“I don’t know. Maybe. We went more than once.” I had vague recollections of the ocean, gathering shells on a beach, filling buckets with wet sand to make castles. Early childhood, fuzzy memories. I knew my folks rented a cottage down there with my aunt and uncle a couple summers. I had pictures in an album somewhere. We stopped making the long trek a few years before the accident.
“Our place was right on the beach, fifty yards from the water.” He didn’t look at me when he said this, his voice subdued, laid-back, as if the beer was really relaxing him. Except that it had been a while since a single beer had had that kind of effect on my brother.
“You almost drowned,” he said.
“No, I didn’t. When?”
“It was at night,” he continued, still not looking at me. “The Dindas-they rented the place next door-had stopped by. There was a party in the kitchen, everyone drinking, music playing. Mom had gone to bed with a headache. You wandered down to the beach, waded in. An undertow pulled you out, dragging you far, far from the shore.”
“You’re making that up. I don’t remember anything like that. Where was Dad?”
Chris nursed his beer, shrugged.
“How am I still here then? I couldn’t swim when I was five. Why didn’t I drown?”
“I had hooked up with Jody White.” His voiced droned as if in a trance, just another story told to a stranger at closing time. “God, I liked her. She was this tasty blonde-haired doll. Teeny, high voice. Swear if you stuck a finger in her, she’d squeak. Family had a cottage up the road. We were in her room, her parents out somewhere. I had my hand up her shirt. She was one of those pristine Catholic girls, so it was a big deal just getting to second base. Perfect sixteen-year-old tits.” He sighed with fond remembrance. “And I stopped. I knew something was wrong. Felt it right here-” Chris poked a scarecrow finger into his bony sternum. “Didn’t say a word to Jody. Just hopped up and bolted out the door, ran all the way down the beach. I instinctively knew to go to the water. I don’t know how I knew. But I did. It was like I could hear you screaming. In my head. Nobody could hear you a stone’s throw from the cottage. But I could hear you. Half a mile away. I dove in the water and pulled you out.”
It was perfectly still for a moment.
Then Chris took another glug of beer and belched loudly.
“A regular fucking Superman,” I said.
It’s funny when people start talking about things that happened to you before you can really remember them. It’s like their stories worm memories into your brain. I certainly didn’t recall almost drowning, and I’d never heard my parents mention it, but after he said that I started to get pictures in my mind’s eye of swirling black water, felt the shivers of panic and desperation, tasted the thick salt clogging my throat as consciousness slipped away. Then I saw a hand reach down in the murky depths and hoist me up into the clear, clean moonlight.
Suggestion is a powerful thing.
“Did that really happen?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he mumbled. “Maybe.”
Chris got up and went to the window, peering out into the swirling snow as though trying to locate something precious in the abyss.
He stood there a long time, T-shirt draped off his bony frame as if it was a wire coat hanger.
“I tell you something,” he said. “You got to keep it under wraps, okay?”
“Sure.” Who the fuck would I tell?
“Pete and me, well, Pete mostly-he’s a whiz with computers-so we got this business on the side.” He peered over his shoulder. “Electronic recycling.” He enunciated the words clearly, since he knew he was talking a different language. “Disposing of old hard drives, smartphones, anything with digital data, that kind of shit.”
“And people pay you for this?”
“Fuck, yeah, man. You can’t throw that shit in the garbage.”
“Why not?”
He looked at me as if I was missing half a head.
“Because it’s got, like, all your personal information on there, little brother. Your computer is as personalized as a goddamn fingerprint these days. You’d know this if you joined the rest of the twenty-first century.”
Coming from a homeless junkie, that stung. But I had to admit he was right; I didn’t know jack about computers. I wasn’t big on technology, period. Honestly, if it wasn’t for Jenny pressing me, I probably wouldn’t even have gotten a cell phone, not that it matters up here; half the calls get dropped anyway. I don’t like being plugged in to someone’s beck and call. I didn’t own a computer. Rarely used the Internet for anything. Didn’t even have an email address. At least not one I ever checked. I didn’t have time to sit on my ass playing video games or ogling pictures of naked women. I was too busy busting my ass to keep my head above water.
I could picture this business of his. A gang of pasty dope fiends gacking over circuit boards and Legend of Zelda, or whatever nerds played these days. I supposed I should’ve applauded his initiative, told him I was proud of him for at least trying, provided positive feedback, but I couldn’t muster the enthusiasm. It was too late in the game, especially when I knew feeding the habit comes first, and that its appetite is insatiable. So what did it matter? Whatever ambition my brother had shown wouldn’t last long; it’d be up with the smoke he inhaled to get high. You can’t have a life when you are on drugs. Because being on drugs is your life.
A truck outside backfired, and my brother practically jumped out of his ragged old kicks.
He caught me laughing.
“What’s so funny?”
“Nothing,” I said. “I’m glad you’ve started a company, a business, whatever you and Pete are doing. Really. It’s terrific.”
He turned around and faced me, eyes glassed over as he tongued a scab on the corner of his blistered lips.
“But you didn’t help your cause with Turley down at the station. Guy’s just trying to help out some old woman who’s worried about her son. You should know you’re only going to make it worse by carrying on like a lunatic. Everyone knows you around here. Just being high is against the law. Turley and Pat Sumner can lock you up for that. All they need to do is draw your blood. How long you think you’d last in a real prison?”
“We found something, Jay.”
“What do you mean, ‘you found something’?”
“Someone dropped off a computer. We were cleaning the hard drive. That’s what we do. Erase the hard drive, remove old files, data, pictures. We-found something.”
“Erase?” I started to get it. “You mean you go rooting around for personal information you can use.” I might not have known a lot about computers, but I wasn’t stupid. Phony credit cards were a billion dollar industry.
Chris smirked.
“Jesus Christ,” I said, pushing myself up.
“Sure, sometimes we have a look around. What’s the big deal? They’re throwing the things away. What are you getting all pissed off for?”
“Because people are trusting you to do a job. I know that word doesn’t mean anything to you. But it’s how the rest of the world operates. And you are taking advantage of them. Identity theft? That’s what you’re into these days, Chris?”
You’d have to be an idiot to drop off a computer to my brother and his junkie pals.
He wet his lips, bobbing like a madman, crazy eyes bugging again. “You’re missing my point. We uncovered something. It’s big, man.”
“What? Someone’s bank statement?”
“Ain’t no bank statement, little brother. I mean, big. Really big. What we found is going to rock this town. I’m talking shake this fucker to the core!” He pointed frantically at his pigeon chest. “Gonna see I was right all along. Gonna see-”