But he sees it. He has to. He sees behind the curtain. He’s the only one who does. And beyond the script is something else, the desire he has in this moment to destroy my new bike, my cherished and most prized possession, and in doing so, leave me to feel exactly as he does in the world. Alone.
I walk the broken bike home, wobbly and sobbing.
Paul is on the back porch tending to holes in the chicken wire that Pepper dug beneath the makeshift pen he built for her and Mork. He sees me. “What happened?”
I tell him the story. The park, the school, Timothy Manning and the boys from the group home, Tony, my broken bike. Paul is furious, dropping the hammer, spitting the nails in his teeth onto the ground. “He did what?”
We go into the kitchen, where Tony sits at the big table. Paul asks him if it’s true.
“No. He broke it himself,” Tony says. “’Cause he wanted me to get in trouble.”
“Why would he do that?”
“Because he’s a sneaky little shit. That’s why.” There is so much hatred in his eyes.
“I don’t believe you,” Paul says, trying to catch those angry eyes. “He spent months saving for that bike. He wouldn’t just break it.”
“Yes he would! That’s how sneaky he is!”
“He’s lying!” I scream.
“I know he is.” Paul turns to Tony. “He’s your brother, goddamn it! I just don’t understand this. You are going to pay to have it fixed!”
“You can’t make me! I won’t do it! He made it all up!”
He runs down the stairs with a face full of tears and slams the door to our bedroom. Paul sits with me. He says we’ll fix my bike, not to worry. It’s just some light damage. I think of Tony and there is a split, a new idea of him emerges in my mind less like a teammate and more like an enemy or a force of nature, innately bad, like a sickness or the rot of an apple. When Mom gets home, she says she’s sorry I have to deal with Tony’s “impulse issues.” I wince, even though I’m angry. Something feels wrong.
She takes away Tony’s allowance and tells him she’s going to give it to me until the bike is fixed. Tony says, “I don’t care! Everyone here hates me! This is unfair! I hate all of you!” He refuses to do his chores. He sulks in his room. He never apologizes. He has made up his mind that this is a war and I am his enemy. But I’m just so sick of the noogies and headlocks, the spit in my eye, and if it’s a war he wants, I decide I’m going to give him one.
CHAPTER 16
THE WAY OF ALL GREAT DRUNKS
On the day the crate of chimney sweep tools arrive, the air is crisp with a chill. As I walk down the street at dusk, Breys Avenue smells of burning wood. Fire means warmth and warmth means shelter which matters in a place with cold winters and two hundred days of rain every year. It’s a good day to be a chimney sweep. A big white truck parks in front of our house and two men unload the wooden crate the size of a piano which Paul signs for. One by one he removes the tools and places them on the blue tarp: a black circular brush as big as a cat, a series of six-foot iron poles, steel wire brushes attached to a hemp rope, a wooden scraper, a wire-frame fan, a vacuum that looks like a rubber garbage can, and one black felt top hat. Paul puts the top hat on his head, covering his wild patchy black hair. “How do I look?”
“Like a bearded turtle going to a dance,” Mom says.
“All those chimneys,” Paul says. “Someone’s gotta clean ’em.” This is his contribution, one that allows him to keep tending to the rabbits, one that doesn’t require him to leave the house for some “square nine to five” that he could never hold down because of “all the goddamn holes in the résumé.”
Once they are set up with a call service and place an ad in the local Yellow Pages that reads “Stone Soup Chimney Sweeps” next to an outline of a man in a top hat hanging from a brick chimney, once Paul has read two books about the process and cleaned our chimney with Mom’s help and we’ve heard for weeks about how this “new income” is going to “help out a lot around here,” a call comes in for a job and we wave goodbye to Paul one Saturday morning after he packs the brushes, poles, vacuum and fan into the truck and drives away with that black top hat on. He’s whistling as he climbs into the front seat. Mom says, “Isn’t it amazing how you can still make a living with wood and fire in this age of jet planes and space travel?”
A few hours later he comes home covered in gray ash, a thick outline around his eyes from his goggles, his hands black from the grime, a noticeable slump in his shoulders. He describes to us a day of standing on a rooftop breathing in dust and scraping brick. “It couldn’t have been that bad,” Mom says. “Didn’t it feel good to be out in the crisp air?”
“I was cold. Here.” He hands her a check with a black thumbprint on it. “I’m going to wash up.” He gets more jobs sweeping chimneys and each time he comes home covered in muck and ash. After a few weeks, he stops wearing the top hat when he goes out. “It makes me look stupid,” he says. He stops watching cartoons with us, just washes up and takes a shower and says, “Well, that wasn’t very fun.”
When he leaves on a drinking binge again, when Mom comes home from work and there are three messages from the answering service from a woman on Thompson Avenue asking what happened to the man from Stone Soup Chimney Sweeps, when Mom’s face goes white and she looks at us while cradling the receiver in her hand and asks, “Did Paul say where he was going,” Tony says, “He didn’t say anything, just packed up the truck and left.” She puts the receiver down. We have cereal for dinner that night because she’s too upset to cook. Tony declares that he’s tired of rabbit and he doesn’t care if we all die if that means we don’t have to eat the disgusting little creatures anymore. Mom is too anxious to fight, which means that she’s right on the edge of getting the depression.
The next morning I’m up at five again taking the frozen water bowls out of the barn, defrosting them with hot water in a pitcher from the kitchen sink, filling their food bowls with pellets from the fifty-pound feed bag at the back of the barn.
Paul parks his truck in front of the house a few nights later. We see him sitting there in the driver’s seat, hunched over the steering wheel. Mom goes outside to talk to him while we wait in the living room. “He was drunk. I told him to go away until he is sober,” she says when she comes back in. We tell her we don’t care that he’s drunk and it’s better that he’s home but she says kids shouldn’t see adults “when they’re using” because it might be bad for them. Tony says Dad drinks all the time and it’s fine and Mom says, “Paul is an alcoholic so it’s different. Your dad might be one too but he’s a functional alcoholic.” Tony says it doesn’t matter if he can function or not, it’s his house too so we should just let him sleep here since it’s below freezing and all he has is his truck. Mom says the truck smells like puke because of the “Duck Pill” Paul takes to make him sick when he drinks as part of his recovery and she doesn’t want us seeing him like that. We say we don’t care. We just don’t want him to freeze to death. She says that sometimes you have to practice “tough love” with people so they can reach “rock bottom” and go to AA. But Paul’s already in AA, we say. And what if he dies? Mom says she’s powerless over the disease and powerless over his actions. We say yeah but you could let him in the house so he has somewhere warm to sleep.