Free Body and Bread by Nan Cuba

be…” here he shook his fist, flexed his jaw, “in your face.”
    Sam flipped a grape then looked up, catching it on his tongue. He shut his eyes, chewed, and positioned his shoulder blades among the huisache’s angles of gnarly bark. This ought to be fun, he thought. Better than breaking our backs over those damn plants.
    “One…two…three...”
    Cyril’s hoe swung up, down, hitting the ground in rhythmic clicks. A crow landed on the cedar fence, cocked its head, bobbed, cawed.
    “Four…five…”
    Sam squeezed a grape until the pulp popped loose, then sucked.
    “Six…seven…eight…”
    Cyril stepped forward, chopped, stepped, chopped, his straw hat’s brim tilted against the sun. A dishrag’s dripping corners hung below the hat, water and sweat beading in his eyebrows, soaking the shoulders of his long-sleeved shirt.
    “Nine…ten.”
    Sam rose, smiling, to meet his brother; he raised his fists. As he deflected Kurt’s punch, he skipped sideways; Kurt moved in corresponding steps. Each time their bodies rubbed, bumped, or jabbed one another, Sam’s smaller frame swelled. He teased, winking, nodding between dares: “Come on.”
    Kurt’s face reddened in blotches; his grunts and pants increased with Sam’s taunts. The pummeling against Sam’s stomach and cheek hurt but was expected. Kurt, taller, fifteen pounds heavier, usually won these bouts. As Sam was forced off balance, Cyril’s elbows pumped at plants a few rows over, that hat’s wet skirt the last thing Sam saw before he went down.
    Afterward they stood, weak, breathless, until Kurt brushed at dirt clods stuck to his jeans, then walked toward his row of weeds and cotton. “Too bad,” Sam shouted. “I was ready to chop again ‘til you came at me like that.”
    Kurt reacted like Sam knew he would: He stopped, and he laughed. “You bastard,” he said. He wiped his hairline with the back of his hand, flipped sweat onto the dirt. Sam wheezed his giggle, clutched himself, toppled onto his side.
    Cyril dropped his hoe, ambled toward the ‘49 Ford pickup parked next to the fence. He reached over the lowered tailgate, unscrewed the top of his tin cooler, turned the spigot and filled the lid. He sucked gulps, filled it again, set it on the truck’s fender. He removed his hat and the dishrag, drenched the cloth, bathed his face, his neck. He sat next to the cooler, his legs falling lazily open, and between more sips, he stared past the brothers at something invisible to Sam, something far away.
    “Sam,” Kurt called, “come back to work and I’ll find a hanky for your head as cute as Cervenka’s.”
    My biceps need work, Sam thought, and my chest could use some sun. He took off his t-shirt, draped it through a belt loop. He picked up his hoe, swinging at weeds with determined whacks, triceps straining.
    “So, you think he’s queer, or what?” Kurt said as he chopped in the row next to Sam. Each nicked root echoed: tap .
    At the end of the field, Cyril stood, poured, drank, his head tilted back. Sam imagined his belly filling with sluicy coolness.
    He remembered seeing Cyril two years before in the high school hallway, his textbooks carried in a ratty briefcase and no noticeable friends, even though there’d been other Czech students. Wasn’t he in the band? The guy played basketball, for sure. Cyril’s quick fakes had been legendary.
    Cyril repositioned his hat, brushed his palms across his jeans then ambled toward his hoe, which lay in a furrow near Sam. His face turned toward the barn, then forward again. He moistened his lips, stretched his arms behind his head, then above it, finally swinging his hands. The guy made walking a sport, Sam thought.
    “Or maybe,” Kurt continued, “he’d rather screw one of his daddy’s sheep.” An eyebrow lifted; he scratched his head.
    Sam knew Kurt wasn’t comfortable around Cyril—all that aloofness and ease in this crop-and-animal place. But insulting Cyril not only might be dangerous; it