The Brother Years Read online

  Also by Shannon Burke

  Into the Savage Country

  Safelight

  Black Flies

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2020 by Shannon Burke

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Name: Burke, Shannon, author.

  Title: The brother years / Shannon Burke.

  Description: First edition. New York: Pantheon Books, 2020

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019037326 (print). LCCN 2019037327 (ebook). ISBN 9781524748647 (hardcover). ISBN 9781524748654 (ebook).

  Subjects: GSAFD: Bildungsromans.

  Classification: LCC PS3602.U7555 B76 2020 (print) | LCC PS3602.U7555 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—d23

  LC record available at lccn.loc.gov/​2019037326

  LC ebook record available at lccn.loc.gov/​2019037327

  Ebook ISBN 9781524748654

  www.pantheonbooks.com

  Cover photograph: ClassicStock/Alamy

  Cover design by Kelly Blair

  ep_prh_5.5.0_c0_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Shannon Burke

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1: The Wager

  Chapter 2: Superior Human Beings

  Chapter 3: Submission

  Chapter 4: The Open Sea

  Chapter 5: The Frozen Beach

  Chapter 6: The Trip

  Chapter 7: Philanthropists

  Chapter 8: Departure

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  A Note About the Author

  To my family

  Something long preparing and formless is arrived and form’d in you,

  You are henceforth secure, whatever comes or goes.

  —Walt Whitman, “To Think of Time”

  1

  The Wager

  In later life, we see things with a more practical eye, one we share with the rest of society; but adolescence was the only time when we ever learned anything.

  —Marcel Proust

  The four of us—the Brennan kids—were a tight-knit, tumultuous, bickering, cohesive mob. Our father was a Southside dreamer full of elaborate plans meant to advance the fortunes of his family. Coyle, the oldest kid, was our drill sergeant, implementing Dad’s extreme orders with an iron fist. Brave, exacting, and unrelenting, Coyle had a spartan sensibility. I’ll give an example.

  One day in the sixth grade my friend Jimmy and I were drawing pictures of tanks and dragons while listening to Hot Rocks on a cassette deck. Coyle came into the doorway and stood there with a judgmental scowl, hanging on to the molding, suspicious of the chaotic sounds coming from the cassette player.

  “What’s this music?” he said.

  “Rolling Stones,” Jimmy said. “Don’t you know it?”

  “I don’t listen to music,” Coyle said. “It’s a waste of time.”

  That was Coyle in a nutshell. Music was a waste of time. Everything was a waste of time except work and school and sports and the marching orders from Dad. As far as I could see, Coyle’s whole purpose in life was fulfilling our father’s wishes.

  I was the second-oldest kid in the family and the one most different from Coyle. I did not fulfill my father’s wishes in anything. I was not orderly. I was not diligent. I liked any book with a barbarian or spaceship on the cover. I played Dungeons and Dragons, which Coyle thought was about the lamest thing he could imagine. I had a notebook of poems and little stories and made movies on Dad’s video recorder, mustering my younger siblings to act in these productions, all of which Coyle thought, of course, was a waste of time.

  Our family was poor. I should get that out of the way at the beginning. Dad was taking classes to get his teacher’s certificate, but in the meantime he had about six jobs—paper delivery, painter, roofer, renovator, tennis pro, maintenance. And while Dad was going through his endless rounds of drudgery, and Mom was cooking or cleaning or repairing the old house, Coyle was left in charge of his younger siblings. He liked being in charge. Coyle’s natural, domineering temperament flowered when he had subjects to rule over. And there was no one he liked to boss around more than me.

  He pointed out that I didn’t fold my clothes in the right way. I scattered food when I fed the cats. I missed the corners when I swept floors. To his eye, everything about my methods was idiosyncratic and inefficient. But I didn’t care what he thought was the proper way. I wanted to do things my own way, which was endlessly irritating for him. And that was satisfying for me. Irritating Coyle was a side benefit to doing things in the way I wanted.

  This pattern of instruction and resistance was the basis of our relationship for our childhood until the year I was twelve and Coyle was thirteen. That year, in the late winter of his eighth grade, my exacting older brother did something that surprised everyone: He refused to get a haircut.

  Our mother cut our hair, so it wasn’t like we’d make an appointment or anything. Mom just said it was time for a cut and we’d sit on the high chair in the kitchen and she’d take out the scissors and hack away. Up to that point in his life Coyle had been utterly indifferent to his hair. He kept his hair short so it didn’t get in the way of his achievement in school and sports, but I don’t think he’d ever thought about how it looked. Worrying about your hair was for girls.

  But on this day in February 1979, Mom told Coyle to get on the high chair and he said, “I’m not getting my hair cut. I don’t want to look like a geek.”

  “Since when is having normal-length hair looking like a geek?” Mom said.

  “Since now,” Coyle said.

  And that was that. Coyle refused. And once Coyle decided on something it was almost impossible to get him to change his mind. Mom wasn’t going to war over a haircut. So she just told me to get on the chair instead.

  “You want to be a hippie, I guess,” Dad said that night when he came home.

  Dad was a swaggering, bustling bull of a man. He had a thick neck and arms so muscle-filled that they stuck out to the side. Excessive work was Dad’s religion. He didn’t put up with back talk or resistance to his schemes. But I think Dad was secretly pleased that diligent Coyle finally wanted something other than high grades and a winning baseball season. Coyle, finally, was acting like a normal human being.

  So, Coyle was allowed to skip the haircut and that seemed to be the end of it. But a few weeks later Coyle refused to wear the khaki pants Mom laid out for him for school. He put on old, ripped jeans instead and a T-shirt with an emblem of a rooster.

  “Collared shirts are for dorks,” Coyle said.

  A few days later I heard music coming from the basement. I went down and saw Coyle doing sit-ups on the dichromatic gym mat, listening to my cassette copy of Who’s Next. A while later I heard Coyle lifting weights and listening to Led Zeppelin. No one listened to Led Zeppelin in our house. That was hard rock. It was supposed to be immoral in some undefined way. And it was perfectionist Coyle listening to Led Z
eppelin IV. That was just weird.

  In school that week I noticed that Coyle had migrated from the center lunch table where the studious kids ate and was now sitting at the edge of the cafeteria with some long-haired kids we called “burnouts.” The burnouts were considered to be the worst kids in the school. They wore concert T-shirts and hung out with girls that had long bangs and wore black eyeliner and smoked cigarettes and talked in bored monotones. “Freaks,” Coyle had called them before. “Loo-sers.” But now perfect, straight-A-student Coyle was sitting with the burnouts. At one point during the lunch period I even saw him get up and stand on his chair and pretend to be Commander Cornelius from Planet of the Apes, pointing at the popular kids and saying, “Kill the humans!”

  A few more weeks passed, and then I was on the back porch when Coyle appeared around the side of the house riding a Honda 125 on-road/off-road motorcycle. I could see right away that it was a used bike, a Frankenstein-type deal, with metal table legs as monkey bars and with a kid’s sparkly banana bicycle seat to sit on. All the paneling and unnecessary framework had been removed. It was light and fast and stripped down and jerry-rigged and there was something undeniably pleasing and just utterly cool about that bike. I was attracted to it immediately.

  Our house was the smallest in the neighborhood. We had a long, narrow backyard wedged between larger plots of land with weedy bushes on either side. Coyle rode the bike up into the middle of the yard and came to rest in a patch of dirt that was the pitcher’s mound in our backyard ballgames. I jumped off the porch and walked over.

  “Where’d you get it?” I asked.

  “Farrelly’s brother is a mechanic. He helped me find the parts and we’ve been putting it together bit by bit. I’m going to ride it to school.”

  Dan Farrelly was one of Coyle’s new burnout friends—a skinny kid with straight blond hair, very blue eyes, and a wolfish look. He was the catcher on the baseball team.

  “Dad won’t let you ride it,” I said.

  “When I’m sixteen he will. It will save them time so they don’t have to drive me around. Until then I can ride it in the backyard and at Deach’s Pit.”

  “You have to ride on the roads to get to Deach’s Pit. Dad won’t let you.”

  Coyle didn’t bother commenting. He didn’t need my approval to do what he wanted to do. He just revved the engine and I walked around the bike, pretending not to be impressed. Our six-person family lived in a two-bedroom house. All our possessions were communal, including our clothes. Everything was worn out or broken or had lost its luster from overuse. That bike was undeniably the coolest thing that anyone in the family had ever owned. And it was diligent Coyle who had it. I was already thinking of ways of convincing Coyle to let me ride it when I heard the screen door slam and turned to see our father walking out.

  Dad had a way of moving when he was angry. The Southside street swagger came out. He didn’t like surprises.

  “It’s mine,” Coyle said before Dad even got to him. “I got the frame and the engine from Andy Brands. I’ve been working on it in Farrelly’s garage at night. I’m going to start riding it to school when I turn sixteen so you don’t have to drive me. It will save you time,” Coyle added hopefully.

  “You don’t get your license for over two years,” Dad said.

  “I can practice before then in the backyard and at Deach’s Pit, where all the other kids ride their dirt bikes.”

  “You’re not other kids” was all Dad said. “Get off. Now.”

  Coyle knew not to counter Dad directly, particularly when he was in a bad mood. Coyle got off. Dad threw a leg over the bike. He revved the engine a few times, then got off and took the key out and put it in his pocket.

  “I need to talk to your mom. Until then, you don’t ride.”

  Coyle let out an exasperated puff of air.

  “My friends ride at Deach’s Pit every weekend.”

  “Yeah, well, those friends are not role models,” Dad said.

  That was the first time I heard Dad acknowledge that he knew what was going on with Coyle and his new group of burnout friends.

  “I had the same kind of friends growing up,” Dad said. “Smoking. Cutting class. Up to no good. It’s why I moved out of the city. To get away from that. If those guys you’re hanging out with ride motorcycles, it makes me think you shouldn’t do it.”

  “You don’t know them,” Coyle said sullenly.

  “I can tell what they’re like,” Dad said.

  Next door, in Mrs. Chambers’s house, the blinds moved. Seneca, the suburb we lived in, was supposed to be this fancy place. Dad had moved us there so we would have what was supposedly “a better life.” All the houses around us were large and fancy, with red tile roofs and manicured lawns and long curving driveways with multiple expensive cars parked in large garages. Our house didn’t fit in at all. It was small, squat, and redbrick, with dirt patches in the yard. We had one shower for the six of us. When we got in fights they spilled out into the yard and all the neighbors peeked out to see what was going on with the weird, poor family in that rich neighborhood.

  Dad ignored Mrs. Chambers. He held the key up to Coyle.

  “Is this the only one?”

  Coyle grudgingly took another key out of his pocket. He handed it to my father.

  “I’ll talk to your mother. Until then this is a lawn ornament,” Dad said.

  He walked back to the house.

  “Lawn ornament,” Coyle said when Dad was gone. “Where’d he get that one?”

  “I knew he wouldn’t let you ride it,” I said.

  I reached out for the bike, but hesitated to see what Coyle thought of that. He gave me a skeptical look.

  “Don’t even think of touching it,” he said.

  * * *

  —

  Our father delivered five hundred Chicago Tribunes every morning of the year, and three days a week the older kids helped. That meant on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Sundays, Coyle and I woke at three in the morning and drove with my father to the delivery garage, where Coyle and I stood side by side at the binding tables passing rolled papers through machines that mechanically knotted papers with a string. There were stacks of bound Chicago Tribunes piled in the corner and the smell of cigarette smoke and fresh ink. Hot, stale air blew constantly from high fans while an old radio played WGN Newsradio 78. Coyle was faster and stronger and more adept at the rolling than me, and since we split the work, every morning we were at the garage he complained that I was too slow and made more work for him.

  On that morning, though, the morning after Coyle got his motorcycle, as we stood side by side at the binding tables, there was the normal invective-filled conversation that went back and forth among the other workers and the drone of the radio and the slap of the wooden door on the spring, but Coyle didn’t comment on how slow I rolled or how I took too many breaks. It was unusual not to be derided and I noted it.

  Once the papers were bound and tossed into a wheeled canvas hamper, we brought the hamper out into the pitch-black and frigid dark at four in the morning and filled the back of the station wagon with the papers. Afterward, I got into my spot in the very back of the car, half buried in Tribunes. It was my job to push the papers forward so Coyle, who sat right behind Dad, could transfer the rolled papers to the front seat, where Dad would grab them and toss them out the window in a continuous stream while he blasted classic rock over the station wagon’s speakers. “Don’t Do Me Like That.” “Hungry Heart.” “Summer Breeze.” Those songs in the backseat with the frigid wind swirling and the aching, queasy nausea of being up before dawn in my gut, and the smell of ink, and the dull, flat, intermittent smack of the paper on cold concrete—that was the delivery part of the mornings, and usually during the delivery Coyle complained that I didn’t transfer the papers fast enough to the middle seat. He said that I lay down and closed my eyes and he had
to reach over the seat and smack me with a rolled paper to get me to do my job.

  But on that morning Coyle did not smack me with the rolled paper when I lay down to rest, even though I did fall behind, and that, also, was unusual.

  By six o’clock we were back at home, walking into the lit house, where Mom was cooking bacon and eggs and toast, and Fergus and Maddy, my two younger siblings, were on the living room floor, doing sit-ups, push-ups, and jumping jacks. Every morning, even if we did the paper route, we had an hour of calisthenics before school. Using all of our time for improvement was our father’s obsession. We were going to get ahead in life with hard work and diligence, and he had begun to train us from the day we were born in reading and math and also in all athletics. So in the morning we did calisthenics, like we were in boot camp. The exercise routine was listed on an individualized note card, one for each kid in the family, one for each day of the week, kept in a small, metal note card box.

  On that day, within a minute of arriving home Coyle and I had flung off our jackets and gotten our exercise card for the day from the metal box and were side by side in the living room, feet beneath the couch, doing sit-ups, while Dad passed through the room, calling out to me, “Aw, you’re lagging behind, Willie. Look at your brother. He’s faster. Pick it up!”

  Usually Coyle would have chimed in with my father’s criticisms, but on that morning Coyle did not comment about how I lagged behind during the exercises, and because Coyle had not commented at all that day—not on how slow I rolled papers or transferred papers or did my exercises—I knew Coyle was thinking about ways to get my parents to allow him to ride that bike. He was obsessed with it. The four of us—the kids in the family—worked together with our father every day. We did sports together. We slept together in the same small room on two bunk beds. There were no secrets among us. And I knew that if Coyle was so distracted that he couldn’t spare the time to deride me, he must be working out some elaborate plan.