The Things a Brother Knows Page 17

  Dov is standing out front when we arrive.

  He grabs us into a big bear hug and he kisses us both on both of our cheeks and it isn’t until after all that that he notices my rose-covered hat.

  “You’re really taking your look to a whole new level.”

  “I’m doing my best, Dov.”

  I hug him again, absorbing the feeling of his strong arms around me.

  He’s brought a backpack. I know he doesn’t own one, so he must have gone shopping. He looks like a kid on the first day of kindergarten. I can picture him in the store. Asking for a backpack like the one his grandsons have. I reach for it, to lighten his load, but he smacks my hand away.

  We order way more than we could reasonably eat. Crab comes in every form. Fried, cracked, sautéed, lumped, cold, steamed. The only thing missing is liquid crab, but then I notice the crab soup on the menu. There is no crab territory left uncharted.

  Dov wears a look of satisfaction. He stretches his arms out, resting them on the back of our booth. He sticks his gut out a little. Takes in the sight of us.

  “You did this. You really did it.” Broad smile. “What an adventure, walking so far. I admire you. Both of you. You’ve shown tremendous skill. Maturity. Conviction. I also hope along the way you’ve managed to have some fun.”

  I blush at this even though Dov can’t possibly know that I’ve met a girl and held her naked chest against my own. He may know a ton, but he can’t know everything.

  He clears the plates from in front of him and leans forward. His huge forearms resting on the table. His face turns serious.

  “And now it’s time to come home.”

  Dov didn’t come to eat crab. Of course he didn’t come to eat crab. He’s here on a rescue mission. He’s come to Baltimore to bring us back.

  “We’re going to Washington, Dov.” Bo stays calm. His voice strong and flat.

  “Baltimore. Washington. What’s the difference but a few hundred miles?”

  “Actually, Dov,” I say, “it’s only about forty-five miles.”

  He shoots me a look. “Nobody likes a smart-ass.”

  The waitress approaches but then backs away slowly. Skilled enough at her craft to recognize when people don’t want to be asked if everything is okay.

  “Why not finish it here? Over an orgy of crab. It’s as good a place as any.”

  Bo stares Dov down. For the first time ever, Bo actually looks bigger than Dov to me. “I can’t do that,” he says. “I’m sorry.”

  “Listen, motek. I know about war. Okay? I know. I’ve been there. I never had a doubt about serving, and there were times I even enjoyed being a soldier, but I deeply regret if I made it sound easy. It’s still war. It’s still ugly. It’s still painful. But it fades. It does. Those memories, the things you’ve seen, they become like something from a book you once read, or somebody read to you, by a dim light, a long, long time ago. It takes a while, I know. That’s why I thought this trip was not such a terrible idea. I thought it would give you the distance to close that book and start over again. You get a second chance. You can start over again. Like moving to a new house. Or a new country. Come home. Forget what it is you think you need to do. Come home. And let’s start over.”

  Bo shakes his head.

  I cover my face with my hands. It doesn’t seem to hit Bo the way it hits me that Dov is pleading. I wouldn’t have guessed Dov was capable of this kind of desperation, and watching it, I remember Abba and his naked body that day we fixed the fence.

  There are parts of the adults around you you’re never meant to see.

  “There’s a cab out front. It’s taking me to the airport so I can catch the last flight back tonight. Come with me. Please.”

  “I can’t,” Bo says. “I won’t.”

  Dov sighs. He reaches for Bo’s hand and squeezes it across the table cluttered with empty crab shells.

  “Okay.”

  He gets up and collects his new backpack. I walk him out to the street.

  “Come back,” I say.

  “What?”

  “In three days. There’s a big rally on the Mall to support the troops. A Million Strong for America. Fly down for that. Bring Mom and Abba. Let’s all go together.”

  He puts his arms around me and I hold on for more beats than one of our regular embraces. He doesn’t make a move to end it. That comes from me, finally.

  When I pull back he studies my face.

  “Look at you,” he says. “Eighteen years old. A man.” He reaches out and brushes the hair off my shoulders. Tucks a strand behind my ear.

  “I’m proud to be your Dov.”

  I call Christina.

  Parpar. The butterfly.

  I don’t tell her how the ink from her body still holds such a place in Boaz’s imagination that he uses it as a lock for his secrets. What I say is that even though theirs was a high school thing, she’s still a big part of his life. Of his story. Of who he was and who he is. Max or no Max.

  I call Mom and Abba.

  I call Pearl and Zim, which it turns out takes only one phone call, because aside from the hours she’s serving frozen yogurt and he’s eating popcorn at Videorama, they can always be found together.

  I ask them each to come and be one of the million strong.

  This doesn’t have to be about the war, or what we think about it or why we’re in it or what our exit strategy is shaping up to be.

  I ask them to come here for Boaz.

  I ask them to meet us on the Mall. Three mornings from now. So that he can see for himself that no matter how he feels in the darkness of his static-filled room, he is not alone.

  On our last night before we reach DC I finally beat Bo at blackjack.

  He throws my hat to me Frisbee style and I catch it one-handed and do a bow. At long last. My moment of victory. I put it on my head but it doesn’t feel right. The shape of it has changed.

  I fling it back. It belongs to him now.

  He throws it back at me.

  “You won it. You deserve it.”

  “No, it’s yours.”

  “No, Levi. It’s your hat. I bought it for you for your birthday.”

  “You did?” So Mom had nothing to do with it.

  “Yeah. I remember we were leaving a game with Abba, the Sox won big that day, and outside Fenway you stopped to look in the window of one of those shops, and I saw you staring at the hat. And I said I had to go to the bathroom, that I’d meet you at the car, and I went into the store and bought it and hung on to it until your birthday. I think you were turning eleven.”

  “I was turning twelve.”

  “Right.”

  I put on the hat.

  “And that was not one of my worst birthdays ever. It was definitely one of the better ones.”

  Our final day’s walk doesn’t bring us to the DC I’ve imagined since lying in bed with strep throat in sixth grade. No wide avenues or reflecting pools or cherry blossoms or white stone monuments.

  Our final day’s walk brings us six miles north of all that to the visitor check-in center at Walter Reed Memorial Hospital.

  I hesitate before following Bo inside. I hate hospitals. I mean, who doesn’t? Is there anybody out there who loves hospitals? Probably not. But I really hate them.

  The guy behind the desk is in uniform. Bo stands rigid, but he doesn’t salute.

  “PFC Boaz Katznelson to see Staff Sergeant Jack Bradford.”

  We sit and wait. The room is filled with people not talking. I clean my hands with Purell from one of the many bottles lying around. I watch some CNN without the sound. Bo sits, chin up, back straight, eyes forward.

  While we’re waiting I start thinking maybe this is it. Maybe this is the destination. Maybe I’ve called everyone to meet us tomorrow at a rally Bo has no intention of going to. Maybe we came all this way to see Jack, to give Jack something.

  Finally someone comes to get him. A woman in uniform. I settle in for what might be hours of silent CNN while I wait for Bo
to visit his friend.

  The woman looks at Bo, and then at me, over her clipboard.

  “It’s okay,” Bo says. “He’s my brother. He can come too.”

  I follow them both through a never-ending, complex set of stairways and hallways and walkways, past all sorts of doorways I’d rather not look into, until finally we reach Jack’s room.

  She steps in ahead of us, then comes back out and nods.

  “Katznelson!” a voice bellows.

  Bo goes right to his bedside. They shake hands and don’t let go.

  “You look great,” Bo says. He does. Bo isn’t lying. Jack’s got movie-star good looks.

  “And you look like shit,” Jack answers. “But that’s nothing new.”

  Bo introduces us. Jack repeats my name like it’s a name he’s heard before.

  “Levi,” he says. “Thanks for coming.”

  His roommate is home for a few days, so there’s an empty bed we sit on while Jack shows off his legs. They’re his third set, if you count the ones he left behind when the IED blew up their Humvee.

  The ones he’s got now are better than the ones the hospital first fit him with. Those made his stumps bleed. Now they’re improved but still not perfect. He calls them his robot legs. He likes being upright, but they can’t beat his chair for speed.

  “The body is a puzzle,” he says. “We’re just trying different ways to make mine fit back together again.”

  Suddenly, I start to feel this itching in the back of my throat. Maybe it’s exhaustion. Or the smell of the hospital. Or Jack’s mechanical legs. Or just everything piling on top of everything else, like a stack of dishes that starts to list to one side before collapsing in a spectacular crash. Whatever it is, I’m about to lose it, and I know that the last thing I want to do right now is cry.

  That’s not what men do.

  Men walk five hundred miles to visit a friend in the hospital.

  Men walk for their brothers.

  I look at Jack. He looks like Bo, who looks like Loren, who looks like the picture Celine carries in her wallet of Mitch. They are brothers.

  Brothers don’t get itchy throats and cry. They don’t sit home on their bedroom floors staring at their toes.

  They do something.

  I get up. Bo has his pack propped up against the wall next to Jack’s bathroom. He’s too involved now catching up with Jack to notice as I reach into his bag. Quietly. It isn’t the shoe box I’m after this time. I feel what I’m looking for and I grab it and I sneak into the bathroom and I lock the door behind me.

  Bo’s electric clippers.

  TWENTY

  “OH, SWEET JESUS,” Jack says.

  Bo just stares. Openmouthed. He’s become a man of few words, but whatever he’s got left in him, I’ve just snatched those away.

  I rub my hands over my head. I don’t think I got it quite right. I know I’m supposed to have a little more on the top than the sides, so maybe I don’t have a true high and tight, but I am sporting an allover, super-short buzz cut.

  Bo coughs. And then he starts to laugh. He turns red and holds his sides. He gasps for air. Jack is laughing too. They’re hysterical. Tears flowing and everything.

  And because laughter is more infectious than even the microbes I tried to Purell away, I start laughing too.

  “Let’s see it!” Jack says. “Bring us the fallen hair!”

  I go back into the bathroom and collect fistfuls of my hair from the wastebasket.

  “Man, you could knit my kid a sweater out of that.”

  “You have a kid?” I ask.

  “No, but I will someday.”

  “Well, then, someday I’ll learn how to knit.”

  Visiting hours are over at nine, but Jack has some sort of a relationship going with the nurse on his floor. I’m not totally sure what sort, but whatever it is, he convinces her with his movie-star smile to look the other way.

  There’s an empty bed. And a pretty comfortable armchair.

  “We’ll get some shut-eye,” Jack says. “And we’ll take off before morning rounds.”

  “You’re coming with us?” I ask.

  “You got a problem with that?”

  “No.”

  “ ’Cause wait till you see how I roll. You won’t be able to keep pace.”

  No matter how much it might feel like a prison here, this isn’t a prison, it’s a hospital, and Jack is a free man.

  Technically.

  But his doctors haven’t cleared him to leave the grounds, and certainly haven’t cleared him to ride in his wheelchair six miles into the center of the city. So we sneak out in darkness. Like we’re doing a prison break. And again Jack relies on his friend the nurse, who helps to see that we make an unnoticed departure.

  First stop: breakfast.

  The waitress leads us to a booth before realizing that isn’t going to work; then she gets all flustered and knocks over the chair she’s moving to make room for Jack at a regular table.

  He gives her one of his smiles and calls her darlin’ and tells her not to worry, just to bring us three hot coffees right quick.

  As she walks away he says, “She must be new. ’Cause this place is a favorite hangout for guys in my condition. The press loves to offer us steak dinners if we’ll talk about how shitty the hospital is or how screwed we’re getting by the government or whatever, but I’m just working on putting the puzzle back together.”

  He looks at Bo. “What about you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What kind of shape are your pieces in?”

  Bo doesn’t answer, so Jack turns to me. “What kind of shape is your brother in, Levi? Like I said, the body is a puzzle. And the mind is probably the most complicated piece.”

  It’s stupid, I know, because hair is hair and it doesn’t say anything about who you are on the inside, and it doesn’t change you, but sitting here with these two and looking like they do, somehow things feel different. I feel different.

  “I think he could use some help,” I say, and then I turn to Bo. “I think you could use some help putting the pieces back together.”

  He stirs his coffee and he nods slowly. “After,” Bo says. “After today.”

  The morning quickly turns into afternoon. Yes, Jack is fast for someone in a wheelchair, but six miles is still six miles. I’d told everyone we’d try to meet up around ten, and we’re already a few hours late.

  I send a text to Pearl, my ambassador to the group: “On our way.”

  Pearl texts back: “No hurry. Million strong more like few hundred strong.”

  Me: “Hang tight. Have a smoke. See you soon.”

  Pearl: “I don’t smoke anymore, douchebag. Don’t you notice anything?”

  Me: “What gives?”

  Pearl: “Richard hates smoking. I like Richard. Do the math.”

  Jack seems to be having the time of his life. Which I know is a strange thing to say about a guy who’s sweating bullets while using leather-gloved hands to push himself the distance of a 10k. He probably ran a 10k once to raise money for a cause, or as part of a neighborhood Thanksgiving ritual, or for any of the reasons people get together and run, and I’m guessing a guy like Jack did it in under thirty-five minutes.

  But today it takes us some good time.

  “Oh yeah!” he shouts through his heavy breathing. “Smell that freedom. It’s a beautiful city and a beautiful world and it’s just freakin’ great to be alive.”

  Bo gives him a friendly punch.

  “I mean, seriously. We can just cruise down the street here knowing that the trash in that Dumpster isn’t covering up a bomb.” He points one direction. “And we know that truck isn’t carrying insurgents ready to open fire.” He points across the street at a white Toyota pickup truck.

  A white Toyota pickup truck.

  Just like the one that sent Bo diving into that ditch.

  “You saw a lot of those over there? White Toyotas carrying insurgents?”

  “Sometimes Nissa
ns. Sometimes with bombs in the back. The thing is, little brother,” Jack says to me, “there’s all sorts of stuff that in your previous life you’d never even give a second look, but this stuff, it’s suddenly a trigger. Overflowing Dumpsters. White pickup trucks. I’m talking cold sweat on the back of your neck.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “I get it.” And if that sounds like a brush-off, it isn’t.

  I get it.

  We take a break so Bo can run inside a convenience store and grab us some drinks. Jack asks for a beer. I figure the guy’s earned it. And I’ve earned myself a Gatorade.

  I look at my watch. It’s one-thirty.

  “How late do you figure this thing’ll go?” I ask him.

  “Who knows? Midnight maybe?”

  “Midnight? And it started at ten?”

  “No, it starts at sundown.”

  “That’s not what the Web site says.”

  “What Web site?”

  “A Million Strong for America.”

  “A million what?”

  “Oh Jesus. That’s not where we’re headed? To the A Million Strong for America rally?”

  “No. That’s not where we’re headed.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Your brother didn’t tell you?”

  “He doesn’t tell me much of anything.”

  Just then Bo comes back outside.

  “So where are we headed?” I ask him.

  He throws an extra tall can of beer to Jack, who catches it in one leather-gloved hand.

  “We’re meeting up with some people.”

  “But not a million people?”

  “I’d doubt that.”

  “We’re not going to a rally to support the troops?”

  “No, Levi. We’re not.”

  “So? Where to? And you’d better tell me, because I have to go on ahead, but I’ll catch up with you wherever it is you’re going. I’ve come all this way—all this way, Boaz—and I think I’ve earned the right to know, finally, where it is you’re going.”

  He looks at me, and just as I start to think this is it, that he’ll give me one of those blank stares and say nothing at all, he says, “The Vietnam Memorial. At sundown.”