River of Heaven Page 6

  Ansel King because he, Leonard Mink, was up to no good. He was a member of the Michigan Militia, a survivalist group, a few of whom had decided to make some noise this country would by-God notice. Mink needed fertilizer—ammonium nitrate—and a lot of it. That and nitromethane, an explosive often used in drag-racing fuel, and he’d have what he needed to make a truck bomb hefty enough to bring down the Sears Tower in Chicago. Make what Timothy McVeigh did in Oklahoma City look like a popcorn fart.

  But that day outside the McDonald’s in Bryan, Cal didn’t know any of this. Mink was, to Cal’s way of thinking, just this man, sort of bony and lanky, just this thirtysomething-year-old man with that long nose and that spiky haircut. “Just a kid it seemed to me,” Cal says. “You know. Just like you’d see in any small town. No one you’d ever think was up to no good. He said, ‘Excuse me, sir.’ Then he saw what I was after—that penny—and he said, ‘Looks like it’s your lucky day.’ Like I said, that was the first time I saw him.”

  “The Sears Tower,” I say, remembering going up in it once when I made a trip to Chicago to see the sights. One hundred and ten stories high, 1,450 feet in the air. From the Skydeck that day—a clear day in early May before the hot days of summer when the heat and the humidity hold in the smog—I could see four states: Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, and Michigan. I think about the federal building in Oklahoma City and how it exploded that day in 1995. “Mercy,” I say, and I hope that’s all I need to say to let Cal know I understand exactly what it would have been if Leonard Mink had been successful with his plan. Another Oklahoma City. Another World Trade Center. This is the world we live in now.

  “Mercy is right,” Cal says. “That’s why I had to stop it.”

  The cuckoo clock on the wall behind me marks the hour—eight o’clock—and Stump lifts his head to watch the bird slide out of the chalet house and set to calling. Stump waddles over and puts his front paws up on my legs, wanting, I know, for me to pull him up onto my lap so he can get closer to that cockamamie bird. I hoist him up, and he watches until the bird has gone back into his house and the quiet settles over the room.

  “Stop it?” I put Stump down and nudge him away with my leg, intent now on what Cal has just said. “How were you going to stop it? How did you even find out what this Mink was up to?”

  For a good while, Cal doesn’t answer. He just looks down at his hands. Then he nods, and when he finally speaks, his voice is small and as distant as the years that stretch between us. “Let’s just say I found out,” he says. “Now I know too much, and there are people who aren’t happy about that. Please, Sammy, don’t ask me to tell you anything more than that.”

  I’m thinking he could be anyone, this man who sits now in my house. He could be someone I’ve never known, a stranger come to say the thing he’s never been able to say to anyone else. Or he could be who he is, my brother, Calvin Brady, who has lived his life away from me and has chosen me now to hear his confession.

  “Were you?” I say, and then I stop myself.

  “Was I a part of it?” He narrows his eyes. “Sammy, do you really think I’d be involved in something like that?”

  I’m ashamed that such a thought even flickered in my head for an instant. “I’m just glad you’re all right,” I tell him, and for now I let that be enough. “Cal, I’m glad you’re here.”

  I MAKE UP THE BED FOR HIM IN THE ROOM ACROSS FROM mine, the spare room I’ve always kept in order the way folks do who expect overnight guests from time to time. The bed is the bed I slept in when I was a boy in Rat Town: rails, the head and foot pieces all made from cast iron. The night table beside it has the same lamp on it that I had then. Amazing how long something can last when you set it aside and rarely use it. A lamp with a shade that has a world map drawn on it, thin lines—the explorers’ routes—crossing the oceans, curving around the contours of the continents and the islands. I used to trace my finger over those routes, feeling the nub of the shade’s fabric, the heat of the bulb. I liked to fall asleep imagining the explorers—Columbus, Magellan, Da Gama—on the dark oceans, nothing but the stars overhead to help them chart their way.

  “My God,” Cal says when I turn on the lamp. “How old is that thing?”

  “Old,” I say. “Like us.”

  Cal nods. “As old as that.”

  I find a set of new sheets in the bureau, and we get to work putting down the fitted sheet and tugging it tight at the corners of the mattress. Cal gives me a hand. Together, he on one side of the bed and I on the other, we shake out the top sheet and let it billow up above the bed and then sink down. We smooth it with our hands, working like that, folding hospital corners, just the way our mother taught us when we were boys.

  “Have you made those corners all your life?” I ask. “Those hospital corners like Mom showed us?”

  “All my life,” he says. “Some things you don’t forget.”

  The thought comforts me. I imagine the two of us, all these years when I had no idea in the world where he might be, rising each morning and making our beds the same way, the folding of sheets into those hospital corners a small, simple thing we carried from home. The way fingers fold the corner of a sheet into a triangle and tuck it beneath a mattress—a little thing like that to remind us that we’re brothers.

  “Sammy,” he says, and his voice cracks as if these are words he’s been trying to work up from his throat a long, long time. “Sammy,” he says again, “you and me…well…goddamn it.” And I know he’s trying to tell me he’s sorry that he’s stayed away all these years.

  “We’ve got time,” I say. “We’ve got lots of time.” I lay out blankets. We slip the pillows into their cases. We work in silence, and when we’re done, we stand on opposite sides of the bed, looking at each other. “You should get some sleep, Cal. You’ve come a long way.”

  “I left my truck on the street, Sammy, on account I didn’t know if you’d let me stay.”

  “You can put your truck in my garage,” I tell him, and I realize I’m agreeing to provide harbor from whatever trouble bears down on him from Ohio.

  He nods. “I’ve got a duffle bag.”

  “I’ll give you a hand,” I say, and together we go outside.

  We’re in the phase of the new moon, and without its light, the stars are brilliant overhead. Star light, star bright, I think, recalling that old kids’ rhyme Cal and I used to say those summer evenings when we sat on the porch with our mother and father and kept our eyes out for the first star. Tonight, I see the North Star at the tip of the Big Dipper, and I make my wish: that this can be the start of something for Cal and me.

  He opens the door to his Explorer, and the dome light comes on. I see the litter that covers the passenger seat and spills down to the floorboard: wrappers torn from Hershey bars, paper coffee cups from 7-Eleven, a pair of black socks rolled into a ball, a USA Today newspaper, a pocket-size Gideon’s Bible, a Phillips head screwdriver, a Wal-Mart road atlas, a compact disc of the Three Tenors in concert (Carreras, Domingo, and Pavarotti—imagine that), all this belonging to my brother. It’s the CD that fascinates me most; something about the idea of Cal driving down the road, singing along to Core ’ngrato, weeping perhaps to Il lamento di Federico, amazes me. My brother, a fan of opera. My brother who somehow walked away from that feed supply and grain elevator in Edon, Ohio, a hero, and now can’t live with it for reasons I suspect he’ll tell me in due time. The things we don’t know and wouldn’t guess in a million years.

  The things I never could have imagined, I think, as Cal and I turn in for the night. We go to our bedrooms, and we fall asleep, the way we did so many nights when we were boys and we had no idea what was coming at us from the world we’d already made, the one we wouldn’t know until we found ourselves smack dab in the middle of it, shaking our heads, bewildered by how all of this had ever come to be, wondering how our lives had turned into stories we never could have dreamed.

  6

  IN THE MORNING, CAL IS UP BEFORE I AM. I WAKE TO THE
smell of coffee percolating and sausage frying on the stove. In the kitchen, Stump is already going at his duck and potato.

  “Hey, sleepyhead,” Cal says to me. “Mister Sandman pay a long visit, did he?” It’s only 7:30, but from the looks of things, Cal’s been up and at it awhile. “I couldn’t let Stump starve, so I poked around and found his food. Then I thought I’d rustle us up some breakfast.”

  “Thank you,” I say. I sit down at my kitchen table, feeling somewhat a stranger in my own home.

  Then I hear Arthur’s usual knock at my back door. Shave and a haircut. I always answer it by knocking on the inside of the door. Two distinct raps. Two bits.

  “It’s my neighbor,” I say. “Arthur Pope.”

  “Arthur Pope,” Cal says, and I know he’s recalling him.

  I get up to open the door. From the step, Arthur points behind him. “You got another truck in your garage. What gives, sailor?”

  “I’ve got company,” I say. “My brother.” I step back, and Arthur pokes his head around the door frame. “Do you remember Cal?”

  Arthur comes into the kitchen. “Cal Brady,” he says. He stands with his hands on his hips. “You got yourself in the middle of a mess, didn’t you. I saw it all on TV. Up until then, I hadn’t heard your name in ages. I would have sworn you were dead.”

  “No,” says Cal. “I’ve just been away for a while.”

  “Come for a visit, have you?”

  “That’s right. Me and Sammy. We’ve been catching up.”

  “How long’s it been?”

  Cal and I glance at each other and then look away. Neither of us wants to be the one to say it. Finally, the silence gets to be too much, and I say, “It’s been a lot of years, Arthur. You know how time goes.”

  “It goes fast,” he says. “I’ll tell you that. It goes fast and then you’re dead.”

  “Or you feel like you might as well be,” says Cal.

  “Sailor, that’s the truth,” says Arthur, and he tells the story of how Bess died and left him alone, and then he and I built that ship for Stump. He’s yakking away. The Seasoned Chefs and Very Vera. Yakkity, yakkity, yak. “And I said to Sammy.” He pulls a chair out from the table, swings it around so it’s facing him and straddles the seat. “‘Sammy,’ I said.” He slaps his hands on the top of the chair back like he’s doing a drum roll—rap-a-rap-rap. “‘I never thought I’d make it after I lost Bess, but now I’ve got this other life, and sometimes I’m amazed there’s all these things that I love to do.’” He points a finger my way. “Isn’t that what I said to you, Sammy?”

  If he did, I don’t recall it, but I say, yes, yes, isn’t it the truth. “Life’s full of surprises,” I say, “no matter how old we get.”

  I look at Cal as I say it. I want him to know that already I’ve forgiven him for the years of silence between us, all those years when I didn’t know where he was. It can happen that fast. The hurt can become something else, some old love the heart remembers. That’s what Arthur’s saying. You can walk through a door into a life you thought wasn’t yours anymore. Here’s my brother, Cal. Who’d have thought it?

  “That’s how you must feel,” Arthur says to him, “seeing what you’ve just been through. What was the story with that man anyway? That Leonard Mink.”

  “He was a crazy man.” Cal pours pancake batter into a skillet. “I just got in his way.”

  “Hey.” Arthur snaps his fingers. “You look like you know a thing or two about cooking. You ought to come with Sammy and me to the Seasoned Chefs tonight.”

  I’ve forgotten that tonight’s the night for another cooking lesson from Vera. I can’t imagine what it might be like for Cal to see her again after all the time that’s passed. “It’s Vera Moon,” I say to Cal. “That’s who teaches the cooking class.” I watch Cal’s face for a sign of what this fact means to him, but he doesn’t react at all. “Gee, Arthur,” I say. “You’re going to have to give me a rain check tonight. Cal and I have a lot of catching up to do.”

  This disappoints Arthur. I have no doubt of that. “Sammy,” he says, “it’s our regular date.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say.

  “No problem,” says Cal. “I don’t mind tagging along.”

  SO WE GO. WE RIDE IN ARTHUR’S CHRYSLER, ME IN THE FRONT seat and Cal in the back. He’s slapped on some cologne, one of those spiky scents I sometimes smell on young men when I pass by them in a store or a restaurant, and I think for a minute what it would be like to be young again, just starting out and all my life ahead of me. I wonder whether it’s what Cal feels tonight, like he’s stepped back fifty years and he’s on his way uptown to see his girl.

  Arthur sniffs the air. He glances up at his rearview mirror. “Cal, you’ve got a good stink going there.”

  Cal pats his cheeks and smells his hands. “Too much?” he asks.

  “Nah.” Arthur gives me a wink. “Just right.”

  I love my brother for that cologne and the fact that he put on too much, anxious to make a good impression tonight. I can tell he’s nervous—he keeps swirling that copper bracelet around on his wrist—and a little shy, and that makes me love him even more. He’s left his cap at home, that one that says WISH YOU WERE HAIR, and he’s put on a fresh shirt, a white corduroy shirt that looks like it’s never been worn; I can see the fold marks creasing the front of it, and the collar is still crisp. He’s wearing a pair of blue jeans—how many of us can do that at this age and not look like idiots?—and he’s got these slippers on, the kind with no backs—clogs, I guess you’d call them—and he looks like a man who’s got a little mileage on his motor but who still knows how to step out on the town. Which he always did when he was a young man, hanging out in the juke joints on the weekends, dancing up a storm. Now he’s going to a cooking lesson with the Seasoned Chefs, going to see Vera Moon.

  “Relax, Cal.” Who’d have thought I’d ever be the one saying this to my brother. “It’s a nice bunch of folks.”

  At the Senior Center, Vera takes his hand between both of hers, and it warms me to see the two of them together. “Cal Brady,” she says. “It’s been forever and a day. My goodness, just look at you.”

  “Vera,” he says, and he brings one of her hands up to his lips and kisses it. “The years have treated you well. Of course, you were always a looker.”

  A blush comes into her face. “And you were always a smooth talker.” She draws her hand back. Then she touches him lightly on his shirtsleeve, takes that corduroy between her fingers and pets it. “Looks like neither one of us has changed a bit,” she says, and though I’ve never been one to play this sort of game, it’s easy to see the old spark kindle up between them. “Welcome home, Cal Brady. Welcome to the Seasoned Chefs.”

  Arthur draws me aside. “Nervous,” he says in a low voice so Cal can’t hear. “Yeah, right.”

  We put on our aprons. I help Cal tie his. “Was I too forward, Sammy?” He glances around the room, looking for Vera. “I don’t mean to offend anyone. I have the feeling Arthur thought I was out of line.”

  “Don’t worry about him,” I say. “He’s got a little crush. That’s all.”

  “Him and Vera?”

  “On his part, to be sure. Her? I really couldn’t say.”

  Cal nods. “So that’s how it is. All right, then. I don’t feel so bad.”

  The door opens and I’m surprised to see Duncan Hines walk in. The tips of his ears are red from the cold, and he has a notepad and pen in his hands, a camera hanging from a strap around his neck. The warm air inside the room hits the cold surface of his eyeglasses and they fog over. He has to take them off, and he stands there, just inside the door, squinting.

  Vera’s voice calls out. “Mr. Hines,” she says, and she sweeps through the crowd of Seasoned Chefs to greet him. “So good of you to come.”

  “Hey, there’s that newspaper reporter,” Arthur says to me, the sight of Duncan making him forget the earlier wound of Cal kissing Vera’s hand. “Think maybe we’ll be in the paper aga
in, Sammy? More PR? Boy, I feel like a celebrity.”

  Vera claps her hands together, and the Seasoned Chefs, who have been all abuzz since Duncan’s arrival, dummy up so they can listen to her. She stands in the middle of the room, looking, as she always does, regal and composed.

  “Gentlemen, it’s a special night,” she says. “Not only are we getting close to Christmas, we have Mr. Hines with us to do a feature for the newspaper.” The Seasoned Chefs applaud. A few of them take out pocket combs and give their hair a once-over. One man uses his finger to groom his mustache. “And, on top of all that,” Vera says with a smile, “we welcome a newcomer to the group.” With a flourish of her hand, the way the pretty girls on game shows do when they gesture toward a prize, she directs our attention to Cal. “Cal Brady,” she says. “Sam’s brother. I’m sure you’ll make him feel at home.”

  Tonight, we’re learning how to make divinity candy. A delicate operation, to be sure, Vera tells us, stressing how important it is to cook the corn syrup to just the right temperature. “That’s why you’ll need your candy thermometers.” She holds one up for us to see, and I notice that there are others waiting at each of our stations, next to saucepans and the ingredients: the Karo syrup, the eggs, the granulated sugar, the salt and vanilla. “Your recipes are all laid out for you,” she says. “Combine the proper measures of sugar, syrup, water, and salt, and heat it until it reaches 260 degrees, the hard ball stage.”

  “Very scientific,” says Arthur.

  “Cook it too long and it’ll reach the hard crack stage,” Vera says. “Then, gents, you’ll have trouble.” She tells us we’ll have to beat the egg whites while we’re cooking the syrup and that perhaps we should work in pairs so we won’t forget to keep an eye on the thermometer. “And don’t let it touch the bottom of the pan because you’ll get an inaccurate reading, and eventually the thermometer could explode. Nothing like a little broken glass to ruin a good piece of candy.”