Baby Brother's Blues Read online

  The guy shrugged, his overly bright eyes indicating he had already begun his trip. “Suit yourself. Takes about an hour to kick in and then you’re on your own.”

  He smiled beatifically at Wesley and turned to contemplate the expanse of bright blue sky outside his window. Wesley decided to do it right then. He needed something to take the edge off. He wasn’t worried about a bad trip, that bane of the amateur drug user’s existence. The guy beside him looked serene. Besides, Wesley had been in hell for the last four months, doing things and seeing things that were surely worse than any bad drug trip.

  The worst this stuff could do was give him some new nightmares, and that might not be such a bad thing. He was tired of the old ones. Tired of going to sleep every night and seeing the faces of the dead babies and terrified old people, the weeping women in all that black shit they always wore. Tired of hearing the anguished screams of his wounded buddies all day, and then again all night. Anything was better than that. He put the tab under his tongue the way he had heard you were supposed to, laid his head back against the hard seat, and closed his eyes.

  He woke up when they landed in Germany seventeen hours later, feeling high in a way he had never felt before, but relaxed in a way he’d thought he would never feel again. He turned to thank the Marine, but the guy had already gotten off the plane and disappeared, taking his cane, his backpack, and Wesley’s wallet with him. More shit luck! He had borrowed two hundred dollars from his buddies for the trip and now he was flat broke. He knew he could stay on the base once he got to D.C., but what was the point of coming all this way to spend the night around the same bunch of farting hard legs he’s just left in Iraq?

  If he told the army he’d lost his ID, they’d replace it, but not the money. He would have to chalk that up to his own stupidity and make the best of it. That’s when he thought about his sister. He was prepared to let bygones be bygones if she was. He now understood that Cassie only meant to help him stay out of jail when she signed the papers for him to go into the army, but at the time, he was furious, blaming everyone from his sister to his girlfriend for the fact that he’d been caught selling dope to middle-school kids on the playground.

  The judge was unimpressed with his self-righteous wrath and told him he had two choices. Two years in the army, or ten years in jail without possibility of parole. He was only seventeen, so as his legal guardian, Cassie had to sign for him. She wept when she handed the papers back to the judge, but Wesley blamed her for not getting him a better lawyer, for not interceding more forcefully with the cops, for not being in his corner when the shit came down.

  Cass had not even been aware of her baby brother’s existence before her father’s deathbed confession that he had fathered a son, her brother, with a young faculty member he met at UC Berkeley on one of his many lecture tours. Her mother, he assured her, had gone to her grave with no knowledge of her husband’s bastard child, although he had named the boy Wesley Jamerson Jr. Stunned, Cass had finally agreed to her father’s plea that she look out for Wesley, who was only fourteen.

  At the time, she was a twenty-four-year-old grad student with a part-time job, a steady beau, and no responsibility for anyone but herself. Within three months, Wesley had been kicked out of boarding school and had come to live with her, an angry ball of misdirected adolescent rage that sucked the positive energy out of every room he entered and replaced it with the sound of gangsta rap and the smell of cheap marijuana. Inquiries as to the identity, whereabouts, and responsibilities of his mother drew only the vaguest, increasingly hostile answers until she realized he had no idea where his mother was. She had simply abandoned him when he got too hard to handle.

  Once Cass understood his situation, she felt a sudden wave of sympathy for her baby brother. She dismissed his past disciplinary problems and brushes with juvenile authorities as the not-unexpected result of his parents’ weird response to his very existence. She dedicated herself to trying to make a home where he would feel wanted, acknowledged, and affirmed. Within six months, he had been kicked out of two more private schools and picked up for truancy twice from the public one she had managed to get him into in the middle of the academic year.

  His book bag always contained more drugs than books and his explanation was always the same: “Somebody put that stuff in there to get me in trouble!” Her efforts to enlist his help in creating the peaceful, nurturing home she’d fantasized about met with a stone wall of defiant resistance. By the time he was seventeen, his cherubic face and bad behavior had earned him a place in a second-rate street gang where his moniker was “Baby Brother.” One day, he demanded that Cass address him that way at home, too. Without looking up from the book she was reading, Cass told him to go to hell.

  “You first,” he said, grabbing his backpack and heading out the door.

  The next day, he was picked up at Ralph Bunche Middle School selling kids two joints for a dollar. When the principal called the police, they found twenty-six dollars in the pocket of Baby Brother’s Sean John jeans and it wasn’t even lunchtime. In his chambers after the hearing, the judge told Cass he admired her struggle to help her brother get on the straight and narrow, but that given the options, the army was the only real chance the boy had to turn his life around.

  “It’ll make a man out of him,” the judge said, thrusting the enlistment papers at Cass and glowering at Baby Brother, slouched in his chair like he was too bored even to sit up straight. “Or it will kill him. Your choice, young man. Make the right one.”

  Once he shipped out, Baby Brother spent months blaming Cass for the chain of events that landed him in Iraq. For a long time, almost a year, he had refused her phone calls and returned her Christmas and birthday packages that followed him from basic training, to a few weeks of specialized combat training, and on to Fallujah. After a while, the packages stopped coming, and he told himself he didn’t care. It was Cass’s fault he was even in this hellhole. What was a care package of snack food and tube socks going to do to make that better?

  Their estrangement was so complete, he didn’t even know she was married until he used the change he had in his pocket to catch the metro to the stop nearest the house where he hoped she still lived. She couldn’t still be mad. She had sent all those packages, hadn’t she? That must mean she still loved him and would be overjoyed that he had shown up unexpectedly on her doorstep, right?

  He rang the bell and stepped back, trying to arrange his face into an ingratiating smile. Suddenly a big, angry stranger opened the door to his sister’s house and frowned down at him.

  “I don’t believe this,” the stranger said. “You’ve got a hell of a nerve showing up here. We didn’t know if you were alive or dead.”

  Baby Brother was taken aback and a little intimidated. He didn’t even know this guy’s name and the man was already pissed. He decided the best defense was a big, bold, blustery offense. “I’m looking for my sister, motherfucker. Who the fuck are you?”

  “I’m her husband, motherfucker, that’s who I am.” The big man let it sink in while he looked at Baby Brother with undisguised contempt. “And I know all about you. I know what you put her through before you disappeared, and if you came here because you think you can do it again, let me tell you one thing.”

  He stepped through the front door, and even in his shirtsleeves, he looked fit and muscular. Baby Brother tried to stand tall, hoping his military uniform gave the illusion that his five-foot-seven was really six-foot-two.

  “If I ever see you around here again, or hear about you trying to contact my wife in any way, I’m not going to call the police or your commanding officer. I’ll come looking for you myself!”

  The guy looked at Baby Brother like he expected a response. When he didn’t get one, he frowned. “Are we clear?”

  Baby Brother looked up into his brother-in-law’s angry face. He looked familiar in a weird way. Had he met this guy before? He wondered if Cassie had told him about the money he stole from her, or the time he got them th
rown out of their apartment for fighting with the landlord, or how he ran up her credit cards to ten grand, or the time she paid for his fifteen-year-old girlfriend to have an abortion and went with her to the clinic when Baby Brother said he wasn’t going. He wondered if Cassie had told her husband about the couple of times he had shoved her around, or that one time he had slapped her when she kept nagging him about school just before he got arrested for the last time and she signed the army papers. She’d still had the black eye when they went to court, so that day she kept her sunglasses on most of the time.

  Court! All of a sudden he remembered where he had seen this face before. Cassie had married the fucking judge!

  “We clear. Your Honor,” Baby Brother said as he headed down the front steps to let the guy know he recognized him, too. At the sidewalk, he turned back with a sneer. “And you tell my sister I said she ain’t got to worry. I won’t be back.”

  The judge looked at him, then slowly shook his head. “You young-bloods think the world owes you a living, and for what? You’re mad at your mamas, mad at your daddies, mad at the women foolish enough to have your children. Always crying the blues. People died to make a place for you and you don’t have the good sense and discipline to step up and claim it. I’m sick of you, and I’m sick of your bullshit blues. Now get the hell out of my face and grow the fuck up!”

  Baby Brother didn’t know what to say to that, so he walked on down the street. When he got to the corner, he looked back, but the porch was empty. Now what? It was after six and people on the street were hurrying home from work or segueing into evening activities that did not include any more time in the unseasonable chill than necessary. Baby Brother saw his options narrowing down to a series of unappealing choices.

  He turned up the collar on his uniform jacket and cursed himself for not bringing a coat. It had been 114 degrees when he left Iraq. The idea of carrying a heavy coat hadn’t crossed his mind. All he knew was that an aunt in California he didn’t know he had, contacted him to say that his mother had died, they were having a memorial service in D.C. in a week, and if he wanted to come, he was invited.

  Of course, he applied for emergency leave to attend the funeral. Every day away from the murderous mayhem of this insane war was a day when the chances of living through it went up astronomically. Besides, he was really in need of some R&R. He figured he’d go to D.C., rent a motel room with the money he’d borrowed, score some weed, hook up with his buddies from the old gang, if any of them were still around, and forget about Iraq for three days.

  The idea of actually going to his mother’s funeral never crossed his mind. She had been dead to him since she sent him to his dad and disappeared. It was still hard for him to believe she had been able to toss him out of her life so easily. When he was little, she’d doted on him, gave him anything he asked for, and excused his misbehavior as growing pains. But when he got older, she stopped thinking he was her very own gift from God. She tried to establish some rules, but by that time, he was too used to having his own way to give it up easily and no amount of punishment seemed to make any difference.

  In desperation, she had demanded that his father take responsibility, threatening him vaguely with disclosure of their affair if he did not. Professor Jamerson had reluctantly agreed to handle his son. When his mother announced she was sending him back east to live, Wesley had imagined a new beginning with the man who had given him his name, but little else. Unfortunately, that wasn’t what his father had in mind. Sticking him in first one private school and then another, Dr. Jameson saw his son once a year, on Christmas, and never invited him home. Letters from his mother were few and far between and finally stopped coming all together. Angry and emotionally abandoned, Baby Brother plunged into adolescence with a chip on his shoulder and a determination to show the world that he was tough enough to handle whatever came his way.

  Less than five years later, he had burned every bridge almost before he crossed it and found himself in the middle of a war he didn’t understand any better than he had understood his life back in the States. He shivered in the cold wind. When the hell was he going to catch a damn break? Awash in self-pity, he didn’t even see the man who walked by him, turned around, and then called his name.

  “Wes Jamerson?”

  Baby Brother turned around and saw the grinning face of a buddy he hadn’t seen since the lucky motherfucker finally got shipped home for good. He grinned back.

  “Is that really Jive Time Jason Harris, the ladies’ pet and the punk’s regret?”

  “Live and in the flesh.” Jason laughed and embraced Baby Brother with real affection.

  Baby Brother clocked his friend’s expensive shoes and stylish overcoat. He couldn’t remember what Jason’s job had been before the war. Whatever it was, he must be good at it. Jason looked like a businessman or a highly placed political operative.

  “What are you doing here, man? When the hell you get out?”

  “I didn’t. I just came home to bury my mother.”

  “Oh, hey, man, I’m sorry to hear it. Rest in peace and all that, you know?”

  “Thanks, man. It’s cool, but thanks.” Baby Brother didn’t want to talk about his mother. He wanted to see if Jason could put him up for the night, point him toward some pussy, and front him the money to buy it, but he didn’t know how to ask. Squatting on an Iraqi rooftop, waiting for a homemade rocket to light your ass up, you can ask a nigga for anything, Baby Brother thought, and if he can, he’ll give it to you. But back in the world, things were different. Saying hello on the street was one thing. A few drinks to catch up was expected. But an overnight guest who had probably seen you at your worst—violent and kill crazy, or crying like a little bitch—that was a judgment call. Only time would tell if the brotherly bonds they’d forged under fire would hold up a few blocks from DuPont Circle.

  “So you already been to the church or whatever?” Jason said, sounding restrained out of respect.

  “That’s where I’m coming from,” Baby Brother lied. “She was cremated.”

  He didn’t know why he added the unnecessary embellishment, except the moment seemed to require a little more detail to be convincing. The wind was kicking up again and the chill went through his uniform like a thousand tiny knives. He shivered again and Jason saw it.

  “Hey, man, you been walking around all day without a coat on?”

  “I’m out of the habit,” Baby Brother said.

  “I heard that! What was it over there when you left?”

  “One hundred and fourteen.”

  “Damn!” Jason winced and shook his head. “That’s brutal!”

  “Almost as brutal as this hawk whistling up my ass,” Baby Brother said with another shiver. “Listen, it’s good to see you, man, but I’m looking for a warm bar with a cold beer.”

  “Fuck that,” Jason said, suddenly animated again. “I live two blocks from here. I got beer and a little weed left over from New Year’s Eve.”

  “Now you’re talkin’,” Baby Brother said, relief flooding his body. “I wasn’t sure you’d still be smoking. You look like a damn congressman or some shit.”

  “Don’t knock it,” Jason said, leading the way. “If that idiot we got in the White House can be elected president, all things are possible.”

  “Yeah, well, you better get in line behind that African nigga from Chicago. You know the white folks ain’t got room for both y’all!”

  “Fuck you, nigga.” Jason laughed. “You ain’t changed a damn bit.”

  And I hope you haven’t either, Baby Brother thought. I hope you haven’t either.

  3

  Abbie Allen Browning needed a world atlas. She had to find Prestonpans. She needed to see it on a map to believe that it really existed. She had been reading a news account in the Atlanta paper of a town in Scotland that had decided to mark Halloween by officially pardoning eighty-one people—and their cats—executed centuries ago for being witches. The town, the name of which was Prestonpans, had recorded
the largest number of witch executions in all of Scotland, which had a grand total of more than three thousand five hundred, mainly women and children, not to mention countless cats, usually black.

  The report quoted a historian who presented evidence in support of the pardons by saying, “It’s too late to apologize, but it’s sort of symbolic recognition that these people were put to death for hysterical ignorance and paranoia.”

  The words leaped out at Abbie. Reading them, she couldn’t help but recognize that these same two emotions were visible everywhere in her own country these days. Hate crimes were on the rise from sea to shining sea as frightened, angry people took out their frustrations on anybody who didn’t look, talk, think, eat, or have sex in what was deemed an acceptable fashion. In Prestonpans, they had called them witches and burned them alive or tied heavy stones to their feet and drowned them or hanged them by the neck until they died and the community could breath a sigh of relief that evil had been defeated, at least in their small, Scottish corner of the world.

  That’s why Abbie had to see it on the map. She needed some information about the town’s topography, its climate, its crops. She needed some specifics in order to convince herself that it must have been something in the water or the air that made the people of Prestonpans act in such barbarous fashion toward their neighbors. She needed to convince herself that the hysterical ignorance and paranoia were theirs alone and could never manifest themselves in Washington, where she lived, or Atlanta, where her niece Regina lived with her husband, or here on Tybee Island, where she was a frequent guest at their beach house and where she was now rummaging more and more frantically through the bookshelves looking for an atlas.

  How could Blue overlook such a household necessity? Abbie thought maybe she should call her friend Peachy and see if he had one, but then he’d think she expected him to bring it out to the island, and he’d already been by that morning with a bag of oranges, which were her favorite fruit, a dozen green Granny Smith apples, and a bunch of ripe bananas that couldn’t have looked fresher if he’d picked them in his garden like he did the tomatoes he’d brought the day before.