Brothers and Keepers. John Edgar Wideman

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      My father had called them thugs. Robby and his little thugs. The same word he’d used for me and my cut buddies when we were coming up, loafing around the house on Copeland Street, into playing records and bullshucking about girls, and saying nothing to nobody not part of our gang. Calling Rob’s friends thugs was my father’s private joke. Thugs not because they were incipient criminals or particularly bad kids, but because in their hip walks and stylized speech and caps pulled down on their foreheads they were declaring themselves on the lam, underground, in flight from the daylight world of nice, respectable adults.

      My father liked to read the Sunday funnies. In the “Nancy” comic strip was a character named Sluggo, and I believe that’s who my father had in mind when he called them thugs. That self-proclaimed little tough guy, snub-nosed, bristle-haired, knuckleheaded Sluggo. Funny, because like Sluggo they were dead serious about the role they were playing. Dead serious and fooling nobody. So my father had relegated them to the funny papers.

      Road grime caked the windows of the battered sedan parked outside the bowling alley. I couldn’t tell if anyone was inside. I let my motor run, talked to the ghost of my brother the way I’d talked that Sunday, waiting for a flesh-and-blood version to appear.

      Robby was a fugitive. My little brother was wanted for murder. For three months Robby had been running and hiding from the police. Now he was in Laramie, on my doorstep. Robbery. Murder. Flight. I had pushed them out of my mind. I hadn’t allowed myself to dwell on my brother’s predicament. I had been angry, hurt and afraid, but I’d had plenty of practice cutting myself off from those sorts of feelings. Denying disruptive emotions was a survival mechanism I’d been forced to learn early in life. Robby’s troubles could drive me crazy if I let them. It had been better to keep my feelings at a distance. Let the miles and years protect me. Robby was my brother, but that was once upon a time, in another country. My life was relatively comfortable, pleasant, safe. I’d come west to escape the demons Robby personified. I didn’t need outlaw brothers reminding me how much had been lost, how much compromised, how terribly the world still raged beyond the charmed circle of my life on the Laramie plains.

      In my Volvo, peering across the street, searching for a sign of life in the filthy car or the doorway of Laramie Lanes, pieces of my life rushed at me, as fleeting, as unpredictable as the clusters of cloud scudding across the darkening sky.

      Rob. Hey, Rob. Do you remember the time we were living on the third floor of Grandma’s house on Copeland Street and we were playing and Daddy came scooting in from behind the curtain where he and Mommy slept, dropping a trail of farts, blip, blip, blip, and flew out the door and down the steps faster than anybody’d ever made it before? I don’t know what he was doing or what we were doing before he came farting through the room, but I do remember the stunned silence afterward, the five of us kids looking at one another like we’d seen the Lone Ranger and wondering what the hell was that. Was that really Daddy? Were those sounds actual blipping farts from the actual behind of our actual father? Well, we sat on the floor, staring at each other, a couple seconds; then Tish laughed or I laughed. Somebody had to start it. A choked-back, closed-mouth, almost-swallowed, one-syllable laugh. And then another and another. As irresistible then as the farts blipping in a train from Daddy’s pursed behind. The first laugh sneaks out then it’s all hell bursting loose, it’s one pop after another, and mize well let it all hang out. We crack up and start to dance. Each one of us takes a turn being Edgar Wideman, big daddy, scooting like he did across the floor, fast but sneakylike till the first blip escapes and blows him into overdrive. Bip. Blap. Bippidy-bip. And every change and permutation of fart we can manufacture with our mouths, or our wet lips on the back of our hands, or a hand cupped in armpit with elbow pumping. A Babel of squeaky farts and bass farts and treble and juicy and atom-bomb and trip-hammer, machine-gun, suede, firecracker, slithery, bubble-gum-cracking, knuckle-popping, gone-with-the-wind menagerie of every kind of fart we can imagine. Till Mommy pokes her head from behind the curtain and says, That’s enough youall. But she can’t help grinning her ownself cause she had to hear it too. Daddy trailing that wedding-car tin-can tail of farts and skidding down the steps to the bathroom on the second floor where he slammed the door behind himself before the door on the third floor had time to swing shut. Mom’s smiling so we sputter one last fusillade and grin and giggle at each other one more time while she says again, That’s enough now, that’s enough youall.

      *

      Robby crossed Third Street alone, leaving his friends behind in the muddy car. I remember how glad I was to see him. How ordinary it seemed to be meeting him in this place he’d never been before. Here was my brother miraculously appearing from God-knows-where, a slim, bedraggled figure, looking very much like a man who’s been on the road for days, nothing like an outlaw or killer, my brother striding across the street to greet me. What was alien, unreal was not the man but the town, the circumstances that had brought him to this juncture. By the time Robby had reached my car and leaned down smiling into the open window, Laramie, robbery, murder, flight, my litany of misgivings had all disappeared.

      Rob rode with me from the bowling alley to the Harney Street house. Dukes and Johnny-Boy followed in the Olds. Rob told me Cecil Rice had split back to Pittsburgh to face the music. Johnny-Boy was somebody Robby and Mike had picked up in Utah.

      Robby and his two companions stayed overnight. There was eating, drinking, a lot of talk. Next day I taught my classes at the university and before I returned home in the afternoon, Robby and his crew had headed for Denver. My brother’s last free night was spent in Laramie, Wyoming. February 11, 1976, the day following their visit, Robby, Mike, and Johnny were arrested in Fort Collins, Colorado. The Oldsmobile they’d been driving had stolen plates. Car they’d borrowed in Utah turned out to be stolen too, bringing the FBI into the case because the vehicle and plates had been transported across state lines. The Colorado cops didn’t know the size of the fish in their net until they checked the FBI wire and suddenly realized they had some “bad dudes” in their lockup. “Niggers wanted for Murder One back East” was how one detective described the captives to a group of curious bystanders later, when Robby and Michael were being led, manacled, draped with chains, through the gleaming corridor of a Colorado courthouse.

      I can recall only a few details about Robby’s last night of freedom. Kentucky Fried Chicken for dinner. Nobody as hungry as I thought they should be. Michael narrating a tale about a basketball scholarship he won to NYU, his homesickness, his ambivalence about the Apple, a coach he didn’t like whose name he couldn’t remember.

      Johnny-Boy wasn’t from Pittsburgh. Small, dark, greasy, he was an outsider who knew he didn’t fit, ill at ease in a middle-class house, the meandering conversations that had nothing to do with anyplace he’d been, anything he understood or cared to learn. Johnny-Boy had trouble talking, trouble staying awake. When he spoke at all, he stuttered riffs of barely comprehensible ghetto slang. While the rest of us were talking, he’d nod off. I didn’t like the way his heavy-lidded, bubble eyes blinked open and searched the room when he thought no one was watching him. Perhaps sleeping with one eye open was a habit forced upon him by the violent circumstances of his life, but what I saw when he peered from “sleep,” taking the measure of his surroundings, of my wife, my kids, me, were a stranger’s eyes, a stranger’s eyes with nothing in them I could trust.

      I should have understood why the evening was fragmentary, why I have difficulty recalling it now. Why Mike’s story was full of inconsistencies, nearly incoherent. Why Robby was shakier than I’d ever seen him. Why he was tense, weary, confused about what his next move should be. I’m tired, man, he kept saying. I’m tired. . . . You don’t know what it’s like, man. Running . . . running. Never no peace. Certain signs were clear at the time but they passed right by me. I thought I was giving my guests a few hours’ rest from danger, but they knew I was turning my house into a dangerous place. I believed I was providing a respite from pursuit. They knew they were leaving a trail, complicating the chase by stopping with me and my family. A few “safe” hours in my house weren’t long enough to come down from the booze, dope, and adrenaline high that fueled their flight. At any moment my front door could be smashed down. A gunfire fight begin. I thought they had stopped, but they were still on the road. I hadn’t begun to explore the depths of my naïveté, my bewilderment.

      Only