Family Circus

BROTHER DIDN’T DIE THE DAY DAY HE DECIDED TO RUN OFF AND JOIN THE CIRCUS HIS JUNIOR YEAR. He piled into a tiny car with all the other Clowns wearing bozo noses and too-big shoes and packing so many cases of beer you’d think they upgraded the never-ending handkerchief trick. Who knows how they all made it out to that pit so far off the beaten road you needed four-wheel drive and a spotlight to make sure you didn’t fall off the face of the Earth at night.

Out there where the air reeked of natural gas and the only entertainment when you didn’t bring scraps of wood to let loose and burn through the night like hand-rolled blunts and Red Marlboro cigarettes, the ones everyone called cowboy killers because we all had country accents and bad coughs and too much time on our hands to do everything our parents did on the front porch and behind locked doors, was the metal machinery that did flips and tricks just like acrobats as it pulled oil from the ground and daredevils from their pack-away-chairs as they attempted to ride a steel beast that would never be tamed until the red dirt was as dry below as it was above.

The lucky ones made it back to the ground with barely a scuff on their knock-off Tony Lama boots, but they showed us every year in school until ninth grade what happens to the ones who don’t. Policemen and paramedics and firefighters all standing around the poor fool as red and blue lights flash in the background. His face contorting in pain, but you never hear the scream. The video always cuts to black before you see what happens next. There’s a reason rule number one in Clown School is don’t get bucked off the pump jack.

Rule number two is never give up your car keys, which was easy for Brother because he didn’t have a car—only three beers on an empty stomach and a license, a solid pre-game by the Clowns’ standards, but no one factored in another friend with a painted face calling and making Brother feel wanted, helping him forget the reason he was really there in the first place.

Helping him forget about that time his best friend on the cross-country team told him his dad fucked our mother in the bed of his rusted-out Chevy pick-up truck her senior year of high school and that’s why she’s pregnant with Brother in her graduation photos. Funny how one phone call made Brother misplace the conversation the Lion Tamer had with him to explain why Brother’s real dad didn’t want him, and my brother, who was always more suited to be a ribbon dancer because he had an undeniable sense of rhythm and unerring grace, the kind that made him look so much more delicate than he really was, or maybe it was just his 28-inch waist and limbs that seemed to stretch like shadows from his torso, yes, my brother, who was always so sure of foot and face until my mother’s little white lie slammed into him like a pie in his identity and whipped cream flavored vodka in his belly, finally understood why we looked nothing alike, and how he desperately wanted to belong to something that resembled a family, even if it was just a group of kids getting drunk in the dark in the middle of nowhere, even if he knew the only reason that girl dialed the phone was because she knew Brother wouldn’t say no to someone who said they wanted him.

And that’s how rule number two of Clown School got broken. How the lessons of our youth faded away like fathers and West Texas sunsets.

You see, my brother was always a better driver than me, even when he was seven and I was new to six. I still remember the day the Disappearing Man taught us how to steer his white work truck with its spools of wire curling from a frame he welded onto the bed. That truck had everything: a water cooler, two ladders, and all the tools you’d expect an electrician to need on the job as if that truck was his shell and my dad was some kind of rare species of roughneck turtle with biceps bigger than my head and a personality he transmitted into success just as easily as copper conducts energy at the flip of a switch. I wasn’t tall enough to reach the peddles, but from the backseat, I watched my brother stretch his legs and cruise down that back-country road.

Rows of newly picked cotton appearing before us as far as my eyes could see. Traces of white still stuck to their stems like cotton candy so sweet you’d be tempted to pull off the road right there and tear it straight from the dirt to place on your tongue as it melted away like childhood memories, and on the other side, peanut plants just pushing up from the soil. I imagined the green, John Deer tractors waiting just at the edge of the field were elephants biding their time until the crops were ready, so they could guzzle down peanuts to their gluttonous delight.

The Disappearing Man hardly had any corrections for Brother, telling him to,

“Ease up on the speed.”

“Watch the curve.”

“Don’t get too close to the white line.”

“You’re doing great, Bubba.”

He watched with steady eyes as Brother sat up straight, hands at ten and two, unbothered by the bulk he was now in control of, but when it was my turn to get behind the wheel, the Disappearing Man transformed into a booster seat, his lap providing just enough height to help me see over the steering wheel. He controlled the pedals as I weaved from one side of the road to the other, never allowing myself to be locked into a lane, so the corrections came like the chorus to his favorite song.

“Stay on your side of the road.”

“Watch that bump!”

“No, don’t get into the shoulder!”

It didn’t matter what he said. I couldn’t listen. Not because I was a rebel, I wasn’t, but this was the first time I ever felt like I could go anywhere, and that, coupled with the car approaching in the distance, terrified me.

“Daddy, what do I do?”

“Just keep it straight.”

A request so simple, I should’ve been able to handle it, but unlike my brother, the power I could feel vibrating in my hands as the wheels chewed up the asphalt like that Zebra Striped bubblegum with its flavor so fleeting you popped another piece in your mouth seconds after unwrapping the first, made me freeze up like a deer in the headlights that suddenly found itself behind the wheel.

The Disappearing Man stepped in well before we were at risk for a collision. His hands appearing on the steering wheel as if they had always been there. After the approaching car passed us, my father pulled over to the side of the road and laughed about the whole thing while I crawled over the console to share the front passenger seat with my brother as the three of us made the long trip back to the Lion Tamer. My father waving at us as we stood under the warm, yellow light radiating from the front porch before disappearing once again.

Of course, this all happened before Brother asked to borrow one of the Clown’s car keys, and they gave them to him because everyone was too drunk to follow their own rules, tossing back bottles in that pit where the pump jack was still performing for the moon, and that turn in the road winding away from Brother’s new found family snuck up on him like puberty. Right around the time my mother was settling into her whip and Brother’s identity crisis. The Lion Tamer would not be disobeyed, and after Brother found out he was only half of who he used to be in our family, it uncaged something in him my mother intended to bring to heel. Like the first time my brother felt brave enough to call her a bitch following her forced confession, and she asked him to say it again just to make sure the roar matched the mane.  Brother didn’t get past the “I” before her hand cracked against his face so hard I was sure he could taste her ring size as she drove him back into his room to pace around until she left his dinner plate outside the door. My mother had dealt with enough lions in her life. She wasn’t going to raise one in her own home, but that all changed when Brother and the borrowed truck went from following the curve in the road to becoming a tumbleweed rolling across the country.

One.

Two.

Three times before coming to a stop, but Brother wasn’t behind the wheel anymore. Somewhere between the first and second roll, he contorted his body through the driver’s side window and planted himself like a dandelion among the mesquite trees for the paramedics to come and pluck his limp body from the ground before God decided to make a wish.

My mother left her whip at home as she rushed to the hospital. Her baby boy with the broken back was still in surgery when she got there, so she called up the Disappearing Man and for the first time all year, he actually showed up and got a standing ovation from the nurses and the doctors and probably Brother too if he wasn’t laying face down and cut open on an operating table. The doctors or magicians, whatever you want to call them, worked on Brother for four hours before sewing him up like a trampoline to bounce back in three to six months. Brother left the hospital two days later with a back brace and a prescription for hydrocodone to take every four hours or whenever he was in pain, but the doctors certainly weren’t fortune tellers, and they didn’t realize Brother was in pain well before he became a patient, even before he took those keys.

###

I was in the car with the Lion Tamer the day she brought Brother home four days after the accident. No longer the clown or the lion, but a trapeze artist soaring high above us, so out of his mind, he couldn’t form coherent sentences, so she changed too.

What was there to discipline when Brother couldn’t stay conscious for more than a couple hours?

She retired her harshness almost as quickly as she picked it up. My mother tended to Brother like a safety net, catching him each time he tried to get up out of the bed, but his body didn’t work the way he remembered now that his movements were limited by the brace, so for the most part, she kept him sedated, handing him pill after pill every four hours or when he cried out in pain, screaming or falling, it all meant the same thing—he was coming down.

###

Two months had passed since the surgery. My mother and brother had fallen into a rhythm. First thing in the morning, she would wake up, rub the sleep from her eyes, and pull her robe from its resting place on the back of her bedroom door. She slipped into the early morning light as easy as egg yolks across a well-oiled pan. The creak of Brother’s door opening always nudged him out of sleep like the sound of my mother’s car pulling into my grandmother’s carport. Tires crunching against the gravel. We used to stay up as late as we could and sit in my grandmother’s sunroom and count the cars as they made their way down the road towards the house, guessing their make and model by the shape of their headlights. There were Jeep Wranglers and Chevy Tahoes and eventually a Mercury Sable, and we’d already be outside waiting for her when she finally pulled up. Back when we were both small enough for her to carry us one at a time from our beds to the backseat of her car on the nights we couldn’t stay up long enough to see her driving down the street, her car still warm from her commute. Those were always the most restful nights because we were both just children wanting to be carried by their mother, but too old for it to be commonplace. Those nights when Mother was more of a Strong Man than a Lion Tamer, a role she returned to as she carried Brother, now seventeen, as much as she could carry her first-born, a boy who had finally grown into a man’s body only to break it, to the bathroom every morning. She helped him sit down or stand there. Whatever he needed, there was no shame or disappointment, just love and patience and then drugs, and he was back to bed dreaming until lunchtime.

###

Mother always picked me up at school on my lunch break. It was my job to go around to all of Brother’s teachers and get his school work while he recovered in bed. Their faces always appearing the same, just a blur of sad expressions. Deep lines drawn into their foreheads and pulling down the sides of their mouth like fresh caramel dripping from an apple. I almost wanted to turn them upside down and watch their pity fold back into a smile. Didn’t they know that Brother didn’t die?

But his accident wasn’t the only rumor swirling around our small town. Everyone knew what was said to him months ago. His half-brother still walked the halls, adding patches to his letterman jacket and stuffing his locker full of books. People looked at him funny until he transferred to another school. You’d think he was the one driving the truck that shot Brother out of the window like a human cannonball without a crash suit, but he’s not the reason brother made it back out to that pit two months later.

###

 When Brother finally returned to school, he was still wearing the back brace. The Clowns helped him carry his stuff from class to class. Even if he did break rule number two, they were happy to have him back. That was just the kind of guy Brother was. Everyone in the school liked him. He may not have been the Disappearing Man’s biological son, but so much had been passed down before my father poofed from the first apartment I can remember living in as a family. I can see it even today. My mother standing in the living room, watching him go. He carried a bag in each hand, but I remember him setting one down and reaching for Brother and me. I was only five years old, and instead of grabbing his hand to say goodbye, Brother and I collapsed into each other like water balloons as our tears exploded into tributaries than ran down our cheeks and onto our arms. We weren’t old enough to understand why he had to go, and no one ever took the time to explain it until many years later. All talk about money problems and never being home. But even after Brother found out our father was really only mine, the Disappearing Man assured us that didn’t matter. We were both always supposed to be part of his act. I just wish Brother had believed him. It was the only part of himself that wasn’t healing, but the hydrocodone helped with that too.

###

Six months after his accident, Brother celebrated the weekend he got his back brace off with a bottle of Jack Daniels he swiped from the liquor cabinet and the pills he kept in his pocket since his return to school. The Clowns must have received the invitation too because they all showed up, parked along the street outside of our house with their engines still running but their headlights cut off. Brother still didn’t have a car, so he had to wait until Mother went to bed before sneaking out of his bedroom window, something that would’ve never happened before the accident because Mother was the lightest sleeper, waking in the dead of night every time she heard someone’s foot hit the floor, but since adjusting back to Brother taking care of himself, it seemed like she slept for all the hours she had missed sitting beside his bed. You could hear her snores through the walls if you listened closely, and Brother always did after he got to feeling like his old self again, which was mostly the problem, except I heard him too.

The screech of his window sliding open had me creeping out into the hallway and up to his door. I pressed my ear against it and listened to him whisper to someone over the phone. His words slurred even before he left the house. I cracked open the door just in time to see him climb onto his bed and stretch his still so delicate body out of the window. If I could have grabbed his shadow and pulled him back in, I would have, but siblings have rules of their own they follow.

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Two in the morning brought a knock to the door and red and blue lights flashing outside of my bedroom window. It felt like an eternity before my mother finally answered, wearing the robe she always kept on the back of her bedroom door, the sleep still present in her eyes. She recognized the officers standing in front of her. Knew the deep lines they wore in their faces were not traditionally a part of their uniform, so when they tried to show my mother a video they confiscated from someone’s cell phone, she didn’t need to watch the whole thing before collapsing to the floor because in it, you can see my brother climbing to the top of a pump jack. Teeth showing from ear to ear, one hand held in the air like he’s some sort of rodeo star until the horse bucks and he’s suddenly falling to the ground, his arm catching in the machinery, the cogs coming to a crunching halt. Except this time, we hear the scream.

This time, we see the fire chief saw through Brother’s arm.

This time, the screen doesn’t go black until Brother’s body is zipped into a bag. Blood staining the already red dirt. You can hear in the video before the policemen get there. Before the ambulance is on scene. Before the firefighters bring out their tool. You can hear Brother crying for his mother, his father, for anything to stop the pain.

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At Brother’s funeral, the Disappearing Man sits in our pew like he’s been a member of our family this entire time. Like just because he wore a black uniform, he feels this grief like the rest of us. The church is crowded with Clowns and teachers and aunts and uncles I haven’t seen in years, and at the very back of the room, I see Brother’s half-brother and his father standing there, tears streaming down their faces. Everyone coming together for a family reunion that arrived much too late.