I park my bike at the edge of the field at the school to see, there, in the middle of the baseball diamond, my brother lying sideways on the ground with his arms twisted in front of his chest and his long blond hair falling over a red tear-soaked face. His yellow-and-white uniform is covered in dirt, untucked in bunches around his stomach. Standing over him with one foot on his back is a tall, thin red-haired boy in a wool-collared brown leather jacket, smiling like a demon at the group of boys who’ve gathered to watch.
What is it about freckles that makes a boy so mean?
“Say another word!” he yells as he stands on my brother’s back. “Anything. Just one word!”
“Stop it!” Tony cries.
The boy kicks him hard in the back. “What’s wrong with you? Don’t you understand English, motherfucker?”
Tony spots me and our eyes lock.
I walk up to the crowd of boys. I don’t know any of them. “What’s happening?”
“We were playing baseball and this kid started mouthing off to Brian saying he sucks at pitching. So then Brian got pissed and decided to kick his ass but the kid won’t fight back. He’s just lying there on the ground.” I learn that Brian is Brian Medford and he is fourteen years old.
“Mick!” Tony screams. “Go get Paul! Hurry!”
“That’s your brother? Hey, kid, c’mere.” Brian Medford smiles at me like he’s inviting me to a carnival game. “You got something to say? ’Cause if you do, I’m gonna make your brother pay.”
“What do you mean?”
Brian Medford kicks Tony in the stomach. Tony makes a retching noise.
“I mean every time you talk, I’m going to hurt your brother.”
“Every time?” He kicks him again.
Tony lets out an awful groan, part cry, part grunt, that sounds like “Ahh-ohh-urgh.”
“Oh, so every time I speak you’re gonna hurt him?” Brian Medford stomps a black Converse high-top right into Tony’s ass.
“Yep.”
A strange feeling comes over me as I realize the potential of the situation. Or maybe it’s more like a feeling is lifted, the feeling of being under his thumb, or his weight, his spit, inside a headlock, watching him ruin another night where we could be sitting in the living room like a F-A-M-I-L-Y listening to Tchaikovsky. I smell the dirt of the field and feel the air on my neck and my arms begin to tingle.
“Anyway, as I was saying.” Brian Medford kicks Tony in the side. It sounds like a mallet hitting a sack of meat. I circle over him. “Star Wars is a great movie. Some might say underrated, despite its great success.” Brian Medford stomps on Tony’s chest as he cries. I see his red face in the dirt, his eyes filled with tears, his mouth twisted in anguish and I feel a hatred for this too. For his weakness. For his inability to get up and fight back.
“Fuck you, you piece of shit!” Brian kicks him in the back of the head. “Yeah, mothafucker, what about now? You’re not so fucking tough now are you?” Brian leans down and slaps him in the face in mockery, enjoying himself. “Who’s the fucking pussy now?”
“Leave me alone! Stop!” Tony screams through tears, his face covered in dirt, his nose bloody, his hair twisted into patches of brown mud and green grass.
Brian Medford stands over him, a red-haired, freckled goblin smiling and cracking his knuckles. “Your little brother is one cold dude.”
There is a tear in space and time, the laws of nature shifting. I’ve fallen through a hole into a place where I am the one with the power to hurt. I memorize his face all messed up in the dirt. I want to become something bigger than the land itself. So this is what it’s like to be the one with the power? It’s shocking to realize it’s in me to be like him. I wonder if it’s in him to be like me. If we didn’t choose ourselves at all but just became what was required of us, like characters following a script.
He sobs under Brian Medford’s shoe. He looks so sad. I try to focus on the anger, the revenge for my bike, but it’s hard to look away from his face, not to wonder if this is what was behind the anger. Maybe he would like to be in my place. Maybe in a different life somewhere we would switch. Maybe I would be the bad son and he would be the good son. I can feel the cruelty of it, like the crack of the baton on the baby bunny’s head, the clubs falling on Phil while he screams in the driveway. It makes me sick and sad. It mutes the colors of the world, turning yellow to gray and green to brown, extinguishing light and creating a dark place inside me.
I wish I could take my brother with me to somewhere new, where we could sit like other brothers do, those kids eating lunches of salami and cheese, peanut butter and jelly, and Frito-Lay potato chips, the feeling that you are protected, that there is enough for everyone, that a boy can close his eyes and sleep knowing someone is going to keep watch instead of the feeling we were both born with, that we know we are alone. Tony has it worse than I do, but I know how he feels because I feel it too. To have to study the faces of the adults, all the adults, who are always different, whose faces change constantly for mysterious reasons beyond our control or imagining, signifying danger or panic, fear or flight. Which is it going to be tonight?
“Okay, that’s enough,” I say. “Let’s leave him alone.”
“No,” Brian Medford shakes his head. “It’s not.”
“He’s not even moving. Just go home and we’ll go home.”
“No.” He nudges Tony’s whimpering head on the ground with his toe.
“I’m serious. Leave my brother alone!”
He kicks him again in the back and I feel something snap. “Leave him the fuck alone! That’s my brother! Stop it!” The crowd of boys watching begin to whoop as I lower my head toward Brian Medford. Tony is a baby bunny. Tony is my puppy, Mork. Tony is Mom helpless on the floor of the den. Tony is Paul drunk and lonely, puking in the front of the truck. My big brother who likes pizza and macaroni and cheese, who dances around the apartment in L.A. with me in our matching tighty-whities.
I jump, running at Brian Medford with flailing arms. “Leave him alone! That’s my brother! That’s my brother!” He pushes me down and I get back up. My arms barely reach his chest. It’s like trying to punch a giraffe. He pushes me hard and I fall down into the dirt next to Tony.
“You guys are crazy.” He spits. He picks up a baseball glove from the ground and walks across the field to leave.
When he’s a safe distance away, Tony gets up. He goes to the fence, crying, bloody. He grabs his bike and yells over his shoulder, “Someday somebody bigger than you is gonna kick your ass! You’ll see!”
I follow him on my bike, trying to keep up. Sad for him and angry at myself. I know we are enemies, allies, traitors. Brothers.
Head down. Pedaling as hard as I can toward home, the spit still wet on my cheek, the brown dirt on his shoes flying off the pedals as we ride straight through the unlucky cracks on Eighteenth Street, I yell, “Someday you’ll get yours! You’ll see! You can’t hurt him! That’s my brother!”
CHAPTER 18
BULLETS
There is a gas can on the back porch meant for the lawn mower but since Paul doesn’t check it, I use it to pour lines of gasoline from one side of the alley to the other, striking a match and standing back to watch the flame leap across the gravel and mud, dancing as it goes. I pretend I’m trying to learn about fire but mostly I just like to watch things burn. I burn small piles of dried grass, notebook paper, receipt paper, brown paper grocery bags, a Luke Skywalker action figure, part of an X-wing fighter, rabbit shit, dog shit, dog hair, cat hair, rubber bands, packs of matches, old T-shirts, old socks, fishing line and once, by accident, the yellow linoleum floor in the kitchen beneath the ledge of the oven door. In the course of my studies, I discover that rubber burns black with smoke that stinks up your clothes, that you can light a peanut on fire and hold it in your hand like a candle, that plastic melts like wax but hair curls up into a tiny ball like an electric snail as it sparks and sputters and stinks up the room, that a gas can, if emptied of all liquid gas and set with a match, will shoot a line of blue flame five feet into the air, big and hot enough to singe the eyebrows right off your face.