Maybe six years ago, my brother called me from clear across the country to tell me that at thirty-nine, he had finally figured out what he really wanted to do. I was happy for him. It had been a long, nasty haul and he deserved a little peace — which, as he told me in his thin, tight voice, was sitting in a rocking chair by the window of his second-story bedroom, in the old farmhouse he’d bought, and taking shots at a three-pound coffee can. It was a .22 rifle and the coffee had chicory in it. When I asked him what brand, so maybe I could picture it, he said he didn’t know and, what’s more, it didn’t matter.
All that mattered were the soft, green-gold, long, long summer evenings you get down in the southern tier of New York State, and the way the wind teased the can. Gently. Seeming to slip in from every direction, so the can danced around in ways he couldn’t predict. He had to concentrate, to see, to aim, to shoot. He said that he sat there for hours, and now and then tears ran down his face and he didn’t have any words for the sorrow. Did I? Was it like mine? Could I tell him?
I told him the truth. That I couldn’t quite get the picture and it’s the pictures that matter to me. I told him that he’d probably have to sit there a while longer and see for himself. I’m the older sister here, by five years. He turns to me about once a decade, and, sure as shit, I always seem to let him down.
I must have blown it big on that one because I didn’t hear from him for ages. Except for the times when I called our folks and he was there, like Christmas 1985 and 1986 and 1987. He’d be all warm and almost teary and he’d want to talk a long time. On my money. In 1988, when my mom said, “Do you want me to put Rick on the phone?” I was so pissed that he never called me that I said, “No, I don’t think so. No.” I could hear her breathe. I could almost hear her swallow her words. I almost wished I’d swallowed mine.
I thought about all the Christmases and birthdays he’d messed up and the time I’d sent him a Lackawanna & Erie Railroad key chain and he’d never even written to say thank you or remember when we used to go down early morning to the station and watch the trains and we were always scared the trains would suck us under, or remember how when Mom was nuts Dad would buy us breakfast in that little wood shack on the way home, so the hell with him. Back then, it was don’t get mad, get even that guided my path. Especially with men. Especially men who didn’t call. Every now and then, I’d think about Rick in that rocking chair, plunking away at some coffee can, and I’d feel a little sad — but it was his turn to spend the damn quarter.
Then out of nowhere, there was this unexpected miracle of telecommunications. Scotty, my old boyfriend, showed up. Somehow, he and I were different this time around. This time we went slow. This time we could stand the silences. This time we actually talked. He started telling me ’Nam stories, and I had to think about them and see the pictures they made. And, I had to face that I had no picture of my brother. Not a snapshot, not a home movie, not any way to see him at all.
It’s funny how the absence of someone who wasn’t ever really there feels. It’s not like a hurt, it’s more like a bruise you don’t notice till you bump it. Then it stings. But only for a second, only for as long as it takes me to put my mind on happier things. For a while I’ve been telling myself that it doesn’t really mean much anyhow, because Scotty is lover and pal and storyteller and brother enough.
Scotty Deschines. Actually, Rupert Deschines till he sprouted to six-foot-two and 190 pounds his sophomore year in high school. No way were the cheerleaders going to shriek “Rupert” every time he completed one of his shamanic passes. That’s how he tells it, how his mom Myra tells it whenever we’re snug on the couch in her Tempe condo, swamp-cooler purring, lizards blissing on the patio wall, the photo album in our laps and all those pictures of Rupert-Scotty. The three of us are flipping the pages and that kid, that place, and that weather seem like a galaxy away, not the two thousand miles and twenty-plus years they really are.
I still do not quite trust Scotty, but being a mom myself, actually a grandma, I trust Myra. I trust most moms. At some level, no matter how the surface looks, we might all be alike. We know about the bruises that lie under things. We tell magic stories about our kids and, sometimes, about the bruises. I think of my own mom, of her young face, pale and slack from too many Seconals, of her tan hands moving over the piano keyboard, playing “Misty” on a drenched August evening. I think of her laughter, hear her and my Aunt Marge telling the stories of their flapper girlhoods. I wish I’d been there, and when Myra tells me Scotty was something special, I wish I was back twenty-plus years, except I’d be twenty-three and he’d be illegal and we’d both be back East, a fate, we’ve agreed, that’s worse than death.
Myra doesn’t use the word shamanic. Neither does Scotty. That’s more mine. What she says, causing him to look at his shoes and go red in the ears, is that he was flat-out magic there on the field. She’d watch him running and dodging and blocking and staying still and she could hardly believe it was the same skinny kid she’d pulled through pneumonia three winters in a row. Scotty hates that part. How she says that and how she pats his balding head and gets this wet look in her old blue eyes.
It took Scotty and me six years and four false starts to get together, six months for him to decide to haul me south to meet his folks, six months for me to agree to go. All of that was longer than the silence that now stretches between me and Rick, my brother. I notice I talk about Rick so infrequently that I am careful to say Rick, my brother. I do think about Rick, my brother, who is frozen in time somewhere around 1968, who is no longer married, who has a kid I hardly know, who sits in green-gold dusk and raises some kind of rifle to his shoulder and listens to the ping of the bullet hitting some kind of coffee can. I think of him at the strangest moments, like when I smell pine and it has that gold-green perfume, like when Scotty and I are tramping around the Mogollon Rim in hunting season and hear gunshots and we both speed up a little, and most of all, when I hear Scotty tell me a story and I realize I know more about twenty-four-year-old Scotty and his Special Forces Medic patch than I do about my brother and whatever he wore or thought or did or didn’t do when he was that same age.
Actually, on our previous go-rounds, I didn’t have a picture of Scotty. He was a stranger to me. “A stranger in a stranger land,” like this great country-western song says. I was a stranger to his thoughts, to his secrets, to his stories, to everything but his body, and that solid homeland, that flesh and smell and hunger, known as though never not known, was enough to hook in my memory and reel me back.
This time around, everything with Scotty and me seems amazingly comfortable, and after a year, still hotter than a FNG on his first night in Bangkok. Fucking New Guy in Bangkok, 1969. Ancient history to most people, that time and that weird war, but practically last week to Scotty, who was in that war, who was more there in that war than he’s ever been since. My brother wasn’t there, in that war, though he’s two years older than Scotty and he could have been. He was somewhere else. He was somewhere, year after year, that wasn’t quite there. That much I do know. You have to be a hippie to remember there. As in, “Omigawd, what acid, I’m really there!” Don’t ask me where exactly my brother was. I truly don’t know.
Wherever it was, ’Nam would have been better. Scotty doesn’t know he’s convinced me of this, but he has. In the albums his mother spreads out in front of me, there is one picture of that time. Scotty’s ears stick out, which they still do, and he is a big fellow, which he still is, and you can see the man he will become. I can’t see his eyes behind his glasses, but I can guess that he’s looking straight into the camera, no flinching, no turning away.
She has only this one picture of that time, and she knows zero of the stories that might go with it. I think it’s her loss, but I understand. I don’t want to know how my youngest got on and off cocaine and I don’t want to know what happened in the hours right before my middle daughter took her gorgeous kid and left the marriage I know too much about. But late at night, when we’re worn out from our fine loving and we can’t listen to another song by Creedence, or Judy Collins, or Springsteen, Scotty tells me the stories, one after another, sometimes repeating them two or three times, the way old people will tell stories, the way that gets you to see the pictures behind the stories. As I listen I understand these are the pictures that are not in his mother’s photo album. It was, it is too dark under the jungle’s triple canopy, there is too much flesh, too much blood and bone for them to have ever been developed.
I’m willing to see those pictures, to let them come up out of the dark, to watch the boys and the men and the pain and the light take shape, and I’m starting to remember Scotty’s stories. I think we human beings have a gene for both telling stories and remembering. It doesn’t work till we’re old or scared or we’ve been through something that must not be forgotten. Then that story gene jumps out of the old animal puddle and we tell and repeat and those who listen start to remember, so when it’s time for them to pass the stories on, they mostly get it right. Maybe they add some things in — you could do that, out of love, out of respect, out of hatred or pain. But when that gene is working, you have to listen. And, when it’s pumping out whatever it pumps, you have to talk.
“It wasn’t patriotism,” Scotty tells me. “It was other things.” He pulls on his beer. Beer lubricates the story gene, especially late at night, especially when talker and listener have exchanged sweat and satisfaction and whispers that hover over their tired bodies.
“Mmm,” I breathe against his chest.
“Can you hear me?” he says. “Put that thing in.”
I reach up and take my hearing aid from next to the mirror, among the baby oil and the discarded clothes, and put it in my ear. I turn the little dial, hear the air crackle, and rest my other cheek on his skin.
“It wasn’t patriotism,” I say. “It was other things.”
“Right,” he says. “It was friendship. It was the buzz. It was clarity.”
I wait. I love his breathing and his smell, our smell, and I love his room that has no pictures and a nine-millimeter automatic in a holster above the headboard and a shotgun down alongside the waterbed. It’s like being on an ocean in a boat with a strong, well-armed friend. I feel warm. I feel safe.
“You were with these guys,” he says, “and all of you were with death, twenty-fucking-four hours a day. . . .”
He stops. I wait.
“You were so tired,” he says. “Every one of you. Maybe you’d been up three nights straight, with that lousy army amphetamine, did I tell you about that, we called ’em Green Hornets?”
I nod. He ruffles my hair, pulls me in a little closer.
“So, you spent the day digging holes and stringing wire, and then you go out on ambush,” he says quietly.
I can’t imagine that fatigue. Maybe a little, as a single mom, hitting the floor at six a.m., getting the kids out to school, myself to work, then back, buying groceries, doing a wash, cooking dinner, adult education, and study till one. Still, nobody was trying to kill me.
“You’re all the time scared to death.” He stops.
“You . . . are . . . scared . . . all . . . the . . . time,” he says again. Scotty is a calm, understated guy. In six years I’ve seen him mad maybe twice, heard him be scary once when he told me that if anybody had spit on him when he came back, he would’ve shoved their nose into the back of their head. I’ve heard him be rowdy plenty of times, but even that is gentle and silly. Lighten up is his favorite mental-health advice.
I know scared . . . all . . . the . . . time. I can see, can smell, can feel scared . . . all . . . the . . . time. Scared shitless syndrome — SSS, we called it in the funny farm, those three times I went, those times I was happy to be locked in. Now and then, if I haven’t been taking care of business, if I let myself get too hungry or tired or pissed off, I go right back into it. Can’t think. Can’t move. Can’t breathe. Can’t do anything but stay still and do what passes for prayer till my heart lays off and I can swallow past whatever it is — from being little, a little girl, a spooked and furious little girl — that blocks my throat, that cold-cocks my heart.
“I know some about that,” I say. Scotty is staring at the ceiling. I can hardly see him. We talk about getting a lava lamp so we can watch the shadows play off our bodies, but we haven’t done it. He says it’s a great relief to tell me things from the late sixties, early seventies and not have to explain. So, we miss lava lamps, and tie-dyed bell-bottoms, and ponytails. When we’re out in the high canyon sun, he still wears a bandana.
Once, a little before Christmas, which we both hate, we had our own celebration. I remember the pines outside and the clear morning light pouring through the picture window. He put on my gift, the patchwork skirt my friend Crazy Sue had made for me in 1968, and a purple bandana, and we took my holy beads from around my neck and hung them around his. We were listening to Steppenwolf and Scotty sashayed around, into the sun and out, across the living-room shag onto the sticky kitchen tiles, up and down the long hallway, till he stopped at the wall cupboard and took out his green beret and a couple of medals and the death’s-head plaque the guys had given him in 1970: Rupert “Dark Cloud” Deschines. The death’s head had fangs, and the grunts and officers thanked him for his work.
Now, lying pressed against his warm body, that memory sings in my blood. Brother, I think in that old, dreamy, stoned way. Brother.
“One time,” he says, “I was with some Vietnamese regulars and a bunch of ’Yards and we were going through this elephant grass.”
It’s the tripwire story. I wait.
“Did I tell you how that grass could cut your hands to shreds? You had to wear gloves. When you got it bent down, it was so fucking slippery to walk on that you had to grab what was left standing around you to stay off your ass. You wore canvas gloves. In that heat. That’s how bad it was.” He doesn’t wait for me to tell him that he’s told me. I wouldn’t anyhow. I need to hear these stories over and over again.
And I don’t have any big need to tell him mine, the ones about the draft-board bust and the bail-fund benefits and the teach-ins and sit-ins and die-ins and the marches — except for the time I stepped out to walk ten city blocks, knowing that somebody had called the cops and threatened to blow away one of those peace cunts. I can still hear the slow, steady thump of the single Buddhist drum. I still remember how everything was blurred because I was so scared. I made my feet step in time to that dark Buddhist beat. That’s the only way I kept moving. That’s the only story he’s heard.
“I couldn’t see anything,” Scotty says. “I heard a pop. I heard somebody yelling, ‘Bac se. Didi mau. Bac se.’ That’s ‘Doctor, run fast.’ I told you that once, right? I know that one of those fuckers has snagged a tripwire and is out there in a world of hurt. I know that because he is screaming and these people don’t scream. I know that this whole stretch of grass is rigged with tripwires and I gotta get to that little fucker.”
He made himself lift one foot, then the next, then the next, one step at a time, forcing himself to walk, forcing himself to breathe. Going forward, breathing in, breathing out, going, breathing. His skin is soft and warm against my cheek. He’s put on weight since that holy stroll. I love his bulk. He is a bear in my arms, a tree. I imagine him in that cruel grass, young and thin and hard, his skin clammy, his muscles frozen, his heart racing inside his ribs. I can see how his eyes would have been behind his fogged glasses, how his breath would have moved choppy and short and stubborn around his heart. I cannot hear what he heard. I have never heard that sound. I have not even come close. And the smells that he tells me were there, never.
“Did you get to him?” I ask. He doesn’t answer. He begins to snore. Later, he will deny it. He will tell me that he doesn’t snore. It’s me who snores. And we will have to wrestle about that. It will be dawn and we will be laughing and wrestling and not kissing because we haven’t gotten out of bed to brush our teeth, and, you see, we will have already made love at least once.
Maybe these nights and mornings have given me courage. Maybe it’s the stories, the way Scotty’s stories fill me with pictures, the way they light up the dark empty spaces in my heart where my brother ought to be. Maybe it’s this most recent war, and the television pictures of rockets over Baghdad like hot jewels against the midnight sky. Maybe it’s how I remembered my favorite Classics Illustrated, each picture framed in flowers and jewels, hundreds of pictures and more than one story, not the full thousand and one that Scheherazade told to save her life, but five or six. Two of them began in Baghdad. With all my young heart, I wanted to fly there someday, to a place where a girl could tell stories to save her life.
Watching the rockets, knowing how far we are from their scream and dazzle, and how close, I begin to see something. I know it’s not a huge deal, not life or death, not didi mau, bac se, but I see I have to do something about my brother. One of the nights when I’m at my place and Scotty is denned up in the pines, I find my photo album and I make myself look at the pictures. There’s formerly crazy Mom. There’s Dad who might, right this minute, as I tell this story, be moving into old-age la-la land. There’s Rick. He’s blonde and round-cheeked and you can see that the dark little girl on the sled next to him, the frazzle-haired kid squinting at the camera, is less than thrilled about something. You can tell that she might be the kind of sneaky little shit who would tell her kid brother ghost stories and then holler to her parents that he was crying and keeping her awake. You can tell that she would be pissed at getting caught, and she would not have one, not one-half a baby regret that she’d done such an awful thing. You can tell that she’s already made up her mind that life is not a square deal. You could guess that she already tells stories, not all of them ghostly, most of them full of jewels and magic carpets and captive princesses and knights that cut them free and take them away.
Scotty has an older sister. She’s far away. He doesn’t write. One night, I start to tell him about Rick, and I stop. There are stories that happen across an ocean and there are stories that happen in your very own back yard. I can see that yard as a bunch of vines, all tangled together, thicker than any jungle and ten times as scary. There are wonderful blossoms and unbelievable birds and there are tripwires, folks. If you go back into that jungle, if you keep breathing, if you listen to your racing heart and lift your foot and go forward, sometimes the screaming doesn’t stop, sometimes what you step over still blows up in your face.
I’m having those thoughts as I look at the picture, and the ones after it, and the one taken last Christmas: my folks, my kids, and Rick flashing a peace sign at the camera. There is no triple canopy. There are no flares. There is only the flashbulb reflecting off Rick’s glasses. I can’t see his eyes. I can only see his scared grin and how he’s facing square into the camera.
I pick up the phone and he’s there. I tell him about being mad and he says he doesn’t blame me. I tell him I miss him and he says he knows that he’s the one who’s got to break the silence. I start to cry. He says that sometimes he goes to this island our family used to camp on and he sits on the big rock and he cries and cries. He says he’s found the little boy who lives inside him and he doesn’t know whether to kill him or hug him. I, for once, wisely keep my mouth shut. We’re quiet for a minute.
“I’ve just got a couple of questions before I hang up,” I say.
“Shoot,” he says. I see him there, in that rocking chair, with the rifle, sighting out along the barrel, watching the can twist and sway in the soft air.
“What brand is that coffee?” I ask. “I need to know.”
“Luzianne,” he says. I see that bright red and blue and black can. I see how it might catch the sunlight, how the earth would keep moving into dusk and the light and colors fade. I see how, at the last, there would be just that black shape dancing against the pale sky. The picture jumps up clear and bright beyond my tears.
“And the chair,” I say, “what kind of wood?”
And he tells me.
This story originally appeared in the Tucson Weekly.
