AT THE POOL there were a couple of ladies laughing and sipping drinks at the little round table beneath the green-striped umbrella, and a very big fat man, not overly fat but very big, was taking huge vaults off the little diving board, leaving it bouncing on its fulcrum like a flimsy plank of pine siding as he hit the water in a cannonball, showering the laughing ladies with water, again and again. The ladies cried out, Stop! Oh, stop it! Their laughter rose and drowned in the humid salty darkness and the clacka-clackity-clacka sound of cars cruising past on the cooling white-slab highway along the beach. I listened to the cars long into the night, in my bed, along with the faint surf, my father snoring lightly, my mother and Hal lying still as the dead. The Gulf breezes puffed against the windows, slipped through seams, and drifted through the chilled air of the room like coastal ghosts released from their tight invisibility, sustained for a while by the softly exhaled breath of the living.
MY BROTHER MET ANOTHER boy and began going off with him, around the Alamo’s grounds or at the pool or, when I’d followed them there, across to the beach, where I couldn’t follow without an adult. He became more of an absence, and so I drifted into the same safe quietude where I spent most of my time, anyway, where most middle children spend their time.
At some point in my childhood I wanted out of my family, although I loved my mother and father and tolerated my brothers as well as anyone else. I didn’t want never to see them again, but it would have been nice to live with some other family, possibly across or down the street, instead of my own. An imaginary one, maybe. When you are quiet, you are different, which makes everyone a little nervous and suspicious, if you are the only one that way. I was at ease if left alone in my room to read comics, or alone in the large tract of woods bordering our cul-de-sac street. I loved spying on others walking in the woods when I was hidden and could see them without their seeing me. Sometimes I looked into windows at night, but only at ordinary things. People eating supper, or watching television. No undressing or showers or such. I only wanted to experience the mystery of seeing things as they really were, when you yourself did not enter in. It seemed frank and honest in an exciting way. There was nothing to fear in terms of yourself in such moments. If you were quiet and still, it was almost as if you weren’t there. It was like being a ghost, curious about the visible world and the creatures in it. As if you were dreaming it, and not a part of the dream but there somehow, unquestioned.
ONE DAY HAL ASKED permission to go out with his new friend’s family on a charter fishing boat. They would have to leave very early, before dawn. I determined to rise then, too, and see him off. But I wasn’t able to, and no one woke me, so I didn’t get up until light was seeping into the sky over the Sound. I rushed outside onto the motel lawn, stood there barefoot in the dew and cool heavy breeze, and looked out across the water. On the horizon I could see the gray silhouette of a ship, a big ship, which in my memory’s surviving image appears to be a tanker of some kind, an oceangoing vessel. But at that moment, on the lawn, I thought it must be the boat Hal had gone on with his new friend and family — these people I’d never spoken to, whom I’d only watched from across the lawn, complete strangers to me and already fast friends with Hal. Watching the ghostly ship far out in the Sound, I had the strongest feeling that he’d gone away and would never return. It was something I couldn’t quit grasp, just yet, someone going so far out in the water on a boat that you can’t see them anymore, and then coming back in. I was very sad, I remember, thinking that he was gone forever. And I have lost the memory of his returning from the fishing trip to the motel. I’ve wondered why I felt so much sadder then than I did when he died. Anticipation is expansive in the imagination. Memory is reductive, selective. And any great moment must be too much to absorb in that moment, without the ameliorative power of genius or mental illness. When Hal died, years later, it seemed like the completion of something I’d been watching and waiting for all that time.
His last words, I was told, were a blurted, Look out!
My father’s last words, I was told, were, Something’s wrong.
If my mother had any last words, they are a secret, as she was old and alone. And if any words were formed in her mind as she lay unconscious and slowly dying on her bedroom floor, no one will ever know what they were.
IT’S HARD TO REMEMBER Hal in very specific ways. He was a small boy, and then a small man. I did not remember him that way, since he was four years older and so until I was into my later teens he was larger than me. I remember how shocking it was when, a couple of years after his death, I went into his room and tried on one of his shirts. It was tight across the shoulders, too short in the sleeves. This was shocking because I had thought he was at least as tall as I was and stockier, but he was not. He had always carried himself like a larger boy and man.
A second child will always feel displaced by the first. People say it’s the other way around but it’s not. Later in life there are the photographs you discover of your older sibling, before you were born, with one or both of your parents. It’s then, after you’ve had children yourself and know the experience in your own life, that you understand the bond between the new, young parents and their first child. You understand how miraculous and illuminating it is. You know how the experience has remade the whole world for the parents, and how the only child’s world, entirely new in the magnificent, solipsistic way only an only child’s world can be, eclipses all else, and when the second child comes along it is only as if the eclipsing body has moved aside, moved along in its path. The wonder has passed, leaving the washed and dazed sense of deep and cathartic change, an experience that will never be repeated for anyone in that little world. And, in truth, it leaves everyone feeling a little bit diminished. You realize this, when you are older and you have memories and these memories are informed, in a slow infusion of understanding, by the old photographs taken before you were even conceived.
Hal was a prodigy, in many ways a typical first child in that he was precocious, gregarious, fearless, bestowed at birth with the grandest, most natural sense of entitlement. Every first child is a king or queen. A prince or princess, an enfant terrible of privilege and favor. And Hal was talented. When he was three, he learned the words to the popular song “Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier” and sang it so adorably that our parents secured a recording session for him down at a local radio station.
He was introduced by George Shannon, a local radio and television personality. I imagine Hal wearing his cowboy outfit, a black hat and black, sequined shirt, black pants, black, filigreed cowboy boots, a toy six-shooter in a toy holster on his belt. He probably wasn’t wearing this outfit, since it had nothing to do with Davy Crockett, but there’s a framed photo of Hal at about that age, wearing that outfit, that hung for decades on our mother’s living room wall, and so that’s how I see him, then. A musical cousin, Doc Taylor, strummed the song’s tune on a guitar, and Hal sang the song in his piping voice.