The Language of Men (19 page)

T.J. pointed. "I think he likes pepperoni better."

There were a dozen pizzas stacked up on the table and we were well into the third. I found out from T.J. that Jamie's brothers worked at a pizza place and the owner gave them a stack of pies to take home. No one else was out there, so we dug in.

"Here you go, Steve." Mike kicked three boxes of pizza off the table. Steve ate a hole through the middle of each one. He scratched at them until the crust buckled and then he inhaled the entire pizza. He ate nearly three whole pies in under ten minutes. We watched him slowly walk out into the grass. He collapsed and licked his paws.

T.J. walked over to Steve and started petting his belly. "Hey, boy. Hey, boy." Steve groaned and rolled onto his back. T.J. stumbled over to the pizza that Steve had been eating and bent down to pick up a slice.

"T.J., don't eat that, man," Mike said.

T.J. held the slice close to his face and sniffed it with his eyes closed. Then he walked over to the back of the house and smeared it across the sliding glass door. A group of girls in the kitchen scrunched their faces at him. T.J. spit on the glass and it dripped down, cutting clear bars through the sauce and cheese.

I grabbed a box of pizza and walked around to the front of the house. The black asphalt glistened. It was so quiet, and something like homesickness sat in my throat. I felt like I was walking on and off a stage each time I passed beneath a yellow streetlamp. Into darkness, out of darkness, into darkness. Marlon's cigarette glowed inside the car.

"Pizza, dude," I said.

"Oh, fuck yeah. Thanks."

I climbed into the Monte and sat next to him.

"How's it going in there?"

"Not bad. That kid T.J. is nuts."

"Are they in there?"

"I don't even know what those dudes look like."

"I do." Marlon chomped on his slice.

I tore off a slice and took a bite. Marlon cracked open a beer and slurped the foam.

"You going away after high school or what?" he asked.

"I don't know, man. Everyone keeps asking me that. We still got plenty of time." I stared out the window. "You still planning on moving to Baltimore?"

"Hell, yeah. Pronto."

"So weird."

"It's awesome." He took another slice and chewed with his mouth open, staring out the window. Even though Marlon had locked himself in the Monte, hiding from an enemy only he knew existed, I envied his confidence about college. I listened to him chew and thought about all the lunch periods I spent in the library with Mia or at home with my mother. I heard the party's music in the distance.

"D'Aries!"

I stood in the driveway, trying to figure out where the voice was coming from.

"D'Aries!" The dude I was playing cards with gently opened the garage door and I crawled underneath. He looked like a cornered raccoon, curled up and nervous, surrounded by boxes and old winter coats.

"That chick's got a boyfriend, man. And he's huge."

I started laughing, but he was serious. Something had happened. He told me he was flirting with the Irish girl when this big Italian told him to get the fuck away from her. He tried to get out of it, but with these guys, anything you said was an insult.

"Where's T.J.?"

"I don't know," he said.

I wanted to stay in the garage, just like I wanted to stay in the car with Marlon. I told him we'd be leaving soon and I'd come back for him.

I unlatched the wooden gate and walked into the backyard. People gathered on the patio, watching. Waiting. Mike was standing next to T.J., who was walking in small circles with his hands in his pockets. A big Italian guy with a large gap in his teeth was pointing at T.J. and yelling. He kept calling T.J. a fucking idiot. He'd point to his own head and then at T.J.

"You're a fucking idiot. You fat fucking idiot."

T.J. mumbled something. Mike tried to talk but the Italian cut him off and told him to stay out of it. People were curious about what was going on, but for the most part, the music and the party went on without us.

I turned and walked back to the front of the house, through the front door, the living room, into the kitchen. I watched the scene through the window. When I turned around, I bumped into Jamie. Her eyes were red and watery.

"Just tell them to stop." She held onto my arm. A feeling of power surged through me. For a second, I felt like a man on the cover of a romance novel, ripped chest bursting through a white silk shirt. To me, Jamie had a fearful, yet confident look on her face, as if she knew I would protect her from whatever danger lay ahead.

"Please," Jamie said.

I saw that the Italian guy had at least ten big dudes standing behind him. Even if he were by himself, we'd be screwed. T.J. was the only one who could fight. The rest of us were scrawny and scared.

"T.J., what's going on, man?"

He didn't answer me. He kept pacing and hiking up his baggy pants. I asked him again but he wouldn't answer. I wondered where his rage came from, what blew the fuse inside his head.

"They won't fight me one on one. Why won't they just fight me one on one? No, no, they won't."

I saw tears running down his face, but they weren't from sadness or fear. I didn't know where they came from.

"If they do anything, hit that piece of shit with this."

The rock was cold and heavy. He pulled another one out of his pocket and handed it to me. The crowd had thickened and the Italian and his crew couldn't see what we were doing. I kept hearing "fucking idiot" and "Northport faggots."

"T.J., are you crying? Calm down. Don't let them see that, man." Mike ran his hand through his hair and looked back and forth between me and T.J. Then T.J. started screaming, asking them why they wouldn't fight him one on one. T.J. spread his arms out wide. His voice cracked.

"This fucking pussy's crying," someone said.

"You want more pizza, you fat shit?" the Italian yelled.

T.J.'s rock cracked into the Italian's forearm. We pushed T.J. back into the house, shut and locked the doors. Jamie was yelling, spreading paper towels over Steve's puddle of red puke on the kitchen floor. We took off through the front of the house, kicking over plants, knocking miniature figurines off the mantel and stomping them into little pieces. Another big Italian dude was in the dark driveway, yelling. He chased after us and by then the people we came with were running with us, too, following us back to the Monte. Rocks spilled out of T.J.'s pants. I could have dropped my wallet, my glasses could have flown off and I wouldn't have stopped. It didn't even feel like my legs were moving. I was swept up into this parade of guys I'd just met, and I didn't want to imagine being there alone.

Marlon was passed out in the Monte and we pounded on the windows to wake him up. I fumbled with my keys in the driver seat. A guardian angel pin my mother had given to my father was stabbed into the visor above my head and sparkled in the street light.

"Start the fucking car, D'Aries!"

The keys jingled and slipped out of my hands and onto the floor. I hunched over, searching blindly with both hands. The first bottle smashed on the front bumper. The second nailed the passenger door and I could tell from the sound that it was dented. T.J. rolled down the window and started yelling. The Italian reached into the car, grabbed T.J.'s shirt and started slamming T.J.'s shoulder against the seat. The Italian slapped T.J. a few times before I finally got the car started.

We slowly rolled through the crowd of hands and feet kicking and slamming the car. I found an opening and gunned it and we took off, bottles smashing on the back, glass raining down on the street.

I blew through stop signs, screeched around corners, going nowhere. On an empty street in the next town, I pulled over. Inside the silent car, I put my head on the wheel and breathed. The door squeaked open. Someone put both feet on the street. I could hear crickets. The faint sound of water flowing into the drain. Then I turned to see Mike's back heave toward the roof. His puke came in waves, and once he was through, he spit and closed the door.

"What did I tell you?" Marlon said. "I knew it."

I drove home, slow and careful. I signaled at every turn, stopped at every yellow light, waited five seconds at every stop sign. At one of the lights, I rolled down the window and let the air cool my flushed face. I pulled the two rocks out of my pocket and weighed them in my hands. As we drove through the intersection, I tossed them out my window and heard them clack against the pavement.

Mia called me early the next morning. "How are you feeling?"

I lay in bed, trying to stop the room from spinning. I could still see part of the glow-in-the-dark eye my brother had painted on the closet door. "A little better," I said. "Still stuffed up."

"Mmm hmm."

I breathed heavily into the phone. I knew she knew about the party. She had a way of finding things out.

"I'll come over and bring soup," she said. "We'll watch a movie."

On Monday, Marlon, T.J. and some of the other guys called me over to their lunch table. Mia was waiting for me in the library, but I sat with them and talked about the party. T.J.'s face was a little swollen. We laughed. We talked about how much destruction we had caused inside Jamie's house. We could all describe in detail which plants we had knocked over, what color the figurines were that we had stomped on, or the twisted expression on the Italian's face when T.J. nailed him with the rock. For some reason, breaking stuff was the funniest thing we could talk about. We started calling ourselves Team Destructo. I looked around the cafeteria and met the gaze of my old friends, sitting on the opposite side of the room.

I said I had to get to class. Halfway there, I stopped and stood in the hallway. Each locker wore its MASTER lock like a badge. The distant sounds of the lunchroom echoed. The library, my destination, was silent.

In the next letter to my brother, I described the party in detail. I told him how many beers I had drunk, how fast I had driven the Monte, how hard I had hit the Italian with my rock. I told him that Dad never said anything about the Monte and that the morning after the party, I heard him getting ready for work. I looked out the window and watched him bend down next to the Monte's dented fender, stick his hand inside the wheel well and pop the metal back into place.

MEMORIAL DAY, sophomore year. Don returned home a skeleton, a ragged voodoo doll, a ghost of my brother come back to reclaim his room. The eyeball on the door must have been watching me the whole time, relaying information to my brother on the other side of the country.

But Don didn't take back his room. He dropped his duffle bag in my old room across the hall. My mother took him outside and placed a chair on the deck. She threw a black cape around him, the same one she used when she ran her beauty parlor out of our basement, where she gave volume to our neighbors' limp hair. She studied Don's unruly black locks separating in the comb's teeth and snipped them with her silver scissors. Some of his hair dropped through the deck. The rest my mother pushed back and forth with a broom, until each strand fell between the boards.

A knock on my door. Don entered with his hair damp from a shower and said, "I hope you don't think differently of me." I felt strange listening to him say this, as if he were apologizing for something he did to me, when he looked like he'd hurt himself the most. Blood rushed loud in my ears as my brother looked up at me, as if he were the last person in the audience.

I never visited Don in California. I didn't know what his room there looked like. I tried to picture him getting off the plane, hailing a cab, riding through the streets of San Francisco, pulling up outside the college, walking through the doors with a duffle bag slung over his shoulders and—then what? Or I tried to imagine my parents packing up the Explorer and driving him to California. My father would have double parked in front of the college, leaned against the side of the Explorer with his black sunglasses on, a Winston clenched in his teeth, while my mother pestered Don about the curtains that were on sale at TJ Maxx, right around the corner. My father would carry Don's mattress up three flights of stairs, pinching Don on the back of the neck once they reached the landing. After he set it down, my father would tell Don to fetch him a ginger ale.

I just couldn't see it.

For months, years, my mother spoke in code—California was the place where my brother "messed around" or "screwed up" or "started with all that crap." Then she stopped talking about it. My father said the whole thing got blown out of proportion:
Your brother took a two-year vacation and now he's paying for it. End of story.

A couple times a week, the three of them got in Mom's Taurus and drove somewhere. Maybe I had asked to go with them; maybe I didn't. Maybe my father spoke to me the way he did when my cousin Matt died, letting me know that it was okay if I stayed home.

I do remember going with them once, but my father wasn't there. My mother drove. Don sat in the passenger seat, and I was in the backseat. We drove through Kings Park and a few other towns I recognized, but then we turned down streets I'd never seen—long, treeless roads lined with parking lots and plain buildings, like an abandoned strip mall or a modern-day ghost town.

We parked in the back. My mother told me to wait in the car. I watched them walk up to a squat brick building, Don a few steps ahead of my mother. The building had dozens of windows, but only one door. From my position in the back seat, the building looked like a big red face full of eyes, the ears lopped off. My mother and brother slowly entered the mouth.

Don and I started spending long nights together, driving around, smoking weed in parking lots. It felt the same as before he left, except now we hung out more and talked for hours. He told me stories about all the different places he and his high school friends used to party. It seemed like each patch of woods we drove by contained a secret spot I couldn't see from the main road. I wanted to ask him questions about California, but I stayed quiet.