Stony Brook Short Fiction Prize

By Rebecca Power

My brother, the veteran, picks rutabagas with my mother in the garden and shows her how he can still peel carrots even though he is missing a thumb.

I don’t help. I’m off with my friends playing chicken on the train tracks or letting air out of each other’s front tires or cutting one another down in front of cute girls so maybe they’ll think we’re real clever and give us a kiss and a phone number.

Sometimes, when we’re sitting on the front porch watching the sun touch down, my brother tries to crack open a beer with just his four fingers and tells me how he could just about kill Bobby Thatcher for spoiling his drinking hand. Sometimes I ask him why he doesn’t and he just laughs at me and tells me to open his beer for him.

Sometimes, when its warm enough to sit outside after dark and my parents are off for the weekend fishing or hiking or visiting relatives a few towns over, my brother will buy me and my friends beer from the grocery store and we’ll sit around swatting mosquitoes and feeling like adults and ask him to tell us about Iraq and the war and how he lost his thumb. My brother will stretch out his legs real long so you can see every inch of skin and sinew and scar up to where his shorts cover his kneecaps and he’ll ask us if he’s told us about the time he almost got his toes blown off by a roadside bomb or if we remember that story of how he put a dead bird in Bobby Thatcher’s helmet so the next time the alarm bell sounded, just for practice of course, Bobby jammed his helmet on his head and got a claw imbedded right behind his ear.

“No, tell us,” we’ll say, and we’ll all listen in silence until a few of us crack up a little before the punch line because we all know what’s coming.

To me and my friends, my brother and Bobby Thatcher are just about as close to heroes as we’ve ever known.

To my mother, Bobby Thatcher is pretty much the worst thing you can say. She’ll never get on our backs about cussing or dirty jokes at the dinner table, but you even whisper that name within earshot and she’ll tell you to get right out the door if you want to talk about sleaze like that good-for-nothing low-life.

My brother says she still hasn’t forgiven Bobby for telling us my brother was dead and all.
“We were just kids, Mom,” my brother will drawl all pacifying like while he does the dishes and fixes the television antenna and she sharpens the kitchen knives.

That is a sure sign my mother is heated about something. When she is sharpening knives.
When she is happy she vacuums the living room and sings Frank Sinatra and Billy Holiday under her breath so you can’t hear when she goes off key or forgets the words. When she and my father have a fight she dusts all the hard-to-reach places like above the cupboards and behind the TV. She says it makes her realize that there are more frustrating and less rewarding things than being married to my dad. When she and my father make up like they always do real clean and neat, she polishes the brass candleholders and puts them out so dinner will look extra special that night. They’re the ones my brother says he bought in Baghdad, just for her.

When my mother thought that my brother was dead, she knitted me a sweater. A great big wool sweater for the winter and a hat and gloves and a matching scarf for my father and about ten hundred pairs of wool socks because it was a week before we figured out how he wasn’t dead and my mother is a real fast knitter. My brother says how he had to hand it to Bobby, being that clever with the timing and all.

He was supposed to be coming home for a month. My brother, that is. Home for Christmas and then back on his second tour and then who knew. He didn’t get to use the phone more than once a month, seeing as they were out in the middle of the God-forsaken desert and all, so his last call had been about three weeks before he was coming home, telling us when to pick him up from the airport and asking us what we wanted for Christmas because he’d get to stop in Baghdad before he came home. We were all real excited to see him after almost two years, and my mother had even started cooking all his old favorite meals just for practice when the phone rang.

We don’t have some military man way off here where we live to tell us the bad news in person, so we always knew that the phone could ring one day and hate to inform us and be sorry for our loss and instruct us on when to pick up the remains in two or three weeks once they’d been shipped home. So that day just shy of a week before he was due home, when Bobby Thatcher called, sounding real official, and told us that he had some tragic news about my brother’s unit, we believed him just like any other family always fearing for the worst would.

“That awful boy,” my mother still says, sharpening knives at the kitchen table while my brother wipes down the countertops and sweeps the floor, “he just let me cry and cry into the receiver ‘til I was blue in the face and never even once thought to put me out of my misery. I’d hate to think what he has for a mother.”

“He didn’t mean no harm, Mom,” my brother always tells her. “He was just getting me back real good for what I did to his girlfriend that he thought he was gonna marry some day.”

So my mother knit me sweaters and socks six days in a row and called relatives and cried, and I stayed out drinking with my friends all night saying how I was never, ever going to join the Army, and my father, who was already on Christmas vacation from work, just sat watching TV and letting his beard grow until late one night while we were all eating dinner we got a call from my brother, real pissy, saying how he couldn’t believe we’d forgotten to pick up our own flesh in blood, home after almost two years, from the airport.

Sometimes, when my brother tells this story to all my friends, he’ll laugh and say how really Bobby was doing my mother a favor. She didn’t get nearly so upset over the scar on my brother’s back or the missing piece of nose when here he was, rising from the dead and all and bringing brass candlesticks.

That Christmas dinner, even my feeble old grandmother could cut right through the turkey all by herself. That was how sharp our knives were.

*****

Now that my brother’s lost his thumb and nearly his arm and the Army says he’s given enough for the country, he stays around the house a lot. His job at the hardware store gives him real good hours and weekends off, so mostly he hangs around at home and helps my mother put out bowls of beer so the slugs drown in them and don’t eat her garden, or he goes fishing with my father an hour south on the lake and we have catfish or trout for dinner on Sunday night. I don’t go. I’m busy planning our senior prank even though it’s still summer and writing in toothpaste on my friend’s car window before his date or talking to girls my friends tell me are real easy if you just look into their eyes a lot and tell them that they’re pretty.

When my brother isn’t helping my mother or fishing with my father, he’ll take me hunting or show me how to do an army push up or throw a baseball with me in the back yard. He tells me the reason he never drops the ball is from playing Hot Potato with Bobby Thatcher when they got bored. He says how sometimes when they were just killing time out in the desert, waiting for the terrorists or jihadists or whatever they were supposed to be fighting, Bobby and him and some of the other guys would set a grenade and toss it back and forth, trying to see how long before someone would get chicken and toss it. My brother says that you have to be real careful not to drop it so it rolls away from you, because by the time you pick it up it will most likely have exploded and all your buddies will be picking you out of their hair.
He says that is how he got one of the scars on his right arm and how Andre Henderson lost a foot.

“Poor Andre,” he’ll say. “Kid couldn’t catch worth shit.”

Once, my brother told my mother how he got that scar, and my mother smacked him upside the head and told him how she couldn’t believe she’d spent so much effort pushing and screaming him into this world when he didn’t seem to have any problem risking leaving it.

“I was just kid, Mom! Ouch! Christ! I’m still here, aren’t I?” he told her.

“I should have never let you enlist,” she tells him from time to time. “All it got you was a mess of scars and some crazy war buddies like that deranged Bobby Thatcher. I swear, if he ever shows up on our doorstep, I’ll kill him myself.”

My brother always laughs and hugs her and tells her he doesn’t think Bobby will be showing up on our porch any time soon and that she should go fix herself a drink and put her feet up, because he’ll finish clearing the dinner table.

I don’t help. I’m busy on the phone with some girl or one of my friends, plotting which one of our buddies we’re going to tell the Navy recruiter at school is real interested in joining up.
Truth is, I’m glad my brother joined the Army. All through high school he was the lousy one in the family. He’d stay out drinking with his friends all night and lie about going hunting when he was really taking some girl up to his friend’s cabin in the woods. I remember when he and his friends all got suspended for filling our school’s two stairwells all the way up with packing peanuts so no one could go to classes. They had to shut down the school for two days, so my brother and his friends were heroes, but I swear my ears are still ringing from hearing my mother shouting at him in the kitchen from where I was hiding all the way up in my room. I didn’t really like my brother or his friends back then, when they were my age now.

Sometimes, my brother still goes to visit his friends from around town. They all work at the grocery store or the liquor store or fix septic tanks and then hang out at the local bar and suck in their stomach when cute girls pass by. Some of them, like my brother, went off to Iraq. They are all still out on their third tour, off in the desert searching for Osama or Saddam or whoever. Some of them never got to their third tour. That’s because some of them are dead.

Most of my brother’s old friends are my friends’ older brothers. The ones who stayed around here we all know real well. They tell us stories about how they managed to finds a few tons of packing peanuts and how my brother was smart enough to remember a ladder so when they were stuck on the second floor of the school after filling the stairwells, they just climbed out a second story window onto that ladder. When they get bored or drunk or a paycheck in the mail, they’ll help us rearrange each other’s furniture or prank call the library or they’ll offer to race us down Main Street after dark when no one is out and the cops won’t catch us.

Sometimes they invite my brother along.

“For old times sake,” they’ll always say, and my brother will just laugh and shake his head and say he’ll see them around some other time and not to get themselves killed playing games with each other.

I guess to his friends, my brother joining the Army was pretty much the worst thing that could have happened to him.

To me and my friends, my brother joining the Army means that we never run out of stories to hear or talk about. Some Friday nights, instead of jumping off the bridge and trying not to drown before we get to the bank again, we build a campfire in my backyard and roast marshmallows and hotdogs and listen to my brother tell about how he almost broke up Bobby and his girlfriend.

Instead of racing us with his friends or selling us a handle of liquor under the table or giving us ideas for our senior prank, my brother tells us war stories about how once, to get back at Bobby for unscrewing all the nails in his bunk bed at base, so when my brother sat on it the bed collapsed like a house of cards, my brother made Bobby’s girlfriend think Bobby was cheating on her. My brother says how they didn’t get to use the internet that often, and Bobby was about to send his girlfriend, who he was real enamored with and planning to marry some day, an email that was real sappy. Right before he could send it, Bobby got a call from the Sergeant to get his ass into the barracks and put back together that bed and give him a hundred pushups and God knows what else, and leaves the computer up with the email open.

My brother says how he is just standing there, looking at this sappy email pulled up on the screen, and remembers how Bobby said that this girlfriend had pretty much stolen him away from some ex of his and was still paranoid that Bobby was going to run back to her. So what did my brother do? He sat down at the computer and changed Bobby’s girlfriends name to Bobby’s ex’s name everywhere in the email. Then he pressed “Send.”

“It was pretty lousy,” my brother will say, stoking the fire or throwing on another log, “but my head still had a bump from where the top bunk crashed down on me and there was no way in hell I was gonna let Bobby get the last laugh on me this time.”

The next time Bobby called her up, my brother will tell us, he got an earful and a break up and only after my brother used his phone call to ring her up and say how it was his fault and just a joke, did she take Bobby back.

“It wasn’t that smart a thing of me to do,” my brother tells us, “Bobby was gonna marry that girl and I don’t think she would have let me be his best man after that stunt.”

Someone always asks what Bobby did to get him back, and my brother just laughs and says how right after that was the time around Christmas when his obituary got circulated in the local newspaper and all the neighbors brought us food and my mother used all the yarn she’d ever had to make everyone in our family a pair of socks for every day of the year.

“The only thing Bobby could do better than take a joke was play one,” my brother always says, and he sips his beer on the front porch and tells us how the sun setting in Iraq looks pink against the yellow-brown-black sands.

School starts, and my brother still works at the hardware store and helps my mother iron shirts on Saturday afternoon while I’m off with my friends stealing orange cones from construction sites so we can reroute traffic. My mother tells me that if I don’t behave myself I’m going to end up in prison or worse, and my brother tells her not to worry, I’m just being a kid. Worse things have happened. When she’s gone upstairs to dust, though, he tells me to be careful and do well in school and apply to college and do all of the stuff my parents always told him to do, and I hear the words he used to say come straight out of my mouth so easy and real that I sound just like him.

“I don’t need to go to school. I’ve been in school since forever and it hasn’t done much good for me yet, has it?” I tell my brother that I want to join the Army and go fight in Iraq and get some scars and maybe lose some toes, just like him.

He just shakes his head and tells me to go see my friends and not to get arrested or some girl knocked up.

Sometimes, I think he means it.

Sometimes, when it’s just my brother and I sitting on the front porch watching the sun go all white to cream to yellow to gold while the sky around it does it’s best to impress as well, I ask my brother how he lost his thumb.

“It was that damn Bobby Thatcher,” he tells me, drinking his beer and smiling a little so the scars on his face go crooked and pull his face all crazy for just a second or two. “Never make a best friend in the Army,” he’ll tell me. “They’re nothing but trouble and they make you do crazy things sometimes.”

Then I ask him to tell me a war story and he tells me how he had saved all his pudding for an entire month, and then filled Bobby’s boots with it one morning before inspection.

*****

A few weeks before Christmas, some my brother’s friends from Iraq, the soldiers, come home to see their families. They are all my friends’ older brothers, and they all have scars and broad shoulders and tan skin just like my brother had when he got back, before he realized he wasn’t in the Army anymore and stopped getting up at five to do push ups and run around the neighborhood and fix the bandages on what was left of his thumb. They don’t go to the bar or race us down Main Street after dark. Mostly they just stay home, like my brother does, and help their fathers build cabinets or change a tire and tell war stories to their little brothers and their little friends.

One evening, while my friends are off making holes in the pond to icefish, my brother’s friends, the soldiers, come over to visit. They all sit in the living room and listen to the fire crackle and talk about town and politics and the jobs they are gonna get when they aren’t on tour anymore, and I sit real quiet next to my brother and listen and wait for them to tell war stories because I don’t have much to contribute. They all crack open beers and my brother lets me have one, too.

We stay like this for maybe an hour or two, talking about nothing until the beer is mostly gone and there isn’t much else to say about town or politics, until Jimmy Swanson says the best beer he ever tasted was the night after Fallujah ended. He says how’d he’d been right in the thick of it for days and lost one of his good buddies and the best moment of his entire life was after it was over, drinking a beer with his unit and letting all the sand pour out of his boots.
He says that when one of the other guys did the same, a dead scorpion came out, too.
Everyone chuckles.

“I remember being up for four days straight at Fallujah,” Dixon Cartwright says slowly into his bottle, “on day two some shrapnel cut open my arm and it wasn’t til day five that I could get it sewn up.”

Everyone chuckles again. Dixon Cartwright has a scar going from wrist to elbow that’s half an inch wide and raised up on his arm like a snake.

“Once when I called my girlfriend,” Harker Perry says from my couch where he used to sit and ask me if I’d ever kissed a girl yet, “we were getting shelled so hard I could barely hear her. I just told her reception was bad, but she didn’t believe me.”

Everyone is laughing and nodding.

I don’t get what’s so funny.

“I remember being the one who had to call my friend’s girlfriend when he died,” Dixon Cartwright says, playing with the skin on his scar that doesn’t have hair. I didn’t remember her name and I had to ask it and already by then she knew because there wasn’t any other reason why some soldier out in the middle of the fucking desert would be calling her.”

“I tell you,” Jimmy Swanson says, just like he used to when he was giving advice about fishing or sneaking out after dark, “worse for your hearing than any gunshot or bomb or alarm is some girl screaming over someone dead. When I was stationed in Baghdad and a suicide bomber blew up a restaurant nearby, there were so many women screaming I just about fired into the air to drown the noise out.”

Everyone is smiling into the fire and swilling the aftertaste of their beer. I don’t get why everyone keeps laughing at the stories.. These stories about screaming women and dead boyfriends and suicide bombers. I’m just waiting for the real stories. The stories about pudding in boots and practical jokes on mothers back home and how long a grenade can get tossed around before it blows up.

And then my brother asks if he ever told them the story of how he lost his thumb.“It was that damn Bobby Thatcher,” he tells them, drinking his beer and smiling a little so the scars on his face go crooked and pull his face all crazy for just a second or two. “Never make a best friend in the Army,” he tells them. “They’re nothing but trouble and they make you do crazy things sometimes.”

Everyone is chuckling and nodding like they know what he means, and I am sitting forward, waiting for my brother to tell how Bobby got the last laugh because after taking off a thumb there isn’t much you can do without killing a man.

“We were in Tal Afar,” my brother starts, leaning back and stretching out his legs so you could see the scars on his ankles where his pants and socks are both too short to cover. “Bobby and I were just doing routine patrol around the outskirts of town with a few other guys in a truck, and we got attacked a few miles out from base.”

No one says anything. They all just keep staring at the fire or their beer or their scars on their arms.

“I remember,” my brother says, “how the first shot was with some sort of anti-tank missile. Knocked the car right over on top of us and took out one of the guys right then and there.”
Jimmy Swanson takes another sip of beer and smacks his lips.

“The car turned over and caught on fire, but we’d all jumped or gotten thrown out by then and were hiding in a thicket that was near us when they first shot. They fired into the thicket for about five hours before someone from base sent out a recognizance unit and shot the fuckers, but in the mean time some of the bullets had killed the other two guys and got Bobby right through the gut. I couldn’t get up or nothing to help him, only thing I could do to stop the bleeding was stop up the hole.”

Dixon Cartwright grunts and nods like he knows what my brother is talking about.

The way my brother starts talking is like some teacher doing a review of division or the fifty states or the states of matter. Stuff that everyone pretty much knows by now but you’ve got to go over again just to get your mind freshened up. He says how some bullets exiting a gun get up to 267 degrees Celsius, some more. He says how those bullets don’t cool down for a real long time, and if they get stuck in your body sometimes they cook out your insides just a little, from all the heat and stuff. He says how, when you get shot, you’re in such a state of shock that you can’t really feel the bullet still inside you, cooking your insides.

I just sit there. Listening to my brother talk and stare into the fireplace with his eyes real glassy and his voice deep.

“Well, here I am with my best friend bleeding out beside me and these assholes still firing at me and nothing to plug the hole in Bobby except what I’ve got on me, which isn’t anything. So I did the only thing I could do, I plugged the sucker up with my thumb.”
Everyone chuckles.

My brother says how, if you don’t got the adrenaline and stuff of getting shot pulsing through you, putting your thumb right up against a burning hot bullet is just about the most painful thing you can ever think about doing. He says how the heat gets so bad it spreads up so you think your entire arm is one fire. He says how he spent the next two hours there, plugging up Bobby with his thumb and waiting to get shot until the recognizance unit came and pulled them out of the thicket. He says that by that time the bullet and his bone and skin on what hadn’t been straight burned off of his thumb had fused with Bobby’s insides so that he couldn’t unplug himself. My brother says into the fireplace that he had to ride back to base and then to the hospital with his hand still in Bobby, and when the surgeons finally managed to cut the mess away my brother didn’t have a thumb anymore.

“Crazy shit,” my brother says, taking a swig of his beer and cracking his knuckles. “You’d think the heat would cauterize the wound and all, but the bullet mushroomed so much that I still had blood all the way up my arm. Ruined that jacket of mine, Bobby did.”

My brother’s friends laugh.

I put my beer down.

When my brother’s friends have stood up and clapped my brother on the shoulder and told him how good it was to see him and that when they get off tour they’ll be sure to give him a call and then left through the front door, I help my brother gather up beer bottles and follow after him into the kitchen. While my brother rinses bottles and puts them in the brown paper bag for stuff to recycle for five cents a piece, I sit at the kitchen table and trace the tablecloth pattern with my thumbnail.

We don’t say anything. I just sit there at the kitchen table and he stands at the kitchen sink, until finally I clear my throat and ask him how Bobby paid him back for sacrificing his thumb and all.

From his place at the kitchen sink, my brother smiles over his empty beer bottles and soap suds.

“Eh, nothing’,” my brother tells me. “He died about an hour after we got dragged out of the thicket. Suffocated on the blood in his lungs, or something. Doctors were too busy trying to get me and my thumb out of him to tell me what killed him, and I was too far going into shock from having my thumb slow-cooked to remember to ask.”

He puts the last of the beer bottles in the bag.

“Hey do me a favor,” my brother says, turning from the sink towards the door. “Don’t tell Mom about this. You know how she gets.”

I say ok and keep tracing the tablecloth pattern with my thumbnails.

The next day my friends call. They want me to go to one of their houses because one of their brothers, home from the Air Force, is going to tell them about how he convinced a new recruit that he was too drunk to fly the plane. I don’t go, though. I’m busy sitting in our living room with my brother, watching the sun through the window and asking him to tell me a real war story that will help me prepare for basic training in the summer.