Brutal Youth Read Online Free PDF Page B

he seemed proud of. He finished up at public school only because it was a requirement to get hired at the Kees-Northson Steel Mill over in Brackenridge, which was just down the hill from St. Mike’s. It irritated him to see it every day as he left work, and irritated him more that his wife never stopped fetishizing the place.
    She had always wanted to attend, though her parents refused. (It was one of the only things Bill liked about her family.) When the time came, June had insisted they enroll their older son, Charlie, in the school. Charlie was seven years older than Peter, who remembered those fights well from his hiding place under the dining room table. He even remembered the line his mother would use: “This is how we make our boy into something better than his father.” Bill complained he was paying tuition only so June could brag to her card club. He was partly right. “It’s expensive, but my Charles is worth it,” she used to tell her friends. She always called him Charles around other people.
    Davidek and Charlie weren’t close, partly due to the age difference. Davidek’s most vivid memories of his big brother were about getting pushed around by him. Charlie was always bigger, so all he needed to do was lie on top of his baby brother, smothering him, to win any fight. Then Davidek discovered a foolproof self-defense: The Purple Nurple, aka the Titty-Twister—a tried and true fight move every younger sibling learns after being repeatedly crushed by an overpowering foe. Charlie would rear back, clutching his aching areola, cursing his little brother’s name. “Fucking, Peter … Fuck!”
    Charlie’s name was off-limits in the Davidek house now, except during arguments—which their dinner conversation was now turning into. “I just think private school would give Peter an advantage,” June said. “It’s an investment in the future.”
    Her husband jerked his thumb at the empty fourth seat beside the table, where Charlie used to sit. “That one turned out to be a real good investment in the future, too, didn’t he?”
    After St. Mike’s, Charlie Davidek had spent the next four years getting drunk and fucking up. He flunked out of two colleges. Then he moved back home and spent a couple years working part-time for a landscaping company, and warring full-time with his parents. When they finally made him start paying rent and reimbursing them for whatever he ate out of the refrigerator, Charlie joined the Marines, fleeing Pittsburgh for Camp Pendelton outside San Diego. Enlistment made Charlie someone the Davideks could be proud of again.
    They had Charlie’s military portrait enlarged so it could hang in the center of their staircase. Beside it he hung a snapshot of Bill fishing with a six-year-old Charlie, and Charlie’s scowling senior picture from St. Mike’s. June kept a small version of the military portrait in her wallet, by her credit cards, which allowed her to accidentally-on-purpose show him off to random bank tellers and grocery store clerks.
    Then, a year into his service, Charlie had gone AWOL. The family found out when some men from the local recruiting office visited the house to ask whether they’d had any contact with their missing son. Months later, a letter arrived from Arkansas—no return address—where Charlie said he was working in a garage. He said he was okay, and told them not to worry. He didn’t explain why he’d gone AWOL, but nobody really wondered. Charlie (and another guy from his unit) had taken off in late summer of 1990, just a few weeks after Iraqi tanks rolled into Kuwait, and Americans started tying yellow ribbons around trees. When Davidek’s father turned his son’s letter over to the Marines, they offered to mail back a copy. “Don’t bother,” he said. “I never want to hear from that coward again.”
    All the pictures of Charlie were gone now, even the ones from when he was little. When Charlie’s name did come up, it was usually as a way for