Brad Felver - The Dogs of Detroit

Our eyes meet two or three times before he connects that it’s me, it’s his brother sitting at the other end. “Jesus,” he says. “Johnny?” and I say, “Yep. It’s me, and it’s you too.” He grabs his little computer purse and his drink, and he moves next to me. He eyes me for a minute, like this is just too impossible. He takes a drink. Then he reaches his hand out, and I shake it.

“So what the hell anyway?”

“Business,” I say and twist my glass around, which breaks apart the cocktail napkin. “Slammed these days. Real busy.”

“That’s good, that’s good. Busy is good.”

“Cheers to that,” I say and we raise our glasses but only a couple inches. “Business for you too?”

“No,” he says. “Not for once. Off to Aruba for the week.”

“Wow,” I say and then sit there trying to remember if Aruba is Mediterranean or Caribbean and if Caribbean is the one by Italy or the one with Jamaica.

He waves down the bartender. “Put them both on mine,” he says. Then he turns back to me and says, “Yeah, so Aruba. Meeting a friend there. She went a couple days ago, but I couldn’t get away. Clients everywhere you look. You know how it gets.”

“Clients,” I say and shake my head the way people do. I’m suddenly aware of my fat, callused hands, all cracked open from working a tow truck in winter. I’m not sure who she is. He either got married or divorced about seven years ago; I heard that from someone. So it could be his old lady, or he could have himself a Traci.

Truth is, my brother and me, we always hated each other. To begin with, you need to know that Peter, our other brother, he died when we were still kids. Nobody ever really got over that. Peter and I shared a room, but since we didn’t have space in the apartment to stow his bed, and since Mom and Dad wouldn’t sell it to some idiot stranger, they left it in our bedroom, like the carcass of some big dumb animal. Then Mom and Dad got divorced, and I thought that would be the end of my dead brother’s bed, but Dad took it to his new place down in Dorchester and made me sleep in it every other weekend. Warren got a brand new futon. “You deserve it,” Warren kept saying. “You killed Peter,” which is absolutely not what happened. It was a car accident.

I’m sitting there thinking about Peter and about his bed and Warren’s futon. I’m ignoring whatever Warren is saying about Aruba. “You killed Peter, you little shitbird,” he told me. “You wanted your own room, so you killed him.” He kept saying that; years he said it. Hear that enough, and you start to believe it. All the mean older brother stuff he did like handcuffing me to bike racks or taking a big wet dump in my church loafers, but saying that was the worst.

“So are you living in the same place now?” he asks, meaning that basement craphole over in Eastie, the one that smelled so bad when it rained, like hydraulic cement and wet collie. He came over for a minute after Mom’s or Dad’s funeral, I don’t remember which.

I drink the rest of my drink and push it toward the edge. I figure if he’s buying. I tell him no, that I’m moving to Beacon Hill soon, thinking of buying a place there as soon as I can find one with twelve-foot ceilings.

“Sounds like things are really coming together.” He shoots his cuffs then so that he can check his watch, and his cuff links are these old brass things, tarnished. It looks like something was painted on them, maybe a frosted cupcake or a hyena, but it’s worn off. If he wants to make a big show of things like that, shooting his cuffs like Whitey Bulger, he needs to spring for some new ones.

Warren’s cell phone rings, and I can tell he wants to answer, but it seems impolite, me being right there. “Go ahead,” I say, and he does. He walks over to the big windows overlooking the tarmac and covers his other ear. I watch him for a minute, and then I order us a couple of shots. “Crown Special Reserve,” I tell the bartender. “My brother’s favorite. Make them doubles.” She brings them, and I shoot mine right away, and I’m reaching for the other one when the bartender turns my way and sees me and gets this suspicious look on her face, like maybe I’m some sort of lying kidnapper with mean sex fetishes. She keeps looking over in my direction, won’t turn away, and then Warren comes back and says, “What’s this?” and I say, “She brought us a couple on the house.” I wink and make a moaning sort of sex face so he gets the idea.

Peter died at Christmas. I begged Dad to get a real tree like they had in It’s a Wonderful Life . For once, he listened to me. We took the station wagon to this place way down on the South Shore. We had to rent a saw for a dollar extra, which pissed Mom off since we had one back at home. We stomped through these long lines of trees, playing hide-and-seek. Peter and me kept being the hiders, and for once we were winning. It was so dark and there were so many trees that you could hide and then circle back to a new spot. Warren got real mad about how hard we were to find, so every time he found one of us, he tackled us. Then Peter and me tackled him back one time, and Warren gut-punched me, and I cried, and Dad yelled at us, and that was the end of hide-and-seek. That’s who Warren always was, the kind of brother who knew how to throw a punch but not how to take one. But man, if I didn’t think about punching him back that whole ride home, catching him unawares while he sat next to me. Sometimes I still pretend we never tackled Warren that night, which means it would have taken us couple minutes longer at the Christmas tree place, and what happened next never actually happened at all.

On the way back home the tree shifted loose from the roof and fell into the other lane and another car swerved right into us, which killed Peter and nobody else. He got rushed to the hospital and they did surgery on him, but it didn’t work. Mom crumpled to the floor and bawled like somebody was torturing her until the nurse came out and walked her to a separate room. Dad just got real quiet and stared at the wall for an hour, even when the doctor came out and asked him to sign some forms that made Peter officially dead. It seemed like he didn’t even breathe or blink.

The tree got tossed on the side of the road, but the day after Peter’s funeral, Dad went back to the site with our saw and carved it up into foot-long chunks. He made me go with him to help, but he wouldn’t say a word, wouldn’t even look at me. For the next couple years, he sat on his front porch and whittled those chunks down into nothing, just shavings that stuck to the soles of our shoes. We’d track them back home to Mom’s, where she yelled at us for being such messy boys, but when we told her what the shavings were, she cried and said, “Your father.”

Warren and me drink in silence and watch people. There’s this family of five trying to go through security, but the kids are running around, playing space ninja or something, and saying Kapow! at each other, and the mom looks like she’s about ready to start throwing punches at whoever gets close enough. I’m feeling pretty drunk. It seems like everything is whirring around, people and sounds and even the smells from the coffee stand next to us, all of it blending together. I can feel everything all at once. After a while, Warren says, “It really has been too long. We shouldn’t be like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like strangers.”

I nod, but I don’t say anything else. I’m feeling numb and good. The light in the terminal is just right and it smells fresh. I start thinking about how I should really get back at Warren. Gut-punch him maybe. “Now we’re even, shitbird!” I’d say.

“I should probably brave security here pretty soon,” Warren says.