Boldt by Ted Lewis Page A

right now.”
    We drive along some more without saying anything. Everybody is trying to get to their bar or their home or their wife or their girlfriend just that minute earlier than anybody else. The traffic is heavy and slow, horns are honking and the noise is just what I need to set my feelings to music, so I try and switch myself off. When I do that though, my brother’s face keeps floating into my mind, not as it is now, but as it was when we were kids—when he was seven and I was twelve.
    Then other images flood in like the time he gave Marty Powell cause to want to rough him up a little. In the end it was me that stepped in and got the bloody nose and the bawling out from our mother, and I remember the way my brother kept quiet through all of it even when my mother was holding him up as an example of how to behave. I’d got so mad that afterward, when we were on our own, I’d asked my brother why he’d let me take the blame. He’d just laughed and told me he thought the reasons were obvious considering I was the one who’d got the bloody nose and the bawling out from Mom. I took a few minutes of his self-satisfied amusement then I hauled him one off and paid him the interest on my bloody nose which, of course, only gave me short-term satisfaction until Mom came on the scene again. I was kept inside for two weeks while my brother made a big deal out of going out and playing with his friends.
    I light a cigarette and swear at myself for allowing the memory of a small incident like that to affect me the way it did at the time; it even makes me mad that I can still remember it, but then every memory I have of my brother affects me that way because they’re all of the same kind--- a patchwork of niggling resentment. I flip the match out of the window.
    â€œWhy in Christ’s name didn’t the bastard carve out a career with General Motors?” I say out loud.
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œSorry, George,” I say to him, “I was just thinking about my fuck of a brother. I was thinking why, at my time of life, am I still keeping his ass clean for him?”
    â€œWell,” Murdock says, “it don’t matter he’s your brother, does it? I mean, we’d be in the same position whoever it was.”
    â€œYeah, I know. But it’s because he’s a politician this has happened and I’m involved with him. Christ, he never had to become a politician. He doesn’t give a shit about the niggers or Medicare or Channel 13. All he gives a shit about is himself; that’s all he ever gave a shit about. It didn’t matter what he did—all he wanted was to get himself to the top of the heap. Politics is just like any corporation to him. He doesn’t have any beliefs. They’re just paper clips to him.”
    â€œThen why those particular beliefs?” Murdock wonders. “What’d he do, flip a coin?”
    I shake my head.
    â€œHe likes them,” I reply. “He doesn’t feel them, but he likes people thinking he’s got courage, character. A hero. He’s always wanted to be a hero.”
    â€œLike you, you mean,” Murdock says.
    I laugh. “That’s right, a big successful hero like me.”
    We crawl to the end of Weaver Street and stop at the light.
    â€œWhat now?” Murdock says. “Still follow the route?”
    â€œIt’s getting late. Why don’t we turn it in for an hour or so?”
    â€œFine by me.”
    â€œLook, drop me off at Gardenias’s will you? And you take the car and pick up your stuff from your sister’s and I’ll phone you at the Chandler in an hour or so.”
    â€œFine,” Murdock says, and a few minutes later he pulls the car into the curb outside Gardenias’s and lets me out and drives off.
    The sidewalk is still warm in the evening sun and I can taste the dust in the air, so I cross the sidewalk and walk into Gardenias’s where the coffee is