Like You'd Understand, Anyway

Proto-Scorpions of the Silurian

It's a crappy rainy morning in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and I'm home from seventh grade with a sore throat and my parents and brother are fighting and I'm trying every so often to stay out of it. Jonathan Winters is on Merv Griffin, doing his improv thing with a stick.

My father's beside himself because he thinks my mother threw out the Newsweek he's been saving to show my brother. It had war casualties on the cover. “You couldn't find your ass with both hands and a banjo,” he tells her, though she's not looking.

“Go take a shit for yourself,” she tells him on her way through to the living room. He slams drawers in the kitchen. When he gets like this he stops seeing what's in them. We have to double-check everywhere he's looked to find anything. All of this is probably going to make my brother go off and we all know it, but none of us can stop.

He was institutionalized at sixteen and released eight months later. It was at Yale-New Haven, a teaching hospital, and they either didn't have much of an idea of what to do with him, or they were totally at a loss, depending on who you talked to.

“God forbid we should go somewhere,” my mother says from the living room. She's smoking and keeping to herself. “What we need to do instead is show each other magazines.”

“Maybe you should go somewhere,” my father tells her.

My brother and I are playing 500 rummy. He's kicking my ass.

For a while I was kicking his. He's quiet like he's trying to concentrate. He hates when my father goes out of his way to do something for him. He pats his hair, which is falling out because of the medication, the way you check your pockets for something before you leave the house. His eyes are getting scarier, distracted and unfocused.

He takes a break to make a tuna sandwich. White bread, no mayonnaise: he forks it out of the can and tries to spread it around. The tuna doesn't cooperate. He clears his throat a lot. My mother's still talking to herself. I try a joke. He gets that look you get when bile backs up. He's at this point eighteen or nineteen and has, as he puts it, his whole fucking life ahead of him.

I ask my father why he's home from work today. “What're you, a cop?” he goes.

I'm flipping my cards and debating whether to look at my brother's while he makes the sandwich. I'm also poking through a book I took out from the library. It has a giant scorpion on the cover, and you have to take something out and do a report, every week. It always takes forever to find something that's even halfway interesting. I get good grades, which is what I do instead of talking to people. My parents think I'm going to college. My father says when people ask that it's the one thing this family hasn't fucked up.

Prearcturus gigas it says was over a meter long. I try pronouncing the name under my breath.

“You're all right,” my brother says, eyeing me.

That turns out to be a scorpion three feet long. There's a life-size picture of the fossil's pedipalps — movable things near the mouth that help shovel the prey in — next to a photo of ones from the largest scorpion today. It's like hunting knives next to fingernail parings.

My father starts rooting through the garbage under the sink, swearing. My mother calls it saying the rosary. “Don't go through the garbage,” she tells him. “It's not in the garbage.” Nobody's watching the TV in the den.

Scorpions apparently went nuts during the Carboniferous period, which was way before the dinosaurs. According to what the book calls the fossil record. But our science teacher says the fossil record's a joke. That it's like saying we can figure out who lived in the U.S. by going through twelve dumpsters. Sitting there at the table, waiting, I come across these things from before the Carboniferous that weren't even scorpions. Proto-scorpions. They have like no eyes, no claws. Who knows. They may just be lousy fossils.

My father starts shaking the plastic garbage can upside down into the sink. We can smell it from where we are. “I have no idea what you're doing,” my brother tells him. My mother says he better not be making a mess.

“There, you son of a bitch,” my father goes, pulling out the magazine.

“What do you want from me?” my brother says when he holds it up. “A dance?”

After a minute my father starts cleaning everything up, dropping stuff back into the can's liner. I start winning at rummy.

“Fucking Cincinnati Kid,” my brother goes, watching me tote up.

“I'm the kid with all the answers,” I tell him. You can see him wondering how I meant that and then figuring it's not worth finding out.

“So here's the article I was talking about,” my father tells him. There's a muffin wrapper stuck to it.

“Very nice,” my brother goes. He's rearranging the suits in his hand. He's starting to look worse. He doesn't do almost anything but work out, and his arms when he flexes them rip the T-shirt sleeves.

“I'm out,” I tell him again and fan the cards out between us. I catch him with another big hand.

He sits there with his eyes on me, setting one molar on another. While he does the math I page around some more in the book. There's a drawing of something that looks like a shingle with some antennae. It looks like I'm showing off, beating him while reading a book. But it's somewhere to put my eyes, so I can't bring myself to shut it.

“You playing cards or reading?” my father wants to know. He can see my brother's face.

“The library,” my mother says from the other room. “That's the only place anybody in this family goes.”

“Where're we gonna go? It's a fucking downpour,” my brother tells her.

She doesn't answer. My father wipes his sponge around the rim of the sink, finishing the cleanup.

I'm given a dream hand — a run and a half — right off his deal. And the card I need after that is the first one he discards. I think about not saying anything. Then I go ahead. “I'm out again,” I tell him, putting my cards down to show him.

He pulls his hands back to his lap and sits there. Then he turns the whole table over. At its highest point the whole thing's up over my head. A few minutes after it hits, the neighbor across the street calls to see if everything's all right.

Later when everything's quiet I'm still in the kitchen. There's a divot in the linoleum where the table edge came down. I'm in the corner with my back to the cabinets. My brother's in his room. My mother's in hers. My father hurt his back wrestling my brother up the stairs. He's got the heating pad on it. One end of the pad's tucked into his belt so it looks like he's plugged into the wall.

There's tuna in my sock. My throat's still sore. There's not enough self-pity to go around. “Is he your brother or not?” my father's asking me.

“Yeah,” I tell him.

“So you wanta help him?” he wants to know.

“Yeah,” I tell him, tearing up.

“Well then why don't you help him?” he wants to know.

Because there's what we want, and what we do, I'd figured out, even then.

“You want to help him?” he asks me again.

“Not really,” I tell him, sitting there. Not really, I tell myself, now.