“After school,” Josh corrected.
“Yeah,” I said. “Whatever. But that’s the reason your California and Arizona players dominate the big leagues.”
“The Tigers suck,” Josh said, and his brother glanced up to add his two cents. “They really suck,” he said.
It was then that I became aware of the background noise, a thin droning mewl from beyond the windows as if someone were drowning kittens in the street. Philip heard it then too, and the boys and Denise, and in the next moment we were all at the window. “Oh, shit,” Philip hissed. “Not again. Not today, of all days.”
“What?” I said. “What is it?” And then I saw, while my nephews melted away and Denise gritted her teeth and my brother swore: the zombies were out there at the edge of the lawn, a hundred of them at least. They were singing, locked arm in arm and swaying to the beat, stretched across the mouth of the driveway in a human chain.
Philip’s face was drawn tight. He told Denise to call the police, and then he turned to me. “Now you’re going to see something, little brother,” he said. “Now you’re going to see why I keep asking myself if I shouldn’t just close down the clinic and let the lunatics take over the asylum.”
The kitchen was gray, a weak, played-out light pasted on every surface. Sleet rattled the windows and the conjoined voices mewled away in praise of mercy and forgiveness. I was about to ask him why he didn’t do just that — close up and move someplace friendlier, someplace like California, for instance — but I already knew the answer. They could harass all the chalk-faced Sallys and thump all the Bibles they wanted, but my brother wasn’t going to bow down to them — and neither was I. I knew whose team I was on, and I knew what I had to do.
It took the police half an hour to show up. There were three squad cars and a bus with wire mesh over the windows, and the cops knew the routine. They’d been here before — how many times you could guess from the deadness in their eyes — and they’d arrested these very people, knew them by name. Philip and I waited in the house, watching the Today show at an uncomfortable volume, and the boys stayed in their room, already late for school. Finally, at quarter past eight, Philip and I shuffled out to the garage and climbed into the car. Philip’s face was like an old paper sack with eyes poked in it. I watched him hit the remote for the garage door and watched the door lift slowly on the scene.
There they were, right there on the street, the whole bug-eyed crew from the clinic, and ninety more. I saw squat, brooding mothers with babies, kids who should have been in school, old people who should have known better. They jerked their signs up and down and let out with a howl when the door cranked open, and though the cops had cleared them from the mouth of the drive they surged in now to fill the gap, the big Jesus-thumper with the beard right in front. The cops couldn’t hold them back, and before we’d got halfway down the drive they were all over us, pounding on the windows and throwing themselves down in the path of the car. My brother, like a jerk, like the holy fool who automatically turns the other cheek, stepped on the brake.
“Run them over,” I said, and all my breath was gone. “Run the fuckers over.”
Philip just sat there, hanging his head in frustration. The cops peeled them away, one by one, zipped on the plastic cuffs and hauled them off, but for every one they lifted out of the way another dove in to take his place. We couldn’t go forward, we couldn’t back up. “Your neighbor kills babies!” they were shouting. “Dr. Beaudry is a murderer!” “Kill the butchers, not the babies!” I tried to stay calm, tried to think about rehab and jail and the larger problems of my life, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t take this. I couldn’t.
Before I knew what I was doing I was out of the car. The first face I saw belonged to a kid of eighteen maybe, a tough guy with veins standing out in his neck and his leather jacket open to the sleet to show off a white T-shirt and a gold cross on a gold chain. He was right there, right in my face, shouting, “Jesus! Jesus!” and he looked genuinely surprised when I pitched into him with everything I had and shoved him back into a pair of dumpy women in matching scarves and earmuffs. I went right for the next guy — a little toadstool who looked as if he’d been locked in a closet for the last forty years — and flung him away from the car. I heard shouts, saw the cops wading through the crowd, and then I was staring into the face of the big guy, the king yahoo himself — Mr. Beard — and he was so close I knew what he’d had for breakfast. In all that chaos he just stood there rigid at the bumper of the car, giving me a big rich phony Jesus-loving smile that was as full of hate as anything I’d ever seen, and then he ducked down on one knee and handcuffed himself to the bumper.
That put me over the line. I wanted to make a martyr out of him, wanted to kick him to death right there, right in the driveway and with the whole world looking on, and who knows what would have happened if Philip hadn’t grabbed me from behind. “Rick!” he kept shouting. “Rick! Rick!” And then he wrestled me up the walk and into the house, Denise’s scared white face in the door, the mob howling for blood and then lurching right into another weepy, churchy song as if they were in a cathedral somewhere.
In the safety of the hallway, the door closed and locked behind us, my brother turned on me. “Are you crazy?” he shouted, and you would have thought I was the enemy. “You want to go back to jail? You want lawsuits? What were you thinking, anyway — are you stoned on something, is that it?”
I looked away from him, but I wanted to kill him too. It was beating in my veins, along with the Desoxyn I’d stolen from the clinic. I saw my nephews peeking out of their room down the hall. “You can’t let these people push you around,” I said.
“Look at me, Rick,” he said. “Look at me.”
I was dodging around on my feet, tight with it, and I lifted my eyes grudgingly. I felt like a kid all over again, Rick the shoplifter, the pothead, the fuckup.
“You’re just playing into their hands, don’t you see that? They want to provoke you, they want you to go after them. Then they put you back in jail and they get the headlines.” His voice broke. Denise tried to say something, but he shut her up with a wave of his hand. “You’re back on the drugs, aren’t you? What is it — cocaine? Pot? Something you lifted from the clinic?”
Outside I could hear them, “We Shall Overcome,” and it was a cruel parody — this wasn’t liberation, it was fascism. I said nothing.
“Listen, Rick, you’re an ex-con and you’ve got to remember that, every step you take. I mean, what did you think, you were protecting me out there?”
“Ex-con?” I said, amazed. “Is that what you think of me? I can’t believe you. I’m no ex-con. You’re thinking of somebody in the movies, some documentary you saw on PBS. I’m a guy who made a mistake, a little mistake, and I never hurt anybody. I’m your brother, remember?”
That was when Denise chimed in. “Philip,” she said, “come on, Philip. You’re just upset. We’re all upset.”
“You keep out of this,” he said, and he didn’t even turn to look at her. He just kept his Aqua Velva eyes on me. “Yeah,” he said finally, “you’re my brother, but you’re going to have to prove it to me.”
I can see now the Desoxyn was a mistake. It was exactly the sort of thing they’d warned us about. But it wasn’t coke and I just needed a lift, a buzz to work behind, and if he didn’t want me to be tempted, then why had he left the key to the drug cabinet right there in the conch-shell ashtray on the corner of his desk? Ex-con. I was hurt and I was angry and I stayed in my room till Philip knocked at the door an hour later to tell me the police had cleared the mob away. We drove to work in silence, Philip’s opera chewing away at my nerves like a hundred little sets of teeth.