Rise

His brother was already outside the gates, and he hauled himself into Rob’s new F350 without comment. Weed wackers and edgers and and 22 bags of mulch were stacked in the bed; Glen didn’t say anything about that either. Nor any remark on the name on the side of the truck. He just took the Bud Rob handed him and drained it and dropped the can on the clean mat at his feet.

They drove in silence. His brother stared out the window sideways, taking his time with the second beer, until they pulled up to the bar and went inside and had a few more, per tradition. Even then his brother was mostly silent, watching a soccer game on the flatscreen above the bar, though neither of them followed soccer. Rob spent the time thinking mostly about Amy, the feeling he’d had when he’d hit her in the stomach, like being in church.

Which was all just kind of a commercial interstitial between Glen’s release and what came on the way to their mom’s place. Stuff he’d think about saying in the interview but without any real connection to the event at all. Trivial details that maybe the cops would find revealing. Innocent event between his brother’s emergence, once again, from the pit and his predictably swift return.

“The wings are pretty good,” Rob said, and ordered a dozen over Glen’s silence, with ranch instead of bleu cheese.

He was out with no money and no job, already taxiing on the beer, and Rob had this dread Glen would ask him for work. He’d ask for money soon enough and Rob had a few hundred set aside he’d accepted never seeing again.

“You got a place?” Rob asked.

“Not yet,” Glen said.

“So, Mom’s,” Rob said, thinking she’d enthusiastically allow Glen’s rage at injustices Rob had long ago lost the thread of.

Glen twisted his bony shoulders.

“Amy, you know,” Rob said. “We kinda had a fight last night, you holding up on the couch, and I hit her. In the stomach.”

“She deserve it,” Glen said and Rob wasn’t sure if it was a question or a statement.

“He’s not staying here,” Amy had said, the first thing she’d said when he reminded her of his parole. Little embers had been smoldering in both of them for weeks, the way people were prone to embrace their daily discomforts more often than sip the pleasures. The grind of work, disgruntled clients, unexpected price increases. Mulch had gone up forty cents a bag - not much until you bought a thousand on a bidded contract. A broken hedge trimmer needed replacing Too-late-noticed pile of dogshit. For her part, who knew? Three kids with colds in the class she assisted? Dishes in the sink? A song she didn’t like? They went from simmer to boil, and he reached out low, not a high punch to the voice of it (which he’d not done since he was 19 and slapped his then girlfriend Krystal) but down, to the appetite of it.

She’d been close, up in his face, but incidentally, just because they’d both been in the kitchen for different purposes. They usually argued at a distance, across a table, from different chairs. In the bedroom one would stand while the other was on the bed. But here she was up close. In his mind the punch was a playful(ish) shove, meant to be, what? funny? Evasive? Instead his clenched hand went into her soft unexpecting stomach and she grunted, then breathlessly said “What the fuck, Rob?”

It had been years since he hit anyone or anything, and it felt confusingly good and shameful.

Did she deserve it? He looked away from his brother. “No,” Rob said. “It was about you, staying with us.”

“You’ve been turned. They keep tryin’.” Still taking flight on lies, the world itself holding him down in the dirt and not his own hands pulling at roots.

“Listen, I got to get back to work,” Rob said. “I’ll drop you at mom’s.” In truth, he’d rushed the morning’s work and opened up the afternoon, but now he just wanted to be away.

They were passing through one of the older neighborhoods, still a few miles from their mom’s apartment, when Glen said, “Shit, check that out.”

Rob looked over, ahead of his brother and out the pickup’s window and across the street. A well-dressed older woman was kneeling in the middle of a decently-tended lawn. Rob had an eye for lawns. This one had a dollarweed problem.

The woman was kneeling beside a mid-sized black dog. She wore a dark blue dress, and a hat fancy enough for church. A huge purse sat upright on the grass.

“Stop the truck,” Glen said.

“Why?” Rob asked.

“Just fucking stop the truck,” Glen said.

Rob slowed the truck and his brother hopped out while it still moved, looking up and down the street, beelining the old lady.

She was a large black woman, and in the kneeling her dress caught up in folds on her backside. The dog, on its side, didn’t move. Rob had a quiet urge to help her, help her bury the dog and get on her way to whatever had got her so dressed up, probably church. Her hat was wide and white, with a red sort of ribbon tied up in fancy ways around the crown.

It was all telegraphed, the intent to grab and bolt, away from the old lady with whatever cash might be there – her church money, her grocery cash – bolt to the truck and commit his brother to the quick getaway, laughing and hooting,

The woman heard Glen coming, apparently, because she looked over her shoulder, grabbed the purse and struggled mightily to her feet. She was still turning when Glen got to her. She held the purse behind her back and Glen, for all his menacing sinew, his blue tattoos, his bristly hair, looked small.

“Gimme the purse, lady,” Glen said. From the truck Rob heard it that clearly. He contemplated driving on, leaving his brother again.

‘You get back where you came from,” the woman said. “Just go on out of here. Get.”

Glen snarled something under his breath, something indistinct that Rob could guess at and which only served to bolster the old woman’s already fearless courage. She hadn’t yet cried out any alarm and Rob supposed there wasn’t anyone else inside.

Glen reached for the purse and when she held it behind her formidable back Glen reached around and suddenly was engaged in some kind of childlike dance there in the middle of the yard. The dog didn’t move.

Rob was then laughing, really laughing, at his brother and the big old lady and her damned purse, his brother wrapped around her huge midsection, grabbing at the purse, grunting, ‘Gimme the purse lady, come on gimme the purse.’ The old woman silent in her determination. It got funnier and funnier, the two of them in a dance that got more and more intimate until it was clear Glen was holding on for more than the purse, buried into her enormous heaving bosom. And then an old man, easily seventy, came running out the house, banging open the old screen door, down three or four old wood steps, green paint ten years past needing a new coat, behind the old woman still in her embrace with Glen.

The old man was up to them even before Rob recovered from his laughing, up upon the two. He didn’t even say anything, just reached around the old woman and there was a pretty loud crack and then Glen was lying on the sidewalk not moving at all.

The angle of his legs, an upward stretch of his neck. A single awful twitch he’d never forget. His brother was dead, shot through the ribs, into the heart, maybe the spine the way he didn’t move at all. For some moments, there was no blood. And then there was a lot.

The old man knelt by the dog, not Glen. “That crackhead kill him?” he said.

“I don’t think so,” said the old woman. She had begun, silently, to cry, but it did not show in her voice. “He was old, yeah? A sad old dog.” Tenderly. She touched the dog’s side, went to scratch its fur, then stopped. The old man put his hand on her shoulder. In his other hand, a hard weight, pulling all the way to the earth, was the gun. They saw Rob, in the truck, across the street from them, staring in dumbfounded silence.

“What you want?”

He opened his mouth. Closed it.

“Call the police,” the old man said, but there were already sirens in the distance.

The shot, the approaching sirens: people were coming out of houses.

“That’s my brother,” Rob said.

“He had no business,” the old man said. The gun rose a little.

“I didn’t know,” Rob said, his first defense. “I didn’t know. He just said stop the truck.”

The old woman and the old man stared down at Glen. Rob wondered if the old man had ever killed anyone before, had ever punched anything that hard.

The police arrived, spilled from their vehicles, all noise and light. Fast, in this neighborhood. They were always ready. The old man had put the gun on the ground. There was a wariness in the air.

The police had their hands on their guns, on the hips, but nobody was acting foolish. Nobody was crying, carrying on, raising the hysteria to awkward levels. It was too early in the morning. Rob could still smell the gunpowder, what black would smell like if color had smell, caves and copper.

The police took him for a witness, sidelined with an almost dismissive wave to stay put. They all kept their distance from Glen, once the first pulse check was over. More cars arrived, more police got out, wandered the scene, until one of them, an older guy with a Tom Selleck mustache, said, “Hey, I know this one. Shit, I didn’t even know he was out. The fuck was his name?”

Rob nearly said something. Another cop approached his truck. Funny how pridefully Rob noted when anyone read his name on the side, even now, after all this.

“Glen something,” Selleck said. “Mean one.”

“Not anymore,” someone said and there were general grunts of agreement. People kept coming and coming. A circle formed. Spectators.

It was all right there in the cop’s eyes, looking him over Rob fumbled with his desire to punch out, to thrash, grab a gun, got to town, fly away. The cop was looking him over, making those links between the threat. Still hanging over the scene.

“What’re you doing here?”

As always with his brother the path was one in which every decision had consequence for everyone else. Everything concerning him was like one of those magic scenes in movies, where behind the character died grass, then flowers, then trees, then whole forests. He never just stepped forward into an already settled moment.

Rob could feel it, how quickly the afternoon would turn again. They would haul him out the truck, throw him on the hood, all the violence of the moment still moving into the light. Then down to the station, where he’d be sat for confession. But he didn’t hit her. It was a lie – he’d never hit her, though he wanted to at times.

Like now, wanting to punch out.

“He’s dead,” he said, in a way that never quite found an end – neither a question, nor statement, nor judgement, not even fact.

“The old man says he heard laughing.”

To deny it would be a kind of rise, a weak blow.

He couldn’t look at the cop as he said it.

“I was, I was coming to pick him up,” Rob said.

The cop knew. “You have anything to do with it?” he asked.

“No sir,” Rob said. “No sir, I swear.” He hated himself at moments like this, backpedalling, throwing everything he had to save his skin. Afraid.

“Old lady says she heard someone laughing.”

“Not me,” Rob said. “Not laughing.”

“You two close?” the cop asked.

“Yeah,” almost a sigh. He had to swallow past the the nugget of grief metastasizing in his throat. “Yeah, my brother,” again, stumbling in silence over the guilty urge to make up an explanation, a lie that would punch him out of this mess.

The cop cupped the door.

Rob felt himself rising to defend Glen, to defend them both against it all. Close? He was rising to tell the truth or lie, admit he’d been there, stopped the truck, laughed at the crazy dance. Gone to help the old woman with the dead dog. Gone to steal her purse. Let it all out. But close? They’d covered the body of the dog with a yellow cotton sheet imprinted with little flowers. From underneath came the leash like some kind of tether. His brother had been rolled over. One blue eye was open and he appeared to be staring closely at a crack in the sidewalk under his cheek, a root bulging up.

It was all rushing forward again, step out of the car, please, all that.

“It was funny,” he said. “That big lady, the purse, the bag, the hat.” He choked out a laugh. ‘“What a fuck up. He just, he just….” swallow. “Stop the truck he says. Gets out. Walks over. She put it behind her back. He was like a little kid.”

The cop was about to arrest him. He could feel it, seconds away from a ‘step out of the car, please.’

Rob looked at the cop. “He just got out,” he told him. “Just hit parole. We’d gone to a bar, to celebrate, you know. On the way home he told me to stop the truck. I did.”

Rob and the cop exchanged direct, eye to eye stares. “I never knew what he wanted. I should have kept going.”

What was coming, was coming, he realized. He would be taken in for questioning, they would talk to the bartender. Rob would be...what? Implicated? His brother was dead, what more could be said?

His brother, like the dog, would not rise again.

“Would you mind stepping out of the truck,” the cop asked.

Risky, getting up off the ground, coming up with fists out swinging. In the cab of his truck, his own truck, one he’d worked hard for, a truck he was proud of, he was safe.

“Yeah,” Rob said. “No problem.” He didn’t have anything on him, no weed in the truck. He got out carefully and waited for the cop to turn him around and pat him down, but the guy only turned and waved one of the detectives over. “This is his brother,” he said. The detective, an Hispanic guy about Rob’s age, looked him over. “Says his brother just got out. Parole. They were heading home. He – the brother – made him stop.”

“That all true?” the detective asked. He wrote some stuff down. Rob, suddenly feeling a part of a stage he’d not realized he’d stepped on, took out his wallet and handed the cop his driver’s license.

Rob looked to his brother but only considered the dog. Old dog, just lays down one day and goes to sleep, doesn’t get up again, that sort of thing. Old dogs. It was a nice dog. Easy going, simple. A nice dog.

The cop took his license, told him to stay put, and walked away. Rob leaned against the truck, waiting for the wail of the distant ambulance to get closer or turn off entirely. For a long long time it did neither, just hung in the background, arrested. There was no hurry. And then, as if it had been just out of sight with the siren on some kind of mute, it rounded the corner with a blast of sound, blooped once, then silently eased to the curb.

The officer came back, holding Rob’s license, looking puzzled.

He kept expecting a ‘could you come with me, please?’

The old man was watching him. He no longer had the gun. Off with the cops, presumably. Crazy old bastard. All Glen wanted was the damned purse. Rob felt a lie rise up to his mouth, a fight, his brother was innocent, went to help with the dog, the old lady freaked, grabbed him. Then the old man comes barreling out the house, kills his brother, murders his brother.

Felt it rise up like a song – hard and powerful and angry.

His brother. His brother. And just as quickly the song kept rising and vanished.