Hit and Run

Later, he pulled up to a log-built house crouched on the side of a sage covered hill in the blistering Texas sun. A rusted blue Chevy pickup was in the driveway. He got out of his jeep, stood there, and took a long breath through his nose, letting it out slowly. Then, beyond the pickup, he stared at the house for a long time.

No one answered when he rang the bell. He knocked and waited and heard nothing. Then he tried the door and the familiar handle turned with a twist of his hand.

After stepping into the hall, he called for his brother. "Rafa. You here?"

The house felt smaller, but the smell was the same. Cigarette smoke had sunk into the wood and the plaster. The floor gave in the same place under his shoe in the entry hall. Even the echoes sounded the same.

His father was still in the house—the two o'clock rages that had once filled the halls, the war, the old names, the stories running together in drink and nightmares.

He stopped at the black-and-white photograph in the hall. His father held his wide-brimmed hat in his hand and his forehead was white above his tan leathered face. His mother stood with exhausted eyes in a faded flowered dress. They stood in front of a trailer he couldn’t imagine how they fit into. The three brothers were in front—himself, his twin brother Rafael, and little Alberto. There was a crack in the glass frame and he put his finger on the glass to trace the line of the break.

His brother called from the kitchen, his voice rough and deep, and for a second, he thought again of his father.

"Daniel? That you?"

"Yes."

"Come on back."

He found Rafael at the kitchen table with his head bent over a stack of papers. He was broad through the shoulders, wearing red suspenders and a railroad engineer's cap stained with grease. His hands were thick, but his fingers moved quick and delicate, and he was flicking pages and lining up the edges.

"Sit down," Rafael said, and didn’t look up. He was on his cell phone talking with a man named Carlos. “You know me Carlos,” he said. “I’ve always been good for it.” This Carlos said something and Rafael hung up the phone and went back to the paperwork.

Daniel took a chair and watched his brother's hands move through the stack of paper as if he were tearing the meat off a chicken. He stared at a chip in the Formica kitchen table near the ashtray which was full of cigarette butts and gray ash packed down in layers, and the chip brought the room back.

He and Rafael were both twelve. Alberto was there too, and Rafael was leaning over Alberto with a spoon mounded with pepper. "Ándale. I'll give you a dime to eat this." Alberto looked back at his older brother with his kid trusting eyes, but Daniel reached out and took the spoon himself and poured it in his mouth.

And now Daniel was back again at the table, and Rafael looked up. His skin hung on his wide face like pale parchment. Daniel had never seen so much pain in his twin brother’s eyes.

Rafael slid the a tumbler toward him. "Welcome to the old homestead," he said.

They talked first about the easy things. Rafael's family was fine. Emma was still at the clinic. A saint, Rafael said. But she was in New York seeing her mother and she might stay there a while to give him a break. She might stay longer than just to give him a break Rafael said with his broken eyes. Daniel told him about his new job at the old school, janitor for Christ's sake, but somebody had to do it, and that was life. They drank their vodka and let the other talk until there was nothing left to say.

Daniel felt his brother looking at his tattoos, a scar on his arm. "You do what you have to do," he said.

"What's it like?"

"The first touch tears the skin. Not too much blood."

"No. I meant what's prison like?"

"The guys said I had an angel. They called me ‘Angel Man’. Can you believe it?"

Rafael smiled and sipped his vodka. There was water dripping somewhere. Then Rafael said, "With Mamá gone, we need to sell the house."

There it is, Daniel thought. The angle. "No," he said. "I'll buy it."

"You don't have the money."

"I can live here and pay you over time. I know your Carlos, tell him to wait. What have you got yourself into, brother?"

"My attorney says you can't pay over time. And who would give you a loan?"

Daniel slumped into the plastic chair at the table and his long legs stretched out on the kitchen's tile floor. He watched a gray wheel bug crawl on the outside of the kitchen window glass. It slipped to the outside sill and started to climb again.

Rafael finished his vodka, got up, and poured another at the sink. He was sweating through the shirt under his suspenders. "The broker says inventory the damn house for anything we want to sell."

"You do it."

"The attorney says it's best to have a witness, for us to do it together."

"No. I don't think that works for me."

Rafael drank and set the bottle down. It thumped hard and liquor spilled out the top. "You keep saying no like it changes anything."

"It changes plenty."

"You can't afford it."

"That's my problem."

Rafael looked at him. "That right? A janitor?" He pointed toward the front of the house, toward the hallway, toward the road without looking there. "Give me one good reason to trust you."

They sat facing each other a long time and then Daniel put his finger on the chip in the Formica and rubbed it there. "Ok, brother, let's do your attorney's inventory, but I’ve got an attorney myself and he tells me it takes two to sell.”

They started in the attic. The first thing they saw was Alberto's bike, the red one. It leaned under the eaves with the tires flat, one handlebar broken off, turned to the wall. Rafael looked at it once and then dragged an old chest into the light. When he opened it, dust came up through the shaft of sun that fell from the small window where the roof pitched together. The room smelled close and sharp with old wood and heat.

Inside was their father's Marine uniform.

"Want it?" Rafael said.

Daniel looked at the coat and the brass and the dark cloth folded in on itself. He had enough of uniforms.

"No."

"Papi wouldn't have wanted you to have it anyway," Rafael said. "After the accident, he turned bitter."

In the living room Rafael moved ahead of him as if he had already decided what stayed and what went. He opened a closet. A jacket with Alberto's soccer team emblazoned, a pile of discarded clothes stuffed in a box, a bike helmet on the shelf. He closed the door. "All of this can go," he said.

Daniel stayed in the doorway with one shoulder against the frame. "It's not yours to clear out."

Rafael passed him and went into the kitchen. The light at the window had gone thin and gray along the road. The air was cooler.

He looked back. "You coming?"

Later, Rafael stood at the sink drying his hands on a towel while Daniel went through the papers on the table.

The cuffs of Rafael's sleeves were still damp and he said, "The agent dropped these off this morning." He set the towel down and touched the papers with the backs of his fingers. "We sign and she lists it."

"No."

Rafael turned and looked at him. "We don't have time for this."

Daniel said nothing.

Rafael picked up the pen and rolled it once between his fingers. Then he set it back down.

Daniel rose from the table, his hands loose at his sides, and went to the front window. Somewhere deep in the house, the water still dripped. Slow. Regular. "What else do we need to look at?"

"I guess nothing. I think Papi's car is in the barn."

"Let's go," Daniel said.

The old barn still had hay bales piled to one side. Daniel remembered building forts there with the other kids, sweat on their faces, straw in their hair.

The blue tarp was stiff with dust and bird droppings. Rafael caught one corner and Daniel another and they pulled it back and exposed a faded blue two-seater, Mustang in stencils on the side. The top was down.

Daniel ran his hand along the hood, leaving a clean line through the dust and then stood there and stared at the car. "Papi kept it?" He leaned into the passenger side.

Rafael glanced at Daniel. "Kept it? He didn't look at it. The cops dropped it off after six months at least. You were already sent up. They didn't bring back the keys, just dumped it."

Daniel stepped back. The front bumper was missing. He gave the handle a tug, and the door squealed as it opened. He got in and pulled the brake handle and let it fall. Then he pressed the clutch and jiggled the gear lever. He looked out through the windshield and called back to his brother. "Get in the back."

Rafael pushed, and the car inched forward with a slow resistance that gave way as the wheels turned.

Daniel held the line, guiding the car out into the open. "Keep it coming."

When the car reached the side of the road, Daniel let it drift to a stop before setting the brake, his hands clenched on the wheel and his knuckles went white. His head pressed forward.

"Daniel?"

"Yeah," he said, and got out of the car.

Daniel wiped his hands on his jeans and looked back at the house. They walked back toward the house. At the porch, Rafael pushed the door open and went inside.

Daniel stayed where he was. He looked past the yard, out toward where the road dipped and rose again. After a while, he went in.

Rafael had moved the papers into a stack.

Later, the light had gone flat through the windows and they sat in the living room without speaking. At some point, Rafael got up and went into the kitchen. A cabinet opened and closed.

An instant later, Daniel was at the kitchen door, one hand on the frame. And then he put his forehead against the wood. “Why won’t you sell it to me?”

Rafael turned and looked at him. “I’m not a damn bank.”

Daniel nodded.

“You can stay in Papi’s room tonight. Your old one is full of storage.”

Daniel went up to his parent’s room and sat on the bed. He could hear Rafael in the kitchen below him, rattling pans, talking to himself. He lay on the bed and looked at the ceiling. In the closet, his mother’s clothes were still hanging, the hangers loose as he looked at them. He stopped at one dress, then another. His parent’s bureau was against the wall. He opened it: His mother’s blouses were all folded neatly, old photos, jewelry, a photo of her as a young girl with ‘Gonzalez’ scrawled on the back. There were newspaper clippings about the arrest ten years ago. Daniel pulled out the clippings and sat on the bed. He read them for a while and then put them back in the bureau.

His brother was on the phone downstairs and he listened to him argue through the vent in the floor. After the voices had died, he went downstairs.

Rafael looked up and the whites in his eyes were wide like the day they were kids and trapped on a bridge, the train coming fast and howling at them.

Daniel looked at his brother a long time, and then leaned into the table. “I need your pen.”

After he signed, Daniel didn’t say anything but walked by his brother and stepped out on the porch. At the edge of the driveway, he stopped. He stood by the road for a long time. Then he walked back to his van.

Rafael watched him drive away until he was lost in the dark. He went to the living room and sat in his father's chair, the back of it dark and greasy. From where Rafael sat, he could see the hallway and the photograph on the wall, the cracked glass, and the three boys standing in front of the trailer. He sat leaning forward, a glass of vodka in one hand, the house keys gripped tight in the other.

After a while, he got up and went to the kitchen and looked out the window. There was a light in the distance where the road dipped. He stepped back and threw the keys at the stack of paperwork and the pile spilled to the floor. The door to the kitchen slammed as he walked out. He got in his pickup truck to drive off with the gravel spinning behind him and soon pulled behind Daniel's van at the bottom of the dip.

Rafael stood next to Daniel’s van and watched his brother piling stones and then climbed down to kneel beside him.

Daniel didn’t say anything when Rafael picked up a stone and placed it on the cairn next to the slab of rock his brother had just placed.

They went back and forth, each adding a stone one at a time.

A stone fell off the pile when Rafael placed it on top. "Goddamn it," he said.

"Do you remember when we were building the porch with Papi?" Daniel said. "Alberto told us we couldn't build shit?"

"I remember." Rafael said. “He said next time to ask him what to do, a six-year-old.”

They both laughed.

With a red ribbon horizon behind them, in a country where black-hided cattle grazed in high meadows, where weather-widowed ranches hunched on golden grass and American flags hung on the barns like beacons of lost pride, they gathered stones in the blue night.