After Eli (2 page)

Then the pallbearers stood up — my uncle Al and Jim Pilcher, who was Eli’s best friend from high school, and Rachel Crowley’s brother Jason, and Coach Bowers, and a couple of the college guys. Coach Bowers gave Eli’s coffin a pat before he helped pick it up, and let his hand rest there a minute on Eli’s flag, gentle, like he did sometimes on a football player’s shoulder after he’d played a really good game.

Then we drove to the cemetery in a long train of cars following the hearse, and they folded up the flag on the coffin and gave it to my mom, and that was the last of Eli.

Afterward, people came back to our house and hung around downstairs eating all the lasagnas and macaroni casseroles and pies that neighbors had brought us, as if dying was something you could fix with carbs. I didn’t want to talk to anybody and I didn’t want any stupid macaroni casserole. So I left and went up to my room, that’s across the hall from the room that used to be Eli’s.

Eli’s door was closed, so I could almost pretend that he was in there, reading or drawing or playing computer games or listening to music. There was a sign on his door that said
KEEP OUT
and underneath in red marker a P.S. that said
DANNY YOU TWERP THIS MEANS YOU TOO!
Though if I knocked, he pretty much always let me come in.

I stood there holding my breath and wishing that this was all just a lousy dream and that any minute I’d wake up. I thought that maybe if I held my breath and wished hard enough and knocked, Eli would answer. But I didn’t knock, because there wasn’t any light under Eli’s door and I knew it wasn’t a dream.

That’s when I started my Book of the Dead.

I still have it, though I don’t write in it anymore. It’s in an old three-ring binder of Eli’s that he had his freshman year in college. There used to be a label on it that said
Physics 01 Bates Bldg. Room 22,
but I peeled that off.

The real Book of the Dead is from ancient Egypt. It’s this collection of magic spells that are supposed to help a dead person make it safely from the world of the living to the afterlife, which wasn’t easy in ancient Egypt. You had to protect yourself from hostile entities and placate the gods and fight off supernatural crocodiles. Actually the ancient Egyptian death trip sounded a lot like
Dungeons & Dragons.

There was a final test right at the end. Thoth, the god of wisdom, weighed your heart on a pair of enormous scales, and if it was lighter than a feather, then you were free of sin and you got to go to Egyptian heaven. If it was heavier than the feather, you got eaten by a monster called the Gobbler that was part lion and part hippopotamus.

I wondered what Eli’s heart would weigh. I thought Eli had a lot to answer for.

Eli didn’t have to go to war. He volunteered. He did it on purpose. I thought how he probably didn’t even think about what it would do to us, to me and Mom and Dad and Rachel, if he got killed. He went because he wanted to is what I thought. Because it was there.

So I knew how Clare Mallory felt back in 1924 about her dad, who went up Mount Everest and never came back down. A part of her loved him and missed him and would have done anything to have him back. But a part of her hated him for doing that to her. A part of her was really angry at him too.

W
hen I was four or five, I poked a fork into an electrical outlet. The next thing I knew there was a flash and a crack like somebody had whapped me over the head with a frying pan, and then I was lying on the floor with Eli bending over me yelling, “Jesus, Danny, wake up!”

Which is when I knew I’d nearly fried my brains because Eli had taken the Lord’s name in vain, which he never did just then because of dating Bridget Babcock, who was a Baptist.

After the fork incident, my mom went out and bought all these little plastic covers and plastered them over every electrical outlet in the house, and Eli got me this educational picture book called
Safety with Mr. Electricity,
which he used to scare the pants off me. Finally Mom made him stop because I was starting to have nightmares.

In my nightmares Mr. Electricity looked pretty much like the little cartoon guy in the book, with his yellow T-shirt with the lightning bolt on it, except that he had glowy vampire eyes and pointy teeth. At night when the lights were off, he’d crawl out of the electrical outlets and slink around the house, trying to melt the eyeballs of helpless little kids and turn their brains into vegetable soup. Especially helpless little kids who’d poked at his butt with a fork.

After spending my formative years with Eli and Mr. Electricity, it’s probably a miracle I can bring myself to charge my iPod.

Anyway, I think it was that fork that gave Eli the idea for his Education Days. I needed them because I was a Darwin Award waiting to happen, is what he said. At first I thought that was a compliment.

Then I found out that actually the Darwin Award is for people who have killed themselves in incredibly stupid ways, thus eliminating themselves from the gene pool. Such as Charles Stephens, who went over Niagara Falls in a barrel with an anvil tied to his feet for ballast. Afterward nothing was left of him but one arm. They knew it was his arm because of the tattoo.

“I think Education Days is a crap idea,” I said. “I already go to school. I don’t need any more Education Days.”

“Admitting you need help is the first step toward solving a problem,” Eli said. “This is your chance to benefit from my superior brains and experience. Don’t be a wuss.”

This was how Eli always talked me into doing things. So far, so as not to be a wuss, I’d jumped off the high board at Marshall Lake, eaten a whole jalapeño pepper, run around the outside of the house naked, called a girl that Eli liked on the phone and pretended to be a computer dating service, and ridden a skateboard down Turkey Hill and into a ditch.

“Forget it, Eli,” I said.

“I’m not doing this for you, you twerp,” Eli said. “I’m doing this for me. When the zombies start crawling down the chimney, I don’t want you squealing around being short and useless. I want you out there competently defending me, with a cleaver.”

Then he gave me this grin, and Eli always had a really great grin, even though it was sort of crooked. It went up higher on one side than the other. That grin always pretty much talked me into doing things too.

Here’s some of the stuff Eli taught me on our Education Days:

How to crack my toes.

How to whistle.

Which finger to give when you’re giving somebody the finger.

All about bras.

How to smoke a cigarette, even though he told me not to get in the habit because it would rot my lungs.

How to drive a car, even though I could only go fifteen miles per hour up and down the dirt road in back of the barn.

How to unlock a car door with a coat hanger after you’ve gotten out of the car and slammed the door and left it running with the keys inside it by mistake.

How to shoot a BB gun, what not to shoot it at, and why “Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes” was a stupid idea.

The seven words that nobody is ever supposed to say and when you can say them anyway.

How to light a barbecue grill in under thirty seconds, using a technique I had to swear never to reveal to Mom or in print.

How to throw a football.

What to do in a fight.

He also told me where babies come from and how to make sure they don’t, which pretty much freaked me out at the time, but Eli said give it a few years and I’d realize that there was a lot of potential there.

You’d think that some of this would be the sort of stuff a dad would do, but to tell the truth, a lot of the time our dad wasn’t around, and even when he was around, he still wasn’t really there, if you know what I mean. Walter says our dad’s absence created a vacuum, which is something that Nature abhors, and that Eli filled it up.

Here is a typical conversation without my dad:

Scene:
The Anderson family kitchen. In the middle of the room is a large wooden table, on which the OLDER BROTHER once carved his name with a jackknife, which is why the YOUNGER BROTHER was never permitted to have one.

The MOTHER (Ellen Anderson) is stirring a pot on the stove. The OLDER BROTHER (Eli Anderson, age 17) is sitting on the table with his feet on a chair, eating all the black olives out of the salad bowl. The FATHER (Edward Anderson) is thumping around outside in the garage.

Enter the YOUNGER BROTHER (Danny Anderson, age 6), holding bizarre ceramic object.

Me:
Hey, look what I made in school.

Mom
(looking over shoulder while stirring): It’s lovely, darling.

Eli
(dropping olive and clapping hand to heart): That — is — so —
awesome
! Uh . . . what is it? An anteater?

Me
(modestly): It’s a dragon.

Eli:
And it’s pink. Way to go, kid. I detect the influence of Picasso and Henri Rousseau and maybe a touch of Captain Underpants.

Me:
It was going to be yellow, but Jane-Marie took all the yellow. She made a banana.

Eli:
Hey, pink is cool. Lots of good stuff is pink. Like bubble gum and the small intestine and Pamela Anderson’s . . .

Mom:
Eli!

The FATHER (Edward Anderson) enters.

Dad:
Get off that table, Eli. It’s wobbly enough without you planting your butt on it. You think I’ve got nothing better to do than patch up the furniture all the time? What’s for supper?

Mom:
Spaghetti. Look, honey, Danny made a dragon.

Dad:
So when are you going to finish stacking that woodpile, Eli? It looks like Paul Bunyan threw up out there.

Eli:
I said I’d do it, Dad. I’ll do it this weekend.

Me:
Dad, did you see my dragon?

Dad:
That’s a dragon? What kind of dragon is pink? Where’s the mail? Did you kids forget to bring in the mail?

You see how it was. You’d try to tell him something or show him something but he’d be thinking about something else, like why hadn’t you cut the grass or why hadn’t you taken your shoes off on the porch because they were all over mud and you were tracking up the floors.

My mom always said that my dad didn’t mean it and he just had a lot of worries, and Eli said nobody could grow up with Aunt Wendy without having TSWS and DTMTA. TSWS was Terminal Social Withdrawal Syndrome and DTMTA was Desire to Move to Australia.

But back when I was a kid, having a mostly absent dad didn’t bother me all that much because I always had Eli.

I never thought about how I’d get along without Eli being there. In all those Education Days, that’s one bit I never learned.

W
hen I think about the terrorist attacks on 9/11, I don’t think just about the people who died. I also think about the lucky ones, the people who nearly died but didn’t. They missed the plane in Boston or were late to work that morning or had a stomachache and decided to stay home sick. They weren’t there when the planes hit and so they survived.

Afterward, a lot of them were on the news saying how God must have been looking after them that day. But my question is: Why wasn’t God looking after all the passengers on those planes and all the people trapped in the tower on the 106th floor, with the I beams melting under them and the smoke crawling under the doors? Where was God then?

Pastor Jay says there’s a pattern behind everything that’s just too big for us to understand. But I think he’s wrong there. I don’t think there’s any pattern at all. I think living or dying is just dumb luck. If Eli had taken a few minutes longer to lace up his boots that morning, or if he’d had three eggs for breakfast instead of two, maybe he’d have been in a different truck, one that didn’t run over the bomb.

Walter says that every time we make a decision, no matter how small, the universe splits into parallel universes, so that there’s a universe where one thing happens and another universe for something else. There are universes where Columbus sank on his way across the Atlantic and where Hitler won World War II. A universe where Eli never went to war, and one where the terrorists never got on the 9/11 planes at all, but decided instead to settle down in Florida and open up a little restaurant on the beach selling crab cakes and French fries and souvenir T-shirts.