Now they were at the kitchen table with a half-eaten cheddar cheese sandwich beside them on a plate. The other half of the sandwich was working its way through Sandra’s uneasy digestive tract while Dawn stood behind her with a pair of scissors, cutting her long mess of hair down to a cooler, more comfortable summer coif. Ellie was by my side at the gas range. We stood and leaned our palms on the counter and waited for the leftover Sloppy Joe meat to finish reheating in the pan. A week of free room and board and our prisoner still hadn’t softened up. He kept his back to me whenever I entered the room. He sneered and demanded vodka and saw every kindness we showed him for the desperate bribe that it was. Even Ellie, with all her liberal reservations about violence, seemed almost ready to give the go ahead for execution. Though she never had to worry about pulling the trigger. We all knew who that task would fall on.
Every minute he stays here puts all of us at risk, she said, stirring the bubbling meat in the pan. The foremen are already suspicious, what with Dale walking off the job without a word. Won’t be long till they start getting nervous about whatever’s going on up here at the house. Then we’ll be lucky if we can find a pack of blind junkies to lead the harvest.
I shook my head and sighed and watched her split a couple of cheap supermarket hamburger buns in half and arrange them on the paper plates resting beside the range. She stirred the steaming meat mixture one last time and scooped a heavy spoonful onto the flat bottom half of each bun. The Sloppy Joes were her own doing, part of her continued effort to make things easier for our mothers in the wake of everything that was going on. For three days the house had been filled with the smells of ketchup, cumin, and chili powder. Ellie smacked the top bun onto the congealing meat and cut the sandwich in half with a butcher’s knife and laid the knife on the counter over a paper napkin. She managed to take a bite without slathering the corners of her mouth with sauce. I wished my brothers knew that trick.
There’s no middle way between it, I said. If he can’t be reformed, he has to be dealt with. Trouble is, my heart isn’t in it the way it was a few days ago. If you’d told me then we’d have to give him the Old Yeller treatment, I’d have jumped at the chance. But now I don’t know. It’s funny. You bring a person meals and tend to their needs and you start to feel responsible for them, no matter how big a bastard they are. Makes me wonder how the guards at San Quentin used to manage it back in the day. Wish I could pick one of their brains right about now.
Ellie scratched at a mosquito bite behind her armpit. With the heat rising more and more each day, she’d started going around the house in some of my old t-shirts with the sleeves cut off clean at the seam. We’d grown familiar enough with each other to share such things in common, and to where I didn’t think twice about seeing her bra straps running free in the breeze.
I wish there was a way to get through to him, she said. I don’t like to believe it about a person, least of all someone with the same blood as me. I don’t like to believe someone could be so cruel and heartless. But then I think about how it’s Elliot’s blood running in our veins, and I wonder if we aren’t just a herd of black sheep all flocked together. You’ve got to admit, he’s more like him than we are.
Is that supposed to make me feel better?
It should. I wouldn’t want to be like either of them.
That’s what I mean. You can’t kill a man unless there’s distance between you. The longer I spend acting like his maid, the harder it’ll be for me to put him down.
It shouldn’t have to come to that. But we’re damned if we do and damned if we don’t.
You don’t know how right you are, I said. I’ve been studying on it these past weeks, and what I found isn’t too encouraging. The Bible takes a hard stand against fratricide. Men who kill their brothers wind up marked and exiled. Entire races cursed for the sins of one ancestor.
Ellie set her Sloppy Joe down on the plate and looked at me with raised eyebrows. Glad you found something to keep your spirits up through all this, she said. But we need a practical solution. The Bible’s not going to help us here.
She smiled a smart little smile and continued chewing through the mouthful of meat lodged in her cheek. Blasphemous as she was, I suppressed the tongue-lashing I would have given her just a few weeks before. To that end, I suppose I owed her for planting the seed of the solution in my mind.
How many wine bottles do we have left in the pantry?
Ellie shrugged. Beats me, she said. Go ask the two drunks. They’re bound to know.
Come on. That’s not fair. Your mother drinks more than mine.
Yeah. But that’s saying a lot and you know it.
All right, fine. I’ll go see for myself.
What are you going to do?
I’m going to do what I should have thought to do a long time ago. Do me a favor and fix another sandwich. I’ll be right back.
While Ellie ladled some of the dripping meat onto the remaining bun, I went around the house collecting everything I would need for the mission at hand. I started in the pantry. Of the nine compartments built into the big cardboard box, only four still contained full bottles of wine. A few odd bottles were arranged on the shelf beside the box, but I reasoned they appeared even more questionable than the cheapo Mexican stuff our mothers purchased in bulk. Nothing from the local vineyards was ever worth a damn, though sometimes a passable Chilean brand went on sale down at the supermarket. In school the ag science teachers taught us all about the Napa region and the unsurpassed quality of California reds, but once you got to the age of sneaking drinks for yourself when no one was around, you realized that hardly a soul east of the Diablos had ever really tasted the wine of our country. I grabbed one of the bottles from Sonora and blew the dust and dirt off the label and carried the bottle by the neck to my bedroom.
The Bible was resting closed on the four-inch space of wood frame between the headboard and the mattress. An old edition of the New American Standard Bible that had outlasted America itself, the book was battered and yellowed with a stripe of filth down the side from where my unclean fingers had gripped the pages. Stained much darker since Dad died. The cover was deeply cracked, like my ankles in August, when the sun blazed and there was no moisture left in the air or ground. I flipped to the New Testament and skimmed the pages until I landed on the passage I was looking for. Marking the page with my thumb, I carried the Bible and the wine to the kitchen and collected the sandwich and the rest of my supplies. I came down the hall balancing the paper plate on my forearm like a waiter. The prisoner lay curled up on the edge of the bed with his back to the door and the loose chain wrapped around his calves. I set the plate, bottle, and glass on the dresser and took the heavy corkscrew from my pocket. He didn’t acknowledge me at all until the cork popped out. Then he turned his head.
Is that what I think it is?
Three meals a day for days on end and this was the first time he’d spoken before I did. Tilting the stemmed glass to an angle, I poured the deep red wine against the side of the bowl and watched it rise up halfway to the rim. It’s not vodka, I said. But it should help to get that monkey off your back.
I set the bottle on the bookcase and held the glass out for him to accept. He looked at the offering with his hands pressed flat against the bed. I raised the glass to my lips and took a sip and made sure he saw me swallow.
See, I said. It’s fine. Go ahead and drink.
He reached out and seized the glass with both hands. It couldn’t have been more than five seconds before the glass was empty again and he sat gasping and eyeing the rest of the bottle. Another, he said.
I took the Bible out of my back pocket and opened it to the passage I had chosen. He saw what book it was and shook his head. You can have another one in a little while, I said. First, there’s something I want to read to you. You said you were a believer once, but that you had lost your faith. So I’m here to bring you back into the fold. Right now you’re probably thinking I’m wasting my time. Maybe you even feel sorry for me. Well, brother, I feel sorry for you too. Cause whether you’ll admit it or not, you were a prisoner long before you showed up at our door. You’re a prisoner of your own sin and arrogance. But I know someone who can set you free. Someone you used to know before you started down the path of darkness.