Читать книгу The Brothers Bishop - Bart Yates - Страница 8

When I was five years old I stuck a pencil in a nice man’s eye. He was at a desk, typing a letter, and I was sitting on a stool next to him, scribbling a brontosaurus on a sheet of typing paper. I remember looking over at him and wondering why he was so intent on what he was doing, and I remember wishing he’d pay more attention to me. So I held the eraser end of the pencil by the corner of his eye and waited until he turned toward me before making my move. I didn’t push too hard and his lashes caught the bulk of the attack, but it still must have hurt like hell.

“Jesus Christ, kid!” he yelled, cradling his eye socket. “What did you do that for?”

I didn’t have an answer for him then. I still don’t. Sometimes you hurt people for no reason. Just because you can.

So this is how it ends. The day, I mean, with the sun dropping in the dunes at my back, coloring the surface of the water red and gold. I’m standing barefoot in the sand and the cold tide is licking at my ankles like a mutt with a foot fetish. I live half a mile from the beach, so I come here almost every day of the year to clear my head. It’s summer now so I don’t have the place to myself like I do in the winter, but I can usually find a quiet spot and pretend the ocean belongs exclusively to me.

Tommy’s coming home tomorrow, with his new scrotal-buddy and a young married couple in tow. He called last week and asked if he could come see me, but he waited until I said yes before he told me he was bringing an entourage. When I told him I wasn’t really in the mood to entertain anybody besides him, he got pissed.

“Don’t be a dick, Nathan. You’ve had the cottage to yourself for three years. Is it going to kill you to have a little company for a couple of weeks?”

I told him that was the whole point, because we haven’t seen each other since Dad died, and it would be nice to get together without a bunch of strangers barging in and taking over. He said his friends weren’t really strangers, though, because “Philip is practically your brother-in-law” and “Kyle and Camille are my two best friends in the world.” He assured me we’d all get along famously.

He’s been like this his whole life. He thinks if he loves somebody, everyone else he cares about will automatically love that person too. What an idiot. But of course I caved in. I always do. You can’t say no to Tommy.

Tommy’s my younger brother and a complete flake. He bounces from one job to another and one relationship to another and one financial crisis to another and all he does is eat, sleep, shit and fuck.

But he gets what he wants from everybody, anyway, because he won the genetics lottery. He got our mother’s looks—thick blond hair and startling blue eyes, clear skin, high cheekbones, delicate hands and feet—and he also got every ounce of her charm. I’m a clone of my father—pug nose, high forehead, black hair, brown eyes, sloped shoulders, heavy limbs, and yes, okay, an admittedly unattractive tendency to think of the world as a very screwed up place. If you saw us together on the street you’d never believe we’re brothers.

I don’t believe we’re brothers, either. There is no way in hell somebody as beautiful and lighthearted as Tommy could be carrying around my father’s genes. I think Mom took one look at me when I was born and decided she wasn’t going to have any more dark, surly children, so she went and had an affair with a surfer or a Swedish porn star or something and got knocked up with Tommy.

I don’t really remember our mother. She died when I was five years old and Tommy was only three, so everything we know about her we got from my father. From what he said, though, she sounds exactly like Tommy. Dad said that Mom could make people love her without even trying. He liked to tell the story about the time they were at a restaurant and she couldn’t make up her mind about what kind of soda to order. Dad said she must have been overheard, because within half a minute three glasses appeared on the table—a Coke from the waiter, a Pepsi from the busboy, and a Dr. Pepper from the maître d’.

I guess I should warn you, though, that Dad was a liar. He had at least thirty different versions of that particular story—sometimes he’d say Mom was wearing a black evening gown with long sleeves, and the next time he’d go on about how her tits were spilling out of a skimpy red halter top. He always tailored his stories to fit his audience.

But something tells me most of what he said about Mom was true, because my brother can charm the short hairs off a troll, and he sure as hell didn’t learn that from anybody he grew up with. I think charm is genetic—a personality fluke equivalent to being able to shape your tongue like a U. Why I didn’t get any of Mom’s magic and Tommy got it all is just another of life’s little inequities I intend to confront God with at the earliest opportunity.

I’ve been standing in the water long enough for it to have covered my feet with sand and strands of foul-smelling seaweed. It’s tempting to just keep standing here until I’m buried up to my neck.

I’m not ready to deal with Tommy yet. Especially not with three complete strangers in tow. This will sound terrible, but my life has been considerably better since Dad died. When we cremated him, it felt like someone took a pillow off my face and I could finally breathe for the first time in my life. Now Tommy is my sole remaining relative, and the truth is I hate that someone is still alive in the world who has a familial claim on me. I don’t want Tommy to die or anything, I just want him to forget about me and leave me the hell alone.

It’s not about love. Of course I love the little shit. But he knows too much about me that no one else on the planet knows, and when he’s around I have no choice but to think about everything I hate about myself and my past. He’s a gangrenous leg attached to my psyche, and I need to hack him off before he infects my whole fucking soul.

Okay, okay, that’s pretty dramatic. But it’s exactly how I feel. And if you were me, you’d feel that way too.

A couple of teenage kids run by, both of them dressed in ratty old cutoffs instead of swimsuits. They’re probably fifteen or so, and slender and tanned, and one of them slows down and smiles and waves. “Hey, Mr. Bishop.”

Great. One of my idiot students. Just what I need today. He’s new in town and it takes a second to remember his name. “Hi, Simon. Having fun?”

“Yeah.” He picks at some peeling skin on his shoulder. “We’ve been here all afternoon and now we’re getting ready to go out on my dad’s new boat before it gets too dark.”

I glance at the falling sun. “You better hurry. There’s not much daylight left.”

He grins. He has straight, white teeth with just the hint of an underbite. “I know. Dad’s trying to prove to Mom what a great sailor he is or something. We’ll probably all drown just because he won’t admit he’s not very good at night sailing.”

The other boy is waiting for him and Simon gives another little wave. “I guess I should go. See you later.”

He runs to catch up, water flipping from his heels onto his back. I watch him go, admiring his speed and lightness.

His ass isn’t bad either.

I’m a high school English teacher. I never used to work during the summer, but for the last three years I’ve been forced to teach remedial grammar courses to kids like Simon who can’t tell a pronoun from a potato. And no, I’ve never done anything improper with one of my students, and I never will. But it doesn’t hurt to look.

Is anything more flagrantly sexy than a teenage boy? They’re so full of hormones and semen it’s a wonder they can walk. Most of them spend every spare minute playing with themselves, but there are a few who haven’t yet figured out how to deal with all the sensations in their bodies. You can see it in their eyes—a moist vulnerability, like their corneas are floating in cum and they haven’t got a clue what’s going on or what to do about it. Simon is like that, I think. He’s a true innocent, a kid who would be horrified to know what most of his peers are doing three times a day in bathrooms and bedrooms and behind the bushes. But one of these days his body will override his hang-ups and he’ll erupt like Vesuvius, spurting jiz on everyone and everything within a thirty-mile radius.

Mark my words. I know the type well.

A gull flies overhead, calling out. Why do they always sound so lonely? The breeze from the ocean picks up and I raise my arms like wings to let it blow over me and tickle the hair in my armpits. The gull dips and glides and I try to imitate how it moves.

Tommy and I grew up on the beach. Not literally, of course, but we spent almost every day of every summer here when we were little kids, and when we were in high school we were both lifeguards. I can’t imagine growing up someplace far away from the ocean and the dunes. What’s it like to go home to dinner without salt on your skin and sand between your toes?

I live in southern Connecticut in a little town called Walcott. The name of this beach is Hog’s Head Beach, and it’s about two hours north of New York City and an hour or so south of Providence. I’m thirty-one years old and except for the six years when I was in college and grad school I’ve never lived anyplace else and I never will. Sure, the town is backward (like every other small town in America) and the winters are cold and real estate is expensive, but who gives a crap? I own my cottage, and I’m within easy walking distance of a good pub, the public library, and a terrific bakery. A quarter mile from my front door in the other direction is a small cliff with a lighthouse on it (my closest neighbor, Caleb Farrell, lives in the house attached to it), and woods all around, and this beach.

I know almost everybody in town and they know me, and while that sometimes drives me crazy, for the most part it makes me feel safe. Tommy graduated high school and moved away the following summer, but I think he was a fool to not come back after he finished college like I did. He keeps trying to get me to move. He’s worried because I never get laid and he says I’m wasting my life and he hasn’t been to see me since Dad died because he says that Walcott is the rectum of the universe and he’d rather glue his nipples to a car bumper than spend another second in “that godforsaken hellhole.”

But when I asked him why he was finally coming back for a visit, he said he was homesick.

I knew it would happen, sooner or later. He can pretend all he wants, but he loves this place more than I do.

Walcott is a resort town that no one who isn’t rich can afford to live in, unless, like me, you happen to be lucky enough to have inherited a house that’s been in the family for over a hundred years. My great-grandfather was a fisherman in the early nineteen hundreds and he built the cottage himself, which apparently made my great-grandmother insane because it took him nearly eleven years to finish it. He’d work on a room for a few days, then he’d leave to go fishing for months at a time, refusing to rush the job or hire somebody else to do it. I feel sorry for my great-grandmother, but I’m glad the old bastard did it that way, because he built the thing with a mind-boggling attention to detail that only comes from sitting around for weeks on end with nothing to do but fish and think about what you want your house to look like.

He built it like a boat. I don’t mean that it’s shaped like one, but he designed it with the same practicality and space-saving principles you find on small ships—nothing is wasted, nothing is merely decorative. It’s two stories high, with the kitchen, guest room, bathroom and living room downstairs, and a gigantic master bedroom upstairs. The woodwork is simple and straightforward, but it’s all oak and maple and pine, and when the sun comes through the windows in the morning the walls and the floors shine like church pews. Bookshelves are everywhere; the door to the guest room is actually a bookshelf that swings out on hidden hinges and shuts again with a quiet click. There’s a potbellied stove in the corner of the living room, and a modest wine cellar under the kitchen, and in the master bedroom there’s a massive old Edwardian desk looking out from an alcove onto the cornfield behind the house. Family legend has it that my great-grandfather stole the desk from some snotty English nobleman who lived in Rhode Island, but like the rest of our family history the story is probably bogus.

My favorite part of the house is the narrow, spiral staircase that connects the two levels. It’s the only incompetent piece of carpentry in the house, rickety and uneven and somewhat dangerous to negotiate if you’ve had more than your share of red wine on a cold winter night. All the upstairs furniture had to be lifted through the windows from the outside because none of it would fit up the staircase. But my great-grandfather built it like that on purpose. He was an exquisite craftsman and could easily have come up with something elegant and functional, but for some inscrutable reason he chose to build an eyesore instead. And what’s really funny is that in his will he stipulated that no one was to alter the staircase in the slightest, save for replacing boards if the old ones rotted out.

He never told his son or his wife why he did it that way and no one in the family since has had any clue. Maybe he wanted to restrict access to the upstairs; maybe he thought it was funny to have something ugly and out of place in an otherwise handsome home. Personally, I think he left it that way to piss off his wife. But whatever the reason, whenever I look at it, I wish I’d known the contrary old son of a bitch. The staircase screams attitude, and the only people in the world worth knowing are people with attitude.

There’s a note on the front door of the cottage when I get home. It’s from the “chairman” of Walcott’s Historical Society, Cheri Tipton, politely reminding me that we had an appointment earlier that afternoon, and she was sorry to have missed me, and could I please call her at my earliest convenience to reschedule.

Shit. I forgot all about it. She called last week and asked if she could come over and take a walk with me through the cornfield, because she said she came across some historic papers that seemed to suggest that an old Indian village—predating European settlement by several centuries—may once have stood on my land. I told her I’d never found so much as an arrowhead out there but she insisted on stopping by anyway. I’m not surprised I forgot to be here. I have a bad habit of forgetting to show up for anything I don’t want to do.

I crumple up the paper and stand outside the door for a minute, wondering who else is going to invade my house this week. Jesus. Maybe I should just open a Holiday Inn and put up a neon sign advertising multiple vacancies.

I make no apologies for being a hermit. My choice to live alone has been deliberate and entirely voluntary. As a general rule, people piss me off and I’m a much happier man when I’m by myself. I should mine the front yard and buy a couple of dobermans and then maybe I could finally get some privacy.

I take a deep breath. There are two big bushes on either side of the door with cantaloupe-sized white flowers that smell faintly of cat urine. I have no idea what kind of bushes they are, but they’ve been there my whole life. I could ask Tommy, I suppose, but who cares? I don’t need flowers by my door; I need a state-of-the-art security system.

My father was a mean-spirited, petty old man, and a complete waste of human DNA. Aside from that, though, we got along fine.

It’s impossible to talk about my dad without getting mad. Tommy says I should get over it and move on, but Tommy has never understood the healthful benefits of loathing someone with your whole heart. He thinks my bitterness is self-destructive and difficult to maintain, but, truly, it’s no effort at all. It comes naturally to me, like breathing, or taking a crap.

I’m being flip because I know Tommy’s right. My resentment of my father eats at me like cancer. And I should get counseling or a lobotomy or something and maybe eventually learn how to deal with everything he did to us as kids and adults—all the endless cruelties, large and small, he so liberally bestowed on us—except there’s one thing I know I can never get past or dismiss so I won’t even bother to try.

He loved us.

What a bastard.

Yeah, I know how fucked up that sounds, but there it is. If he’d hated Tommy and me, I think I could maybe forgive him for how he treated us. But he didn’t hate us. He loved us, and still he went out of his way to hurt us, time and again, and he never apologized for anything.

His name was Vernon Michael Bishop, and he had a glorious tenor voice. He sang for local weddings and funerals, and people always said it was like listening to an angel. He ran the local paper, the Walcott Gazette, for a number of years, and I’ve been told—ad infinitum—how he generously allowed charities and “good causes” to advertise for free. He was interim mayor for two years when Cloris Adams suddenly died in her office and the town needed a replacement until the next election, and he organized the annual food drive for the Lion’s Club every Christmas. He was a big, hearty man who looked you right in the eye and did his best to make you laugh. He was a pillar of the community. So goodness gracious, what’s my problem? The man was a saint, right?

Oh, did I neglect to mention that Vernon Michael Bishop liked to beat up little kids? Not all little kids, of course. Just two very special little boys. His sons.

The worst time—though certainly not the first—was when he found Tommy in bed with Jacob Roberts. Jacob had spent the night (he was the last overnight guest we were ever allowed to have, incidentally), so I had given up my bed and slept in the living room on a cot. When Dad got up in the morning and came down to boil water for tea, he decided to poke his head in and see if Tommy and Jacob were awake.

They were nine years old, and they were naked, and apparently Tommy had his fist wrapped around Jacob’s puny penis when Dad walked in on them. I was just waking up and came running into the kitchen just in time to see dear old Dad drag Tommy out of the bedroom and begin slamming his head on the counter by the sink. Jacob was scrambling into his clothes in the bedroom and wailing like a cat in heat. I tried to get Dad to stop but I was only eleven, and when I grabbed his arm and begged him to let go of Tommy, he backhanded me hard enough to break my nose and send me flying into the dish cabinet. I still have scars on my neck and shoulders from plunging through the glass.

Tommy told me later that Dad apparently came to his senses when he looked over and saw me crumpled on the floor in a puddle of blood. He let go of Tommy—who was only marginally better off than me—and calmly told Jacob to stop crying and go home. Dad called an ambulance for us and was soon arrested by the police, but because of his sterling reputation in town and the heinousness of Tommy’s actions (discussed, no doubt, in the strictest confidence), the charges were dismissed after a stern warning from the sergeant on duty, who then graciously offered Dad a ride home and probably gave him a cheerful clap on the back as he was getting out of the car.

Dad gave his word that he’d never hit his children again, and, being a man who followed his own peculiar code of honor, he never did. But with physical violence no longer available to him, he was forced to come up with alternative strategies to continue waging war on his children. And that was when he began his long, inspired campaign of verbal and emotional abuse that continued until the day he died.

In retrospect, I wish he’d kept hitting us.

There’s a full moon tonight. I like to sit on the porch behind the house at night and look at the stars, but the moon is too bright this evening, blotting out everything else in the sky. The mosquitoes are out in force but I’ve smeared myself with citronella and vanilla extract so they’re mostly leaving me alone. I’ll have to check myself later for ticks, though, because nothing discourages those evil little vampires and Connecticut is rife with Lyme disease.

In the moonlight the cornfield looks like something out of a Grade-B horror movie. The rows are in shadow, stretching back a quarter of a mile or so, and the tops of the cornstalks sway back and forth in the breeze, whispering to each other. I think Cheri Tipton is full of shit about my land being the site of an ancient Indian community, but in the stark light of a full moon it’s easier to believe her, for some reason. I’m with Hollywood: If there are ghosts in the world, they live in cornfields.

The corn isn’t mine, by the way. I rent the field out to a local farmer, Dale Cromwell, who started farming it for my grandfather almost fifty years ago. He pays me enough to cover the land tax, and every spring, like clockwork, he tries to convince me to sell the land to him. I could probably get a lot of money for it, but I don’t want to take the chance of him deciding to build a house on the property and blocking my view.

Anyway, I called Cheri again and she’s coming back in the morning after my class at the high school. She’s bringing what she insists on calling “the evidence” with her, and she thinks it will persuade me to let her dig around out there with a “small team of archaeologists” from my alma mater, the University of Connecticut. I told her I didn’t imagine Dale would appreciate her messing up his corn, but she said she thought she could reach some kind of agreement with him if only I’d say yes.

I didn’t flat out tell her no, but I’m going to. I’m sure someone in my family in the last hundred years would have known of something like this village she’s talking about, and I’ve never heard a word about it. And even if there is something to her story, she says she doesn’t think there will be any “significant ruins,” because she says it’s just a place this mysterious tribe lived for a few short years and then disappeared from without leaving much behind except vague rumors. So what the hell does she think she’s going to find? Chewing gum wrappers?

Whatever, I don’t want people traipsing around in my field all summer with pickaxes and shovels and making noise when I’m trying to work. Cheri Tipton can kiss my ass if she doesn’t like it.

I get up at sunrise and stumble downstairs to the shower, then I make breakfast and go back upstairs with a cup of tea to sit at the desk and grade papers. While I’m circling misspellings and comma splices, I sip at my tea and stare out the window and play with the loose brass handles on the bottom desk drawer with my toes.

When I was in junior high and high school, mornings used to be when I wrote in my journal. From the time I was thirteen until I left home for college, I got up every day and scribbled down whatever I was thinking. For reasons that are utterly obscure to me now, I used to think I’d eventually want a written record of my teenage years.

I was in junior high at the time and my English teacher was having us read The Diary of Anne Frank, which gave me the idea (along with every other overimaginative kid in the class) to start keeping a journal. After all, I did have my very own Nazi living in the same house with me, and our bedroom door was hidden behind a bookshelf, just like Anne’s. I bought a fountain pen and one of those cool black leather notebooks with unlined pages, and I used to sprawl out on my bed and write for half an hour or so right after I woke up.

It was all there: daily life with Tommy, first loves, fights with Dad, first sex, jobs, dreams, nightmares, masturbation fantasies, grievances, and an embarrassing amount of self-important, pseudointellectual rambling. There’s a place in the downstairs bedroom where Tommy and I (who shared that room our entire childhood) kept things we didn’t want Dad to find. It’s a cubbyhole in the closet under a loose board, and until I moved out of the house after high school I always kept my journal there. In the five years between when I first started writing and when I moved out, I had seven full notebooks in the cubbyhole.

It’s odd but I never once worried about Tommy reading my journals when we were kids. A lot of the stuff in them was about him, of course, but having a common enemy in the same house with us made us considerably closer than most siblings, so I never cared if he read them or not. Besides, he was usually in the room with me while I was writing. I still remember the first paragraph, word for word:

Tommy’s fucked-up. He put an empty bottle of ketchup back in the refrigerator and I asked him why and he blushed and wouldn’t tell me until I pinned him on the floor and threatened to fart on him. Then he told me he didn’t want to throw away the ketchup bottle because the jar of mayonnaise would get lonely.

What a spaz.

Okay, so Anne Frank didn’t have to worry about me usurping her rightful place on library bookshelves. But stuff like this made Tommy laugh, and there were hundreds of similar entries. He used to dig my notebooks out at night before bed to read whatever I’d written earlier that day; he said he wanted to “keep an eye on the weird-ass things” going on in my head.

And he was furious when I told him I’d burned all seven of the notebooks. He said those memories were a part of his life, too, and I should have thought to ask him before I did such a thing. I suppose he’s right, but I’m not sorry. He wasn’t the one who had to sit in the same house with those fucking things day after day, wondering who would find them after I was dead and imagining what they’d think and say about us when they read them. So I got drunk one winter night and carted the notebooks out to the bare ground of the cornfield, poured gasoline over them and struck a match. The burning leather smelled horrible but I didn’t budge until all the paper had turned to ash and the covers were only charred, unrecognizable scraps. I was crying while I did it, but the heat from the fire felt good on my face and hands.

Tommy likes to pretend that our childhood was one lighthearted episode after another, but Tommy has yak shit for brains. He never read the journals after he left high school, and he’s managed to convince himself that Dad was Andy Griffith and Walcott was Mayberry, and he and I were typical teenage boys. Sometimes I wish I hadn’t burned the journals; then I could shove them in his face and make him read the stuff he doesn’t want to remember.

But that would mean I’d have to read it, too, and that’s the last thing I want to do.

The kids file in one after another, all hormones and pimples and self-conscious posturing. There are twelve of them, freshmen and sophomores, and since there’s no air-conditioning in this furnace of a classroom, the girls wear only short skirts and sleeveless blouses (quite a few of them without bras) and most of the boys are decked out in lightweight shorts and tank tops. Simon comes in right before class, still wearing what looks like the same pair of cutoffs he had on yesterday and a T-shirt with big holes in it, one of them gaping open enough to reveal a few inches of his stomach. He smiles at me and sits in an open desk at the front of the room. His blond hair is uncombed and curly and covers half of his ears.

It’s nine o’clock in the morning, and for the next hour and fifteen minutes these poor, grammatically challenged dimwits are my prisoners. They don’t want to be here and neither do I, but I push back from the desk with fake enthusiasm.

“Okay, did everybody read the chapter about verbs last night?”

In the front row, Vernette Shute rolls her eyes and Peter Russo swats at a fly. Simon shifts lower in his seat and opens his legs wide; his shorts are loose enough to reveal green and black plaid boxers underneath. The rest of the kids stare out the open windows and either scratch themselves or yawn and put their heads on their desks. One boy picks at an inflamed mosquito bite on his left bicep.

I try again. “Who can tell me what a verb is?”

I lead a lethargic discussion for fifteen minutes and then give up and hand out worksheets and a reading assignment to complete by the end of class. I collect their homework assignments from yesterday and sit at my desk to grade them. By nine thirty the heat and the boredom have me fighting to keep my eyes open. I unscrew the lid on my thermos and pour myself a cup of strong, bitter coffee, but what I really need is a hypo full of adrenaline pumped directly into my heart. Sometime around ten they start finishing up their work and stirring, looking at me expectantly, wanting to be dismissed early.

Vernette has fallen asleep with her head on her book, but when I start shuffling papers on my desk she jerks awake and blinks like an iguana on a rock. Peter, a sweet, dumb kid with a sweet, dumb wrestler’s body, puts both arms over his head and stretches. His tank top is too big for him and a small brown nipple exposes itself. Simon is watching but looks away quickly when Peter glances over at him.

I clear my throat. “Okay, hand in your worksheets and be prepared tomorrow to talk about the chapter you read today.”

They’re all out of the room in a virtual stampede before the last word is out of my mouth. That is, everybody except for Simon. He makes no move to get up.

“Anything wrong, Simon?” I ask, getting to my feet.

He glances up at me and blushes for some reason. “No, I’m just tired.” He makes up a few questions about the assignment, obviously not interested in my answers, then finally seems to realize I’m waiting to go. He stands up fast, awkwardly scooping up his textbook in front of his groin, but not before I see what he’s trying to hide: the poor little bastard has an erection, straining away cheerfully at the fabric of his shorts. His face is strawberry red.

I pretend not to notice and he says good-bye and charges out of the room ahead of me.

What caused that, I wonder? Peter Russo’s hairless nipple? A random breeze? Maybe Simon isn’t as innocent as I thought.

Jesus. I wouldn’t be fifteen again for anything in the world.

Cheri Tipton was a friend of my mother’s, a fact she reminds me of every time I see her—which fortunately is only once every six months or so. She’s waiting for me on my front steps when I get home from teaching, and she’s dressed in Birkenstock sandals and a loose yellow sari type of thing.

Cheri’s fat. She’s about five foot two, and she weighs over two hundred pounds. The sari hides a lot of her bulk, but her bloated ankles and shins are visible under its hem, and her feet look like they’re being choked by her sandal straps. Her short hair is dyed raven black and she’s got a mole on her forehead the exact same color. Maybe she dyes the mole, too.

She kisses me on the cheek with wet lips. “Hi, Nathan. I’m a little early.”

I tell her not to worry about it and open the door. She waddles in ahead of me without waiting for an invitation, and steps through the kitchen into the living room, looking around with unconcealed curiosity.

“It’s exactly like I remember it.” For some reason there’s a tinge of sadness in her voice.

“You’ve been in here before? When was that?”

She laughs, and the big silver crucifix earrings she’s wearing jiggle against her cheeks. “Years ago. But I used to come here all the time before you were born.”

I seriously doubt it. She may have been friends with Mom, but Dad didn’t like having company in the house and I’m sure he wouldn’t have put up with a frequent guest. I tell her to have a seat and I go upstairs to change clothes. When I come back down she’s standing by the sliding doors, staring out at the cornfield.

She hands me a folder. “Take a look at that, would you? I’ve highlighted the part that piqued my curiosity.”

Inside the folder is a copy of a letter dated March 4, 1708. It’s two pages long and signed by someone named Henry Bradstreet. The letter is addressed to his brother, John, in London, England, and is mostly about day-to-day life in rural America, painting a somewhat rosy picture of “the colonies,” with the apparent intention of convincing John to relocate across the ocean. I scan through it, skipping over chunks of flowery writing about God’s providence and mercy. The highlighted section reads:

“…I heard today of a story that might perhaps interest you, knowing as I do your fondness for tales concerning the Red Man. Minister David Shepard told me in passing of a cache of antique farming implements, of Indian origin, that two of his slaves unearthed recently as they were clearing a patch of ground behind the main house. Minister Shepard is quite intrigued, because he believes these tools to have belonged to a nomadic tribe of savages no longer extant….

When I look up she’s staring at me with an expectant look on her face. I return the letter to the folder and hand it back to her. “That’s it? That’s all you’ve got?”

She frowns. “The Shepard farm was right here, Nathan. I tracked down the old surveyor’s records and figured out where the boundaries were, and your cornfield overlaps the property almost exactly.”

“So? What makes you think there’s anything else to find out there? Did this Bradstreet leave any other letters behind?”

She has nervous hands. Right now she’s worrying at the cuticles of her fingernails with her thumbs. “Not that I can locate. But this actually isn’t the first time I’ve heard reports about the tribe he’s speaking of. I’ve come across several articles in scholarly journals that speculate about a previously undiscovered native people who used to live in this part of Connecticut.”

She needs to get out more often. “Look, Cheri. You said yourself there’s probably nothing to find.” I wave at the cornfield. “Dale Cromwell’s been plowing around out there for years and never turned up a thing except rocks and weeds and an occasional dead crow.”

She smoothes her dress. Her eyes are brown and bloodshot. “I know. But maybe there’s something farther down. Maybe something’s been overlooked.”

I scratch at a spider bite on my knee. “Why are you so curious about this? I thought the Historical Society was mainly interested in restoring old houses.”

She sniffs. “You obviously haven’t been to visit our museum in a while. We now have a rather extensive collection of Native American artifacts.”

The “museum” she’s talking about is a one-room building that used to be a welding shop. The last time I made the mistake of checking it out, there were only three tables in the room, covered with trinkets from the big days of commercial whaling and a few gaudy brochures advertising tours of historic homes. I remember nothing about it really, aside from being distinctly unimpressed.

“I see. But even so…”

“Oh, for goodness’ sake, Nathan, what’s the harm of letting me poke around out there for a bit?” She actually has the balls to sound irritated. “Don’t you find this the least bit intriguing?”

I shrug. “Not really.” I open the sliding doors for her and step outside onto the back porch. “But I guess it won’t hurt if you want to look around.”

If she thinks I’m going to let her dig up my cornfield on the strength of a two-hundred-year-old letter and a story about a hole full of rusty old tools she’s out of her mind.

She starts to walk toward the cornfield but after a few steps she glances back at me. “Aren’t you coming?”

“I don’t think so. I’ve got company arriving in a few hours and I need to get the house ready.”

She looks put out but manages a polite smile. “Oh? Anybody I know?”

God, I hate nosy people. I smile back sweetly. “Watch out for the ticks. They’re bad this year.”

Tommy said he’d get here “some time after noon,” so I decide not to waste the next few hours cleaning the cottage when I could be on the beach getting the last bit of private time I’m going to have for quite a while. I yell out the back door to Cheri telling her I’m taking off and she can call me later if she finds anything. She’s bending down by the stone wall on the east side of the cornfield, poking around in the dirt with a stick. She waves at me and yells thanks then goes back to digging up worms for her young or whatever it is she’s doing.

When I’m retired like she is, I swear to God you won’t find me scratching in the mud with a stick, looking for potsherds and tepee poles and who knows what else. I plan to spend my days on the beach, sleeping on the sand and listening to the waves roll in.

I park the car in the farthest lot from the entrance and cut through the dunes, and when I emerge by the water it only takes a few minutes to get to an isolated spot. I strip off my shirt and sandals and plunge into the ocean immediately, floating on my back and closing my eyes and letting the tide carry me wherever it wants.

I read a poem once that compared waves hitting the shore to the pulse in a human wrist. I can’t remember the exact words, but it talked about how the ocean was the world’s heart and the beaches were its arteries and veins. I’m not usually too keen on eco-poetry, but that one stuck with me for some reason. I paddle around and hum to myself for a few minutes, putting Tommy and Cheri Tipton out of my mind as much as possible.

“Hey, Mr. Bishop!”

The voice is so close it startles me and I thrash around for a second, searching for who called me, but I can’t find anybody. I tread water and spin in a slow circle.

A head explodes out of the ocean not two feet away from me. I lurch away, panicking, before I recognize Simon. He’s got a shit-eating grin on his face.

“Simon! Jesus Christ, I could kill you!”

His grin just gets bigger and he pushes his wet hair behind his ears. “Hey, Mr. Bishop,” he says again. “Nice day, huh? How are you doing?”

“Fine, fine, couldn’t be better. I just peed myself is all.” I splash water at him. “Where did you come from?”

He swims a few feet closer to shore so that he can stand. “I was over there in the dunes taking a nap when I saw you and decided to come say hi.”

I dog-paddle over to him and put my feet down in the sand, too. He’s about six inches shorter than me, because the ocean comes up to his neck while it’s only up to my armpits. “So you don’t have a job this summer? Or are you getting paid to scare the crap out of people minding their own business at the beach?”

“Dad and Mom won’t let me get a job because it’s already the middle of the summer and they say I need the time to study. I got way behind last year at my old school and they want me to get caught up before the fall.”

A wave pushes into us and moves us a little closer to shore. “And hanging out here counts as studying?”

He shrugs and his shoulders make a brief appearance above the surface of the water. “I’m doing good in my classes so they don’t care.”

I almost tell him he’s obviously not doing so “good” in English but then decide not to be a jerk. “What other classes are you taking?”

“Just remedial math. It only meets on Tuesdays and Thursdays.” He turns his head and sneezes, and the sun glints off the moisture spraying out of his mouth, making a brief but delicate snot rainbow. He laughs. “Cool.”

Why am I talking to this kid? “Well, I guess I should be going.”

He looks disappointed. “How come? You don’t teach in the afternoons during the summer, do you?”

“No, but I’ve got company coming into town. For all I know they may already be here.”

He walks with me as I head toward shore, plowing through the water. His ribs unveil themselves an inch at a time, and then his waist and butt, and eventually we’re both on dry sand. He digs around in his ear with a pinkie finger. “Yeah? Who’s coming?”

“My brother and three of his friends.”

Now why did I tell him that? When Cheri Tipton asked me the same thing I made her eat silence.

“Cool,” he says again. “Is he older or younger than you?”

“Younger. Two years younger.”

He reaches down to brush sand from his shins. The shadow from his body angles off to his left and he suddenly squats to hold his knees. “I’ve always wanted a younger brother but my folks don’t want any more kids.”

“Are you an only child, then?”

He nods, squinting at the sun. “Yeah. I had an older sister once but she died when I was a baby.” He stares up at me. “I bet you were a pretty good older brother.”

I barely know this kid. What makes him say something like that? I pick up my shirt and shake it out. “Yeah, well, I guess I should be going.”

He nods. “Okay.” He looks forlorn for some reason.

“See you tomorrow in class?”

He nods again.

I head toward the parking lot but when I get to the dunes I turn around. Simon is still hunkered down where he was, watching me.

Cheri left another note on my door. This one says “Hi, Nathan. Thanks for letting me have a look. The site looks promising! I’m going to keep searching through my archives and the Web and see if I can unearth more information. I’ll be in touch.”

Wonderful. Isn’t it precious that she has a hobby?

I’ve already put clean sheets on the bed in the guest room (after Dad died I sold the twin beds Tommy and I used to have and replaced them with a double), but now I open up the hide-a-bed in the living room and get it ready for whichever couple ends up sleeping out here. Having people visit wouldn’t bother me so much if they weren’t taking over the whole goddamn house.

I love this room. Books are everywhere, and there’s a ponderous old armoire made entirely of oak that takes up most of the north wall. It was already an antique when Grandpa bought it in the nineteen forties, and it’s probably worth a fortune by now. But what’s inside it is even more valuable: behind the locked doors is a small but impressive collection of first edition books, packed tightly onto three glass shelves. Grandpa didn’t have much money, but every time he had a little extra he’d go out and buy a rare book, and quite often he even managed to find a signed copy. God knows how, but he got his hands on first editions of Dickens and Tennyson and Kipling and Emerson and just about everybody else famous who wrote a book in the nineteenth century. If Cheri Tipton and her history-buff friends knew what was in this armoire, their shit would turn green for a month.

On a whim I get the key for the cabinet out of its hiding place (I keep it in a vase that belonged to my mother) and unlock the heavy doors. As I’m swinging them open the distinct aroma of old books—that weird combination of dust and paper and leather peculiar to used book stores and library basements—hits me full force. I love that smell. The best hours of my life have been spent in a quiet corner or under a tree or on the beach with a book in my hands. I’ve been told on more than one occasion that I should stop reading so much and actually have a life, but do you know what I’ve figured out? People in books are much more interesting than the people who’ve told me that.

I pull out a small black copy of essays by Emerson. The cover is slightly water-damaged, but the pages are unmarred except for places in the text where somebody has marked various passages with a pencil. I riffle through it and I’m startled to find that somebody in my family has underlined many of the same sections I’ve always loved. Whatever our differences, every single member of my family has always felt the same way I do about books in general and the Transcendentalists in specific—even my fucked-up father.

Emerson saved my life in college, by the way. I know that sounds melodramatic, but I’m not joking. I was planning to kill myself one night (attempt number three if I’d gone through with it, but who’s counting?) when for some reason I picked up a tattered copy of The Norton Anthology of American Literature instead of the bottle of pills next to it on the table by the bed, and I discovered the “Self-Reliance” essay for the first time. It was like I’d been having a nightmare and all of a sudden a sweet old man reached out of a book—and across a century and a half—to shake me awake. Scoff if you will, but I swear I could feel him in the room with me the whole time, sitting beside me and talking softly, like someone keeping watch over a sick friend. I know this makes me sound like a crackpot, but once or twice I even thought I felt a hand on my head.

Are there people still alive in the world who are as wise and kind and modest as everybody says Emerson was? I’ve never met anyone remotely like him, but I suppose that might simply be a reflection on what I deserve. I mean, look at his social circle: Thoreau, Whitman, Melville, Hawthorne—his journals and letters read like a Who’s Who from that era. Great people draw other great people to themselves.

And who do I draw to me? Cheri Tipton and Simon Hard-on. Jesus.

I’m standing on one bare foot with my other foot on top of it, and I’m still wearing my swimsuit and reading my favorite dead guy’s words when there’s a knock on the door in the kitchen. I yell out, “Just a minute,” and put the book back in the armoire, but before I can lock it up again I hear the screen door open and footsteps, and then Tommy is standing in the living room doorway staring at me.

He smiles. “Nathan? What are you doing?”

My eyes are suddenly wet and my throat feels tight. “Nothing,” I mumble. “Just thinking.”

He’s dressed in khaki shorts and a white cotton shirt with the two top buttons open, but that’s all I have time to notice before he walks over and pulls me close to him, burying his face in my neck. His hands are cool and dry on my back. A lot of people have hang-ups about touching other people’s skin, but that’s never been a problem with Tommy.

He pushes me away for a second, holding my shoulders, and says, “You’re so dark you look like an Indian,” then he hugs me again before finally letting go. He smells like coffee.

I finish locking the armoire. “Where are your friends?”

“They’re outside admiring your rhododendrons. Come out and meet them.”

“Let me get some clothes on first.”

“Don’t you dare. I want them to see how beautiful my big brother is.”

He’s always saying shit like that, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t like it. Compared to him I look like Quasimodo, but he never seems to notice. I can’t help but smile at him and he takes me by the hand and pulls me after him into the kitchen.

I may be the older brother, but this is the way it’s always been with us. My earliest memories are of him leading me around by the hand as soon as he could walk. I thought I’d finally escaped the leash when he moved to New York, yet every time he comes home I dust off my old collar and let him reattach the chain. I’ve been told my whole life how lucky I am to be so close to my brother, but I can’t tell you how often I’ve dreamed of being an only child or a member of a family where the siblings can’t stand each other.

No matter what anyone tells you, love is not necessarily a good thing.