Blood Relations Read online

  “You’re not the man your brother is, Mick, so maybe this fightin’ stuff all the time ain’t for you.”

  “Maybe it ain’t, Dad,” I said, smiling out the passenger window. “’Cause I sure ain’t the man my brother is.”

  “And I promised old Healy you’d apologize for stranglin’ him, so you will. I explained to everybody that you was mental from gettin’ beat up, so while you still ain’t none too popular with the neighbors, nobody’s pressin’ charges.”

  It was true that I was mental. It was also true that I was sorry for choking old Healy—but only because it made me look even more like Terry. But it was also true that if Healy told me today that I was just like Terry I’d probably choke him again.

  “Okay, thank you,” I said, because right now I simply wanted to get along. I was humming along fine. My painkillers were killing my pains. I’d just had a little vacation from everybody. And I was under medical orders to do nothing but lie on my back for the rest of the week. I wasn’t happy, exactly, but I wasn’t not happy either, which was good.

  It was supper time when we got home. I popped a pill before walking in. Already seated at the table were Ma, Terry... and Sully. In the middle of it all was a meatloaf that I could tell from the doorway was about eighty-five percent Bell’s meatloaf mix, with a lit candle in the middle of it.

  “Welcome home, sweetheart,” Ma said, a little teary, a little tipsy.

  “How come you didn’t come and see me?” I asked before taking another step inside. I hadn’t planned that question, didn’t realize it was even in there inside me. It just blipped out when I laid eyes on her.

  “Well... well, your father had to work late... and early... and I couldn’t get anybody to take me... the visiting hours over at that crazy hospital... I tried, god, did I try to get over there. ...”

  “Okay,” I said. She only leaves the house when my father takes her. I blew out my candle, got instantly dizzy, and slumped into my seat.

  Terry got up, took the keys from Dad, and left. He was only waiting for his truck.

  Dad sat down with his rack of beers, and helped himself to six or seven slabs of loaf and a big ladleful of water-logged diced carrots, all perfect little orange squares. Ma served me, but I didn’t look down at the food. She served Sul, and he dug right in. He hadn’t even spoken to me yet, the rat. I watched him chomp his first few bites. He could feel me watching him, I knew.

  The meal went on in perfect, typical, blissful silence until I broke it up.

  “Please excuse us,” I said, kicking out my chair and pulling Sully, still chewing, up out of his.

  “Oh, you don’t like it,” my mother pouted.

  “No, I like it just fine,” I said. “It’s just, you know how it is, that fine hospital food’s got me spoiled.”

  She nodded, relieved, humming her agreement with her mouth full. “Ummmm, ahh, that’s true. I had such a Salisbury steak the time I had the kidney stone out...”

  Sully wasn’t too happy, because he was hungry. But I’d make it up to him. I pulled a couple of beers from my father and headed off to my room. There I shoved a can into his hand, put some ancient, spacey Pink Floyd on the stereo, and whipped out my medicine.

  “Meds?” Sully said, wide-eyed and stupefied. “They sent you home with a whole bottle? Didn’t give them to your father? They left you to self-medicate?”

  I didn’t quite see the joke. “Ya, so what’s so amazing about that?”

  He laughed, pulled back. “Nothing. I just thought of something funny, that’s all. Has nothing to do with you.”

  “Good. Here,” I said, and stuck two pills in his hand.

  He looked in his hand, looked at me. I ate my pills and swallowed long on my beer. Pink Floyd swirled all around the room.

  “I feel funny,” Sully said. “This is weird, doing this kinda shit at home, with the old Mom and Pop gumming away on the meatloaf one room away.”

  “So?” I said.

  “So, it feels creepy, that’s all. It’s like inviting your parents to a circle jerk. I mean, it kinda spoils the atmosphere, y’know?”

  “Hell, what are you talkin’ about, you never did no circle jerkin’,” I said.

  Sully was indignant. “Sure I did. It was with the Boy Scouts. We were at a jamboree with this scoutmaster who was in the seminary over at St. John’s, and he’s playin’ his guitar, and we’re all sittin’ around the fire and he breaks into a round of ‘If you’re happy and you know it, pull your whang—’”

  “You did not, you lying sack,” I cut in.

  “Okay, I didn’t. But I thought about it. And when I think about it and add my folks to the scene... brrrr... well, it’s totally blown, all right?” He stuck the pills back into my hand. “Here, knock yourself out.”

  I stashed them back in the bottle. We both polished off our beers, and when I heard my parents leave for the O’Asis, I went and got us more. We sat at the kitchen table.

  “Sully, what happened to Toy?” I asked in a way that let him know I wasn’t playing.

  “I don’t know,” he said, shrugging.

  “Did you know they were gonna be waiting for us?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What the hell does that mean, you don’t know?”

  “I knew the when, all right. And I told you guys that. Your brother told me, and Augie told me, and Baba told me—they’re all tellin’ me at the same time, get the picture?—they told me when it might be a good time not to be with you guys. And then I risked my life tellin’ you and Toy. But you wanted to be brave.”

  Sully could say the word brave in a way that made you ashamed of it.

  “Coward.” I grabbed his beer away from him. “I ain’t drinkin’ with you.”

  He grabbed it back. “Bullshit. I was still there, wasn’t I? Right up to the last minute. I was ready to hang in there. You don’t know, Mick, I was standin’ there, tryin’ to be cool, hopin’ they were just bluffin’ and that they wouldn’t do it, but all the time, I was pissin’ myself. You know, that brave shit ain’t my bag.”

  I got cooler yet. “So then, where were you?”

  “Well... then, then Toy started with all that secrecy jazz, y’know, the Spanish. I didn’t know he was no Spaniel. You didn’t neither, don’t lie. And then, y’know, I didn’t know what to think. I was thinkin’, Well, who the hell is this guy, anyway? I don’t know jack shit about him. He’s hidin’ stuff from us and... who the hell knows what’s up with him? So I was pissed, maybe I’m not exactly sure why, but I was. And I figured, screw this, I ain’t gettin’ my head caved in for him. What would I have been fightin’ for, if I hung in there?”

  He looked at me, expecting I don’t know what. A nod, or a smack in the mouth. But I wasn’t giving him any. “And me, Sul? What about me?”

  “Mick, I swear, I never thought in a million years they’d pull any real shit on you. I still can’t believe it. I guess... I guess the rules’ve changed.”

  “Playin’ a new game, Mr. Sullivan. The rules have changed big time.” The way I said it, and the way I just let it hang there between us, Sully knew that I was sort of putting it to him, a question, a need for him to declare.

  “You know, Mick, I don’t mind that Toy’s... that he ain’t in the family. I was just surprised. He’s just so shadowy, he makes me nervous. I need to know things, you understand that.”

  Again he waited for me to lighten his load. Again I didn’t.

  “I heard he got away fine. Not a scratch.”

  I didn’t even blink.

  “I’m a go-with-the-flow kind of a guy, Mick. This against-the-grain stuff is hard for me, doin’ things different than I usually do ’em.”

  “So it’s hard for you, Sul. I know that. So what’s wrong with hard? What if I tell you I’m gonna be an against-the-grain kind of a guy from now on? What’re you gonna say to that?”

  He stood up, paced. Finished his beer and got us two more out of the refrigerator. He sat down close to me, almost touching
me, but not touching me. We don’t do that. “I say, that’s really hard for me. I say I don’t know what I say. I say gimme a pill. But just one.”

  I smiled and threw the pill in his mouth like I was feeding a fish chunk to a seal. We drank the beers down.

  “Come with me,” I said, and the two of us wobbled down the hall to Terry’s room. I pulled open the top two drawers of his dresser and pulled out every one of his precious collection of pocket T-shirts. I gave Sully the neat little stack of navy blues and yellows. I kept the three different shades of green. Sitting cross-legged on the floor and using Terry’s own Swiss army knife, we took turns cutting the pockets off all those shirts. It was like gouging the heart out of some game animal.

  We fell into a laughing jag as we did it. In the end, as we stood over the dead pile, I said to Sully, “He never, never leaves the house without one of these stupid damn things on. So now, he’ll never leave the house again. Thus, we have already made the world a better place.”

  It made perfect sense at the time.

  Out in the Sun

  SOMETHING HAPPENED TO ME when I attacked Terry’s shirts. I woke the following morning bold as a blue jay. “Nice shirt,” I said to Terry when I saw him later that day. He was wearing one of the navy Ts, with a second one turned inside out underneath to cover the gaping hole in his chest. He didn’t say anything back to me. I knew he wouldn’t. One thing you could always count on with dear Terry was that he couldn’t remember half of any previous evening. And while my own recall was pretty shabby, I retained just enough to enjoy the hell out of this. He was always doing pointless, idiotic things under the old influence, protesting something—gays in the military or an IRA bomb that failed to kill the Brit it was meant for—that he could never recall or care about again. And I knew he thought he sliced up his own clothes and now felt like a schmuck.

  “Fall down, didja there, Terry? Good thing you had two shirts on, huh?”

  “Wanna be dead?” he growled as he grabbed his coffee to go.

  “Better dead than red,” I said. I’d been waiting all my life to say that to somebody. But he wasn’t even listening anymore. He slammed the door in my face.

  Cock o’ the Walk, I had no school for the rest of the week, and a doctor’s note in my pocket to prove it. Sure there was a little headache to go along with it and the occasional oozy discharge from a stitch, maybe some dizziness, but I had my medicine—now there’s a thought—and nothing else but time.

  I decided it might be fun to go to school. Not to school, actually, not inside, but there, around it. To see my babe.

  “What are you, nuts?” Evelyn snapped. “Don’t you ever, ever call me that again. Not even in your dreams. How hard did you get hit in the head?” She had me so frazzled I thought it was a real question. “It was kind of like when a car falls off the jack—”

  “It will feel like a powder puff compared to how hard I’m going to clock you if you ever use that sexist ignoramus crap on me again. You got that?”

  I nodded, dumb as a bug. I felt my eyes blinking, beating like hummingbird wings. I didn’t do it on purpose, but it worked in my favor anyway. She relented.

  “So how are you feeling?” She scowled.

  “My head hurts a little.”

  “Well, go home to bed, fool,” she said. It wasn’t unpleasant, and it wasn’t totally cold, the way she pushed me around.

  “Okay,” I told her dutifully. “Will you come and see me after school?”

  “No.”

  “But Toy told you to check on me, remember?”

  Now she got truly concerned. “You’ve seen him?”

  “No. He’s still not around?”

  She just shook her head solemnly, gave me a weak wave, and walked back to school.

  Well, that’s enough, I thought. This much I can do. And I walked to Toy’s house.

  I pushed the buzzer six times, then held it on the seventh, all pissed off and adrenalined about I really wasn’t sure what.

  “Ya, ya, ya, YA!” The woman snarled as she ripped the door open. “What’s your problem, goddamnit?”

  She froze me. I hadn’t thought it through this far, to someone actually being there and answering the door, and it left me standing there with all my stupid hanging out. She looked down from the step above, thick peach-colored terry-cloth bathrobe hanging on her very loose, soaking up fresh shower water from her skin. A white towel twirled up in a cylinder from her forehead like a ten-gallon pillbox.

  “Hey,” she said, snapping her long fingers in my face. “I said, what do you want?”

  After a few more mute seconds, “Toy,” I blurted.

  As I said Toy’s name, the irritation ran out of her face. But it wasn’t replaced by anything else. She folded her arms across her chest, breathed in audibly through her nose, and exhaled the same way.

  “Toy isn’t home,” she said.

  “Well, um, could you tell me where he is? I’ve kinda been wo—”

  “No, as a matter of fact I can’t tell you where he is.”

  She let that one hang there, even though it was obviously unfinished. Could she not tell me because she wouldn’t, or because she really didn’t know? The way she said it, kind of harsh and pugnacious, seemed like she was daring me to ask.

  “I am his friend,” I said. “If that’s what you’re worried about.”

  She gave me the tiniest little half smile, the same thing as saying “Duh” to me.

  “I know who you are,” she said. “It’s not like you need a damn program to keep up with all Toy’s many compañeros.”

  I got a little embarrassed, remembering the one time we’d met, when she had no shirt on. Suddenly, I could not shove that picture out of my mind, and it made it even harder to talk. “Oh, ya,” I said, trying mightily to be as cool as I could, which was none too cool. “Ya, I believe, I believe, we did meet, I think I remember.”

  Her smile grew and became more like a real smile, less like a poke. “Yes, I imagine you do remember. What is it you want with my boy?”

  “Well, I just want to check on him, to see that he’s okay, that everything’s all right.” I stopped, looked for her reaction, but she didn’t respond. She just nodded the way teachers do when they think you can do better. “I miss him,” I said, and was amazed to hear it.

  “Good answer,” she said, turned, and walked back into the house. She didn’t close the door, so I didn’t go away. In a minute I heard her coming back down the stairs. She walked out onto the porch with a mug of coffee in her hand, strolled to the top step, and sat down. She’d left the towel upstairs. Now she shook out her wet head, letting her long, kinked, silver-streaked brown hair hang down to dry. It was one of those first good warm mornings of spring when if you stood in the sun sixty-five degrees felt like eighty-five, heating up your head and your still March-thin blood. “I like to let the sun do its work. Normally I blow-dry it, but when the sun is right I like to just put myself in its way and let it soak into me. My hair feels better after that, and it smells better, and I feel, I guess, cleaner. From the sun, you know?”

  I turned my back to her and looked up into the sun, to check. It hurt my eyes. Always did. Damn too light eyes. I closed them, and it still hurt, right through the thin pink lids. But I knew what she meant.

  “Ya, it feels good,” I said as I turned around to look at her through the sun spots. “It does make you feel, I guess, cleaner is right. You feel kind of weird and kind of dirty if the sun is out and you stay inside all the time. I love the sun.”

  “Really? You don’t look like it.”

  I looked down at my hands, white and dry as rice paper. “Well, I do need to get more of it.”

  She nodded, almost as if she wasn’t listening, took a sip of coffee, and leaned back. “What happened to your face?” she asked, sounding like she already knew. Although everything she said sounded to me like she already knew.

  I reached my hand up automatically, my fingers lightly touching and covering the bad spots. I
had forgotten about them, and now I felt grotesque.

  “Do I have to tell you?”

  “Certainly not,” she said, and kindly moved on to something else. “He goes away sometimes. Trips. He calls them just that, trips. His father calls them that too, trips. Captain Trips, is what I call his father, who also likes to go on trips. They go off together a lot of times. Alone lots of times too.”

  I nodded, because I was supposed to.

  “Toy is not his name, you know, and I never call him that. That’s just a stupid thing his father started calling him when he was tiny, because that’s all Carlo thought of having a baby, was that it was like having a great toy around. His name, though, is Angel.”

  Whoa. Why did that change things? Of course I wouldn’t know, but I did know that things were changed. Angel. Angel? God, there was so much more now. With him gone, there was so much more here, now. Somehow it felt more like I’d gotten inside him. I would probably never use his real name—he did call himself Toy, after all, and I wasn’t about to mess with what Toy wanted—but it was there just the same, wasn’t it?

  “So then, is he gonna be here, you know, anytime soon?”

  When I didn’t hear anything for a few seconds, I looked up to find she’d been staring at me, distantly, dreamily. “Sometimes it’s a long time. Sometimes not so long. But as he gets older, the trips get longer, and more frequent. I worry. It all scares me. Not like with Carlo, because who cares? But with Angel? It’s very sad. And I can’t touch him. He is a wonderful boy, and warm, but he’s off by himself. And when he returns? He’s gone, off even further. I cannot touch him. Not with words, and not with the mother’s hands. I cannot touch him.”

  She wouldn’t stop staring at me. I liked it. It made me uncomfortable. I wanted her to stop, but she wouldn’t. I couldn’t be there anymore, even though I decided I liked her very much, I could feel the time running out on this, running out on me as I got anxious.

  “Well, okay,” I said in a moronic, light, casual way, like I didn’t come here for anything big in the first place. “I’ll just try again, maybe next week.” I stood, wobbled, started sidestepping away.