My brother was born breach. He entered this world showing his arse, and I like to imagine he left it doing the same.
From an early age his temperament always leaned heavily toward the belligerent, a mood he adopted after his peers ostracised him on account of a sleepy eye and poor upbringing. They said he smelt like shit and looked dumb. They were only right on one account. My parents were poor, but we had a pot to piss in. It was under the sink in the kitchen, a little sandcastle bucket I never remember playing with. The only toilet in the three-up-two-down was outside and in the winter icicles would hang from its basin like stalactites. Pissing was fine in the house, my father would say, but if you needed a shit, then out you go. Sometimes it would be so cold the shit wouldn’t come out. Or when it did, it would splash the cold water back up your arsehole and we would scream blue murder. But all this was bearable compared with having to wipe ourselves clean with freezing cold newspaper. The paper would be damp in the mornings, and frozen solid with sharp edges in the evening. Mother would say it was like wiping your arse with a cactus, and she wasn’t far wrong. Used to be that after a while all my white Jockeys would have black marks on the seat from where ink had rubbed off my arse cheeks. My mother would laugh when she came to wash them, saying she could keep abreast of the news while separating our smalls.
But my brother, Alan, the one born breach, he didn’t like going outside. He was only six back then, three years younger than me, but I would tease him about the Bog Monster that lived in the outside toilet. He would get so scared he took to pushing his arse cheeks on the floor to help hold that shit in rather than go outside. I never realised his sitting on the floor shuddering and red-faced was anything more than a childish peculiarity, one he would grow out of. I figured he just liked to sit around a lot and get angry. Turned out I was wrong. Because he would clean any excess faeces off his Jockeys before our mother had time to wash them, none of us knew what the hell he was doing. Smart kid you see. Not dumb at all.
Then came the day we found out. We were all in the living room watching the black and white portable. My father, in a surprisingly good mood after winning on the horses, lifted Al up onto his wide shoulders and began twirling him around. Al was small for his age. He never developed as quickly as the other kids. This why they would get to calling him slow, saying his body was waiting for his brains to catch up. And it’s true, being six made him look like he was four. But being so small never stopped his temper from growing. When my parent’s friends and neighbours praised him on understanding the most common of things, believing him to be much younger than he looked, Al would cuss and kick out at them until mother or father restrained him. I guess that’s why father would play with him more than me. He must have felt sorry for him, or something.
My father was three spins in when he suddenly stopped and began sniffing up toward the ceiling.
“Who’s shat?” he asked.
Mother looked around smelling the air. “I don’t smell anything?” she said. They both looked at me. I was sat on the couch picking at a scab on my knee when I looked up and caught their stare. “Don’t look at me,” I said “Maybe it’s fartypants up there,” I said pointing at Al.
I wasn’t really paying attention to Al’s face. The thought that he had been shitting his trousers for some time never even crossed my mind.
“Al, you shat?” my father asked turning his head as far back as he could without breaking his neck. Al said nothing. “Fuck me, it’s getting stronger!” said my father.
“Eddie, please! Don’t swear in front of the kids.”
“You can’t smell that? It’s like dog shit. Everyone check their feet.”
We all lifted our feet and checked our soles. I hardly had any grip for the rubber to adhere too let alone dog shit. Al was in slippers. In unison both mother and I said no. Al remained silent.
It must have been lifting Al’s legs up so he could check the bottom of his slippers, and AL reaffirming his grip around his neck that forced my father to dry heave. My father had a nose like a bloodhound, and a face to match, and I could tell he’d caught the scent of something quite disgusting.
“H Christ! You can’t smell that?!” He began walking in small steps around the cramped living room, Al clinging on to dear life behind him. “It’s bastard everywhere. I can smell the shit everywhere!”
By then mother and I were following close behind, sniffing around his trail to locate the smell. We couldn’t smell it no matter how much we tried.
“Maybe you’re getting a tumour,” my mother said, and father turned to face her, his cheeks tanned with exhaustion. “A bastard tumour?! Well, if I am it’s probably down to you bleeding nagging me all the time. The brain can only take so much crap Shelia before it gives up and - ”
My fathered stopped in his tracks. His bulbous nose twitching, blood shot eyes rolling toward the back of his skull. He placed his hand up to his face, a builder’s hand, thick with calluses and broken skin. He looked at it once and then smelt his fingers. He wiped his chin, just above my brother’s grip, and brought his hand back up and smelt it a second time.
“I GOT SHIT ON ME BASTARD CHIN!!!”
He dropped Alan to floor with a thud and rushed to the kitchen. Mother shouted that under no circumstance should he wipe his face on the tea towel. We heard the tap running and a few cuss words. When he returned a few minutes later he shoved his wet face into mine. Lifting his chin up high and looking down the bridge of his nose at me, he asked if I could see anymore. I looked around and noticed a big dollop of beige paste smeared along his neck. I instantly pushed past him and ran to the door leading to the kitchen.
“EEWWWWW!! It’s all over your neck!!” I shouted.
Mother checked and soon enough she was right behind me, dancing from one foot to the other. “He’s right Eddie, it’s all over your neck! It looks disgusting!”
“Mother Fuc-“
Father ran past us and we both jumped out of the way. In a flash he had his neck under the tap again, handful after handful of water being thrown everywhere but his neck.
“You’re getting everything wet, Eddie!”
Father stopped and readjusted his aim.
“I can’t see diddily shit! Help me, woman!”
“Not if your life depended it on it!”
He picked up the old soap bar, its centre cracked and black, and began scrubbing his face, neck and chest. When he finished he wiped down with the tea towel. He looked so angry mother didn’t even protest. Back in the living room Alan had disappeared.
“Al! Get out here!!”
Father knew where he was without even looking. When Al ever got in trouble for kicking out at strangers who said he was cute and adorable, or when he got to breaking things on account of his temper, he would go hide behind my father’s armchair. Both my brother and I used to call my father the crocodile on account of his snapping jaws and swiftness when irate. We never fell victim to the death roll, like we’ve seen an actual croc do so many times on nature programmes, but he sure as shit could go from dormant to full of zip when he needed to. Seemed Al had done his research on those crocs and knew that if you stood at its tail, no croc, however angry, could turn fast enough around to snap at your heel. Its body wasn’t made for turning fast. “That’s how you survive,” Al once told me while playing Snap one night in my bed. “You don’t run, but instead stay close. Close but just out of reach.” See how smart he could be?
“Eddie,” said mother quietly. I looked over and found her eyes wide open, motioning to her own backside. “He’s probably, you know,” she said tilting her head to the side. “Just don’t be hard on him, eh?”
“Hard on him?! Jesus Shelia he wiped his shit all over me! What do you think I’m going to do? Thank him?!”
He walked up to the armchair and pushed it away in one swift movement. His teeth were exposed, each looking just as sharp as pick axes. When he found Al he was crying, his sleepy eye swollen and red, hands shivering. The shock of seeing his son so scared caused a change in my father’s mood. Rage drained from his face, his muscled relaxed. Kneeling down beside him, father placed his hand on Al’s shoulder.
“I’m not gonna hurt ya, Al. I just want to know what’s going on.”
Al didn’t say or do anything other than cry.
“Let me see your hands, then,” asked my father. But Al tucked them under his armpits and shook his head violently.
“Are you testing my patience, is that it?”
Eventually mother pushed my father aside and led Al to his feet. She placed her arms around him and held him close to her stomach.
“Leave him be, Eddie,” said my mother “Can’t you tell he’s frightened of you? And maybe a little embarrassed?“
“So he should be. Wiping shit on your father’s face is a flogging offence in some countries!”
Mother guided Al to the seat where she sat him down and began stroking his head.
“It’s okay honey,” she said softly, “your father just wants to make sure you’re okay is all. It’s important not to worry about this. It’s perfectly natural for young boys to… you know. Isn’t that right Jimmy?” She turned to me and crumpled her face up tight until her eyes looked as evil as gargoyle’s. She wanted me to agree, so Al could feel no remorse for his actions and to feel like any normal six year old that shits his trousers, like we all did, like she wanted us all to have done. And what could I do? He was my little brother, three years younger than myself. It was my job to look out for him, to chastise and beat on the older kids that would tease him about his eye, or the foul stench that followed him everywhere. I was meant to stand by him when my father would raise his hand, or berate him for being so ill tempered. I had no other choice but to look out for him.
Al looked to me, his eyes two glassy marbles of sorrow and pain. He wanted to hear the truth, the truth my mother wanted twisted. I looked up and found my father’s eyes upon me too, the last embers of rage still burning deep, his skin cerise and unshaven. And I’m sure, although still very angry with Al, he wanted to hear me agree to all this as well.
I walked slowly toward Al. When I reached him I knelt down and smiled gently. He looked relieved at my being there, safe.
I reached out and patted him tenderly on the shoulder and said quietly, “Like fuck I did.”
A hand caught the back of my head and sent me reeling across the floor and into my father’s armchair.
“See?!!,” shouted mother to my father. “Look what your foul mouth as done to our kids!! No better than a barfly, either of them!!” Al was crying again. I rubbed my head and looked to my father who had his hands raised to the ceiling.
“Mother of Christ! What have I done to raise two kids that show no respect? One has a mouth full of shit and the other’s trousers are filled with the same!”
He dropped his hands, walked up to me and struck me across my head again. “Don’t fucking use that word in here again, you hear?”
“What? You mean, ‘Fuck’?” I asked, feeling his palm a third time.
I began crying.
“Yes! And stop crying or I’ll give you something to cry about!” He left me and went over to Al. Taking him by the hand he dragged his skinny body into the centre of the room. Mother tried to keep hold of Al’s other arm but after a strong look from my father she let go and sat observing the situation with some unease.
“Right, I’m going to get to the root of this boy! Stand up!”
Al was a heap on the floor, snot dripping from nose in long strands. Patience having no place in my father’s heart, he quickly grabbed Al’s arm and yanked him to his feet. Once upright my father raised his head so he could see his face.
“So, how do you do it, eh? You cross your legs over like this?” Father demonstrated a move that looked like one taken from the Karma Sutra. His body twisted around itself, his legs tied together. He began shaking as if constipated, his face growing ever redder. After a few seconds he let out his breath and released the hold his body had on itself. “Is that it? Like that? Or do you have a different technique? I want to know Al! I want you to show me!”
My mother cried out, concern for her son’s safety echoing through her voice. “What is this going to prove, Eddie? The boy needs support not ridicule.”
“Quiet woman! We tried it your way and it didn’t work. Now, show me boy! Or so help me God I’ll tan your backside so hard you wont be able to shit for a week!”
Al looked to me, and then my mother. I noticed her tired old face had become blotchy with worry, hands wringing out the other. And although her concern was evident enough to me, she tried her best to conceal it from her youngest child. Al turned back to my father and after a few seconds lowered himself to the carpet. There he pushed his buttocks to the floor and began shivering just like I’d seen him do on many occasions. It was humiliating for him. He sat before us all and revealed the secret of his dishonour.
He was six, and although he looked much younger, in that one moment he appeared older, stronger. His face during this time never left my father’s eyes. He sat on his arse, his britches fouled with his waste, and he stared at my father as if he was the one full of shit.
“Enough,” said my father. After a minute of stroking his chin, he knelt down and took Al’s hand. Turning it over he panned out his fingers in his and stroked each one.
“You’ll grow to have strong hands, Al, gifted hands. Hands like yours can take you places, anywhere. You remember that.” Al stopped shivering, his body becoming peaceful. When my father let go and stood up, Al followed and gave him a big hug. I don’t think my father was expecting that. Neither did my mother and I. But Al was like that - unpredictable, just like the crocodile.
It came as no real surprise that he ended up losing his life to a drunk with a knife on his twenty-eighth birthday. All those years of torment about his eye, of looking younger than his years, dumber, finally came to a head on that cold November evening. His hands never changed his fortune like my father said they would either; instead they became calloused, just like my father’s, due to working from one building site to the next. Fighting one man after the other. Father died knowing he failed his youngest son, the one he would swing on his shoulders and sing lullabies to when he was young. He attended Al’s funeral dressed in the only suit he ever owned. His body riddled with cancer. Mother wept a thousand rivers, and father shed a solitary tear. I watched all this with great sadness, and relief. My brother was gone, my only brother. But I would not need to look out for him any more. An angel he would become, and now he can look out for me.
JOHN FANTE
KNUT HAMSUN
WILLIAM SAROYAN
CRAIG CLEVENGER
WILL CHRISTOPHER BAER
ETGAR KERET
JIM CRACE
CHARLES BUKOWSKI
