“Nah, Charlie. You were a little kid.”
Charlie gulped. His chest hurt. He could feel the words burning up through his throat and then he said them. “Mama told me to tell you to come home for lunch. To come home from Oscar’s. She told me to tell you that. But I was mad at you for breaking my sub and I didn’t want to talk to you and I didn’t do it. And maybe if I had said that you would have come home early—maybe then—”
“Nah, Charlie. Anyway, I was dead already.”
“You were?” Charlie said.
“Yeah. I was dead pretty fast.”
“What happened?” Charlie said. He’d been waiting years to know. The kid didn’t answer. His nose started running again. The lizard ambled down his arm to the floor, so Charlie picked him up and held the cool, breathing body in his hand. After a while he heard a rustling sound down below. Someone else was down there, breathing. The person didn’t say anything.
“I saw him,” the kid said at last.
“Who?
“Pauly.”
“Pauly?”
“Pauly. Down the street?”
“You mean Paul Clifford?”
He nodded.
“He’s the one … that killed me.”
“Paul Clifford? Pauly down the street? He’s the one who—he killed you?”
He nodded.
“Fuck. Paul Clifford? What’d he do?”
“I don’t know. It happened so fast.”
The kid took a deep breath.
“I was on my bike riding to Oscar’s and I saw Aaron’s brother Pauly was there. He said—he said he had this rifle and did I want to take a shot with it, it would only take a minute. So I said okay ’cause he said just a minute and you know Mama never let us touch guns.”
“Yeah.”
“So we went to the woods to do some shooting and he shot all these bottles and he wouldn’t give me a turn at all. So I asked him if I could have a turn and then he shot me.”
“He shot you? Because you wanted a turn?”
“I don’t know why. I don’t know. I was standing there and then I can’t see anymore, it’s all black. And when I wake up I’m falling.”
“You’re falling?”
“My whole body is falling and it’s a long way down, and the water’s cold. It’s real cold in there, Charlie, the water’s way up over my head and cold and bad smelling. I try to keep my head up over the water and I yell and yell, but he doesn’t get me out, Charlie, he won’t let me out, and so I yell and yell and it hurts every time in my body, my body really hurts, but I keep on yelling and no one is coming and no one comes and I’m all alone in there, I’m all alone, and I can’t do it. I try, Charlie, I try real hard, but I can’t keep my head up anymore. It’s cold under there and I can’t breathe. I can see the sun shining down through the water, it’s shining down really hard making the metal pail bright. It’s really shiny. I can see it shining right through the water. And then I died.”
“Man. Oh, man. Oh, man.” He couldn’t say anything else but that. He saw his brother Tommy drowning. They were all of them down there, Tommy and himself and their mama and his papa, too, all of them down there, drowning in the cold water.
“Fuck. Paul Clifford. Why’d he do a thing like that?”
“I don’t know. I tried to ask him why’d he do that to me, but he wouldn’t tell me. He ran away.”
The kid didn’t say anything else for a minute. His nose was running down into his mouth and he wiped it on his sleeve. He mumbled something in a low voice.
“What?”
“She don’t want me, Charlie.”
“Who?”
“Mama. She don’t want to see me. She forgot all about me. And I been trying to get back here since the day I was born.”
He didn’t know what to say. He put a hand on the kid’s back and rubbed it in little circles. The kid’s back was moving back and forth as he took big gulps of air. That’s all right, Charlie thought. You go on breathing. You just breathe now. Breathe for all of us. You got some catching up to do on that score.
All his feelings for Tommy had been locked up in a room somewhere and now the door was open and they were running amok.
He looked at the kid. Little snot-nosed white kid who was and wasn’t his brother. He couldn’t take it in. He didn’t even try.
Thirty-Three
“Tommy?”
Denise stood beneath the tree and heard the name come out of her own lips. It felt strange on her tongue and sounded strange to her ears, as if she was just trying it out, as if she’d never said that name before in her whole life.
She had stood there listening and felt her mind spinning in the dark and she wasn’t grabbing hold of anything; there was nothing to grasp onto except those two voices that sounded just like her own two boys talking in that rickety pile of lumber they used to hide out in. Her own two boys, she’d know them anywhere, only it wasn’t. She had heard and she hadn’t. There was a thing she had to do but she didn’t know what it was and she didn’t know what was real anymore and then she heard a voice that was her own voice speaking the name.