living in a homeless shelter on Lowbriar Avenue, then I’ll be eligible for assistance, and isn’t that just ducky.”
Sometimes Brady would look at Frankie and think, You’re in the way. You’re in the way, Frankie, you’re in the fucking goddam shitass waaay.
Sometimes—often—Brady hated the whole fucking goddam shitass world. If there was a God, like the Sunday guys said on TV, wouldn’t He take Frankie up to heaven, so his mother could go back to work fulltime and they wouldn’t have to be out on the street? Or living on Lowbriar Avenue, where his mother said there was nothing but nigger drug addicts with guns? If there was a God, why had He let Frankie choke on that fucking apple slice in the first place? And then letting him wake up brain-damaged afterward, that was going from bad to fucking goddam shitass worse. There was no God. You only had to watch Frankie crawling around the floor with goddam Sammy in one hand, then getting up and limping for awhile before giving that up and crawling again, to know that the idea of God was fucking ridiculous.
Finally Frankie died. It happened fast. In a way it was like running down those people at City Center. There was no forethought, only the looming reality that something had to be done. You could almost call it an accident. Or fate. Brady didn’t believe in God, but he did believe in fate, and sometimes the man of the house had to be fate’s right hand.
His mother was making pancakes for supper. Frankie was playing with Sammy. The basement door was standing open because Deborah Ann had bought two cartons of cheap off-brand toilet paper at Chapter 11 and they kept it down there. The bathrooms needed re-stocking, so she sent Brady down to get some. His hands had been full when he came back up, so he left the basement door open. He thought Mom would shut it, but when he came down from putting the toilet paper in the two upstairs bathrooms, it was still open. Frankie was on the floor, pushing Sammy across the linoleum and making rrr-rrr sounds. He was wearing red pants that bulged with his triple-thick diapers. He was working ever closer to the open door and the steep stairs beyond, but Deborah Ann still made no move to close the door. Nor did she ask Brady, now setting the table, to do it.
“Rrr-rrr,” said Frankie. “Rrr-rrr.”
He pushed the fire truck. Sammy rolled to the edge of the basement doorway, bumped against the jamb, and there he stopped.
Deborah Ann left the stove. She walked over to the basement door. Brady thought she would bend down and hand Frankie’s fire truck back to him, but she didn’t. She kicked it instead. There was a small clacking sound as it tumbled down the steps, all the way to the bottom.
“Oops,” she said. “Sammy faw down go boom.” Her voice was very flat.
Brady walked over. This was interesting.
“Why’d you do that, Mom?”
Deborah Ann put her hands on her hips, the spatula jutting from one of them. She said, “Because I’m just so sick of listening to him make that sound.”
Frankie opened his mouth and began to blat.
“Quit it, Frankie,” Brady said, but Frankie didn’t. What Frankie did was crawl onto the top step and peer down into the darkness.
In that same flat voice Deborah Ann said, “Turn on the light, Brady. So he can see Sammy.”
Brady turned on the light and peered over his blatting brother.
“Yup,” he said. “There he is. Right down at the bottom. See him, Frankie?”
Frankie crawled a little farther, still blatting. He looked down. Brady looked at his mother. Deborah Ann Hartsfield gave the smallest, most imperceptible nod. Brady didn’t think. He simply kicked Frankie’s triple-diapered butt and down Frankie went in a series of clumsy somersaults that made Brady think of the fat Blues Brother flipping his way along the church aisle. On the first somersault Frankie kept on blatting, but the second time around, his head connected with one of the stair risers and the blatting stopped all at once, as if Frankie were a radio and someone had turned him off. That was horrible, but had its funny side. He went over again, legs flying out limply to either side in a Y shape. Then he slammed headfirst into the basement floor.
“Oh my God, Frankie fell!” Deborah Ann cried. She dropped the spatula and ran down the stairs. Brady followed her.