Alex gave John a long, wary look, as if immersing himself in water on John’s command was equivalent to going all the way on the first date. Then John pulled his stopwatch from his pocket, gave him the go signal, and Alex tore into the creek as John took several paces back toward the tree line. As Alex dove under the surface, John made out the sharp smell of tobacco from somewhere nearby, then looked up the bank to see his sister standing partially hidden in the trees, like some FBI agent who liked to taunt the Mafioso she was keeping under surveillance.
Eighty seconds later, a soaking-wet Alex dropped the bricks at John’s feet, gave him a wide-eyed and expectant look. “Eighty seconds,” John told him. Then he picked up the bricks in one hand, walked to the bank, and tossed them into the center of the creek. “Sixty this time.”
“Am I supposed to be learning how to swim here?” Alex asked between gasps.
“This is strength training.”
“Cruel and unusual strength training.”
“Strength training involves real pain or it isn’t worth shit.”
“Why’s that, John?”
“Because if I’m going to teach you how to crack your opponent’s skull with your foot, you need to be willing to break your heel.”
For a second it looked like Alex might burst out laughing, and just the tease of amusement that flashed in his eyes made John want to strike him, because it implied that Alex was the one indulging John and not the other way around. Alex took a step back at the sight of whatever expression John had allowed onto his face, lifted both his hands to signal that he was ready.
This time Alex retrieved the bricks in seventy seconds’ time. When John informed him of this, he said, “How about this? If I make it under sixty seconds, I get to ask you a question.”
“One-word answers only,” John said. Then he hit the stopwatch and gave him a go signal. For six more rounds, John’s prediction proved to be true: Alex couldn’t make it under sixty seconds. Then on go-around number seven, Alex completed the challenge in fifty-eight seconds. For a few more seconds he stood in front of John, dripping like a wet dog, hands open as he waited to hear the verdict.
“Ask.”
“Who’s Dean?”
“One-word answers.”
Maybe the frustration of having flubbed his own game got to him, because it took Alex another few tries before he was able to get under sixty seconds again. Then, with heaving breaths, he dropped the bricks at John’s feet and said, “Is Dean your brother?”
“Was,” John answered.
Four more tries and Alex finished in fifty-five seconds.
“Shoot,” John said.
“Is Dean the reason you hate me?”
“I don’t hate you.”
“One-word answers.”
“No!”
Against his will, his eyes cut up the creek to where Patsy was still watching them from a distance. He was sure she was too far away to hear their words, but she was sitting on the bank of the creek, knees to her chest, arms folded around her knees, eyes locked on John as if she were trying to read their exchange from his facial expressions. Was she the reason their brother’s name was on Alex’s lips, or had Alex only pretended to be asleep when they talked about him in the car?
John said, “We’re done here. Any more of this and you’ll be on your back for the rest of the day. I need you on your feet.” He started off toward the clearing and heard Alex’s footsteps as he fell into step behind him.
Eddie had told John that he didn’t currently have a full house. That meant he had empty beds. In accordance with the note John had left for his sister that morning, the mattresses from those beds had been stripped and deposited in a pile in the middle of the clearing. John spread them out side to side. Then, without warning, he seized Alex’s right arm in two places, bent at the knees, and threw Alex’s entire weight over one shoulder and onto the mattresses. Just as John expected, Alex flailed his limbs when he hit, and he rolled over onto one side, grabbing handfuls of mattress in an attempt to right himself.
“You fall like that in a real fight and you’ll break your arm and take yourself out of the game,” John said. “You won’t be on a mattress, and you won’t have a clear idea of what’s lying on the ground around you. Learning how to fall is learning how to get back in, and learning how to get back in is learning how to—”
“Win?” Alex asked with a sneer.
“No. Kill. Get up.”
Alex followed this instruction, but he did so with his eyes on their feet, and his upper lip curled back over his top teeth. To the ignorant observer, it might have looked like Alex was just struggling to draw breath, but John could read the expression for what it really was: anger and disgust. Was he losing the trust he had earned the day before?
Alex lifted his eyes to John’s chest, stared at it for a few seconds. “Where’s the picture?” he finally asked. John felt himself flush with embarrassment, told himself that he hadn’t brought the necklace with Mike’s photo on it because they didn’t need it, not today, not when Alex was learning how to fall. But he knew Alex wouldn’t believe this for a second, which made him wonder if it was actually the truth. Alex gave him a slight, wry smile, as if he could hear these thoughts in John’s head and took a kind of masochistic pleasure in them.
John turned on his heel and marched back through the woods toward the cabin. Once he reached the threshold he realized he had not asked Alex where the necklace was. But he didn’t have to look hard for it—it was coiled in a nightstand drawer. He waited until he entered the clearing to put it back on, waited for Alex to smile warmly at him, to read this small gesture as something more monumental than it seemed to be on the surface. But Alex didn’t seem impressed in the slightest.
He ordered Alex to assume the basic warrior stance he had learned the day before. Alex complied, eyes staring dead ahead as John backed up several spaces, bent an arm in front of him, and rammed Alex from the side, sending him flying over his other leg. Alex hit the deck, teeth gritted, eyes screwed shut, and before he could catch a breath, John began manipulating Alex’s limbs as if he were a mannequin, molding them into the defensive prone position: falling leg bent, arms still bent in the defensive stance position, chin tucked to chest.
“On your feet,” John said. Alex answered by hesitating for several seconds, then rising to a standing position. John told himself not to indulge him, that the blow hadn’t been that hard.
“You want hard? We’ll lose the mattresses.” He told himself he wasn’t angry, told himself he was beyond anger. Then he backed up several paces and slammed Alex from behind, bent arm hitting the guy’s lower back like the bumper of a car. Alex flew forward but managed to roll onto his side before he hit, breaking the fall with his lower back, keeping his arms bent and his chin tucked.
“Good,” John said quietly. But the way Alex stared at him, eyes wide and unblinking, nostrils flaring, made John feel like an abusive husband complimenting his wife on how well she had taken to the stairs he had just thrown her down. He extended one hand to Alex to help him up. Alex stared at it for a few seconds, then got to his feet on his own, eyes locked on the photo of Bowers hanging from John’s neck as if he were drawing strength from it. John tried not to linger on this insult, a powerful one in the tiny universe they had created in the center of the clearing. He told himself he had to reassert his authority. He told himself that neither of them could move forward if he didn’t get some respect back.
He backed away as Alex assumed the stance. Then he ran at him, seized the back of his neck and his left wrist, pulling his arm out from his body to immobilize him as he bent him at the waist, forcing him to stare down at his own two feet. Then John swung his rear leg high, preparing to sweep it down so his boot heel struck Alex’s ankle. His plan had been to yank him off balance before the strike, to scare him into thinking his Achilles tendon was about to be struck.
It half-worked—but Alex realized what was about to happen and sank his teeth into John’s thigh.
It came as such a shock to John that it overrode his conscious thought. He released Alex’s wrist, but there was no stopping his own rear leg, which he had already swung high and was coming back down to the spot where Alex’s leg had been. But Alex shot to a straight-up standing position and threw John off to the side. John felt his legs go out from under him, and then the sky filled his vision and he felt like he was in a brief free fall. Then he heard the crack of his shoulder impacting the dry earth and he knew Alex had managed to throw him off the edge of the mattresses.
His world spinning, he was on his feet. He could sense the pain coming and knew the only way to ward it off for another precious few minutes: rage. He spun, saw Alex standing there, wild-eyed, staring at him. So John threw a classic punch, saw it connect with Alex’s nose, saw Alex’s head snap back, strings of red spewing from his nostrils. He hit the mattresses on his ass, and John realized he was bearing down on him even as the edges of his blurred vision came back into focus, then seemed to stretch like plastic wrap being pulled at the edges.
“You stupid son of a bitch! I’m trying to help you!” He heard the curses tumbling from his mouth, tried to tell himself they were coming from some other place, someplace right next to the spot where he had heard bone snap when he hit the earth. “What does a man have to fucking do for you, anyway? What does a man have to do for you that’s ever fucking good enough? Huh? Can’t you see what I’m—can’t you see what I’m—”
His sister’s frantic cries distracted him, and the minute the words stopped flying from his mouth, he could feel the pain: nails driven into his right shoulder and acid filling the veins of his right arm. What was he even saying? Can’t you see what I’m trying to do? He saw the look of horror on Alex’s face, realized it had nothing to do with what John had said, with what either of them had done.
Patsy started running toward them; then she took a good look at John and stopped in her tracks, her mouth falling open. John decided to follow everyone’s lead and looked down at his right arm, saw the shoulder was inches lower than it should have been, saw the bloody tip of white bone jutting out from the side of his forearm, like the stub of a small branch that had been torn free from the bark of his arm.
Then the full force of the pain hit him as if someone had pulled so hard on his right shoulder he had caused a rip down the middle of his torso.
He threw up, hit the earth on both knees, then keeled forward into blackness.
11
Everything seemed like a dream until they reset his shoulder. He remembered being carried out of the clearing, seeing the blue sky get laced with pine branches, then being set down inside some cool, dark room and listening to Eddie and his sister argue in hushed whispers about whether they should take him to the hospital. He didn’t hear Alex’s voice, but this wasn’t the comfort he wanted it to be because all he could see was the twin strings of blood shooting from Alex’s nose, and the vision, as it replayed again and again in his mind, filled him with something that felt like dread.
Then there was an unfamiliar voice close to him, telling him in a trembling whisper to relax and be still. Then a piece of wood was slipped between his teeth and he tried to force himself out of his body and into some far corner of this unfamiliar room. He heard the snap of his shoulder clicking back into place, felt his torso rise up off the bed involuntarily from the agony of it, and then he passed out in the middle of his own strangled cry.
When he came to, he was sure it was days later, but then he saw his sister sitting on a wooden chair in the corner of the room, and she was wearing the same outfit she had worn earlier that morning as she watched Alex lug bricks from the creek and lay them at John’s feet—beige-colored jeans and a lime-green T-shirt with the name of some dive bar written across it. It looked as if they were in the main house—a small room with three beds just like the ones in the outer cabin and adobe walls. More framed prayers and sayings on the walls. John went to sit up, then saw that his right arm had been set in a cast that was still drying.
“Eddie took his guys into town for an AA meeting,” she said.
“You passed out before the stitches, but you should probably buy flowers for the guy who reset your shoulder. Poor thing. You called him names he’d never heard before, and he was a skid row drunk, so that’s saying something. And that scream you let out—well, it was pretty funny, watching what it did to a bunch of guys just a few days off speed. I mean, they were jumpy to begin with, but—”
“Where’s Alex?”
Her sarcastic smile vanished. “Maybe that’s the last thing you should be asking.”
“He can’t leave.” His voice sounded raspy and distant. He knew he shouldn’t feel this weak from a broken bone; it wasn’t the first time in his life he had worn a cast. He dreaded the thought that his exhaustion came from somewhere else. He had lost control over Alex, and there was greater pain in that proposition than there currently was in the right side of his body.
Patsy said, “He didn’t leave unless he walked.” John fell silent, allowed his body to go lax, even though he was afraid of the exhaustion that threatened to overtake him. “Tell me why I shouldn’t shut this whole thing down,” Patsy said.
“Because you don’t have that kind of power.”
“I have some, John. I have the power to call the authorities and tell them what happened to Mike Bowers, and I also have the power to tell them what you two are up to.”
“What are we up to?”
“Trying to kill each other for one.”
“That is not what I was trying to do out there!”
“Oh, really? He said you were trying to teach him how to fall. And somewhere along the way you threw some kind of high kick, and then his nose got broken. So explain to me how this training environment of yours works, John. Enlighten me!”
She was bending over the bed, and he realized how immobilized he was—by pain, by fatigue, and by the cast that had been applied a few hours before. Part of him thought she just wanted payback for the way he had torn into her about Eddie two days ago, but he was too tired to deny the obvious. She had seen what had taken place out there; she had seen John’s anger and how easily it had exploded to the surface. And it had scared her as badly as it scared him.
“What did he say to you?” she finally asked. Her voice was quieter now. Clearly she thought John’s silence meant she was on the verge of getting some admission out of him, and suddenly she was humble and gentle. “He must have said something to set you off. I could hear him asking a bunch of questions down by the creek…” She trailed off and he broke eye contact, stared at the ceiling.
“He asked about Dean,” he finally said. “He wanted to know who he was. He wanted to know if Dean was the reason I hated him.”
As if their brother’s ghost had just walked into the room and taken up a post next to John’s bed, Patsy turned her back to him and moved to the chair she had been sitting in earlier. “What did you say?” she finally asked.
“I told him I didn’t hate him.”
“Is that the truth?”
“I’m trying not to. That’s all I know.” John’s answer surprised both of them. Patsy stared at him for a long while, as if something in his tone had given her some hope and she needed to study him to make sure it had been sincere.
“Try harder,” she finally said, but there was no real anger in her voice, and he realized this was her way of saying that she wasn’t going to call the authorities, whoever that might end up being. That she wasn’t going to “shut this thing down.” Not yet.
“I never said Dean’s name in front of him,” John said. “Did you?”
“I told him we had a brother who died recently. That’s all.” She allowed these words to hang in the air between them, pathetically inadequate as they were to describe Dean’s life, his history, and his effect on their family.
“Get him for me,” John said. “Please.”
Patsy left the room without another word, leaving John to watch the last light of day retre
at across the ceiling and then vanish into that strange, seemingly lightless glow that fills the evenings in the desert, as if the very earth and everything struggling to live in it maintains a kind of radiance from having been pummeled by unrelenting sunlight all day. There was a small clock on the nightstand, but John kept himself from counting the minutes. It was dark by the time he heard footsteps outside the room. He didn’t dare reach for the nearby lamp lest he start a wildfire inside his right shoulder. But when the door opened on its hinges, he saw only one shadow, his sister’s. She turned on the lamp for him and avoided looking into his eyes as she said, “He won’t come. He says when you’re ready, you can go see him.”
He closed his eyes to absorb the pain of this slight and once again saw the blood coming from Alex’s nostrils, the horrified expression on Alex’s face as he hit the earth. After all he had paid witness to in Iraq, how could a bloody nose have this effect on him? Maybe killing was easy when it was your true intention. What made life unbearable was the pain you caused when you were trying to do the right thing.
“John?”
His vision misted, and he blinked furiously. He had avoided tears, but Patsy had seen the first threat of them. Maybe his pain gave off some kind of vibration detectable to a blood relative. She stood over the bed, staring at him expectantly. But when he went rigid again, she withdrew and told him he needed to rest.
In the middle of the night, he awoke to the sight of his sister standing over him in a baggy nightshirt, her hair sleep-rumpled. She extended a glass of water toward him, opened her other palm to reveal two blue pills. He took them from her with his good hand and swallowed them before she could tell him that they were for the pain.
He drifted off within minutes, awoke to the sound of slow, shuffling footsteps and the faint light of early morning. Patsy was in the chair across from the bed, fully dressed and freshly showered, but paying him no mind as she turned over a large envelope in her hands. In his drugged haze, he assumed it was a good-bye letter, that she was leaving him to deal with Alex on his own. The thought of it forced him to shut his eyes and do his best to wish himself back to sleep.