My little brother John John

 

Copyright 2010

Chapter One: Losing John John – 1972

            The greatest adventure of my life began with the greatest tragedy of my father’s. I was so young that I remember not so much what actually happened, but the smells and sounds of it. I was on my first sleepover in Banks, Oregon – thirty miles west of Portland – when my father knocked on my friend’s front door and told me I had to come home. Right now.

            My father never cried but tears were streaming down his bearded face. He was shaking and he smelled sour, like sweat and throw-up swirled together. He didn’t stop shaking and never said a word on the long drive home. We drove through the four-way stop sign without stopping over the bumpy railroad tracks, without looking left and right, past my babysitter’s farm without blowing kisses and past our two horses in the meadow with no noise from my father but shuddering gasps and wet snorts. He sounded like he was choking. He didn’t honk the horn at Simba, our dog, who chased up all the way up the rutted, muddy driveway to our single-wide trailer in the woods. He just held my hand so tight I thought it would break and I have never been as terrified ever since. I still get a panicked feeling when my father looks as if he might cry. When he is overwhelmed and incapable of maintaining his fearless façade, my heart races me right back to the front seat of that car ride and I feel like my stomach is being suctioned out of my body.

            My father brought me home that night to a trailer as still and close as a coffin. My grandmother Nellie May was there, my Aunt Ronnell and Uncle Tim, the neighbors and my baby sister Jenny – but not my little brother John John. I didn’t notice his absence at first; I thought something had happened to my mother. She was lying face down on her bed, one arm hanging off the side like a dislocated Barbie doll and I wasn’t supposed to bother her. It was hot and the trailer smelled of salmon casserole and venison nobody was eating. Somebody had lined up pictures of my brother on the counter where we normally colored and cut out paper dolls.

            John John had a head-bobbing belly laugh triggered by the words “say cheese.” In the photographs, I sit next to him, trying to smile pretty, but my little brother looks like he sees something silly behind the camera – pants falling down, a pie flying through the air, Tweety about to trick Sylvester. By the time he is big enough to sit still for pictures on his own he can almost swallow the laughter. But giggles still slip out between the spaces of his Halloween pumpkin teeth.

            Except at Christmas. As a baby on Santa’s knee he appears about to vomit. The next Christmas picture he is lurching for my mother. The last Christmas picture his chin is quivering and the veins on Santa’s hands are bulging with the strain of holding him. He looks a lot braver in the other pictures lined up on our coloring counter. Like the one where he’s helping his daddy cut down a Christmas tree in the woods, while my mother and I wait in the front seat of the car in case we have to beep the horn to warn them somebody is coming. Or the one where he’s sitting quietly, right beside his daddy, waiting for a deer to tiptoe into a sunny spot. By the time he is three he is almost as tall as my father’s hunting rifle.

            I was about to ask why pictures of me weren’t lined up on the counter when my father finally told me John John was “gone.”

            “It’s okay Daddy, he probably just ran away. He’s copying me. Again,” I said, tugging on my father’s jeans. He lurched toward the toilet and I had to run to keep up. I sat Indian-legged on the yellow linoleum floor bunching up tissue paper for my father to wipe his mouth. I kept prattling as he heaved, as only a six-year-old girl who doesn’t want to say how scared she is can prattle.

            “Let’s go and find him now Daddy; he might want some hot chocolate already.”

            Hot chocolate worked when I had run away, just a few months earlier. I was mad because my little brother wasn’t doing what I told him. He was just leaning against his lions-and-tigers high chair letting oatmeal dribble down his chin like it didn’t matter that he didn’t wear a bib anymore. He wasn’t getting in trouble; my mother was taking his picture like it was cute. Not listening to me at all. So I bit him as hard as I could, right through his ear.

            “That’s it, Little Miss, you’re getting your mouth washed out with soap,” my mother had said. She yanked me from my chair and marched me to the sink horizontally – like a battering ram. I wouldn’t say sorry even after two twirls of the Palmolive bar between my teeth. That’s when I decided to run away, all the way up to the fence that kept our horses from eating up the neighbor’s grass before I changed my mind. There had been hot chocolate waiting for me when I got back that night. Little marshmallows on top when I said I was sorry – even though I wasn’t.

            Now my father was heaving and my mother’s arm was dangling off her bed and somehow it was all my little brother’s fault. I kept saying “John John will say he’s sorry too.” But nobody was listening to me. He probably wouldn’t get his mouth washed out; everybody would think it was cute.

            Like when he played his favorite game: truck driver. He would wait at the end of our driveway for his daddy to come home from a long day driving the town dump truck. John John would climb into his lap and steer all the way home. His feet would pedal through the space around my father’s shins like this was what made the engine go. Anything he could reach to tug became a make-believe air horn: my father’s beard, the rearview mirror, the gear stick. If he was tired, he father would only tip his head back and make a honking noise that sounded more like a duck.

            But when he was happy, like when a long week was over and he knew there were kid-frosted, Betty-Crocker cupcakes waiting for a weekend of hunting in the woods, then my father would grin and pounce. He would pull up John John’s turtleneck and blow on his still-outey belly button until my little brother almost peed his pants. My father’s lips on my brother’s tummy were as loud as the honks the big trucks made when they saw JohnJohn tugging on an imaginary chain above his head.

            This time, he didn’t wait for his daddy at the end of the driveway. My mother was home alone, watching her baby girl inside the trailer, and I was at my very first sleepover. No-one actually witnessed what happened. There is no evidence that can prove or justify what happened next, only a hypothesis too painful to doubt. My father’s pickup truck was parked in our yard. John John must have climbed in, pretending to steer it like all the times he sat on his daddy’s lap. Somehow his little swinging feet kicked and released the emergency brake. The truck started to roll backward down our steeply sloping driveway. He managed to open the driver’s side door, but the force of it flung his tiny body under the left front tire.

            My mother found him, too late.