Nevada Barr: 13 1/2

Beef Cop edged the nurse out of his range of vision. “Son, was it you who hit your brother?” he asked.

Tears started again. “I hit him,” he said. “I had to.”

“Good kid.” The cop’s voice turned flinty. Richard imagined words striking sparks when he talked. “What did you hit him with? That axe? The neighbor girl… ”

Morphine, or Darvon, or whatever it was furred the edges of Richard’s tunneling vision. Through this black fuzzy sleeve he watched the cop pull a notebook from his coat pocket.

“Vondra Werner,” the policeman verified. “Vondra Werner said you spent most of the night with her.”

At first Richard didn’t see the ghost of a grin behind the cop’s words. Then he did, and he knew the man thought he was a hero.

Not just a survivor, but a hero.

“That’s enough,” Nurse Sara said. “Look at him, poor, poor, beautiful boy… ” was the last thing Richard heard.

Nothing was ever going to be right again, Dylan thought.

Except Rich. Rich didn’t die. He almost died, but he didn’t.

The first time Dylan saw him again was at the trial. It wasn’t held in Rochester because everybody there hated Dylan too much for it to be fair. They were trying him in a little town called Hammond about three hours away. He had to get up at five every morning so they could drive him there in time. The courthouse was small and looked like it was supposed to, with benches and a fence between the audience and the lawyers. Every day it was packed, mostly with newspaper and TV people.

Rich, looking like his old self with color in his skin and everything, his hair a little longer than their mom would have let him wear it and waving in that surfer-boy style he liked, was pushed down the aisle of the courtroom in a wheelchair. His leg was wrapped in so many bandages they’d had to cut open that side of his pants even though it was probably twenty below zero outside. He’d gotten skinnier.

Though Dylan knew Rich would spit on him, or ignore him like he was a bug, or scream he was a psycho, or worse, he didn’t look away. He kept watching the rolling chair. When it first came through the double doors, everybody got quiet. Then, as it got closer, flashbulbs started flashing and people started murmuring.

Rich was so cool-academy awards, the red carpet. He was smiling for the cameras but kind of sadlike. Dylan loved him more at that moment than he ever had. Nothing Rich had done in the past mattered. This was what mattered. The love hurt Dylan, it was so big.

Since that night the whole inside of him felt black and crusty like the inside of a lightning tree. Mostly, Dylan stayed in the burnt-out hole and didn’t think or feel. He didn’t know what to be or how to be anymore. No one else seemed to know what he was either. Or what to do with him. Doctors, lawyers, cops asked questions. A newspaper guy got in, and flashed, and questioned until the cops chased him out.

Dylan hadn’t been able to answer the questions, so he’d coiled up in the black and hid. Until he saw his brother. The pain of loving Rich felt almost good; it made him feel like a person. He didn’t look away as the wheelchair rolled down the aisle toward him but steeled himself to take the hit. Maybe it would kill him, but he doubted it. Nothing he wanted to happen had happened for a while now.

Then Rich was opposite him on the other side of the wooden railing. He held up his hand, and the nurse stopped the chair. Dylan felt like crying, his brother was so cool. He’d made the nurse do what he wanted without saying a word, like a cop stopping traffic. Bracing against the armrests, Rich struggled to get up. The nurse, all done up for the trial in her crisp uniform and hat, put her hands on his shoulders to make him stay down, but he shrugged them off.

Dylan stood too. If Rich wanted to hit him, he could. For a weird jag of time, Dylan experienced his brother’s fists hammering him, his feet smashing into his ribs and belly, and he welcomed it. He craved being beaten to death like he craved air when he’d been under the water too long.

Getting up must have hurt Rich. His face lost color, and he swayed like he was going to pass out. Holding onto the railing to keep himself up, he made it the two steps to where Dylan stood waiting.

The muttering in the courthouse dried up. Nobody was even breathing. Time stopped, and the people were hanging on the second hand, wondering if the clock was going to work ever again. Dylan wasn’t breathing either. He was waiting to die. Not the good kind where everything is over, but to be killed inside.

Rich balanced himself against the rail so he could stand on his bad leg, reached out both arms, and said, “Brother.”

The sere, cinder-lined core of Dylan filled with warm liquid. He was melting from the inside out. Time flowed backward. He hurtled from eleven, to eight, to six. A little boy threw his arms around his big brother’s neck and bawled like a baby. Rich didn’t have to be so good to him.

Rich was crying too.

People in the courthouse didn’t know what kind of noise to make. Their murmuring fattened up with awe and pity, then morphed into white-hot fury. Dylan smeared the tears and snot from his face into the crook of his arm as the sound grew into the feral growl of a mob working up to a lynching. Except he was eleven. So they couldn’t even enjoy being mad at him. He was a little kid. They had to pretend to be sad at the same time.

Rich fell back into his wheelchair. Mrs. Eisenhart, Dylan’s court-appointed attorney, pulled him from the rail. The judge was pounding his gavel for quiet.

They were all mad for Rich, because he wouldn’t be mad for himself. They hated Dylan. They needn’t have bothered; he hated himself more than they ever could.

He sat down. Mrs. Eisenhart had brought him the suit and tie his mom got for Lena ’s baptism. He’d been nine then, and the suit was too small. He squirmed trying to get the crotch to stop crawling up his butt.

Mrs. Eisenhart kicked him under the table. Rich was being sworn in; Dylan forgot about wedgies.

The other lawyer, the one against Dylan, began asking questions. Rich didn’t want to answer, but he’d sworn on the Bible and had to. He hadn’t seen Dylan do anything. He insisted on that. He’d been next door necking with Vondra Werner. When Rich said that, he looked at Dylan and kind of shrugged.

Dylan turned around with a great big, sheepish grin plastered on his face, looking to see what his mom and dad thought of that. Men in the courthouse were smiling; when they saw his face the smiles whispered out, leaving only the scratching sound of dead leaves in the air. His big old grin brought the undergrowl back into the ambient noise.

The parched silence, the sudden remembering that his parents weren’t there, froze Dylan’s smile in a creepy kind of way. Like a supervillain had zapped him with an ice ray. Flash bulbs popped. “Butcher Boy,” one of the newspaper reporters whispered, and a bunch of them scribbled in their notepads.

Mrs. Eisenhart closed a sharp-nailed hand on his shoulder and turned him back toward the judge.

Rich told the jury, the judge, and the lawyers that he’d come home and found Dylan drenched in blood. He’d tried to get the axe away from him, and Dylan had nearly hacked his leg off. Thinking Dylan was possessed, or might hurt himself, or was sick, Rich, even though he was bleeding to death, got the axe away from him and bonked him on the head. Then Rich had passed out and didn’t remember anything until he woke up at the Mayo. That was it-the whole story.

The prosecutor made Rich tell it different ways. He tried to make him add to it, say he saw things he didn’t, but Rich wouldn’t do it. Everybody was listening so hard Dylan could feel his brother’s words being sucked past his ears into the gallery.