like the guys at the mill or his old high school baseball coach or Lucky, the famous dog from his childhood who was supposedly so smart she did everything on his paper route except collect the money.

  Or he’d give me the look that meant that he was going to get all bummed out and recite the other list, the people who he said “just didn’t get it"—like the Republicans or the management at the mill or the guy at the unemployment office who gave him the same load of crap he gave him the week before. Then he’d just shake his head like he was the one who just didn’t get it, which was actually worse than watching him get all choked up about some long-lost dog from his childhood.

  Either look meant I had about ten seconds to get Dad inside and get him up the steps before he woke my mom up. Which I was usually able to do, especially if I stayed up reading The Ultimate Baseball Encyclopedia until he came in. But when I wasn’t, it meant that my mom came down to breakfast the next day with her eyes all puffy from crying and my dad had to sleep on the La-Z-Boy that night and th
ey went back to fighting and Eli went back to sucking his thumb from under his blankie and Jake and I had to be on our good behavior until they made up. But after a while they stopped making up, which meant my mom’s eyes were puffy pretty much all the time and my dad slept on the La-Z-Boy pretty much all the time until he left.

  The look, in Jake’s case, means his eyes are like mirrors. I can’t tell what he’s thinking. All I can see is my own scared self looking back at me.

  I grab the coat rack and steady it. Then I grab Jake by the shoulders and steer him in the direction of the stairs. He misses the first step and starts laughing.

  “Shhh.” I clap one hand over his mouth and squeeze him by the back of the neck with the other, then I push him up the steps, nudging my knee into his back, step by step, until we finally get to our room.

  I get him into our room, where he kicks off his jeans and starts to climb up to his bunk on the top. He wobbles a little, sort of like the coat rack, then bolts into the bathroom and throws up. I swing the door closed, flick on the fan, and pray our mom hasn’t heard anything.

  While Jake is hanging his head over the toilet, I get out the can of Citrus Magic, this orangey-smelling spray that says it makes odors disappear magically. Our mom opens the door and walks in, wearing her pink robe with the coffee stain down the front.

  “Honey?” she says to Jake. “Are you sick?”

  She sniffs and I give the room another blast of Citrus Magic.

  Jake doesn’t look up. “Food poisoning,” he says, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “The shrimp cocktail.”

  She looks confused. “That’s funny. No one else got sick… .” Her face gets that long-term fatal headache look.

  “Me, too,” I say all of a sudden. “I don’t feel too good, either.”

  “Did you throw up?”

  I shrug. “Not exactly, but my stomach feels weird. I couldn’t sleep.” Both of which are technically true.

  She pats the pockets of her robe like she’s looking for cigarettes, even though she just quit smoking again last week, and you know it’s one of those times that she wishes she wasn’t someone’s mother, that she could have a smoke and go back to bed and not have to worry about things like barfed-up shrimp cocktail.

  I tell her to go back to bed, and that if we’re old enough to handle Human Sexuality class, we’re old enough to take care of this. Which we do, mostly by Jake going to bed and me fumigating the entire place with Citrus Magic.

  The next morning on the way to the bus stop I ask Jake about how he managed to get up on the Dumpster the night before.

  “My manly upper-body strength,” he says.

  Then I try to think of a way to ask him about him and Andy Timmons without acting like I care.

  “Last night,” I say.

  Jake won’t look at me straight on.

  “It wasn’t the shrimp cocktail,” I say.

  Jake doesn’t let on if he hears or not. He’s eyeing my new baseball cap. “Gimme that for a second,” he says. “I’ll fix it for you.”

  I hand it over sort of cautiously. Jake puts it on his own head, cups his hand around the brim, and squeezes it. He takes it off, examines it, then curls the brim a little more till it has the rounded, broken-in shape he considers cool. He puts it on my head, snugs it down, • and steps back to admire his work.

  “There,” he says, tugging it down till it practically covers my eyes. “Now you won’t look like such a dork.”

  And instead of being mad at him like I planned on, I’m actually sort of grateful to him for at least doing a big brotherly kind of thing.

  Which confuses me more than trying to walk to the bus stop with my hat pulled down so far I can hardly see where I’m going.

  Which means I’m a couple steps behind Jake when a white car pulls up with Andy Timmons and his goatee in the driver’s seat. I peek out from under the brim of my hat and watch as Jake gets in and leaves me standing there on the sidewalk looking like a dork after all.

  That day at the end of lunch—after everybody except the janitor and a couple of chess geeks have left the cafeteria—I pull the American Express bill out of my back pocket and throw it into a trash can, where it lands on top of somebody’s leftover meat loaf. Where hopefully it’ll get mixed in with all the crusts from kids’peanut butter sandwiches and the fruit that mothers always pack but which nobody ever eats and all the pencil shavings and old test papers from the school, and get carted away to the dump, where it’ll get buried underneath a bunch of flat tires and broken toilet seats. Which won’t solve the problem of my mom having an American Express bill that is never going to make it out of the have-to-wait pile, but which at least is something.

  As soon as the bell rings, I head down the hall to meet Arthur at his locker so we can walk to tryouts together. Before I even get there, I can see him because of his flaming red hair. Even though it’s probably the worst possible hair a person can have—except for prematurely gray hair—he seems to like what he calls his “defining feature,” which sounds like something his mom made up to make him feel better about it.

  He’s standing in front of his locker with all his books and papers and old sweatshirts and sneakers and candy bar wrappers dumped out on the floor.

  “I can’t find my permission slip,” he says.

  I feel for mine in my back pocket.

  “You get yours signed?” he says.

  “Yup,” I say, which isn’t technically a lie. It’s signed. By me.

  I lift up one of his old sweatshirts, which I’m pretty sure he’s been dragging around from one locker to another since fourth grade, and hunt for the permission slip. Arthur asks if I want anything to eat. His dad has an office job and his mom is a nurse, so he always has money for after-school junk food.

  “Whadya have today?” I say.

  “What do I have?” He gives me a maniac grin. “Gonorrhea.”

  Arthur has pretty much the same sense of humor as Eli. He thinks any sentences containing words for private bodily parts or private bodily functions or words not generally used outside the confines of Human Sexuality class are hysterical. Lately, he’s especially fond of otherwise normal words such as but and screw and nut. All of which is highly embarrassing for me, especially the gonorrhea line, which is a reference to the fact that up until Human Sexuality class I thought gonorrhea was an intestinal problem, like diarrhea, something I was stupid enough to share with Arthur.

  What he actually has is a Butterfinger, a Snickers, a pack of Little Debbies, and some Rolos. I’m pretty hungry, having not eaten the beef goulash on account of it maybe having Mad Cow disease; so I go for the Little Debbies.

  “You got your new stuff?” he says, pawing through a bunch of crumpled-up papers. “It says on the form that we have to buy our own cleats.”

  I don’t say anything; I hold his biology book up and shake out all the papers inside.

  “I got new cleats last night,” he says. “And a Barry Bonds batting glove.”

  Arthur’s always getting new stuff. He has Nintendo, Game Cube, and PS2.

  “And a … you know.” He points to his crotch.

  I don’t get it.

  “A nut cup.” He says this in a fake whisper which is actually pretty loud and which is obviously heard by a bunch of girls walking by, including Martha MacDowell, who up until Arthur mentioned the aforementioned nut cup was looking at me in a way that wasn’t kindhearted or pitying but which was completely normal.

  I smack Arthur on the back of the head and give Martha MacDowell a look that I hope is also completely normal and go back to looking for his permission slip. She and the other girls go past and Arthur finds his permission slip inside the pocket of his official Pirates backpack which reminds me that I haven’t told Arthur yet about the Stargell.

  “Hey,” I say. “You’ll never believe what I got.”

  I don’t wait for him to answer because I know he’ll say gonorrhea or scabies or one of the other disgusting diseases we learned ab
out last week. “A Stargell rookie card.”

  I watch his face for a minute, waiting for this piece of information to sink in. “A mint condition ‘62.”

  Even Arthur, who’s the kind of Pirates fan who likes to own all the stuff with the logo on it but doesn’t actually know a whole lot about the good old days, knows about Stargell.

  “No way.”

  “Way.”

  For once, he doesn’t know what to say. His mouth actually hangs open. The next thing I know he’s picking me up, physically picking me up, like ball players do to their coaches when they win a big game, and he’s trying to carry me around the hallway.

  Which, even though it’s highly embarrassing, is the kind of thing I like about Arthur. He’s the kind of kid who, even though he’s got Nintendo and Game Cube and PS2 and new cleats and a new glove and a new nut cup and pretty much whatever he wants without even having to spend his allowance, actually gets really happy when somebody else gets what they want. He’s also the kind of person who’s really out there with his feelings. Which my mom says is because he’s a redhead and redheads are often pretty out-there people emotionally.

  Which, even I have to admit, can actually be sort of good, at least on certain occasions. Like when a person finally gets something they’ve been wanting their whole life.

  When we get to the locker room, Arthur shows me the aforementioned nut cup, which, in my opinion, is way too personal to even talk about let alone be seen in public with. Which means Arthur thinks it’s funny to throw it at me. Which means I actually have to physically touch it to throw it back at him, which grosses me out enough that I overthrow the stupid thing. Which lands at Coach Gillis’s feet.

  “Malone?” he says. “Does this belong to you?” He holds the nut cup in the air so that everyone in a 185-mile radius can see it.

  I decide I will definitely not live long enough to even get through puberty if this kind of stress keeps up.