The Dangers of Proximal Alphabets - By Kathleen Alcott Page 0,32

recognized him for what he was, which was downright scary, but it was during this time that James, sitting on the front porch on his night off, watched his brother exit their house fully asleep carrying a baseball bat that had been in the back of their closet for nearly four years.

The way James tells it, he had remained gentle the three blocks downtown, had tried to coax Jackson (whose fingers held the bat loosely as if it were merely an extension of his limp left arm) into turning around. But it was no dice, and so the younger brother followed the older brother dutifully, as he had so many times before. Given the considerable distance that had grown between them during the period of his drug use—and more recently since I’d spurned Jackson and he’d grown even more solipsistic—James was glad to be alone with his brother, to do this small, quiet thing. The bat remained inert until, with a switch that seemed to affect Jackson’s every muscle, it didn’t.

All told, six windows were smashed and three cracked. When the cops arrived, Jackson was gone—how this happened, James can’t explain or even remember. He had finally wrestled the polished wood out of his brother’s hands, had stopped to catch his breath and shifted to find himself amid brilliant reds and blues encircling him where he stood with glass in his hair and blood on his hands from when he’d tried to intercept his sleeping brother’s blows to the Shoe Repair window after restraint had proved impossible. Jackson must have wandered off as easily as he’d stepped out of bed and into the night, and no one, had they been awake to witness him walk by unhurried, would have suspected him of menace. They would have seen, instead, a young man with all the hopes in the world, bearing a gracious half-moon smile, up for a midnight stroll in the hometown he knew and loved.

James, on the other hand, was already a favorite of the cops by his association with Dillon, was bloody and holding a bat, had the telltale dilated pupils and high pulse, did not answer questions easily. He was searched, remnants of drugs were found in his pocket, blood was tested.

Given the town’s quickly changing identity, or rather the fact that finally tourists had begun taking in its quaint values in hordes, there’d been a great deal of pressure from the city council to make an example of cases such as these, to assert that these sorts of incidents were not permissible, were not to be repeated. Both drugs and vandalism were on the rise, and as luck would have it, James’s (Jackson’s) crime included both. He had managed to crack in half the sign of the Shoe Repair shop, which was over one hundred years old (both the sign and the shop); he was charged with possession, vandalism, and defacement of a historic landmark. Given his previous record (a minor in possession of alcohol as well as an evading arrest when we’d all run from the cops and gotten away but his pants had caught cartoonishly on a fence), it didn’t look good for him.

As for Jackson, he found himself sore and vaguely satisfied the next morning, as if in his dreams he’d swum hard and strong in a clear green river and his muscles had somehow experienced it. He began to feel uneasy as he rose into his usual Saturday morning routine of eggs-in-a-basket (he adored the concise circles like I did) and reading on the front porch. As the coffee began to take effect, he felt his body more clearly; the pleasant buzz in his lumbar region and the satisfied ache of well-used shoulder muscles sat outside the possibility of just a good dream. A smarting between his thumb and forefinger revealed itself as a small, deeply lodged splinter. When he opened the screen door, he found that James’s guitar was leaned against the railing and his precious shoulder bag, which was never without him, was lumped next to it. He retreated inside to find Julia. Not because he particularly wanted to talk to her, but because the sight of her buried deep under the blankets, snoring, one arm extended straight out over the edge of the bed as if in greeting, or sitting up in bed staring at the wall remembering God knows what, was a signal of all things normal and familiar. Only she wasn’t there.

A note on the kitchen table, which