Haywire, Brooke Hayward [the best ebook reader for android TXT] 📗

raft. He’d run guns down through Mexico and smuggled cocaine up from Bogotá. Lived off stolen credit cards. Lots of nefarious adventures. He’d wrangled horses, raced motorcycles, had sailed the seven seas.

“On the whole,” continued Bill, so softly that I thought for a moment he was talking to himself, “if I dropped dead tomorrow, and had that moment to look back and decide what more I wished I’d done in my life, it would be hard. I’ve done an awful lot of the things I’ve fantasized doing. I’ve led a pretty exciting life.”

He stood up and stretched. “Got to keep moving.”

“Not bad for an old man of twenty-nine. Like what fantasies?”

Ping! went the glass jars as he passed. There was a slight gurgling aftermath as the pale fluids in them trembled.

“Oh, I think the fantasy of being reasonably successful in a fairly competitive business, making a lot of bread without having had a formal education. All kinds of possession fantasies, like being able to travel here and there, being able to do all the inane things you want—not feeling trapped because you can’t afford this or that. The ones you have when you’re a teen-ager, of where you want your life to go in terms of success or material trips. I’ve skated through most of those. I mean I’ve done it. Flashy cars. Being a rich bachelor, marriage, kids. Then the fantasies you have when you’re married, of being a bachelor again. Being in love. It hasn’t been all bad. Can’t really complain. I had the opportunity to make my own mistakes. Made every one.” I loved him dearly.

“But Bill,” I sighed. It was really snowing hard now; we would have trouble getting a taxi to the theatre that night.

As he’d said, he’d had more opportunities to do more things than most people. What he’d chosen to do with those opportunities—that was another matter altogether, a matter of some concern to everyone in his family except me. What was to Father, for instance, patently erratic, if not downright demented, behavior was to me Bill’s saving grace. Literally. He was always moving on. An aberrant knight. He was always disappearing without trace or warning. He was even hard to find when he was around. Once he’d been sighted, he was hard to keep in focus; he kept slipping over the horizon. And he never looked back. Then unexpectedly he’d reappear. “Heard from your no-good crackbrained brother,” Father would say with gruff affection. “Turned up again the other day like a bad penny.” As an escape artist, Bill ranked with Houdini. Father and I argued about it: Father insisted that Bill’s demonic elusiveness was a fatal flaw and I claimed it kept him alive.

“But, Bill, tell me which ones—the fantasies—you haven’t lived out.”

“I’m not going to tell you all of them. But they are almost all related to being outdoors. Never got to be a commercial airplane pilot—that was always one. Let’s see, what others do I have? Actually, what I’ve always wanted to own and be able to operate properly is a commercial tuna-fishing boat. I’ve always had a thing about boats and working on them; fishermen—I don’t know—the ocean, independence, the whole thing, whatever it is. I’ve had that one for fifteen years. I still flash on it from time to time. The only thing that stops me is that I really wouldn’t know how to find a school of tuna.” And he laughed, carrying me with him. “But I still hang on.”

Father moved in his sleep. It was getting very dark. Bill turned on another light.

“Pop,” he said. “Are you okay?”

If I’d had to distill my feelings about Bill into a single image, it would have been rooted in the mythology I’d loved as a child. Jason and the Argonauts, Odysseus sailing on. And Hermes, with winged sandals, who was, from the day he was born, the shrewdest and most cunning of all.

Father opened his eyes and looked at us for a minute, then closed them again.

“Do you realize we’re going to be orphans?” Bill asked me, his hands clenching the iron footboard of Father’s bed. “That’ll be a new one.”

He’d read my mind.

“Aren’t we too old to be orphans?” Past the statute of limitations. But we still thought of ourselves as children. Bill’s question was interesting. Would we ever grow up? It didn’t seem likely, at the rate we were going. Hansel and Gretel without a father any more, just a stepmother. Ridiculous. Why was it that we—and all my friends, the ones I liked the most—had remained, at the core, children? Why did we all seem so much less mature than our parents—as we remembered them—had been at the same ages? Why, when our prime ambition as children had always been to grow up, were we now so protective and appreciative—in ourselves and each other—of our most childlike characteristics?

Maybe it was how we’d managed to survive. Protective coloration, like a permanent case of Bambi’s spots.

“How did we survive, anyway? How did we get this far? Don’t you ever wonder about that?”

Bill smiled ruefully. “Just lucky, I guess. The old whatchamacallit. Pioneer spirit. Staying power. We must have inherited something from the Colonel and Grandsarah, after all. In a renegade form, a mutation; may be troublesome to our public and even to our near and dear, God bless them, but—here we are. Fit as a fiddle.”

“What do you mean? Crazy as a coot is more like it. Look at the whites of your eyes. Here, I’ll get out my compact if you like.”

“Crazy is bueno, muy bueno,” chuckled Bill, rolling his eyes in their sockets.

“Come on, Bill, cut it out. They’ll get stuck like that, as Mother used to say.” As Mother used to say. Not a single day of the last eleven years had gone by that I didn’t wonder what Mother would have been doing right that very minute.

“Crazy keeps us young.” He thumbed through the pile of notes and telegrams on the table.

“In that case,