Fiction by Robert Denby: "OK", Part Three
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| Photo by Beyzaa Yurtkuran |
Anyway, I know it sounds bad of me to say, but let me say this upfront: I'm going to spend the next couple of days dealing with my brother, which means that I'm going to have to sound very harsh and tough and put on a no-bullshit frontline. I'm sorry about that, but that's how you deal with Bobby. If I don't point him in a very specific direction the second I pull into town, we'll just bounce around in God-know-what direction.
He was fun when he was a kid, though. He's three years younger than me, and we had a lot of fun together before I grew older and started junior high and those three years suddenly became huge. I got along OK with kids in my class, but I don't know; all of that software that enables people to go to each other's houses after school? And whatever makes roofers and people like that want to go out drinking after work? I've never known how to turn that on. Like I said, school itself was alright, and I was even good at studying and all of that, but while all the other kids went to each other's birthday parties or overnighters or whatever, I always just went home. There wasn't any cruelty about it and I was never picked on (Even in elementary school, I was a head taller than everyone else.) It's just that whatever people have that makes other people want to extend themselves to them, I just didn't have. And the funny thing was, I was fine with it. It wasn't until I got into girls that I ever felt lonely. Go to school, do what the teacher tells me to do, go home.
So, the point is, I'd pick up Bobby at his classroom, walk home with him, and we'd hang out while Mom was at work (I've always hated the word "babysit." Even back then.) Sometimes I'd do my homework first, but often I'd head up to Bobby's room to see what he was doing. We each had our own rooms all while we were growing up; Mom used to settlement from Dad's death to buy our house outright, and it was a nice one: two stories, three bedrooms, two bathrooms, big backyard, nice street. Quiet. Mom told me to make sure he did his homework, but we'd watch Thundercats or G.I Joe instead, and then we'd play. Sometimes inside, sometimes out. We'd wrestle, we'd play Indiana Jones (He wanted to be Indy, but always wound up being Short Round. I was the bigger one.) We invented our own starship, the U.S.S. Viking, and we'd either play that in the backyard and sit at the kitchen table drawing blueprints for the ship itself and maps of the various solar systems the Viking had visited. We'd do this sort of thing every day for years, long after I officially should have "outgrown" things like that. He was funny; we'd be mapping out a solar system, and he'd want to name the planets "Pleptune" and "Neuto". I'd sock his shoulder and tell him those names were stupid, but in the end, we'd usually end up keeping them. I couldn't come up with anything better.
That was a good stretch of time, up until I started junior high. He was in fourth grade and I was in seventh, but when you're in junior high, he may have well have been back on Pleptune while I was here on Earth. Then I started noticing girls, and while I never felt like I got better at being around people, I somehow found groups of people to hang out and smoke cigarettes with after school. Mom said that Bobby old enough to be home by himself by then, so all the things we used to do after school just sort of went away. I used to feel like if I had kept hanging out with him, he wouldn't have wound up the way he was. It's like I grew up and moved on, but he's still that kid I used to play with. But instead of drawing pictures and watching cartoons, he's huffing paint thinner and shoplifting at 7-11. Being the type of kid he was was cute when he was six, but it's a lot less cute when he's 32. Not doing your homework isn't the end of the world when you're in elementary school, but Bobby's problem is that he never really learned how to do anything else, either. Not to work, not to take care of yourself, not to stop blaming other people for his screw-ups (You heard his phone call yesterday.) So whenever we cross paths, I have to turn into some kind of asshole. I'm sorry about that, but you kind of have to overcompensate with Bobby. The kind of basic rules that keep us fed and sheltered and polite to each other, Bobby just can't do.
I passed Vegas a couple hours back, but besides that, it's been black. The moon isn't even full. The sun should be up in a couple of hours; I hear people go all mushy over desert sunrises, but I see the sunrise every morning, and every one of those are a desert sunrise, technically. Even if the desert's been paved over.