PENANCE

Michael was a black belt in karate. Despite the voices and the depression and the anger, he'd been studying martial arts twice a week at a local dojo for three years, since he was fifteen, and he excelled.

He had always been a great athlete; built like a big gymnast, he had, in the last few years, become fanatical about the martial arts and lifting weights in the same way he had become fanatical about God, reading the Bible, studying the occult, and trying to listen to the messages of the snakes.

His athletic ability was amazing: he could jump up, kick the hanging light fixture in our kitchen, a good seven feet high, softly enough so that it didn’t even move, snapping his leg back at the last second; he could drop, instantly, into a split; he could spin in the air, wheeling one hard, weaponlike foot around in a flesh-colored blur.

Michael and a neighbor, Bill, who took karate with Michael on Wednesday nights and was one of his last remaining friends, had discovered the potent combination of speed and working out. They were getting to be—according to me, a kid who also dabbled in speed—speed freaks. They took pills with absurd names: blue torpedoes, white crosses, black beauties, sometimes got their hands on a line or two of crystal meth.

Michael loved speed because it amped his nerves, which he thought was good for both karate workouts and listening for God. Like a ninja, he could hear the sneezes of rodents, the steps of a grasshopper; he could hear angels in trees and raindrops bubbling in the ripped-apart clouds above. If he took enough, he could hear his spine vibrate like a struck triangle, sending a steady harmony down to those weaponlike feet.

We were latchkey delinquents, my brother and I, our parents doing all they could to keep ahead of their debt. The house was almost always empty of adults. But the only real danger my brother and I faced in our suburb, a place with virtually no serious crime, was ourselves. My younger brother spent his afternoons at an overpriced local day-care center for kids aged five to twelve.

In our garage, after school, Michael and Bill sometimes whaled on a punching bag chained to a wooden ceiling beam. They would get revved up on pills, fling sweat all over the place, shout, the chain ringing and clinking.

Bill was a brown belt, but lanky, weak, and less coordinated than Michael. My brother, on the other hand, looked like some Caucasian version of Bruce Lee, his hero, all sinewy muscles, striations, full of long, complicated silences. Michael was smart enough to keep his grander delusions to himself, to guard his secret life from his friends and family, and this, certainly, had a lot to do with how quiet he became.

One day, a year or so after the murder of S, I was in my room sketching, my artistic outlet back then. I was coming off a lunchtime high—a good time to sketch. My brother was out cutting the grass, a dictate from my father—it had to be cut by the time he got home.

Most days I went to a guy named Kirk’s house, who was fifteen but looked thirty, whose college-age brother sold cocaine and had a propensity for high-speed, somehow survivable, car crashes. Years later, Kirk lost everything and then went into rehab and found God. He got a girl pregnant after that and married her to do the right thing without considering how much he secretly hated her. But back then he had these parties every day after school because his parents traveled for weeks at a time on business—actually, there was just kind of an ongoing party at Kirk’s house, a kind of puking, fucking, teenage bacchanal. I shot pool and drank cheap beer and smoked weak pot. You could hear kids creaking the beds upstairs sometimes, usually the football players and their girlfriends. Evidently there were some layovers, some business deals gone bad, and now Kirk’s dad was home for the week and I didn’t have anything to do but go home and sketch myself down from a high.

So I was at home, upstairs, nothing to smoke, nothing to drink, nothing to do: door closed, a breeze blowing the curtains in, the smell of freshly mown grass, the voices of kids shouting in the distance. The lawnmower engine sputtered, stopped. I was lost in what I was working on. So it took a few seconds, or maybe minutes, for me to notice the silence, look up.

When I looked up, Michael and Bill were standing over me, Bill grinning, Michael blank-faced, empty-eyed. I tried to look nonchalant, like I was ready to ignore them. I said, in a half-whisper, What’s up? I felt my heart beat in my throat and temples.

What the fuck are you drawing? said Bill over my left shoulder (usually I drew surreal, menacing-looking landscapes).

Go cut the grass, Michael said, deadpan. Me and Bill got stuff to do.

I said, calmly, it was his turn this week, feeling tired and distant from the pot I'd smoked earlier.

They wanted me to answer this way. It was in their smiles. This wasn’t about grass-cutting. It was about karate. They took an arm each, then floated down the stairs, out the sliding patio door, into the yard—tall green grass, high wood fence, trees, long fat shadows.

Start the lawnmower.

Fuck you.

Bill laughed, said, Oooh myyy God.

Michael clenched his fists, as if this were the cue to begin, assumed his karate stance. Start the mower, motherfucker, or I'm going to kill you.

Fuck you, I said. I smelled fresh-cut grass. The sun was burning hot, the heat dry. Everything was green. I tried to smile, to break the tension.

The first kick stunned me, landing in the center of my chest, my ribs giving under it.

Start the mower. Or I will kill you.

I was on the ground now, on my hands and knees, and I couldn’t breathe. I got up, world hazy at the edges, and started walking toward the house. I was afraid to fight, especially my brother, who towered over me with his strength like a God at that time. The house wobbled, tilted, leaned, moved away.

Next came a swing-around foot sweep. Right out of Enter the Dragon, a movie my brother had seen at least thirty times. I looked up at the white-blue sky, the light purple scars of cloud. Grass clippings stuck to my back and arms. I heard bugs as if they were tunneling in my ears.

I got up, leaned over, waited for my breath, which didn’t come. I turned bluish, then green. My brother kicked me softly in the ass, pushed me forward with his heel.

Start the mower. I'm serious.

I walked over to the mower. Hot gas fumes blurred the grass ahead of it. Putting my foot on the metal base, I pushed it a few feet forward.

Bill was ecstatic, as happy as I ever saw him, laughing and leaning over and slapping his knee. He flashed his speed-freak tooth-grinding smile.

Practice for the test tonight, he said. Sidekick, stance, frontkick, stance, punch, block, roundhouse.

I saw it coming, saw all that energy coming in slow motion—the tense curve of Michael’s ankle, the point of his toe. I didn’t even put up my arms. Didn’t flinch, duck, or even close my eyes.

Once I was on the ground, everything went still. Things just stopped. I couldn’t hear anything. I felt no pain or shame. I was beyond all that, or suffused in it to the extent that it no longer registered as unique. I was a coward, sure, but a hardened one, one who could take a good share of abuse before cracking, which, in my case, usually meant pleading for some kind of amnesty. I thought, for an instant, because I had hit my head so hard on the ground, that I was going to die—that Michael had actually done it this time—right here, alone in my suburban backyard.

Up above me, against a big background of sky, Michael was shirtless, shoeless, wearing only shiny blue Adidas sweatpants with three white stripes down each leg. He crouched, hiking up his pants at the thighs to assure flexibility in the next kick.

Fake the front and roundhouse, said Bill, fake the front and roundhouse.

I got up slowly, not even thinking, not even trying to be defiant, and spit one of those high-viscosity cottonmouth pot lugies right in the middle of my brother’s sweaty, muscled chest. Not a cowardly act, and honestly I don’t know where it came from.

Michael wiped it off quickly, flung it, stringy, from his fingers. He faked front, roundhoused. I'd seen the move before—was a Bruce Lee fan myself—knew what was coming. I ducked. He missed, landed hard on his back, and immediately jumped up.

Oooh myyy God, said Bill, laughing.

Michael had me on the ground in seconds. He hocked up a good one, spit, and let it hang, thick and lumpy, over my face. I shook my head back and forth, clenched my lips.

Open your fucking mouth, pussy, Bill said. Open it! He’s going to spit in your fucking mouth, you motherfucking cocksucking pussy motherfucker.

You fucker, I screamed, but with my mouth half-closed so he wouldn’t spit in it. Moo fuffer.

Just as it landed hot and sticky on my face, our neighbor, Mr. Connelly, the guy who had accidentally backed his truck over our dog the year before, came into the yard with a rake.

Leave him alone, he yelled. Michael, let him up. Greg, you want to come over to my house until your mom gets home? Come on. Stay over here for a while, he said, holding the rake, his face red, his giant belly hanging over his belt and jeans.

I wiped my face on my hand, my hand on my jeans. I thought Mr. Connelly was probably glad that I got a good beating. He knew I was a little hellion, mixed up in all kinds of unlawful stuff. I used to grind up his curb with my skateboard. He thought I deserved it, and I probably, for something, did.

My nose bled. Drops of blood spotted the ground in front of me.

No, I managed finally, and I was crying and pissed that I'd let my brother make me cry. I was also pissed at old man Connelly because I hadn’t started crying until he'd asked me if I was okay.

I'm fine, I stammered. I'm going inside.

Old man Connelly stood watch, rake in hand, from his yard. Michael started the lawnmower to finish the grass. Bill cruised, blowing me a kiss on his way out of the yard, laughing, rubbing his eyes to mimic crying, flipping me off.

Maybe ten minutes later, as I was looking out the kitchen window after cleaning the blood off my nose and upper lip, tears streaming down my face now that I was alone, I noticed the mower idling by itself in the middle of the yard.

I leaned forward, craned my neck, to see where Michael was, if he was coming inside. What I saw sent a jolt through me. I thought of it later as the most tangible evidence, since the shouting about seeing God four years earlier, of my brother’s loosening grasp on the world.

Michael was out by a tree in the corner of the yard. He'd found the sharp stump of a broken-off branch at face level and he was talking to it, arguing with the tree or himself, gesticulating as if giving a grand speech, a sermon. He then reared his head back and slammed his forehead onto the branch.

He backed up, blood pouring down his face. I backed away from the window—what—went back to the window, thinking my brother was going to kill himself.

He slammed his face on the sharp branch again.

I sat down, dizzy.

Within a few minutes Michael came in the back door, theatrical, absurd. Oh man, he said, blood all down his face. Oh God!

I didn’t look up.

Rock flew up and hit me in the head, he said, trying to gauge my expression, my body language. I got what I deserved, you know. I got what I deserved. Right?

I looked at him now, at his forehead. It was a big open gash, fairly serious, a mouth on the wrong part of his face. All the anger seeped out of me. I put ice in a towel and handed it to him. We were standing alone in the kitchen, brothers after school, a slice of twisted Americana.

Blood dripped from the towel onto the kitchen floor, falling in red oblongs, splatting wetly. He needed several stitches, although later he would refuse to go to the hospital, say that he was fine, even though the wound would ooze through the night, making pink circles on his pillows.

He saw the whole thing, he told me. He sees everything.

I hoped he meant Bill or Mr. Connelly, but I knew he didn’t.

His snakes got loose that night. It must have been ten or eleven, maybe midnight. Earlier, just before my father got home, Michael had made a big deal about the incident on the lawn, said he was sorry, that he wasn’t really thinking about killing me, acted nicer than he had in months, repeatedly apologizing. Then everyone arrived home—mother, father, my younger brother.

I didn’t mention the beating, the bloody nose. After several beatings, this one simply being emblematic, I knew telling was the worst thing, a way of insuring that the next one would be worse. In this way my brother and I became closer in our secrecy, and further from our parents than we already were. My father, if he found out Michael had hit me, would kick Michael out of the house for a few nights and then sulk around feeling bad about it and this, in turn, would make Michael, when he returned, want to kill me all over again, which would make my father kick my brother out, and so on.

Michael and I stuck to the flying-rock story about his wound. I was petrified—of my father kicking Michael out, of Michael coming back and beating me, of Michael killing himself, of the life we were all stuck in. I lived with an almost constant adrenaline flow when I was at home.

We all looked around for the snakes, under beds, behind sofas; in the garage, in tool cabinets, behind an old freezer; my father lifted up heating-duct grates. Nothing.

The next morning I opened up my underwear drawer to three writhing snakes. I jumped back, momentarily panicked.

I called Michael an asshole, told him to take them away. My father, dressed for work, stood in the doorway, not wanting to be bothered by our fighting. All right, you guys, my father said, I'm getting really sick of this.

When my father left, Michael leaned over me, whispered in my ear: It’s good to have snakes in your room when you sleep. They absorb your pain while you dream.

I could smell his rotten smoke breath. Get out, I said.

I love you, he said.

Get out.

A few weeks after this incident, a neighborhood kid, walking through the woods behind our house, found all three snakes dead. Michael had smashed their heads with a large rock on which he had written the word god with a marker pen.

The kid, named Bart, and something of a neighborhood tattletale and nuisance and an avid Eagle Scout, came to our door on a Saturday morning to tell us what he had found, knowing, after seeing Michael in our backyard, that the dead snakes were his.

My mother, still in her bathrobe, with a cup of coffee in her hand, told Bart to go home, that the snakes weren’t ours—if there even were snakes out there—and that he didn’t know what he was talking about. Bart was thirteen or so and was shocked. He couldn’t believe my mother, a soft-spoken, even meek, woman, as generous as anyone I’ve ever known, the woman who gave the best candy for Halloween, the woman who every kid liked, would shout at him. What had gotten in to her? He was just trying to help.

My mother spent the rest of the day trying not to think about the dead snakes and the rock, about what all these clues might be leading to. When I brought up the snakes at dinner that night, one in a gloomy stream of gloomy dinners while Michael was around, my father told me to shut up and eat.

I hate this fucking family, I mumbled.

What?

It’s a little late for me to be rambling.

Eat your dinner, smart guy.