Emperor of the Air (14 page)

Darienne closed her lips tight. Whenever Lawrence corrected her, she pursed them so that they turned almost white. I thought this had something to do with her epilepsy, which she’d had since childhood, but I wasn’t sure. She had been a special needs student in high school. Although we were never allowed to see her report card, I think she flunked most subjects. It wasn’t because she was unintelligent, my mother said to Lawrence and me, but because there was a different force driving her. She painted beautifully, for example—“like a professional,” said my mother—and played second oboe in school orchestra. But something about the epilepsy, I guess, made her slow. My mother parceled out her medicine in small plastic bottles that Darienne kept on her dresser. She never had any fits—she only had the
petit mal
disease—but she slept with cloth animals in her bed at age nineteen and used a Bambi nightlight. It was small and plastic and shaped like a deer.

Although Lawrence never paid much attention to her, Darienne still liked to show him everything she made and everything she found. At the end of most days she went downstairs to the basement with sheets of her sketch paper in her hand. She stayed in his apartment for a few minutes, then came back up.

“Why do you just draw lines?” I said to her one afternoon when she came upstairs.

“I don’t. I draw plenty of things.”

“I’ve seen you just drawing lines.” I grabbed her hand. “Let me see.”

“Edgar, you don’t care what I draw.”

“I
don’t
care,” I said. “You’re right. I just want to see.”

Really, though, I did care. I wasn’t sure whether I cared about her because she was my sister, or just because there was something wrong with her, but I did care. She didn’t think I did, though. For my birthday that year she had given me a diary, and inside, on the flyleaf, she had written in ornate calligraphy:
I DON’T THINK YOU CARE ABOUT ANYTHING
. And below that, in small letters: (But If You Do, Write It In Here). Underneath that, she had made a sketch of the sculpture
The Thinker
. It was a good sketch, and in parentheses even lower on the page, in even smaller writing, she wrote, august rodin.

Darienne was a good artist. In the mornings she did drawing exercises. She sat in the window bay of her bedroom, our yard and the drainage canal curving below her, the hills with their elephant grass and vanilla pines in the distance, and she drew lines. She wouldn’t show me, but I saw them anyway when I was in her room. They were curved, straight, varied in thickness, drawn with the flat edge or the sharp point of the pencil.

“That’s a nice one, Dary,” I said one morning as I passed behind her while she was drawing at the window. “Where did you get the idea for that one?”

That afternoon she came out to the yard where Lawrence and I were pulling out tiny screws and springs from the motorcycle carburetor. “You know, Edgar,” she said, “all great artists practice their lines.”

“Actors practice their lines,” I said.

Lawrence laughed.

She pressed her lips together. “
You
know what I mean,” she said. She walked around until her shadow fell on the carburetor. Then she stood there. “Maybe now,” she said, “you two want to go out and shoot some animals.”

“You’re weird, Dary,” said Lawrence.

“I’m not weird. You guys are weird.” She threw a dirt clod in our oil pan. “Not everyone feels the same forces.”

“You going to clean that dirt out?” said Lawrence.

“Why? So you can spend eight more hours taking out a cylinder?”

“We’re working on the carburetor,” I said.

“It looks like Lawrence is doing everything.”

I loosened a small mixture screw. “If I practiced the oboe as much as you,” I said, “I’d be Doc Severinsen.”

She worked her lips. “Doc Severinsen plays the trumpet.”

“He plays the oboe, too.” I looked at Lawrence. I had made this up.

“The oboe is a double reed,” Dary said. “It’s one of the most difficult instruments.”

The truth was, she was right. I had heard that the oboe was a fairly difficult instrument, and Darienne was pretty good on it. She could have played first oboe in school orchestra, but she played second because Mr. MacFarquhar, the director, didn’t want her to have the responsibility. I felt bad saying the things I said to her. But she brought them on herself. I would have had conversations with her, but they never worked out.

“I hope the dirt clogs your engine,” she said.

Lawrence made up a game that year that Darienne hated and that we played on all our car trips. It was called What Are You Going to Do? Lawrence drove and led the game. “You are driving along the summit pass of a mountain,” Lawrence said one evening as he drove, “when under your foot you notice that the accelerator has become jammed in the full open position. You are approaching dangerous curves and the car is accelerating rapidly.” He rolled down his window, propped his elbow out, adjusted the mirror to give us time to think. My mother shifted in her seat. “What are you going to do?” he asked.

“Press the brakes,” said my mother.

“You’ll burn them out.” He adjusted his headrest.

“Steer like hell,” said Mrs. Silver. Lawrence smiled.

“Open the door and roll out onto the road,” said Darienne.

“You’ll kill other drivers and possibly yourself.” He put the blinker on and passed another car. “Edgar?”

“Shift the transmission into neutral,” I answered.

“Bingo,” he said. He leaned back and began whistling.

In high school, Lawrence had been in one piece of trouble after the next. He had broken windows and stolen cars and hit someone once, or so one of my teachers later told me, with a baseball bat. I knew about a lot of it because the school faculty told me. “You’re Lawrence’s brother,” the older ones always said to me, more than a decade later, at the start of a new school year. Then they told the story about him stealing all the school’s lawnmowers or driving a car into the Mississippi River. I never asked Lawrence about the bat because I couldn’t imagine my brother doing that to anyone. I did ask him about some of the other things, though. He had broken into a gas station one night with his friends, poisoned a farmer’s milk herd, set fifty acres of woods on fire. One night, racing, he turned too wide and drove his Chevy Malibu into the living room of a house. But he wasn’t hurt. Nothing ever happened to him. He had a juvenile record and was headed, my mother said, for the other side of the green grass, when, the day he turned eighteen, like a boiling pot coming off the fire, he just stopped.

It didn’t seem that anybody just changed like that, but evidently Lawrence did. This was how my mother told it. “The candle of the wicked shall be put out,” she said. I was seven years old then. Lawrence was supposed to move from the house but she let him stay, and some sense just clicked on in his head. He stopped going out and his friends started calling him less, then stopped calling him completely. He cut his hair and bought a set of barbells that he lifted every evening, standing shirtless in the window of his room.

A few years later, when I was in junior high and after he had bought his computer, he began telling me to stay out of trouble. I had never gotten into any, though. I didn’t want to steal cars or hit people. “It’s not something I want to do,” I told him.

“You will, though,” he said. He looked at me. “That’s for sure—you
will
. But be careful when you do.” Then, to show me that he had said something serious, he put his left hand behind him. My mother had taken tranquilizers when she was pregnant with Lawrence, and now his hand had only two fingers. He always held it behind his back when he said something important. The lame fingers were wide at the knuckles and tapered at the ends, and the skin over them was shiny and waxlike. I hardly noticed it anymore. I remember my mother had once told me that Lawrence’s hand was my father’s legacy. She said this was how my father lived on in our lives.

I didn’t understand at the time. “What do you mean?” I asked.

“It’s cloven,” she said.

On our family trip every June we drove for two weeks. The summer Lawrence left we started west through Nebraska and Wyoming, then south, through Utah and the Arizona desert, where we drove with wet towels hanging in the open windows. We headed west, over the Colorado River where it was wide, then back again, into canyonland, where the earth turned red and the mesas were veined with color. Darienne held a sketch pad on her knees and drew the cypress that clung to ledges in the escarpments. We turned north, into Utah, where mirages rose off the salt beds and in the distance the mountains were topped with snow. Whenever we stopped, my mother and Mrs. Silver and Darienne went on collecting trips. They came back with pieces of wood, dried seed pods, rocks with flecks of silver in them or with edges that looked polished. Darienne showed them to Lawrence. He stood at the side of the road, smoking, one hand on the open door of the car, while she went through what they had found. A rock that looked like a face, a flower that had dried to powdery maroon. He puffed on his cigarette, looked at the things she showed him. Then he got back into the car.

“The problem with our sister,” he told me one day as we were drinking root beer at a gas station outside Salt Lake City, “is that she doesn’t know what to do with what she knows.” Darienne and Mrs. Silver and my mother were across the road sitting on a fence. Lawrence leaned over and picked a leaf from a patch of iceplant that was growing along the station lot. “Take this iceplant,” he said. “Now, what would Dary say about it? That it’s the color of the sea or something.” He looked at me. “But what would you say about it?”

“That it’s a succulent and stores water.”

“That’s right.”

That night we drove until dawn. Darienne and my mother and Mrs. Silver slept in the back while I sat in front with Lawrence. The Great Salt Lake lay somewhere to the side of us, and I watched for it in the moonlight but could not tell it from the salt flats that extended everywhere around, gray and white and as unbroken as lake water. The mountains were gone by early morning. Then mesas appeared, and canyonland, and the road began to climb and dip. Behind us the sky was whitening. Lawrence quizzed me on the motorcycle engine. Then we were silent, the wheels clicking over the expansion fissures in the road.

He turned to me. “Knowledge is power,” he said.

“I know.”

“I’m going to go out and get that power.” He tapped the wheel a couple of times. “I’m going out to California.”

He hadn’t ever mentioned leaving before. I looked over at him. “That’s it,” I said. “That’s what you were going to tell me.”

“Nope.”

In fact, he had left Point Bluff once, a few years earlier. But it was only for the summer, when he went to work in Chicago. That was the only time he had ever been gone. He came home once or twice a month. One weekend when he didn’t come home he had invited Darienne and me to come see him. He wrote that he would take Darienne to one of the world’s great art museums and me to the Cubs game, but my mother wouldn’t let us go. She said she didn’t trust Chicago. “The Bible has spoken of such cities,” she said. “If he wants to see you, he can come back here.” He stayed away three months.

“When are you going to be back?”

“I’m going to stay out there a while,” he said. “I’m getting into computers. I haven’t told anybody yet, Edgar.”

“Where will you go?”

“Silicon Valley,” he said. “You ought to see it.”

“You going to stay out there forever?”

“I’ll be back.”

“When?”

He sprayed the windshield three times with the automatic washer, then ran the wiper. “Edgar,” he said. “You’re not thinking about what’s important.”

I looked ahead of us. There were mobile homes scattered at the roadside. I never knew exactly what he meant when he said that. I tried to think what a twenty-seven-year-old would be thinking. “Are you meeting a girl?”

“Nope.”

We drove on. Now the road was jet black in front of us, new asphalt. It was going underneath without noise. I thought about him leaving. Twenty-seven was old to be living in the basement, but I’d had the feeling now for a while that our family was different from other families. Other families we knew went to lakes in the summer. They threw wedding parties. It didn’t seem that anybody in our family could ever get married. It didn’t seem that anybody could leave.

“Computers are hot,” I said.

“That’s right.”

“And you’re good at them.”

“I’m great at them.”

“Lawrence,” I said, “what’s Mom going to do?”

He turned around and looked at the three of them asleep in the back. Then he looked straight ahead over the wheel again. He lowered his voice. “If I told you something, would you keep it quiet?”

I nodded.

He motioned his head toward the back seat. “I don’t care what Mom does.”

“What?”

He stared ahead.

“What?” I said again. I looked at him sitting next to me. He had the half-Indian nose Darienne gave my father in her paintings. Underneath it his stubble was unclipped. His skin was pocked from old acne. I tried to think, I tried to think
hard
, whether I cared about my mother. Then I looked up. “You sound like a bastard,” I said.

He turned to me. “Bingo,” he said. He clapped his hands together under the wheel. “That’s something important. I
am
a bastard.”

I picked my fingernails.

“That’s not what I was going to tell you, though.” He pointed to his head. “But at least you’re thinking. I’ll tell you something else, though, right now.”

“What is it?”

He held the wheel with his knees and put his arms behind his head. Then he glanced behind us. “I slept with Mrs. Silver,” he said.

“What?”

He put his hands back on the wheel and whistled the opening of the Bellini oboe concerto. I looked behind us.

“You did not.”

“I sure did. In the basement.”

For some reason, although it had nothing to do with Mrs. Silver, I thought again about whether I really cared about my mother. Then I thought about whether I really cared about anybody. Then I thought about Mrs. Silver. I put my arm across the seatback. “Did you really?”