The Same River Twice (16 page)

Dane and I were very close until my behavior veered to the illegal. Our break came when I stole an electric football game to clean the seeds from a quarter-pound of marijuana. The gentle vibration worked perfectly but Dane didn't share my pride at ingenuity. He was outraged by the tiny seeds rolling into the end zone.

A few months later the county sheriff banged at the door with a warrant for Dane's arrest. Mom cried and Dad's face paled beneath the strain of incredulity. I watched from the bathroom, fully aware that the wrong name was on the warrant. I marched to the door and gave myself up in what remains my most heroic act to date. Dad was less angry at me than at the foolhardy notion of going to court at seven
A.M.

Several years later, the night before I left Kentucky, Dane and I lay talking in our flanking beds. He said that he worried about me, and I asked why.

“You don't have goals, Chris. You just want to go. You don't check your progress and you can't see where you're heading. If you can't prove the answer, it's all messed up. Know what I mean?”

While I contemplated the truth of his words, he began to snore. Dane was a mathematician whose life moved along an advanced formula of direct lines, bracketed exponents, congruent functions, and the ultimate goal of symmetry. He had no room for my random patterns of oblique and gleeful entropy. Dane could prove the world was round without ever leaving his room. I needed wind, a flagship, and open water.

When I asked for time off work to attend the wedding, the manager of the restaurant said not to come back. I greeted Dane with the news that I'd been fired for his wedding, trapping him into complicity with my lifestyle. He couldn't scold me, as he had in the past. I felt full of myself, like a hand puppet turned inside out.

Shadrack had recently learned the word “hodad” from a crossword puzzle, and we organized a hodad party. He and a friend with a green mohawk painted a beach mural on a wall.

“Are them boys all right?” Dane asked.

“Yup. They're artists.”

“Ain't queer, are they?”

“No. They're friends of mine. It'll be a great party, Dane.”

“What the heck's a hodad?”

“A guy who hangs around the beach, pretending to be a surfer.”

“Like you and art.”

I turned up the stereo. Angry voices bellowed off key. Dane plugged in a bluegrass tape and somebody stomped it after ten seconds. Promising to replace it, I introduced Dane to a woman with a pierced nose. Our only window shattered into the street, venting the acrid haze of cannabis. At midnight a second wave of people arrived with another blast of hysteric energy. Cocaine flowed like twin white train rails.

Periodically I checked on my dismayed brother, who wandered my dump with his feed store cap bobbing above the exuberant crowd. He became grimmer and grimmer. The party peaked at three
A.M
. and people slowly trickled away, the floor squeaking underfoot from spilt beer. Shadrack was busy with the pierced-nose woman beneath the kitchen table.

I offered Dane my bed. He shook his head, holding the smashed bluegrass tape in his big hands. An empty coke vial crunched below his boot. I waited for him to speak so I could condemn his choice. He knew better, as always. The expression on his face reminded me of our father's contempt, and I got mad.

“You're too young to get married,” I said.

“Maybe,” he said. “But you're too old to live like this.”

I went to my room and closed the door. In the morning we began an argument that lasted the next several years. By the time we reached Kentucky, Dane and I had not spoken for over five hundred miles. He reluctantly agreed that I was right—I should have hitchhiked. After Columbus's third trip across the sea, he was brought home in manacles and chains. I knew how he felt.

We turned onto the dirt road up our hill, and drove along the ridge to our house. Vines on the south wall clung thick as snakes. My sisters, Jeanie and Sue, rushed across the yard, gave us each a kiss, and entered the house with Dane. Mom stepped from the porch and hugged me, rocking like a jonquil in the wind. She escorted me into the kitchen, where Dad stood beside the stove. Mom stayed in the middle, a demilitarized zone.

Dad and I regarded each other like a brace of roosters. I stiffened my shoulders. Seeing a familiar reaction, he relaxed and offered a beer, the family grease for social interaction. We settled into our former bunkers at opposite corners of the kitchen, separated by the stove. After several years, we had returned to the site of countless vicious conflicts which I'd always lost. During the Civil War, Kentucky was notorious for pitting son against father, brother against brother.

Dad and I gulped our beer through a strange new gauze of respect. I'd stayed away, had never asked for money. His hair was white and he had a belly. He was losing his family to the outside world and there was no replacement. We drank another beer, discussing safe topics that neither of us cared about. He slowly realized that I would not rise to his bait, while I saw him as he was-—a man unsure of how to face an adult son. He was stiffly cordial, treating me like an ambassador from an enemy country that had recently signed a treaty. This hill, I realized, belonged irrevocably to Dad. He was Ferdinand ruling Portugal, and he could keep it. I had the New World.

An hour later Mom marshaled the family to the table. Everyone sat in their accustomed seats. For years supper had been nightly and common, with tardiness promptly punished. Now we were disbanding like a riverboat crew confronted by the railroad's swift competition.

I offered to hold the rings for Dane and he refused.

“Why not?” I said. “Afraid I might pawn them for tux money?”

“Don't you have it?” he said.

“They're gray, with a swallowtail,” Jeanie said. “We're picking them up tomorrow in Lexington. Forty dollars is cheap for a tuxedo.”

“Not cheap enough,” I muttered.

“Some were a hundred dollars,” Sue said. “They were black velvet. But gray goes with pink and that's what us girls are wearing.”

“You got it or not?” Dane glared at me.

I glanced quickly around the table. Mom stared at her plate. My sisters were smiling at how nice we'd look. Dad chewed the ham bone, its end small and round as a snake's eye.

“No, Dane,” I said. “I don't.”

“You could have broke down and got a job.”

“For a tux?”

“For me!” He pushed from the table. “You should see how he lives! Not a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of. And he wants to hold my damn rings. One of his girlfriends had a ring in her nose like a root hog.”

“Is that true?” asked Jeanie.

“Yup,” I said. “On the side, though. Not in the middle.”

“Good thing she doesn't have hay fever,” Dad said.

Jeanie and Sue giggled, while Mom smiled. Dane gripped the chairback so hard the veins on his hands quivered.

“It's not funny,” he said. “No wonder he doesn't bring girls home. They do it under the table up there.”

“That wasn't me, Dane.”

“Your yankee buddy done it.”

“Shad's like a brother to me.”

“What's wrong with the one you got?”

“If I weren't your best man, I'd tell you.”

Dad slammed the ham bone against the table like a gun barrel. The sound echoed in the small room.

“That'll do, boys.”

Dane left the room, his big feet stomping the pine slat floor. Now that Dad and I enjoyed a cease-fire, I'd attacked my brother. For all my wayward ways, I was still the favored son and Dane was relegated to piloting the
Niña,
running aground on his own efforts to please the family.

Mom spoke, gentle as rain. “The evening before we got married, your daddy ran his truck through a pasture gate.”

“I'm not a gate.”

“He's not much of a truck,” Dad said. “Let him be. Lord knows we've all let you be.”

The next day everyone but me drove to Lexington for the tuxedos. I went down the hill to my old stone grade school. Every Halloween I'd carried stolen feed corn onto the roof and hauled Dane up by his belt. I would give him half my corn and we'd shower passing cars with the kernels, rattling them like Demeter's sleet. Other boys from the hill screamed at their brothers like dogs; Dane and I had waited until we were adults to fight. In three months he was going to graduate school on a computer scholarship. Though I'd left first, he no longer needed me. I resented the loss.

I walked home well past dark and ate leftovers alone. The family seemed scared of me, a change from my childhood role. My job then had been to head off trouble by saying something funny, diverting attention. Now I'd become the trouble. I lay on the couch, drank a pint, and went to sleep.

We drove to the church early and changed clothes in a back room. The tux fit a little too tight. My grandmother and Aunt Lou arrived in a flourish of dacron. Cousins appeared, distant uncles and aunts, a hermitic great-uncle with his third wife. My old buddy J.J. roared his pirate hot rod into the lot, windows streaming rock music and marijuana smoke.

The family of the bride was polite and charming, although their Southern Baptist beliefs opposed them to coffee, cigarettes, alcohol, dancing, and me. Ellen's clan outnumbered us three to one, but we had them buffaloed. The only other male in the wedding party was Dane's college roommate from Saudi Arabia. Seeing Ahmed, Ellen's family gasped, fearing that he might just be a black man. Ahmed hung on my arm like a virgin in a strip bar, his accent thick in my ear.

“Chrees. I never been to a Chreestian church before.”

“Hey, everybody,” I bellowed. “This here's Ahmed! He's from the Middle East!”

Group tension flitted away like a lynch rope tucked from sight. I left him with J.J. and searched the church for Dane, who was vomiting in the men's room behind a locked stall. I climbed onto the pristine sink and leaned over the partition.

“You'll be all right,” I said.

Dane gagged and retched. The stench rose, palpable as river sludge. My foot slid off the sink and I tumbled to the tile, landing spread-eagle on my back. Dane staggered from the stall.

“You split your pants, Chris.”

“And you've got puke on your ascot.”

He helped me up and we swapped ties. If I walked carefully, the swallowtail would conceal the ripped seam. Dane gave me the rings. Each of us waited for the other to initiate a hug, but the mutual need made us incapable and afraid. Knowing we wanted to was almost enough. We shook hands across the urinal.

The families bunched the chapel like cheering sections at a home-coming game. The king and queen grandly strode the center aisle, followed by Jeanie and Ahmed, then Sue and me. Every few steps I lit candles with a four-foot flame rod that responded to a trigger in its handle.

The air filled with candle smoke, weeping, and the photographer's flash. Half blinded by the strobe, Ahmed stumbled into Jeanie, who dropped her bouquet. I bent to pick it up and the flame rod swung wild, clipping Ellen's great-aunt across the temple. Our procession continued until we faced the holy man, a chubby guy with a pitted nose. After the mumbo jumbo, he stared at the puke on my ascot and asked for the rings. My clan gained a sister and a daughter. Her family lost on all fronts.

The reception room was hot and we carried our watery punch to the parking lot. I hunted the great-aunt to apologize. She was stilt in the church bragging that the Lord had touched her during the ceremony. Her companion winked and waved me away. Outside, pockets of family squared off like gangs in a street fight. Our linked tribes milled about, smiling without touching, obeying invisible picket lines. We were a black sheep flock mired by secrets that everyone knew. Feud and subterfuge etched our past.

“I'm in the restaurant business,” I told everyone. “Be opening my own place soon. Business is for me.”

I tarried in the lot, watching blood-kin strangers depart as furtively as they had come. My tux itched. After quick goodbyes, J.J. and I vaulted into his car and roared away. The family had come together like a handful of uneven strands temporarily spliced. We were Penelope's filament, secretly unraveled each night, then re-woven for public sight.

J.J. popped open the glove box and tossed a bottle of amphetamines in my lap. Melancholy melted into time-released segments of joy. He dropped me off in Indiana and I hitchhiked north.

Beneath a tree outside of Scranton, Pennsylvania, I snuggled into my sleeping bag. The Milky Way spread across the chilly sky and I gave up on being a playwright. It was not free enough, was dependent on director, actor, set designer, even the audience. I decided to become a poet. My life was already flowing along lines that, if not poetic, were too grim to consider. As in hitchhiking, there were no rules in poetry. What few poems I'd read had dispensed with punctuation, logic, and rhyme—all severe restrictions to my dormant creativity. Poems were often short, which would allow me to flourish in the realm.

I zipped the bag tight and pulled into a ball. I felt as if I might explode and implode simultaneously. When I stopped fighting, the tears arrived. The scent of exhaust drifted from the highway. The ground was soft, a comfort.

Dane did everything properly, made all the correct decisions. He had a lovely wife, would eventually own nice things, and make the standard visits home. None of it mattered. He could never overcome the betrayal of a family that had always loved me more than him. My wild behavior was a prolonged effort to get out from under the burden, and I wondered if the opposite was true for Dane. If so, I hoped he didn't realize it. One poet per family was enough.

My return to Salem possessed all the heralded pomp of a rising ghost. I was determined to live, breathe, and eat poetry. In a fit of creativity, I taped photographs of great poets to the edge of a mirror and hung it above my desk. As long as I sat facing the mirror, my face joined their ranks, and I belonged with them. I spent most of my time peeking at the mirror from across the room, waiting for inspiration. Twice I sat at the desk. An incredible tension rose within me. My stomach hurt, and I could not grasp a pencil. There was poetry in the mirror but I had no idea how to get it out. The photographs mocked me. My mind felt like an old brick.