Thanks, little brother by Ian Rogers

Years later I still wouldn’t go back to the river but that day when my brother Sam pulled me out I didn’t want to leave it. We had gone over a drop, ten feet or so, me following as always, but I was going too slowly. I didn’t clear the hydraulic and the mess of water falling into water, toppling over itself, tipped my kayak and sucked me back behind the pour. Underneath it all my head hit a rock and for a moment all I could see and feel was dark.

I opened my eyes and it was like waking up. I yawned, pulling in and pushing out air at the same time, holding a mouth of cold just there, full up with wet. I spit it out with my breath and watched as it mixed with the water, bubbling and churning and pulsing around me. And then I felt the edge of my boat hitting the back of the fall, and I looked down, moving to pop my skirt, but the pull loop was not there, disappeared in the smooth of the neoprene, sealed into itself. I remember waiting there breathing out into the water, watching as blue turned to blue, light and dark both until it was all one and none of the other. And I remember that down there, strapped into my boat, waiting, it all seemed about right.

But the hand on my shoulder, underneath the strap of my lifejacket, the feel of cold spilling over my legs, the harsh air scraping across my face as I came out of the water, they didn’t seem wrong. And they lay me on the grass and unzipped my jacket and I shouldn’t remember any of it because I had no more breath left. I had no breath at all until my brother, kneeling over me, one hand on my forehead and another cradling my chin, gave me his. He held my head in his hands like he was palming a ball and I felt very small underneath him. As boys we had bathed together and years later when the pulse of the water was reduced to sleeping and dreaming we would come to blows, but down there on the grass by the river, I don’t think we were ever as close. Not before and not after.

I lay there for a long time, just breathing; breathing slow. My hand fumbled around my jacket for my knife but it wasn’t there. My brother had used it to cut me free of the boat and then tossed it to the river as they pulled us out from shore. I would have liked to hold it, to feel something solid and cold and real in my hands. We didn’t tell our mother, but she saw it on the news; turned on the television to see two boys dripping from the river, wet with rain and heat, staring blankly at the microphone that asked them to tell how they felt about it all. I looked at my brother. He was near tears. I put my arms around him and squeezed him tightly. He felt enormous in my arms, like I shouldn’t be able to reach all the way around him, but I did. I pulled tighter and tighter until I was lifting him off of the ground and the air was near out of him, until I put him down and set him walking again; until we were home without a word between us. My brother stopped going to the river after that. I guess he felt guilty about it.

For a long time afterward I didn’t know what to say to him and things were awkward between us, but by the time I moved in with him, which was years later, it had gotten better. I was just out of school and he was just beginning again, working at a law degree at the U. It was a surprise when he applied. He had always been more of the athletic type, not much taste for school, but I guess working retail for a few years can give you a taste for a lot of things. Most days I saw him only briefly, at meals or just before falling asleep. I didn’t have a job and he was going easy on me about the rent so I did most of the cooking around the place, and he went easy on me about that too. A lot of nights he would come in late, grab a plate and join me on the couch.

“Thanks, little brother,” he would say, and we would stare off into the tv screen letting its words substitute for our own. But one night he came home early, cracked a few beers and, handing me one, sat down across from me at the table. He was smiling. Smiling, and saying nothing.

“What’s with you?” I asked.

“Nothing.” He said. “But I can’t stay. I’ve got a date.”

“With who?” I asked. “The barbershop girl?” He had mentioned her a few days before, and he was smiling the same smile now that he had then. He nodded a little. I repeated my question.

“Stylist.” His mouth was full as he said it and he barely squeezed out the syllables.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Don’t stylists work at salons? I think Barbers work at barbershops.”

“I guess I don’t know much about that,” he said. He filled his mouth with what was left on the plate and left to take a shower. Then he was gone, and I could smell the cologne hovering in the doorway when he left. The rest of it was outside with him, but that was some of it he left behind for me. I was almost glad for it.

He kept seeing the girl for a few weeks, but never took her by the apartment, so I never got to see her, except in the smile on his face when he came home. He didn’t talk about her much, only when prompted and then he would give a few vague but sentimental lines; a kind of muscled poetry.

“I don’t know,” he said one time. “She gives me the sweats. Like when you’re lifting heavy.” He said it like he was confessing something.

I woke up one day and looked in the mirror and decided I’d need a haircut. I went down to the shop where he had said that she worked. He hadn’t let her name slip, so I didn’t know who I was looking for, but I thought I’d recognize her somehow. When I walked in there were a few people scurrying around the back, cutting hair and sweeping it up. The shop was poorly lit. The walls were paneled with plastic wood grains and the floor was colored and coated to match, which in the dim lighting it nearly did, and it almost seemed like it should creak as you walked over it.

A girl came up from the back and, looking me over, asked if I needed a haircut. I told her I did.

“It’ll be just a minute,” she said, and as she turned around I saw the name Carrie clipped to the breast of her shirt. She walked slowly, easily around the room as she grabbed the broom to finish sweeping, and there was a slight sway to her hips, squeezed into a tight layer of denim. She wore a dark blue polo with the company logo stitched into it, which she had knotted just below her beltline. She was fluid as she moved and her arms and hands, her face and neck, seemed to spill out of her clothes like water from a pitcher, and underneath it she looked all perfumed soft. She was something to look at.

She led me to the back of the room and sat me down, running a comb through my hair.

“How do you want it,” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Shorter.” It was all I could think of. She shook her head and gave me a smartass kind of a look.

“You’re in luck,” she said. We talked as she worked. She was young, just a few years out of high school, and just a few years younger than I was. The shop was her uncle’s and she had been working that job since she graduated. She told me that she thought about going back to school sometimes, but that four years seemed like a long time. I told her that it was a long time but I guessed there were worse things you could do with it.

“Like this,” she said clipping strands of hair from the end of the comb.

“Maybe,” I said. “Maybe if you don’t like it.”

“I like it alright, I guess.” She said, and the way she said it she might have meant it, and I wanted to know if she did, but I didn’t ask. When she finished she examined her work in the mirror, a look on her face like she didn’t know about something. She stared at me in that mirror for a long time.

“Do we know each other?” she finally asked. I said I didn’t think so. She shrugged and I followed her to the register at the front and paid, and I don’t know why I did it. I guess I didn’t know for sure that she was the girl that Sam was talking about, but I thought she probably was, and I knew I shouldn’t but I wanted to see her again and I told her so. She smiled.

“You like baseball?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “Not at all.”

“Want to go to a game?”

“Yeah,” I said. And something about the way that she smiled, I don’t know but she stuck in my head all day.

The stadium was less than a mile from Sam’s apartment, and walking over I figured that I should have called it off. When I showed up she was waiting out front, at the end of a small parking lot surrounded by a scattering of cars. Some of them looked like they had been there for weeks. Twenty feet above her a sign advertised the Ems, the local minor leaguers, exploding off their cardboard backing in monochromed strides. She smiled as I walked up to her and we went in. Inside the stadium there were hardly any people, and most of them were with us in the cheap seats. We looked down as the playing started, and from up high it looked like they could have been working at something else entirely, some long purposed goal unknown to them, ants on a hill. We made small talk. She asked me if I’d ever played.

“No,” I said. “Not for a while. I was never any good. My brother, though, he played baseball through college.”

“Your brother?”

“Yeah.”

“Older or younger?”

“Older,” I said and she nodded. I was happy when she left it at that.

“So when was the last time?” she asked. I told her not since I was pretty young, and I thought about how old I would have been. I thought about the smell of the grass on that neighborhood field right after they would cut it and how it would bleed from the mower, and how it would bleed under our feet, and how the sweat and blood of it all would mark our shoes and our clothes, our arms and legs. I thought how sometime in the night it was all washed clean with wet and how in those summer mornings it would all start over again as soon as I could drag Sam out of bed. But I didn’t tell her any of that. When we left she asked if she could come see the apartment, and I said no. I jumped on it; it sounded harsher than it should have.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s just the place is a mess. You shouldn’t see that just yet.” She smiled up at me, and I think she understood, or at least thought she did.

I saw Carrie more over the next few weeks and one night when Sam got home I asked him about his girl. I knew I shouldn’t have. He frowned when I asked.

“It’s done,” he said. “She ended it. Found someone else.” He shook his head.

“I’m sorry,” I said, and he smiled a weak sort of smile. He handed me a beer and turned on the tv, and sitting there watching him, watching him stare at the screen and nurse his beer he just looked so pathetic. It made me angry.

“So that’s it,” I said. It sounded too hard.

“What?”

“You’re just going to leave it at that?”

“What do you want me to do?” he asked and his voice was quiet. I told him I didn’t know, and then I told him he should fight for it, and even as I said it the words felt childish in my mouth.

“Fight?” he asked. “Fight who?” And he was looking at me like I was a little boy again, and I wondered for a minute if he knew. I told him that I thought he had it all wrong, that he was just giving up and I thought that was just sad. I was talking loud, almost yelling. I don’t know, maybe I wanted him to hit me. Maybe I thought it would justify something. But he didn’t hit me, and it didn’t justify anything. He just swallowed hard and then shrugged me off and turned back to the tv, and I could see it all rising into his eyes. Watching him hold it all in like that, I thought I just couldn’t take it anymore.

Seeing my brother look that way made me tired, and then later seeing Carrie made me tired, so that things couldn’t go on the way they were. The next time that Carrie asked to come see the apartment I let her, and I kept her there until Sam came home. When he saw her he didn’t look surprised but I think he must have been. He hardly looked at her, though she couldn’t take her eyes off of him. Her mouth was open wide, and when she finally looked at me it was all disbelief and anger and none of the easiness of a moment before. Sam moved to the refrigerator and took out a beer. He opened it and sat down at the table with us. He took a sip and looked at me like he was suddenly much older.

“Did you know?” he asked. There was a softness in his eyes that surprised me, and I told him that I did know. He took another sip of his beer and then handed it across the table to me. He got up and opened another and took it into his room, pausing briefly to say, “nice to see you again, Carrie,” before disappearing behind a closed door. She looked over at me.

“You knew?” She asked. And I nodded. She looked up at me asking why and I had no idea what to tell her.

“I liked you,” I said, and it was the only explanation that I could give. She got up to leave and I followed her. I was surprised that she let me. I think that she must have been too.

About a mile from the apartment, a small river ran through town. There was a low overhead dam, a smooth pour of water over a ten foot drop. We walked there, Carrie and I. As the water reached the bottom it piled over onto itself and a long flushing hole spread across the width of the river, framed by two high cement walls, which would lock you in there if you ever got caught in it. There were hardly any rocks on the rest of the river, nothing that would give you the least trouble except for this five foot stretch, which would hold you there until it was bored with you, drowning you slowly all day. I would go there sometimes when I had nothing better to do. I liked to watch the violence of the water fighting against itself. It caught me in the pit of my stomach every time I saw it, like standing on the edge of a great height. Carrie and I walked there and watched the water for a long time.

In the silence of the falling water, looking at Carrie, I started to think about that day on the river a few years back. I started to think about Sam; about him and me when we were kids, how we used to play baseball in the neighborhood, and because there wasn’t much else to say I said what I was thinking.

“I remember one time,” I said, “I was at bat. My brother was on the other team, and they had this mean little pitcher. He wasn’t much to look at. He was short, kind of squat, but back then he could out throw every one of us, and he let us know it. I was the youngest guy out there, but I was still taller than him. They were mostly my brother’s friends and they let me tag along. Anyway, it was the end of the game, bottom of the last inning and I don’t know. I guess I had high hopes.”

It started raining and I asked her if she wanted to go inside. She shook her head. Maybe it was just the rain, but she looked in a bad way. I didn’t know what to say about it but I kept talking anyway. I missed the first pitch, I told her, and then the second. When the third pitch came I swung through and hit nothing but the air on the edge of the bat. Someone called me out, the little pitcher, maybe, but I said I’d caught the side of the ball. I said it was a foul. No one believed me, but I kept at it, saying I touched the ball, and the pitcher looked like he was about to run at me. It was getting kind of ugly, and I wanted to give in, but I’d kept it up for too long by then, and I wouldn’t let myself. Finally my brother came in from the outfield.

“If he says he touched it then he gets another shot,” he said. “That’s the rules.” But when he looked at me his eyes were mean and he was shaking his head when he turned around.

“I missed the next pitch anyway,” I said. “I think about that sometimes.” She was looking at me, like she didn’t understand, but she hadn’t seen his eyes as he had walked away. He hadn’t looked at her. He had only looked at me.

My brother and I didn’t mention what had happened with Carrie, and things were pretty much as they had been. But that weekend he loaded his boat on the top of the car and went out to the river with some friends. It had been years. He saw me looking at him through the window as he got into the car, and he didn’t wave goodbye.

Carrie and I kept seeing each other for a few months. It was good, or at least it might have been. It was so nearly good that it seemed a shame to stop it, especially given everything. One night in the middle of it all, still weeks from the end, we made plans to meet at the neighborhood bar. Carrie wasn’t old enough but I knew the bartender, and he had a soft spot for her. My brother had taken the car out to the river so I was stuck walking. I misjudged the timing and got there about twenty minutes early, which annoyed me because Carrie was usually late.

I took a seat at a booth and ordered a beer, sitting down to wait. I finished it quickly and ordered another. The door opened and my brother walked in with a few of his friends. They looked that happy kind of tired you get after a day on the river and I envied them it, and cursed my luck that he should show up tonight, though I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised.

The waiter brought my drink, and I drank it, thinking that I should probably go over and talk to my brother, but part of me hoped that I wouldn’t have to, that maybe we could go the whole night without seeing each other. I looked across the room at the door, hoping to see Carrie walk through it, but she didn’t. When the waiter came by I asked him if I could bum a smoke, and he said no, that he wasn’t allowed to smoke on the job, but I gave him a look like I could use it and he handed me one, gave me a light. Holding it in my fingers I knew that I should stub it out. I knew that Carrie hated the taste of cigarettes, but sitting there, watching the clock and waiting for Carrie to show, I thought that there were worse things I could do. I finished my third drink, and finished the cigarette, smoking it down to the filter. Then Carrie walked in.

From outside she opened the door, bringing the smell of the rain in with her. She was wet from it and her coat dripped wet on the floor, drops beaded and fell from her hair as she ran her hands through it. From across the room, watching it all it seemed like the smell of the rain was coming from her hair, a scent raining throughout the bar, dripping from the ceilings to the tables and the ground, filling the glasses and ashtrays and empty bottles. I was glad she was there, glad to sit and pass the night with her. But she saw Sam sitting at the bar, and moved to talk to him, smiled at him as she sat down at his side.

I wanted to go over there, but thought maybe it wasn’t a good idea. I went anyway. I went over and kissed Carrie and asked my brother how the river was.

“Alright,” he said. “I got messed around a little, but nothing bad.” I said it sounded like he’d had a good time and he said that he had. He looked big sitting there with his friends, with Carrie, the two of them looked big together and I started to feel very small, a little boy with grass on his knees, clutching a bat. I touched her hand, but she pulled it away, not wanting to let Sam see it. He looked at me, gave me a slight smile.

“It’s too bad you couldn’t make it out with us,” he said.

“Yeah,” I said, “but you know.” I said it softly.

“Maybe it’s time you tried it again,” and I couldn’t tell if he meant it or if he was goading me into something. Maybe it was both.

“Yeah,” I said, and he looked so big, and so confident sitting across from Carrie, and I wanted to cut him down a little, take him down to a more manageable size. I reached for Carrie’s hand again, this time snatching it out of her lap, holding it tightly, bringing it to my lips. I kissed it slowly, massaging it between my own. I looked back at my brother.

“Yeah, maybe I will give it a try one of these days,” I said.

“You think so,” he said, but he’d hardened a little and he wasn’t asking, and I told him that I did think so. He looked me in the eyes and said that I should watch myself and behave in front of my girlfriend, and the way he said it was like it was a dirty word, and just then I hated him for that.

I looked at him and his eyes were cold, and I knew I was looking the same way. I felt it in my stomach, churning, and I thought maybe it was something else entirely. He looked at me like he wanted to hit me, he should have wanted to, but he didn’t. Standing there in front of me, a mile high, he wouldn’t put a finger on me, and I couldn’t stand it. My hands were raised, and before I knew it I was pushing him. I pushed him hard into the bar and he knocked over a stool. He knocked over a glass. I was surprised to see him falter, surprised that I could move him, and before the surprise wore off he was pushing back, and I was scared because I knew he was stronger than me but I never knew by how much, and I thought that maybe right then we were all going to find out. But he let go and turned around to walk out. I called after him, told him to come back.

“So that’s it,” I said. “That’s all?” I was yelling. He turned around and looked at me, and looked at Carrie, and he barely took his eyes off her when he hit me. He knocked me over. It hurt in my face and it hurt in my back and I wondered if it would spread until it hurt all over. I wondered if he felt the same way. I got to my feet. There were tears in his eyes, but he managed to hold them there until he looked at his hand, and when he did that I thought they might start to fall but he wiped them away with a still tightly balled fist. Standing now, off of the stool, he looked not much bigger than I was and I regretted it and wanted to tell him so.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“I know it,” he said. And then he looked away and he was as good as gone. I looked at Carrie, who was sitting on a stool at the bar, watching my brother walk away, watching him through the window. She didn’t look at me.

“What?” I said, though I guess I knew. She shook her head and I said it again.

“You’re a sweet guy,” she said, “but you’re not very kind.” She looked up at me with water in her eyes and I broke then. I knew that she was right, and I wanted to tell her that, and I wanted it not to be the way that it was, but the door had already closed behind my brother and he was in the outside now, lost somewhere beyond the glass. There were a lot of things that I wanted to say, there was too much, and I didn’t have the words for it all. The whole thing had tired me out, and I slumped over. I could feel the muscles in my legs and back give.

“I love you,” I sighed to the room around me which had now cleared out except for Carrie and I could almost taste the smoke on my breath as I said it. There was too much familiarity with those words. They were thick with it, flat with it, and I still don’t know why I said them. I hadn’t meant it, but she had heard me and now we were stuck with it, the both of us. She frowned at me, but grabbed my hand and rubbed it between her own, like she was trying to warm it. And when she began to smile again I thought I would never want something to be true more than I did then.