Authors: Newton Thornburg
Charley smiled slightly. “Is that a fact.”
“No, I mean it,” she said. “Maybe not the businessman-family man part, but what you
are
. Your character. Brian always said that you got all the brains and character while all he got was the curly hair.”
“Among other things.”
“Well, that’s what he says, anyway.”
“Just so I get this straight, you are—what?” Charley asked. “An old friend? A new friend? His fiancée—what?”
“I’ve been living with him for three years now. Why? Is that important?”
“I suppose not. Just curious. And another thing I’m curious about—why didn’t he call me? Why you?”
“The bail money. He just couldn’t ask you himself.”
“I don’t see why not. But let’s move on. What’s he charged with? What’s the specific charge?”
“Felony destruction of private property and first-degree assault.”
“
Assault?
”
“Yes. He handcuffed a security guard while he did the bulldozing. Then he let him go and stayed there while the man called the police.”
“Well, that’s a plus anyway. And just how much damage would you say he did, dollarwise?”
“I’m not sure. The set probably cost three or four hundred thousand to build. But the big item will be lost production time, keeping the crews here while they rebuild the set or sending them all home and bringing them back later. That kind of thing.”
“Which means bail will be substantial.”
“I suppose so. But Brian wanted me to make it clear that he isn’t asking you for a gift or loan—he just wants to sell his interest in your company. That’s the only way he’d let me call you.”
Charley didn’t know what to say to that. When his parents died in a car crash nine years before, he and Brian had each inherited half of the estate. And Brian had promptly sold out to Charley for four hundred thousand dollars, payable over ten years at 8 percent interest. Which meant there was only forty thousand and change left to pay on the contract. So Charley couldn’t help wondering where the rest had gone. As far as he knew, Brian had worked fairly steadily in Hollywood, in recent years as a production assistant of some kind, before that as a stuntman or stand-in, not to mention his stint as “personal manager” to a superstar.
“That sounds like him,” Charley said, not without irony.
Which Eve Sherman missed. “He’s a proud man. And with good reason, I think.”
It had been three years since Charley had seen his brother, and while he was not inclined to accept the woman’s assessment of him, neither could he accept the idea of Brian behind bars. Even now, after all their years apart, he felt yoked to him in a way he was to no one else, not even his wife. The bonds of childhood were simply like no others.
Then too there was the matter of the funk Charley was in, his own little midlife crisis or whatever the hell it was. Flying out to Colorado would mean getting out of the round of golf and the vodka tonics afterwards, followed by a spate of yardwork at home and maybe a nap, then Willis Tate’s retirement party at the club, all the pleasant little tortures of the good life.
“All right, I’ll fly out as soon as I can,” he said now, picking up a pad and pencil. “Tell me where you’re staying.”
By then, Donna had come back into the bedroom, looking every inch the take-no-prisoners lady executive, from her carefully mussed blond coiffure down to her Ferragamo shoes. Though he knew she was in a hurry to leave, she stood waiting by the bed until he had hung up.
“Colorado?” she said. “What’s all this? You’re going to Colorado?”
“Brian,” he explained. “He’s in jail for bulldozing a movie set. That was his current lady friend. She says he needs bail money, not to mention my sterling presence.”
“Well, you’re not going, are you? My God, Charley, we send him almost fifty thousand a year.”
“I’ll just make the final payment, that’s all.”
“But it’s not due for six months yet.”
“So I’ll deduct six months’ interest. It’s no big deal.” Getting out of bed, Charley put his hands on his wife’s padded shoulders. “The kid’s in jail,” he said. “I can’t know that and just go on out and play golf, as if everything was okay.”
“He’s not a kid. He’s forty-one years old, for Christ’s sake.”
“And in jail.”
“You could send the money from here.”
“Yeah, but I’m not going to. I’m flying out there today.”
“And what about Willis Tate’s party tonight? I want that listing, Charley, and he’s your buddy a lot more than mine—old Flossmoor family and all that bullshit.”
“My dad’s buddy, Donna. Not mine.”
“That dump of theirs will go for a good seven hundred.”
“Probably. But don’t worry—you’ll get the listing, as you always do. If you can’t charm the old bastard, browbeat him. It usually works, doesn’t it?”
He had gone too far. She was looking at him with pure hatred. “Go to hell,” she said.
He smiled sadly. “I’m sorry, Donna. That was just jealousy talking. I’ve always envied you, what a closer you are.”
“Sure, you have.” She was not an easy sell. “All right, then—you go on to Colorado and help your little brother. He’s been a screwup all his life, but don’t let that discourage you.”
“I won’t.”
“Meanwhile, I’ll try to hold down the fort.”
Ignoring the sarcasm, Charley kissed her lightly on the cheek, knowing her makeup would still be slightly sticky. She did not return the kiss. At the doorway, she looked back at him. “You’ll call tonight?”
“Sure. And have a good day—Brian might need the money.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” she said.
The only nonstop flight Charley could get a seat on did not arrive in Colorado Springs until a few minutes after eight in the evening. Though the flight took almost three hours, Charley was so lost in thought he later would have almost no memory of it. All those miles across all those endless plains, he squinted out his little window at the still-dazzling sky and thought about his brother and their life together, what different paths they had taken, what totally different men they seemed to have become. And the irony of it was that for the first twelve years or so people were always getting them mixed up, saying they looked so much alike, an assessment neither of them ever agreed with. The truth, Charley figured, was simply that people got their names mixed, not sure which of them was Charley and which was Brian.
The older by nineteen months, Charley was also taller, thinner, and if not smarter, certainly a much better student. Brian, on the other hand, was a much better mischief maker, in fact was pretty much a world-class pain in the ass from infancy on. There just never seemed to be a temptation he could resist, whether it was the playing of an innocent trick on a classmate or creating general havoc at home. And when he was caught, which was most of the time, he would simply fall back on his good looks and warm smile to disarm his victim as well as his guardian at the moment, whether parent or teacher.
By the time he was in high school, though, he put away such childish things and became more seriously delinquent. He never studied, wouldn’t listen to his parents or teachers, and was a constant truant. He drank excessively, smoked marijuana, and became so dedicated to making out that any girl seen with him was assumed to be a slut, when in reality she was probably only in love with him. At the same time, he never quite lost his love of mischief. Leader of the beetle patrol, as he called it, he and two of his friends took upon themselves the task of upending Volkwagen beetles, which were a great favorite of the underpaid teachers of the time. While his cohorts would stand on either side of him, pressing against the roofline of the car, he would take hold underneath the door, and the three would begin to rock the homely little vehicle so violently that finally all it took was a word from Brian—and a sudden surge by all three boys—and one more beetle would tumble helplessly onto its back.
The three were reputed to have struck the spotless yellow VW of Miss Mellinger, head of the English department, on three separate occasions, an overzealousness that resulted in their expulsion from school for two days. It was a punishment that Brian endured in style, however, cruising the school grounds with his friends in someone’s bright red Chrysler convertible, drinking beer and smoking cigarettes and waving to the kids inside, as if he were a hero instead of a miscreant.
Nor was the beetle patrol Brian’s only achievement in high school. Looking out the jet’s window, Charley couldn’t help grinning at the memory of his brother pretending to try out for the track team when he was a sophomore, chugging toward the finish line in the mile run with a lit stogie clamped between his teeth and a trail of blue smoke drifting out behind him. Even the coach, old “Second Wind” Sarff, had joined in the laughter that afternoon. And oddly, Sarff was not an exception. Despite the fact that Brian was known to be a problem student and general troublemaker, he always seemed to be well liked by the faculty, probably because his attitude was never surly or hostile. And then there was that winning smile.
Even that couldn’t help him in college, however. Enrolled as a probational student at Illinois State, he found all his courses to be remedial: bonehead math, bonehead English, bonehead science. Terminally bored, he dropped out within a month and enlisted in the marines just as Richard Nixon was being drummed out of office. A year and a half later he came home on crutches, with the back of his right leg a quilt of shrapnel scars that he belittled as spent-metal wounds, barely deep enough to bleed. They were enough, however, to return him to civilian life, staying at home in Flossmoor for all of two months, until he had no more need of crutches. Then he was off again, taking odd jobs here and there—including lumberjack and stevedore, according to his postcards—before he found something more to his liking: the tail end of the counterculture movement, a ragtag army of diehard hippies and acidheads trooping up and down the West Coast, living on handouts, drugs, and sex. Through the rest of the seventies, Charley would receive occasional battered letters from him—from Vancouver and Mazatlan and places in between—usually asking for money, sometimes containing snapshots of him and his friends, beaded, bearded, barefoot, all grinning like idiots.
In time, though, Brian settled down in Hollywood, “doing a little of this and a little of that,” as he said during one of his rare visits home to their parents’ place at Thanksgiving, with Charley and Donna and their little boy Jason there too. Brian had brought a very sexy blonde along with him, a movie starlet so quiet he referred to her as Harpo. Though the girl was obviously in love with him, that was the last they ever heard of her. Then, on a Christmas afternoon six or seven years ago, Brian phoned Charley from Nashville, where he said he was staying with a friend who wanted to say hello. The friend turned out to be the country singing star, Kim Sanders, and she had much more to say than hello.
“I just wanted to tell ya, Charley, I’m sorta in love with your badass brother and one of these days we gonna go and git ourselves hitched, we are. I just love the mean old sumbitch, I really do, and I wanna tell ya I never been happier.” She had laughed then, with the lilting huskiness that probably had much to do with her success as a country music singer. “And just between you, me, and the fencepost, Charley, I gotta admit right now I’m higher than a turkey vulture. Merry Christmas, y’all!”
Brian reclaimed the phone and confirmed what the singer had said, that he was traveling with her on the road and that they would be getting married “one of these days.” He said that he was her “semimanager” now and that if he wasn’t careful, he might have to learn one or two things about the music business.
“She thinks she’s pretty hot stuff, Charley,” he said. “But I can lick her. Most of the time, I can lick her.”
In the background Charley heard the superstar’s whoop of laughter. And in the years that followed, Charley would occasionally come across a newspaper or magazine item about the singer, sometimes about a performance or new song but more often about a narcotics arrest or some nightclub brouhaha. And in the accompanying photographs, Brian was usually there, standing behind her or off to the side.
Then, just four years ago, TV and radio flashed the news that Kim Sanders had died of a drug overdose—while her companion, Brian Poole, dozed beside her.
Thinking of that unhappy night and the rest of Brian’s life, Charley could only shake his head at how greatly it contrasted with his own. All those years, Charley had pretty much just sailed along. A good student and fair athlete in high school, he made the National Honor Society and lettered in basketball and track, running a fairly respectable half mile. In his senior year he was even voted prom king, an honor bestowed on him, he figured, because he was then dating the prettiest, most popular girl in class, herself the inevitable prom queen. At the University of Illinois, he majored in English Lit and minored in world history, both against the wishes of his father, who wanted him to study business administration. And like the nation’s current president, he hated the war, demonstrated vigorously against it, and did his best to dodge the draft. He also smoked pot, though more daringly, actually inhaling the stuff. And he did his share of womanizing too, until a girl named Donna Sunderson showed him the deeper joys of monogamy, including almost endless sex. To lessen his chances of being drafted, they married in their senior year—only months before Brian was wounded and shipped home. And twelve months later they had their first and only child, little Jason.