Brad Felver - The Dogs of Detroit

“Right,” I say. “Me too. I always put it off till the last minute.”

“We could brave it together.”

“Well,” I say. The bartender comes over. “One more?” I say, thinking that’ll help me get my courage up. Even now Warren’s my big brother.

We drink and avoid eye contact for a while. We’re strangers at a bar. It’s supposed to be easier to talk to strangers in a bar. There are these people all around us, this blurred commotion, and it makes me feel like we have this privacy, like we’re in a tent. Warren’s movements get slower. When he picks up his whiskey, the napkin sticks to the underside, but he doesn’t seem to notice. I get really mad at him for that. Just peel the fucking napkin off! I want to shout. Who wants to go to Aruba with a guy who acts like that? Then he starts talking in a low voice, not quite a whisper, but hushed, private. “I wish we did this more.”

“Me too,” I say.

“Do you? You don’t hate me?”

“You’re my brother.”

“That’s right,” he says. “I am. That’s something, isn’t it?”

“That’s a lot.”

Warren is drunker than I am. His eyes get wide and sad, like a big dumb cow. As much I want to punch him then, there’s a right time and a wrong time to punch your older brother, I do know that. You can’t punch sad people, that’s a rule. He leans toward me more. “I always thought you hated me. You always loved Peter more.”

“Peter and I shared a room,” I say.

He swipes at the air between us. “Don’t be a shit. Why can’t you just admit it?”

“It always seemed like us against you,” I say. “I don’t know why.”

“Peter would be fifty this year,” he says like he didn’t hear me, “did you know that?”

I didn’t, but I lie, Yes, I did, of course I did. Peter and me were awfully close. “It’s been a long time.”

“Fifty fucking years old. Dead for forty-one.” He shakes his head and rattles the ice in his empty glass until the bartender looks over. For a minute I think he might cry. A thousand people around us, coming and going, living their lives next to each other but not really with each other, and my older brother who I always hated, he was right about that, drinking whiskey and crying. It’s sad, but my brother and me can only really talk about three or four different things, and one of them is our dead brother. It’s sad how I can’t punch him either, or maybe how I don’t really want to anymore. I guess I’ve always wanted to know someone else was still miserable about all of it, but now that it’s happening, it’s a nasty business. Big brothers aren’t supposed to cry, but little brothers aren’t supposed to be dead either, I guess.

Warren leans forward into his hands, and I can see the grease stains under his fingernails. I don’t even know what business he’s in now, but I do know what grease under the fingernails means. “Can I tell you a secret?” he says. “I wasn’t as sad at mom’s funeral or at dad’s as I was a Peter’s. Isn’t that awful?” He rubs his face the way you do when you need to shave or when you’re too drunk. His cuff links pop out again, and that’s when I recognize them. They were Dad’s. Dad always wore them to church, which was the only time he ever had to dress up nice.

“No,” I tell him. “I don’t think it’s so bad. Peter was a real sweet kid.”

“Remember how you wouldn’t sleep anywhere else but Peter’s bed? How Dad even took it to the new apartment when he moved out?”

“What do you mean?” I ask, but even as I’m saying it, I do remember. Dad kept the bed for me. There was another person in the room a lot of those nights, too, I remember that. I’m not saying I believe in ghosts or something dumb like that, but I wasn’t alone. I’d call out and look all over the place, but I’d never find him. I needed him to help me against Warren, but he was gone. I guess I gave up on him at some point, and I guess Warren wants me to feel guilty about that. Some people never do change.

“I need to hit the head,” I say, and I get up. “I’ll be right back, and we’ll go through security together.” Warren’s too drunk to notice I don’t have a bag. He staring down at his drink, and I step behind him and raise up my fists, and I’m about ready to get even, one big haymaker right into the curve of his neck, but the bartender looks my way again, that goddamned bartender, and I have to run off and hide.

I go over at the far side of the security lines and stand in the middle of all the strangers and watch my brother. He’s looking down into his glass like it’s a telescope. It’s five minutes, and he doesn’t move. I can’t tell if he’s sleeping or trying to keep from crying or if he’s just thinking real hard. He finally jerks awake when they call his flight, what I think has to be his flight: 2142 to Miami, Florida. Can’t even afford direct. He grabs his bag and takes off toward security. He starts looking around, every direction, but he can’t tell me from all the strangers in line. He stumbles over to the bathroom and then comes out looking real confused. For a minute, I fantasize about stomping out there and tackling him but I don’t. I stay hidden in the crowd, and he eventually moves off, trying to make his flight. The whole time he’s in line, he keeps looking around, but I don’t ever show myself. He’s probably going on vacation alone, which is just sad. I’m sad for him even though he’s always been so horrible to me.

He’ll be fine. We’ll forget about each other for a few years, forget we still have a brother left. And things do have a way of getting better. They did after Peter died; it just took a while. They will now. Pretty soon I’ll be in a new apartment, one with wall-to-wall and a dishwasher. It’ll have laundry, or at least I’ll be close enough to walk to the Laundromat. Lately I’ve been thinking about running for something. School board, maybe. I’d like to help out all those kids. And someday soon I’ll be sitting in a lawn chair in front of my door, like Dad used to, only I’ll be reading the latest polling numbers, and right then some young tart with pouty lips will walk right over to me and say, Hello, there, kitten, I’m Traci .

My wife moved in with you last month. You, a bald museum docent. Surely you know the story by now.

She comes home from the library at six or so, and I’m still running sausage through the grinder and sheathing them into the casings and twisting them at eight-inch intervals until I get the long sausage trains like in the cartoons. I have the air conditioner cranked up, even though it’s almost November. Gus, our Irish Setter, I have tied up on the sidewalk, and he’s staring at me through the window. I’m just churning out the sausages, hanging lengths from cupboard doors and the refrigerator handle and the backs of chairs. It’s a one-bedroom apartment, so there’s sausage everywhere, even in our bedroom, even hanging from the curtain rod in the bathroom. Everything smells like fresh sausage. I have to do this from home since I let my lease on the shop over in Turtle Bay lapse last month.

Well, this part you’ve probably heard about already, but here’s how it actually happened. Karen walks in with Gus, and they both see these sausages hanging on everything. She can’t even turn on the living room lamp without brushing up against a knackwurst. And Gus starts bucking around, trying to get at anything he can, and his hair is wafting about the whole apartment.

“Marty,” Karen says, “get your sausages out of our bedroom right now!”

And I tell her it can’t be helped but that I will soon. It’s a couple grand worth of sausage hanging around here, and I’ll have it in cold storage by morning. But right now she needs to get the dog out or he’ll have a seizure from too much excitement.