"I don't know. That's all I remember, for five years."
He arched his back again, and raked his fingertips over her thighs,
making her shudder and jerk her wings back.
That's when he saw the corpse at the foot of the bed. It was George.
#
He went back to school the day after they buried Davey. He bathed all
the brothers in the hot spring and got their teeth brushed, and he fed
them a hot breakfast of boiled mushroom-and-jerky stew, and he gathered
up their schoolbooks from the forgotten corners of the winter cave and
put them into school bags. Then he led them down the hillside on a
spring day that smelled wonderful: loam and cold water coursing down the
mountainside in rivulets, and new grass and new growth drying out in a
hard white sun that seemed to spring directly overhead five minutes
after it rose.
They held hands as they walked down the hill, and then
Elliot-Franky-George broke away and ran down the hill to the roadside,
skipping over the stones and holding their belly as they flew down the
hillside. Alan laughed at the impatient jig they danced as they waited
for him and Brad to catch up with them, and Brad put an arm around his
shoulder and kissed him on the cheek in a moment of uncharacteristic
demonstrativeness.
He marched right into Mr. Davenport's office with his brothers in tow.
"We're back," he said.
Mr. Davenport peered at them over the tops of his glasses. "You are, are
you?"
"Mom took sick," he said. "Very sick. We had to go live with our aunt,
and she was too far away for us to get to school."
"I see," Mr. Davenport said.
"I taught the littler ones as best as I could," Alan said. He liked
Mr. Davenport, understood him. He had a job to do, and needed everything
to be accounted for and filed away. It was okay for Alan and his
brothers to miss months of school, provided that they had a good excuse
when they came back. Alan could respect that. "And I read ahead in my
textbooks. I think we'll be okay."
"I'm sure you will be," Mr. Davenport said. "How is your mother now?"
"She's better," he said. "But she was very sick. In the hospital."
"What was she sick with?"
Alan hadn't thought this far ahead. He knew how to lie to adults, but he
was out of practice. "Cancer," he said, thinking of Marci's mother.
"Cancer?" Mr. Davenport said, staring hard at him.
"But she's better now," Alan said.
"I see. You boys, why don't you get to class? Alan, please wait here a
moment."
His brothers filed out of the room. and Alan shuffled nervously, looking
at the class ring on Mr. Davenport's hairy finger, remembering the time
that Davey had kicked him. He'd never asked Alan where Davey was after
that, and Alan had never offered, and it had been as though they shared
a secret.
"Are you all right, Alan?" he asked, settling down behind his desk,
taking off his glasses.
"Yes, sir," Alan said.
"You're getting enough to eat at home? There's a quiet place where you
can work?"
"Yes," Alan said, squirming. "It's fine, now that Mom is home."
"I see," Mr. Davenport said. "Listen to me, son," he said, putting his
hands flat on the desk. "The school district has some resources
available: clothes, lunch vouchers, Big Brother programs. They're not
anything you have to be ashamed of. It's not charity, it's just a little
booster. A bit of help. The other children, their parents are well and
they live in town and have lots of advantages that you and your brothers
lack. This is just how we level the playing field. You're a very bright
lad, and your brothers are growing up well, but it's no sin to accept a
little help."
Alan suddenly felt like laughing. "We're not underprivileged," he said,
thinking of the mountain, of the feeling of being encompassed by love of
his father, of the flakes of soft, lustrous gold the golems produced by
the handful. "We're very well off," he said, thinking of home, now free
of Davey and his hateful, spiteful anger. "Thank you, though," he said,
thinking of his life unfolding before him, free from the terror of
Davey's bites and spying and rocks thrown from afar.
Mr. Davenport scowled and stared hard at him. Alan met his stare and
smiled. "It's time for classes," he said. "Can I go?"
"Go," Mr. Davenport said. He shook his head. "But remember, you can
always come here if you have anything you want to talk to me about."
"I'll remember," Alan said.
#
Six years later, Bradley was big and strong and he was the star goalie
of all the hockey teams in town, in front of the puck before it arrived,
making desperate, almost nonchalant saves that had them howling in the
stands, stomping their feet, and sloshing their Tim Horton's coffee over
the bleachers, to freeze into brown ice. In the summer, he was the star
pitcher on every softball team, and the girls trailed after him like a
long comet tail after the games when the other players led him away to a
park to drink illicit beers.
Alan watched his games from afar, with his schoolbooks on his lap, and
Eric-Franz-Greg nearby playing trucks or reading or gnawing on a sucker.
By the ninth inning or the final period, the young ones would be too
tired to play, and they'd come and lean heavily against Alan, like a bag
of lead pressing on him, eyes half open, and Alan would put an arm
around them and feel at one with the universe.
It snowed on the afternoon of the season opener for the town softball
league that year, fat white wet flakes that kissed your cheeks and
melted away in an instant, so soft that you weren't sure they'd be there
at all. Bradley caught up with Alan on their lunch break, at the
cafeteria in the high school two blocks from the elementary school. He
had his mitt with him and a huge grin.
"You planning on playing through the snow?" Alan said, as he set down
his cheeseburger and stared out the window at the diffuse white radiance
of the April noontime bouncing off the flakes.
"It'll be gone by tonight. Gonna be *warm*," Bradley said, and nodded at
his jock buddies sitting at their long table, sucking down Cokes and
staring at the girls. "Gonna be a good game. I know it."
Bradley knew. He knew when they were getting shorted at the assayers'
when they brought in the golems' gold, just as he knew that showing up
for lunch with a brown bag full of dried squirrel jerky and mushrooms
and lemongrass was a surefire way to end up social roadkill in the high
school hierarchy, as was dressing like someone who'd been caught in an
explosion at the Salvation Army, and so he had money and he had burgers
and he had a pair of narrow-leg jeans from the Gap and a Roots
sweatshirt and a Stussy baseball hat and Reebok sneakers and he looked,
basically, like a real person.
Alan couldn't say the same for himself, but he'd been making an effort
since Bradley got to high school, if only to save his brother the
embarrassment of being related to the biggest reject in the building --
but Alan still managed to exude his don't-fuck-with-me aura enough that
no one tried to cozy up to him and make friends with him and scrutinize
his persona close in, which was just as he wanted it.
Bradley watched a girl walk past, a cute thing with red hair and
freckles and a skinny rawboned look, and Alan remembered that she'd been
sitting next to him in class for going on two years now and he'd never
bothered to learn her name.
And he'd never bothered to notice that she was a dead ringer for Marci.
"I've always had a thing for redheads," Bradley said. "Because of you,"
he said. "You and your girlfriend. I mean, if she was good enough for
*you*, well, she had to be the epitome of sophistication and
sexiness. Back then, you were like a god to me, so she was like a
goddess. I imprinted on her, like the baby ducks in Bio. It's amazing
how much of who I am today I can trace back to those days. Who knew that
it was all so important?"
He was a smart kid, introspective without being
moody. Integrated. Always popping off these fine little observations in
between his easy jokes. The girls adored him, the boys admired him, the
teachers were grateful for him and the way he bridged the gap between
scholarship and athleticism.
"I must have been a weird kid," he said. "All that quiet."
"You were a great kid," Alan said. "It was a lot of fun back then,
mostly."
"Mostly," he said.
They both stared at the girl, who noticed them now, and blushed and
looked confused. Bradley looked away, but Alvin held his gaze on her,
and she whispered to a friend, who looked at him, and they both laughed,
and then Alan looked away, too, sorry that he'd inadvertently interacted
with his fellow students. He was supposed to watch, not participate.
"He was real," Bradley said, and Alan knew he meant Davey.
"Yeah," Alan said.
"I don't think the little ones really remember him -- he's more like a
bad dream to them. But he was real, wasn't he?"
"Yeah," Alan said. "But he's gone now."
"Was it right?"
"What do you mean?" Alan said. He felt a sear of anger arc along his
spine.
"It's nothing," Billy said, mumbling into his tray.
"What do you mean, Brad?" Alan said. "What else should we have done? How
can you have any doubts?"
"I don't," Brad said. "It's okay."
Alan looked down at his hands, which appeared to belong to someone else:
white lumps of dough clenched into hard fists, knuckles white. He made
himself unclench them. "No, it's *not* okay. Tell me about this. You
remember what he was like. What he...did."
"I remember it," Bryan said. "Of course I remember it." He was staring
through the table now, the look he got when he was contemplating a
future the rest of them couldn't see. "But."
Alan waited. He was trembling inside. He'd done the right thing. He'd
saved his family. He knew that. But for six years, he'd found himself
turning in his memory to the little boy on the ground, holding the loops
of intestine in through slippery red fingers. For six years, whenever
he'd been somewhere quiet long enough that his own inner voices fell
still, he'd remember the hair in his fist, the knife's thirsty draught
as it drew forth the hot splash of blood from Davey's throat. He'd
remembered the ragged fissure that opened down Clarence's length and the
way that Davey fell down it, so light and desiccated he was almost
weightless.
"If you remember it, then you know I did the right thing. I did the only
thing."
"*We* did the only thing," Brian said, and covered Alan's hand with his.
Alan nodded and stared at his cheeseburger. "You'd better go catch up
with your friends," he said.
"I love you, Adam," he said.
"I love you, too."
Billy crossed the room, nodding to the people who greeted him from every
table, geeks and jocks and band and all the meaningless tribes of the
high school universe. The cute redhead sprinkled a wiggle-finger wave at
him, and he nodded at her, the tips of his ears going pink.
#
The snow stopped by three p.m., and the sun came out and melted it away,
so that by the time the game started at five-thirty, its only remnant
was the soggy ground around the bleachers with the new grass growing out
of the ragged brown memory of last summer's lawn.
Alan took the little ones for dinner at the diner after school, letting
them order double chocolate-chip pancakes. At 13, they'd settled into a
fatness that made him think of a foam-rubber toy, the rolls and dimples
at their wrists and elbows and knees like the seams on a doll.
"You're starting high school next year?" Alan said, as they were pouring
syrup on their second helping. He was startled by this -- how had they
gotten so old so quickly?
"Uh-huh," Eli said. "I guess."
"So you're graduating from elementary school this spring?"
"Yeah." Eli grinned a chocolate smile at him. "It's no big deal. There's
a party, though."
"Where?"
"At some kid's house."
"It's okay," Alan said. "We can celebrate at home. Don't let them get to
you."
"We can't go?" Ed suddenly looked a little panicked.
"You're invited?" He blurted it out and then wished he hadn't.
"Of course we're invited," Fred said from inside Ed's throat. "There's
going to be dancing."
"You can dance?" Alan asked.
"We can!" Ed said.
"We learned in gym," Greg said, with the softest, proudest voice, deep
within them.
"Well," Alan said. He didn't know what to say. High
school. Dancing. Invited to parties. No one had invited him to parties
when he'd graduated from elementary school, and he'd been too busy with
the little ones to go in any event. He felt a little jealous, but mostly
proud. "Want a milkshake?" he asked, mentally totting up the cash in his
pocket and thinking that he should probably send Brad to dicker with the
assayer again soon.
"No, thank you," Ed said. "We're watching our weight."
Alan laughed, then saw they weren't joking and tried to turn it into a
cough, but it was too late. Their shy, chocolate smile turned into a
rubber-lipped pout.
#
The game started bang on time at six p.m., just as the sun was
setting. The diamond lights flicked on with an audible click and made a
spot of glare that cast out the twilight.
Benny was already on the mound, he'd been warming up with the catcher,
tossing them in fast and exuberant and confident and controlled. He
looked good on the mound. The ump called the start, and the batter
stepped up to the plate, and Benny struck him out in three pitches, and
the little ones went nuts, cheering their brother on along with the
other fans in the bleachers, a crowd as big as any you'd ever see
outside of school, thirty or forty people.
The second batter stepped up and Benny pitched a strike, another strike,
and then a wild pitch that nearly beaned the batter in the head. The
catcher cocked his mask quizzically, and Benny kicked the dirt and
windmilled his arm a little and shook his head.
He tossed another wild one, this one coming in so low that it
practically rolled across the plate. His teammates were standing up in
their box now, watching him carefully.
"Stop kidding around," Alan heard one of them say. "Just strike him
out."
Benny smiled, spat, caught the ball, and shrugged his shoulders. He
wound up, made ready to pitch, and then dropped the ball and fell to his
knees, crying out as though he'd been struck.
Alan grabbed the little ones' hand and pushed onto the diamond before
Benny's knees hit the ground. He caught up with Benny as he keeled over
sideways, bringing his knees up to his chest, eyes open and staring and
empty.
Alan caught his head and cradled it on his lap and was dimly aware that
a crowd had formed round them. He felt Barry's heart thundering in his
chest, and his arms were stuck straight out to his sides, one hand in
his pitcher's glove, the other clenched tightly around the ball.
"It's a seizure," someone said from the crowd. "Is he an epileptic? It's
a seizure."
Someone tried to prize Alan's fingers from around Barry's head and he
grunted and hissed at them, and they withdrew.
"Barry?" Alan said, looking into Barry's face. That faraway look in his
eyes, a million miles away. Alan knew he'd seen it before, but not in
years.
The eyes came back into focus, closed, opened. "Davey's back," Barry
said.
Alan's skin went cold and he realized that he was squeezing Barry's head
like a melon. He relaxed his grip and helped him to his feet, got
Barry's arm around his shoulders, and helped him off the diamond.
"You okay?" one of the players asked as they walked past him, but Barry
didn't answer. The little ones were walking beside them now, clutching
Barry's hand, and they turned their back on the town as a family and
walked toward the mountain.
#
George had come to visit him once before, not long after Alan'd moved to
Toronto. He couldn't come without bringing down Elliot and Ferdinand, of
course, but it was George's idea to visit, that was clear from the
moment they rang the bell of the slightly grotty apartment he'd moved
into in the Annex, near the students who were barely older than him but
seemed to belong to a different species.
They were about 16 by then, and fat as housecats, with the same sense of
grace and inertia in their swinging bellies and wobbling chins.
Alan welcomed them in. Edward was wearing a pair of wool trousers pulled
nearly up to his nipples and short suspenders that were taut over his
sweat-stained white shirt. He was grinning fleshily, his hair damp with
sweat and curled with the humidity.
He opened his mouth, and George's voice emerged. "This place is..." He
stood with his mouth open, while inside him, George
thought. "*Incredible.* I'd never..." He closed his mouth, then opened
it again. "*Dreamed*. What a..."
Now Ed spoke. "Jesus, figure out what you're going to say before you say
it, willya? This is just plain --"
"Rude," came Fede's voice from his mouth.
"I'm sorry," came George's voice.
Ed was working on his suspenders, then unbuttoning his shirt and
dropping his pants, so that he stood in grimy jockeys with his slick,
tight, hairy belly before Alan. He tipped himself over, and then Alan
was face-to-face with Freddy, who was wearing a T-shirt and a pair of
boxer shorts with blue and white stripes. Freddy was scowling comically,
and Alan hid a grin behind his hand.
Freddy tipped to one side and there was George, short and delicately
formed and pale as a frozen french fry. He grabbed Freddy's hips like
handles and scrambled out of him, springing into the air and coming down
on the balls of his feet, holding his soccer-ball-sized gut over his
Hulk Underoos.
"It's incredible," he hooted, dancing from one foot to the other. "It's
brilliant! God! I'm never, ever going home!"
"Oh, yes?" Alan said, not bothering to hide his smile as Frederick and
George separated and righted themselves. "And where will you sleep,
then?"
"Here!" he said, running around the tiny apartment, opening the fridge
and the stove and the toaster oven, flushing the toilet, turning on the
shower faucets.
"Sorry," Alan called as he ran by. "No vacancies at the Hotel Anders!"
"Then I won't sleep!" he cried on his next pass. "I'll play all night
and all day in the streets. I'll knock on every door on every street and
introduce myself to every person and learn their stories and read their
books and meet their kids and pet their dogs!"
"You're bonkers," Alan said, using the word that the lunch lady back at
school had used when chastising them for tearing around the cafeteria.
"Easy for you to say," Greg said, skidding to a stop in front of
him. "Easy for you -- you're *here*, you got *away*, you don't have to
deal with *Davey* --" He closed his mouth and his hand went to his lips.
Alan was still young and had a penchant for the dramatic, so he went
around to the kitchen and pulled a bottle of vodka out of the freezer
and banged it down on the counter, pouring out four shots. He tossed
back his shot and returned the bottle to the freezer.
George followed suit and choked and turned purple, but managed to keep
his expression neutral. Fred and Ed each took a sip, then set the drinks
down with a sour face.
"How's home?" Alan said quietly, sliding back to sit on the minuscule
counter surface in his kitchenette.
"It's okay," Ed mumbled, perching on the arm of the Goodwill sofa that
came with the apartment. Without his brothers within him, he moved
sprightly and lightly.
"It's fine," Fred said, looking out the window at the street below,
craning his neck to see Bloor Street and the kids smoking out front of
the Brunswick House.
"It's awful," Greg said, and pulled himself back up on the counter with
them. "And I'm not going back."
The two older brothers looked balefully at him, then mutely appealed to
Alan. This was new -- since infancy, Earl-Frank-Geoff had acted with
complete unity of will. When they were in the first grade, Alan had
wondered if they were really just one person in three parts -- that was
how close their agreements were.
"Brian left last week," Greg said, and drummed his heels on the
grease-streaked cabinet doors. "Didn't say a word to any of us, just
left. He comes and goes like that all the time. Sometimes for weeks."
Craig was halfway around the world, he was in Toronto, and Brian was
God-knew-where. That left just Ed-Fred-George and Davey, alone in the
cave. No wonder they were here on his doorstep.
"What's he doing?"
"He just sits there and watches us, but that's enough. We're almost
finished with school." He dropped his chin to his chest. "I thought we
could finish here. Find a job. A place to live." He blushed
furiously. "A girl."
Ed and Fred were staring at their laps. Alan tried to picture the
logistics, but he couldn't, not really. There was no scenario in which
he could see his brothers carrying on with --
"Don't be an idiot," Ed said. He sounded surprisingly bitter. He was
usually a cheerful person -- or at least a fat and smiling person. Alan
realized for the first time that the two weren't equivalent.
George jutted his chin toward the sofa and his brothers. "They don't
know what they want to do. They think that, 'cause it'll be hard to live
here, we should hide out in the cave forever."
"Alan, talk to him," Fred said. "He's nuts."
"Look," George said. "You're gone. You're *all* gone. The king under the
mountain now is Davey. If we stay there, we'll end up his slaves or his
victims. Let him keep it. There's a whole world out here we can live in.
"I don't see any reason to let my handicap keep me down."
"It's not a handicap," Edward said patiently. "It's just how we
are. We're different. We're not like the rest of them."
"Neither is Alan," George said. "And here he is, in the big city, living
with them. Working. Meeting people. Out of the mountain."
"Alan's more like them than he is like us," Frederick said. "We're not
like them. We can't pass for them."
Alan's jaw hung slack. Handicapped? Passing? Like them? Not like them?
He'd never thought of his brothers this way. They were just his
brothers. Just his family. They could communicate with the outside
world. They were people. Different, but the same.
"You're just as good as they are," he said.
And that shut them up. They all regarded him, as if waiting for him to
go on. He didn't know what to say. Were they, really? Was he? Was he
better?
"What are we, Alan?" Edward said it, but Frederick and George mouthed
the words after he'd said them.
"You're my brothers," he said. "You're. . ."
"I want to see the city," George said. "You two can come with me, or you
can meet me when I come back."
"You *can't* go without us," Frederick said. "What if we get hungry?"
"You mean, what if I don't come back, right?"
"No," Frederick said, his face turning red.
"Well, how hungry are you going to get in a couple hours? You're just
worried that I'm going to wander off and not come back. Fall into a
hole. Meet a girl. Get drunk. And you won't ever be able to eat again."
He was pacing again.
Ed and Fred looked imploringly at him.
"Why don't we all go together?" Alan said. "We'll go out and do
something fun -- how about ice-skating?"
"Skating?" George said. "Jesus, I didn't ride a bus for 30 hours just to
go *skating*."