The judge nodded. Sat back. His chair squeaking. Another long pause. After a moment he sucked through his teeth and scratched his chin. “You present this court with a real problem, Mr. Brooks.”
“How so, Your Honor?”
He held up the scorecard that the jury had returned along with the verdict. It was the formal listing of my crimes, along with mandatory sentencing guidelines as outlined by the State. He waved the paper. “In Roman times this was called ‘the handwriting of requirements that was against us.’ Here today, the State of Florida requires that I sentence you to a term of punishment based on your crime as dictated by the law.”
“I understand.”
He pointed to the twelve empty jury chairs in the jury box. “They found you guilty of manslaughter. They did not agree with either you or your attorney’s argument that you had a moral obligation to defend that woman and her daughter”—he pointed to Catalina and Gabby, who were sitting one row behind Allie—“beyond the geographical boundaries of your home and place of work.”
I nodded. “Yes, sir, they did.”
He waved that piece of paper. “This brings with it a minimum requirement of eight years. And a maximum of two life terms to be served sequentially.”
I did not like where this was going, but I nodded. “That’s what my attorney tells me.”
The judge sat back in his chair. For several minutes he tapped his pencil on his desktop. Then he said, “Mr. Brooks, please stand.”
I did. My chains rattled.
The judge stood. “Mr. Brooks, I am sentencing you to life.”
Allie gasped behind me. As did most of the courtroom. Two dozen cameras clicked hundreds of photos. Mutiny bubbled just beneath the surface. The bailiff and four well-armed police officers stepped forward.
Judge Werther pounded his gavel, and the courtroom slowly quieted. Staring out across the room of reporters and cameras, he focused on me. “The conditions of your sentence are as follows.” He placed the gavel quietly on the desktop and folded his hands in front of him. If I’m not mistaken, his eyes had become glassy. “Go live your life. The one you never got to live.”
“Sir, I don’t follow you.”
“I have considered the manifest weight of the evidence, and I am reversing the jury’s decision. In legal terms it’s called sua sponte. Meaning after forty-plus years on this bench, I am making a decision of my own, which I believe serves justice better than the decision of the twelve who sat there. I am throwing this verdict back at the state’s attorney and telling him that he has to retry you. That I don’t really care what the jury said. I think they got it wrong. And based on my conversation with the state’s attorney, he does too. Given what has happened here, and been revealed, he knows it will be political suicide to retry you, and so he has no intention of ever doing that.” Judge Werther shook his head once. “Mr. Brooks . . . you’re free to go.”
I once owned a carnival. On Friday nights, when we were operating over capacity, I called it controlled chaos. But it was nothing compared to what that courtroom became when he pounded his gavel one last time and said, “Bailiff, remove Mr. Brooks’s chains.”
47
Bobby was called before Congress to testify. I asked to tag along. He didn’t think it’d do any good, but I went anyway. Walking in amid shouts for his blood, he said, “You sure you want to be here? This could get nasty.”
“I’ve seen nasty, and it doesn’t really scare me. I wouldn’t miss this.”
Most of my brother’s critics used the hearings as a chance to peacock. They drilled him with questions and he answered. Honestly. Not the least bit flustered. I sat in the chair next to him. His attorneys thanked me for my presence and my service, but reiterated that I was not compelled to testify. But given the public nature of my life over the last few weeks, they wondered if I had anything to add. They said this as if they were doing me a favor.
I told the story of the three events in our younger lives. My dad’s absence. The tae kwon do debacle. And Mr. Billy. Of their effect on Bobby and me. Then I tried to paint a picture of Bobby in those early years. One of the senators strutted and told me those stories had no bearing on my brother’s cowardice. He opined for about twenty minutes.
When he finished, I said, “Sir, you see this medal hanging around my neck?” It was dangling against the base of the microphone.
He didn’t respond.
“The governing body that you now represent awarded it to me upon returning from war. With all due respect, I’ve earned the right to speak in this chamber, and if I want to tell you about my childhood, then”—I smiled—“you’re going to hear about my childhood.”
He huffed and tried to say something senatorial, but I cut him off.
“None of us are the men we’d hope to be. Not you. Not my brother. And certainly not me. We’re all guilty. Despite what you may think about him, my brother has spent his life trying to get back to good. Paying penance. Here in this place. With all of you. How many of you can say the same?
“We’ve lost a lot of lives to something that’s been over a long time. Something that up until now nobody’s really wanted to talk about. You want to give it one more life? What good would it do?” I scanned all those angry faces. “As a kid I said ‘yes, sir,’ you sent me away, and I fought for you. Then I came home a broken man and fought a different war. Been fighting it a long time. Now I’m sitting here fighting again. Getting spit on by you. All of you value the knight who storms the castle, kills the bad man, and saves the girl. But you need to ask yourself, how does the knight live on the other side of the rescue? When he’s sitting in his castle with armor that’s rusty, a sword that’s grown unwieldy, and a horse that’s gray and old? There are a lot of us. I’m just the one talking at the moment.” I sat back. “So no, Senator, I will not hand you my brother’s head on a platter.”
To their credit, they did alter my military records to permanently reflect my name, rather than Bobby’s.
48
At the invitation of the Vietnamese government, Suzy, Allie, and a host of other people traveled to Vietnam. Much had changed, and when the memories flooded back, they hurt. I couldn’t have made it without Allie. She held me up. She shielded me from the cameras, asked a lot of questions, and then cried through most of my answers. It was good for both of us.
The hike in took several hours, but I led Suzy to her father’s remains. One reporter asked me, “How can you remember the way?”
I turned to him. “How can I forget?”
A beautiful tree had grown above him. When they unearthed him, she sat for a long time next to the hole, talking to him. When I had buried him, I’d taken one dog tag and left the other. She sat there, turning the second dog tag in her hand.
Suzy wanted to bring her father home. She asked me to help pick up the pieces and place him in a box. I reached into that black dirt and for the second time carried my friend. And in those moments, I wept like a child and told him I was sorry and asked him to forgive me. When we had all of him that we could find, we closed the box.
Suzy had brought a marker. Stamped in aluminum. It looked like a giant dog tag. The two of us nailed it to the tree above the hole.
Upon her return she buried her father in Arlington. Full military honors. And nobody spit on him.
ALLIE AND I RETURNED to the beach where we had long ago fallen in love. We married. Honeymooned along the beach. Allie was right. She’d been holding her love a long time, and when she gave it to me, well . . .
I bought a ’72 Corvette. Fitting, I thought. I took it apart, put it back together better, and we drove it most nights. We rode the merry-go-round at the carnival. The flying chairs. We laughed. We visited Rosco’s grave, where I ate a doughnut and then gave myself some insulin and told him that I missed him. We filled another Mason jar with sharks’ teeth. We danced along the beach with Gabby and Diego. We did all the things that for years I’d felt guilty doing.
Sometimes I stand on the beach and cry for n
o reason. No reason at all. Allie found me one afternoon and asked me why. I said, “The place where the tears come from is full again.” After not being able to cry for most of my life, I cry now at the drop of a hat.
And, to be honest, I like it.
49
Voter opinion turned against Bobby. Smelling blood, the networks continued their feeding frenzy. The backlash was constant and severe. He was labeled a traitor. Public death threats multiplied. The airwaves were filled with large personalities, all of whom were standing on an angry soapbox. Many wanted to talk to me.
To turn me against my brother.
Given the growing storm, Bobby resigned. A live press conference. We watched it with sadness.
Later that afternoon I told Allie I needed to go for a ride. As we walked to the Corvette, Catalina hollered at me across the parking lot. “Joe? You’d better take a look at this.”
Around the back of the restaurant, she handed me a flashlight and pointed to the crawl space. We knelt and crawled along the base of the dune until I came upon a smiling Gabby and Diego. Next to them was a dog. It looked like a Rhodesian ridgeback and had evidently given birth to about eight puppies.
Catalina whispered, “That Rosco, he got around.”
Gabby lifted a reddish-brown furball with big paws and floppy ears. Its eyes had barely opened.
“Do we know whose dog it is?” I asked.
“No idea,” Catalina said.
Allie patted my back. “Congratulations, Papa.”
I pointed at the squirming mess of fur. Each pup the spitting image of Rosco. “What am I going to do with all of those?”
Gabby now had a puppy in each hand. She said, “Can we keep them, Mama?”
Catalina raised an eyebrow at me. “See what you have done?”
I smiled. “Good old Rosco.”
I CRANKED THE CORVETTE, and Allie and I drove the coastline southeast. I drove with tears in my eyes. Every few seconds, Allie would reach up and thumb one away. But not all the tears were sad.
Bobby wasn’t hard to find.
During my brother’s drunken years, which often coincided with mine, he kept a cabin in a little place called Yankeetown. It’s a fishing village on the west coast of Florida, about two hours southeast of Cape San Blas. His cabin sat isolated on a point, and faced west. He’d crawl through the door, climb inside a bottle, and disappear until he couldn’t remember why he started drinking in the first place. After a week or two he’d surface, buy some groceries, and return to the security and confines of his sunsets.
A tidal creek flowed just north of his property, spitting distance from the cabin door. Fifty yards across, the water moved with a fast current. During the painful periods of my life, I’d stand on the opposite bank and check on him through binoculars. Watching his movements. Originally, my intent was to hurt him, drown him, rip his head off, dump his body in the river, and post his head on a stake. I kept my distance and watched him through magnified lenses. The water between us was a barrier. If I lost my mind and jumped in, he’d see me coming and have a chance to get away.
Over the years I watched him fluctuate between puffy-faced and overweight to gaunt and bone-skinny. One thing became clear. If I knew torment within, Bobby lived it on the outside. And while his might have been self-inflicted, it was torment nonetheless.
EPILOGUE
As they pass through the Valley of Baca, they make it a spring; the rain also covers it with pools.
—PSALM 84:6
I turned onto the coquina road and wound nearly a mile through palm trees, palmettos, and scrub oaks. Plants whose roots held fast through the last hurricane. We parked a half mile back of his cabin and slipped through the trees, moving slowly. The breeze blew from the north across our faces. We saw Bobby sitting on his dock. Legs dangling over the water. An unopened bottle of tequila next to him.
We stepped onto the dock and he didn’t turn. The afternoon sun was falling. The light was golden red and soft, and layered the air with an amber glow. Allie sat down on one side of him and I sat on the other. None of us spoke for several minutes.
Finally he pointed north across the tidal creek to the patch of palm trees where I’d built a hide so many years ago. “I used to sit here and wonder why you didn’t just put me out of my misery.”
I stared at the trees. “Me too.”
He turned the unopened tequila bottle in his hand. “Why didn’t you?”
I watched the sun drop off the edge of the earth and bleed crimson into the Gulf. “Wasn’t what we needed.”
“What was?”
“Not that.”
The outgoing tide ripped beneath our feet. He spoke without looking at me. “You ever wonder what life would have been like had I gone?”
“Not much anymore.”
“But did you used to?”
“Sure.”
“Ever come to anything?”
I laughed. “It’s tough for me to see past what it all became.”
“After you left, I used to sit up nights and listen to Mom cry herself to sleep. I’d get on the floor and press my ear to the air vent. She prayed one thing over and over.”
I knew the prayer. Last time I’d heard it Mom was coming undone on the beach the night before I left. I pulled the brass Zippo out of my pocket. Dull from the decades. I held it up to reveal the worn engraving. My fingertips traced the grooves like Braille. STRENGTH TO STRENGTH. I flipped it over. SEND DOWN THE RAIN. I handed it to him. My tether to hope. “Had it done over there . . .”
“Why?”
“To help me remember.”
“Remember what?”
“Mom’s voice.”
He turned it in his hand, flicked it lit, then slammed it shut on his thigh and passed it back. “You don’t even smoke.”
“Fire can be a comfort when you’re lonely.”
Bobby paused and waved his hand across me, him, and the world Mom had born us into. “You think this was what she was talking about?”
I surveyed the world. “Yeah.”
He unscrewed the tequila top. I heard a somber finality in his tone of voice. “All my life, I’ve always wanted to be you. To make hard decisions no matter the cost.” He shook his head and lifted the bottle to his lips. He held it there. Lips trembling.
I eyed the bottle. “How long’s it been?”
His reply was slow in coming. Liquid courage hung two inches from his lips. “Long time.”
I knew if he crawled in there he’d never swim out. I reached into my backpack, pulled out a gallon of chocolate milk and a package of Oreos, and set them on the boards between us. Minutes passed as he stared between the two worlds.
He studied the gallon jug. “When’d you start on chocolate?”
“When I tired of regular.”
“When was that?”
I laughed. “’Bout the time you stole my girlfriend.”
He nodded. Shot a glance at Allie. Then me. “Yes, I did that, too.” He glanced at the roll of antacids in my hand. “I thought the doc said your heart was strong as a twenty-year-old’s.”
“It is.”
“Why then?”
“I like the taste.”
He eyed the Oreos. “How long we been eating these things?”
“Since we been brothers.”
“They’re probably the cause of your diabetes.”
“No.” I flung one out across the water. “That was floating on top of the water I drank when I was in-country.”
“Agent Orange?”
“Yep.”
He swallowed, but it was difficult to get down. Tears dripped off his cheek and landed on his jeans. “We missed a lot.”
I stared out across the water. “We were born into a world at war.”
“Why you think God did it this way?”
“I don’t think this was His original intention.”
“What was?”
I shook my head. “Not this.”
He turned to me. A question on the tip
of his tongue. “Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why didn’t you ever tell my secret? Undress me before the world?”
I swigged the chocolate milk, licked the soft middle of a cookie, and then crushed the remaining wafer in my hand. I opened my palm and let the pieces spill onto the surface of the water. Then I checked my blood sugar and gave myself three units of insulin.
“Something happened when Suzy’s dad came to get me. Something in the way I see. Evil became a person. As real as you and me. And when I came home, you were not that person.”
He set the tequila bottle on his lap. Stared at it several minutes. Then, without saying a word, he turned it upside down and emptied it into the river. He pulled the draft notice from his shirt pocket. Yellowed. Tearstained. Ripped down the middle and taped together like a cross. He rolled it like a scroll and slid it inside the bottle, then screwed the cap back on.
He offered it to me.
I shook my head. “You do it.”
Bobby stood, took two steps, and heaved that bottle as far as he could out across the tidal current. It spun through the air, reflecting light like a diamond, splash-landed, disappeared, bobbed to the surface, and began its long trip to the other side of the world.
Bobby sat, his shoulder brushing mine. I offered him the milk jug and he took it, swigging long. When he finished, the chocolate milk dripped off his chin. He whispered, “Good call on chocolate.” He turned to me and tried to speak again, but his voice cracked. Behind us, rain clouds had blown in. The breeze pushed across our shoulders, turning the air cooler. He looked up at the clouds. Then back at me. Squinting. “Brother?”