MICHAEL

Estanislao drops me at my house, the finest home I've inhabited. After Fabiola and I married, she communicated to me in no uncertain terms that she didn't intend residing in an apartment. I was content with my surroundings. It was a guarded complex with teachers, government workers and divorcees. It was the ideal locale that had brought Fabiola and me together, but she was counting on me to provide her with a more glorious future. I was in love and I wanted to please even though I knew that the expenditure was going to cost me a chunk. We searched for a month. I drove to a residence advertised in the newspaper in an upscale neighborhood. Situated off a dead-end street on a cul-de-sac, the brick home with large trees in the frontyard piqued my curiosity. I walked inside and was captivated. White tile floors and white walls with exposed wooden beams appealed to my minimalistic tastes. There was the feel of a Roman villa as the breeze swept through the front door and out the back. A feeling of spaciousness freed me. When I have suffered from depression, I have looked for wide-open spaces where I can gaze miles into the distance. This exercise brings relief. The house gave me the same liberating sensation. Estanislao leaves me in the driveway. It is 6:30. There is the famous James Thurber cartoon in which a man returning home at the end of an eight-to-five day approaches his house with trepidation at the horror of the virago looming over the domicile. As he steps through the front door, he is stepping into the maws of a monster. I don't suffer from the same fear. I am indifferent. If my relationship with Fabiola or my job with the Herald ended tomorrow, I couldn't give a shit. I've reached a point where I feel like a native indigenous to the Rio Grande Valley sitting along the banks of the river and watching the detritus float past him. "Daddy!" calls Marcos. "Daddy!" He is sitting in front of the television with his dinosaurs. "A kiss for Daddy, papacito," He stands up to greet me. "Where is my wife?" "I'm in the kitchen, honey. I thought you would be home earlier. What took you so long?" "Estanislao and I ended up playing a grudge match and it took longer than I thought. What's for dinner?" "Spaghetti." "Any wine?" "No." "You know I can't relish a plate of spaghetti, honey, without a glass of wine." "I'm sorry, but before you start complaining, can you come into the kitchen and give me a kiss." I give her a kiss. We have reduced our lives to formalities. Formalities allow us to move from one moment to the next without unpleasant obstacles. Even our fucking has become little more than a formality. We don't sleep together anymore unless we're juggling a sick Marcos throughout the night. When the weather is nice, which is usually through the fall and winter and into the spring, I sleep in our enclosed porch and breathe the fresh air. From my last stretch as a bachelor I became accustomed to inflatable mattresses. I couldn't believe that I was sleeping peacefully on $20 purchases. During the summer when the evenings outside are pleasant but unventilated houses make sleeping impossible without air-conditioning, I move the mattress to my office and sleep. Fabiola and I find an occasional spontaneous moment to have sex, but usually I rouse her at six in the morning, wrestle her out of her panties and slither my way on top. While she fights all attempts on my part to touch her tits or pussy, I am able to summon enough of an erection to push my way into her. Then I become one of the Twelve Apostles in order to maintain a firm appendage. It's as if a switch turns on when I have established myself in her. I am the McAllen lawyer she met at the Island whom a few weeks later gave her a ride to Edinburg the night before she was going to take her college entrance exam. They had eaten dinner and he had left her at the motel when she called him and asked him if he wanted to come over. When he arrived, he didn't say anything. He took her into his arms and kissed her because he knew that she wanted it. "Let's go, poppy. We're going to the store. I'll get you a balloon and a donut." "Don't get him a donut. He hasn't eaten." "Do you want anything else?" "He needs cough medicine and the kids need milk." "Do I get something special for the children?" "Ask them." I walk down the hall to each of their rooms and yell through the doors. "Adriana, I'm going to the store. Do you want something special?" "Bring me some potato chips, Daddy-O," she says over her music. I open Adrian's door and he is playing a video game. "Daddy-O, you have to see this play. You're not going to believe it." He switches to his instant replay and a Dallas Cowboy is returning a 100-yard interception. "What a run!" I say. "I don't recognize those uniforms. Who are you playing?" "The Admirals." "The Admirals?" "It's a team I made up. I'm winning, 66-3." "Why don't you play one of the regular NFL teams?" "I like playing my own teams." "I'm going to the store. Do you want anything special?" "Bring me a Hershey bar." I return to the front room and Marcos is darting toward me after escaping his mother's grasp. "Make sure you buckle him up." "Please, Fabiola, I know what I'm doing." "I forgot to tell you. Your mother called. She wants you to call." "Did she say anything in particular?" "No, but I'm sure it's the same thing." "I'll see you in a little bit." I have gone the entire day without thinking about Michael. Ten years younger than I, he is the baby brother in the family. We fear he may be dying of brain cancer. He is head basketball coach and English Department chairman at Brownsville High. Six months ago he was training his team when he dropped to the floor with a seizure. The ambulance rushed him to the hospital where he was diagnosed with a brain tumor. Called an astrocytoma, it is a three on a scale of one to four. We took him to Andy Anderson in Houston for brain surgery. The doctors excised most the tumor, but they couldn't extract everything because they were cutting into a delicate area. Michael has suffered a numbness in his extremities as a result of the surgery. "In our family we live forever," he proclaimed over fajitas and beers a few years ago. Like a Greek hero defying the fates, he has been struck down. For my mother and father the unexpected events have been devastating. My mother keeps asking why. My father says he'll never play golf if Michael dies. We're in limbo these days. He's receiving both chemo and radiation. Two months ago the doctors read his MRI and asserted that the cancer had disappeared. Last month they looked at the MRI and announced they had detected a spot where the tumor had allegedly vanished. "It could be a glitch," they told Michael. "The majority of the time it is nothing." My brother is not himself, more a result of the treatment than the disease. At least that is our hope. He has the MRIs taken in Brownsville and we drive to Houston to have them read. He and I are going next week. When my daughter died, Iliana and I rode an emotional rollercoaster for three months until her passing. There was optimistic news followed by terrible news. I knew from the beginning that it was going to be the same wild ride with Michael. And it has been. I strap Marcos into his carseat. I never knew my daughter. I accepted that babies sometimes didn't make it. I haven't visited her grave in five years. I have forgotten her although her short existence inspired me to love my two older boys more. Michael is the reason I have a deep love for all my boys because he was my first little boy. Michael was a shared miracle. For my older sister and me, as well as my folks, we could never kiss and hug him enough. He was an endless source of laughter and entertainment. As his big brother, I took him under my wing. I felt it was my responsibility to both protect and instruct him. I was 15 and a freshman in high school. My friends would come over to the house on a regular basis to shoot baskets or play catch and Michael would accompany us. He was five and he wanted to be one of the boys. In spite of all the attention we showered on him, he wasn't spoiled. But he had knowledge that children his age wouldn't comprehend for another ten years. There wasn't a cuss word he didn't know or a punch he couldn't throw. He had a metallic race car with pedals that we would push down the driveway and along the sidewalk as fast as we could. He would sit in his seat with a devilish grin and urge us to push him harder. He suffered more than his share of spills and scrapes, but he never cried. He wanted to be tough like the big boys. I was sitting in the backyard, high on dope and wine, watching Adrian shoot baskets while Marcos kicked and threw a variety of balls, and I thought about everything mysteriously coming together, even in the most common and anonymous of moments. I learned sports from my father. He had been a Cleveland Brown and St. Louis Card fan, but with the expansion of professional sports into Texas he adopted the Dallas Cowboys and Houston Astros. His fidelity to Notre Dame remained most strong. When I was a kid, it was my duty to rise early, run to the corner store, buy the newspaper, return home and prepare coffee. I took advantage of the time between returning home and his arriving to the kitchen to read the newspaper. Once he entered, the newspaper had to be neatly arranged section by section so he could read each at his own pace. Though my dad never taught me anything about hunting, fishing or repairing an engine, he schooled me in the history of sports. Whether it was Johnny Lujack guiding Notre Dame to an improbable win against Ohio St. or Bobby Thompson crashing the shot heard 'round the world, he loved telling those tales imbuing them with a mythical majesty. His passion has never ebbed. He refuses to watch Notre Dame with anyone because "I don't like for anyone to hear me screaming and yelling." Baseball was my first love. I played sandlot football until I was in high school with a brief freshman stint in high school as a member of the kickoff team. Basketball was my most successful sport. I started my senior year in high school. We didn't win a game and I quit halfway through the season. I could shoot a basketball, but I couldn't think basketball. When my brother Michael arrived, I became his mentor. I taught him everything in the same manner that my father had taught me except he didn't have to sprint to the corner store for the morning paper. We had a hoop hanging over the garage door and it was basketball in which he excelled also. In his case, though, he was four inches taller than I and was more a product of club ball than playground ball. I never played on organized teams until I was in high school while he was competing in elementary school. As a result, he understood the game. He became a playmaking guard. Despite his advantages, he could never imitate my pure jumpshot. He could pass, he could drive and he could collect garbage, but he could never pull up from twenty feet and swish with consistency. The same love I had for him and basketball I transferred to my two boys. Besides coaching them in basketball, baseball and soccer, I had the perfect half court when we lived in the country. The three-car garage was located at the end of a long driveway behind the house. At the end of the driveway I placed a portable basket whose base I filled with sand. We shot baskets everyday. My oldest son, who is the spitting image of his uncle, never learned a jump shot either. My youngest son was even less successful. They loved the game and we shot for hours although they never achieved much success, both of them hanging up their sneakers midway through high school when they realized that they would never play varsity ball. Nevertheless, there I was a few nights ago repeating the same ritual and becoming sentimental about both the present and past. My love for Michael was the seed for my love for my first two boys and two more boys were frolicking at my feet.