River of Heaven Read online

  Then my phone rings, and it’s Arthur calling. “Are you watching CNN?” he asks.

  I tell him I am.

  “Your brother,” he says.

  “Yes,” I say. “It’s him.”

  I keep the television on throughout the day, waiting for more news, and while I wait, I talk to Stump. I tell him about Cal and how, when we were kids, I thought he hung the moon. Back then I thought he was like someone I’d see in a movie, one of those rockabilly cats, all slicked up and ready to bop. He was a real tomcat, my father said. Cal, who wore gabardine slacks with red flames stitched on the hip pockets, and two-tone shoes just right for dancing to Carl Perkins or Jerry Lee Lewis or Lefty Frizzell at the juke joints. Some evenings, I’d see Cal all jazzed up in one of his shiny rayon shirts, sleeves rolled up on his biceps. He’d be uptown, sitting on the hood of his coupe, just waiting for the world to come to him, and I’d think, there he is, there’s my brother.

  One night, Grinny Hines came out of the Verlene Café and said, “Buddy, that shiny shirt makes you look like a queer.” Cal got off his coupe, stood face to face with him, this man who made his money from running gambling operations for the mob that operated out of places like St. Louis and Chicago and Detroit. He was a dangerous man, this Grinny Hines, but Cal didn’t care. He punched him between the eyes and put him down. That was Cal, quick to act when he needed to, unwilling to take any guff, which worries me to death now that I know he’s at that feed supply with that gunman.

  I tell Stump how the two of us, when we were boys, slept in the same bedroom in our shotgun house in Rat Town. Two bedrooms in that house: one for my mother and father, and one for Cal and me. Sometimes, when I was a small boy, I’d wake up afraid of the dark—maybe I heard a noise outside, or maybe I thought I saw some sort of shape in the shadows—and I’d lie there trying my best not to call out to him, not to admit I was scared to death.

  One night, he must have known that I was frightened because he said to me, “Sammy, are you asleep?”

  “No,” I said, “are you?”

  I ask Stump how I was supposed to know how stupid that was. I was just a kid.

  Stump’s on the floor by my chair and I’m rubbing my finger over his head. “I’m talking to you, ain’t I, dope?” Cal said, and the next morning he told the story to our parents and it quickly became our family joke. One of us would make a blunder—drop a dish, stub a toe, knock over a glass of milk—and someone would say, “Hey, you asleep?”

  When I think about the times when everything was good in our house, I think of that good-natured teasing, and I wish our life together could have always been like that. But there was Dewey Finn, and, because of him, everything between Cal and me would change forever.

  ARTHUR COMES OVER IN THE AFTERNOON, AND HE SAYS, “Gee, Sammy. Shouldn’t you maybe go out there? Shouldn’t you be there for your brother?”

  How do I admit that more than likely Cal doesn’t want anything to do with me? How do I tell Arthur that once Cal found out that I walked the wrong side of the street when it came to the baby-oh-baby, it was the beginning of the end of what it meant to be brothers?

  “I’m going to wait it out,” I say, and I keep the television on, hoping for more news.

  It comes in bits and pieces. The gunman is a man named Leonard Mink. CNN has a picture of him now, and I lean forward in my chair studying it: a lean man with a long nose and not much of a chin. His cheeks are all caved in, and his hair is combed up in spikes and held in place with styling gel the way young men do these days. To me, he looks like an ostrich, a very pissed-off ostrich, and it’s easy for me to imagine him in that grain elevator office holding a gun on Mora Grove and Herbert Zwilling and my brother.

  The standoff continues, and eventually CNN cuts away to report the other news of the day: the recovery of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the war in Iraq. Dusk comes on, and soon I hear the whack of the evening paper against my front door and then the delivery boy’s bicycle, chain rattling against its guard, as he heads on down the sidewalk.

  Stump wakes up when he hears the noise, and he yawns and sniffs at the air. I move through my house, switching on lights, and when I open the front door, I find Arthur’s granddaughter, Maddie, standing on the porch, the rolled tube of my newspaper in her hand.

  Without a word, she steps inside. Again, she doesn’t have on a coat, just a T-shirt, her slender arms bare, and a pair of blue jeans that hang from her hips, gathering in folds around her tennis shoes. She lays the newspaper on the library table by the picture window. Then she turns to face me. “If you’d like company,” she says, and her eyes go down to the floor. She folds her hands in front of her. “That is, if you wouldn’t mind,” she says, “I’d like to sit with you awhile.”

  I glance over at Arthur’s house, where I see a light on in the kitchen. I can even see him at the sink, washing dishes, and I realize I’ve let the time go by all day without a thought of eating anything.

  “Does your grandfather know where you are?” I ask.

  “He told me it was all right.”

  I never would have guessed that I’d be eager for this company, but here she is, this girl, and it pleases me to know that she and Arthur have talked about me today, that more than likely he went home, after being here to watch the television with me, and he said to her how sad it was for me to know about Cal held hostage out there in Ohio, and how a man hadn’t ought to be alone at a time like this. Now here she is to keep me company, and the gesture overwhelms me as if somehow the three of us are family.

  “Okay, then,” I say, and I close the door.

  “Have you had supper?” she asks, and it’s like she knows I haven’t, knows I wouldn’t even have given it a thought. “It’s all right to be worried,” she says. “I don’t have any brothers or sisters, but I know what it’s like when people go away from you. People you love. I can imagine what it’s like for you now.”

  I remember what Arthur told me about his son, Maddie’s father, and how he took off for Mexico and hasn’t surfaced since. I suspect she can imagine what it would be like if she were to turn on the television one day and see a photo of him flashed on the screen, the same way it’s been for me seeing Cal. It’s like a door opened and the dead just walked right in.

  “You must have better things to do than to spend time with me,” I say.

  Stump is sniffing around her feet, and she gets down on her knees and scratches his head. “Who says I came to see you?” She looks up at me and smiles. How lucky I am to have this girl I’m just starting to know, who’s willing to offer her smile, her gentle teasing, as a way of saying she’s here with me, here because she knows there’s no one besides her and Arthur to ease my way. “Stump,” she says. “What say we get something to eat?”

  So we do. I open a can of duck and potato for Stump while Maddie warms a can of chicken noodle soup on the stove. She makes herself at home in my kitchen, finding a pan in the cupboard, opening the pantry for the Saltine crackers. “You can set the table,” she tells me, and I’m happy to have that chore, to find the soup bowls—I even use the Currier and Ives china bowls that my mother always saved for holidays—and the spoons, and the cloth napkins I keep folded in a drawer. Just like that, we set up shop, moving about the kitchen, bumping into each other once or twice and sharing a chuckle over what klutzes we are.

  Maddie drops a spoon, and without thinking I say, “Hey, you asleep?” She picks up the spoon and looks at me. “It’s what my brother and I used to say to each other,” I tell her, and she comes to me then and puts her hand on my back. I think of the way Vera touched me at the Seasoned Chefs.

  “He’s going to be all right,” Maddie says. “Just wait. You’ll see.”

  Then, as if she’s conjured it, Cal’s name is coming from the television, and we hurry into the living room to see what’s happening.

  He’s on the screen, not just his photograph, but him, in the flesh. It’s dark in Ohio, and he’s outside the feed supply,
his face lit up by the news stations’ lights. There are microphones in his face, and reporters are shouting questions at him: What happened in there? Who fired the shot? Is Mink alive? Two police officers are trying to escort him through the crowd. It’s snowing hard now, and the snow is gathering on the bill of his cap. He keeps his face down, and then he’s gone, the police officers parting the crowd of reporters, and I see them easing him into the back of a squad car. My last image of him is through the window of the car, as it drives away. He still has his head bowed, but at least I know that he’s safe.

  The camera focuses on a CNN reporter, a handsome man with blond hair. He says the story isn’t yet certain, but earlier in the evening, the woman, Mora Grove, walked out of the feed supply. She said it was Cal who convinced Leonard Mink to let her go. Cal just kept talking to him, kept telling him she had nothing to do with what had brought him into that feed supply with his gun, a hunting rifle. Then it was just Cal and Herbert Zwilling and Mink still inside. Nearly an hour went by. Then a single shot was heard inside the feed supply. From this point on, the facts still needed sorting out. All anyone knew for certain was that Leonard Mink was dead, and the hostages were all alive. “From every indication,” the reporter says, “there are at least two families tonight who have Calvin Brady to thank for the fact that their loved ones are coming home to them safe and sound.”

  Again, Maddie lays her hand on my back. “You see?” she says. “I told you he’d be all right.”

  I don’t know what to say. I stand here in my house, thankful that my brother’s alive. I’m thinking about how the years of silence between us have been stones on my heart, and I’m trembling from the relief I now feel and the shame, too, because he’s a hero, and I know I could never be that, not in a million years.

  When I’m alone (Arthur has come to collect Maddie, and the three of us have lingered awhile, hoping for more news from Ohio, but nothing has come), I call Directory Assistance and get Cal’s telephone number. I’ve looked up Edon in my atlas, a town in northwest Ohio, population 898, two miles from Indiana. I dial the numbers and listen to the phone ring in whatever home Cal has in this small town. No one answers. Not now, nor when I try again an hour later, nor any of the times I try on Tuesday morning, and finally I give up, and it seems like things are the way they’ve always been, not a word for my brother and I to say to each other.

  Then later in the afternoon, when I’m out in the yard with Stump, a car parks across the street, one of those sport utility vehicles—a black Ford Explorer with a wheel cover missing on its front driver’s-side tire and mud flecked up on the hind fender. What kind of dope, I wonder, is the man behind the steering wheel who doesn’t take better care of a jazzy set of wheels like this?

  I shade my eyes with my hand to get a better look, and the power window on the Explorer goes down, and I see that the man at the wheel is Cal.

  He has a cap on his head that says WISH YOU WERE HAIR. The cap is too big for his head. It sags down over his ears. He lifts his hand, puts two fingers to the brim of that sloppy cap, and gives me a shy salute.

  I take a few steps across the yard, meaning to go out to the street and talk to my brother, but before I reach the gate the window on the Explorer goes up and Cal drives away.

  The rest of the day, it seems that it’s all been a dream, and for a while I even find myself doubting that it was really Cal I saw in that Explorer. When evening comes, I settle down in my chair with the Daily Mail. Stump flops down on the rug. It’s quiet for a good while, just the sound of Stump grunting as he burrows into sleep, the rustling of the newspaper as I turn the pages, the ticking of the cuckoo clock on the wall.

  To my surprise, I find an Associated Press item about the hostage crisis averted in Edon, Ohio. I’m just starting to read it, when Stump stirs. He tips up his muzzle and barks. Then the knock comes on the front door, and I get up to see who it is.

  It’s Cal. He still has on that cap, and standing the way he is on the dark porch, it’s hard for me to see his face beneath the shadow of its bill.

  “Sammy,” he says. “It’s me. It’s your brother.”

  “I saw you this afternoon,” I say.

  He nods. “I didn’t know what to say to you, then. I couldn’t even get out of the truck.” He looks down at his feet. “It took me a while to work up the nerve to come back and try again.” He takes off his cap. He twists it around in his hands. Finally, he lifts his head and looks at me. “Sammy,” he says, “it’s been a long time.”

  I tell him it surely has. Then I open the door wider so he can come into my house.

  It’s strange at first, having him here. I ask him whether he’d like something to eat, or some coffee, or a bottle of pop. “Maybe you’d like a Pepsi-Cola,” I say, and he says, no, nothing. “Sammy,” he says, “I just want to sit down for a while. I’m give out.”

  So we do. We sit in the living room, Cal on the couch where a quilt is still bunched up from when I took a nap, and I in my reclining chair.

  Stump starts to waddle over to investigate, but I grab his collar to keep him near me, not knowing how Cal might take to him.

  “It’s all right,” Cal says, so I let Stump go. Cal holds out his hand, and Stump gives it a sniff and a lick. “Now he’s got my scent,” Cal says. “Now we’re friends.”

  I wish it could be so easy for Cal and me, but we have all those years of silence between us, and we have to take it slow.

  “Winter’s here,” I say.

  He nods, grateful, I’m sure, for this harmless chitchat about the weather. “There was frost this morning.” He has a copper bracelet on his left wrist, the sort folks wear to ward off arthritis, and he keeps fiddling with it. “I had to scrape off my car windows.”

  “The woolly worms are more black than brown this year. That means we’re in for a rough winter.”

  “Dad used to talk about signs like that. You remember?”

  “Yes, I remember,” I say. “Woolly worms and walking sticks, thick hulls on walnuts, dark breastbone on a goose.”

  “Frost this morning,” Cal says, even though he’s already made mention of it. “A hard frost,” he says. “We’ve already had snow in Ohio.”

  Of course, eventually we have to get around to it, the question of why he’s here. “Cal, all this time,” I say.

  He’s scratching Stump behind his ear, and Stump, shameless as he is, just keeps leaning in for more.

  “I know. Sammy, believe me. I know.”

  “And now here you are.”

  “I saw that piece in the Daily Mail about that fancy dog house you built, and I thought it was about time we tried to patch things up.”

  “You take the Daily Mail?”

  “Always have, wherever I’ve lived.” His voice breaks. “Jesus, Sammy, you think I’ve ever forgotten you, forgotten home?”

  I let a few moments go by, just so I can marvel over the fact that this is my brother. I want to go to him. I want to put my arms around him and tell him how good it is to see him. I want all those years without any word to melt away and leave us like we were, two boys who loved each other before we came unraveled and our lives scattered, willy-nilly. But I can’t bring myself to tell him how much I’ve missed having him in my life, can’t let him know how much the distance between us has hurt me.

  “I saw you on television,” I say. Then I ask him the question I’ve wanted to ask him ever since he came into my house. “Cal, what in the world happened at that grain elevator?”

  He bows his head as if he can barely stand to think of it. “You walk away from something like that, and you start to take stock of your life—I can tell you that for sure. You start to tally up all the things you’ve done wrong, all the mistakes you wish you could put right.” He raises his head to look at me. “Sammy, I’ve spent a long time trying to forget what went on here with Dewey Finn, and now this mess in Ohio has brought it all back.”

  “That was a long time ago,” I say. “We were different people.”

/>   “I’m a hero,” Cal says. “At least, that’s what people back in Ohio think, but the truth is I’m in a mess—trouble I can’t even tell you about—and I need a place to be.” He lifts his hands from his lap, and for a moment I think he’ll reach them out for me to take. Then he presses his palms together and touches his fingers to his lips as if he’s praying. “Sometimes your heart tells you what you ought to do, and, if you’re smart you listen. I know you don’t owe it to me, Sammy, but still I’m hoping we can remember what it means to be brothers. Years don’t change what runs between us. We know each other better than anyone on account of what went on with Dewey. Folks back in Ohio think they know who I am, but, Sammy, they don’t know the truth.”

  HIS STORY STARTS WITH A PENNY, JUST A LITTLE THING LIKE that the way the stories that matter often do. “A penny,” Cal says. “Right outside the door at McDonald’s. I walked past it at first. Then I thought, well, a cent’s a cent. If I don’t pick it up, some other Jake will. So I went back.” He gives me a helpless look and shrugs his shoulders. “All I wanted was that penny. I had no idea what was coming down the pike.”

  He bent over to pick up the penny—“It was heads up, Sammy. Now, you know they say that’s good luck.”—and the door to McDonald’s opened. “That was the first time I saw him,” Cal says. “That was the first time I met Leonard Mink.”

  Only he wasn’t Leonard Mink, then. Not when Cal met him outside that McDonald’s in Bryan, Ohio. He was Ansel King. That’s the alias he was using. “It was just before Thanksgiving,” Cal says. “The corn harvest was done, and the days had turned cold and rainy.”