Brotherly Love by Pete Dexter Read Free Book Online Page B

there against his leg as his
father reaches past him for the dresses on the bed.
    * * *

    H e wakes up early in the
morning. The sky outside the window is dark, and he cocks his head,
following the almost soundless steps of his father as they pass his
room and then descend the stairs.
    The front door opens and closes, and Peter puts his
feet on the cold wood floor and feels for his sneakers.
    His jacket and pants are tossed across the foot of
the bed and he dresses in the dark, listening to the sounds of his
skin passing through his pants legs, of his own breathing. He fits
his feet into the cold sneakers without putting on his socks, and
ties the laces in double knots. He stands up and walks into the hall,
and then goes down the stairs too.
    At the door he stops; he has never been outside alone
at this time of the morning. He weighs the darkness outside against
the darkness in the living room; he touches the place where the door
meets the frame and finds his father has not closed it completely,
not wanting to make the noise.
    Peter opens the door. His father’s car is parked
across the street; in front of it is the green car with the antenna
mounted on the trunk. The windows of the car are fogged; a policeman
is inside.
    He holds himself still and looks across the yard to
Victor Kopec’s house. Nothing moves. He takes a few steps and then
stops, afraid of making the smallest noise.
    He hears a bus somewhere in the distance, and then a
dog, farther off still. The sounds relieve him.
    He moves again, walking away from the house until his
line of sight clears the edge of Victor Kopec’s porch and he sees
the front door. There is a lamp above it that Victor Kopec keeps on
even during the day, and in the orange light he sees that this door
is not flush against the frame either.
    When he steps again, the surface beneath his tennis
shoes changes and he finds himself standing on the bare spot where
the convertible uprooted the tree. He moves off the spot—he has
avoided it since the accident—and then, faintly, hears a drowning
voice inside Victor Kopec’s house.
    "Fucking God," it says.
    A moment later something breaks on the floor, and
then the house is quiet. Peter stands a few feet behind the bare spot
in the lawn and waits. Time passes, he doesn’t move. He stares at
the front door and wills his father to come out.
    The sky in the east turns pink, a boy comes past on
his bicycle, one of his pants legs rolled to his knee to keep it out
of the chain, tossing newspapers backhand onto the steps. His bag
says Daily News. Something moves inside the police car, moves and
settles.
    And then the front door to the house opens, and
Peter’s father comes out, carrying Victor Kopec over his shoulder,
wrapped in a sheet.
    He walks without hurrying across the street and stops
behind the red convertible, the body still draped over his shoulder,
going through the keys in his hand to find the one to the trunk. In a
moment his knees bend and he lowers himself until he is even with the
lid of the trunk. His back is straight and his arm embraces the sheet
to steady the load.
    The sheet moves and Peter sees Victor Kopec’s bare
feet.
    There is a popping noise and the trunk yawns open.
His father bends farther forward and ducks his head, bends until the
body drops of its own weight into the trunk of the car. Peter hears a
soft thud, almost as if Victor Kopec has sighed; the bumper of the
car dips and evens.
    His father straightens himself and looks into the
trunk, as if he wants to memorize what is inside it, and then he
closes the lid carefully and walks back across the street to Victor
Kopec’s front door. He pulls the door shut and locks it.
41
    Peter sees the blood on his father’s sleeves.
    His father crosses Victor Kopec’s yard and enters
his own. Peter hasn’t moved. His father nods at him then, as if he
in some way expected him to be there. He returns the nod, the
movement strange after holding his head still so long, and