Brotherly Love Read Online Free PDF Page A

what I’m
saying, I lost something here too .... "
    His father stares at the cop until he runs out of
words, and then, when the room is quiet again, he turns back to
Constantine.
    "Is that it?" he says.
    Constantine looks from his father to Victor Kopec,
perhaps measuring the distance between them. Victor Kopec shrugs,
comfortable, as if the men in the room will be with him forever.
    "Is that it?" his father says again.
    The old man shakes his head. "That’s what I
was gonna ask you," he says.
    His father turns and considers Victor Kopec. Without
another word, he reaches across the space between them and takes the
policeman’s hand. Victor Kopec is startled at first, and then seems
to relax.
    "My sincere condolences," he says.
    His father shakes the hand and nods.
    "Now it’s over," the old man says.
    His father looks into Victor Kopec’s eyes.
    "Something happens, you got to either forgive
somebody or kill them, it makes you loco the thing ain’t settled,"
the old man says.
    The room is quiet again while the words themselves
settle.
    "Charley?" the old man says.
    "Everything’s settled," he says, still
looking at Victor Kopec. Constantine takes off his glasses and wipes
the corners of his eyes, as if he has been crying. “That’s good,"
he says, the handkerchief still in his eye. "Victor helped us
out a lot of times, and this way, we’re all friends and he ain’t
dead, he can help us out some more."
    Victor Kopec begins to nod, but in that same moment
Peter sees him reconsider, as if he realizes something has changed
between himself and the men in this room. That he has been
threatened.
    Victor Kopec smiles now, no longer sure of himself,
no longer so comfortable.
    "Constantine," he says, "my sincere
appreciation for working this out between us."
    The old man stirs in his chair and pushes himself
slowly to his feet and smiles. "You’re neighbors," he
says.
    Then one of the men places the coat over his
shoulders, centering it carefully, and another opens the door. On the
way out, the old man suddenly stops and looks up the staircase,
directly into Peter’s eyes.
    He holds on to the
banister, frozen. The old man lifts his hand, his thumb comes up,
turning it into a gun, and pretends to fire a shot.
    * * *

    T he men leave, the front
door shuts, the house is suddenly quiet. Peter’s father stands at
the door, a moment and then walks into the kitchen.
    Peter himself sits on the stairs, thinking of the
pistol the old man had made of his hand. Of his crooked fingers that
could not point up the stairs.
    He is thinking of the moment the old man pretended to
shoot when a noise comes from the kitchen, almost a shot itself. He
waits, and in the quiet that swallows the house afterwards, he
suddenly moves, surprised to find himself moving, running down the
stairs, crossing the living room, slowing now as he gets closer, and
finally walking, a step at a time, into the kitchen.
    He sees the blood first, it spots his father’s
shirt and his pants and falls in heavy drops on the floor around his
shoes. His father is leaning into the icebox with both hands, as if
he were holding it up, and then Peter sees the spot between his hands
where he has smashed it with his head. The smooth line of the door is
dented, as if someone had dropped it off the truck.
    His father turns to him, his eyes are black and his
face is running with blood—the cut is in his hairline—and for one
long moment Peter feels himself in the same place with him, feels
himself in the center of the place, in the center of his father’s
thoughts.
    And then it passes.
    The blood runs out of his father and the look in his
eyes turns dull, and he is seeing something else.
    "Go to bed," he
says.
    * * *

    I n the morning, an
ambulance comes for his mother. It is not as surprising to hear the
noise in the hallway, or—after he has climbed out of bed—to see
the men carrying her down the stairs, as it is simply to confront her
appearance. She is a ghost. Her face,