Baby brother is carrying a sackful of groceries when he lets himself panting into the place. He comes slow-stepping through the workshop and up the ramp into the debauched wasteland of Cecil’s living area.
“Cecil? It’s Ben,” Ben has one free hand cupped across his nose. “You home? Brother? You alright?”
Cecil’s still in pajamas, soiled ones, propped against the partial wall behind his mattress and smoking a Marlboro with rapacious concentration. On the bedside table are partly empty or overturned beer bottles and two wide-mouthed mason jars junked with his cigarette leavings: charred rolling papers and still-smoking butts mashed into a fine black scree of sedimentary ash.
Ben sets his sack on Cecil’s couch, steadying himself against the doorjamb and the smell.
“Brother . . .”
Cecil holds up a hand, buying some time, drawing his cigarette down in one last crackling drag.
“What’s . . .” Ben interrupts himself with a burp. “What are you doing?”
Cecil coughs out a blustery white cloud of smoke.
“Quitting.”
He drops what’s left of the cigarette into a mason jar, takes a pencil and his pack of Marlboros and makes his notation in the lid.
“That makes six today. I get three more.”
“Three more what?”
“Cigarettes, idjit.”
The idea was they’d grill a few steaks, watch today’s away game against Iowa State. But Cecil forgot Ben was coming by, and the house reflects his tatterdemalion state. The kitchen’s even meaner than the living room, days-old dish plates shellacked with dried oatmeal and refried beans and peanut butter paste and curdled milk. Banana peels rotting in the sink. There’s plenty of room in his fridge for the groceries but nothing Ben would deem fit for consumption.
Ben finds some pink rubber gloves under the garbage disposal and snaps them over his shirt cuffs. He starts running hot soapy water for the cleanup.
“Get yourself a shit, a shave, and a shower,” Ben shouts from the kitchen. “Game starts in a half hour and you smell like a pigpen, if you want to know the truth.”
From his side of the knee-wall Cecil mutters some wiseacre incoherence under his breath.
“This place needs some sunshine,” Ben says, cracking the mullion windows over the sink. He walks into the living room and throws the screen door wide. Even with the cold breeze Cecil doesn’t budge. Ben makes a move for the mason jars, intent on dumping the offending ashtrays into the wastebasket.
“Leave off.”
“Oh my God, Cecil. The smell . . .”
“The sight, too. Reminds me why I’m quitting.”
Another inadvertent burp from Ben.
Cecil smiles.
“You’re looking a little green around the gills yourself.”
“I was up late last night.”
“Meditating over a bottle of hooch?”
“Something like that. You have any Pepto in the house?”
“Bathroom. Behind the vanity.”
Cecil hears baby brother searching through his medicine cabinet.
“This crap tastes like microwaved chalk,” Ben says, coming back to the living room with the Pepto. “But I sure do like your new toy in there.”
“Must have been made in Taiwan because it’s already broken.”
“Let’s get you washed up.”
Cecil shakes his head.
“What?”
“I can’t.”
“Why?”
Cecil massages his right shoulder.
“Gimped my shoulder again. Now I can’t get back out of the tub. The other morning I was stranded two hours almost in that thing.”
“What about your toilet?”
Cecil picks at his sheets.
“Brother . . .”
“It’s been a couple days.”
“Jesus, Cecil. How do you get this bad and not call?”
Baby brother undresses Cecil, helps him insert an ass bullet, a humiliation Cecil hasn’t endured for at least two decades and one that he wouldn’t mind avoiding for two more after today, then lifts him into the empty rig and wheels him into the bathroom and hugs him grunting onto the toilet.
While Cecil’s bowels are emptying he can hear Ben finishing the dishes, stripping the mattress, starting a load of laundry.
Getting into the tub is tougher than it ought to be, but they finally accomplish it without major mishap. Once Cecil is installed in the water Ben mixes two shandygaffs in the kitchen. Cecil doesn’t have any lemonade so baby brother improvises with Coors and orange Kool-Aid, dials up the game on television and punches the volume so they can catch the color commentary from the bathroom. Ben delivers Cecil’s shandy to the bathtub and then lowers his bulk, both hands clamped about his own beer, carefully into Cecil’s empty rig, which is parked beside the tub.
Cecil drinks the entire beer in one go, licking an orange, powdered moustache from his whiskered upper lip. He hoses his lopsided body with the handheld showerhead, soaping his skeletal legs—they’re thinner than Ben’s wrists—with arms that are starting to fail him.
He can tell that the serrated sight of this latest scar has Ben’s stomach spinning cartwheels.
“Where’s that new boy nurse?”
“I told him I was healed.”
“I’m calling the service and get him back starting tomorrow.”
Cecil doesn’t answer. But he’s not arguing.
Ben touches Sputnik and says, “How long before they fix this thing?”
“Insurance wants more paperwork before they’ll fix it. I hadn’t yet filled out the warranty.”
“Give me the forms and I’ll get it done.” Ben finds something on the checkerboard tile worth looking at. “Have you ever thought about moving in with me and Becca?”
“As often as I think about rolling off a bridge.”
“We’ve got the room. Or will have it, once the new addition is built. And I’ve already told the contractor to build one of these swing sets for the shower. For when you visit.”
“Hand me that razor and that shaving cream, will you?”
Cecil beards his face in white foam and shaves without a mirror, the fingers of his left hand doing advance work for the blade. The individual noises of the basketball game soothe his scraggled nerves: the squeal of a shoe, the breathy grunts from a dead-ball brawl, the lonesome shrill of a whistle.
“There’ll come a time when you won’t be able to live like this any longer. Alone, I mean.”
With the showerhead Cecil spritzes first the razor and then his clean-shaven cheeks. He’s developed a talent for turning silence back on Ben and is flexing it now. Eventually he says, “I can see how from where you’re sitting, my life here might not seem like a whole helluva lot to write home about . . .”
“What are you . . .”
“Don’t interrupt! It’s mine and I made it. Made it out of nothing. Capital-M made it. It’s the only life I got and I tend to like it. So stop worrying that fat little head because I’m fine. I will be fine.”
“You’re fine.”
“Capital-F fine. Now hand me the fucking shampoo.”
“What you are is well down the road to another pressure sore and surgery, possibly traction . . . that’s capital-T traction, brother . . . if you remember . . .”
“The only thing I can’t do is get back out of this tub. Go fetch me another beer, then help me up so we can see the goddamn game already.”
Ben eyes him awhile.
“I’m going to interpret this conniption as a good omen.”
After bringing a second pair of Kool-Aid shandygaffs in from the kitchen baby brother lifts Cecil’s naked and dripping proportions into the rig. While Cecil performs his skincare check Ben sits on the toilet. The brothers sip their fruit-flavored beers and try to avoid the touchy topic of home healthcare.
He’s wearing flannel pajamas and his lucky game-day boots when Ben finally gets him tucked back into the living room. The bed has been remade with a fresh waterproof slipcover, crisp cotton sheets, and a comforter. The Cowboys are neck and neck with the Cyclones, the scoring’s tit for tat. Nevertheless Ben takes a break to broil the steaks and pan-sear some mushrooms. Ben serves him dinner in bed and, despite Cecil’s protestations, manages to swipe the giant ashtrays, hiding them out of sight in the garage while they eat. Two beers and Cecil’s steel-wool world has blurred to blessed velveteen. He hoovers the steak like he hasn’t eaten in weeks and, after his plate is cleaned, lights another Marlboro.
“Nothing like a smoke after a good meal,” he sighs, leaning back into the pillow.
“Okay Blondie.”
“Bring me one of those ashtrays.”
“Nope.”
“Where’m I gonna ash?”
“It’s not my problem. I’m still eating.”
Cecil resumes that shut-eyed rapture Ben walked in on earlier.
“You think Mother and Dad were happy?” Ben asks.
“Why?”
“No reason.”
His eyes are still closed.
“It was different between them after I went into the hospital. Dad was different. He’d been riding me so hard for so long. I’d push back sometimes but he’d push back even harder. Back and forth like that was how we talked. Then I was hurt and he couldn’t push anymore. Mother wouldn’t allow it. Dad was beside himself. He couldn’t figure out how to be around me. Couldn’t talk to me the way he would a normal person. There was always this . . .” Cecil’s eyes have opened, “. . . pity.”
“I was mad at you after the accident.”
“Mad.”
“Jealous maybe. Mother and Dad were always gone to visit you in the hospital. I had to make my own breakfast, lunch, and dinners. Do the chores on my own. Walk to school on my own.”
“Dad rode you twice as hard. I’m sorry.”
“What are you sorry about? I’m sorry. Sorry for being mad. Sorry about my . . .”
“Ben,” Cecil taps an ash into the steak sauce on his plate, hissssss . . . , “you were twelve.”
Ben looks grateful for the interruption. In almost fifty years, this is as close as they’ve come to discussing the accident.
“I remember one fight in particular. It was right in my hospital room. I’m strung up in traction, pretending to sleep. And they’re carrying on about the farm. Back and forth. Really going for the other’s soft tissues. Dad was expecting I’d work the harvest and now he’s having to hire someone instead. I guess you were too little to pick up the slack. Mother’s saying to him how you mustn’t be neglected. How he needs to see our new circumstances in a more positive light. But she puts it a little plainer than this. So then he digs in. You know how he’d get. But she stays on him. Badgers him just speechless. Finally he’s had it. Storms out. But I hear him stopping at the door. ‘Well,’ he says. ‘I love you Ida.’ Then he huffs it out the door and on back home, I guess.”
“I wish I’d seen that.”
“The thing I remember is the way he said it. He really drew out the ‘well.’ Then he spit out the other part like it was spoilt milk. I mean he couldn’t get it out fast enough. You could tell it cost him, saying that.”
Halftime’s almost over. Ben clears their plates into the kitchen and when he retrieves the ash-blackened mason jars from Cecil’s workshop he comes back carrying a big gift-wrapped box, which he presents to Cecil without commentary.
Cecil opens the present in similar silence.
“What’s a Toshiba . . . Satellite . . . P-R-O?”
“It’s a notebook-type computer. You’re supposed to be able to plug it into the wall and get the time and temperature, the news and whatnot, right from the phone line.”
“I’d just as leave keep the phone line free for dialing time and temperature.”
“This is different. There’s more. It’s called the worldwide web. They’re saying it’s the next big thing.”
“Looks to me like the next big thing in Japanese paperweights.” Cecil squints around what’s left of the cigarette, turning his head sideways. “Are you catting around on Becca?”
“What?”
“Why are you so interested in Mother and Dad all the sudden?”
“No reason.”
“I find out you’re leaving Becca I’ll get up out of this bed and open some whoop-ass on you right here.”
Ben falls into the couch cushions with an overblown groan.
“I think . . .”
“What?”
“I think Becca might be . . . could be thinking about . . . leaving me. Maybe. I don’t know.”
Cecil opens his mouth but then promptly shuts it. A beat as he reconsiders.
“Can’t blame her, really.” He’s trying hard not to smirk. “You find yourself living all alone, think about putting up in my spare bedroom. I’ll take real good care of you, baby brother.”
Ben’s snigger gives Cecil permission to do the same and soon they’re cackling like hyenas.
“Asshat,” Ben laughs.