“Could you picture us being old farts?” the younger one asked.
“No.”
“Sitting around all day, lying under the trees, farting...”
“And drinking beer.”
“Sure. Where do you think the farts would come from?” He giggled.
They finished their beers together and started in on two more.
“What do you want to be remembered for?” asked the older one.
“I don’t know, the other answered. He paused, considered. Finally he said, “I just want to live.”
“Yeah. Me too.”
They breathed together for a while, looking up at black sky through the tree branches, then the older one sat up and leaned against the tree. The younger brother sat up with him.
“I mean it, Sal,” he said. “I just want to live, that’s all. That’s the whole answer.”
“Hey, it’s a good answer,” Sal replied. “And it’s what I’m going to remember you for now. I’ll even put it on your tombstone: ‘Dave Nekro. He wanted to live.’” His hands framed the epitaph in the air and he pronounced the words with exaggerated drama. They laughed together. It was funny to be irreverent, to pretend that they would die, one before the other. But then they fell quiet and lied down again, because it was serious to be thinking of death at all, and strange to be laughing at it. A third brother, older than both of them, had died not so long before, and suddenly they were sober again.
He had crashed his car into the same fat oak tree —it would come to be known as “the family tree” —that loomed behind them. He had got drunk, passed out while driving and veered off the road. Now Dave and Sal were sprawled next to the same tree, lying flat against the same ground. And one was talking about writing the other’s epitaph.
“So you plan on outliving me.”
“Yes,” Sal answered. “Maybe six, seven years. I guess I just want to live a little bit more than you, that’s all.”
Dave tried to match his brother’s wit. “Then we’ll have to put it on your tombstone: ‘Sal Nekro. He wanted to live longer.’” He swept his hands in the air, just like his brother had done, and they laughed again. “That’s how you want it, right?”
“Yep, just like that, remember me that way,” Sal said. The beer was making him speak more slowly. “If I’m the first one to go, I mean, which like I said, I won’t be. But put it in stone. I’ll do the same for you.”
They shook hands and called it an old wine pact. “That’s what the old farts would call it,” Sal explained, and they sealed it, in lieu of wine, with their last two beers. Dave suggested that the pact be written down, but Sal reminded him that the key word was ‘remember,’ and ink would be a hypocrisy. They didn’t have a pen with them anyway, Dave pointed out.
Then they began to meditate on this pact, and each separately thought how they could not be hypocrites now, how they would have to remember each other in a special way. And each was reminded again of where they were, at the sight of their brother’s death, under the family tree.
“What’s on Jim’s stone?” asked Dave, after they had been quiet long enough. They were getting sleepy, but had not fallen off yet.
“I don’t know. I can’t remember.”
“Me neither. I think it’s a bible verse.”
“Try to remember.”
“I am...”
They lay next to the oak tree quietly. Sal picked bark off the tree, reaching mindlessly behind his head, and Dave returned to staring at the pre-dawn sky. Eventually Sal stopped picking bark, and Dave closed his eyes, and they both slipped away into the darkness of sleep.
It was the same night, exactly one year before them, that Jim had rested against the tree. Metal caged him in and separated him from the bark and the stars and the ground, and when it was light —Sunday morning light then —he did not wake up. There was no one there to shake him at the sunrise, and he would not have responded anyway. When he was finally discovered several hours later, it took blow torches and power saws to get to him. Even then, with all of the racket and commotion he did not rouse. He just lay there, with his head covered with drying blood, in the middle of metal and beer cans and broken glass, next to the big old oak.
Dave had dreamt the scene many times in the last year. They were bad nightmares at first —Jim would not move! —but they evolved slowly to a kind of afterward serenity. In the early dreams he had tried to shake Jim awake, but eventually he would come to just sit with him. Sal would always be there, too, and after a while they began to take on a sleepy sameness, Jim lying there, Dave and Sal next to him, and the fat oak standing like a monument.
But on this commemorative night something different appeared in the dream. Above the wreckage Dave noticed —and they must have been there all along —three tombstones that read like a roll call: “Jim Nekro: He wanted to live ...Sal Nekro: He wanted to live... Dave Nekro: he wanted to live.” Dave thought, in his dream, that he ought to start screaming, but he found he had neither energy nor will.
When it was daylight, both Dave and Sal continued to sleep. Finally, several hours after dawn, Dave was the first to stir. His eyes opened, fluttered, closed. He raised an arm up to his forehead, brushing against empty beer cans beside him, and he groaned. His eyes opened again and he saw oak leaves and blue sky. As if these conscious senses had rung an effective alarm he sat up and reached over to shake his brother.
“Sal. Hey, wake up, we’re in deep shit.”
Sal grunted, rolled over with his face to the ground, and covered his ears and head with both arms. Dave shook him harder.
“Come on. We were supposed to go see Jim this morning.”
“No.”
“Sal, we never made it home. Mom’s probably just now telling Dad how our beds haven’t been slept in. We’re going to get it big this time.”
Sal rolled over again, uncovered his head and opened his eyes halfway. “Dave, will you please cool it?” he said. “My head hurts and yours ought to, too.”
“But Sal...”
“Yeah, okay.” He started to pick himself up slowly; it was clear that he was in no hurry. Dave tried another tactic.
“Sal, Mom wanted us all dressed up and at the graveyard this morning. She’d probably be crying as it is, and here we are making it worse.”
“All right, all right. Let’s go.”
They stumbled over to their car and got in. Sal started the engine up and began driving straight to the graveyard. They would not have time to go home, he said. Dave agreed, but he was convinced that one place or another their father was going to kill them and their mother was going to cry.
For the better part of the drive they were silent. Dave finally spoke.
“Hey Sal, do you remember?”
“Remember what?”
“Last night. Our pact.”
Sal paused, thought, and said, “Yeah. We were going to live forever, right?”
Dave looked at him, didn’t answer. Sal thought, remembered more clearly. “We were talking about our epitaphs.” Dave nodded, and they continued the trip quietly.
The graveyard was a large estate on the edge of town. It smelled of drying lawn and withered flowers. A scattering of trees gave character to the rows of marble and granite, and the green leaves balanced the yellowing of the late August grass.
The family was already at the graveyard, standing in front of the family plot. Their mother wore a summer dress with a big floppy hat. Their father had on one of the same sport jackets he wore every Sunday. Their little sister Susan was dressed up like her mother but without the hat. She stood between mother and father, who each had an arm around her. She looked like an only child, sure to be held tightly in the years to come.
The three were looking down at Jim’s grave marker now. “James Allen Nekro,” it said, giving his life span of twenty one years. “Rest in peace” was inscribed below it. “I am the resurrection. Even though a man dies, yet shall he live.”
Sal and Dave had stopped their car a hundred yards away and were standing beside it, inconspicuously watching the family’s frozen pose. For several minutes the brothers stood frozen themselves, not daring to approach. They smelled of beer and their clothes were dirty and ruffled, and their stance, up to that point, had a sway from the night before. But now they did not move.
Sal finally said, “Dave, let’s not go.” Dave nodded, and they quietly got back into their car, opening and closing the doors without giving themselves away.
“Are we going home then?”
“No. We’ll go back later, when they’re asleep.”
“What about Jim? His gravestone, we were going to see what it said,”
“We’ll have to come back after they’re gone.”
And they left the graveyard and drove off as quietly as ghosts, back to the family tree where they decided to kill some time.
from March to December
from March to December
