Gun Case

In his head my brother was a little boy, helpless, when he thought of himself, so he didn’t understand that saying things like I have a black belt or I unlocked the gun case made him difficult, sometimes, to approach. He bumped into things or knocked things over because he hadn’t realized how big he had gotten. He was a little boy—we were both little boys—but I was in my forties, he was in his fifties. My father’s last words were You don’t deserve to outlive me. He said them to my brother, who told me he was referring to both of us. I don’t know. I wasn’t there at the end. Nobody called and I wouldn’t have gone anyway. He had used the line before, so really it was just another disappointment. I had hoped for something unexpected, something tragic and grand. At the reading of the will, we discovered he had changed it again, leaving my brother almost everything. For me, he had calculated a minimum wage for the years that I had taken care of him. He left me exactly that amount. My brother had been pushing against our father for his entire life. Without him, the force of his pushing had spun him off balance. I could be cold-hearted, hard-headed; I could be the stand-in but I wasn’t going to be. I wanted out and fast. I wrote a check for the deposit on an apartment downtown, by the bars. I started putting things in boxes. My brother sent me a text: he had unlocked the gun case and I needed to call before I came over. The coyotes were howling like somebody screaming and maybe it was somebody screaming. I wasn’t quite clear on it, but he said it wasn’t safe to come over. It was fine, except I hadn’t finished moving out yet, so really it wasn’t fine.