Brotherly Love Read Free Page A

the huddle of men back and forth
across the room.
    And all the time, the man named Sally is talking.
"You can’t kill him, Charley," he says. "Constantine
don’t want him hurt."
    A chair turns over, a lamp falls from a table. The
boy hears his father hissing through his teeth as he fights. All the
other noises in the room are soft. The boy pictures a neighbor
walking past the house on the sidewalk, pausing for a moment to look
at the lighted windows, and then walking on.
    "Listen to me, Charley," the man says.
    His father stops struggling and hangs for a moment in
the center of the red-faced men holding him, hangs as if he were in
his hammock in the back yard.
    "Listen to me," the man says. "Listen
to what I’m telling you. She didn’t feel a thing."
    And in that moment, hanging helpless, his father
turns his head, as if to remove himself from the one who is talking,
and in doing that his eyes move to the corner of the room, and are
somehow drawn to the staircase where Peter is sitting with his face
pressed into the banister.
    "I want your word," the man says. "I
can tell Constantine they ain’t nothing to worry about here now."
    Behind the men, Peter’s mother is crying.
    "Later you want to do something, you can talk to
Constantine yourself, right?"
    His father doesn’t answer and his eyes stay
fastened to the staircase.
    "All right?" the man says. "Lookit,
you got things to take care of right here anyway . . . Charley?"
    His father rolls his head then, slowly, and looks at
the man who is talking, and in a movement so small Peter is not sure
he sees it, his father nods. His uncle drops his father’s feet and
the ones holding his waist and arms set him upright and then step
back, wary.
    The men flex their arms and necks, some of them out
of breath. His father’s shirt is ripped along two lines that follow
the muscles in his back.
    The one named Sally waits a moment and then kisses
his father on the cheek and walks out the door. The other men follow
him, each of them making some gesture. His uncle is last out of the
house.
    "I would of killed him myself, Charley," he
says.
    Peter’s father does not
answer. He waits until the uncle is gone, then closes the door. He
walks up the staircase slowly and pauses for a moment in front of
Peter, studying him as if he cannot remember who he is. Then,
absently, he reaches out, touches his hair, and walks past him toward
the end of the hall.
 
He stops
before he gets to the end, though, and stares into the pale light of
her room, as if memorizing what is inside—a place full of stuffed
animals—and then he closes the door.
    * * *
     
    C ertain things come to him
without his knowing how. He sees the fragile looks between his mother
and father, and understands that in those gestures there is a certain
panic.
    It is as if they were tied head to foot with ropes,
unable to move an inch, struggling one moment, giving in the next.
And they cannot touch each other at all.
    And they cannot touch him.
    That is what he wants now, to be touched.
    The things he knows settle on him with a certainty
that precludes mistakes or misunderstanding; he knows them as well as
the room where he sleeps or his own face in the mirror.
    He walks into the living room and finds his father
sitting in a chair by the window, staring across the front yard, and
knows that there is nothing he can say that his father will hear.
    His father sees him, then looks back out the window,
silent.
    He was silent before the accident, too, but it was a
natural part of the rooms of the house then; now it is unnatural, and
the rooms are unnatural too.
    His mother comes downstairs only to cook and to eat.
He sits down on the floor next to his father, wanting him to touch
his hair again. He thinks of the night the men held him while the one
named Sally talked. He wishes he had thrown himself into them, dived
on them from the top of the stairs. He judges the distance now,
imagining his path through the living room air and the