Building Blocks (2 page)

Brann flipped pages to look at designs for houses to be built on mountainsides and for clusters of apartment buildings to front onto a large central park. His father had ideas, no doubt of it—he just never did anything about them. There were drawings too, and Brann studied one of the four Connells, his mother and three kids, done when Brann was three. In the picture they were sitting out in the country somewhere, under a tree. He could almost smell the summer air in that one. He had forgotten the actual day, but the picture made it realer to him than memory
could. His dad sure could draw, Brann thought. But being talented didn't help anything, not unless you tried for something with your talent.

“It's fate,” his father said. Well, Brann had done some thinking about fate. Who wouldn't, in this century? With overpopulation so bad they were all liable to starve, and even Brann—who was one of the lucky ones, who lived in a good neighborhood in a rich country—could see ten matchbox houses from his front door, crowded together along the street. With pollution in the air. And pollution in the waters, spreading like some horrible disease, like the black plague crossing continents, killing lakes and rivers. And pollution in government, with this Watergate thing, which stank as far as Brann was concerned. Billy Whitcomb's father, a reporter with the
Times
with his own byline, said the same thing. And at any minute bombs could drop and blow everything to kingdom come. Who wouldn't think about fate?

You shouldn't lie there and let fate smother you. You should charge out to meet it. In all the stories Brann had read, the people had taken hold of their own fates, grabbed onto them. Alexander, King Arthur, Napoleon—they didn't use fate as an excuse
for not doing anything. Even when they knew it was a bad fate, they went after it. Fate was like a sword blade, hard and sharp.

Brann slammed his hand down on the table. He hit so hard his palm stung, and the old sketch his dad kept tacked on the wall over the worktable rattled in its five-and-dime frame. Aunt Rebecca, his father's youngest sister. Aunt Rebecca was the only one in his whole big family that Brann's father liked; but he liked her enough for all the rest put together. She lived in Taiwan with her husband, who was a pilot, so they never saw her. But it was Rebecca Brann's father talked about on the rare occasions when he talked about his childhood, and Brann felt like he knew her, between that and her frequent letters. In the drawing, she was a kid, about ten, laughing and about to start running somewhere. She didn't care where as long as it was someplace new. She'd make it an exciting place, just by being there. Brann's Aunt Rebecca had the same wide mouth his father and Brann had, but on her it was beautiful, because her smile was so big, because she was so happy.

The fight upstairs would go on for a while, then his father would wander helplessly around the house
for a while, or maybe go outside and stake the tomato plants he'd put in along the back of the little plot of yard. The Connells lived here, in this township where all the houses were overpriced, for the sake of the school system. It was supposed to be one of the best public school systems in the country. His father had to commute into the city to go to work, an hour a day each way on the train, and that was expensive too.

Everything was expensive, everything was too expensive here, but the school system was worth the sacrifices. They said. Brann didn't care. He wasn't about to care about anything.

If things were different. If, for example, he had a father like Billy Whitcomb's who had his own byline in the
Times
so people listened to what he had to say. Or even Marty Eliot's, who talked all the time about how great he was and was pretty much of a horse's ass, but made a lot of money doing nose jobs and face lifts. The Eliots went for vacations to places like Squaw Valley and the Virgin Islands. Or a father in the military or who ran his own business, anything, just something Brann could respect. He was the kind of kid who would do better with a father he could be proud
of. He wasn't asking for anything impossible, he wasn't asking for a father he liked or anything. But he guessed he was doomed to be the kind of kid who was ashamed of his old man—and it didn't do any good trying to hide it from himself. This kind of truth was like fate, you had to grab hold of it even if it was sharp and painful.

He turned around in the little room, trying to find something to do for a while.

The blocks were built up into the fortress design his father sometimes made. What about a grown man who still played with building blocks? Although these
were
special: old, oak blocks grown golden with the oils of the many hands that had built things with them. Every time you touched them, his father had explained, a little oil from your skin worked into the wood, a little part of yourself got permanently added to them. Most of the deep golden color belonged to his father, who had built with them the most. His dad's Uncle Andrew had made them for his godson, and it was the best set of blocks Brann had ever seen. There were hundreds of them, some as big as bricks, some as small as regular square alphabet blocks, some rounded so you could make pillars, and some curved so you could make
arched gateways or windows. You could build just about anything out of those blocks.

Brann crouched down to peer into the enclosure his father had built. He could crawl under the gateway, if he was careful and kept his back low, it was that big. A tower rose out of the center, with a window like a single eye in it. If Brann took that down and built up a shorter tower at each corner, then he could crawl inside the fortress.

He didn't think about it, he just stood up to dismantle the tall tower, carefully, block by block. Then, using the same octagonal design his father had used, he built towers on each corner of the wall, where soldiers would be stationed to keep watch. The wood in his hands felt warm, as if it was touching him as much as he was touching it. It felt familiar. It should, for all the hours he'd played with these blocks.

Sarah would be home tomorrow, and she'd stay home for two weeks before she went off with the family she was going to work for, taking care of the kids for a summer on Cape Cod. She could stop the fights. She just said, “Stuff it you two. Save it for later.” So Brann could count on two weeks at peace. Brann reminded himself to go apply again for a paper route
that afternoon. You had to go in about once a month, to remind them you were alive, so that when a route opened up you'd get it. With that and his grass-cutting jobs, he might earn fifteen dollars a week. By the end of the summer, he could afford a ten-speed bike—unless prices went up again. And they surely would.

Brann's watchtowers were slender and had many windows, one at each place where the stairs would turn, if there were real stairs inside. He made crenellated tops to them, so the archer sentry could fire off warning shots. Crossbows, he corrected himself; these soldiers would be armed with crossbows. His father's tower had had solidity and grace, both. Brann's towers didn't look the way they had looked in his imagination. They never did. His father knew without thinking what shape belonged where, and how wide the base had to be for it to narrow up to the right-sized top. Brann's father would have built these towers slowly, but Brann was a fast worker.

His father knew a lot of things, like how to build cabinets and put in electric wiring. He just didn't
do
things—except the lousy draftsman job where he'd always worked, an architectural factory he called it, a long room with tables in it, and everybody drawing
on them at once. Other men quit or got promoted, but not Brann's father. He didn't try for things. He didn't even stick up for things.

About the only thing Brann knew his father had stuck up for, had demanded and gotten, was the naming of Brann. Brann's mother told the story, and Brann could never tell how she felt about it. She was used to getting her own way, but Brann suspected she liked having his father win an argument, because she only told the story when she was feeling good.

Before Brann was born, they'd decided that he should be named after his father's side of the family. If he was a boy he'd be Thomas, after his father's father. If he was a girl, he'd be Rebecca of course. But he was a boy and his dad was sitting beside his mother in the hospital when they brought him in—eight pounds eleven ounces, screaming for food; with a head of red hair, they said, waving his arms and legs, and completely out of temper with the world. The nurse brought the birth certificate to fill out. His father suddenly said, “Brann, with two n's.”

“What?”
his mother had said. She put all the surprise in her voice very time she told the story. “What was I to think?” she would ask them, “a child of mine
who was supposed to have the perfectly sensible name of Thomas turned into something you'd expect to find in a supermarket, next to Whole Wheat or All-Purpose.” Remembering, Brann grinned—he liked the way his mother told stories.

“That's his name,” his father had said.

“What do you mean? What about Thomas?”

Meanwhile, baby Brann was howling away. They were ignoring him.

“I don't know. It just—came to me. No, honestly, Di, I don't know. But that's his name. I choose it. No arguments, not about this.”

His mother said she flapped her mouth a couple of times, then gave in. “I was still pretty weak,” she said. “He took advantage of my weakness.”

Brann wasn't sure how he felt about her giving in. He always introduced himself, Brann with two n's Connell. It was an odd name, and he didn't like that. Teachers always asked him what kind of name it was, and he would say what his father said, “It's Irish.” But it sure was unusual, and Brann liked that. He also liked his father arguing up for it.

The towers were finished. He sat back on his heels to study the effect. In general it was all right,
but the towers didn't rise high enough. They couldn't be any higher, but they could look higher. His dad would know how to do that.

Brann crawled inside the fortress. There was room to sit cross-legged in it, even room to curl up on the floor. He heard footsteps overhead. Somebody looking for him. Let her look, let him look. If they didn't care any more about him than to ruin the first day of his vacation with that kind of fighting—let them worry. Serve them right. He had enough worries just being alive without adding their problems to it and having to listen and wishing his father would just tell her to shut her mouth. But his father never did that, and he never would do that, because Brann's mother was right about it all, right about everything. Except marrying his father.

Brann curled up a little more tightly, careful not to knock against the wall with his bare feet, and fell asleep.

It was dark when Brann woke up. Somebody must have come down and turned off the light. There wasn't even (he peered through the broad gateway which led into his father's fortress) a line of light under the door to the laundry room. He wondered how long he'd slept there on the cool cement floor.

(The floor wasn't cool, wasn't cement.)

He could see the vague shape of the fortress gateway even here in the absolute night of the windowless cellar room.

(The floor was wood.)

Brann jerked awake and sat up without thinking. Around him, building blocks exploded, clattered and banged on a wooden floor. That was strange. He must still be asleep.

He heard a movement across the darkness, like sheets rustling, or a mattress creaking. He looked in that direction.

A window gleamed under a night sky. So he was
dreaming he was in a room. He could see the top branches of a tree, black against the sky. The branches swayed slightly, in leafy moonlight. Brann's eyes grew accustomed to the dim light. He looked around the room: a bureau with a mirror on top of it, a door opposite the window, a bed beside the window, and a boy sitting up in the bed, staring at him. What kind of a dream was this? The boy's hair was cropped short and he had a long face, pale in the moonlight, with dark eyes in the middle of it. The boy stared and stared at Brann. Brann stared and stared back, waiting for the dream to take its direction.

Nothing happened.

The silence mounted. Brann moved cautiously to pinch himself, hard. It hurt.

But it shouldn't hurt—when you pinched yourself in dreams it wasn't supposed to hurt. And in dreams you couldn't move your body the way you usually could. As soon as he thought of that, Brann stood up.

If he was awake, what was going on? He couldn't be awake.

“Who are you?” the boy in the bed asked. He didn't move. “Where did you come from?” His voice was low and whispery, scared.

“New York,” Brann said. His own voice sounded high and squeaky. He jammed his hands into his blue-jean pockets. You could dream you were awake. He'd done that. “Where do
you
come from?”

“I live here,” in the same voice. “What are you doing in my room?”

“I fell asleep.” Brann whispered too. “Why are you whispering?”

“My grandparents are down the hall. Grandma sleeps lightly. I'm surprised you didn't wake her up knocking over the blocks. How'd you get into our house?”

Brann shrugged. Really, it had to be a dream. It would explain itself, sooner or later. He waited to see what the frightened little kid would do next.

“What's your name?”

“Brann, with two n's.”

“Are you a burglar?”

Brann decided to take the offensive in this conversation. “Are you scared of burglars?”

“No.” The boy shook his head. “My father would take care of them good. Besides, we haven't got anything to steal. Unless they're tramps and just hungry—but then they'd stick to the kitchen, if they got in.”
He was a skinny kid, and little in his bed.

“How old are you?” Brann asked.

“Ten. Almost ten-and-a-half. How old are you?”