Brother and Sister Page 5

  But Paul threw Bob off and scrambled to his feet in one smooth-flowing motion. He turned, came wading back in and reached Bob before he was completely standing again. Paul’s arms pinwheeled, left and right savagely clubbing Bob back across the room, until Bob stumbled backwards, throwing his arms out to the sides for balance, and Paul smashed his right fist into Bob’s unprotected face.

  Bob fell like a tree, this time not trying to get up again. Paul stood over him a minute, breathing heavily, then reached down and dragged Bob upright. Bob was only half-conscious. Paul half-carried and half-pulled him to the door, then shoved him out onto the porch. Angie, looking terrified through the window, saw Bob save himself from falling down the stoop by grabbing desperately at the porch post. Paul shouted something at him, Angie couldn’t hear what, and Bob went down the steps unsteadily and out to the sidewalk. Without looking back, he turned right and walked out of sight.

  Paul came back in after a minute, lighting a cigarette with shaking hands. He looked at Angie. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I tried to make him go. I didn’t want anything like that.”

  “I know,” said Angie.

  Paul looked around the room as though embarrassed and said, “I’ll make you some more tea.” He left the room, heading for the kitchen.

  Angie remained seated in the chair. She hadn’t acted, she hadn’t spoken, she hadn’t made a choice. But non-action had turned out to be action after all; silence had turned out to be louder than any words could have been. In making no choice, she had still chosen.

  Bob was gone. The decision had been taken out of her hands. Paul had made the decision for her and she hadn’t had to do a thing.

  It didn’t matter whether it was the right decision or not. She hadn’t had to make it, that was the important thing, and she was more grateful to Paul than she could have said.

  FOUR

  Danny McCann was a happy drunk. “I tell you, Paul,” he said happily, “the beer ads are right. Enjoy life--every golden minute of it. Drink booze--every golden drop of it.” He suited the action to the words by chugalugging a glass of the foamy brew.

  It was Saturday afternoon, three days after the funeral. Paul had stayed at home with Angie until today, but gradually the oppressive emptiness of the house had gotten to him. This afternoon he’d called Danny McCann, a high school buddy of his, back in circulation now after being given an undesirable discharge from the Army six months ago.

  They had met here, in Joe King’s Happi-Tyme Tavern, at two o’clock. Danny had arrived first, had gone to work immediately, and now, a little past five, he had a healthy glow on. Danny McCann had always been a ne’er-do-well, had always cheerfully admitted it, had never suffered pangs of guilt or shame or inferiority at being tossed out of school or fired from jobs or found undesirable by the Army. “I found the Army undesirable, too,” was his standard comment.

  “I’d like to enjoy life,” Paul told him in answer to his remark. “I really would. But all I’ve got is a thirty-day leave, and five days of that are gone already.”

  “I tell you the way it is, Paul,” said Danny. He was a short, chubby, round-faced type. Though only twenty- one, his rather bulbous nose was beginning to show the redness that would flower into alcoholic scarlet before he was forty. “I’ll tell you the way it is,” he repeated. “In the Army, I was what they call a guardhouse lawyer. That’s exactly what I was. I took the UCMJ and I read it the way other guys read Confidential. I read that thing backwards and forwards, and if there was an angle around, I knew about it. And do you know what? There’s an angle around for you.”

  Paul looked at him with renewed interest. “There is? Such as what?”

  “Such as the thing they call the hardship discharge,” Danny told him.

  “Don’t be silly. What hardship?”

  “Don’t tell me ‘don’t be silly’--I know what I’m talking about. How old are you?”

  “Twenty-one.”

  “Okay then, you’re legally an adult, right?”

  Paul grinned and shrugged his shoulders. “Legally,” he said. “I guess so.”

  “Right,” said Danny. “And Angie, how old is she? Sixteen?”

  “No. Seventeen.”

  “Just as good. Legally, she’s a child, right? What they call a minor.”

  “Yeah,” said Paul. “I suppose so. If you say so.”

  “I say so. Now, there isn’t anybody else in the immediate family, is there? There’s just you two. I don’t mean uncles or aunts or anybody like that. I mean immediate family.”

  Paul nodded. “Just Angie and me.”

  “Right,” said Danny. “And Angie isn’t married or anything. You are Angie’s only adult in the immediate family.”

  “So what?”

  “So she needs your protection, that’s what. That’s one of the gizmoes in the hardship discharge. If you are the only remaining adult in the immediate family, and there are minors in the immediate family who need you near them for protection and support--to be like a guardian -- then you can apply for a hardship discharge.”

  “Sure,” said Paul. “You can apply for the moon, too.”

  Danny shrugged. “Okay,” he said. “Don’t take the chance--don’t try it. Go on back to Germany when your leave’s up.”

  “Wait a second,” said Paul. “How does this work? How would I go about applying? I mean, if I wanted to.”

  “You go to the Red Cross,” Danny said. “And right now, you go to the bar. It’s your round.”

  ***

  On Monday, Paul went to the Red Cross, where he learned that Danny had been absolutely right. The man at the Red Cross started the forms rolling, and Paul got Father Mancenik, the pastor of the church, and Dr. Lynch, the Dane’s family doctor, to write the necessary substantiating letters. And then there was nothing to do but wait.

  Paul spent most of his waiting time with Danny McCann, and his days rapidly assumed a pattern. He got out of bed around two in the afternoon, washed and dressed, and made himself a cup of coffee. Most of the time, Angie was in the house when he awoke, working or reading or watching television, but since he invariably woke up with a hangover, there wasn’t much conversation between them.

  Having downed the cup of coffee and taken two aspirin tablets, Paul would then sit and watch television till five or thereabouts, when Angie would make lunch for him. He would eat alone at the kitchen table, since she had eaten her lunch hours before and wasn’t ready for dinner yet, and then he would leave the house, going first to Joe King’s Happi-Tyme Tavern to meet Danny. Then the two of them would spend the night bar-hopping.

  They ran across a lot of the people Paul had known back in high school and in the days before he’d enlisted in the Air Force, and they made the rounds in groups of from two to twelve. They always wound up at an after-hours place in the city called the Black Hat. Then they drove back to Thornbridge in Danny’s car, and Paul rolled into the sack around five or six in the morning.

  A couple of times, he and Danny parted company early in the evening, and then met again well after midnight at one of the local Thornbridge bars. Those were the times when Danny was anxious to go pick up a girl. He wanted Paul to come along with him so they could pick up two girls, but Paul begged off every time. When Danny asked for a reason Paul merely got sullen and angry and refused to talk with him.

  The thing was, he didn’t know exactly what his motives were. Actually, there was no one clear-cut reason for his not wanting to go quail hunting with Danny. There were a number of reasons, most of which he hardly suspected himself.

  In the first place, and most obviously, there was Ingrid. Or, rather, the memory of Ingrid. That fiasco had been too recent for him to want to get himself involved, emotionally or physically, with any other girl. Once burned, he was twice shy.

  Secondly--not so much a reason as an excuse -- there was the fact that his parents had been dead less than two weeks. To go playing around so soon after their death would be, to say the least, in bad taste.

>   The final--and perhaps most important--reason he didn’t understand himself, at least, not on a conscious level. It was more complicated than the other two and concerned both his parents and his sister.

  In essence he felt he was making use of his sister and the death of his mother and father. Angie didn’t need him, not to the extent he was claiming in his application for discharge. Hell, she would be going to work pretty soon. And Thornbridge was full of uncles and aunts on both sides of the family, all of them a hell of a lot more capable of watching out for Angie than Paul was.

  He remembered, when he was just a kid, hearing his father at the dinner table one time, talking about this woman who worked in the office of Uncle James Dane’s trucking company. It seems her husband had run out on her a few years before and, according to Paul’s father, it was easy to see why the poor guy had up and left. But he had given her four kids before leaving, so even though she had a job she was collecting relief for the kids because they were all under age. And Paul’s father said it was a shame the way that woman treated those kids. He said it was a sure bet she would’ve left the kids, too, except that she was staying around because of the relief money she got for the kids. Which she used on anything in the world except the kids, according to Paul’s father.

  She didn’t feed them enough, and only the cheapest food, and she got them all second-hand clothes and made them wear them till they were practically worn through, and none of the kids ever had so much as a nickel to spend on themselves. It was a damn shame, Paul’s father had said, and he had also said that he couldn’t think of anything lower than a person who would use other human beings that way, without any love or concern for them at all.

  Now Paul was doing exactly the same thing with Angie. Oh, it didn’t show, the way it had with that woman. Nobody was going to point a finger at him and say he was the lowest of the low, but it was the same thing. He was using Angie. He was getting a discharge from the Air Force--at least, he was trying to get one--on the basis that he had to take care of his kid sister. And for God’s sake, he hardly even saw her, much less took care of her! So he was using her, just exactly the same way that woman had used her children, and just as callously.

  But that wasn’t the worst. Paul’s father had said he couldn’t think of anything lower than what that woman was doing, but of course he hadn’t known then that his own son was going to do something one hell of a lot lower. He hadn’t known that his own son was going to use his parents’ death as a way out of the Air Force. He wouldn’t have thought for one second that his son could be as completely low as that.

  Paul never sat back to figure all this out--these were thoughts that filtered through bit by bit, despite his efforts to keep them buried, far down out of sight, to make believe that they weren’t there.

  Gradually, he became aware that he couldn’t allow himself to have a good time when he was out. He stayed gloomy and morose, never really joining in with the crowd, and he couldn’t even think of going along with Danny to pick up a couple of girls.

  And one thing more. This thought wasn’t quite at the conscious level either, but it didn’t have to be. It was as basic to him as breathing, it didn’t have to be thought about. It was this:

  He had been happy all his life. A few times, of course, he’d been discontented or annoyed or upset about something but, generally speaking, his life had been happy. While he had been at home.

  But then he had enlisted in the Air Force and he had gone away from home. And there had been Ingrid, and the squadron commander being down on him, and his parents dying. The whole world seemed to go to hell. And it had all happened after he had left home.

  He wasn’t going to leave home again. Not for anything. That house on DeWitt Street had been home for as long as he could remember. He was going to live there, he was going to be there. He was never going to leave that house again. Not ever.

  And that was why he could be as low as the woman his father had talked about that time. Because he would do anything, anything, to keep from having to leave home again.

  ***

  Uncle James came to the house on the second Thursday after the funeral. He showed up at four in the afternoon, when Paul was up and sitting in the living room, watching television and nursing a hangover.

  Uncle James looked exactly like a ward heeler politician.

  He was short--barely five feet four inches tall--and shaped like a barrel. He always wore bluish-gray suits with vests, wide-collared white shirts, loud ties and black shoes. His face was round and as lined as a prune. He had dark, narrow-set eyes above a round pug nose and a wide, thick-lipped mouth. His eyebrows were bushy and black, sticking way out from his face--his black hair was thinning on top and graying at the sides. He always had a cigar in his month, and he rarely smiled or laughed unless he’d been drinking.

  Uncle James was Paul’s father’s older brother. He was a rough, bitter, money-hungry, ambitious, driving man; everything that Paul’s father had not been. Paul’s father had managed to get to college for two years, while Uncle James had quit school at fifteen to go to work. Paul’s father liked good music, good books, good food and good liquor. He dressed well and was tall and lean and handsome. He and Uncle James were as different as day and night.

  But it was Uncle James who had supported Paul’s father all his life. That had been a bitter dose for Paul’s father to have to swallow, but there hadn’t been any choice. Paul’s father had not been born for manual labor. He had a good mind, a fastidious mind. And he had no particular hunger for money itself, though he did appreciate the things that money could buy. But he hadn’t been able to finish college--he had had to pay his own way, his parents being dirt poor--and without that college diploma and that college education, there just wasn’t any place at all for Paul’s father.

  Except with Uncle James. Uncle James, at twenty-four, had started his own trucking company, with one beat-up, run-down, second-hand junk heap of a truck. He drove it himself, working sixteen to eighteen hours a day, seven days a week. He had driven himself more than he had ever driven the truck and he had made the venture pay. Six years after he’d started, he owned a fleet of fourteen brand-new trucks, he had his own garage out on Western Avenue, and he no longer had to do his own driving.

  He was doing so well, in fact, that he could even make a living for his kid brother, Paul’s father. He brought Paul’s father in as office manager, which meant, in essence, that he was the one who did the talking for James. He talked with the customers, with the union, with the tax people, with the employees, with the automotive dealer from whom the trucks were bought and with everybody else. He was smooth and personable and friendly and honest. He actually was worth what Uncle James paid him. And Uncle James paid him damn well. He didn’t make anywhere near what Uncle James made, of course, but that didn’t matter. He wasn’t that hungry for money.

  Besides, no amount of money would have made up for the fact that he was living on his brother’s charity. And it didn’t matter how valuable he was to his brother’s firm; it was charity because no one else would have given him such a job.

  Although Paul’s father had never voiced his feelings on this matter, it hadn’t taken Paul long to see what the situation was. Before he was in high school, he understood clearly just what the relationship was between his father and his Uncle James. And even though no one was to blame for the situation--least of all Uncle James--Paul had never liked this particular uncle. Uncle James made his father depressed and unhappy, and that was enough for Paul. He disliked Uncle James.

  The death of his father hadn’t changed his feelings in the slightest. In addition, he had a hangover. Therefore, when Uncle James came barging into the house that Thursday afternoon without so much as knocking, Paul looked ironically at him and said, “The door’s unlocked. Come on in.”

  “I’m already in,” said Uncle James, who had never had time to develop a sense of humor.

  “So I notice.”

  “Where’s your sister?” Un
cle James demanded, uninterested in foolish conversations.