Jason Mott - The Crossing

Only now that Gannon was unconscious on the cold, deserted road did Tommy and I laugh.

The laughter was fleeting, but wonderful, like a meteor slashing across the night sky.

“We’ve got to get him out of the road,” I said.

Tommy flinched. He looked up to see me still standing there in front of the car. “I told you to run,” Tommy said, his voice steady and even.

“We’ve got to get him off the road,” I repeated. I was already jogging around and opening the rear door of the police car.

Tommy reached down and took the pistol from Gannon’s holster.

“Take the bullets out of it and throw that away,” I said.

He placed the gun on the highway. He fumbled through the pockets on Gannon’s belt. “Hold these,” he said, handing me the man’s handcuffs. “Hurry up,” he barked.

I took the cuffs. “You don’t need these,” I said.

Tommy rolled Gannon over and, after a few awkward moments, managed to pull him up off the ground and lift him over his back in a fireman’s carry. He’d wrestled off and on growing up. Most of the schools in most of the foster homes he and I had been shuffled through over the years had wrestling programs in some form or other. He’d actually managed to get pretty good at it. The physical side of it—all of the strength and muscles required—were just a matter of deciding to do it. The mental aspect required a lot of thought and Tommy wasn’t much of a thinker, but he had gotten pretty good at that too. He could always tell what his opponent was planning. He always knew, milliseconds before it happened, when someone was going to shoot their hips forward or try to spin out or go for an underhook. And his mind reacted to it all on its own. He didn’t have to think about it. It was one of the few things in his life, maybe even the only thing, that had come naturally to him. If he’d ever stayed in a single school for more than a season, maybe he would have gotten recruited by some college. Maybe in one of those places where wrestling was a pastime and boys like him could be someone people admired.

But he never did stay anywhere longer than a season and so he never had gotten really good and there were no college recruiters looking for him. The only person looking for him was the unconscious foster father he carried on his back.

Just as Tommy got Gannon to the car, I opened the door and there, sitting in the back seat and as quiet as a corpse, was the Old Man, Jim Gannon’s father himself. He’d had a stroke years ago and been confined to his body ever since. The doctors said that he was aware, but paralyzed and unable to speak. The most he ever did was blink, and even that came only on rare occasions.

Gannon had dressed him in khaki work pants and a flannel shirt and a pair of soft-soled nurse’s shoes. The Old Man didn’t seem to register me as I opened the door and took a moment to stare at him.

“What is it?” Tommy asked.

“It’s the Old Man.”

“What?” Tommy looked past me. “Is he sick?” Tommy asked. “The Disease?”

“No,” I said.

Gannon groaned a little, in the early stages of coming around.

“Give me the handcuffs,” Tommy said.

“You don’t need to handcuff him,” I replied. “Just shut the door. It can only be opened from the outside. He won’t be able to get out.”

“Give me the handcuffs, Virginia!”

“You. Don’t. Need. Them,” I said, laying each word out like a brick. Then I turned and tossed the handcuffs out into the darkness. “Don’t be so simple.”

Tommy was deciding whether or not to run out after them when Gannon, suddenly back to his senses, grabbed his arm. “Tommy...” Gannon said, groggy and slow.

Tommy snatched Gannon’s hand away and shoved him to the far side of the back seat. Then he bolted back just in time for me to slam the door closed, locking the man inside. “Tommy!” Gannon called. He looked out at the boy through the window, a firm calmness in his eyes. “Tommy...open this door.”

Without a word Tommy walked around to the front of the car and picked up the pistol that still lay in the middle of the street.

“I told you to throw that away,” I said.

He tucked the gun into the pocket of his coat. “If you want it, come over here and take it.” His voice was a hard, low warning, something that would let his sister know that for all of my intelligence, despite that flawless, unbreakable memory of mine, he was powerful in his own right. He’d saved me. Not for the first time, and not for the last.

“You’re welcome,” Tommy said.

“It was my idea,” I replied.

“You’re still welcome.”

Then we stood there in the dark and the cold, looking at the man trapped in the back seat of the car. It would be up to me to figure out what to do next. And it would be up to Tommy to do whatever needed to be done. Just like always. I would get us both to Florida in time to watch the launch and then, after that, I wouldn’t need him anymore. And, at the same time, he wouldn’t need me anymore. He’d go off to the war. Do his duty the way his draft notice demanded. He would die.

It was the only way things could turn out for us, no matter how much we wanted it to be different. We couldn’t know that at the time, but years later, the past would be immutable, and I would have to live with it, perfectly preserved in the halls of memory. And, years later, I would be able to speak for my lost brother, to see this trip the way he had seen it. The last great gift he gave to me.

* * *

Tommy hadn’t been a smart boy and he would never become a smart man. But that wasn’t what really bothered my brother. Neither was it that The Disease or the war would one day find him. The latter, in fact, I’d almost say Tommy always saw as something inevitable. Maybe even welcomed.

Tommy told me once that he could never be like me. Not even if he tried at it every single day for five hundred years, cloistered away like a monk. He’d only ever come up short. He said he’d known that for about as far back as he could remember—which wasn’t very far. To be sure, he had memories. As many as most other people did, he figured. He remembered important stuff: the first girl he’d kissed, the first time he got in trouble in grade school, a smattering of song lyrics, a handful of lines from movies. If he was supposed to show up somewhere at a certain time on a certain day he could, for the most part, hold that much in his head. Maybe he’d have to check the calendar again and again in the days before and tell himself, “Now, don’t forget!” But that’s how it went. That’s how it was with everybody.

Everybody except me.

In the last few years before our final trip together, perhaps sensing his growing unease, his body no longer looked like a copy of mine. He had shot up four inches above me and filled out wide and strong. He was all muscle and intention. In spite of the changes to his body, he and I still shared much of the same face. Sometimes when we were together I could look at Tommy and find myself overcome with a feeling of both loneliness and togetherness all at once. Being a twin was cruel in its own way. From the moment you were born you were let in on the dark secret of humanity, the thing that no one wants to know about themselves: that a person is both unique and, at the same time, mass produced. And therefore no better than anyone else.

Hell of a thing for a child to have to grow up knowing.

By the age of twelve Tommy was already being told that he was handsome. Not cute, the way people told it to the other boys his age, but handsome, the way people spoke of grown men. He was athletic. Strong. Everyone knew he would grow up to do something physical. Maybe he’d be a boxer or a wrestler, but never a bully. And then, assuming he lived long enough, the architecture of his physique promised that he could be the type of man that made people feel safe when they had every reason to be afraid. Maybe after he’d been wrestling for a few years he would become a firefighter. Policeman, perhaps. He had a good smile. “A soft smile,” people told him, girls especially. Maybe he’d become a doctor with a stern voice but a soft smile, the kind you trusted to save you no matter what harm you had brought upon yourself.