Read Online Angelhead by Greg Bottoms - Free Book Online Page B

around, picking up dirty shirts and socks, kicking over old soda cans, fingering a cheap, silver-plated crucifix on top of a knife-marked mahogany dresser. He had stained the head of Jesus red with magic marker. The smell, again, was that indescribable electric smell that reminds me of mental illness, of halfway houses and psychiatric care and the homeless.
    His milky-looking picture of Christ with roving eyes was gone; his scribbled-over Bible, gone. Food cartons, old socks and underwear, dirty tissues, crusty spots on the carpet where he had spit phlegm or shot his seed, half-hung posters, silence. Silence and a giant emptiness. A grand, cavernous emptiness like a tomb, like a church.
    My parents, when I asked about him later that night, kept their eyes on dinner and said he'd gone “away,” gone “to find a job.” There was an air of strange secrecy about the whole thing, a feeling I often got from my parents concerning Michael. I was sixteen now, precocious, inquisitive to the point of annoyance. What did that mean, I wanted to know. Find a job? He was seeing Jesus in school hallways, God in thermal windows,
sacrificing snakes.
What kind of job was he going to get?
    He’s almost twenty-one years old, my father said, standing in the kitchen after dinner, wearing sweatpants and suede slippers, holding a Diet Coke, the small paunch of his belly pushing out his T-shirt. It’s time he took care of himself.
    My parents, though very loving while at the same time very busy in that upwardly mobile American way, could not take another day of our life, could not let their home be this dangerous (Mr. Connelly, my rake-wielding rescuer, had come over one Saturday and spoken to my father). And my father had a propensity, a hopefulness, you might say, to believe that a good hard dose of life was always the best medicine. It had worked for him. So Michael, I found out, had been sent away.

    In the weeks before this, we all hid from each other. We lived in separate rooms. I stayed away from the house as much as possible, hanging out in arcades, at friends’ houses. Even Ron and I, who usually at least spoke, grew apart. Part of this was my adolescence, my wish to be free of family; part of it was my secret life of drugs and alcohol; but the biggest reason for it was that we had Michael to think about—our brother, our flesh and blood that we could not understand—every time we were together. Michael was connected to them. I didn’t want Michael, so I didn’t want them. We were all part of the same problem.
    We each lived a private life. We shared space, a roof, nothing else. I’ve spent many years since that time trying desperately, in different ways, to have an existence exactly the opposite of the one I knew as a boy, and I have largely succeeded, though I still have nostalgic feelings, of course, concerning my mother, younger brother, and father. But any nostalgia, no matter how beautiful or comforting or endearingly sad, eventually leads to Michael and crumbles under the weight of my memory of him.
    Just a week before he left, one day after his mostly honorary graduation from high school, which he was asked, politely, not to attend, Michael had made a cross out of baseball bats in our garage, soaked it in lighter fluid, and set it on fire. He had used six Louisville Sluggers that sat languishing in a barrel with footballs and tennis rackets. My father put out the modest blaze with a bucket of water, muttering at Michael, exhausted now, incapable even of yelling.
    Smoke had filled the room, however, and alarms went off, the windows went opaque with a yellowish gray residue. Clouds of billowing blue-gray smoke went out into the neighborhood like signals of distress.
    A fire truck showed up because Mr. Connelly, our ever-watchful neighbor, had seen the smoke and called. My father, embarrassed, not wanting anyone involved, told them it was an accident—spilled lighter fluid, a match, an