“Arly will be fine.” In those four words, the coach stripped Grand of the pitcher mound.
I never thought I’d see my brother defeated. He was always so strong. The boy with the durability of linoleum. On that day, I realized the linoleum was just an accessory for effect, and underneath it, he was just as fragile as us all. My brother. The one I thought was marked for eternity, and yet here I am, and where is he? Maybe forever on that ball field. Forever being revealed and they forever stepping back as if he’s sickness between sickness.
It was small use to remind them of how they’d say, I love you, Grand Bliss, in the golden glow of a big win. Even smaller use to say he was once their friend. The buddy who bought them all tickets to the Reds game, and drove all the way to Cincinnati and back. The pal who stayed sober when they got drunk. The one who punched the guy who would’ve punched them.
He was the heart they could all be loved by, and yet not one of them loved him back. I wanted him to shout. To cancel out what they were telling themselves. To deny until he won. To shape back his hero self and put on the cape to become my perfect brother once more. But all he did was squeeze his glove and walk away.
When he saw me at the fence, it was like it was through a microscope against his brow, magnifying me to the point of shocking him into a run that was so fast, I would never have caught up to him had he not stopped to get sick.
“How long were ya by the fence?” He wiped his mouth in one long gesture.
“I just showed up as you were leavin’.” I couldn’t bear for him to know I’d seen it all.
He turned a cheek to his vomit. “Really?”
“Really. I’m stumped why ya left practice so early.”
He looked at me and knew, but the lie offered him a chance. All truth could do then was to tap us on the back. We never turned around.
“Heat’s made me sick. Coach said it was all right for me to go home.” He lifted his cleats, checking his shoelaces to see if any vomit had splashed.
As we walked home, I knew from far away the trees would’ve looked nice, the grass would’ve looked green, and we would’ve looked like just a couple of boys walking home, armed with Midwest love and Bible Belt morals.
But up close, the trees were scorched, the grass was dead, and the boys were on the verge of tears with the belts of those morals tightened around their necks, threatening to hang them if they dared step off the stool of masculinity.
We didn’t speak the whole way. That’s brothers for you. A splintering silence. A lonely cope. A quick pace to the house we shared and the home we hoped would always be there.
And this is where so many of my nightmares begin. Walking up the porch steps and finding the man with the notepad. He’d been talking to Sal. Grand interrupted their conversation by asking, “Who are you, Незнакомец?”
“A journalist from The New York Times,” Sal answered for the man.
Grand gave a fatherly sigh toward Sal. “Whatcha been tellin’ him?”
“We’ve just been talking about the heat.” The man tucked his pad of yellow paper into his back pocket. “You know your shoelace is untied?” He gestured down to Grand’s shoes. “What’s that on the laces? Chocolate stains?”
“Bloodstains.”
“Funny stain to be on shoelaces. Either way, it’s a pleasure to meet you, kid.” The man offered his hand.
It was unnatural how the man called Grand kid. There wasn’t enough distance in age between them. I figured the man was in his early twenties. Hair copper like fused pennies. Eyes dark like casual shadows. Lines around the mouth from Marlboro Country.
The way he moved, he was like a human saxophone, with jazz in his step. Of course, it probably had something to do with his skin. Such a glow you’d never think he’d ever been sick a day in his life.
“Aren’t you going to shake my hand, kid?”
Grand leaned into the porch rail, the man watching the sweat glistening on Grand’s bare chest. Watching the way that strand of damp hair fell across his eye, like a sort of whole world holding.
“Perhaps if I introduce myself.” The man kept his hand offered. “I’m Theodore Bundy. Just call me Ted.”
This was the type of thing to get Grand grinning. To get him to the man’s hand. I wish mine would’ve been a knife to Ted Bundy right then and there. I wish I would’ve been bigger than myself, the thing to make him nothing but the slowly bleeding dust.
After Grand introduced himself as Michael Myers, they seemed to hold hands a little too long. Grand was the first to let go. Something told him to. Maybe something that was still being said back on the ball field.
The man looked at his own hand, slender like the rest of him but now sullied from ball diamond dust. Maybe some oil from Grand’s baseball glove and pine tar from the bat. This dirt on the man’s hand was painful to him. He was so spick-and-span, like he washed in a Maytag, spinning out on gentle cycle.