Dylan Nice - Other Kinds

I called when it seemed it would be daylight back in the east. Already the plains were damp and hot, spitting rain. By Ohio the roads began to cut rock walls into the feet of the Alleghenies. The mountains broke the line of sight; lights disappeared from the horizon. The highway split into narrower and darker roads. There were a sign at the start of the county to tell me how high I was and I climbed up out of the heat. The cold air felt cleaner.

It was late at night when the state route turned to dirt, a half mile from where I was headed. My brother Jason bought his company house on the road where we were raised, then built a deck and fenced in some dogs. They crouched and wagged at the kitchen door without barking and I lowered my hand. The floorboards were warm and I could feel the fire Jason had banked in the basement.

He stood in the bathroom at the top of the stairs. “Any particular reason you’re here?” he asked. His brow was dark and steep.

“Just wanted to be able to tell where I stood,” I said.

I thought the woods and the hills would make me feel housed again; I liked the dead silence, the lack of sirens and highway noise. Nothing but the quick click of pipes when the water was hot enough to circulate.

“Well,” he said, “the room’s ready.”

I slept into the dusk and awoke to gray sky behind the blinds, the low ceiling only a few feet from my face. The kitchen air tasted bitter with coal soot while Jason emptied the burner of its ashes. His wife filled a basin with warm water to bathe the baby. Their daughter held her body taut, squirming with closed eyes. His wife stood in loose cotton and cradled the baby’s neck, lowered her into the water.

“This is your brother’s child,” she said. “I can already tell she’s not going to like it here.”

Her eyes moved slowly as her hands smoothed over the baby. A breeze blew over the house, sucking the curtain to the window screen and pulling trails of steam from the bath. I remembered winter baths as a boy: the open window, the uneven heat. I sat in the hot water in the old house with no other houses around it. I imagined I was in a skyscraper with hundreds of stories stacked on top of me. It was a world of small secret rooms.

Jason came up the stairs behind us, his arms blacked with coal dirt.

“Glad you’re up,” he said. “Come out on the porch with me.”

It was raining a coastal mist. The lane past Jason’s porch turned muddy and began to puddle. He pulled a bag from his back pocket full of a synthetic pot he’d ordered off the Internet. I watched through the window as his wife finished bathing the baby and wrapped her in a towel. She moved to the window to watch us.

“This is the Mad Hatter,” he said, opening the bag. “It’ll scramble your brains for a half hour.”

“The federal government is trying to outlaw it,” his wife said through the screen door. “If it causes central nervous system failure, your brother will be the first one to know.”

She was pulling her hair up, letting it fall again — she was tall, brunette, what Jason repeatedly called a good woman. He put her through nursing school doing twelve hour days hauling demolished buildings out of the state’s only city. She kept him from letting his teeth fall out. Jason got the glass pipe hot and handed it to me. The Mad Hatter tasted dry and wasn’t as warm or heavy in my head as I’d hoped. Rain dripped down the tin gutters. There was gunfire in the distance, someone sighting in their rifle.

“I like the kind of quiet I have here,” Jason said.

“Anything noisy gets lost in the trees,” I said.

Our dad had moved back to the more populated side of the state after our mother died of a fast cancer. I left to sort out what was me and wasn’t. Jason stayed to live the way we knew: hungry, tired, at work in a desperate way. He fell in love with hardship. It was an easy thing to trust. He sent me letters, old photos he found in attic drawers. Sometimes it was a grandfather in uniform, a grandmother with her hand on her hip, posed in front of a ball game.

“I want to take you out on the hill tonight,” Jason said.

The hill wasn’t so much a singular place as a collection of places, deep in the woods, that served as a realm for him to enact the purest form of himself. He drank beer from red and white cans, discussed his tattoos, his future tattoo plans. You could buy little orange bottles of medicine from guys with tracheotomies who had prescriptions for work-related injuries. Their wives had hard, skinny bodies and drawls so thick as to sound Celtic.

Jason went in the house and came out with a T-shirt.

“You won’t want to wear that yellow one out there,” he said, gesturing.

I looked down at myself, the stripes running parallel to my chest.

“Suppose not,” I said.

He started the truck while I downed the beer I’d only just opened.

“Bring it,” he said, “We’re only heading up to Danny’s.”

Danny’s was a shingle-sided house that sagged into a mountain’s slope. Jason straddled the dirt driveway’s washouts while dogs tied at the hilltop barked. We parked beside a stone garage with rotted beams. An old, fast car sat rusting, its tires flat against the dirt floor. Danny was shirtless and sitting on the gate beside a plastic bucket of ice and beer.

“Got my little brother with me,” Jason said.

“I’d have figured that out,” Danny said.

Three girls in T-shirts longer than their shorts stood in the driveway, piling dirt. It was a contest and Danny was the judge. He used his boot to help the youngest and the two others called him a cheater. I tried to hold myself stiff at my shoulders while he and Jason talked about getting each other better jobs. They told each other how good for it they were. Neither moved their mouths much when they spoke. The rain had stopped but the humidity made the dust stick to our skin and sting.

“You know me,” Danny said. Sweat beaded on his pitted brow. He looked like a man who’d lived a life in complete disregard of his body. “I’m a family man. I got these daughters.”

It turned into a clear cloudless night and Jason exhaled hard, pointing out his breath. A bare bulb lit the wood and stone from a wire wrapped around a rafter. Danny finished a tight roll on a blunt before handing it to me with a lighter.

“You ever knock anyone up?” he asked.

“No,” I said.

There was a pause while he considered my face and realized I must be halfway through my twenties.

“You queer?” he asked.

From behind the shed, his daughters pulled hair and screamed.

“I’ll rip your head off,” one said.

“I’ll rip your head off,” said the other.

“I’ll rip both your fucking heads off,” Danny shouted, a sudden anger I remembered expecting from every dad I knew when I was little. Our own father raged until the anger got too heavy for him and then he apologized so as to feel nothing.

“No, man,” I said. He grinned because he could see I wouldn’t try and fight him. I hadn’t had the spirit to fight in a long time.

Danny’s heavy wife came out and took the daughters into the house by the backs of their shirts. The blunt went around a few more times. There was nothing for me to be but a child. I didn’t know what to do with my face, where to look when I talked. They looked at me with hard fixed eyes. I was a thief. I was here because I could not pay for the things I needed. Another hit made me cough hard. Danny knocked the pipe clean on the workbench and laughed. I went outside the garage door to spit in the dirt while my stomach held tight with fear.

“It’s getting to about that time,” Danny said. “Some of us work for a living.”

I was still bent over, coughing. Jason slapped my back and a hollow thud came through my chest.