It was an old shambling two-story house on a block of old shambling houses, with only narrow walkways between them. But this house was smaller, darker, meaner than the rest. Some of the homes had been freshly painted, some had lovely lawns, new windows, a nice car parked out front, but not this one. It was owned by a Virgil Pepper. It had been owned by Virgil Pepper for forty years. Three Peppers were listed at the address: Virgil, James, and Fran.
The door was opened by Fran. “What do you want?” she said. She was short and heavy, wearing the sort of well-worn housedress that indicated she wasn’t planning to go out that day. Based on the state of her hair, the paleness of her face, the way she squinted into the sunlight, she wasn’t planning to go out tomorrow either.
“I called,” I said. “My name is Victor Carl.”
“You’re that lawyer fellow, right?”
“That’s right,” I said.
“What is it you wanted to talk about again?”
“I wanted to talk about your brother,” I said. “Your brother Bob.”
58
“We thought he was dead,” said Jim Pepper, leaning back on his recliner, wincing as he shifted his position.
“We hoped he wasn’t,” said Fran.
“Of course we hoped he wasn’t,” snapped Jim. “What kind of fool wants his little brother dead?”
“I was just saying,” said Fran.
Fran sat on a sagging, mud-colored couch. I was sitting stiffly on a stiff fold-up chair. Both Jim and Fran spoke with a slightly southern accent, more a West Virginia twang than the flat prairie accent of Chicago.
“When was the last time you saw your brother?” I said.
“Let’s see, now,” said Jim, talking over the television that remained on, a daytime drama with perfect teeth and concerned faces. “He was seventeen, I think. A real hippie-dippie, hair down to his ass, into the drugs and the causes.”
“Bobby was a hippie?”
“Sure. Grapes. Something about grapes, I remember, and a Mexican feller he was all up in arms about. Times was tough around here, what with our mother gone and our father away and our father’s sister trying to take care of us. She was a bitter old witch, less than useless, with a mouth on her.” Jim raised his chin to the ceiling, raised his voice to a shout. “Did you hear that? Less than useless.”
There was a bang from upstairs, as if a wall had been slammed in response.
“No one ever accused Bobby of being quiet,” continued Jim calmly. “One day the two of them, they got into a fight, and things was said. That night he just took his guitar and left. This was like 1975 or so.”
“It was 1978,” said Fran.
“Something,” said Jim, shooting his sister an impatient glare. “We got a couple cards, something from Albuquerque, but then nothing.”
“You would expect that he’d keep in touch,” said Fran. “Visit for Christmas or the anniversary, but no.”
“We thought he was dead,” said Jim.
“Why wouldn’t he come back to say hello?” said Fran. “Tell us he’s alive, at least? Daddy would have liked to hear from him.”
“When did your father die?” I said.
“He ain’t dead,” said Jim with a snort. “He’s upstairs.” Jim raised his voice again. “Nothing but a useless bag of bones anymore.”
An angry grunt came from above, and then another, more plaintive.
“Hold your horses,” shouted out Fran. “We got a guest.”
Another grunt, and then a bang.
“You want some tea, mister?” she said, smiling sweetly.
“That would be nice,” I said. “Thank you.”
“Bobby just disappeared off the face of the earth,” said Fran, without making any effort to rise up and boil some water. “No letters, no calls. But that was always like him, so concerned for the world, without no care for his own family. Couldn’t he at least a done something to let us know he was still alive?”
I shook my head in agreement, even as I wondered that he had stayed as long as he had.
However dark and forbidding the Pepper house was outside, the inside was worse. Greasy wallpaper, collapsing furniture, lights dim, shades drawn. Jim was puffy and pale, about fifty-five years old but already a physical wreck, wincing in his chair, fiddling with his cigarette. Wearing sweatpants, a flannel shirt, dingy socks, he lay stiffly on his recliner as if he had been screwed in place. When he died, forget a coffin, just set the chair on full recline and lower them both into the hole. His sister leaned back on the couch, her bare, venous legs crossed so that one pilling slipper was hoisted in the air, bouncing back and forth to some twitchy rhythm. And everything smelled of smoke and cabbage, of mice urine and green beans, of the browning scent of decay and death.
“What is it exactly you’re doing here again?” said Jim.
“Your brother is involved in a very delicate mission,” I said, somewhat truthfully.
“What kind of mission?” said Jim.
“Oh, I can’t disclose anything more. You both understand, I’m sure, what with the current climate.”
“He’s into something, isn’t he?” said Jim. “Bobby was always into something. He liked to play with knives, poking and prodding. Does he still do that?”
“In his way, yes,” I said. “But in order to allow him to handle the sensitive matters which I’ve already described, we are required to do a customary background check. It’s quite usual. I just wanted to come to his boyhood home and find out if his childhood was normal.”
“Normal?” said Jim. “What the hell’s that?”
“You know, baseball, birthday parties, that sort of thing.”
“There’s never been nothing normal here,” said Jim.
“But Bobby did like baseball, Jim, you remember,” said Fran. “In the afternoons he used to sit in the backyard listening to the games on his transistor radio. He said, with the play-by-play and the cheers from the ballpark, it was like sitting in the bleachers.”
“I ain’t cared much for baseball,” said Jim, “not since they kicked away the pennant that year.”
“Don Young,” I said, nodding.
“Don’t get me started on Don Young,” he said.
“What we’re especially curious about,” I said, “is whether or not there were any childhood traumas that might affect Bobby’s performance on his mission.”
Jim squinted at me for a moment before looking at his sister, who gazed back with tenderness.
Just then another grunt from upstairs.
“You feed him yet?” said Jim softly.
“He spit up most of the oatmeal,” said Fran, “but enough stayed in to keep him till supper.”
“What are you giving him for supper?”
“Oatmeal.”
Jim laughed. He didn’t look so much like his brother, but they had the same laugh. Fran, on the other hand, was Dr. Bob in drag.
“You said you wanted some tea?” Fran said to me.
“That’s right, ma’am,” I said.
“How do you take it?”
“Just a little sugar.”
“That’s nice,” she said, remaining solidly on the couch, her raised slipper still twitching back and forth. “I like a little sugar, too.”
“So you want to know about childhood traumas?” said Jim, taking out another cigarette, lighting it with his Bic. “Well, let me tell you, mister. You come to the right place.”
It was the father, Virgil, at the center of the story. With his own father and mother and spinster sister, he had come up to Chitown from the hills of Appalachia as part of a famous migration north from coal country. There was a whole community in a part of the city called Uptown, mostly poor and struggling, but Virgil didn’t come up north to live the same life he had fled. He found a good job, ventured out into the city, met a pretty Polish girl on the elevated line one afternoon. Her name was Magda, Maggie, and she fell for his tricky accent and rawboned good looks. When he popped the question a month later, she was only too thrilled to get out of the stifling atmosphere of her father’s house with her seven brothers. Virgil’s factory job paid enough so that eventually he could buy a house south of Uptown, just a few blocks from the baseball field, and he and Maggie started a family. First Jim, then Franny, and finally, almost as an afterthought, little Bobby.