He turned to me. Looked more through me than at me. “You dug it up?”
I nodded. “You’re afraid. That’s your secret. You’re afraid.”
He suddenly looked toward the window, and I thought for a moment the rabid dog was coming back through. I tightened in that fear.
He rubbed the back of his neck. A low sound came trying to be a laugh, but it had too much worry to make a real go of it.
“You know the story of the man who went walkin’ in the city one day and found he couldn’t walk over the manholes, even though they were covered. He was afraid he’d fall down into them and the devil would finish draggin’ him down to hell. That’s what I’m afraid of. Men. Holes. And the devil.”
He strained like he was gathering something up inside him and it was heavy, heavy, and just too much. He buckled in the knees and leaned into the doorframe.
“Hey, listen, when I get back from my walk, I’ll watch the game with ya, okay, little man?”
His leaving had the sound of a turning page. Whoosh, flick, and he was gone. By seven thirty, the television was on and Grand wasn’t home. I tried to concentrate on the game, but it was a bad day for the color red. Cincinnati’s ball caps and uniforms, even the stitching on the ball itself, never let me escape what could be in Grand’s blood. I shut the game off and stared at the black screen until eight thirty. Nine thirty. Midnight. Grand still wasn’t home.
Dad grabbed a flashlight. Looked more annoyed than alarmed. The worry was all in Mom at that time as she called to Dad from the porch, “Find him, Autopsy.”
Dad nodded he would as she stood up against the wall of the porch like a second front door, waiting to be opened. Me, Sal, and Dad went up and down the lanes, shining the flashlight on bushes, passing cars, dark porches, and if Grand had been a leaf, a group of laughing teenagers, a napping cat, we would’ve found him.
Onward we went, shining the light across the baseball diamond behind the school. Up in the stands at the football stadium. It felt like a hundred different places before, after, and in between, but no Grand.
I found myself leading us through the woods. Dad shined the flashlight inside the one-room schoolhouse as we passed it. Nothing but one of Elohim’s pamphlets on the ground.
The whole way walking to the tree house, I had that feeling one has when walking toward a difficult decision. I wanted to find Grand, but when I climbed up and saw the tree house empty, I won’t lie and say I didn’t feel relieved.
By that time, Dad was no longer annoyed. He was worried, painfully worried now. The light in his hand anxiously bouncing from tree to tree.
“I wonder where that boy has gotten to.” He sighed. “I wonder—”
His voice fell with the flashlight that banged against the ground.
“Dad?”
It was too dark to see him, but I heard his feet pounding against the ground, running toward something.
I jumped down out of the tree house and picked up the light. Its shine found Sal. The way he stood there, I’ll never forget the horror on his face. What he and Dad had seen, I didn’t know. But he raised his trembling arm to show me.
I was afraid to shine the light to where he was pointing. I would go slow to the sorrow. Light on tree, another tree. Bark, more bark. Took the light lower and saw dirt. Leaves and more dirt, and … the toes of Grand’s tennis shoes.
Oh, God, no.
Slowly I moved the light up his laces, untied.
His jeans. Something red drenching the denim up his left side. More red drenching his hand, his arm. More than more, it was plenty to scream at, as Dad was screaming.
Oh, God, Dad. You on all fours and scooping the blood up from the ground, trying to put it back into the large gaping slash on your son’s arm.
With every scrape Dad made of the ground, leaves and debris were brought up too and because of this Grand’s arm became Halloween and I had to look away because the scare was no longer subtle and I thought I was going to scream my throat to pieces.
It was then I saw the pocketknife. The knife me and Grand had used to cut our fingers. The knife that had once bled us closer. Now it was the knife that cut us apart.
I looked at Dad’s face. His tears didn’t drop. Instead they stopped at his cheeks like they were taped there. I tried to remember, did someone come along with clear tape, and if so, when? Were they still around? Would they tape my tears? I wanted them to. I wanted my tears to be always stuck on my cheeks in that particular fall the way I knew they’d always be on Dad’s. In ten, twenty, the eternity of years, I knew the tears would still be there. This would be the reason I would never again be able to get close to my father. I’d never be able to make it past the tears.
Dad never gave up trying to put Grand’s blood back into his arm, not even when I asked him to. Even when I screamed at him to stop, to just stop it already, he kept going and was so there with it that he never saw Sal. Never saw how he picked up the piece of paper with Grand’s words written on it, Don’t touch my blood.
I’d forgotten about the blood. It was everywhere and I had forgotten it. I almost told Dad to wipe it off his hands. It could make you sick, I almost said, but Sal tore up the letter and stuffed the pieces into his pocket and I did the same with my words.
Even if I had told Dad, he wouldn’t have stopped touching it. How could he? All that blood was Grand before it was anything else. And I mean grand in all the magnificent definition of the word. I fell to my knees at his side and tried myself to put the blood back because, hell, I wasn’t finished with my brother. How could I be when I was only thirteen and he was only eighteen.
I would’ve worn a tie to his graduation. Dad would’ve made me, but I would’ve wanted to. Grand would’ve grabbed the end of it, tugged it until I laughed, tousled my hair and called me little man.
I would’ve gotten the extra boxes needed to pack his things for the dorm, though he would leave me his baseball glove. I’d hold it when I was missing him. Because of this, my chest would start to smell like leather.
He’d study hard at college, though I’m not sure what and that not knowing would break my heart. It breaks my heart still. That I didn’t know my brother enough to know what he would study, what he would become. That I didn’t know he would be more than baseball.
Goddamn it, I wasn’t finished with him yet. I still had to get drunk with him at least once and stumble into a conversation that would maybe heal all things. He’d make me burnt toast in the morning for the hangover. Of course he would. He was Grand.
No, I wasn’t finished with him. We were supposed to grow old together, me and my brother. If I was going to grow old with anybody, it was going to be him. Our parents would die. Our lovers would die. Our friends would all go before us. But we, we would be the last on the road.
My brother of mine, I had your white hair and wrinkles all picked out. Now I wear them, along with my own. Twice wrinkled, twice gray. I hate you for leaving me no choice but to go forth into this heat-colored future and its long voyage I no longer want to hold.
I wonder if when we get to the beyond, if we are there what we were here. If so, he’ll still be eighteen. A beautiful eighteen. And I will be old, as I am. He’ll be like a grandkid to me. What will I do with that?
I wonder if he would ask me for his wrinkles. Even if I handed them over, they’d never fit him, not that eighteen-year-old skin. A boy trying on his grandfather’s face, that’s all he would be.
I’ll never have my brother back even when he is back, because that night he died, he vanished, and vanished things stop becoming more. That is the tragedy of losing an older brother. He stays still. You keep on and one day become the older one. It’s unnatural, that reversal. It’s the thing that keeps the family from ever being whole again.