“Wayne,” Kirk said. “We’re here.”
I took a sharp turn into the lot, parking the van in our usual space six down from the blue handicapped spot. We’d never been the types to take advantage. So long as we had two feet, we could walk the short distance to the building.
I glanced toward the front door as I climbed out of the Town and Country. Dixie Research Center. Not research as you might imagine, but a fancy and rather deceptive name for a call center. Those annoying telephone calls you get at night when you’re trying to enjoy your dinner? That’s either me, or Kirk, or one of our fellow cubicle jockeys trying to sell you siding, new windows, or in-home carpet cleaning. Talking on the phone was something we could do independently, and—I don’t want to brag—we were damn good at it. Kirk and I had traded the top spot back and forth on the “Best Operator of the Month” plaque so many times that they’d given us a lifetime award. We’d worked at Dixie for over twenty years. We made good money here. We could afford a nice car. A nice house. Pansies in the garden. Even a peach tree.
All of which would be gone once the police found out about Mindy Connor.
“You have to let it go,” Kirk said, gripping his briefcase as we walked across the parking lot. “Just act cool.”
“Georgia is a death penalty state, Kirk.”
“What are they gonna do? Stick the needle in one of us and the poison goes into the other.”
“I can’t survive prison. I wouldn’t make it.”
“Stop your whining.” He kicked at a broken piece of asphalt. “Don’t we always take care of each other?”
“Well—” I began, but I didn’t finish the sentence.
Did Kirk always take care of me? I suppose if you just looked at the case of the fire, you would say yes. This was nineteen years ago. We were living in an apartment off of Peachtree Street. The old woman next door had fallen asleep with a cigarette in her mouth. Kirk had awakened to the smell of smoke. I’ve always been a pretty deep sleeper, and it was only because he roused me out of bed that I managed to make it out of the fire.
“But Kirk made it out, too,” you might say.
Maybe I should give you a more complicated example from twelve years ago. Last night wasn’t the first time Kirk risked our freedom. He’s always been a brawler. I suppose some might say he had a chip on his shoulder, but then they might also say that the chip was me. He’s always felt like he had something to prove.
“Young, dumb, and full of come,” as Kirk would say.
What happened was, some jerk at a bar wouldn’t leave us alone. He kept poking Kirk, prodding at him like he was a specimen in the lab.
“Freak! Freak! Freak!” he kept saying, like a duck quacking.
I ignored the jerk, which I’ve always felt is the best way to deal with bullies. Kirk couldn’t do the same. There was something about this guy that got under his skin. The taunting led to threats. The threats led to pushing. The pushing led to shoving. The shoving led to punching, and before either of us knew it, fists were flying.
Kirk’s fists.
My fists.
Who knew?
Freak, the guy had called us. The same word our parents had used. The same word that rude, obnoxious children use before they run and hide behind their mommy’s skirts.
Our only defense in the courtroom was Kirk. He told our lawyer to sit down, and he told anyone who would listen that we had come into this world together and we would defend ourselves together. Not that I was capable of doing anything of the sort. I was sobbing so hard at the time that I could barely form words. Kirk had told the judge he wasn’t sure who had punched the guy so badly that his ear had snapped off. He didn’t know who’d broken the man’s jaw or stomped on his hand. The truth of the matter was that one of us had been attacked, so both of us had been attacked.
We were brothers. We were bound not just by blood, but by skin and flesh and bone. Hurt one of us and the other bleeds. Strike one of us and the other is stricken.
What finally swayed the judge was Kirk’s tearful admission: the man in the bar, the so-called victim, had called us a freak. Not even freaks. Just one freak. As if we weren’t two separate people. We each had our own social security numbers. We each paid taxes. We each had to pass the test before we could receive our individual driver’s license. Were we not men? Were we not of two separate brains, two separate thoughts?
And then Kirk had played what the newspapers called the “conjoined card.”
If we had been not conjoined, but separate—two brothers, one looking out for the other—would both of us now be facing eight to ten years in prison? Could this judge really punish one brother for coming to the defense of the other? Could he send one man to prison, thus damning the other man to pay the heavy price for a crime he did not commit?
Granted, the judge had been confused, but it was Kirk’s eloquent homily to brotherhood that swung things our way. Even I was swayed. My sobbing turned into tears of gratitude for the loving words that came from my brother’s mouth.
Five years’ probation. Medical costs for the victim.
And, like that, we were free men. That was all that mattered to me. That one night in jail when we were arrested was enough to scare me straight. And Kirk, by default, was scared straight along with me. Every time he raised his fist or threatened someone, I was there to smooth things over. To calm him down. To diffuse the situation.
Until last night.
Kirk opened the front door to the Dixie Research Center. Wilhelmina Lenting, the receptionist, was sitting behind the half-circle of her desk, looking smart in a blue blouse and matching earrings.
Kirk never gave Willie the time of day. He knew how I felt about her—that the graceful curve of her neck could flood my mind with bad poetry, that the dulcet tones of her voice sent a shiver up my side of our spine. Yet, in the ten years Willie had been working at Dixie, he’d never done more than glance at her when we walked in the door. His impatience to get to work was always such that I barely had time to tell her hello before we were practically jogging toward our cubicle.
Today, he stopped. I stood there looking like a fool, not knowing what to do with my hand. I shuffled my foot.
Kirk said, “Willie, you’ve changed your hair.”
She stroked down her brown curls. They weren’t lustrous. They weren’t even natural—she must’ve bought a home perm at the store every other payday—but there was something beautiful about the way her hair compacted around her skull. I don’t know why this appealed to me. Maybe if I controlled a penis, my taste in women would be more pedestrian in the way of Kirk’s, but Willie was the type of woman I could see myself having a conversation with. A long conversation. And maybe, if we found we had things in common, and we realized that there was a spark between us, we might end up going on a date.
I’d never been on a date before. Kirk was the one who got the school janitor’s daughter to go to the prom with him. Kirk was the one who lost his virginity in the back of a bus parked on the grounds of a gospel tent revival outside the Bethel Baptist Church. He was the one whose lips touched others. He was the one who knew what it was like to feel warm flesh pressed against something other than his thigh.
I was the one who…watched all this happen. Who, if I was lucky, got a tingling and a tightening while Kirk rutted like a wild boar that’s just come upon a mound of fresh chicory.