Steve Toltz - A Fraction of the Whole

I can’t tell you much about what happened next. But I can tell you that Terry climbed down, grabbed the cricket bat from an astonished Bruno, and slammed it into the side of his head. I can tell you that the fight had been going for only about fifteen seconds when Dave, the uglier of the nonidentical twins, pulled a butterfly knife and thrust it hard into Terry’s leg. I can tell you what the scream sounded like, because it was mine. Terry didn’t let out a sound. Even as blood pissed from the wound and I climbed down and ran into the mix and dragged him away, he was silent.

The next day, in hospital, an unsympathetic doctor casually told Terry that he’d never play football again.

“What about swimming?”

“Not likely.”

“Cricket?”

“Maybe.”

“Really?”

“I don’t know. Can you play cricket without running?”

“No.”

“Then no.”

I heard Terry swallow. We all heard it. It was pretty loud. A softness in his eight-year-old face became instantly hard. We witnessed the exact moment he was forcibly disengaged from his dreams. A moment later tears poured out of him and he made unpleasant guttural noises I’ve had the misfortune to hear once or twice since, inhuman noises that accompany the sudden arrival of despair.

Terry’s old wish had been granted: he was a cripple, just like his big brother. Only now that I’d returned to normal health, Terry was on his own. He used my discarded crutches to get from A to B, but sometimes he preferred to stay at A for days on end, and then when he no longer needed the crutches, he switched to a varnished cane of dark wood. He cleared his room of all the sporting paraphernalia: the posters, the photographs, the newspaper clippings, his football, cricket bat, and swimming goggles. Terry wanted to forget. But how could he? You can’t run from your own leg, especially a leg that carries the weight of broken dreams.

My mother tried to console her son (and herself) by infantilizing him- making his favorite meal (sausages and baked beans) every day, trying to snuggle him, speaking to him in baby talk, and constantly touching his hair. If he had let her, she would have stroked his forehead until the skin came off. My father was depressed too- sulking, overeating, speed-drinking beer, and cradling Terry’s sporting trophies in his arms like dead babies. These were the days my father got fat. In a frenzy, he ate every meal as if it were his last. For the first few months it all pushed out the front and his naturally skinny frame shook with the sudden alteration, but finally it buckled so that his waist and hips fell into line too, expanding to a width exactly one quarter of an inch wider than the average doorway. Blaming me for the calamity cheered him up a little. It wasn’t one of those revelations that would need to be drawn out of him in psychotherapy, either. He didn’t bury his blame but expressed it outright, over dinner, waving his fork menacingly at me like an exorcist’s crucifix.

Fortunately, he was soon distracted by a return to his old obsession: the prison on the hill. He and the warden were drinking buddies and for years they played pool every night, for fun making $100,000 bets on each game. The warden was into my father for an astronomical amount of pretend money. One day my father surprised his friend by demanding he pay up, but instead of insisting his debt be met with money, my father made a strange and dark bargain: he’d forget the $27 million owed to him, and in exchange the warden must bring copies of the inmates’ files down from his office. With his son’s future blown, the only thing my father was proud of was having helped build that prison, a solid achievement he could see from our front porch. So of course he felt he had a right to know who the guests were. The warden photocopied the files, and night after night my father pored over the case histories of murderers and rapists and thieves and imagined them rattling the bars he himself had welded. If you ask me, this was the beginning of the end for my father, although there was an incredibly long fall yet to come. This was also when he began to rave at my mother in public so much that she could no longer bear being with him outside the house; and so she wasn’t, ever again, and on the rare occasion they bumped into each other in the street, an awkwardness fell over them and they were eerily polite. It was only back at home that their normal selves would reappear and they’d yak on insultingly ad nauseam.

Things were strange at school for a while too. As you know, I never fit in; I couldn’t even squeeze in. Terry, on the other hand, had been accepted and embraced from day one, but now, after he lost the use of his leg for athletic purposes, he squeezed himself out. I kept an eye on him as he hobbled around the school grounds, squashing the tip of his cane into classmates’ toes and putting all his weight on it. Personally, I think it wasn’t only his own disappointment that was turning him cold and nasty. It was also a reaction to the endless compassion he had to deal with. You see, people were all very sympathetic to him on account of his loss, plying him with huge dollops of aggravating kindness. It was the worst thing for him. Some people are body-and-soul repulsed at being a figure of pity. Others, such as me, can soak it up greedily, mostly because having pitied themselves for so long, it seems right that everyone else is finally getting on the bandwagon.

Bruno and Dave glared menacingly at Terry whenever they crossed paths. Terry stood his ground and gave them his slipperiest smile. That led into a stare-off, one of those battles of masculinity that looks very silly to a passerby. Later, as I trailed Terry through the school corridors, I realized he followed Bruno and Dave wherever they went. What did he want with them? Revenge? A rematch? I implored him to leave them alone. “Fuck off, Marty!” he spat back at me.

I went back up in the tree. Now I’d put myself there. It had become my secret hiding place. I’d learned a valuable lesson: people almost never look up. Who knows why? Maybe they’re looking at the soil for a preview of coming attractions. And so they should. I think anyone who says he looks to the future and doesn’t have one eye on the dirt is being shortsighted.

One day I saw a commotion below: the students were running haphazardly around the playground, in and out of the classrooms, calling out. I strained my ears in the weird way humans can strain their ears when they want to. They were shouting my name. I hugged the branch so hard I got a full-body splinter. Every student in school was after me for something. But what now? What now? Two students stopped under the tree for a breather and I caught the news: Bruno and Dave had requested my presence behind the school gym. It’s about time, I heard the students say. If stabbing my brother was a statement, maybe I was to be the exclamation point. The consensus was that they were going to tear me apart. Everyone wanted to do his bit.

Then one girl caught sight of me, and two minutes later a crowd was carrying me on their shoulders as if I were a hero, but they were really delivering meat to the butcher. They bounced like puppies as they ferried me to Bruno and Dave, who waited behind the gym. “Here he is!” the children cried, dropping me unceremoniously in the dirt. I slowly rose to my feet, just for the hell of it. You could have sold tickets- it was the hottest show in town.

“Martin,” Dave shouted, “if anyone …anyone…ever… touches you…or hits you…or pushes you…or even so much as looks at you funny, you come to me and I will ANNIHILATE them! You understand?”

I didn’t understand. Neither did the crowd.