Night Miles

It was lying in bed at night I used to think of him. I’d click off the lamp, let a Conan flap to the floor, then pull that sad old quilt over me. I listened to a wide locusty static settle over the pasture. Gradually my eyes got accustomed to the dark, and I could make out the quilt’s patchwork stretched before me—crop fields glimpsed from a mountain pass. I thought of great distances and what it meant to travel them. And that’s when I could see him, my brother, appearing over some snowy curvature of earth, a man now—bearded, I was sure, shrouded in bear hide, our old hound Skokey ranging off a ways.

I was twelve; I had never left northern Missouri. Seeing the wider world in a patchwork quilt was possible for me then. Corey’d been gone six years, half my life, long enough to become a giant—the world itself nearly. I forgot all about what a son of a bitch he’d been as a kid, how he’d quarter a barn cat or open-hand Mother or twist my arm harder than you ought a boy my age. Mother blamed it on he was a blue baby—came out in a noose. He was troubled. But the day he left I forgot all that stuff, remembering only the mythic circumstances of his departure. The papers had called him a killer, and the papers were right. He’d busted free of something, everything, and now he was somewhere I couldn’t imagine—ripping through man and beast, whipping at a world finally big enough to take it. “Out there getting the poison out,” Mother said often those six years he was gone, folding some shirt of his she’d come across.

Still now, thirty-five years later, it’s that slim hour before sleep I think of after I click off my rig’s fuzzy radio, two-hundred night miles ahead of me. It’s that faded quilt, glorious gory Conan, and somehow my brother, the visions I had of him, how all this together could lift me beyond the outlines of my childhood. Looking back, of course, my childhood was still firmly upon me, and it now seems inevitable that on one particular night as I lay there dreaming of his bone-heavy footfalls, his wide winter breaths, the winterkill lolling across his shoulders, I should hear the floor give some, and see beyond the flat fields of my quilt the full shadow of my brother, standing at the foot of my bed, his back to me as he unbuttoned a flannel shirt.

He’d run off plenty as a kid. Weekly, gone days at a time. But the night he left us for good I remember. I was six, Corey sixteen. He sat on the edge of his bed in his garage dungarees and hunting boots, stuffing a duffel with uncharacteristic forethought. Jeans, bvds, deodorant, a comb. His face held a strange ash in the lamplight. A brown crust flecked his knuckles and forearms. “Go back asleep, Pickle.” He said it firm, not mean. I closed my eyes; I slept. Only later was I waked by the hallway ruckus that always attended his departures—the sinewy, red-hot curses; bodies hitting walls; my brother’s voice breaking into a womanish yowl; Mother calling, “Careful, Paul!” The bedroom door bowed in; the handle jiggled. Pop could often corral Corey back into our room, but I’d locked it when the fighting started and lay curled up under my covers. Finally the downstairs door slammed. The house went quiet. Then Mother let loose a long gut-sob I’d never heard before.

He’d been gone a day when word came of a man turned up dead over in Emden. The man was a forty-eight-year-old ex-con who’d come on as a tire-buster at the garage where Corey helped out. Corey got under a car himself now and then but mostly just helped out. The owner knew Pop. Not long after the ex-con started...