Doctor jack bright (part 3)

6

TJ is a pale, freckled child with red hair- their father's- and a frame that stands wiry in worn hand-me-downs. Often onlookers comment on his striking resemblance to Mikell, but to Jack, his youngest and oldest brothers look and are, in essence, entirely different people. TJ lacks Mikell's broad shoulders and tanned shoulders and arms, his sunburnt neck, his iron resolve and firm competence. TJ wavers in the path of decisions; Mikell thrives in it. TJ is soft spoken and feminine in nature; Mikell is accustomed to confidence, a short-haired cowboy with adventurous resolve.

His older brother has always moved as a subtle and direct force of nature one might even call clean, careful, swift, (lethal)— but such thoughts do not occur to him then.

So when addressing the conflict of TJ's acquired tendencies, Jack and Mikell first make sure he's asleep in the other room, and then speak over the dining room table. His older brother drinks a cheap beer from a can, and after a moment, Jack moves to the fridge and gets one for himself, too- he is not yet of age, but such things are a formality in the battered barns and sun-bleached houses of small Midwestern farm towns. It's disgusting, but he drinks it anyway. The alcohol fills a widening pit of frustration in his stomach. It calms his nerves.

(it calmed his father's nerves, too, in a time before TJ and Claire were born, when it was just the two brothers and their mother and the smell of heavy alcohol and charms from AA meetings, but they understand to this day that they are not to discuss this time)

They reach a decision, or at least, a heated compromise. Jack finishes his beer and Mikell takes another from the fridge not because he wants another, but to give him something to do to keep himself from throttling some god damn sense into his younger sibling. Jack goes to bed. Mikell plays with the revolver in the kitchen, even though it is not Wednesday, and the next week- with TJ recovered enough to return to school- Jack outfits him in long sleeves, long pants, and thin gloves, and sends him off with one instruction: touch no one.

7

In late April, Mikell says he's receiving a promotion. When TJ and Claire are in bed, his elder brother opens a locked steel box on the kitchen table and shows Jack two faded leather holsters with a revolver in each.

In words that he did not yet know, Jack knew this object was special. It felt radiant, powerful, unearthly before him. He studied it closely. These revolvers were much different then their father's on top of the fridge—no, these were old, old guns, weathered down with sweat of generations. The yellow glow of the dining room light above them turns the handles a sickly iridescent off-white, the barrels, a diseased grey-green, engraved with tendrils and elaborate vines of faded gold. The belt is an old, brown leather that is somehow miraculously still bound together, but to Jack, the weighted feeling of unease is only in the silver objects the belt holds. Mikell picks them up and Jack is surprised, like he wasn't expecting the movement to be physically possible. They fit so well in his brother's calloused hands that he can feel the hairs stand up on the back of his neck.

"That's not pearl." Jack sputtered out. "The handles."

They remain off-white even when lifted into Mikell's hands, shining not by nature, but by polish. When Mikell killed deer, he would boil out the marrow into a stew, then throw the rest out; all sorts of parts in the pot. Femurs sitting on the kitchen counter to be used. Skulls he let TJ hold.

To a Jack in the future, in a different life, anomalous is a bone-stained word on iron breath. It's a word that's laced with gold.

8

In late May, Mikell leaves for work and does not return in two days as previously promised.

Jack spends more time sleeping then he ever has before. Being a man of science, but not without an imagination- left as a residue from his childhood of books and roleplaying games with his brothers on hazy Midwest summer nights, not needed but only sometimes unwelcome- Jack dreams more than he ever has before. He dreams of his mother and father, of trees that fall in the forest and are never heard. Of Star Trek reruns on TV. Cows standing in a circle, tail to muzzle, some sort of unholy shrine. Sometimes he dreams that Claire is in there with them, in the center, sitting on the ugly rug from their living room with her dolls in the middle of the soft prairie grass. No getting her there, cowboy- he dreams of rabid animals, too, and all to often imagines the herd, all 67 of them, twitching and lurching through the grass in a sickly, uneven sort of rhythm, rotating the circle in a slow, even, mesmerized pace. Round and round, the circle gets smaller, and Jack feels the need, from his spot on the hill, to rush in with some kind of paternal duty, but is frozen to the spot.

Sorry, cowboy. Close but no cigar.

Jack wakes up, always, in the same hazy, nauseous way he tends to do these days, with a guilty weight settled right under his ribcage and his vessel aching, breathing shallow. He sits at the kitchen table with a restless energy that breeds anger in his chest like some small animal gnawing at his sternum and he'll find himself grinding his teeth in an old nervous habit. After about an hour of dazed, drunken silence, Jack will wander to the garage and continue his illegal moonshine activities with shaking hands that make the condenser wobble when he touches it; so much work for so little gain. Frustration it isn't faster, but brewing is a slow burn kind of business. It pays the bills.

"You okay, buddy?" Asks the potbellied redneck he usually sells to. Two gallons for forty dollars; he pays in cash, as he usually does. Jack sits hunched on the garage steps feeling like he's conducting electricity. He's not one for small talk. "Coming down with something?"

Jack nods, and puts on a weary smile. "Mm. Something like that, yeah." His chest squeezes with irrational rage; he doesn't want to speak, but feels like he has to allude to things being alright, at least to some extent. Not like the redneck would call child services anyway. He hopes he doesn't look like he feels, but judging by the scruff on his face that he's been too tired to shave away and the weight he's lost, it's a stretch. "Probably the weather."

"Your brother back yet?" The jugs go in a compartment under the redneck's floor mats, not that the police would care anyway if they found it.

"Nah." Jack scrambles to find something to say; this has been the first human interaction outside of Claire and TJ he's had in two weeks. "Business trip."

Business trip. Not entirely false, he reasoned.

And Mikell does come home.

Mikell comes home in the rain in mid June. He pulls in late at night as Jack sits at the dining room table with his hands around a beer, half asleep. He's pale and weary-eyed in the field it will be days before you sleep and the holster is around his waist still powerful, radiant, you are the right hand of god and will kill for him; he mumbles a tired and half-hearted hello the first time is always the hardest, darling and collapses in bed, and Jack pays him no heed other than that he is home.

Mikell sleeps. He sleeps until the next afternoon. He sleeps with the guns loaded next to him, where he can see them reflecting light in a sleepy haze.

It will be a thousand years before you rest; it is the way of this place.

9

Mikell has worked at the same ranch since he was 16 years old and had been riding a horse as long as he could remember. Jack himself could never quite understand what his older brother could possibly find entertaining about herding cows on horseback all day, but what made up for it was the competitions Mikell did for fun.

His older brother always got excited about the working cow horse runs. Jamie, the owner of the ranch and prime proprietor of Mikell's apparent aptitude for the industry, was always happy to allow he and Chestnut to enter and ride in aimless circles in a sandy enclosure while fellow hillbillies looked on and cheered. Jack would lean up against the metal fencing with John Deere ads strung up along it and watch Mikell and his horse kick up sand in tight circles under florescent lighting and country music with a smile on his face and an odd sort of contentment that comes with seeing your sibling do something stupid. Even if Jack was no cowboy himself- preferred the likes of Star Trek reruns to baying cattle- he could tell Mikell was good by watching how his father swelled with pride, how the judges talked about him over the speakers, how Jamie praised him.

Mikell was good. Mikell was always good at being a ranch hand.

When Mikell was 16, Jamie taught him delicate art of bull riding, and encouraged him to enter in his first rodeo.

Now Jack had never regarded his older brother's job and subsequent hobbies to be too entertaining, but quickly realized that he had a deep, burning passion for watching his older brother get thrown off large animals at high speeds in front of a crowd while wearing ridiculous clothing, and decided to always be in attendance. After all, Jack had never seen a stupider sport than riding a bull for eight seconds.

The only thing was that Mikell was good.

This was infuriating to Jack, who came with the specific little-brother goal of watching the person who he constantly bickered with get thrown off something. No, Mikell was good, too good. Jack would watch with anticipation in a small sports arena a couple hours away from home as his brother grabbed either side of the chute with difficulty, fastened his helmet, and awaited the buzzer with hand on rope reins, only to hold on for the full eight seconds with frightening ease. Rider after rider would be thrown off violently before and after him, but no, Mikell never fell, and Jack would bathe once again in the burning feeling of inadequacy that came with having an older sibling that succeeded in something at all.

When Mikell was 19, Claire tagged along with Jack and his father for the first time to see Mikell ride at a Rodeo. When it was time for him to go, Mikell threw one fringe-adorned leg over the side of the chute and waited for the handlers to allow him on. This bull had been particularly violent, and it was clear that Mikell was nervous, watching the previous rider not only get thrown off in the first three seconds but get stepped on repeatedly as the animal continued to buck.

The handlers on horses drove the bull back into the chute to the crying jeer of the crowd, and Claire tugged on Jack's pants sharply.

"What?" Jack had to raise his voice over the clamor of the competition, the buzz of excitement and anxiety that made Mikell grip the metal chute tighter then he had before.

"He shouldn't go in." Claire yelled. "Don't let him go in!"

"What?"

The handlers gave the signal, and he watched his brother climb in the tight chute completely, hands on either side, steadying himself, locking the dented helmet and mouthguard. The announcer started reading off his name and number, to which his father cheered next to them. Claire looked at him, eyes wide in panic, then turned sharply and put her hands on the fence surrounding the arena. The buzzer went off, the timer started, and chute opened, sending Mikell and wild animal into the ring.

But the bull didn't buck.

Mikell looked confused at one second on the timer, still holding tight to the rope as he had when the bull charged inward. The bull didn't buck. The bull stood, still, in the middle or the arena, despite knocking the sides of chute with anger a few moments prior. Two seconds. Three seconds. The audience is in shock. The ref looks to the announcer.

At four seconds, the bull starts to move again, and Mikell continues to brace for the first impact that never comes. The bull is walking. The bull is walking back towards the chute. Mikell looks dumbfounded. Five seconds. Six seconds. At this point, even if the bull was to start bucking, Jack figures that Mikell could hold on for the last two seconds and still make the round, if this even counted. The bull finishes walking back to the chute of it's own accord and huffs loudly.

Seven seconds. The crowd is silent. The bull faces the chute, and it's very clear now that Mikell is expecting to die, to be thrown in the air in the most violent buck in the history of all Rodeos.

When it hits eight seconds, the buzzer goes off. The crowd acts like it isn't over; remains silent, entranced. When the chute opens again, the handlers don't need to do anything; the bull walks in on it's own accord, the chute closes, and Mikell, a little stunned, stumbles off, pushes himself back over the side of the chute, and lands on his feet, just as blood trickles down Claire's face from her nose.

(he would have died had i not changed it)

Jack thinks of this now. Jack thipiercescesesis as the crickets chirp and pierce through his angry haze that clouds his thoughts and mind. Jack thinks of this and Claire wanders in and asks if she can sleep with him, she had a nightmare. Jack thinks of this as he lies awake with her there, thinking of trees falling in the forest and wishing there was more he could do.