My Brother Never Came Home
T. Fox Dunham
_ “Ash,” Rudy said.
“Of course you know me. I’m your little brother.”
“All ash now,” he said.
“You’re stoned.”
He sucked down the rest of the beer. The bottle slid from his hand, shattering on the wood floor. He didn’t flinch, nor did he notice when he got up and walked over the shards with bare feet. He left bloody prints as he walked to bed.
In the fields of wild wheat around the farm house, I heard the rhythm of rattlesnakes coming up from the valley to hunt mice.
For two days, he didn’t bother to pull out the four shards stabbing his feet, the cuts infected. I waited till he passed out drunk after ten beers, grabbed the first aid kit from the bathroom and extracted the glass, cleaning the oozing puss and bandaging his feet.
A day after his eighteenth birthday, he enlisted in the United States Air Force. He left mom and me and the chickens and our goat, a man vivacious with life, ready to make something with his time on the planet. An vacant stranger came home. Those bastards did something to him, some kind of experiment. I started asking around once, writing letters to buddies Rudy had served with. The next week, our newspapers came printed in red ink. I stopped making inquiries. The newspapers returned to normal.
I’d heard tales of soldiers being used in experiments, to test nerve gas or a new kind of chemical weapon like what caused the Gulf War Syndrome. In the name of national security, they’d experimented on my brother. It cost him his soul.
He was my older brother—bloody noses, dirt bikes, nudie magazines and a bond like steel—all lost.
Every day, he’d sit in pop’s old rocking chair, swaying back and forth, back and forth, back and--
“Rudy. Want a beer?”
“Not thirsty,” he’d moan.
“Rudy, this is Jessica. You knew her sister in high school.”
She wore her tight Levi’s for me as a favor, showing off her thighs.
“Don’t remember,” he said, letting the flies land on his face.
He never turned his gaze from the window to look at her.
“Jessica is hot,” I told him after dropping her off at home with a bottle of vodka for the favor.
“Jessica is burnt,” Rudy said. “She is ash.”
“Rudy, what’s my name?”
“The dead don’t need names.”
Fine. The hell with it. Three weeks passed—swaying back and forth, back and forth. Then I needed my older brother.
On a Sunday night, Momma asked me into her bedroom to talk to me.
“Family sometimes have to do harsh things to protect each other,” she told me. “That is the burden of the bond of brothers. You’ve got to be there for him when the time comes.”
She went to bed early that night. “Just feeling a bit under the weather, son.”
I left that night to see an old girlfriend, didn’t get back till the next afternoon.
“Wake the hell up, bro. Mama died. I found her on the kitchen floor this morning on top of the coffee pot. Didn’t you see her? Did you try to help? Shit.”
She may not have died immediately. If he had called 911, gotten her to a hospital. From Pop’s rocking chair, he had a direct view into the kitchen.
I punched him in the heart. He just took it. I hit him again. He gazed out the window like a canary in a cage, out towards the valley. Christ. Jake, my buddy, was going to hook me up with a roadie job, maybe even some lighting work on a Metal Tour in a few weeks, but I couldn’t leave Rudy. He only fed himself when you put the food in front of him, only showered when you started the water and yelled at him to wash.
“Wake the hell up!”
I struck him on his mouth. His lip burst like a watermelon hitting pavement, gushing blood down his flannel shirt. He just got up and went to bed, dripping blood on the floor.
I needed Rudy the most that June day when Momma passed. I needed my brother back—to grieve, to know I wasn’t alone. I was only nineteen; I knew shit about the world. That’s what big brothers are for.
I was alone when I put Momma into the ground. I didn’t bother getting him up or dressed. I just let him be in his rocking chair. When I got home, I looked into his soulless eyes—like two drained ponds.
“Rudy. Mama’s gone now. She’s up with Jesus and the angels in everlasting glory.”
“Everyone is gone,” he replied, his gaze petrified at the window.
I searched for a hint of recognition, comprehension.
What did I expect? Life? Death? Light? Dark? He was a ghost. I went upstairs, got my bong out of the closet and sparked her up. I blasted Metallica. Now that Momma was gone, I couldn’t take care of him. I didn’t want to. I know that wasn’t right, but I needed my own life. I considered just going, just hitting the road.
I was high when I heard my name through the floor, Rudy screaming like he was on fire. I ran down, my head flying. I lost my balance on the stairs, fell on my legs, striking my bone on the fourth step. The pain felt far away for now, but once I came down from the high, it was going to be hell.
Rudy studied a point on the ceiling. I couldn’t see what he looked at. He followed it with his eyes. I kept still, even held my breath, frightened I’d scare him back into the land of nod.
“Rudy?”
“Glory,” he said. Glory all burning.”
“What about Glory?”
“Burning angels in everlasting glory.”
“You’re seeing angels?” I asked.
Maybe I should have driven him up to the Pacific Mental Health Center, gotten my brother real help, but I had twenty-eight dollars and thirty-two cents in my account, no steady jobs, and Mama’s meager savings left to us could only pay the bills for another two months. I couldn’t ward him to the government, take him to a Veteran’s hospital. They were the bastards that did this to him.
Then slowly he lowered his head. The sun in his eyes set to the west.
It felt lighter, like he’d climbed off my back. Motion. Feeling. He had crossed over from the hell where he’d been banished. My brother still lived. What had motivated the sudden change? Lightning hadn’t struck. His middle name wasn’t Lazarus. I considered his eyes:
Pop once told me that there were three kinds of seas: woman rage waters, sleeping baby and restless man. Which sea churned? I’d seen life in his eyes, a glimmer, a cry for help. Rudy waited for me to free him.
“I won’t abandon you again like I did when we were kids that summer. Christ. I hope I don’t.”
I knew I wasn’t the best of men, understood what I was capable of. If it got too hard, I could run. I was the star runner on the track team at Lincoln High. I could run for hours and not tire.
I helped him back to his rocking chair.
“Snake,” he said.
* * *
My twelfth summer marked the last day we went camping down at Silver Miner stream, a mile behind our house, down in close valley. My dad owned thirty acres of land, woods and hills and creeks. The plot had been in the family since we stole it off the Paiute, and it stayed Paiute land—old and grumpy, sacred. We snapped the branches off birch trees, dropped candy wrappers on the ground, not giving a passing thought to grass we crushed beneath our bare feet or the squirrels, the wild turkeys, the grouse we shot at with air rifles.
I checked the cigarette pack in my flannel pocket, making sure I didn’t crush it. I’d stolen the pack off Uncle Rick after dinner the night before, two cigarettes left. So drunk, he didn’t notice.
We hiked to the creek down an incline, its steep bank covered in granite. Rudy carried the tent kit. We usually made camp at a bend in the creek, just down stream from a beaver damn that had flooded much of the lower woods. This spot had a special significance for us. Rudy found Pop there, after he and mom had a bang up fight. Pop sat on an tree stump, hunched forward. The air reeked of burning steak, the gritty odor of meat burning to charcoal. Pop’s right hand had fallen into the small fire, much of the flesh burned away to white bone. A clay jug of moonshine had tipped over in his lap, another jug at his feet.
Still we kept camping there, perhaps out of a morbid fascination. You could feel Pop’s death tainting the place, the misery of his life soaking the creek bank.
We had our poles. Rain fell in the night, so we’d been out early looking for night crawlers for bait. We gathered them in a Maxwell coffee can, and he carried it under his arm. I had the tackle box.
“No hard feelings,” I told the worms. “This could just as easily been the other way round, and you’d be eating our corpses.”
Trout ran in the stream, sunfish, perch. We’d spend the morning fishing then cook them on a stick over the fire. I could taste the salty juices in my mouth.
I slipped out one of the cigarettes, let it hang from the moisture on my lip. Rudy was a few years older, going out more with girls, talking about the Air Force. The valley widened between us, and I had to do something for him to notice me, to impress him, let him know I was cool enough to take me with him wherever life took Rudy. After Pop drank himself to his great reward, my older brother was all I had.
“Watch out for diamondbacks,” he said.
“I’m not stupid,” I said. Pop always reminded us to keep a sharp eye, an open ear for rattlesnakes. You’d hear the soft timbre of their rattles in the night, reminding us the land belonged to the snake.
“Bet you didn’t know I smoked,” I said.
“What the hell is that Chris?”
“Just a morning smoke,” I quoted my Uncle Rick. “I can’t think straight until I light up.”
“You take that crap out of your mouth right now, you dumb shit, before I smack it out.”
“I’m twelve now,” I said. “I can smoke if I want to. That’s why we fought the commie.” This was also another favorite quote of my Uncle Rick.
“I’m warning you, boy.”
I realized then I had not thought this plan through, having not obtained a means to ignite my cig’. I felt stupid just sucking on it.
“Ok. So you’re a man now? Well if you want to smoke, fine. Here, let me.”
He took the tackle box from me, got out a wooden match. He struck it with his thumb and pressed the flame to my cig. Oily miasma filled my mouth.
“Go on then, little man. Take a puff.”
I resisted at first, holding my breath till my head throbbed. Reflex took over, and I sucked in two lung’s worth of air, inhaling a draft of vile smoke. I coughed, my body thrown in a spasm from my diaphragm. It felt like I had breathed in oil. I spit out the cigarette. It sprayed ashes down my legs, burning my foot till I kicked it clear. I threw up syrup, butter, pancakes from breakfast all down my Transformer’s shirt.
Rudy dropped the tackle box, buckled over, leaning on his knees, his body jerking with laughter. He tried to say something but couldn’t stop. He let the tent pack slide off his back.
I pushed him, and he lost his footing, stumbling to the side of the hill, sliding down the stones till he caught himself by grabbing hold of the roots of a dead apple tree.
I went for him again, aiming for his face, when a rhythmic rattle, like Yahtzee dice shook in a cup, stirred from the stones, stopping me dead. Certain sounds when heard trigger a reflex that locks your muscles, petrifies your body. We’d been so careless in our fray that we hadn’t been watching our footing.
The brown serpent raised its rattle. We had violated its home, desecrated its sacred hill. It had come to teach us respect with only a single means to educate us.
It studied us with preacher eyes, searching for sinners. I trembled despite attempting to keep still. If we moved, it might trigger the snake to strike; if we didn’t, strike.
Rudy searched for some way to escape the deadlock. Save me Rudy. Do something. I wet myself a little but got it under control. I covered the damp spot so Rudy wouldn’t think me still a baby.
“Play it cool now, Chris,” whispered Rudy. The snake swayed.
“I’m going to chuck the coffee can to the right, near the snake. When it hits the ground, you run boy. You run like Momma is going to switch your ass good. If you don’t, I’ll beat your ass too. I’ll stay behind a few seconds to draw it off from you. I don’t think I’m close enough for it to bite me.”
I wanted to tell him to forget it, that I wasn’t leaving him. We were going to face it together, but really I just wanted to get out of there.
“Start your engines, gentlemen,” he said, flashing me a confident grin. Everything was going to be just fine. He’d make sure of it just like Pop would.
He took in a deep breath. I thought I should pray a bit, but I couldn’t remember the words. The snake tensed like it knew the coming gambit. I swear snakes can read your mind. This one was ready.
He waited, aiming the can. He waited.
My heart rattled against my ribs. Come on Rudy. Throw the damn thing already.
He chucked the can underhanded. The lid cracked open, and dirt sprayed the snake. I turned and fled, leaving Rudy to be lone witness to its fangs, its venom. The snake lashed out, drilling into Rudy’s leg just above his ankle. I didn’t turn back, flying the rest of the way uphill. I didn’t stop till I got to our fence. Bill Crawley—a hand Momma sometimes hired to do odd jobs—mended the chicken wire at the coup. Momma planned to raise some hens next month.
“Hey now rabbit,” he said. “Where’s the nude lady?”
My heart drummed my ears. I couldn’t get enough wind to speak. I’d been running at least five minutes.
“Snake,” I managed to get out. “My brother is down there.”
“Jesus Christ and all the saints and the twelve apostles and the virgin’s tit.”
I blushed from his swear. If Momma had heard that, she would have beat me closer to God just for hearing it.
“I left him. The snake bit him. I left him there.”
“Where is he boy? Down by the creek? Show me.”
“I can’t,” I said, rested enough to start sobbing. My legs would never take me in the direction of the stream again.
“Damn it boy. Your brother is on his way to getting a halo and harp. The nearest hospital is an hour up into Berks County.”
I pointed down the dirt road. Bill chucked his hammer and took off to find Rudy. I collapsed.
It wasn’t long before Bill came back up the hill, holding up my brother. Rudy limped, and he grimaced with each step. His skin had gone sallow, his hair matted wet with sweat. We got back to the house.
“Call your Momma now,” Bill ordered me. “Tell her I’m driving Rudy to County General.”
I called Momma, and she hung up the phone without saying goodbye. She had to know my shame, the way I’d just abandoned Rudy to the rattlesnake. I went up to my room and covered up under a wool blanket. I was no man.
* * *
Planes of various designs filled Rudy’s room like a shrine to flight. When he left for the service, Momma had left it all the same—Stuka Dive Bombers, Zeros, Migs, Sabers, F-16s, hung in space, dangling forever, neither soaring nor falling. Rudy spent so summer days gluing those models together, using a patience I admired and resented. He always wanted me to help, but I’d get bored and break something.
In the Air Force, he never got to fly. We told the family how proud we were of him, but I was satisfied by his failure to become a pilot. I was sixteen, and my brother wasn’t there. I couldn’t ask Momma how to score with Linda Santos or to buy me some nudie magazines. I counted the days till his tour of duty ended.
He wrote home twice a week, called when he could. We asked what he was doing, but he said it was top secret. After a few beers on Thanksgiving, he slipped a few details: he spent twelve hours a day sitting in a silo in Kansas, waiting for the order to blow the Reds to hell over the rainbow. Seven months on his tour, he wrote to tell us that he was going to receive special training before a new assignment, also top secret, and we wouldn’t hear from him for a few months. After nine months of silence, Momma finally called Edward’s Air Force Base where he was supposedly stationed. They couldn’t tell us a thing, just that he was alive. Momma threatened to make a big stink if she didn’t hear from Rudy, then a month letter we got a typed letter with no signature, addressed to Momma using her full name.
Dear Momma:
Doing fine. God bless you.
Once a month we got the same letter, exact in detail, the ink smudge in the corner always there on the paper. The postmark on the envelope read Florida.
They’d trained him in Armageddon, sealed away in some silo, deep beneath the soil, locked away from the living world. He had no means of knowing about the topside world beyond what his superiors told him. He kept saying we were all dead, gone to ash. What had they told him? Judgment day? An experiment to see if their missile jockeys would be reliable after the end of the world? A simulation wouldn’t be effective. The airmen had to believe the world had burned. They vetoed all his tomorrows and yesterdays, made him alone, king of the ashes. When he looked upon my face, he could only see charred skin, boiled cheeks, eyes cooked to cinders.
I’m sure they felt it was necessary—national defense.
Then when they were done with him, they cut him loose. He was honorably discharged for medical causes—stress—and came home. A white van pulled up, and two airmen left him standing in front of the house, his discharge papers at his feet. He looked through me and mom like we were vapors, like we didn’t exist. Nothing existed for Rudy anymore.
He’d sometimes do odd jobs around the place, if you physically took him outside and put the lawn mower in his grip. I tried to keep him busy till I figured out what I was going to do. One night I just left, got halfway to San Francisco, till I turned back. I didn’t come back for Rudy. I didn’t have any money, no place to stay. We had a couple of dirt bikes in the barn we were going to rebuild before he enlisted, and maybe if we got them working we could sell them. So I sat Rudy up outside, handed him the tools, and his clockwork started turning, going to work on the engine. I’d climb the junkyard fence and rip off some of the parts we needed. Rudy always carried around a greasy, dull screwdriver.
At night when the moon was ripe, I’d watch him sitting in the worn, orange upholstered chair where my old man drank, a couple of spent beer bottles at his boots. I’d catch quick glimmers of desperation in his eyes like a zoo lion pacing behind the bars of his cage. Something still lived in the shell. I thought about abandoning him on hillside to the rattlesnake. I’d heard the agony in his voice in that brief moment when he returned, looking up at the ceiling, the futility. He was the last man in the world.
He remembered things from his life, like how to fix a dirt bike. I just had to sit him down in front of it. I could find him in there in his head, meet him halfway, lure him home with reminders of his old life.
He always loved the Fourth of July. I got some fireworks, some meat and fixings, fired up the gas grille just as Pop always had. I cooked hamburgers, chicken legs, nice grilled potatoes. I even boiled up some corn-on-the-cob in an oil drum. We drank corn liquor from a jug I found in the barn—Pop’s last hurrah. I was saving it for a special occasion. I tried making Momma’s corn bread, but I burned it. He just munched on it anyway, not noticing. I watched for signs of a memory, a spark of his identity rekindled. He scratched lines on the picnic table with a screwdriver, not looking up.
I set up a bottle rocket in a beer bottle and lit the fuse. It shot off, leaving a trail of red sparks on the night sky. I fired a second one, a third. Rudy followed them, a glimmer of recognition growing until the placid pools of his eyes stirred, clearing, getting sharper.
“I want to fly, Chris,” he said. “Like the angels.”
I prepared the last one, lit the fuse, and it fizzled. A string of smoke unwound, and then it popped, burning my wrist. I went inside and ran the burn under tap water.
I was getting sleepy from the liquor, and I wanted to hit my bed before my stomach rolled. I went out to get Rudy. He crawled on the dirt, picking up shreds of paper from the fireworks. He clutched the two red sticks from the rockets in his fist.
“It’s gone Rudy,” I told him. “You can’t put it back together. Only God can now.”
He dropped the refuse, and it fluttered on a breeze. He fell to his knees.
“Shreds of paper and black dust now,” he said, lucid. My heart galloped; perhaps I had reached him.
“Who Rudy? Momma?”
“You can’t hear me,” he said. “You’re a walking, burnt dude, a corpse that just won’t lie down. The snakes came in the air, blew up the world. I can’t find your pieces. I’m sorry bro. I don’t have any rubber cement.”
“Come on into the house.” I took his shoulder. “Feels like rain.”
“I can’t find your pieces,” he said again. “I keep looking and looking, and I’m tired. Please Chris. Let go. I’m so goddamned tired.”
He was a ghost to me, but in his mind, I was the ghost with empty eyes. There’s no point in trying to talk to ghosts. He was holding on for me, to save me.
“All gone to ash. Scattered on the wind. I’m alone. I have so much love inside me like straw stuffing.”
He howled like a coyote, the agony of his imprisonment in dementia obvious in his cry, chilling my bones. I picked him up, carried him to the porch. He continued howling, and my stomach churned. I got him on the porch swing. I passed out from the liquor.
Thunder woke me. Spears of lightning struck at the earth. The wind had toppled over the gas grille while I had been out. The rain thrummed the earth, hail cracking the roof.
Still dark, I went inside the house. Rudy sat in Pop’s chair, a dented, gas can in his lap.
“They lied to you, Rudy,” I said. “All part of some twisted war game.”
“Make me burn too,” he said. “To be with Momma and my brother in Glory.”
I smacked the can from his grip. It struck the crystal lamp on the end tabled, which toppled over and broke into shards. The odor of the gas made my eyes water.
“Want to burn free,” he said.
He’d never come home to me. I knew it. What they had done couldn’t be fixed, especially not with the resources of two hicks. I’d seen the agony he suffered without pause, now and for every moment in his life. I couldn’t leave him like this, trapped behind his eyes, only seeing a dead world, cities turned to concrete bones, the ash of men, women, children lashing in the wind.
Momma had known what was needed. She’d tried to steel me for it.
I picked up the can, popped the cap and splashed gasoline on the furniture, the walls, over the floorboards. I took a box of matches from the mantle and struck one. I dropped it on the floor, and a curtain of flame climbed the wall, bubbling up on the ceiling, spreading across the room.
Rudy didn’t feel any pain. He looked finally at peace, a part of things.
I ran out from the house and watched my home collapse in flame.
The police called it a suicide and closed the case damn quick. I suspected pressure from the military. I took the gig for the Metal Tour.
I poured Rudy’s ashes over the stones on the valley hillside for the rattlesnakes to guard.
“Of course you know me. I’m your little brother.”
“All ash now,” he said.
“You’re stoned.”
He sucked down the rest of the beer. The bottle slid from his hand, shattering on the wood floor. He didn’t flinch, nor did he notice when he got up and walked over the shards with bare feet. He left bloody prints as he walked to bed.
In the fields of wild wheat around the farm house, I heard the rhythm of rattlesnakes coming up from the valley to hunt mice.
For two days, he didn’t bother to pull out the four shards stabbing his feet, the cuts infected. I waited till he passed out drunk after ten beers, grabbed the first aid kit from the bathroom and extracted the glass, cleaning the oozing puss and bandaging his feet.
A day after his eighteenth birthday, he enlisted in the United States Air Force. He left mom and me and the chickens and our goat, a man vivacious with life, ready to make something with his time on the planet. An vacant stranger came home. Those bastards did something to him, some kind of experiment. I started asking around once, writing letters to buddies Rudy had served with. The next week, our newspapers came printed in red ink. I stopped making inquiries. The newspapers returned to normal.
I’d heard tales of soldiers being used in experiments, to test nerve gas or a new kind of chemical weapon like what caused the Gulf War Syndrome. In the name of national security, they’d experimented on my brother. It cost him his soul.
He was my older brother—bloody noses, dirt bikes, nudie magazines and a bond like steel—all lost.
Every day, he’d sit in pop’s old rocking chair, swaying back and forth, back and forth, back and--
“Rudy. Want a beer?”
“Not thirsty,” he’d moan.
“Rudy, this is Jessica. You knew her sister in high school.”
She wore her tight Levi’s for me as a favor, showing off her thighs.
“Don’t remember,” he said, letting the flies land on his face.
He never turned his gaze from the window to look at her.
“Jessica is hot,” I told him after dropping her off at home with a bottle of vodka for the favor.
“Jessica is burnt,” Rudy said. “She is ash.”
“Rudy, what’s my name?”
“The dead don’t need names.”
Fine. The hell with it. Three weeks passed—swaying back and forth, back and forth. Then I needed my older brother.
On a Sunday night, Momma asked me into her bedroom to talk to me.
“Family sometimes have to do harsh things to protect each other,” she told me. “That is the burden of the bond of brothers. You’ve got to be there for him when the time comes.”
She went to bed early that night. “Just feeling a bit under the weather, son.”
I left that night to see an old girlfriend, didn’t get back till the next afternoon.
“Wake the hell up, bro. Mama died. I found her on the kitchen floor this morning on top of the coffee pot. Didn’t you see her? Did you try to help? Shit.”
She may not have died immediately. If he had called 911, gotten her to a hospital. From Pop’s rocking chair, he had a direct view into the kitchen.
I punched him in the heart. He just took it. I hit him again. He gazed out the window like a canary in a cage, out towards the valley. Christ. Jake, my buddy, was going to hook me up with a roadie job, maybe even some lighting work on a Metal Tour in a few weeks, but I couldn’t leave Rudy. He only fed himself when you put the food in front of him, only showered when you started the water and yelled at him to wash.
“Wake the hell up!”
I struck him on his mouth. His lip burst like a watermelon hitting pavement, gushing blood down his flannel shirt. He just got up and went to bed, dripping blood on the floor.
I needed Rudy the most that June day when Momma passed. I needed my brother back—to grieve, to know I wasn’t alone. I was only nineteen; I knew shit about the world. That’s what big brothers are for.
I was alone when I put Momma into the ground. I didn’t bother getting him up or dressed. I just let him be in his rocking chair. When I got home, I looked into his soulless eyes—like two drained ponds.
“Rudy. Mama’s gone now. She’s up with Jesus and the angels in everlasting glory.”
“Everyone is gone,” he replied, his gaze petrified at the window.
I searched for a hint of recognition, comprehension.
What did I expect? Life? Death? Light? Dark? He was a ghost. I went upstairs, got my bong out of the closet and sparked her up. I blasted Metallica. Now that Momma was gone, I couldn’t take care of him. I didn’t want to. I know that wasn’t right, but I needed my own life. I considered just going, just hitting the road.
I was high when I heard my name through the floor, Rudy screaming like he was on fire. I ran down, my head flying. I lost my balance on the stairs, fell on my legs, striking my bone on the fourth step. The pain felt far away for now, but once I came down from the high, it was going to be hell.
Rudy studied a point on the ceiling. I couldn’t see what he looked at. He followed it with his eyes. I kept still, even held my breath, frightened I’d scare him back into the land of nod.
“Rudy?”
“Glory,” he said. Glory all burning.”
“What about Glory?”
“Burning angels in everlasting glory.”
“You’re seeing angels?” I asked.
Maybe I should have driven him up to the Pacific Mental Health Center, gotten my brother real help, but I had twenty-eight dollars and thirty-two cents in my account, no steady jobs, and Mama’s meager savings left to us could only pay the bills for another two months. I couldn’t ward him to the government, take him to a Veteran’s hospital. They were the bastards that did this to him.
Then slowly he lowered his head. The sun in his eyes set to the west.
It felt lighter, like he’d climbed off my back. Motion. Feeling. He had crossed over from the hell where he’d been banished. My brother still lived. What had motivated the sudden change? Lightning hadn’t struck. His middle name wasn’t Lazarus. I considered his eyes:
Pop once told me that there were three kinds of seas: woman rage waters, sleeping baby and restless man. Which sea churned? I’d seen life in his eyes, a glimmer, a cry for help. Rudy waited for me to free him.
“I won’t abandon you again like I did when we were kids that summer. Christ. I hope I don’t.”
I knew I wasn’t the best of men, understood what I was capable of. If it got too hard, I could run. I was the star runner on the track team at Lincoln High. I could run for hours and not tire.
I helped him back to his rocking chair.
“Snake,” he said.
* * *
My twelfth summer marked the last day we went camping down at Silver Miner stream, a mile behind our house, down in close valley. My dad owned thirty acres of land, woods and hills and creeks. The plot had been in the family since we stole it off the Paiute, and it stayed Paiute land—old and grumpy, sacred. We snapped the branches off birch trees, dropped candy wrappers on the ground, not giving a passing thought to grass we crushed beneath our bare feet or the squirrels, the wild turkeys, the grouse we shot at with air rifles.
I checked the cigarette pack in my flannel pocket, making sure I didn’t crush it. I’d stolen the pack off Uncle Rick after dinner the night before, two cigarettes left. So drunk, he didn’t notice.
We hiked to the creek down an incline, its steep bank covered in granite. Rudy carried the tent kit. We usually made camp at a bend in the creek, just down stream from a beaver damn that had flooded much of the lower woods. This spot had a special significance for us. Rudy found Pop there, after he and mom had a bang up fight. Pop sat on an tree stump, hunched forward. The air reeked of burning steak, the gritty odor of meat burning to charcoal. Pop’s right hand had fallen into the small fire, much of the flesh burned away to white bone. A clay jug of moonshine had tipped over in his lap, another jug at his feet.
Still we kept camping there, perhaps out of a morbid fascination. You could feel Pop’s death tainting the place, the misery of his life soaking the creek bank.
We had our poles. Rain fell in the night, so we’d been out early looking for night crawlers for bait. We gathered them in a Maxwell coffee can, and he carried it under his arm. I had the tackle box.
“No hard feelings,” I told the worms. “This could just as easily been the other way round, and you’d be eating our corpses.”
Trout ran in the stream, sunfish, perch. We’d spend the morning fishing then cook them on a stick over the fire. I could taste the salty juices in my mouth.
I slipped out one of the cigarettes, let it hang from the moisture on my lip. Rudy was a few years older, going out more with girls, talking about the Air Force. The valley widened between us, and I had to do something for him to notice me, to impress him, let him know I was cool enough to take me with him wherever life took Rudy. After Pop drank himself to his great reward, my older brother was all I had.
“Watch out for diamondbacks,” he said.
“I’m not stupid,” I said. Pop always reminded us to keep a sharp eye, an open ear for rattlesnakes. You’d hear the soft timbre of their rattles in the night, reminding us the land belonged to the snake.
“Bet you didn’t know I smoked,” I said.
“What the hell is that Chris?”
“Just a morning smoke,” I quoted my Uncle Rick. “I can’t think straight until I light up.”
“You take that crap out of your mouth right now, you dumb shit, before I smack it out.”
“I’m twelve now,” I said. “I can smoke if I want to. That’s why we fought the commie.” This was also another favorite quote of my Uncle Rick.
“I’m warning you, boy.”
I realized then I had not thought this plan through, having not obtained a means to ignite my cig’. I felt stupid just sucking on it.
“Ok. So you’re a man now? Well if you want to smoke, fine. Here, let me.”
He took the tackle box from me, got out a wooden match. He struck it with his thumb and pressed the flame to my cig. Oily miasma filled my mouth.
“Go on then, little man. Take a puff.”
I resisted at first, holding my breath till my head throbbed. Reflex took over, and I sucked in two lung’s worth of air, inhaling a draft of vile smoke. I coughed, my body thrown in a spasm from my diaphragm. It felt like I had breathed in oil. I spit out the cigarette. It sprayed ashes down my legs, burning my foot till I kicked it clear. I threw up syrup, butter, pancakes from breakfast all down my Transformer’s shirt.
Rudy dropped the tackle box, buckled over, leaning on his knees, his body jerking with laughter. He tried to say something but couldn’t stop. He let the tent pack slide off his back.
I pushed him, and he lost his footing, stumbling to the side of the hill, sliding down the stones till he caught himself by grabbing hold of the roots of a dead apple tree.
I went for him again, aiming for his face, when a rhythmic rattle, like Yahtzee dice shook in a cup, stirred from the stones, stopping me dead. Certain sounds when heard trigger a reflex that locks your muscles, petrifies your body. We’d been so careless in our fray that we hadn’t been watching our footing.
The brown serpent raised its rattle. We had violated its home, desecrated its sacred hill. It had come to teach us respect with only a single means to educate us.
It studied us with preacher eyes, searching for sinners. I trembled despite attempting to keep still. If we moved, it might trigger the snake to strike; if we didn’t, strike.
Rudy searched for some way to escape the deadlock. Save me Rudy. Do something. I wet myself a little but got it under control. I covered the damp spot so Rudy wouldn’t think me still a baby.
“Play it cool now, Chris,” whispered Rudy. The snake swayed.
“I’m going to chuck the coffee can to the right, near the snake. When it hits the ground, you run boy. You run like Momma is going to switch your ass good. If you don’t, I’ll beat your ass too. I’ll stay behind a few seconds to draw it off from you. I don’t think I’m close enough for it to bite me.”
I wanted to tell him to forget it, that I wasn’t leaving him. We were going to face it together, but really I just wanted to get out of there.
“Start your engines, gentlemen,” he said, flashing me a confident grin. Everything was going to be just fine. He’d make sure of it just like Pop would.
He took in a deep breath. I thought I should pray a bit, but I couldn’t remember the words. The snake tensed like it knew the coming gambit. I swear snakes can read your mind. This one was ready.
He waited, aiming the can. He waited.
My heart rattled against my ribs. Come on Rudy. Throw the damn thing already.
He chucked the can underhanded. The lid cracked open, and dirt sprayed the snake. I turned and fled, leaving Rudy to be lone witness to its fangs, its venom. The snake lashed out, drilling into Rudy’s leg just above his ankle. I didn’t turn back, flying the rest of the way uphill. I didn’t stop till I got to our fence. Bill Crawley—a hand Momma sometimes hired to do odd jobs—mended the chicken wire at the coup. Momma planned to raise some hens next month.
“Hey now rabbit,” he said. “Where’s the nude lady?”
My heart drummed my ears. I couldn’t get enough wind to speak. I’d been running at least five minutes.
“Snake,” I managed to get out. “My brother is down there.”
“Jesus Christ and all the saints and the twelve apostles and the virgin’s tit.”
I blushed from his swear. If Momma had heard that, she would have beat me closer to God just for hearing it.
“I left him. The snake bit him. I left him there.”
“Where is he boy? Down by the creek? Show me.”
“I can’t,” I said, rested enough to start sobbing. My legs would never take me in the direction of the stream again.
“Damn it boy. Your brother is on his way to getting a halo and harp. The nearest hospital is an hour up into Berks County.”
I pointed down the dirt road. Bill chucked his hammer and took off to find Rudy. I collapsed.
It wasn’t long before Bill came back up the hill, holding up my brother. Rudy limped, and he grimaced with each step. His skin had gone sallow, his hair matted wet with sweat. We got back to the house.
“Call your Momma now,” Bill ordered me. “Tell her I’m driving Rudy to County General.”
I called Momma, and she hung up the phone without saying goodbye. She had to know my shame, the way I’d just abandoned Rudy to the rattlesnake. I went up to my room and covered up under a wool blanket. I was no man.
* * *
Planes of various designs filled Rudy’s room like a shrine to flight. When he left for the service, Momma had left it all the same—Stuka Dive Bombers, Zeros, Migs, Sabers, F-16s, hung in space, dangling forever, neither soaring nor falling. Rudy spent so summer days gluing those models together, using a patience I admired and resented. He always wanted me to help, but I’d get bored and break something.
In the Air Force, he never got to fly. We told the family how proud we were of him, but I was satisfied by his failure to become a pilot. I was sixteen, and my brother wasn’t there. I couldn’t ask Momma how to score with Linda Santos or to buy me some nudie magazines. I counted the days till his tour of duty ended.
He wrote home twice a week, called when he could. We asked what he was doing, but he said it was top secret. After a few beers on Thanksgiving, he slipped a few details: he spent twelve hours a day sitting in a silo in Kansas, waiting for the order to blow the Reds to hell over the rainbow. Seven months on his tour, he wrote to tell us that he was going to receive special training before a new assignment, also top secret, and we wouldn’t hear from him for a few months. After nine months of silence, Momma finally called Edward’s Air Force Base where he was supposedly stationed. They couldn’t tell us a thing, just that he was alive. Momma threatened to make a big stink if she didn’t hear from Rudy, then a month letter we got a typed letter with no signature, addressed to Momma using her full name.
Dear Momma:
Doing fine. God bless you.
Once a month we got the same letter, exact in detail, the ink smudge in the corner always there on the paper. The postmark on the envelope read Florida.
They’d trained him in Armageddon, sealed away in some silo, deep beneath the soil, locked away from the living world. He had no means of knowing about the topside world beyond what his superiors told him. He kept saying we were all dead, gone to ash. What had they told him? Judgment day? An experiment to see if their missile jockeys would be reliable after the end of the world? A simulation wouldn’t be effective. The airmen had to believe the world had burned. They vetoed all his tomorrows and yesterdays, made him alone, king of the ashes. When he looked upon my face, he could only see charred skin, boiled cheeks, eyes cooked to cinders.
I’m sure they felt it was necessary—national defense.
Then when they were done with him, they cut him loose. He was honorably discharged for medical causes—stress—and came home. A white van pulled up, and two airmen left him standing in front of the house, his discharge papers at his feet. He looked through me and mom like we were vapors, like we didn’t exist. Nothing existed for Rudy anymore.
He’d sometimes do odd jobs around the place, if you physically took him outside and put the lawn mower in his grip. I tried to keep him busy till I figured out what I was going to do. One night I just left, got halfway to San Francisco, till I turned back. I didn’t come back for Rudy. I didn’t have any money, no place to stay. We had a couple of dirt bikes in the barn we were going to rebuild before he enlisted, and maybe if we got them working we could sell them. So I sat Rudy up outside, handed him the tools, and his clockwork started turning, going to work on the engine. I’d climb the junkyard fence and rip off some of the parts we needed. Rudy always carried around a greasy, dull screwdriver.
At night when the moon was ripe, I’d watch him sitting in the worn, orange upholstered chair where my old man drank, a couple of spent beer bottles at his boots. I’d catch quick glimmers of desperation in his eyes like a zoo lion pacing behind the bars of his cage. Something still lived in the shell. I thought about abandoning him on hillside to the rattlesnake. I’d heard the agony in his voice in that brief moment when he returned, looking up at the ceiling, the futility. He was the last man in the world.
He remembered things from his life, like how to fix a dirt bike. I just had to sit him down in front of it. I could find him in there in his head, meet him halfway, lure him home with reminders of his old life.
He always loved the Fourth of July. I got some fireworks, some meat and fixings, fired up the gas grille just as Pop always had. I cooked hamburgers, chicken legs, nice grilled potatoes. I even boiled up some corn-on-the-cob in an oil drum. We drank corn liquor from a jug I found in the barn—Pop’s last hurrah. I was saving it for a special occasion. I tried making Momma’s corn bread, but I burned it. He just munched on it anyway, not noticing. I watched for signs of a memory, a spark of his identity rekindled. He scratched lines on the picnic table with a screwdriver, not looking up.
I set up a bottle rocket in a beer bottle and lit the fuse. It shot off, leaving a trail of red sparks on the night sky. I fired a second one, a third. Rudy followed them, a glimmer of recognition growing until the placid pools of his eyes stirred, clearing, getting sharper.
“I want to fly, Chris,” he said. “Like the angels.”
I prepared the last one, lit the fuse, and it fizzled. A string of smoke unwound, and then it popped, burning my wrist. I went inside and ran the burn under tap water.
I was getting sleepy from the liquor, and I wanted to hit my bed before my stomach rolled. I went out to get Rudy. He crawled on the dirt, picking up shreds of paper from the fireworks. He clutched the two red sticks from the rockets in his fist.
“It’s gone Rudy,” I told him. “You can’t put it back together. Only God can now.”
He dropped the refuse, and it fluttered on a breeze. He fell to his knees.
“Shreds of paper and black dust now,” he said, lucid. My heart galloped; perhaps I had reached him.
“Who Rudy? Momma?”
“You can’t hear me,” he said. “You’re a walking, burnt dude, a corpse that just won’t lie down. The snakes came in the air, blew up the world. I can’t find your pieces. I’m sorry bro. I don’t have any rubber cement.”
“Come on into the house.” I took his shoulder. “Feels like rain.”
“I can’t find your pieces,” he said again. “I keep looking and looking, and I’m tired. Please Chris. Let go. I’m so goddamned tired.”
He was a ghost to me, but in his mind, I was the ghost with empty eyes. There’s no point in trying to talk to ghosts. He was holding on for me, to save me.
“All gone to ash. Scattered on the wind. I’m alone. I have so much love inside me like straw stuffing.”
He howled like a coyote, the agony of his imprisonment in dementia obvious in his cry, chilling my bones. I picked him up, carried him to the porch. He continued howling, and my stomach churned. I got him on the porch swing. I passed out from the liquor.
Thunder woke me. Spears of lightning struck at the earth. The wind had toppled over the gas grille while I had been out. The rain thrummed the earth, hail cracking the roof.
Still dark, I went inside the house. Rudy sat in Pop’s chair, a dented, gas can in his lap.
“They lied to you, Rudy,” I said. “All part of some twisted war game.”
“Make me burn too,” he said. “To be with Momma and my brother in Glory.”
I smacked the can from his grip. It struck the crystal lamp on the end tabled, which toppled over and broke into shards. The odor of the gas made my eyes water.
“Want to burn free,” he said.
He’d never come home to me. I knew it. What they had done couldn’t be fixed, especially not with the resources of two hicks. I’d seen the agony he suffered without pause, now and for every moment in his life. I couldn’t leave him like this, trapped behind his eyes, only seeing a dead world, cities turned to concrete bones, the ash of men, women, children lashing in the wind.
Momma had known what was needed. She’d tried to steel me for it.
I picked up the can, popped the cap and splashed gasoline on the furniture, the walls, over the floorboards. I took a box of matches from the mantle and struck one. I dropped it on the floor, and a curtain of flame climbed the wall, bubbling up on the ceiling, spreading across the room.
Rudy didn’t feel any pain. He looked finally at peace, a part of things.
I ran out from the house and watched my home collapse in flame.
The police called it a suicide and closed the case damn quick. I suspected pressure from the military. I took the gig for the Metal Tour.
I poured Rudy’s ashes over the stones on the valley hillside for the rattlesnakes to guard.