This morning I woke up to crackles of rain drops hitting against the window pane of my second floor apartment. I considered two options. Take my dog for a walk in the rain, only to walk around for ten minutes, unable to get the shit out of him, or just wait for him to shit inside the apartment. Me being the complete neat freak that I am opted for one and grabbed the leash and rushed downstairs with my dog chasing my heels. Exactly ten minutes later I was back inside my apartment but luckily the dog had serious urge to shit. I opened the refrigerator to hopefully find something to fill my stomach before lunch but nothing. No left overs, no instant breakfast, nothing. I boiled some water to make instant coffee and sat at my desk to check my email. No one had written me. No one had written me for two months now but I still feel the need to check every morning.
Today was a saturday. A saturday filled with rain showers that gave me an excuse not to do anything. What was I suppose to do? I couldn't go out and look for a job in the pouring rain. I might as well make the best of it and watch one of the films from my dvd collection. And then I'd pick up the old Kafka novel that I'd stopped reading to read the Murakami novel which I still haven't finished. Why I choose to jump between different books I don't know. That's just how my brain functions. I get bored with one, so I start another. I get bored with that one, so I get back into the first. Then maybe I could surf the internet a little bit and see what's going on the world today? Another rise in gas prices maybe. Another town destroyed by terrorists or the forces against.
I sat down to play the movie I'd grab out of my dvd stack but the damn player was jammed. It wouldn't spin the disc. I became frustrated so I just picked up the Kafka novel and started reading from where I had left off. Strange, I couldn't remember at all what happened in the previous pages. Had I read up to this point at all? Nothing seemed to be working out for me this morning, so I just stared out the window. What can you really do on a rainy day but stare out the window and hope the rain will go away and come back to play another day just like the song suggest. Look out the window like a little kid back in Kentucky. And that's when it hit me. I once had a brother.
It wasn't that long ago. I could probably count with all of the fingers and toes I have. Back in Kentucky, we had a country house on a 20 acre lot of pure land. No trees and hills and unusable land nonsense. 20 acres of vast land space and our house plumped right down smack in the middle of it all. We had so many friends and relatives that came over, we'd use up all that land space to play our little games. There was cousin Louis and all her friends. Cousin Ralph and his brothers Simon and Texan. Junior and my best friend Robbie. My next door neighbor Terry and his brother Tracy. My mother's best friend's daughter, her name was Tracy too, who used to come over at least once a week. David and Coral. June and her friend Dana. When you live in a small town and you've got the only swimming pool, you're bound to have a lot of friends. Oh yes, there was my brother. My brother Kevin was 8 years older than I was, but he treated me no different than his equal. When he was sixteen and I was eight, he drove me around town, we went to the market together, he'd let me hang out with his sixteen year old friends. But when I did something wrong, like let one of them chickens out of its cage, he'd show me that he was the older brother. That's what amazed me so much about him. He was so many things to me, all rolled up in a 165 pound package. Kevin since he was eight years older than I was, didn't do anything much when the local kids were over. He'd be there to supervise, but other than that, he'd sit on his little rocker in his room and read his novels and write in them journals he always kept with him wherever he went. When something happened, I'd yell out "KEVIN," and he'd come running to rescue me like he was Clark Kent.
When it rained, he'd stay in his bedroom, lock the doors and didn't come out. Why he did this I never knew. It could be a lot of things but my best guess would be that he missed our mother who died during a storm that wiped out half this town several years back. I really don't have memories of my mother, just pictures. My father is always reminding me how much I act like her and talk like her but I think he just says that for kicks. My dad had turned into a belligerent drunk for a couple of months after her death and continued to drink on those moody mornings especially after a night of rain. When I was twelve my brother took me on a trip to New York City. He'd told me that one day he was going to live here and that he was going to become a famous writer. I asked him why he just didn't move up here now and just looked at me and rubbed my head. So many things I didn't know about my brother. Fourteen years I had lived with him and for fourteen years he had taken the time to help me with my homework, learn the names of all my friends and classmates and knew when it was pizza day at school so he'd be sure to give me an extra dollar for lunch.
I'd never thought that Kentucky was a place for a smart individual like my brother. He had top honors at his school and was enrolled in so many after school activities but our family didn't have the money to send him out of state. My father had practically lost all our money on random things and events after our mother died and all we had left was this house and this land and several mouths to feed. At this point, our economy had gotten so bad, my cousin Louis and her family moved in with us and sold their home, thinking that they'd invest in something. Well that something had turned out to be a fraud and they'd lost all their money. Such a pity what money makes people do. So to bare the brunt of living conditions, my brother had to take up two jobs. One to support his education at the community college and the other to help with the mouths that needed to be fed and the bills that needed to be paid. With this much said, I'd just like to add that not once have I not gotten that extra one dollar from my brother on pizza day, not once had he'd forgotten.
Couple years past and it was time for him to graduate from college. All our family members were there. He was the first to graduate from college and we congratulated him until his damn hands fell off. At dinner that night, my father had asked him what his plans were now that he'd finish school. I don't know what my brother's reply was but my dad was furious. He'd picked up his plate and thrown that sucker against the refrigerator and later on that night, saw him chugging down a bottle of Jack Daniels. Kentucky's very own.
That summer was the last time I'd seen him. He walked me over to Robbie's house and patted me on the head. They say he'd walk into the tracks of an on coming train but no one found a thing. There should have been blood everywhere and parts stuck in other parts, no? Well nothing was found that was for sure. No one thinks he'd ever just take off on the family but I knew better. I'd like to believe he left to come back one day with arms full of raisin bread and a bank account to get our family back on our feet. Maybe he's in New York, the city that he'd always wanted to live in. That's who I think of now, looking out my window through the rain. Looking for my brother Kevin to pass by. Hoping he'll give me some lunch money and an extra dollar when I want to have pizza.
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