The butterscotch ’85 Dodge Caravan that my mother drove until 2000 was such a source of embarrassment for me in junior high that I asked her to drop me off for school around the corner. Prior to my angst-filled teen years, the van wasn’t so bad. In fact, I had no problem driving with my family from Texas to Wyoming with a ridiculously large piñata strapped to the car carrier on top of the van. The van brought us twice to Texas, once for a family reunion and once for my grandmother’s funeral. It even transported us over the border into Mexico. The van was sometimes the only way that our family could be brought together prior to 1994, when my brother went to prison and left the back seat of the van empty for the next six years.
The first trip I remember in the van was to Yellowstone. Somewhere around Sheridan, Wyoming I became sick and vomited a pink watery substance that ran down the front of my shirt onto the velvety ribbed seat right behind the driver’s side. I looked in embarrassment at the back of my dad’s head and tried to focus on his black wavy hair and the pink tips of his ears to keep from throwing up again. I cupped my hand and again the pink vomit came, dotted with small bits of the sandwich I had eaten earlier. My brother’s voice came from the seat furthest back in the van, loud and disgusted. “Mom! She’s puking! Pull over, please! Stop it! Why can’t you hold it in?” My sister next to me was aghast at my inability to control the worst of bodily functions. Her face began to change as she watched the vomit trickle down my sleeve. Her plump pink cheeks and squinty blue eyes became pursed and creased and her fleshy fingers squeezed the tip of her nose. My mother’s hand reached back and squeezed my leg. “We’re almost to the rest stop, honey. Just be quiet!” she bawled at my brother.
Driving in the van with my brother provided many hours for him to physically torture me. It always happened when Mom and Dad weren’t looking, and was often forgotten if he would give me a Pepsi. In one of the family albums from when I was younger, from when my parents still took pictures (they stopped after my brother went to prison), I am standing in front of the glorified box of a van clutching a Pepsi and wearing an oversized cap. My brother is standing in the background, still smiling, but not quite a part of the family. He was always so much older that no babysitter was needed. Mom and Dad would go out for dinner and he would start in with pyrotechnics and harassment of me or my doll, Darina, who he called Diarrhea. He kicked me in the stomach so hard once that I couldn’t breathe and doubled over on the ground. He comforted me, only for a second, before he said, “I’ll give you a Pepsi and a dollar if you don’t tell Mom and Dad.” I finally managed to catch a breath and released with “Okay.” Later that same night he took my doll and smashed her plastic face against the poles of the unassembled canopy bed in my room. Her face slowly morphed back to its old shape, but her neck remained severed and lay like a real baby’s head would, morbidly wounded and burned into my memory. When Mom and Dad finally came home, Dad had to perform emergency surgery to reattach the plastic head to the cloth neck, using dark gold thread arranged in jutty stitches that still appear like lightning bolts on her neck today.
I always felt as if my younger sister and my brother ganged up on me. I came eight years after he was born, from a different father. But this doesn’t mean I didn’t immortalize him, or make him omnipotent in my consciousness. He was always so cool, even though his temper was hot. Much of the time spent with him was climbing on his best friend’s trampoline next door, clutching frantically onto the circular metal sides of the tramp while he and his friends tried their hardest to make my back end flip completely over the sides so I would bounce off the fence located three feet away. When I wasn’t up the street at the house, I was busy fetching quilts and water to put out the various fires that he set in the field in the back of our house. He loved fire; it was unpredictable, burned bright, caused destruction to everything around it. Fire held the fascination for him that he held for me.
Many evenings would start with the search for the right can of Aqua Net hairspray in my mother’s bathroom cupboard, and end up with my grandmother’s quilt dragging behind me as I hectically tried to reach my brother as his hands waved in the twirling smoke coming from the grass below. Mom and Dad would leave us cash for pizza, and my brother would order just enough for him to eat (he would make sandwiches for my sister and me) and use the leftover money to purchase a Bic 5-pack. When the hairspray ran out, then it would be time for the finger-through-the-flame trick, which we found out doesn’t really hurt, but is mesmerizing either way. My sister and I would watch the pink of flesh as it passed through the blue of flames over and over and became hypnotic, the trance only ending at the slight flinch of his eyes. Sometimes hands would be replaced with feet and socks; the small balled-up fibers of cotton on the socks would capture the flame and suffocate it with a WHOOSH and a shriek from my sister and me. Then feet would be abandoned once more for hands covered with the butane from the Bic; one simple flick of the flint lighting up the hand as if it were holding fire, as if it had created it. My sister and I would look at my brother as if he were Zeus, as if he had indeed created the fire, as if we were creations sprung from his forehead.
My mom and brother would also gang up on me, telling me that chicken fingers in the grocery store were really human fingers or other cuts of meat were dog. On one particular trip to see our grandparents in Burns, Wyoming, my sister and I were riled up because of the Amy Grant song that had just played on the radio. We jerked to the stops in the music and had some choreography. We undid our seatbelts and held them out from our laps, and when the song stopped short we released the seatbelts so that they slapped against our thighs. For the next line we would hug each other and sing along. This song was much more entertaining for us than the Nanci Griffith that our dad would play otherwise, only he wasn’t on this trip. After a few verses our mother became irritated and said that she was going to turn around. She merged onto the exit ramp, and my sister and I cried out, “No, Mom! We’re sorry!” and I added, “I promise I’ll be quiet. And so does she.” She kept driving. My sister and I put our seatbelts back on and stared out the side window of the van.
Nighttime rolled around and I shook my sister awake. We were in some strange town. We sucked our thumbs and mumbled to Mom, “Where are we?” She didn’t answer us back and we looked at each other for comfort. The town wasn’t very big and the streets weren’t paved. The white of the building on my side of the van was reflected in the moonlight and made it look like a ghost. We rounded a corner and I looked up to see another ghost house, this time set off by black shutters. I was beginning to get worried and asked, “Where are we?” I couldn’t see my brother’s face when he said, “We’re lost.” So I didn’t know whether he was lying to me or not. “We’re going to stop at this house and ask for directions,” my mom said, turning her neck slightly toward my sister and me. She turned off the van, and opened the door. Just as she did, my grandma came out of the white house with shutters. We were in Burns! Mom and my brother had tricked me again! My sister, asleep by now, woke up to my grandma dragging her out of the van and pulling her hair away from her face where it had become glued with spit. Grandma was wearing black socks and my grandpa’s size 14 slippers and oversized sweatpants. She grabbed my wrist and told me to get out of the van and give her a hug. I got out, and she squeezed me so hard it hurt. Then she let me go and went to do the same to my brother.
My brother was 15 the first time he got in trouble. It was on the same visit to see my grandparents that I knew something might be wrong, that he had done something worse than light the field on fire. He had two Game Boys and Walkmans that he did not have before. He let me play the Game Boy, and in between the sounds of Tetris I asked him, “Where did you get this?” “Don’t worry about it. Don’t tell Mom and Dad. Here, I’ll give you a dollar.” I complied, because Tetris and George Washington were high on my list of priorities, much more so than narking on my brother. One evening, after a surprising trip to McDonald’s where I was allowed to order something for myself (we were normally fed a hamburger and small fry due to my father’s tight wallet), I knew something was wrong. I had ordered a Quarter Pounder meal and my brother quickly jumped on me and called me fat. “What eight-year-old would eat a Quarter Pounder? Gosh, why don’t you order a Happy Meal like your sister?” I swooshed the burger around in my mouth and felt sick, as if the tears I felt coming on could easily turn into vomit and come from my mouth instead of my eyes. We sat around the table and no one said anything. Finally Dad started in. “What the fuck were you thinking!” A small gasp erupted from my sister and me and the vomit switched back to tears. Dad never said fuck. Dad started to do a lot of things we weren’t used to after that.
My brother went to the boys’ home in Worland after that incident. It turns out that he and a friend had broken into several vehicles around town and had stolen thousands of dollars’ worth of merchandise. Since he was a minor, this offense was not as serious as it would have been if he were an adult. I never visited him in Worland, but we went to pick him up after he had been there for six months. He seemed a little different, a little nicer, but being a naïve young girl, I still felt as if the sin he had committed was unforgivable, and I even asked a counselor at church camp if he would still go to heaven.
The boys’ school soon led to jail. This was when I learned the distinction between jail and prison. When my brother was in jail, I couldn’t hug him. I could only talk to him through a black, dirty, foul-smelling phone. He was no longer a person; he was a criminal behind glass. He was a spectacle, he was glorified, and he was separate. My friend’s older brother came to pick us up at elementary school. I sat squished in the backseat of some two-door domestic drug dealer car listening to Bone Thugs-N-Harmony on a shitty sound system and listened as he told me about jumping my back fence to go thieving with my brother. I almost felt proud at that moment, steeped in the smell of cigarettes and explaining to my parents how I had gotten home. At this moment I realized my brother’s fire. He had started to smolder in my mind. I was no longer myself, I was his sister, and this gave me power. Even if he wasn’t around, his reputation was. And I started to feed off of it.
Later that year, my friend and I sat in the counselor’s office, feeling privileged by the fact that our brothers were fuck-ups. I told the counselor about finding porn and cigarettes in my brother’s room. When I found the porn trading cards, I stared at the downy pubic hair suspended between the model’s spread legs and wondered what it meant. I knew it was wrong, but I sat and looked anyway. It was knowing my brother on a personal level that we’d never really gotten to, partly because of his age, and partly because of his incarceration. I wanted to know why my brother liked this, this porn, this sin. But he was now making me popular. One night I felt especially ashamed and excited of him at the same time. I had fallen asleep next to the fire in the living room and had the FM radio by my head. The local radio station made a spectacle of those in trouble, so I would often hear about my brother.
That night’s crime report said my brother and his friend had broken into the local Knights of Columbus. Missing were several cases of liquor, a skull belonging to the group, and 300 dollars in cash. My brother was bad, a criminal! I had to hear his last name, my last name, on the radio. My parents knew he was going down the wrong path. They just couldn’t control his fire. And my mother fed off of it.
After the radio broadcast, family trips and family holidays were over as we knew them. My brother was gone from the family entirely. Nearly 15 years later he still has yet to spend a Christmas with the family. No more pictures of the children smiling under the Christmas tree, and an empty stocking on Christmas. My mother was never the same. She and my brother had spent too many years together, supporting each other living in a one-bedroom shanty in Douglas, Wyoming. She knew what he did was wrong, but she must have felt out of control; she couldn’t lasso his actions or emotions.
I was still in elementary school when I arrived home in the afternoon. The cops were there. Not because of my brother (as they would be in future years), but because of my mother. She had stopped taking her medication, and had torn the house up. She had taken every single coffee cup in the cupboard and thrown them in the shower. The curtains in every single room had been ripped down from the rods and sat in piles on the floor. Toys in the playroom sat amongst broken porcelain and my brother thought the whole thing was funny. I went into his room and sat in his closet so no one could find me. Mom had threatened to burn the house down.
“Anyone got some marshmallows?” Someone’s voice floats through the firecracker display, which has gone totally wrong. I look up and see the two identical freckles on my brother’s cheeks, lit up by the fire glowing orange and brown as if some kind of omen. He and several other adolescent boys wearing shorts are attempting to stamp out the fire, and look as if they are engaged in some sort of ritualistic dance. My brother smiles and takes off his sweatshirt and begins slapping at the fire and hopping from left foot to right foot, swinging the sweatshirt at the fire, and the fire answers back by dancing first up toward the sky and then laying low to fool the other boys into thinking that the fight, the dance, was over.
I stared at my brother’s chest, which was exposed by the V-neck orange jumpsuit that was assigned him when he went to jail. I mostly listened to my mom talk to him about the weather, our relatives, but never about what he had done to get into jail. Each time it was the same offense: stealing. Even though he got caught, I’m sure that what he had stolen in his life far outweighed the consequences. What ultimately landed him in prison was stealing from my parents. He took a book of checks from them and forged slightly over a thousand dollars. They prosecuted him, and on the day of his 18th birthday, he was shipped to the state penitentiary in Rawlins.
We only went to visit him once out of roughly six years that he stayed there. We slept in a nice hotel, and ate at a truck stop called Rip Griffin’s. We woke up in the morning and had to arrive about two hours before we would see him. My sister and I had to pose for photo IDs that we would present to the warden in order to get into the prison. I watched my mom and dad as they were both frisked and as the contents of her purse were spilled onto a table, and a bottle of aspirin confiscated. When we finally made it into the room where my brother was sitting, I was glad to see him. This time he was wearing a light blue, long-sleeved button-up shirt and blue jeans. His head was shaved, and I noticed some tattoos. On the backs of his arms I could see the lower half of a phrase that still bothers me today: white pride. I suppose what they say about prison is right, you have to find your kind and stick to it. He also had a Nike sign on his ankle and FTW underneath a skull on his arm. He told me it meant “from the walls.” Either way, he had chosen to “fuck the world” a long time before I figured out what the tattoo really meant. Most of the visit was spent in the yard outside while my mom and brother smoked cigarettes. I sat against a wall near the fence and stared at the other prisoners. I felt like my brother didn’t belong there just as much as a 12-year-old child belonged there.
I don’t know what happened to my brother during his time in prison. I know he was in solitary confinement, the hole, for six months for getting in a fight with a child molester from our town. The hole consisted of 23 hours a day of darkness and only one hour for exercise. I suppose that would institutionalize most anyone. And maybe that’s why he kept stealing, embezzling from the Kwik Shop where he worked, leaving the state on probation to get his girlfriend an abortion, wrecking his truck into a taco stand. All of these offenses landed him back in prison for six months at a time, and then in the halfway house where I would try and see him to ask him about Dad. Dad used to pick my brother up by the scruff of his collar and tell him he “better cool his jets.” I found this feat amazing, because my brother was about five inches taller than my father. But my father was five times as angry about what was happening. One day I got in a fight with my mom and dad. And they ganged up on me just as my brother and sister would. Dad became the one to physically hurt me. Dad backhanded me and threw me down the stairs and I walked to the halfway house, face still bloody. I had to know if Dad had ever hit my brother. The lady at the front desk of the halfway house said that he was there, but he wasn’t going to talk to me.
My brother has managed to stay out of prison for about five years now. He’s wanted in Wyoming for stupid traffic tickets, which have turned into bench warrants. He lives in Colorado now and I went to visit him this past Fourth of July.
The Fourth of July is fire in the sky. I feel a thump on my back and look around to see a bundle of 100 black cats at my feet hissing and sparking and pouring blue smoke. I look up at the building and see my brother sneak a quick look over the arch of a western wear sign, grinning and giving me the bird. I start to jog backwards and watch as the street dance is lit up by orange sparks and listen as bangs and screeches of mothers drown out the band for an instant as they watch the crowd tap dance out of the way. Later on, in the alley, I watch as bright blue, green, and pink sparks fly out of the “conic tri-color fountain” that my brother has inserted in his ass, which has turned black on both cheeks.
I wake up several hours later in a flower bed in front of a bank. I make out a man’s voice in the background. “Are you drunk? We called the cops. You’ve been here for quite a while.” My brother had left me again, had let me down again. We had all laid down for a nap earlier after thinking my car was stolen, only to be escorted by the police to where I had parked it. I told the man I was merely tired, and stumbled off to find my car. I called my brother and yelled at him. I don’t know what I said, but we haven’t talked in about a year. And I don’t care. He has done enough damage to my life; his name constantly coming up in the therapy, counseling, and diagnosing sessions my parents forced me to take in my teenage years. I know his time away from me has been much more significant than his time with me. No matter what I do for him (bring him my old computer, drive him to funerals, visit him in the hospital after he tried to commit suicide), I will never be bad enough for my brother. I will never be good enough for my brother. I’ve said good riddance for now, and I will not let him in my life anymore.
