“Jake, how many times do I got to tell you? I’m only doing what’s best for you. I’m only doing what you would do, if you had the cojones.”
Jacob leaned forward, straining, and looked under the bed. Nothing. “You never took care of me.”
“Better than the old man ever did, that’s for sure.”
“Because he loved you the best.”
“Love? The old man? Them words don’t go together.”
“He did all of this for us, Josh. He wanted both of us to carry on for him.”
“Except I never wanted it. Not the fucking legacy, not the place in the community, not the life given in tireless service to others. I just wanted the money. But Dad fucked me over by leaving me the house instead. Laughed all the way to the goddamned grave, with you sitting there holding his bedpan and a fresh copy of the will.”
Jacob’s head throbbed and his tongue rasped against the roof of his mouth, the result of too much whiskey. He looked around the room. The only time he had ever desired ownership of this house was when the lawyer cracked open the will and announced that it belonged to Joshua. Maybe he should have bought it then. Surely the lawyer could have found a way around the covenant that prevented its sale.
The room seemed smaller and less forbidding than it had in their youth. Two baseball gloves hung on a row of pegs above the dresser. One was right-handed, one left-handed. Jacob had learned about transverse twins, and how the embryo split and the two halves developed as mirror opposites, facing each other, confronting each other. Jacob clenched his right hand. Joshua, as a lefty, had always been the better baseball player, especially as a pitcher.
That was one of the few ways their grade school teachers could ever tell them apart: by the hand with which they wrote. Occasionally Joshua would force Jacob to cover for him while he was off skipping school or smoking marijuana under the football stadium bleachers. Jacob had practiced writing with his left hand until the print was legible. He didn’t want to disappoint Joshua, and of course Joshua wielded the ultimate weapon against him.
Jacob had often imagined the two of them facing each other in the womb, fighting for Mom’s physical resources and sapping her strength. Then, at the moment of release, struggling toward the bright opening above in a desperate, winner-take-all race. As if they each knew the prizes that awaited and the stakes of life and death.
“Renee doesn’t know about you,” Jacob said.
“She knows enough.” Joshua went to the window.
Outside, the sun had risen but was veiled in ragged clouds. A spring breeze whistled through the shutters and a loose slat knocked against the exterior wall. Tap tap tap.
Mother had made that same sound walking down the hall after her stroke, tapping with her cane. Jacob could picture her hunched inside a peach flannel nightgown and wearing frayed slippers, ankles streaked with thick blue veins. Her body trembled as she slid a foot forward, balanced herself, swung the cane and planted its tip against the floor, adjusted her weight on the handle, and slid the second foot beside the first. Repeated over and over, slowly, until she reached the stairs. Then the tap of the cane would be broken by the clatter of her spidery hand against the railing.
“We had some good times in the old barn, didn’t we?” Joshua said, without turning.
“The chickens didn’t.”
“Heh. So you remember that, huh?”
Jacob grew faint and wanted to lean back on the bed but was afraid Joshua would take it as a sign of weakness. His lightheadedness was partially due to the hangover, but Joshua’s torture of the animals still had the power to shock him. The things Joshua did with a lit cigarette and that place where the guinea hens’ eggs came out . . .
He swallowed a hard knot of liquor nausea. “Daddy never did figure out why the hens quit laying.”
“The Gentleman Farmer. What a joke. He just wanted a big driveway so he could see his enemies coming from a long way off. That Wells paranoia runs deep, don’t it, brother?”
“You could have sent me a letter. I would have paid you and you wouldn’t have had to come back.”
“It’s more fun this way.” Joshua went to the closet, grinned, and opened the door. Jacob closed his eyes. The creak of the hinges hadn’t changed in two decades. The sound was still a dry scream combined with a perverted snicker.
“Wish me, Jake,” Joshua said, and they may as well have been eleven years old again. Wish Me started out as a game where one of them would guess which toy the other boy was holding in his bed across the dark room. Then Wish Me evolved into an elaborate fantasy in which they pretended to be someone else.
From Captain Kangaroo to Pete Rose to Batman to Shaggy on the “Scooby Doo” cartoon, they would run through the heroes of the day. Then Joshua started on monster movies, Dracula and the Mummy, using sinister voices that were as creepy as those of swarthy Hollywood actors. Instead of staying on his own bed, Joshua would sneak across the dark floor and slide under Jacob’s.
“Wish me a monster with fangs and red eyes,” Joshua would whisper in the darkness.
Jacob would barely be able to breathe and his vocal chords grew as tight as banjo strings. “I’m not afraid of you.”
“It’s not me you’re afraid of. It’s the Sock Monster.” And the sock would climb over the edge of the mattress, Joshua’s hand inside, scratching softly against the blankets. And no matter how many times Jacob told himself it was only a hand, the menace in Joshua’s voice made the Sock Monster a real and terrible threat. And Jacob would squirm away and bunch up near the headboard, only to find the Sock Monster crawling through the bed’s gap to snap and claw at his flesh.
All the while, as he pinched and poked, Joshua laughed and made cruel comments in his creepy fake voice. He would keep up the Sock Monster game until he was bored or tired, then he would say, “Do you give, you big sissy?”
By that time, Jacob would be curled into a shuddering and whimpering ball.
“Suck that snot back up your nose and tell me you give.”
“I give,” he said when he could part his clenched teeth.
Each morning, Jacob never failed to find a sock under the bed, pocked with small round spots of dried blood. His blood. As if the Sock Monster had really dug teeth into him, pulled his hair out by the roots, gnawed his fingers and toes.
Eventually, Joshua stopped sliding under the bed and began hiding in the closet instead. That’s when things really started getting nasty. And Jacob was eleven again.
“Wish me, Jake,” Joshua repeated, and Jacob opened his eyes to find himself in the present, in the room he never thought he’d see again except in occasional nightmares.
“I don’t want to play.”
“You better. Or I’ll tell.”
“I’m not twelve anymore.”
“No, but the statute of limitations don’t run out on murder.”
“It wasn’t murder.”
“Well, I guess in a court of law they’d call it manslaughter or reckless endangerment or something to make sure you got off with a slap on the wrist. Since you’re so upstanding and all. But we both know it’s a killing no matter what name you give it.”
Jacob felt as if his ribs were splintered and digging deep into the meat of his lungs and heart. “I was just a kid.”
“That cane was her life, Jakie Boy. She hardly ever took a step without it. Even when she sat and read the newspaper, or dusted her little knickknacks, that cane was right there with her. She probably could have beat off a rabid mountain lion with that thing. She sure enough knew how to whoop us with it.”
“She shouldn’t have hit me. Not right there on the elbow, where it made my arm go numb.”
“You always was the type to carry a grudge. Look what you done to me. Let me live like scum while you rode that golden ticket to the top. And I reckon you figured Momma was in the way, too.”
“She shouldn’t have hit me.”
“The stroke crippled her up a little, but it didn’t hurt her mind a bit. Helped her focus. Just made her hate us that much more. You remember why she hit you?”