In the evening it was the same. But when Richard woke up in the morning and found that Mark was up, he washed quickly so as not to miss the large morning breakfast. His parents weren’t there. He might have known that by sound alone: Magical Mystery Tour was being played on the hi-fi. Leo and Mark sat with their legs crossed, their knees resting against the edge of the butcher-block table. They were smoking, and the sun caught the smoke and danced with it over their heads.
“Hi, man,” his brother said with such good humor that Richard felt happy. Mark nodded at him and then he heard Louise say his name ominously. “Richard, if you want eggs here’s the pan. But Betty says that it shouldn’t be washed and left to dry because it—”
“Rusts,” Richard said with faint contempt.
Leo laughed.
“Oh, you know,” Louise said quickly. “How silly of me—you are the strange young man who lives here.” She picked up the coffeepot and shook it. “There’s coffee. But I think little Leo has eaten all de bacon.”
Richard knew he’d made her nervous and he felt bad. He and Louise had always gotten along very well. He put a hand on her arm to add to the reassurance of his words. “Thank you. Your preparations are thorough and, I feel, vital to the health of our community.” She and Leo laughed. They had always based their relationship with him on this kind of banter. Mark looked a little bewildered by the exchange, and Richard thought to himself, Oh, he’s going to be surprised every time I show intelligence. Louise announced that she was going out to read on the lawn and she left. Richard fried two eggs while Leo and Mark rustled the front and back sections of the New York Times.
He broke both yolks when flipping them over and he told them about it proudly. Leo enjoyed his mood but Mark was stubbornly unresponsive. “So where are Mom and Dad that this rock-and-roll orgy is going on?”
Leo looked at him with ferocious appreciation. “You’re so Proustian today, man. It’s intense.”
“Proustian?” That seemed wrong.
“Uh, they’re in town shopping. Listen. Are the three records you have in there all you’ve got?”
“There’s this and Their Satanic Majesty’s Request.”
Leo made a face. “That’s not a good one of theirs.”
“I am humbled.” Leo laughed again and Richard was tempted to give up any seriousness. “This is a very bleak aspect of my life. My record collection is like a middle-aged person’s idea of being hip.” Even Mark got that one.
His brother and Mark went back to the newspapers and Richard felt deserted. He knew it was irrational, but he needed companionship desperately. I’ve got to separate my loneliness from a desire to be friendly to them. He would relax and let them make the advances.
But there were none. They left him eating his breakfast, the kitchen in a sun-filled chaos of drained orange juice glasses and dirty plates. He put away the milk and the melted butter and read about Koosman’s arm problems but lost the thread of it thinking he was like a spinster: eating breakfast alone was an emotional problem.
He looked out the window at them as they talked on the lawn. His brother was tall and strong. Leo had a man’s body and Richard lacked that. But his brother’s long face and his eyes with their open expression always had something childish about them. Richard realized the look was gone. Leo leaned against a tree, talking, and his face was concentrated and joyless. Louise seemed harassed, even worried, as she looked at him.
I’m making it up, he thought. Drama, drama, drama. Fuck it. He got up and the chair legs scraped. The sound was loud and hollow unlike noise in the city, where every sound is met and engulfed by another. Mark, he noticed, looked a little bit like him. A moon face with small eyes and a low forehead. No, Mark’s uglier, he thought. He was coarser. Broad, hairy forearms, his hair mousy and knotted.
Richard decided to go out. Opening the front door made a noise and they all turned to face it. They had abruptly stopped their conversation and they watched his progress up to them. Louise said, “Hello,” with too much formality.
“Am I interrupting?”
“No, man.” Leo was almost scornful of that possibility. “Anyway,” he went on, “we should do that today, Mark.”
Mark sat on the lawn in a half-lotus. He nodded with great deliberation, his eyes fixed on some spot in the distance.
“All right,” Louise said in a rush, “so that’s decided. But I have a lot of work to do, so I won’t go along. Is that all right, Leo?”
“Sure, sure.” He looked at Richard. “Uh, we were thinking of going to a pond near here to swim. You wanna come?”
“Swim? Well—”
“Why don’t you come, man? It’ll be good.”
“Okay, I’ll tag along, but I may not swim.”
Leo seemed to disapprove but he said all right and he and Mark went in to change. Richard looked at Louise, who still seemed disproportionately tense. She was pretending to be absorbed.
He was in the back of Mark’s Volkswagen half-back sedan, the sun roof and car windows open, trying to inhale cigarette smoke that was caught, right out of his mouth, by the wind, when his brother asked him, “Do you know where would be a good place to buy guns?”
“Guns?”
His brother nodded with what was supposed to be complacency, but his mouth was nervously tense like a child’s before weeping.
“Well, you mean for a rifle or—”
“Yeah, a rifle. But I mean, you know, the best store for that?”
“Well, I don’t know very much about it.” His brother didn’t hear him and he repeated it. “But I would say that Sears, whose gun department is very big, is the best.”
“Sears?” Leo seemed almost offended. Mark smiled. “I don’t think so, man. I was thinking more of a local store.”
“You should ask around. But the only store that I’ve seen guns in is Ralph’s Hardware, and Sears. And Sears has an enormous section.”
“Let’s check them out,” Mark said. Leo dragged carefully on his cigarette and squinted out the window of the car. Richard saw him as if in a movie. Leo nodded yes grimly with hard-won integrity, his eyes seeing a tragic future. Something was up, Richard knew, but he also knew that he shouldn’t ask. So he was not surprised when they drove past the pond they normally swam in and drove on to town. They stopped at the hardware store, and Leo told them to stay put while he browsed. Richard and Mark said nothing until Leo returned and said that it wasn’t very good. “We’ll go to Sears,” he said, and a moment later laughed incongruously.
Richard wasn’t frightened in Sears, despite the nervously breezy manner that Mark and Leo affected. He thought, They’re obviously not going to rob it, so there’s nothing to fear. They think it’s illegal to buy guns—confusing motive with action. He trailed behind them and enjoyed looking at the gun section. It was commingled with the games section: Ping-pong, pool, tennis, baseball, football, and basketball equipment reminded him of his childhood when he often came to the sporting goods department to strengthen his resolve to blackmail his parents into buying him a new glove. But Richard was included in Leo’s and Mark’s paranoia enough to be anxious when a salesman approached them while Leo handled a rifle.
Richard felt he should stay away from them while they were being waited on, since his nervousness would make him appear suspicious. He noticed that after a brief moment of awkwardness the salesman showed them various rifles with great enthusiasm. His brother was amusingly ignorant of guns—he deduced from the slight smiles that Leo’s questions were greeted with—but of course the salesman took Leo for a city boy interested in hunting. Leo bought a rifle and a Puma knife, and Mark showed Richard some knives that looked as if they had rubber tips but were in fact throwing knives.