shining hard and bright

He let Al take care of things, because Al had always been the one who took care of things — he’d found some lawyer to take care of the paperwork, he’d fixed up the house, he’d made sure about mom. There hadn’t been a telephone call when it all got divvvied up; the check had come in the mail, and Max had cashed it out, and that had been all. It got him through eighteen months, tops. He’d felt bad, leaving it all on Al, leaving mom — but then it had been the last legs of whatever took her, and coming back home had been the beginning of the end. He’s never been any good around sick people anyway, and Al had taken it on with the diligence of a man with nothing else going for him and no way to avoid the obligation. No wife, no kids.

his is the first time he’s hearing his brother’s voice in a while, and it’s not under the most auspicious of circumstances.

“Where are you right now, Max? Are they holding you?”

Al’s voice comes tinny down the handset speaker, with a hard buzzing tone reverberating underneath the words that can only be down to shitty wiring or a busted payphone or both but the sound is piercing Max’s brain like a six-inch nail.

His cuticles are bitten down bloody. Max wills himself to relax and be cool and keep the facts straight: “I’m fine, it’s fine, I’m not in the drunk tank. I’m at the bus station in South Fork. I’ve got this suitcase the size of a fucking tank, but I’m up, so I figured I’d call.

“What happened?”

“Nothing happened, I just need a break for things to cool off. I gotta come down to Denver, man, I’m sorry.”

“For how long?”

“That’s sort of the thing. I don’t know yet how long.”

“Just stay put, I’ll come and get you. Christ, you couldn’t have given me a little lead time?”

“No, no, no, don’t come down here, not with the price of gas — I’ll come out to Denver and you can meet me there.”

“You can make it on your own?” Doubtful, and a little guilty, like they’re kids again. Dragging him back from wherever he’s gotten himself into trouble, and annoyed with himself for not stopping him from getting into it in the first place. Al’s always been better at long-term planning.

“I’m not a kid. I’ll call you when I’m there at the bus concourse, you don’t have to come out in the middle of the night. Though I guess I already woke you up, so it’s up to you.”

He can hear Al sighing; he can imagine him rubbing at the bridge of his nose, with the deep vertical furrow gouging his forehead. “You didn’t wake me. I was doing some work around the house.”

“At two in the morning? Jesus, I hope you’re not using power tools, Mrs. Watkins across the street will have a coronary.”

“She’s been dead for years,” Al says, and just when Max thinks he’s going to get reproachful with him or worse, say something about mom, he adds, “The old bitch. Listen, I’m sorry I snapped at you. Really, it’s going to be fine. You know you’re always going to be welcome here. This is your house too. I just wish you’d told me sooner.”

What can he say? I’m sorry; I missed you; I love you. Max thanks him. Right now he wants to believe it. He’s tired and strung-out and scared, and he’s running out of time.

*

For the first few hours after the drive from the bus terminal, Al leaves him there on the couch and he sleeps like a baby. Then once he’s in an actual bed at night, with clean sheets and pillows and the whole thing: nothing. Of course his older brother is the kind of person to own spare bedsheets just in case some fuckup comes to visit — the lady Max has been seeing has a whole closet full of pink starched linens, but the two of them don’t do much sleeping whenever their paths cross. She said she was divorced. Maybe that was just her being generous with herself; must have been, or Max wouldn’t be here.

It ought to be different, coming home. Other people look forward to that, don’t they? Lying there in his old bedroom, on the mattress that hasn’t been turned over since about the Truman administration, he doesn’t do much sleeping either. Nothing really lends itself to that; the radiators feel like they’re on full blast, and as he lies around in the semi-darkness of the streetlamps, his eyes keep trying to pick out papers in the faded geometries of the wallpaper, like his brain’s running on overdrive. He can’t make his brother trade places with him, but he sure wishes he could join him where he is now.

The house has changed somehow in his absence, or the angles are wrong; all the doors fall shut too heavily, the vibrations are fucked up. Lying there on the edge of sleep and waking, against his will he’s waiting for the sound of the bedroom door sliding open, bracing himself for the sound of footsteps in the hall. All the sounds of habitation that are no longer there; still looking for his father’s shape there in the darkened corners, big as he seemed when Max was a boy, and unable to quite convince himself that he never will. Dad hadn’t lingered; there hadn’t been any kind of long illness, just a sudden break, and maybe it’s better that way.

This place had been normal once. None of it had seemed the least bit strange until Max had left. Once out in California he’d caught the smell of dad’s cigarettes, walking past an empty room, and he’d been struck with a sudden nausea. He’s not frightened of the empty rooms, or even the dark; he’s weighed down by the dread that when he wakes, he will not be alone. It’s him that’s strange, not this place.

Sleep doesn’t come, and the waiting makes his skin itch. He can only stand about an hour of that awful heavy-eyed waiting before he gets up and has to start pacing in the hallway, up and down past all the closed doors.

The last time he stayed over here, he went and found Al’s room in the night, the big bedroom overlooking the backyard that once belonged to their mother and father. That was after the funeral, with the whole house still shrouded in condolences and flowers, and he’d crawled in beside his brother in bed. He’d laid his head on his brother’s chest and cried and his brother had let him do it, and things had gotten sort of out of hand. If Al felt weird about it all after that, he can’t blame him.

Max takes his little blue shaving bag to the bathroom and stands in front of the mirror. There’s bloody gauze in the wastebasket, and a scattering of cut bristles in the sink, a white smear of what might be toothpaste or might be greasepaint on the tap handle. The mirror doesn’t tell him anything he doesn’t already know. Max scrapes out a little spoonful from the neat little mahogany-wood vial he got out of the back of an issue of Cheri, the last flake he’ll have until he can cut the wrappings off the quarter-kilo bundle he’s got squirreled away in his suitcase and start testing.

He takes a little blow, and he starts to think about the kids in the newspaper. About the perverts out in Denver, and the runaways, and the guys down at the bar who figure this kid-snatcher is selling them off to big time out-of-towners out of the Stapleton International Airport. Bent over in front of the sink, Max wipes his nose on the back of his hand, and thinks about the folded-up maps in his suitcase, thinks about city blocks and gas prices and mileage. He’s sworn to himself that he’s not going to make this Al’s problem, that he’s going to keep a lid on his obsessions for the first time in his life, but something is prickling at his brain, some idea is beginning to germinate there like a single sprouting seed.

He doesn’t sleep at all after that. He stays up clear through morning.

*

Breakfast is scrambled eggs and black coffee. Scraping at his plate, Max asks, “You think he’s stalking them?”

“Max, what are you talking about?”

His brother has been up for hours too somehow; you can hear him moving around the house, and the smell of cooked food is already in the air. Whatever that doctor’s got him on, Max wants some. Maybe if he asks, Al will give him something that’ll let him sleep at night. Max can’t tell him he stayed up until sunrise wishing Al would come back and keep him company. He can’t face this house alone.

“You know, stalking them like a hunter. You’ve got a pervert in town, he’s got his pick of the litter, so why’s he pick this kid and not that one?”

Al hesitates in front of the sink, and he doesn’t need to turn around to know his brow is furrowed, his expression frozen that way. “Oh, Max — all that stuff’s just terrible, I don’t know why a person would go and do a thing like that. I don’t know what somebody like that does.”

Like he’s perturbed with him for asking, but more than anything, like he doesn’t get why Max would care. Max wants to understand — he wants to know how to stop it. If somebody was stealing TV sets, or ladies’ jewelry boxes, he’d would want to figure that out too, but with this thing going on, and in Denver, it’s just got him going. That’s all. If they grew up in Dallas, it would be Kennedy, but they grew up here. This is home.

Max adjusts his approach, folding up the newspaper and making a mental note to do some clippings. “Do you remember when we used to go down to the reservoir and shoot at the ducks? We’d be freezing out there, and we’d be waiting for hours before you could get a shot in.”

We means, dad too, and mentioning him was the wrong idea. Al darkens. “Those are hardly the same thing.”

“I’m not saying that it’s the same, I’m saying there’s tactics to it. I think he’s waiting for them. Do folks in town think it’s more than one guy?”

“I don’t want you getting involved in this when you’re in town. Please, just stay out of trouble.”

“I’m not involved, it’s just interesting. I’ve been following it for a while now and I just got to thinking, you know, when I’m here—“

“Max, please. I just don’t want to hear about it.” Al sets the coffee pot down just a little too hard, and the clatter gives his words some finality. Max scrapes at his plate, and keeps his eyes low.

Maybe once he could have been a cop — a real police detective, Dragnet and Columbo and all that stuff. He’s good at seeing patterns, even worked in computers for a while before that went down the shitter. He’s never been too good at doing any one job for too long. It gets stagnant.

That’s the last they speak of it; Al lets Max have his little project, over in the other room where he doesn’t have to look at it, and Max will return the favor. For the last few minutes of his life, it’ll actually seem pretty funny.