Free Brotherly Love by Pete Dexter Page A

that sticks out so far that walking with it is
something you have to think about, like carrying a suitcase—and
he’s smoking a cigarette. The short one, he knows, is Phillip
Flood’s son.
    The other one is his nephew. Charley’s boy. They
all live together in the house across the park from Nick’s that
once belonged to Charley. How that happened, he doesn’t want to
know. The little girl got killed, the wife went crazy, Charley
disappeared . . .It seems to Nick that all these things happened a
couple of months after they found the cop next door in the trunk of
his convertible, but time moves for him in a different way than it
used to; the order of things isn’t as clear as it was. He isn’t
sure.
    He remembers watching the boys in the park—it seems
to him they were both riding one bicycle—and feeling bad for the
one that belonged to Charley. He never walked over and talked to him,
though, the way he would any other kid. He had a house of his own and
a son of his own, and did not want the entanglements.
    These guys, you did not want the connection.
    Nick drops his chin until it rests on the jacket,
protecting his face from the cold—everything but the top of his
forehead—and pushes through the wind. How many fighters had broken
their hands on Nick DiMaggio’s forehead? He goes back, remembering
three. He figures that means there were probably a dozen.
    It makes him smile, the way his memory blurs. It
seems to him that it started about the same time he was beginning to
see what things were about. But what he remembers and what he
understands are not the same thing, and he knows that, and this part
of his life is as good as the part that came before.
    The smile is still in his head when he senses the
movement from the other side of the street.
    Four of them come out of the alley half a block away.
    Phillip Flood’s son and his nephew are passing the
cigarette back and forth, probably discussing how to get into some
girl’s pants—it terrifies Nick sometimes, thinking he might have
had a daughter——and they don’t see them until it is too late.
    Nick comes to the intersection and looks down the
crossing street—Chadwick—to his garage. The door is open, an
eight-year-old Cadillac sits underneath it, half in and half out of
the shop. Harry is on his tiptoes, bent into the engine.
    He wanted to put the water pump in by himself—Nick
could see that, so he went to Ed’s for coffee. He wonders if the
kid has even noticed the way it got cold.
    Nick stands for a moment at the corner, absorbed in
the ordinary sight of his garage and his son leaning into the open
hood of a car, and then, standing still, he is visited by the feeling
that he is watching the place from his old age, remembering it. He
moves, turning away, frightened, and looks up the street to see what
will happen with the boys.
    He wipes cold tears from his eyes and finds a place
against the wall where the wind isn’t as strong.
    The short one sees them first. He looks up and seems
to stumble; the cigarette falls off his lip and blows up the sidewalk
to meet them. He turns his head, looking for someplace to run. A
house or a store, a fire station.
    The taller one stops too, but he only looks at what
is there in front of him.
    The colored boys close the distance. Nick sees the
short one is pretending to have something in his pocket.
    Nick crosses his arms and waits. The colored boys
collect in a circle over the white boys; as big as men. They look up
and down the street.
    One of them notices him then, half a block away. He
stares at Nick, deciding something, then slowly smiles, as if there
is an understanding between them.
    Nick feels himself deciding to walk away. He looks
down Chadwick again, at the open door and the sign over it——NICK’s
AUTO REPAIRS AND GYMNASIUMM—his kid leaning so far into the
Cadillac’s engine that it looks like he is going to fall in.
    He decides to walk away, but he doesn’t move. He
was born on the second floor