Send Down the Rain(79)

“They’re probably the cause of your diabetes.”

“No.” I flung one out across the water. “That was floating on top of the water I drank when I was in-country.”

“Agent Orange?”

“Yep.”

He swallowed, but it was difficult to get down. Tears dripped off his cheek and landed on his jeans. “We missed a lot.”

I stared out across the water. “We were born into a world at war.”

“Why you think God did it this way?”

“I don’t think this was His original intention.”

“What was?”

I shook my head. “Not this.”

He turned to me. A question on the tip of his tongue. “Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why didn’t you ever tell my secret? Undress me before the world?”

I swigged the chocolate milk, licked the soft middle of a cookie, and then crushed the remaining wafer in my hand. I opened my palm and let the pieces spill onto the surface of the water. Then I checked my blood sugar and gave myself three units of insulin.

“Something happened when Suzy’s dad came to get me. Something in the way I see. Evil became a person. As real as you and me. And when I came home, you were not that person.”

He set the tequila bottle on his lap. Stared at it several minutes. Then, without saying a word, he turned it upside down and emptied it into the river. He pulled the draft notice from his shirt pocket. Yellowed. Tearstained. Ripped down the middle and taped together like a cross. He rolled it like a scroll and slid it inside the bottle, then screwed the cap back on.

He offered it to me.

I shook my head. “You do it.”

Bobby stood, took two steps, and heaved that bottle as far as he could out across the tidal current. It spun through the air, reflecting light like a diamond, splash-landed, disappeared, bobbed to the surface, and began its long trip to the other side of the world.

Bobby sat, his shoulder brushing mine. I offered him the milk jug and he took it, swigging long. When he finished, the chocolate milk dripped off his chin. He whispered, “Good call on chocolate.” He turned to me and tried to speak again, but his voice cracked. Behind us, rain clouds had blown in. The breeze pushed across our shoulders, turning the air cooler. He looked up at the clouds. Then back at me. Squinting. “Brother?”

I loved it when he called me that. Always have. “Yeah.”

“Thank . . . you.” The words were separated by pain and they were long and hard in coming. The empty tequila bottle bobbed in the distance. Glass reflecting sunlight. A diamond floating on the surface of the world. “For giving me what I needed.” He swallowed and dug his hand into the package. “And not what I deserved.”

I put my arm around my brother’s shoulder.

We sat there a long time. Brothers. It’d been a long, long time. I sketched while he licked and flung Oreos. We finished off the milk and cookies. He started laughing.

I said, “What’s so funny?”

The air had turned ripe and pungent. The last warning before the rain.

“I’ve just been fired.” He raised a finger. “By the American people, no less. Literally got run out of town. Can’t really get hired anywhere, by anyone . . . to do anything.” He sucked through his teeth. “I have no idea what I’m going to do now.”

“You ever thought about a career in the carnival?”

Allie laughed as all three of us watched the bottle disappear out where the ocean touched the sky.

He raised both eyebrows. “No. Never given it much thought.”

“You’ve never really lived until you’ve guessed people’s weights or torn tickets at the tilt-a-whirl.”

“You hiring?”

“Matter of fact, yes.”

“You hire guys like me?”

“No . . . No, we don’t. We hire illegal aliens mostly, but . . .” I started laughing. “Thanks to you, most of them are legal now.”

He chuckled. “I should fit right in.”

We hadn’t laughed this much since we were kids. It felt good.

I finished my sketch. “You got any dinner plans?”

He pointed at the water in front of him. “I hadn’t gotten past the edge of this dock. Much less dinner.”

“We’ve got this weird little Mexican-seafood-fusion restaurant on the island that’s attached to a carnival. The food is off the chain, and the chef they’ve got is winning awards and being written up in magazines, and they’ve got these little fried doughnuts that I just can’t get enough of. And when I finish eating, I walk across the street and pop popcorn, scoop ice cream, and then turn on the cotton candy machine and hand it out free to all the kids and then just stand back and watch them smile. And then I hop on the flying chairs and ride till I get so dizzy I can’t stand up, and then I pick out a valiant steed on the merry-go-round and ride till the music gets stuck in my head, and then, when I’m done, I walk out on the beach and let the water wash over my feet and look for sharks’ teeth and wonder how my life turned out the way it did.”

“And then?”

“Then I wake up tomorrow and do it all over again. Although—” I paused. “Now I’ve got to add nursing puppies into the mix.”