4. Riot #2
“No.”He snapped back to his hunched position.“No. I did not. No, I did not. Not. Not!”He threw the Bible on the ground.
“Okay, okay,”I said gently.“How about I make us some dinner and then I’ll help you look tomorrow after work?”
He gazed up at me with those open, blue eyes like I was offering him a kidney.
“Yes. Please.”
I offered a hand to help him up, but he somehow rose to his feet from a cross-legged position without so much as a twist. I used to tease him and tell him that he was an alien. Or a pod person.
Of course, he would then proceed to spend half an hour telling me all the reasons why extraterrestrials wouldn’t be able to survive in our atmosphere.
But if they could, the pod person theory would be the most likely.
However, if the aliens were discerning then I would be the one more likely to bebody-snatcheddue to my fuller physical stature and more symmetrical facial features.
I think he was trying to say I was good-looking. But it had been hard to understand at the time.
“What do you want for dinner?”I asked him, sliding the storage pod door closed with a grating sound.
Brennan halted his mechanical walk and turned to appraise me. He stared at me for a long time, expressionless, blinking in front of the setting sun.
“SpaghettiOs. Over the fire pit,”he replied before taking calculated steps toward his bunkhouse.
I smiled. SpaghettiOs started on a camping trip when we were kids. That camping trip was one of the few real memories I had of our dad, the firefighting hero.
He had taken us camping at Alum Creek State Park.
We all slept in one tent and had the time of our very young lives.
We hiked along a creek that led to some cave-like overhangs.
It was like we’d stepped into a different universe.
Each turn, a discovery. Brennan was overjoyed looking at the rocks, naming each layer of rock and sediment.
We planned to catch fish for dinner, but it had not been a successful session, hence the SpaghettiOs. We had been hiking and fishing all day and we were starving. I remember those cans of pasta and sauce with sliced hot dogs tasted like the best thing I’d ever eaten. I was happy. I was five.
Brennan got frustrated with the fishing. He had done all kinds of calculations with how far to cast the line, how deep to rig the sinker, but nothing was biting. My dad laughed, creating a distinct crinkle at the corners of his eyes when he smiled, calf-deep in the water.
“Sorry, kiddo, not a lot of logic and planning when it comes to fishing. You have to be patient and feel the fish. Will them to come to you,”he had said. Brennan appeared confused, which was surprising because my big brother always had all the answers.
“That doesn’t make any sense, Dad.”
Dad smiled again, casting a line far into the center of the creek.
“Sometimes things don’t always make sense, Brennan.
There are some things we can’t put to logic.
But they work out anyway. Or they don’t.
”He tilted his head back and forth.“But usually, they do. If you believe they will. That’s the magic of it.
You never know. You can chase after something your entire life and never catch it.
But the moment you stop chasing and start picturing what it’ll look like when it’s yours, well, you might discover that it’ll end up finding you. ”
A few minutes later, a tug on Brennan’s line made his eyes go wide.
“Dad!”he shout-whispered, afraid to scare the fish.“What do I do?”
“Be smooth, don’t tug. Lean back and then reel in the slack, nice and slow.”
It had only been a tiny smallmouth bass, but I’d never seen Brennan so excited. At the time, I was grumpy that my brother had all Dad’s attention. I had a small children’s pole, and it wasn’t catching any kind of bass.
I remember being surprised when our dad made him throw it back.
“That’s just a little guy, not even enough meat on him for little Riot here.
Would be a waste and it’s a shame to waste a living thing.
”Brennan pouted.“How about this? We come back same time next year and that little sucker will be so big and fat that when you catch him again, you’ll be able to feed all three of us. ”
Brennan’s eyes lit up at that.
Unfortunately, we never made that trip back to Alum Creek State Park. A few months after that camping trip there was a huge fire in the valley. It was the poor section and all the houses still had old knob and tube wiring. Nearly the entire block burned down, and it took my dad with it.
Brennan had begged my mom to take us back to the campground, but after the funeral, she had become a recluse, despondent.
She was never the same after losing him.
None of us were. Brennan didn’t know how to process his feelings.
He never cried. He just looked surprised.
Surprised that he was suffering something he didn’t understand.
Still, he begged Mom to bring us back to Alum Creek.
Time and again, she said no. It wasn’t something she was comfortable doing.
When I was old enough to understand what that trip had really meant to him, I promised, no matter what, we would go back once football ended my freshman year of college.
And like so many years earlier, Brennan was once again let down by his family. I was already in jail by then, awaiting sentencing that would take another several months to be made .
It wasn’t Alum Creek State Park, but that night as my brother and I cooked SpaghettiOs over the open fire pit, halfway between my house and his, I knew we both felt closer to Dad.