IN FACT, I’D never read Burroughs; it wasn’t a book my parents would have wanted in the house. All I knew about Tarzan was whatever was in the tap water. When Reg began to lecture me on the racism of the books, I didn’t know if the books were racist, which wouldn’t be Tarzan’s fault, or if Tarzan himself was racist, which would be more problematic. But I didn’t think I could win the argument by admitting ignorance. This left as my only option a quick God, look at the time withdrawal.
I walked home alone through the dark grid of downtown streets. A long train thundered past on my right, setting off the lights and bells of the barrier arms. There was a cold wind flipping the leaves on the trees, and outside Woodstock’s Pizza, a loose scrum of men I crossed the street to avoid. One of them shouted an invitation to me, but it was uninviting.
Todd was still up and he hadn’t read Burroughs, either, but there was a manga version—New Jungle King Tar-chan—and he was all over that. Tar-chan had superpowers. Most definitely. Todd tried to describe the series to me (which seemed to be a sprightly mix of cooking and pornography) and offered to bring me some issues next time he went home, but it wasn’t clear I wouldn’t have to be able to read Japanese.
I couldn’t get him focused on the point now—that Reg was an asshole—because he was so busy making his own: that Masaya Tokuhiro was a genius. Anyway, it was becoming less clear to me that Reg had been so egregiously out of line. And why had I been jabbering away about Tarzan in the first place? That was indiscreet. I must have been very drunk.
• • •
A NIGHT OR TWO LATER, I finally treed Ezra. He had my suitcase, but I was still being punished; it wasn’t convenient just then to turn it over. “You’re too busy?” I asked incredulously. How many floors did he think this apartment building had?
“Correctamundo,” he told me. “That you don’t think so just shows how little you know.”
Two more days passed before he unlocked the broom closet—(there’s shit in there that could seriously fuck up the wells. You could poison the whole town if you wanted, Ezra had told me. It was his job to keep that shit out of the hands of the sort of terrorists who lived on the third floor)—and pulled the suitcase out. It was hard-shelled and powder-blue.
“Oh, yeah,” Ezra said. “I forgot. This guy came by yesterday, said he was your brother Travers. He wanted to wait for you, but I told him he couldn’t even imagine the hissy fit you’d throw if I let some friend or family member stay in your place when you weren’t there.”
I was torn between my disbelief that the visitor had really been my brother, a happy amazement that he’d come for me at last, and a steaming disappointment that Ezra had sent him off, probably never to return. These were complicated things to be feeling simultaneously. My heart flopped in my chest like a hooked fish.
Although my parents continued to get the occasional postcard, the last word I’d personally had from my brother came when I graduated high school. It’s a big world, he’d written on the back of a picture of Angkor Wat. Get big. The postmark was London, which meant he could have been anywhere but there. The fact that my brother’s name was not Travers was the most persuasive detail in Ezra’s account. My brother would never have used his real name.
“Did he say he’d come back?” I asked.
“Maybe. Maybe he said in a couple of days.”
“A couple like two days or a couple like a few days? Did he say a couple or did he say a few?”
But Ezra had had enough. Ezra believed in dispensing information only on a need-to-know basis. He sucked on his teeth and said he couldn’t remember for sure. He’d been busy. He had an apartment building to run.
When we were kids, my brother was my favorite person in the whole world. He could be, and often was, awful, but there were other times. He’d spent hours teaching me to play catch and also cards. Casino and I doubt it, gin rummy, go fish, hearts, and spades. He was a good poker player, but under his tutelage, I was better, if only because I was so little no one expected me to be. We made some serious book off his friends. They paid him in cash, but I took my winnings in the more universal currency of Garbage Pail Kids cards. I used to have hundreds of those. Buggy Betty, the little green-fly girl, was my favorite. She had such a nice smile.
One day, Steven Claymore threw a snowball at me with a rock inside, because I’d said he was ineluctable, which he didn’t like the sound of but proved true. I came home with a spongy lump on my forehead and some gravel in my knee. The next day my brother showed up at school where he held Steven’s arm behind his back until Steven apologized and then my brother took me to Dairy Queen and bought me a chocolate-dipped cone with his own money. There was trouble about this later, both the arm-twisting and the two of us leaving our respective schools without telling anyone, but the family rules of conduct had gotten all vague and convoluted where my brother was concerned and there were no real consequences for either of us.
• • •
SO I’D HAD several reasons for choosing to come to UC Davis.
First, it was far enough from home that no one would know anything about me.
Second, my mother and father had said okay. We’d visited the campus together and they’d found the town practically midwestern. They were particularly besotted with the spacious bike lanes.
But third, and really, I’d come because of my brother, and my parents must have known and had their own hopes. Ordinarily, my father kept his wallet nailed shut and all the bike lanes in all the midwestern-type towns in the world wouldn’t have had him forking over a year of out-of-state tuition when there were perfectly good universities right there in Indiana, one of them merely blocks away.
But the FBI had told us that my brother had been in Davis in the spring of ’87, about a year after he took off, and the government can’t be wrong about everything; even a stopped clock, etc. They’d never said anywhere else they thought he’d been, only Davis.
And I just didn’t think I could do it anymore, this business of being my parents’ only child. In my fantasies, my brother would rattle his knuckles on my apartment door and I’d open it, not expecting a thing, thinking maybe it was Ezra coming to borrow Todd’s Game Boy or instituting new protocols for the building regarding hazardous trash. I would recognize him instantly. God, I’ve missed you, my brother would say, pulling me into a hug. Tell me everything that’s happened since I left.
The last time I saw him, I was eleven years old and he hated my guts.
• • •
THE SUITCASE wasn’t mine. That goes without saying.