Two Halves of a Half: A Brother’s Story (Part 2)
Part 1 is right here. While E sulks, I hope you enjoy the ride, dear reader…
Most of the time, E’s lips waggled from start to finish on a road trip. He would comment on everything from bad weather to how useful genetically modified feral hogs could be, hypothetically.
Today, the younger brother shuffled to the corner of the back seat of the van in simmering rebellion. His body hunched into a rigid, faded-coffee-stain beige C that no mortal could straighten out––not his driving brother, Lincoln, not even the attentive Evelyn and her batting eyelashes. She sat right beside E in the back, and he had the nerve to avoid her chocolate eyes like the plague!
Oh well.
With how upset his brother was with him, Lincoln hadn’t expected his usual, jabber jaw self. Even an ex-lover like Evelyn can’t solve a puzzle like E by herself. Hence the “ex.”
Harsh winds and autumn clouds whipped past outside to cover Lincoln’s van with miles of dirt, all without a peep from E. The man just kept breathing loud and annoying and eating crackers.
So Lincoln twirled a new CD by two brown fingers.
As they merged onto the highway, a third Tejano song hit its bridge and E reached his limit.
“Play some real music or I swear — ”
“Heh, sorry.” He switched discs and that song blared from his speakers. The way E yelped while kicking the driver’s seat, you’d think Lincoln had stabbed him!
“I hate you,” E hissed.
“Aw, you fuck with this. Eve, didn’t he used to like Selena?”
“Mhm, Lee musta bent over backwards to get you this one.” She hesitated, then went on in an odd laughing sadness, “Hey E, if I wound up dead––”
From the sound of it, E threw some crackers at her, Evelyn retaliated with a bone-chilling screech, and Lincoln thanked God and Jesus that they both sat in the back so he could drive. Still, he smiled into their tenth mile.
Fifty-five miles in, Lincoln grit his teeth against the sharp, shrapnel-like pebbles slicing through his van’s paint job.
“What’s the word, weatherman?” Evelyn asked, prodding E’s cheek with a stubby index.
E told her, “The word is jet streams. Look at the clouds’ winding shape, you can see ’em. Plus this cyclonic flow and high temps. But what’s new? Gets rough in tornado alley.”
“That’s too many words,” said Lincoln, eyes crinkling in the rearview mirror. “Look at my kid brother, a whole meteorologist!”
His words met silence, and Lincoln cringed because, really, this entire trip had one purpose, and mistakes like that slipping out couldn’t be tolerated. In swooped Evelyn to save the joke.
“Not yet, he’s not,” she exclaimed. “You still got time left at UT!”
E managed a chuckle for her sake.
Soon enough, Evelyn hijacked the music and cleansed their pallets with Stevie. Between each chorus, she and Lincoln fanned the flames of a serious debate.
“If teeth ain’t bones, snakes ain’t bumblebees on land!”
“Lincoln, what does that mean?”
At any moment, E could wade into their madness. Better yet, let him dive in, forget how cold the water is, forget pain, forget what Lincoln left unsaid and the years he never said it! That’s all Lincoln could ask for.
“Think about it. Bee bodies are all round with those tiny wings, snakes ain’t got limbs or claws. Bees still fly, snakes still burrow. Snakes are the bees of reptiles.”
“…The air you’re blowin’ is real hot but I can see it. I guess.”
Lincoln honked his horn in triumph!
His brother stayed quiet.
“But,” Evelyn cut in, “Teeth lack the regenerative properties of bones. They aren’t bones. They will never be bones! That analogy changes nothing.”
“Come on, E, back me up,” Lincoln whined. “She’s got her doctor voice on!”
In the overhead mirror, a slouching form flipped him off.
An orange sunset glow swept across Evelyn as bronze darkness reflecting light. The sight pissed E off to no end.
“I’m thinkin’ of a noun…” said Eve.
Sunshine! was Lincoln’s first guess, followed by light!
“Literally the opposite,” she snickered.
Darkness?
“Closer.”
Night.
“Not at all.”
Empty space, I dunno…
“It’s a person.”
“Me,” said E.
From the furrowed, bushy eyebrows to the clenched fist twitching in his lap to the carnivorous, predatory tone, he knew he must look a bit off. Like a stupid kid hellbent on getting his way, or a feral dog. That’s how he felt. They hadn’t stopped once in over 200 miles, food was in short supply, and he still had stuff on his chest that Eve didn’t need to hear when he tore Lincoln a new one.
“Me,” he repeated.
“Yes, you,” Eve grumbled. “I wanted to cheer you up…”
E pressed his face to the window, both eyes and glass glaring opaque.
“You can’t fix everythin’.”
Lincoln promised they’d take a break at a MacShack near Davis, Oklahoma, three exits away. How they’d managed to cross state lines running on one tank, gatorades, off-brand crackers, and one bladder apiece, E would never know.
“Watch out, Lee,” Evelyn warned. Her eyes followed the flashing reds and blues parked in an overgrown turnout. “Sooner police are different.”
“Not too different from Texas.” Her comment rolled like sweat off Lincoln’s back. “Momma taught us to act right. Even if we, uh, weren’t.”
“You mean if you weren’t,” said E. “I ain’t never been pulled over for somethin’ I did! But you…”
Lincoln’s cool, twisted smile in the rearview said it all.
E wasn’t having it. Not knowing what he knew. Not after today.
“And now you wanna talk about Momma. It only took, what, 300, 320 miles! Shut up. Just stop. All the stress you gave her right ’til the end and not a word against you. I got whupped for a pack of gum!”
“You stole that.”
“At least I was straight, you fiend, you got off easy and you know it and you know why, too!”
“Aw, man,” Lincoln sighed. “Look what you did. You made me miss the gas exit.”
Like lightning, Eve threw herself between E and the driver’s seat.
“There’s the next one!” she cried. “Go, to the golden arches, we’ll go back for gas! Didn’t you say you had to use it? Don’t look like that, E, it’s what you said. We’ll be there soon ‘nuff, don’t take the pain out on Lincoln…”
The older brother steered Evelyn clear of a raggedy booth filled with stringy-haired druggies murmuring about the lightning, thunder, and wind outside.
“Either we chase the storm or the storm chases us,” one said, sage-like. Then he glanced their way and, oh, Lincoln recognized that look. Evelyn ordered her combo and he stood right between the men and her all the while.
They went out the far door, walked around to the main entrance near the parking lot, anything to get Evelyn out of there while waiting for E to finish his business.
And about E…
“This isn’t working,” Evelyn sighed. “You didn’t talk to him right, don’t deny it, otherwise this’d be smooth. Instead we trapped him with me and he can’t get a word out. He’s bottled up about it, I can tell.”
She was giving Lincoln her doctor-to-patient type voice again. He bit his cheek.
“You’re delaying the inevitable,” she told him.
He stayed quiet.
“Lee, why’d you tell him ‘bout his real dad. Why now? You got a new place, can’t even stick around to help him through it — how is this good timing?”
“That’s just it.”
Lincoln peered up at the sheet of stars, followed the sky toward OKC, where light specks mushed into blue-gray night.
“Momma’s secret hurt me, too, for a while. Now I finally got up the nerve to tell him ’cause I don’t know when I’ll see him again. After graduation, he’s not gon’ stay down here, you know that. I’ll be lucky to see him once a year. Don’t want to spend not one of those times as brothers gettin’ used to life as half-brothers. He’s gotta move on so we can move on. This trip is just…to speed up the process.”
He spared Evelyn a smile.
“For what it’s worth, thanks for helpin’ me delay the inevitable.”
E wasn’t terribly smart. That’s what his 9th grade English teacher had told him, straight to his face and in front of his mother, before complimenting his creativity. The joke was on Mr. Smith, though. In 10th grade, he learned the secret to shallow authors and old books. He passed English with a begrudging respect for both, as well as a B-minus.
The trick was to search for evasions in each story. Anything that went unsaid meant the end of something else. Orwell’s horse would have worked himself to death without a single complaint, and so 10th grade E knew his end would come, one way or another. His blindness manifested as silence.
Silence is death.
And when Fitzgerald’s Daisy concealed her old life with small talk and sweet glaze on fine foods, E waited for the end of the manifestation of the life she hid. It was certain. More than certain.
Omission is death.
E might not be smart, but he wasn’t a blind horse. He saw truth. That’s why he couldn’t bring himself to gasp or shudder while listening in on Lee and Eve. By going around back, he heard every word. He had felt something off. Eve had known everything. They had set him up. And that was that.
To be continued.
In the final chapter, Part 3: While striking out on his own, E drives into a storm and a lion’s den. Lincoln just wants to bring his brother home.
