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illustration: Penny Van Horn
hen we were little, on summer nights, my brother and I would sneak into our neighbor's garden to catch fire flies. The garden was separated from our yard by a tall chain-link fence. My brother, two years older and stronger than me, could climb the fence. I could not. I'd hold our empty mayonnaise jars as I watched him scale the fence in the moonlight and jump down on the other side. Then, in a feat of amazing grade-school strength, he would grab the bottom of the fence and lift it, like a curtain, so that I could climb under. He was, to me, the most powerful older brother in the world. Feeling free and ornery and alive, we would run, laughing, through the fragrant flowers and sweet green stems, plucking orange-red stars from the August sky.
My grandparents grew up in a small mining town in West Virginia. They say there are people in the hills who have spent their whole lives without ever leaving the area. My older brother, as an adult, moved to this small town for a while, conducting sort of a back-to-his-roots experiment combined with an alcoholic flight from reality. He ended up working at a roadside bar that was frequented by miners who had lost their jobs. When he was told I had finished college and moved to Washington, D.C., he invited me to drive out to see him, if I wanted to. I rented a car for the day, before I was to start work in Washington. I had been encouraged by my mother. "Go check on your brother at that den of iniquity," she said. Mom often quotes the Bible.
As I left the sprawl of my new city I wondered what we would talk about, my brother and I. We have never really been together as adults. He left home shortly after failing out of college. After that his life seemed to go steadily downhill. He became an alcoholic. He was arrested for debt, for driving while intoxicated, for starting fights. This had been going on for the past four years, all the time I had been in college. It depressed my parents. It seemed as if my mother started crying in the fall of 1987 and never stopped. By the time I finished school his problem almost seemed normal. It was, at least, familiar.
In high school my brother was popular. He was tall and blonde, with pale green eyes and full lips, broad shoulders and muscular arms. Loud and funny, he had a quick temper and a filthy mouth. "Your brother can turn the air blue," my mother would say. I would watch him in the hallways. He was always surrounded by other boys like him. His friends were the kind of people I hated but secretly wanted to be like.
I pulled my car into the roadside bar's lot just as the sun was going down, leaving platinum light on the undersides of the long veins of clouds, slicing the sky like polished knives. Gravel crunched beneath my wheels. I parked between two Ford trucks, both of which were elevated on ridiculously high knobby tires. I got out and approached the entrance. The sign by the rickety screen door proclaimed that it was Ladies' Nite, the third Tuesday of every month. Light beers were seventy-five cents each and they had exotic male dancers who had driven in from Cincinnati -- "The Bad Boyz." There was a group shot of the strippers on a surfboard. Ohioans are known for shooting the curl. They had titles like "Piston" and "24K." Inside I could hear an already dated dance hit playing. At least, if the conversation between my brother and myself was dragging, there would be some sort of stimulation.
I opened the door and was accosted by the stale smoke. The bar was small, about the size of a large trailer, and decorated in a similar fashion. My brother was bartending. On one end of the room was a dance floor and DJ booth, on the other end was the bar. The dance floor was wrapped with women sitting in unfolded metal chairs and holding cigarettes. They all looked like they'd come a long way, baby. In the middle of the floor was a 30-something man with a 20-something haircut. He was wearing tropical print nylon biker shorts, a tuxedo jacket, and large yellow Oakley sunglasses -- the shield kind. The room looked like a freakish Jenny Craig meeting. He was holding a portable microphone and saying, "Gimme a holler if you're ready for Flex!!" He was followed by a chorus of high-pitched "hoooooo" sounds. The women, I later learned, don't applaud. It takes too much energy and the cigarettes are in the way.
I looked to the other side of the room and saw my brother behind the bar. I walked to the rail as "Moo Moo Land" started playing. My brother held his hand in the air and said, "Hey, bud." His voice was raspy. He had gained weight. He had grown a short moustache that looked like an accident. He smiled at me. "How's it going?" I said. He complained that the women weren't drinking much."It's a bad night for the till," he said, looking toward the dance floor. "We've lost money on this."
I looked over at my brother's customers, distracted from lite beer, getting drunk on the sight of a man peeling away a T-shirt that said "No Fear." The stripper, who wasn't particularly attractive, held a strange mystique for these provincial women. He seemed like a beautiful creature from some idyllic world, where men are tan and always smiling, unlike the men, the real men, in their lives. The women smoked their Virginia Slims as they noticed that the dancer's hair was longer and prettier than their own. This man didn't complain about not having a job. He didn't get drunk or shout at them or hit them, and for the length of the song he gave these women his undivided attention.
It became obvious, however, that "Flex" was going to be dancing to a particularly long house mix. My brother said, "Come on," and told me to follow him outside of the bar. I stepped away from the rail. He said he wanted to show me a dog that was caged behind the building. "Why not?" I said, trying to sound easygoing. My brother ducked under the counter top and walked to the entrance of the bar. I had been stealing glances at Flex, but he was beginning to lose appeal as he tried to rouse the women, circling his fist in the air and shouting "Woo! Woo! Woo!" His technique obviously inspired by The Arsenio Hall Show.
"The bitch just popped," my brother said, punching the screen door out of his way.
We stepped into the cool, humid evening air that lingers in the valleys of the foothill mountains. Against the dark green and purple backdrop a dozen tiny red lights floated. Behind them dull voices mumbled, paused as the cigarettes flared against their lips, and sighed or cussed an exhale. It was the waiting area for the boyfriends, the regular drinkers, and the hopefuls. While the women inside had their turn watching "The Bad Boyz" the local guys passed the time until they could reclaim their turf. They had plenty to gain. Once the last dancer was finished the bar would be theirs again, including the women, who might be riled up. Until then, they had to stay away. They didn't want anyone to get the wrong idea about why they might be in the bar on the third Tuesday of the month.
My brother led me down a driveway that wrapped around the side of the building to the rear. There was a primitive-looking structure in the backyard next to the bar. "There she is," my brother pointed. A dog was lying in a chicken-wire cage with a concrete floor. We stepped closer to the tiny pen. Within was a doghouse -- a plastic bucket turned on its side -- and an old bathroom floor mat, the U-shaped kind that are made to straddle the base of a toilet. "I'll be glad when this bitch finally kicks it," he said. "She keeps waking me up at night." He dipped his head in the direction of a door on the bar's wall. I assumed it led to the basement. It was solid steel, and there were no windows around. "That's where I sleep," my brother said.
I looked at the dog. Her eyes reflected a yellow bug light that hung above the basement door. "We just got rid of her fifth litter," my brother said, his breath smelling of beer and wintergreen tobacco and his voice coarse. "My boss keeps bringing males around. Keeps her knocked up. He sells the pups as hunting dogs." The dog's only response to us was the alternating shrug of her eyebrows. With her muzzle down she glanced at my brother, then at me. I had my hands in my pockets. "We keep her in the cage to keep stray dogs from screwing her, but she gets the ax next week."
I didn't know what to say. I never really did with my brother. He's one of those people that whenever I want to comment on something, or tell a joke, or ask a question, I always think about what will happen after I open my mouth. Will he think I'm a dork? Is it a waste of his time? Does he even care? In the end I usually decide to say nothing at all. We stood there for what seemed like a really long time. Not saying anything, just standing in the yellow light staring at an over-bred dog.
Through the brick wall the thump of the dance beat faded. I could hear several hoots. My brother turned around. "I gotta go back," he said, and walked around the corner. "Come on," my brother said from the other side of the building, not looking back at me.
I walked up to the cage and curled my fingers through the wire hexagons. The dog struggled to her feet. In the path my shadow made she waddled to me, her toes clicking on the concrete floor. The dog pressed her muzzle through the mesh. She looked at me and made a whistling sound, like a teapot announcing it's full of steam, and slowly wagged her tail, which remained pointed at the ground. I squatted down to her eye-level, as if I were a young father telling his child why he won't be living with Mommy anymore. I rubbed the short golden-brown hair on her muzzle. I looked up at the bar, at the steel door, at the brick wall. I heard laughing as the MC's amplified voice entertained the women. Behind me, in the grassy field, silver-green in the August moonlight, the low hum of a thousand locusts floated through the warm perfume of honeysuckle and black-eyed susans. The sky was navy blue now, a giant velvet backdrop spangled with orange-red fireflies. I turned toward the landscape. Lost in the field, in the laughter and the green grass and the moonlight, I grabbed the bottom of the wire mesh and lifted it higher and higher.
