The resort had never been prosperous. It was just a place for travelers on a budget to rest their heads for the night. Now, it was a wreck, hidden behind a natural outcropping of stacked boulders that God had arranged to look like praying hands. Once, the rocks had protected the guests from road noise. These days the barrier hid the blackened skeleton of the main office, the three cabins still standing out of the original eight, a swimming pool that hadn’t seen water in years, and the mobile home where the Bitch lived with Ethan. I don’t know if the cabins were still officially owned by anybody, nor do I have any idea how the Bitch had ever managed to find such an isolated place to live.
We pulled up in a cloud of dust to find the Bitch on the mobile home steps, smoking a cigarette, dressed in faded jeans with torn knees, and a sleeveless white t-shirt. She’d aged since the last photograph I’d seen, which dated back to some months after my birth. She’d been young and pretty in that one. But her skin had leathered and her hair, once a shiny brown, had gone gray and stringy, with a long white lock that crossed her face in the shape of a question mark. When she grimaced at our arrival, she revealed a front tooth missing among others yellowed from tobacco and time.
Leaving the rental’s A/C was a shock. The outside temperature had been edging into the high nineties in Vegas, but here it was more like a hundred, in air that seemed more dust than oxygen.
Daddy said, “Hug your mother.”
I crossed the seventeen steps between myself and the stranger on the mobile home steps. She put her arms around me and called me honey, even as her fingers probed my back, testing the bunched muscles there for any signs of flab. “My God, Jen. I remember when you were just a baby.”
I cut the hug short. “I’m not a baby any more, Mom.”
“No. You’re not.” She squeezed my upper arm, testing its solidity with strength I would not have expected from her. “She’s an Amazon, Joe. Better than her pictures.”
And that was just hateful mockery, because I knew what an Amazon was, and what one wasn’t. An Amazon is talclass="underline" I was still three inches shorter than Daddy. An Amazon hacks off her right breast: I still had both of mine, and I daily cursed the hormones that had built them into a pair of fleshy curves softer by far than my bulging arms, my corded shoulders, and my granite abs. I was strong, and I was compact, I’d used diet and exercise to reduce those unwanted tits to the smallest size the genetic roll of the dice would allow, but I was still only a girl, the Amazon status we’d strived for a goal that would forever remain beyond my reach.
Daddy must have been thinking the same thing. “Where’s the boy?”
The Bitch raised the cigarette to her lips and took a drag so deep the paper sizzled. “Inside.”
“Call him out.”
The Bitch took another long, slow drag of her cigarette, just to demonstrate that she wouldn’t be hurried by the likes of us. “Ethan! Your father’s here!”
Ethan emerged from the mobile home, screen door slamming.
In all my life I’d seen less than thirty photographs of my brother. They were what Daddy gave me instead of birthday or Christmas presents. As per the agreement that had governed the relationship between parents since the day of their dissolution, the two of them provided each other with such updates twice a year, just to keep each side apprised of just how the other was developing. Our basement dojo has a wall, tracking Ethan’s metamorphosis from the chubby-cheeked toddler he was when last we saw each other, to the thick-jawed, iron-necked bruiser he was now. Watching that chest fill out, those arms swell, those muscles layer upon muscles, and those eyes grow dark as coals, in what amounted to time-lapse photography of a monster sprouting from a seed, had spurred me on more than any number of Daddy’s lectures or rewards or punishments. Nothing communicated the urgency of hard training more than those pictures. Nothing made my own situation look more and more hopeless, for while Ethan and I were twins, the nasty combination of gender and genetics had provided him with a body much more hospitable to muscular development than mine. His last measurements, sent with glee six months ago, had already declared him a foot taller and some fifty pounds heavier than myself, with less than one percent body fat.
He was even bigger now. The last six months had provided him with another growth spurt. He was stripped to the shorts, by design I think, his hairless pectorals gleaming with the sheen left by his latest workout. His face, tanned to near blackness by the brutal desert sun, was so dark that the unpleasant white glow of his teeth stood out like a searchlight at the bottom of a deep well. His greasy shoulder-length black hair completed any resemblance he might have had to Tarzan. Next to him, the Bitch was a wisp in danger of being blown away by the next strong wind. He dwarfed her, and dwarfed me.
If my father had raised an Amazon (a label I rejected), then the Bitch, with her exacting cruelty, had raised a Greek God.
There were flaws. The enlarged jaw and forehead testified to the hormonal imbalance inflicted by steroid abuse. I had a touch of that myself, and had endured taunts about my face in most of the schools I’d briefly attended. Like mine, his chest was lined with hairline scars from training accidents and, I think, punishments. Unlike me, he was so very muscle-bound that his flexibility had suffered. He moved with the clumsy deliberation of a stop-motion dinosaur in a fifties monster flick. I moved better than that. And, like the Bitch, he couldn’t really smile, at least not at us: the closest he could manage was an uneasy grimace.
“Hello,” I said.
His voice was thick, his consonants guttural. “Hello.”
Once upon a time, we had drifted together in the same womb, knowing nothing of the venom being passed between those who had brought us into this life.
The Bitch said, “Hug your father.”
My behemoth of a brother turned the head on his massive tree-trunk neck, and narrowed his eyes as he took in the figure of the man whose seed had provided half of him. Hatred burned in those eyes. He took two steps and enveloped Daddy in an embrace so tight that I half-expected to hear the crunch of shattering vertebrae. Unlike the Bitch, who had made a big show of hugging me back, Daddy just let his arms hang motionless at his sides. It was a brief hug. After a second or two my brother stepped back, his social obligations fulfilled.
Daddy said nothing.
The Bitch’s eyes glittered. “Aren’t you going to say I’ve done well?”
“I don’t have to say it. I can see it.”
“Then aren’t you going to say I should be proud?”
“I wouldn’t give you the satisfaction.”
“Bastard.” Her eyes turned to me: “I’m sure the two of you have a lot to talk about, after all these years. You can spend some time together this afternoon, if you’d like. Your father and I will need the rest of the day to finish work on the pool.”
Daddy could not have been happy about this development, as private time between my brother and me had never been part of the family agenda. But the state of war between my parents had not gotten to where it was by either showing fear in the face of a challenge. “I have no problem with that. She’ll need a few minutes to get ready, but after that, they can have the rest of the day if they want.”
I coughed. “No.”
Her head swiveled. “What?”
“This is just stupid. What are we fucking supposed to do, become friends now? That’s just psychological warfare. I want to get this bullshit over with.”
Ethan’s eyes glittered, but not with the anger I might have expected. “You sure? There’s plenty of time for that.”
Daddy said, “I suppose we could use your help setting up.”
I said, “There’s that, too.”