Jog On Fat Barry Read Free Page B

face began to mirror hers. I could feel it contorting with rage. I grabbed her by the hair. Everything went quiet as I plunged the chisel into her heart. I don’t know how many times I did it, but I could hear bones crack and splinter every time the chisel smashed through her ribcage. When I finally stopped she was bug-eyed and jerking. Her head slumped down onto her chest and her eyes closed. Uncle Frank had been standing there with his mouth open, but he yelped like a puppy when I pushed the chisel into his gut. The sound made me hesitate, and I only got to stick him another three or four times before the cops arrived to stop me. One of the cops took me into the kitchen and gave me a glass of water. His name was Francis Michael Stations. He was fat and didn’t speak much. I wondered if he was the cop who drove Aileen back to Brooklyn General the day I was born, and was going to ask him. I wanted to say that Aileen had named me after him. But why would Stations remember me even if he had been that cop? And supposing he was, and he did, it wasn’t like Stations would give a shit about it anyway.
    “Who’s dead?”
    Out in the hall one homicide detective was talking to another.
    “The kid’s mom.”
    “Kid the doer?”
    “Looks that way.”
    “Where is he?”
    The detective nodded into the kitchen.
    “In the kitchen with Stations.”
    The other detective glanced through the doorway. He looked at me for a moment and then noticed Danny.
    “Who’s the other kid?”
    “The doer’s brother.”
    “How come he’s growling?”
    “I think he’s retarded.”
    The Agency put Danny and me in the system. Danny went some place upstate and I went to juvie. Neither of us went to Aileen’s funeral. I don’t even know if she had one. I’d ask after Danny whenever I could, but no one knew or seemed to care where he was, and, after a few years, I stopped asking. I even forgot I had a brother for a while. I guess it was easier to shut him out. But then, when I was fourteen or thereabouts, I ran into a kid who said he’d been upstate with him. He said the place they were at was a minimum-security detention centre. There was an old man on the gate at night, and if you wanted gum, or a pack of smokes or something, you could skip over the wall, run into town, and no one would be the wiser. The kid said they had a heat wave the summer Danny arrived.
    “It was so hot I lost ten pounds,” the kid said. “Melted away like a fucking ice cube.”
    He said a few nights after Danny had got there, a bunch of them jumped the wall and then hiked over to this little river to cool down in. He said Danny had tagged along and stood on the riverbank, watching them all goofing off in the water. Sometime later, Danny pulled himself up onto the overhanging branch of this big old tree beside the riverbank, and started to climb up it.
    “I never saw anything like it,” the kid said. “Your brother went up that old tree like a monkey up a fucking rope.”
    The kid said when Danny reached the top he looked down at all the other kids floating around in the water and he smiled, but only for a second, because then he straightened up and dove off.
    “The sucker couldn’t tie his own shoelaces,” the kid said. “But he could fly. And it was a beautiful thing, watching him knife into the water with no splash or nothing the way he did… it was a beautiful thing.”
    The kid said a counsellor in the place they were at told them that what had happened to Danny that night was an accident. She said Danny went too high; dove too deep; got tangled up in roots on the river bottom, and drowned. But she was wrong: dead wrong. Danny didn’t know how to swim: he’d never been to a pool in his life; never jumped off any diving board, and if he did knife into the water with no splash like the kid said, it was luck and nothing else.
    “Tangled-up roots on the bed of a river had nothing to do with my brother not coming up again,” I said. “Danny monkeyed up