Steam Laundry

The Younger Brother Speaks

52 The Younger Brother Speaks —On the Yukon, Summer 1898 I watch Tommie slanting himself toward the water as we steam upriver, cap dirty, bent at the waist. He leans his elbows into the rail. There is only two years between us, but it’s a long stretch, maybe as long as the stretch of this river, beginning in one country and spilling out in another. My brother cracks his knuckles, then spits into the water. Of us two, he’s mother’s. I’ve known always. He has her desire for something other than’s in front of his eyes. In St. Michael when the company man told us our tickets were a sham, they both stood poker-faced, determined. They didn’t need to look at each other to decide to refuse return passage to Seattle. Me? Without them, I might have taken it for a sign, turned back, let fate decide my course. The Old Man and I, blue-eyed and rowdy, don’t expect much. We feel lucky instead of left behind. Once I watched him get throwed out of a bar, 53 pull himself up on the lamppost, and dust off his hat, then, smiling, toddle across the street to another. Mother has big plans—laundry, hotel, restaurant—and Tommie will prop her up. Me, I’ll wait, see what happens. I can brush myself off and walk away. She called me Gusty as a baby because I cried so much, that my eyes were hardly ever open like I didn’t want to see the world for all the tears she said, but it wasn’t that. I could see what I’d been born into and I hadn’t gotten yet used to the idea that the best answer to bad luck was to brush yourself off and move on. These days I don’t bother with tears. I watch the bank from the stern, see the cuts and sweepers, the riffles along the eddy’s edge, the changes the steamer leaves in its wake. My brother, he looks ahead, where the bow splits the river into two sides before it passes through. ...