Next Of Kin #4

When Shayne was fourteen Texan told him that people rarely change and if they do, check back in ten minutes and see how much is still the same. At seventeen he thought of this phrase every time we saw his father driving away intent on a different future, then turning back in his truck, driving down the same road, to the same house, slipping off his work clothes and pouring himself the only gasoline which gave him the energy to survive. A sort of invisible gravity attached itself to their house, each crack of the floorboard beneath Shayne’s feet reminded him of this fragility.

Shayne watched as the school bus swirled away, his brothers nervous features and clammy hands dissolving. As soon as the tyres were out of eyesight he exited the balcony and entered the kitchen. Texan had left it like a night time bar, bottles strewn along the counter and lying on the carpet, some full others drunk dry. Usually Shayne would clear away his father’s binges, partly out of duty and because then he could imagine it had never happened. But today he ignored them and dashed inside to find his bag. He had no intention of going to school but to the nearest gas station to earn the money to set him and Johnny free. Lock Haven was another poison which had captured Texan, and for seventeen years had kept Shayne prisoner in his father’s firing range.

Whilst walking up the driveway he wondered if Texan would even notice their absence or whether he would continue on his drunken pathway, blind to the reality around him. Tucking his body away in the garage with Ana’s contented smile shining in a photograph, smacking with approval. He had been working at ‘Azreal’s Minit Mart’ for the last three years grateful for the chance to earn. Reece Azreal had built the Minit Mart from scratch at eighteen his war torn body fleeing Israel for a second chance in America. Shayne often listened to his bosses stories of Israel, he described as a young boy watching his mother like muted angel in his memory, standing at her kitchen sink watching the war tear her country in two, taking her husband, her son and eventually her life too. He would listen to the radio broadcasts from Israel tusking at the unforgiving tendencies of humanity.

Shayne reached into the letterbox and felt one lone letter. They never received any mail, any bills that needed to be paid were done so electronically. Reece would sort any other mail into the recycling bin, desperate to made good of something bad he would say, always re-shaping the waste which trickled through Lock Haven.

“Reece, you’ve got mail.”

His azure eyes glanced to meet Shayne’s

“I do?” He reached out his muscular arms and inspected the arrival.

Shayne watched as he tore open the envelope, but busied himself with cleaning the work surfaces. Reece’s face froze when he read the letter as though he had been mailed one of his mother’s pieces of jewellery or his father’s war medal, proof that he at least made something of himself during the relentless war, a ghost leaping from the page and transforming him back into the heat wave of Israel, taking him back though time.

He held the paper in his palm, fingered the lettering like braille..

“It’s from Elanah, I have a child, a son. She was expecting when I fled Israel. Too scared to tell me, she writes. Says, I would have grown to resent him for keeping me in a country which had taken so much.”

“Is he coming to America too?”

“No, he’s nearly a grown man. He has his own life now.”

Reece had fought his own war, leaving his girlfriend who had refused to leave her ageing mum. Shayne watched him slaving away in the Minit Mart, sending half of his wages back to Israel to a girl who he had dated when he was eighteen, now at forty he could barely remember her image, but was bound to his loyalty to her memory, and to the soil of his fallen country, and his son which he had never even knew existed.

When Shayne was ready to return home it was often dark and Reece would drive him back and drop him off on the driveway, watching and waving as Shayne reluctantly settled back into his house, which had begun less and less to feel like a home. He opened the front door and called for Johnny, the living room was sparsely lighted.

“Johnny? Where are you?” he glanced into the blackness.

Lying on the living room was ground was Johnny, his body poised at an unnatural angel, a bottle of whisky prised between his fingertips trickling out onto the carpet. Next to him was Texan who was completely passed out, his fingertips reaching out towards Johnny, but falling just short.

Shayne threw himself onto the ground, burst into tears, he couldn’t stop his body from shaking. Johnny looked dead, half enraged he couldn’t help thinking that this should be his Texan's grave not a ten year old's.

He picked up Johnny’s writhing body and eased his head over the sink,

“You have to be sick Johnny.” The panic clutched at his throat.

Johnny was half conscious, his eyes rolling back and forth. Finally he reached, the poison breaking free from his lungs. Shayne slumped next to him, holding him close desperate to protect Johnny from this life. Even from a baby Shayne had realised the danger which bound them both to Texan, a mess of love, loyalty and desperation. A fear of moving on. But as he comforted his brother, tears escaping both their eyes, he knew they had to leave.