Two Halves of a Half: A Brother’s Story (Part 3)
Part 1 is here, Part 2 is here, and Part 3 awaits you below, dear reader…
It made sense to E. His brother and his ex-girl were colluding in a MacDonald’s parking lot and it made sense.
No wonder Evelyn had tolerated him in a cramped, stained van for hundreds of miles. No wonder Lincoln had been so gung-ho for a road trip right after revealing the truth to him. The two of them had planned to force that godawful secret down E’s throat by catapulting him through the five stages of grief! They had wanted him to say, “So my dad ain’t Lee’s dad and I’m not me. So what?”
Well, he would show them what.
E went back inside and rounded on the blissed out druggies in the booth as they packed their nuggets to go.
“Can I come with you?”
“Huh?”
The scraggly one with arms like tree trunks gave him a once over. In fact, the whole group was probably doing some soul searching then and there to decide if light-skinned E was Black or White like them. His half-brother Lincoln had that deep cedar kind of brown that would always give him away, but E could play games if he wanted to.
Let the dice roll.
“Can I chase the storm with y’all?” E asked again, this time with a wide grin painted on. “Heard you talkin’ earlier, and I’ve always wanted to try it.”
The big man’s belly rolled with mirth.
“Sure, boy, sure!”
Outside, Lincoln and Evelyn could hardly believe their eyes.
A red pickup peeled out of the parking lot in a caustic puff of blue smoke. In the open bed crouched Lincoln’s baby brother, surrounded by bodies and throwing back a brown bottle. Too soon, E would vanish into the night.
Eve shrieked, “Oh my God, Lee!”
“I see ‘im — go — get in!”
Lincoln jammed the key in his van’s ignition and turned it. Again. And again.
“E musta figured it out — ”
And again.
“He’s gonna hate us — ”
And again.
“He’s never comin’ back!”
Lincoln slammed the keys down as Evelyn’s words rattled his skull.
Fuck school, E had said once, a long time ago.
Would he…? No, no, that was the wrong question. Could his little brother tumble from the mountaintop and land flat out on the same road paved for him way back when? He could. Anyone could.
“We’re outta gas,” Lincoln said, pressing his forehead into the steering wheel.
“What?!”
“We’re out of gas.”
Evelyn stared at him, hiccuped, then began to wheeze through tears.
“I’m a fool,” she whispered.
While rubbing her neck and shoulders, Lincoln remembered the signs they had passed on their way through Davis, the strawberry red 66…
“Let’s use their line ‘n call Phillips. They’ll bring us fuel.”
Evelyn garbled something incomprehensible.
“Huh?”
“Beer,” she said, wiping her face. “That new stuff, a Saint.”
Lincoln shook her lightly. “I need you sober to find him.”
“You need me sane. Fuel and beer, Lee.”
Bad idea on bad idea.
E knocked on the pickup’s back window until his new chauffeurs slid it open.
“How d’y’all plan on findin’ a twister?” he asked.
“With two good eyes!” A woman in the passenger’s seat breathed in his face. The wind blew away bits of whiskey.
E held in his laughter. Well, some of it, and the headwind took care of the rest anyway.
“No radio gear?”
“Nope!”
“GPS navigation?”
“The hell you think this is,” a gruff voice snarled. The driver.
E sat back. Why bother asking whether or not they were tracking the storm using NEXRAD data? At least these people had the foresight to drive straight into the wind. Even in tornado alley, twisters took their sweet time building up and the devils spun out faster than a blown candle, taking any chance for an encounter with them, especially without the proper equipment.
Tonight would either yield nothing or they’d all get lucky and die.
E nudged the fool beside him, a man with basset hound eyes, and he threw together another first-prize smile.
“How’d all y’all end up on the road?”
“A dare!”
“A dare?”
The guy’s puppy dog eyes lolled shut, shot wide, then fell still. E prepared himself to catch the man should he fall from the cargo bed.
“Mhm, fixin’ to win a cross-country dare! Left out from Jackson, up through Arkansas. We’re tryna get to Kansas City an’ loop back ‘round ‘fore Wednesday.”
Jackson?
The man across from E tugged his girl closer under a black rubber raincoat stretched thin as thread. Rays from the industrial flashlights skidding and bumping along the metal floor glinted off the butt of a rifle nestled between the two, perched so snuggly that E wondered whether the rosy-cheeked doll would have the shape imprinted on her face.
Their futile attempt to share a coat reminded E of how either he or Eve had always forgotten how cold Longview’s streets could get after a long movie, the type of movie that chewed you up and spat you out into the night still wearing sunglasses from hours prior. One of the two would always bring a fleece while the other didn’t, and the one without would moan and complain until the warm one just about threw their coat at the other.
They had never shared a jacket like these two. Maybe things could’ve ended differently if they had.
Jackson.
Jackson, Mississippi.
Huh.
That rifle was gleaming real bright right about now.
“What ‘bout you, where you from?” asked the hound.
E smiled so wide his muscles ached.
Eve took the first swig of her third bottle as Lincoln eased the van back onto the I-35E North. Their best chance at finding E was going straight to Moore as fast as possible and hoping he came to his senses soon enough to meet them at the first Moore exit.
Sweet Jesus, they were wishing on stars.
“Let’s sing a tune, Lee!”
Lincoln cringed, eyeing the empty Saints rolling to and fro.
“If you gotta go, please go in the bottles,” he said.
Evelyn’s chin dipped to her collar bone. She rolled liquor over her tongue.
“Wonder if it would fill the bottles or overfill the bottles?”
She was on her way over that edge. Not there yet, but on her way. The first time Lincoln had seen Evelyn drunk, the young woman had gripped a medical school acceptance letter in one hand and his brother’s button-down in the other. Yes, E had been shirtless, and yes, both of them had hurled in Lincoln’s bed in his then-new van. Its first stains, courtesy of his brother and his girlfriend. Well, his half-brother and his now-ex-girlfriend, or ex-lover, or however those two had referred to each other back then.
Christ.
“In about twenty, that third one’s gonna kick in,” mumbled Lincoln.
“Twenty? Minutes?”
“Minutes, seconds. I dunno, you’re the doc. Almost the doc.”
Evelyn finished off the bottle before closing her eyes, exhaling through nose and mouth, and coating the passenger side window with liquid wool, there one second, gone the next, and then she murmured in a throaty, sing-song way.
“Go in the bot-tle, f’ya know what’s good for you. If it spills, for shame. Three bottles to a name and nothin’ to show for it. For you, I guess. When it spills, don’t get it on no one but you, f’ya know what’s good. F’ya know what’s good for you…”
The Country Road 1685 exit sped by.
Shirt-snatching Evelyn emerged around the Paoli exit. As the sign blinked past Lincoln’s blind spot and the van rose from an abyssal dip in the highway, something dawned on him.
“Smart. You drank so I wouldn’t make you drive.”
At such an accusation, Evelyn choked up a lung and brown sludge dribbled from her nose, so Lincoln fished around for a floor napkin.
“Drive? I wanna drive! E never let me drive him anywhere. Southern chivalry, yeah, right. Kiss my grits, E. My grits…”
Lincoln tried to stare straight ahead through all that, but tears pooled in Evelyn’s red-brown dimples, sloshing like her belly, and she hadn’t so much as used the napkin, and she’d never questioned his plan to trick E into acceptance, even if deep down she had sensed the senselessness of it all… The waterworks were ringing her dry.
If Lincoln focused on cushioning his voice, he could slough off any irrational fear of a female planet and replace it with feather soft comfort. He hoped.
“You don’t mean all that, do you?” he asked.
“I say what I mean,” snapped Evelyn, clearing her face. The napkin smelled of french fries. “That’s why I shouldn’t’ve helped you. You Clarke brothers. Reelin’ in women to fillet, to fry. I’m cod. Dear God, I’m cod.”
“What does that make E?”
“He’s cod too,” she said lowly. “We’re fish fishin’ each other, cannibals, just can’t stop comin’ back for more. We tried to fool ourselves with labels and gimmicks, but…forget it.”
A streetlamp clipped Lincoln’s vision, and though he hadn’t had a single swig, he felt like throwing up.
If only E would meet them in Moore. Then, he could take a bat to this whole affair.
“Why d’ya like E?”
Lincoln raised an eyebrow but kept his eyes on the road.
“Like him? He’s my blood — ”
“You can love blood without likin’ it. You can hate blood while lovin’ it.”
Even half asleep, she was too quick. Lincoln took his sweet time scanning the first Purcell exit sign, calculating the 30 miles left between them and a dark side street where E might be, perched on a curb, waiting.
“He’s a grounder. He plows through dirt, levels the field. We used to share the bathroom ‘fore school, and he’d say fix your face or some shit while dressin’. He never fixed himself without fixin’ me, even if he knew it was all a show for Momma — I wasn’t goin’ to no class, not at dawn, not back then.”
A calloused finger struck Lincoln’s side. When he nearly swerved into a barrier, Evelyn brushed off his glare by waving an empty bottle.
“He reminds me’a me, too,” Evelyn murmured.
“Is that right?”
Of course she was right.
“We’re selfish,” she told him.
“Guess so.”
They finally pulled to the curb off Exit 117. By then, they were coughing and belting on strained vocal cords to all of Moore.
“Three bottles to yer name and nothin’ to show for it for you, nuh-uh. When they spill, don’t get it on nobody else! No one but you, none but you, f’ya know what’s really good…”
Heavy precipitation slowed the beat-up pickup to crawling speeds and chilled the cargo bed dwellers to the bone. Better cars flew by. Everywhere E turned, lightning, rain, and pale conduits glared back at him.
How black these bodies would turn if the pulse of God got a hold of them. What would they think then?
Nothing. They wouldn’t think. Even now, there was no telling what they believed. They might’ve seen the truth of his skin and thought nothing of it. This wasn’t the ’60s. This wasn’t concrete.
E was sweating bullets and rainwater.
The shivering doll nudged herself into the crook of her man’s neck until his head lulled and the whites of his eyes lit like molotov cocktails as his pupils shrunk so small they could balance on a pen, one on top of the other. Had E already caught fire? Was he engulfed? E’s fingertips buzzed like he had called down the storm and torn atoms apart with his bare hands, all for a vision of darkened skin rippling outward from the point of contact. For fulfillment, revelation, and death to the bearer of secrets.
“Moore, one mile,” read a sign.
E slid to the wet, metal edge, closed his eyes, and flipped himself over the side.
The young man limped off the I-35 to follow the underpass North, glancing up now and again to see the pickup’s tail lights sway on toward a malignant fist of clouds.
Apparently Lincoln had got himself an identical armchair to E’s for his place in Moore, with a matching suede couch, too. That’s where E awoke the next day to take note of new money spent, never old money had, on rough carpeting, a kitchenette, that couch where Eve lay, and a thin sheet over his brother. What a gentleman; Lincoln had slept on the ground beside a cactus of a coffee table, splinters and all.
E nudged him with his toe.
“You set this place up nice.”
Lincoln grunted, crawling into a seated position. E curled into his patchwork quilt — the thin quilt from some garage sale, not the homespun one Momma had kept on her bed, because E owned that one now. It sat in his linen closet back in Austin, pressed and pristine.
“Why’d you have to bring Eve into it?” E asked.
“Dunno. She already agreed to the trip ‘fore y’all broke up, plus she’s family. She wants you happy… It just seemed natural.”
Standing and stretching well past his full height, Lincoln began to fold his sheet. E felt ant-sized.
“Just seemed natural, get outta here,” he grumbled.
His brother halved the half of the bedsheet.
“The men I left with came from Jackson,” said E, and that surely stopped Lee cold.
“Burnin’ murders Mississippi?”
“They might’ve thought I was White.”
“Well, uh.”
“Yeah.”
“You didn’t touch nobody’s girl? Didn’t look at ’em funny, or…”
“No.”
“No wonder you been quiet.”
“Yeah.”
Lincoln draped the neat linen over his forearm and just kept staring.
“What,” said E.
Lincoln shifted from foot to foot.
“Whatcha lookin’ at?”
“You need a — a hug?”
Laughing off that offer was too easy.
“Boy, please!” E scoffed, but when he looked away, Lincoln kept his eyes fixed on his forehead until the younger brother sprang to life, slamming his palm on the armchair.
“You wanna say somethin’, say it,” he told him.
If E’s senses weren’t deceiving him, Lincoln had the audacity to shrug and say, “I gave you an earful last night.”
“You messed up,” E bit back. “You avoided me, ran me ‘round, brought Eve into it, got me stuck with God-knows-who — you wanna say somethin’, say it!”
“You’re gonna wake Evelyn.”
“F’I died, what would you do?” Lee’s mouth snapped shut. E kept going. “They had guns, what would you do? You don’t even know, you don’t think!”
“I didn’t put you in that truck.”
“You did, you did! What you didn’t do was grow a pair. What you haven’t done is talk to me straight––you threw Eve at me and ran!”
Lincoln stepped to him.
“Ima ignore all that,” he said, timbre rumbling. “You had a brush with death so Ima ignore all that, but you better take a pill. They thought you were White. The end.”
E swallowed to force everything down, but it didn’t work this time. His inhibitions threw a line of true fear––
“I might as well be White!”
There. He had said it.
Lee dropped the sheet and pinched his little brother by the ears, cupping his face in his palms.
“No, you’re not,” he told him. “You’re not.”
“Might as well be!”
E wanted to weld his lips shut but every thought he’d shoved off or entertained since learning the truth sloshed out in a muddy soup.
“Over an hour and they couldn’t tell! Till country Mississippi men couldn’t even tell. If they’d called me out, if they’d realized, at least — ” Lee shook him.
“No! You don’t know what could’ve been.”
“But at least,” E wheezed.
Lee started to rub the damp face dry, prompting E’s retreat back into the armchair and the quilt. This was a mess, a whole mess, and he was a mess, so he’d rather look the part than let Lincoln wipe his eyes.
“I’m more White than Black, Lee.”
“Come on, last I checked Momma raised us both. You’re Black as me!”
What an incredible blindspot Lincoln revealed by saying that. On any other Sunday, a great laugh could come from gibberish like that, but E couldn’t laugh anymore. Numbers, clean numbers, would set him straight.
“Mixed woman plus White man makes around three-fourths White. That’s me, Lee. If what Momma told you is true, then that’s me. It’s always been me.”
And what could a half-brother say to that?
Lincoln spread his arms, defeated.
“You’re right.”
Then descended a silence too total to speak of, a silence that E plummeted right into until he landed in the brown armchair cushions.
“You’re right,” repeated Lincoln, ice cold, as if once wasn’t enough for the heart. “That’s how the blood sifts out. But you know what?”
E rubbed his eyes. “What?”
“Some people still wouldn’t trust you half as far as they could throw you. Some’d take you away from me ‘fore they asked ‘bout any three-fourths bull. They don’t care, why should we?”
He snatched his sheet off the carpet and about-faced. “I’ll make breakfast. You two got class the day after tomorrow.”
“Mhm.”
They did. He and Eve had classes, readings, papers, and professors to impress before spring rolled around and he left this life in the rearview mirror.
What new lies might enjoy longevity hereafter, tiring him out some ten, twenty, fifty years from now? E needed to stock up on rest, the way things were looking.
He turned over to welcome a dreamless sleep…
And his cover was snatched. Lee walked away folding the quilt, saying, on second thought, E ought to help, since he made better curried eggs than Lee and he’d made better eggs since he was old enough to use a stove because Momma had taught him how to add just enough spice to jazz things up, and wouldn’t it be a shame to honor her memory with bad eggs?
E pulled himself up and got to work.
The end. Thank you for taking this journey with E, Lincoln, Eve, and me.
Sincerely, an 18-year-old writer in this broad world.
