amina gautier
 

pan is dead

Blue sent letters, begging letters, meant to soften a small space in our mother's heart. The letters were frequent, relentless, more punctual than bills. They slipped in with the gas and electric bills, the phone bill and the rent reminder, long #10 envelopes mixed in with the short fat ones the credit card people sent. For months, Blue's letters came from a rehab center in upstate New York, all addressed to our mother. Then one came from Brooklyn addressed to my brother Peter. Blue thought he was being slick, but our mother knew what he was doing.
      "I'm supposed to believe that all of a sudden he wants to see his son? What about all those years before? He must think I'm all kinds of a fool," our mother said, finally deciding to read the last of the letters. She would have us know that she was not all kinds of a fool. She was no longer a foolish young girl willing to let Blue lead her by the nose. “I was a fool for him once and look what it got me,” she said, looking at Peter.  
      A few days after opening the first one, our mother softened. We came home one day to find her slowly going through them. They were stacked on the kitchen tables in two piles. She didn't look up when we came in; she didn't even notice us when we turned on the TV in the living room and glued ourselves in front of it. She just sat there reading. She burst out laughing in the middle of one letter, put it down and shook her head at it. Much later, when I turned back to look at her I saw that she'd gone through a whole pile of Blue's letters. She was working on the second pile, her hand covering her mouth, crying silently.
      After some time, she remembered us. "What do you think?" she asked Peter. "Says he's back in Brooklyn now. You want to see him? You're old enough to decide for yourself."
      "I don't care," Peter said. Blue wasn't the kind of father any boy would want to claim. A high school dropout. A heroine addict, former if his letters could be believed. A love from our mother's wilder days, Blue belonged to our distant past. According to Peter, he used to come by regularly. By the time I was old enough to have remembered him, Blue had stopped coming. He'd gone away to nobody knew where.  
      "Well, he checked himself into that place all on his own. I guess that says something," our mother said.
       She invited him for dinner, saying that it would do him good to spend some time with his son.
      "Look at you," Blue said, when I opened the door to let him in. He showed up in denim work overalls and a lumberjack shirt, carrying a small leather bag. His overalls were covered in grease spots, his hands stained with car oil. "I remember you when you could barely walk. Cute little thing in your walker, running all over the house, tearing stuff up."
      I let him in and followed behind him, hoping he would tell me more stories about myself. Blue fascinated me with his skin so black it was blue, his hands so dirty his palms were black.
       “Where’s your mother?” he asked, looking around hopefully.
      “In the kitchen,” I said. “Dinner’s not ready yet.”
      “That’s all right. I need to clean up anyway. I came straight from work,” he said. “Mind if I use your bathroom?” he asked. 
 I pointed down the hallway. Blue took his little bag and disappeared into our bathroom.
      Our mother came out of the kitchen, wiping her hands on a dishcloth. “Did I hear the door? Was that Blue?” she asked.
      “Yeah.”
      Peter came out of his room and joined us.
 “Well, where is he?” she asked me.
      Peter said, “I bet he’s in the bathroom.” He said it slowly, enunciating each word. He and our mother shared a look, but all she said was, “Hmm.” 
      Blue stayed in the bathroom over twenty minutes. Peter timed him. He was relaxed when  he finally came out and sat down to eat with us. Both our mother and Peter watched him guardedly, as if waiting for him to vanish.
      "So how's school?" he asked Peter.
      "Don't get this boy to talking about school. We'll be here all night. That's all he do. Eat, sleep and breathe school. Read everything he can get his hands on. I can't get him to take his head out of the books sometimes. He scores the highest out of everybody in his grade at that school. They’ve already skipped him twice." The way she said it was a complaint. Because he scored the highest on all the standardized tests and finished assignments in five minutes that took the other kids more than an hour, Peter was what teachers called "gifted."  He'd skipped two grades, tested into an enrichment program and was about to receive a full scholarship to a private school in Manhattan for the following year. These things did not make her proud, only perplexed. Our mother didn’t like a lot of fuss. She’d wanted to raise a normal boy, not a gifted one.
      "But that's good," Blue said, impressed. "It's important he gets a good education."
      "You think it's good. I like to see how you feel when you’ve got take off work to go up to his school because every time you turn around some teacher’s calling you to come and get him!" she said.
      "You fighting in school, boy?" Blue asked him.
      "I wish," our mother answered. "That I could understand. This was a while ago, but here's one. His teacher called me up because he disagreed with her. What was it about? Remember?"
      "The shortest distance between two points," Peter said, his head low over his plate.  
      "How's that?" Blue asked.
      "She told the class that the shortest distance between two points was a straight line," Peter explained, his voice sounding tortured.
      "Yeah," Blue said, as if he'd just thought of it. “It is.”
      "No," Peter said. "Connecting two points, but not between two points. I could draw a vertical line between two horizontal points that could go on infinitely."
      "Yeah?" Blue asked, as if it were something very special.
      “Never mind,” Peter said.
      Our mother wouldn’t let it go. “And what about that book report you did that almost gave your teacher a heart attack?”
      “I don’t want to talk about it,” Peter said. He didn't like to talk about being smart, I knew. He had told me before that he had two ways of talking, one for when he was at school and one for when he was at home.
      It was just as well he didn’t talk about the book report, since my mother and I never understood his explanations. Peter had gone into one of his phases. He’d picked up Ovid’s Metamorphosis and gotten hooked on Greek mythology, reading everything he could find on the subject, for nearly a month. He’d tried to pull me in with stories of Titans and Olympians, but I wouldn’t let him. His favorite was Pan, the god of shepherds and flocks. He’d tried to tell me that Pan’s death was a matter of belief, that he died simply because everyone heard and repeated that he had, and that his death signaled the birth of Christianity in the classical world, but he only succeeding in scaring me with his facts. I didn’t want to know the things my brother knew.
      "See?" our mother said. "I’ve got to deal with this day in and out. They’re about to give him an award in three weeks."
      "I still say that's good," Blue said. "Don't think you got those brains only from your mother's side. Smarts run on my side of the family too, you know."
      "What was it like up there in Rehab?" Peter asked. Our mother shook her head at him, but he ignored her. "Was it hard?"
      Blue didn't seem to mind. "A lot of talking. All these meetings where they made you talk all the time. Tell your story again and again. How and why you got there. A lot of church, too. They took attendance at the Sunday service. So you had to be there. Or else you lost your bed."
      "What else?"  Peter asked. I kicked him under the table.
      "Breathalyzers at night when you came in for curfews. If you missed curfew they put you out," he said. He snapped his fingers. "Just like that."
      "Sometimes people deserve to be put out so they can understand what they used to have," our mother said. "That's the only way they appreciate anything."
       "That's the truth if I ever heard it." Blue shook his head and put his knife and fork down. "You know, when you want something you can't always just reach out and take it," Blue said. He looked over our heads to our mother, talking only to her. "You got to work hard for it. Then again, sooner or later, it might just fall into your lap."
      "You sure got a lot of nerve," our mother said, smiling to show she didn't mean it. 
      Blue had gone and Peter and I were at the bathroom sink brushing our teeth before bed. Peter hadn’t said a word since Blue left. He didn’t seem to know how lucky he was to have his father back. My own father was dead and buried; I never wondered about him. He was not nearly as interesting to me as the flesh and blood Blue, the Blue who could change the people around me, the Blue who could make my brother quiet and sullen while reminding our mother how to smile.
      “Blue’s nice,” I said. “I hope he comes back again.”
      Peter didn't say anything.
      "What's wrong?"
      "Nothing."
      "There is."
      "I thought he was supposed to have come for me."
      "He did," I said.
      "Yeah right," Peter said.
      "Then what did he come for?"
      He wouldn't talk.
      I jabbed him with my toothbrush. "Tell me."
      "You're too young."
      "Am not. Tell me. Tell me. Tell me. Or else you'll have to smell me." I lifted my arms and revealed my armpits.
      "You're such a baby," Peter said.
      "Tell me. Tell me. Tell—"
       Peter clamped his hand over my mouth. "Okay!" he said. “Just be quiet.” We went to our room and he pulled out one of Blue's letters to our mother and showed it to me. It was short, just one sentence:  
      Deloris baby, sometimes the nights here so long it can make a man cry.       We woke one night to hear our mother at the door.
      "What are you doing here at this time of night?" she asked.
      It was Blue's voice. "Please, baby. Let me come in."
      "Are you crazy?"
      "Blue's here," I said, excited. I began to crawl out of my bed.
      "Get back in the bed," Peter commanded from his top bunk.
      "But—"
      "Ssh!" he said. "Listen."
      We heard our mother saying something about it not being right with us asleep in the house.
      Then Blue: "Deloris, please. I got to come in. I can't be out there tonight. I need help. If you don't help me Deloris, I won't make it. Just let me stay. I'll sleep on the floor. Don't let me go back out there tonight." He sounded like he was crying.
      "I can't."
      Blue said, "Come on, Deloris. You used to love me, baby. You know it." He crooned, "Deloris you-uuu used to loooovvvve me, giirrlllllll."
      When we woke up the next morning, Blue was fast asleep on a heap of oily blankets on the living room floor.
      "It's not right to kick somebody when they're trying," was all our mother said.
      
      Blue began to stay with us. He would come to our house with oil-stained clothes. Sometimes there were perfectly round holes in his jeans from where the chemicals that leaked on him from under the cars had eaten all the way through the material. Once a week, he had to buy some sort of corn husker liquid to clean the layers and layers of grease and oil caked on his hands. During the day, he was at his old job working on cars. In the evenings, he was with us, making our mother laugh once again. He was able to bring something out in her we'd never seen. Something that softened her. Blue brought bottles of Grey Goose or B&B and he and our mother would sit in the living room, drinking. Occasionally, we could hear their laughter as we drifted off to sleep.
      Before she'd ever met my father, our mother had loved Blue. Another woman she had been. A medical assistant who smuggled free hypodermics out to her boyfriend because although she didn't like his shooting up, she wanted him to be safe. A young woman strutting past the junkyard where he worked, wearing halter tops and Sergio Valente pedal pushers to catch his eye, hoping he'd stop her to talk. 
      The three of us were working on a 1,000 piece jigsaw puzzle one rainy afternoon two weeks later when Blue asked us nervously, "Is it cold in here?"
      "I'm fine," Peter said.
      "Me too," I said, but I saw Blue shiver.
       "Come on, let's go for a ride," he said.
      Blue drove us down Atlantic Avenue under the train tracks. Small drops of water from the tracks sprayed down across the car window. We were framed on both sides by the rusty steel posts and everything looked the same, but Blue seemed to know where to stop.
      "Wait right here," he said. "I'll be right back." He jumped out of his side and slammed the door behind him, walking at a fast pace, heading towards a shadowy figure standing on the corner a block away.
      "Blue must know that guy," I said, watching as he slowed when he got to the man's side. Their profiles talked to each other. Blue put his hand out, maybe to shake. "See, look. They're shaking hands."
      "No they're not."
      "Yes they are. See."
      "Shut up," Peter said.
       The other guy took his hand and they stood like that for a second, with their hands in each other's. Then they drew back, and Blue walked away from the man, turning the corner where we could no longer see him.       Every five minutes, I asked Peter what time it was, but Blue didn't come back. 
      "Where did Blue go?" I asked.
      Peter shrugged, silent and distant. He was hugging himself like it was cold.
      "What if he never comes for us?"
      "He will. And when he comes back, he'll be feeling fine."
      "How come?"
      For a while, he wouldn't say anything to me. He started to play with the radio. He shut it off and began to open and close the glove compartment, pulling it down and slamming it closed hard. Then in a small voice, "You don't understand anything."
      "We're never going to get back home," I said, trying not to cry.
      Peter flicked a glance to me. "You're with me," Peter said, "Remember that." He put his arm around me. We sat like that, for about twenty minutes, scared.
      When Blue came back, he was walking much slower. He seemed to walk and dip, his head nodding. He opened the driver's door. "Hey," he said, smiling easy at us before getting in. "How y'all doing?"
      Peter didn't answer. I didn't know what to say. 
      Blue seemed different from when he left. Looser, somehow. He looked happy and sleepy.
      "Everybody all right?" he asked, scratching his knee.
      Peter wouldn't talk.
      "We're fine," I said.
      "Good. Yeah, that's real good," Blue said and drove us home.       "Where were you?" was the first thing our mother wanted to know when we got back.
      "Hey baby," Blue drawled. "I just took them for a little ride. I wanted to spend some time with my son and I didn't want to leave the little miss all alone."
      Our mother looked straight through him. She yanked us over to her side. "You got a lot of nerve," she hissed. "I should kill you dead!"
      "What's wrong, Deloris baby? What you talking about girl?"
      "Don't try to play me for a fool, Blue. I know you. I know you," she said. "Whatever you do, you gonna have to do it on your own."
      "Come on now," Blue said, smiling easy. "I was just spending some time with my son."
      "You can do that right here in the house, Blue. I never gave you permission to take them nowhere. I never said you could do that." 
 "You never said I couldn't," he said. "Come on baby, what's the matter baby?"
      "Don't play with words with me when I'm this close—" she stopped and looked down at us. Then she did something she hardly ever did. She put her arms around us. "You all right?" she asked us, her hands warm on our shoulders. I didn't answer. I wanted the feeling to last. I thought it felt familiar. She must have touched us like this before—with love and concern and tenderness— but I couldn't remember that far back.
      "We're okay," Peter said, cutting the moment short.
      Her hands slipped away and she straightened her shoulders. "Good. What happened?" she asked us. “Somebody is going to tell me something.”
      "Nothing," Blue answered. "Come on, now. It's cool. Hey."
      Our mother looked at Peter. He didn't answer.
      I did. "Blue got out of the car and he met a man and he shook his hand and then he—"  Peter pushed the back of my knee in with his and I stopped talking.
      "Shaking hands? What is she talking about?" our mother asked.
      "Just an old friend I ran into," Blue said, watching us. "Nothing happened, baby."
      Our mother didn't know what to believe.
      "Nothing happened," Peter finally said. "We just went for a ride. That's all." Then he went to our room. 
      Our mother wore a borrowed dress the day of the awards banquet. A mixture of royal blue and black, with four panels that intersected at her waist, held together by a thin black strip of a belt, cut low in both front and back. The dress looked as if meant for dancing, for spins and turns, whirls and dips, not for an awards ceremony. “How do I look?” she asked, pirouetting in the living room, making the panels fly. She was more than a little drunk; she and Blue had killed a bottle of Grey Goose an hour earlier.
      “You look nice,” I said.
      “If looks could kill, baby!” Blue said, clapping and whistling.
      “What do you think?” she asked Peter.
      “We’re going to be late if we don’t leave now,” he said, pulling on his suit jacket and leading the way out. 
       When we arrived and gave Peter's name, they treated us like royalty. The woman at the table consulted a seating chart, then looked up at us with a bright smile. "Oh yes, our scholarship recipient," she said. She sent one of the hostesses into the room to tell them we were here. Then she embraced Peter as if he were her own son. "We've got a special table up front just for you and your guests."
      "His guests," our mother whispered to Blue. "How's that for something?"
      The first woman handed us to a different woman. She was statuesque, dressed in one of  those voluminous dresses that seemed to have no arms or sleeves yet managed to flow over her arms to her wrists like the wings of a dove sweeping down. "Here you are!" she said to Peter, leaning down to hug and kiss him, leaving a lipstick mark on his cheek. "This must be your lovely family." She turned to us, shaking Blue's hand. She leaned down to me, managing to smile widely and talk through her teeth at the same time, and said, "You've got a tough act to follow, miss. But we know it must run in the family."
      Then she stood up to meet our mother and kissed her on both cheeks. "And you— you must be so proud." Then she led Peter away with her, stopping every few minutes to introduce him to someone. Her pride in him was clear. Her arm never left his shoulder.
      We followed a hostess to our table. For the first half of the ceremony, Peter sat at the dais table, his face blocked by a pitcher of unsweetened iced tea and a vase of fresh-cut flowers. Once the meal was served, he joined us. 
      "You ever see anything like this before?" our mother asked.
      All of the tables wore skirts. The carpet matched the chairs and drapes. A silver place holder sat in the middle of the table, a rectangular white square nestled securely within it, announcing that our table was reserved.
      Blue watched the well-dressed hostesses. "There's more gold in here than in Fort Knox."    
      We sat down to plates of salad and we poured our dressing from a bowl like Aladdin's lamp. Each guest had more silverware and china than I'd ever seen. Three different glasses, four spoons, two forks, two knives, a coffee cup and saucer.
   Sometime during the meal and all of the speeches, our mother began to slouch in her seat and sit sideways, propping her feet in Blue's lap. More than a few people stared. She ignored them and looked at Peter. "How come you're not eating?"
      "I'm not hungry," he said.
      “I’ll help you out. I can finish that for you,” Blue said. Our mother waved him off.
      "You better eat it," she said. "Nobody is playing with you." 
      "This food is nasty," Peter said, pushing the plate further away.
      "What are you talking about? You know how much money these people paid for these luncheon tickets? Fifty dollars!" our mother said.
      Blue turned to him. "Boy, this food is not nasty; it's expensive."
      "You can't make me eat it. You can't tell me what to do. You might be my father, but you're not my daddy," he said.
      Blue’s face fell. Caught in the middle, he looked at me, but I couldn’t help. I didn’t know this brother, this Peter who mouthed off in public. Blue looked down at his plate and said, "I'm here now and I’m trying to be your father if you let me."
      "Yeah right," Peter said. "I know you didn't come for me. I know why you're here." Our mother pulled her feet away, and did her best to ignore all of us. Peter leaned closer to Blue, but I still heard him when he said, "You really think she wants a junkie like you?"       We all went our separate ways when we came back from the affair. Our mother to her bedroom, and Blue to the living room. I followed Peter into our room, where I sat while I watched him kick things around for ten minutes.
      Finally, he spoke to me. "Why did she have to act that way?" 
      "Like what?"
      "Why did she have to wear that and drink all of that stuff before we left? You'd think she'd never been anywhere before. They deserve each other," he said. He turned to me. "Look at them and look at me. I'll never be able to get away from them.”
      "But Blue didn't do anything."
      "He started this whole thing."
      "Are you sorry he came back?" I asked, wondering if he would tell her now that Blue had left us in the car.
      He didn't listen to me. He went to his desk and picked up one of his books on gods and demi-gods. "I used to think one day, she'd be proud of me," he said, idly turning the pages. "When I was older and rich and had a great job, I was going to take care of her. I was going to buy her a lot of fancy things," he said. He picked up a pencil sharpener shaped like a globe and put it back down. "Now I'm not doing anything for her. I'll just take care of you. Only you."
      "How was you gonna do all that anyway?"
      "I'm going to be somebody big," he told me. “Money won’t be a problem.”
      "You gonna do what Ma says?"
      "I don't want to be a doctor,” he said. “But I could be a lawyer. Most presidents are lawyers first."
      "Boy, you can't be president." This much I knew. Everyone knew that the president was always white and never from Brooklyn.        I left him and went to the kitchen for a glass of juice. Blue was packing in the living room. He had the same look on his face that I’d just seen on my brother’s, that look of hurting and trying to hold it in.
      “He didn’t really mean it,” I said.
      “He’s right,” Blue said. He folded his own borrowed suit and laid it on our couch. 
      “You’re no junkie,” I said. “I’ve never even seen you eat a bunch of candy!”
      Blue looked at me strangely, then the corners of his mouth curved. “You’re right about that,” he said. “Never touched the stuff. You know, I had something for him.” He went to his greasy bag and pulled a small brown paper bag out of the zippered section. “I was gonna give him these.” He opened the bag and showed me ten packs of green stars. “They glow in the dark,” he said. “They’re all in there. Planets and stars and even the moon, too. I checked.”
      “What are you gonna do with them now?”
      “Throw them away, I guess. He’s embarrassed. He’s ashamed of me. He won’t want them. He doesn’t want anything from me.” He crumpled the brown bag. “You know you can make the whole sky with them?” Blue said. “Everything.”
      “Can I have them?”
      “You don’t have to--”
      “No, I want them. Please?”
      Blue tried to straighten the bag out, pressing the wrinkles between his fingers. He took the packets of stars from the bag and handed them to me as if they were precious. He piled the packets into my open hands and solemnly folded my fingers, one by one, over the stack of green stars.       Peter was lying face-down on his bed when I returned. “Look what I got,” I said.
      “What?” He didn’t even look up.
      “Look.” I opened my hands.
      “Oh snap! Where’d you get those?” Peter asked, jumping down from his bunk.
       “Blue gave them to me,” I bragged. “He gave me a whole bunch. Like ten packs. They were supposed to be for you.”
      “For me?”
      “Yeah. Don’t you feel burnt?”
      “Give me those,” he said, snatching them from me.
“I’m telling!”
      Peter ignored me. He cupped the packets in his hands and looked down at them. “These are like three dollars a pack.”
      “Yeah, so?”
      “This must have cost him like thirty dollars.”
      “So?”
      “In order for him to buy me this, it means he couldn’t--” Peter looked up at me. “Forget it.”
      “Couldn’t what?”
      “You’re too young to know,” he said.
      “Couldn’t what? Couldn’twhatcouldn’t--”
      “—He couldn’t buy something else for himself, that’s all.”
      “Something he really wanted?”
      “Yeah,” Peter said.
      I followed him to the living room. Blue and all of his belongings were gone, his borrowed suit the only proof he’d ever been in our lives.       Two days later, Peter called me into our room. He'd been holed up in there for hours, refusing to let me in.
      The room was dark. "How come the lights are out?" I asked.
      "Look at that," he said.
      I looked up. Blue’s stars were spread across the ceiling.
      "You’re gonna get it," I predicted. As soon as our mother saw how he'd ruined her ceiling, he'd get a beating. He seemed not to hear me. His eyes were fixed on the ceiling, on all the tiny stars he had plastered up there. Some of them were done up like the constellations. I thought I recognized the Big Dipper. “You better not let Ma see.”
      "She can't hurt me," he said.
      "They’ll fall off soon anyway,” I predicted.
      "Nope," he said. His voice was barely audible, a whisper of pleasure. “They won’t. They’re made to last.”  

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