Steve Toltz - A Fraction of the Whole

We were all on pins and needles.

I wasn’t prepared for the sight of him walking through the back door- he looked so happy you’d have thought he’d been in Fiji sipping margaritas out of a coconut. He sat at the kitchen table and said, “So what kind of welcome-home feast you got planned for the prodigal son? Some fattened calf?” My mother was in such a state she cried, “Fattened calf? Where am I going to get that?” and Terry jumped from the table and hugged her and spun her around the room and she almost screamed in terror, she was so frightened of her own son.

After lunch Terry and I walked the narrow dirt road that led into town. The sun beat violently down. All the flies in the district came out to greet him. He brushed them away and said, “Can’t do that strapped to a bed.” I related the story of Harry’s shifty escape and his appearance that night in the mud.

“And have you seen Caroline?” he asked.

“Now and then.”

“How is she?”

“Let’s go see.”

“Wait. How do I look?”

I gave him the once-over and nodded. As usual, he looked good. No, better than good. Terry was already looking like a man, whereas I, more a man in age than he was, looked more like a boy with an aging disease. We moved silently toward town. What do you say to someone who’s just got back from hell? “Was it hot enough for you?” I think in the end I blurted out something like “How are you?” with an emphasis on the are, and he muttered that the “mongrels couldn’t break me.” I knew he’d suffered through an experience he’d never be able to communicate.

We reached town and Terry gave every person on the street a challenging stare. There were bitterness and anger in that stare. Clearly the hospital “treatment” had done nothing to quiet his anger. He had it in for everyone. Terry had chosen not to blame our parents for his sentence but had fixed his fury on everyone who followed the word of the suggestion box.

Except one. Lionel Potts came bounding up, waving his arms wildly. “Terry! Terry!” He was the only person in town happy to see my brother. It was a welcome relief to feel the force of Lionel’s childlike enthusiasm. He was the sort of man you talk to about the weather and you still walk away smiling. “The Dean boys, together again! How are you, Terry? Thank God you got out of that hellhole. Cunt of a place, wasn’t it? Did you give that blond nurse my phone number?”

“Sorry, mate,” Terry said. “You’ll have to get committed yourself if you want that action.”

So Lionel had been up to see Terry.

“Maybe I will, Terry. She looked worth it. Hey, Caroline’s in the café, smoking. She pretends to hide it from me and I pretend to be fooled. Have you seen her?”

“We’re on our way now,” Terry said.

“Excellent! Wait here!” Lionel pulled out a packet of cigarettes. “These are lights. See if you can wean her off the Marlboro full-strengths, would you? If it doesn’t bother you, a little collusion.”

“Not at all. How’s your back?”

“Crap! My shoulders feel like clamps. A town masseuse, that’s the kind of suggestion that would do some good,” Lionel said as he massaged his own shoulders with both hands.

Terry and I arrived outside the café. It was closed. It was always closed now; the boycott had won in the end. Caroline was lurking inside; the café was her private hideout until her father managed to sell it. We saw her through the window: she was lying on the bar smoking, trying to blow perfect smoke rings. It was adorable. The rings came out as whirling semicircles. I tapped on the glass and reached out to put my hand on Terry’s shoulder in brotherly support, but my hand met with nothing but air. I turned to see Terry’s back moving away from me fast, and by the time Caroline had unlocked the door and stepped out on the street, Terry was gone.

“What’s up?” she asked.

“Nothing.”

“Do you want to come in? I’m smoking.”

“Maybe later.”

As I walked away I noticed a bad smell in the air, like dead birds rotting in the sun.

I found Terry sitting beneath a tree, holding a pile of letters in his hands. I sat beside him and didn’t say anything. He stared down at the letters.

“They’re from her,” he said.

So, Caroline’s letters! Love letters, no doubt.

I stretched out on the grass and closed my eyes. There was no wind, and next to no sound. I had the impression of being inside a bank vault.

“Can I take a look?” I asked.

A masochistic streak in me was dying to get my hands on those stinking letters. I was frantic to see how she expressed her love, even if it wasn’t for me.

“They’re private.”

I could feel something crawling on my neck, maybe an ant, but I didn’t move- I didn’t want to give it the moral victory.

“Well, can you summarize?” I asked.

“She says she only wants to be with me if I can give up crime.”

“And are you going to?”

“Yeah, I think so.”

I felt myself shrink a little. Of course I was pleased that Terry would be saved by the woman he loved, but I couldn’t rejoice. One brother’s success is another brother’s failure. Dammit. I didn’t think he had it in him.

“Only, the thing is…” he said.

I sat up and looked at him. His eyes were heavy. Maybe the hospital had changed him after all. I wasn’t sure how, exactly; maybe inside him something fluid had hardened, or something solid had melted. Terry gazed out in the direction of the town center. “There’s one thing I need to do first,” he said. “Just one little illegal thing.”

One thing. They all say that. Just one and he’ll be on to the next, and before you know it he’ll be like a snowball rolling downhill gathering yellow snow.

“Well, you’ll do whatever you want,” I said, not strictly encouraging him, though not discouraging him either.

“Maybe I shouldn’t do it,” Terry said.

“Maybe.”

“But I really want to.”

“Well,” I said, choosing my words very carefully, “sometimes people need to do things, you know, to get the things that they need to do out of their system.”

What was I saying? Absolutely nothing. It was simply impossible to recommend to Terry a course of action; this was my defense for the unconscionable act of bad brothering I was doing.

“Yeah,” he said, lost in thought, and I stood there like a stop sign, even though I was saying, Go!

Terry picked himself up and brushed the grass off his jeans. “I’ll see you a bit later on,” he said, and walked off slowly in the opposite direction from Caroline’s café. He was really dawdling, I think because he wanted me to stop him. I didn’t.

Betrayal wears a lot of different hats. You don’t have to make a show of it like Brutus did, you don’t have to leave anything visible jutting from the base of your best friend’s spine, and afterward you can stand there straining your ears for hours, but you won’t hear a cock crow either. No, the most insidious betrayals are done merely by leaving the life jacket hanging in your closet while you lie to yourself that it’s probably not the drowning man’s size. That’s how we slide, and while we slide we blame the world’s problems on colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, corporatism, stupid white men, and America, but there’s no need to make a brand name of blame. Individual self-interest: that’s the source of our descent, and it doesn’t start in the boardrooms or the war rooms either. It starts in the home.

Hours later, I heard the explosion. Out my window I saw thick billows of smoke spiraling into the moon-drenched night. My stomach tightened as I ran into town. I wasn’t the only one. The entire populace had congregated in the main street outside the town hall. They all looked horrified, the preferred expression of a crowd of spectators who gather specifically for tragedies. My poisonous suggestion box was gone. There were bits of it all over the street.