Non-fiction: He Will Not Be Bulletproof
Written in 2013.
I was seven when my mom came to pick me up from a birthday party, her lips held tight in a line. With a few words she drove me out to the Big Lake that rested in the trees about a mile behind our ranch house. As we slowed, the summer dust settled around the Jeep, revealing silver manhole-sized circles in front of us, bordering the lake. Sliding from the worn front seat of the Jeep, my feet hit the ground making little dusty mushroom clouds. It took me a few minutes to realize what the shiny silver circles were, and why my mom was in such a hurry to get there.
This would be the driest summer I would spend on my ranch. The grass was long dead, leaving all two thousand acres a crunchy yellow. The horses were always thirsty.
My mom handed me a blue plastic party cup and half-ran to the nearest puddle, scooping up the tiny silver minnows that had been stranded in the shrinking puddles and ran them back to what was left of the lake. I stood in what might have been shock or awe for several minutes, staring at the thousands of fish fighting each other to stay in the water; the weaker and smaller fish being pushed up into the hot air. Neighbors brought my five year old brother to help move the dying fish, but the sun grew hotter, and no matter how many trips we made to the lake with our blue party cups, the Big Lake was still shrinking, and more puddles were forming. By the end of the day, we were all exhausted; there just wasn’t enough water. As we packed up into our cars, I turned to see my brother on his knees beside his puddle, now a pile of dry fish. His small bony shoulders were shaking.
My brother Reno is seventeen years old now, finishing up high school, and, like everyone else, is trying to figure out what he is going to do with the rest of his life. Like me and our father when he was our age, he wants to spend his time reading and writing stories of his own. With bright blue eyes and brown hobbit hair, he is the kind of boy who still declares war on his best friend’s house across the street, and will spend the day sword fighting on the lawn with broken tree branches.
We grew up sitting up in bed, rocking with excitement and terror while our mother read Harry Potter to us, introducing us to the idea that we could create worlds of our own, worlds that we were in charge of. We have been taught that reading holds the answers to all of our questions, and in writing we could heal ourselves of any heartache. We have both been writing our stories ever since we knew how, first in crayon, now in dark letters on a screen. We have both been writing, and we have both been afraid of anyone knowing. We know we need to think of a more stable plan or, as my grandfather would say, a realistic plan.
Seventeen and having to decide what you are going to do with your life. Seventeen years old and trying to find the money that is supposed to fuel your plan. My brother is at the top of his graduating class, SAT test scores that would make anyone jealous. He is terrified of imagining a place that might ultimately waste his time and the money that our parents have worked so hard to raise for our education. He doesn’t say it, but I know it makes him nervous watching me have to fight to keep writing, struggling to find any form of it that can offer me stability. He should have every door open to him, but how do you decide on one life plan, when one path leads to your dreams, and the other will be well-paid and affordable? Which half-assed version of your dream do you settle for?
Reno and I spent all of the sunny childhood days at the Big Lake even though someone teased me for showing up at school with mud on my jeans. I would chase yellow and black racer snakes through the dried cracked earth, screaming when they turned suddenly to look at me. I was never patient enough to catch lizards like my brother. He would sit stone-still in a pile of rocks, waiting to see one of the black lizards with the bright blue bellies slide out from under a rock to bask in the sun. He would move his hand only millimeters at a time, hovering over the lizards doing tiny pushups on the hot boulders. In one quick movement his hand would be on it, only covering the creature until he could gently slip his fingers around its body to hold up, and show his prize. He always knew how to hold them just right, never killing anything, not even scaring them enough for them to abandon their tails.
We didn’t go back to the Big Lake for a while after that hot afternoon with the silver manholes, partly because there wasn’t much lake left, but mostly because our mom didn’t want us to see what had become of our fish.
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My brother just told me that he is joining the military.
“I met with a recruitment officer today.”
After several days of missing each other’s calls, I received his explanation in a late-night text message.
“Because there’s not enough money left for me.”
After we moved into town, away from the cattle ranch and our hay forts, Reno and I didn’t talk for a while. Our parents opened a small bakery about a block away from the high school, and didn’t have much time to be parents anymore. We were bitter, and we were alone. I guess we never thought about being bitter and alone together.
It wasn’t until Reno’s freshman year in high school, almost three years to the day since my best friend Kari was found hanging from a ceiling pipe in her room, that we finally spoke to each other. After she died, I would catch his eye across the room, and know there were words leaning against his lips. I didn’t need to hear them; they could stay there, trapped in his teeth, because I knew there were so many words to him still trapped in mine.
One night, sitting on the living room carpet, the air thick with summer even in the quiet night, he sat crouched over his phone. Every minute he would hit a button, checking to make sure he hadn’t missed a message. From the kitchen, I glanced at him every so often. It wasn’t usual to see him outside of the cave he called his room. For a moment, I remembered those tiny bony shoulders shaking. They were not so bony, not so tiny, now.
That night we sat on the living room carpet, long past our bedtimes, and together we convinced his friend not to kill herself. Finally, I agreed to drive him to her house, even though the city curfew passed hours before.
That night we sat in the car, letting the dim streetlights illuminate us while we spoke in hushed voices even though we knew no one would hear us. We were hesitant, and sad, that it was death that brought us back together, that broke the barrier and released the words that had been laying dormant beneath our tongues for so long.
My brother is going into the military. My baby brother is going off, possibly to kill or be killed. Though he will carry a gun, he will not be bulletproofed. He will learn how to become callous to the world while he offers up his safety for our country. He will be trained to forget his compassion for the living creatures that he has spent his life learning to protect.
I know that we can’t always save the people we love. Ever since Kari killed herself, I thought that I knew how to stop it from happening, that I would never have to receive a call like that again. I swore that if I ever saw someone I cared about at risk, that I would answer their call, tell them I loved them, and that that would be enough. I hate the thought of losing my brother to a war that I don’t understand. I hate thinking about him in another country, trying to save his life by speaking a language he doesn’t know.
I imagine my brother, bloody and alone, on his knees beside the fallen, their eyes staring up into nothing. His shoulders, broad, strong, shaking just the same.
