Thicker Than Water

The fluorescent light in the kitchen flickered to life and I got my first look at my attacker, my older brother Donny, leaning hard against the Formica countertop. He was heavier than I remembered. His face looked swollen, weathered by life, like a man who had aged double in the years I’d been gone, but it was him for sure.

The five o’clock shadow encircling his face was moist with sweat and speckled with grey hairs. The beating he just gave me proved that, despite the years and added weight, he still had the skills that once made him one of the Mid-Atlantic’s most-feared, amateur heavyweight boxers.

I looked up at my older brother through my throbbing left eye and raised a hand toward him.

“Give me a hand getting up?” I asked.

Donny’s giant, clammy hand engulfed mine and he pulled me to a standing position.

We both groaned.

My head spun for a second until I regained my balance. I brushed myself off and straightened my tie, more out of habit than appearance, given it was covered in blood.

There was an old dishrag in the sink. It stunk of mildew but it worked to slow the bleeding from my nose and eye.

“Sorry about your nose.” Donny was still breathing hard but managed to fish a soft pack of Marlboros from the pocket of his sweats. He pulled one cigarette from the pack with his mouth and held the rest of the pack in my direction.

“I quit,” I said, the towel muffling my voice. “Going on two years.”

“Good for you.” Donny lit his cigarette, took a long drag, and exhaled. Smoke poured from his mouth and nose, filling the small kitchen and all the space between us.

From across the room, with the dishrag pressed against my bleeding nose and behind a badly swollen eye, Donny looked like a bull, huffing and puffing, engulfed in a ring of smoke, celebrating a prideful victory having just gored his matador.

After eight years of estrangement, I knew I would reconnect with my brother and the rest of my family, I just had no idea it would be so soon or so violent.

Donny and I stood in silence for a few beats. The rag pressed against my nose was filled with blood but it slowing the blood flow. The smell of mildew on the rag was awful, but it was better than passing out.

My brother rested against the countertop and slowly caught his breath as he smoked. He stared at me hard between puffs.

“How’s your nose?” he asked

I moved the rag away to check for fresh blood.

“I might be broken. At least the bleeding seems to have stopped,” I said.

Donny nodded his head. He reached over, turned on the kitchen faucet and used the weak stream of water to extinguish his cigarette, throwing the soggy butt, no longer burning, into the sink.

“You’ve gotten soft, Paddy,” he said. “There was a time you’d get a couple of shots in on me before I knocked you out.”

“It was dark,” I said.

“Maybe. Maybe living in the big city has made you soft.” Donny smiled.

“Maybe,” I said.

We both stood in silence for another beat.

“What the hell are you doing back here?” Donny’s eyes starred into me. “You’ve been gone what, seven-eight years. Things have been good with you gone. Now here you are back in Dolan Heights sneaking around Robbie’s house in the middle of the night. What for?”

The question was direct, but so was my response.

“Someone killed our brother, so maybe things haven’t been good since I’ve been gone,” I said.

“Bullshit,” Donny snapped back, the calm gone from his voice now.

“It’s not bullshit, Donny.” My jaw ached and my nose throbbed as I raised my voice, the taste of fresh blood on my lips. “He was my brother too, same as you. I came back here, back to this shithole town, to find out what happened to my little brother…to our little brother. To pay my respects to Robbie, not to get caught up in the same old bullshit of kissing some damn ring with you and Pop.”

Donny’s face grew more red with each word I spoke. The adrenaline built in my stomach and it felt like Round 2 with my brother was about to begin at any moment. But instead of charging at me, Donny stood calm and controlled, but with the kinetic energy of a taunt rubber band.

“Just came to pay your respects, huh? Yeah. Funny place to do that, in Robbie’s apartment at 7 o’clock at night, sneaking around in the dark,” he said. “And what bullshit do you mean with me and Pop?”

I looked down at my suit. It was covered in my blood and grime from Robbie’s floor.

“You know what bullshit I’m talking about, I can see it in that look on your face,” I said. “The same bullshit that drove me out of town eight years ago. The same bullshit that’s kept me away all this time.”

“What look?” Donny asked.

My nose had stop bleeding completely. I sighed and threw the rag back in the sink.

Outside, the light rain had opened up into a full-fledged downpour, blasting the side of the cheap apartment. Gusts of wind shot across the side of the building, swaying it from side-to-side, rocking the house. It felt like the entire structure could be blown away at any moment.

“The same look you had all those years ago. You’re already looking for an angle. Trying to work out how this can benefit you. How Robbie’s murder can be perverted to somehow benefit Francis “Donny” Donnelly. It’s sick!” I said. “That’s the way it’s always been with you and Pop. You take and you take and you take and when something is finally taken from you, all you want is revenge.”

Donny just smiled. He was finally catching his breath.

“Yeah, I want revenge, so what? Don’t you,” he asked rhetorically. “Doesn’t Robbie deserve it? What’s wrong with finding the people who did this…finding the people who killed our brother and killing them? Is that wrong? Is that bullshit?”

As always, Donny wanted blood and he didn’t care the consequences of his actions.

“No, Donny, it’s not bullshit. It’s just stupid,” I said.

My older brother stood up with a groan. He curled his upper lip over his lower lip in a manner I had seen many times in my life. It was the same mannerism he used just before punching Walter Biggs for picking on me in the 7th grade.

I was certain another flurry of blows were coming my way.

To my surprise, Donny didn’t come forward in attack. Instead, he dug his cigarette pack from his pocket and lit another smoke.

“Let me ask you something, why did you come here tonight?” I asked.

Without a word, Donny walked into the living room/bedroom of the small aparetment. He flicked on the overhead light, giving me the first true look at the place where my younger brother had lived before he died.

It was barren.

A bed in the corner with the small table next to it that I had searched in the dark. A second-hand couch with a coffee table in front. An old chest dresser, likely half-full of clothes, sat at the front of the room with a TV on top.

Donny went to the chest dresser with purpose, picked up a framed picture and looked at it.

“This is why I came here,” he said.

The frame was black wood with a thin, glass front, the type you could buy at any drug store. Behind the glass was an old photograph taken more than a decade earlier. Though the picture was faded near the corners, the focus of the photo was still very much visible.

In the center of the shot was Robbie after his first boxing match, he was shirtless, his shaggy brown hair tussled, with a swollen left eye, and a huge grin on his face. Both of his arms were extended and wrapped around his two older brothers, Donny on his right in the picture and me his left.

“Look at these guys. You remember these guys?” Donny showed me the picture, his grin while looking at it was almost as big as the one on Robbie’s face in the photo. “What was the name of the guy Robbie beat that night?”

I remembered the night and the happiness like it was yesterday. It was one of those rare times in my life where an entire group of people, Donny, me, Pop, the crowd, all wanted Robbie to win his first fight so badly we would have given almost anything to make it happen.

And then it did.

The happiness was pure and unabridged and all of it was captured in the photograph Donny and I held in our hands.

“Jonathan ‘Deep Sleep’ Shifflett,” I said.

Donny laughed. He took a deep drag off his cigarette and said, “That’s right, ‘Deep Sleep,’ we wore those trunks with the ‘zzzzzz’ on the ass. Man did Robbie beat that kid’s ass that night.”

“Robbie used to have that jab, he used to dominate guys with it,” Donny said with excitement in his voice, the excitement that was always there when he spoke about boxing. “Robbie’d come in there with that straight left jab and just tap-tap-tap, hit ‘em four, five time to lull ‘em to sleep and then bang!”

The scream shook me.

“He’d hit that right cross and it would be over,” Donny said.

“It was all over Deep Sleep that night,” I said looking down at the framed picture.

There was a long pause. Donny took three pulls from his cigarette.

“It’s all over for Robbie now too,” he said.

We stood in silence for a minute.

“What the hell happened to him, Don?” I asked. “How did Robbie end up here? Living like this?”

“Pills,” he handed me the picture. “Legit at first. Broke his hand at work, doctor prescribed his Oxy, got him hooked. After that, it was all downhill.”

Donny made a downward spiral gesture with his hand, the glowing cherry of his cigarette lighting the room.

“Heroin?” I asked.

“Maybe at the end. I’m not sure.” He got up, walked to the kitchen and put out his cigarette in the sink in the same way as before.

“Jesus.”

Back in the living room, Donny took the framed picture back from me, “That’s why we gotta find out who did this to him. They took his whole life away with those fucking pills. Beat him. Shot him and then left him for dead.”

I nodded.

“I owe it him,” he said. “We owe it to him.”