The Debriefing

Five

“Twenty bucks says you don’t jump.”

“Jump?”

“From the roof. I say you don’t. I say you’re a fucking coward.”

Tony mutters to his thirteen-year-old brother, “M, forget it.”

The high schooler turns on Tony. “I know you’re a coward.” The kid looks back to Matt, who cocks his head and looks up at the roof.

The three are on the asphalt playground of Santa Maria Academy in El Paso, which the Wright boys and this asshole, Douglas, attend. Classes are over and Tony has been dawdling, in hopes of a chance to say hi to Sheree Grenner. No such luck. All he and M caught was this guy, who plodded up to give them shit. Douglas is a demibully. (In school Tony just learned about demigods. He likes the word a lot. Demi. Demi. Demi.) Douglas is into football, of course. Kids who play basketball and soccer rarely bully. He has broad shoulders and curly black hair and massive hands, more freckled than his face. He’s a tackle and he tackles very well.

Tony wants to defuse everything. Douglas is dangerous.

So is gravity. The school is four stories high.

Matt: “Let’s see your money.”

“Let’s see yours.”

The bills appear and they give them to another kid to hang on to, Randy, a skinny sciencey sort. “It’s a bet,” Matt says to him. “If I jump off the roof it’s mine. If I don’t, it’s his.”

“The roof?” His eyes go up. “That roof? You sure?”

“Take it,” both Matt and Douglas say.

He does. Fast. Tony can see Randy’s palm glisten with sweat.

Tony is fidgety. “Come on, man. No.”

“Hm.” Matt is examining the challenge: leaping from the roof into a tall pine and grab-falling to the ground. It’s been done three times that Tony can remember. Stan Fredericks will be in a wheelchair forever.

Matt gives a grin to Tony, ignores his imploring eyes and scrabbles up the fire escape. He climbs to the top and then takes a ladder to the roof. He walks to the edge and looks out over the view. El Paso in late spring.

A demidesert, Tony thinks.

Matt’s face seems happy, like he’s seeing something nobody else ever has before.

Tony thinks, as he often has: Are we really related?

He walks to the lip and, fuck, without a moment’s pause he does a swan dive toward the tree. Not what Tony would do — that would be a feet-down, head-up leap, staying vertical and clutching branches to his chest until he worked his way to the trunk and climbed down slowly.

Not Matt. It’s like he’s going off the board at the municipal pool. He disappears into a mass of boughs and branches. All Tony can see is a figure in black — Matt’s totally goth — tumbling and cartwheeling down, down, down, grabbing branches to slow and to steer himself away from the solider limbs. Finally, six feet above the piney earth, he stops and hangs, dangling. Then drops into a heap and lies motionless.

Tony runs to him. “Yo, M? You okay? Say something, dude!”

Jesus. Did he break his neck, after all?

Wheelchair...

But then he slowly rises and pats himself up and down, pulls needles out of his thick, now messy hair. “Awesome.”

“You hurt?”

“Hurt? I just jumped off a roof. Of course I’m hurt. But what’s that got to do with anything?”

Exhilaration and balls-out adrenaline have numbed the pain. Matt walks over to Randy and holds his hand out. Just as the boy was offering the bills, another hand snatches them away. Douglas’s. Of course.

Matt looks up, not frowning, not glaring. Just locking eyes with a boy who outweighed him by fifty pounds, most of it muscle. “What?”

“It wasn’t a fair bet. We didn’t shake on it.”

“Give me my money,” Matt says.

“Get the fuck out of my way.”

Matt doesn’t.

There’s not a single hint of what comes next. Matt simply launches himself into the older boy, fists spiraling madly, elbows bashing into the football player’s gut and groin and, when Douglas bent double, his face. They grapple, they tug, they fall to the ground and lose skin on the asphalt. But Matt keeps breaking away, dodging the beefy fists and comic attempts at kicking, and when he sees a chance he lands one slug, then another and another.

It’s a tough sight. Tony moves in — to do what, he has no idea. Matt glares. Tony stops. Matt moves on Douglas again, frenzied.

A crowd has gathered by now. Douglas is a shit and a bully, demi or otherwise, but nobody is rooting for Matt. Tony can see the spectators growing uneasy. Douglas stumbles backward and trips over a curb. He goes down hard on his back and winces as his tailbone hits asphalt. “Fuck.”

Then it was over.

Bloody and crying, Douglas reaches into his jeans and withdraws the forty dollars. Without a flicker of emotion, Matt reaches out and grabs it.

As the brothers leave, Douglas shouts, “Insane prick.”

The boys walk past a foreign cars garage, a Burger King, a nail salon, a massage parlor — which is why the boys aren’t supposed to walk home this way and which is why they always do. The petite, sexy Vietnamese girl at the door looks at them sullenly.

As they near home, Matt seems to realize that his brother is staring at him.

“Yeah?”

In an unsteady voice, Tony asks, “What was that all about? Looked like you were going to kill him.”

Matt’s voice is a verbal shrug. “It was a bet. I won. He lost. End of story.”

Now, lying in the army hospital bed, giving an Oscar-level performance of a man asleep, Tony kept replaying the Douglas Incident.

Which defined his brother. Which nailed exactly who Matt Wright was.

Push, push, push... a junkie for risk. On the job. In his relationships.

And... with the gambling.

Night after night would find Matt in the casinos or at private poker tables. Sometimes winning big, sometimes losing as much as a month’s salary.

Was there a why? Did Matt have a motive for betraying the team?

Being a cop, Tony had become an expert in human nature. And he knew that there was nothing like the noxious cocktail of greed, addiction and desperation to turn good to bad, so bad you’d even sell your soul to the man who had killed your partner.