The Weekly Screed (#767)

“We could dump it… over the rail”
by David Benjamin

MADISON, Wis. — My kid brother, Bill, had no particular plans. His style was to go with the flow, roll with the punches. You could get into Bill’s face but you couldn’t get much lip. He’d find an angle of deflection. He’d step aside with all due dignity, draining your indignation, sapping your passion. You’d turn away smiling, or shaking your head.

For a while, he was a regular at the big motorcycle gathering in Sturgis, an outlaw festival of belligerence and bloody noses. He strolled through the mayhem untouched, unchallenged and apparently fearless. He wore, like a white-magic wizard, a shield of amiability, invisible but inevitably disarming.

Fight Bill? you’d ask. What’s the point?

Ironically, Bill was a “fighting man,” more than 25 years in the Army Reserve, a veteran of George H.W. Bush’s strange rescue of the princes of Kuwait, and a combat training officer of singular repute at Fort McCoy. His comrades at McCoy admired Bill’s air of command when teaching young troops how to conduct themselves in harm’s way, amidst flying bullets and exploding shells, and how — above all else — to emerge upright and unscathed. He was good at this, I think, because he wasn’t the “warrior” about whom the Army likes to boast. He was the non-fighting man who not only knows how to glide through a fight without damage and to achieve his objective with guile rather than brute force, but also — most important — to make sure none of his friends get hurt.

An easygoing demeanor and a quick sense of humor, tinged with the irony we learned from his dad, Big Bill, worked for Bill through school, despite the depredations of an older brother who was overbearing and sarcastic. It worked for him through the turmoil of a Sixties youth. It faltered in the collapse of his marriage and the alienation of a beautiful and purposeful daughter. But it restored him eventually. He found his metier,  as a quiet contrarian among the rank-and-file soldiers of American’s enormous military machine. He was a fly in that ocean of martial ointment, doing the backstroke while sympathetic noncoms silently cheered him toward the shore.

Bill’s secret was that he didn’t want to beat anyone, and this calm, enigmatic resolve discouraged most everyone from trying to beat Bill.

It even worked with Sonnet, his tough-love daughter, who came to see the saint beneath the tarnish. And his son, Brooks, who for so long fought Bill’s loving counsel helplessly, like a boxer slugging a waterfall.

But along the way, Bill picked up an enemy without empathy, which would not stint its steady rain of blows. It turned Bill’s easy nature into weakness and probed without rest for an opening Bill couldn’t close. Bill’s diabetes was a stealthy stalker closing ground on a victim who was loath to look back over his shoulder. Bill never saw an enemy he could take seriously, and so…

Nor could he take himself as seriously as he might. In a book about our early days, I wrote a scene — almost entirely true — in which Bill and I were stumped about how to dispose of a washtub containing fifty pounds of putrid gray water filled with dead tadpoles. It was Bill, in my recall, who looked at the railing of our rickety porch, mounted twenty feet above the Monowau Street sidewalk, and uttered an inspiration both brilliant and supremely mischievous.

“We could dump it,” he said. “Over the rail.”

And we did, spectacularly.

I wrote, “The water hit the sidewalk with a juicy, gratifying splat, and spewed itself halfway across Monowau. It spread swiftly, darkening the pavement and flooding the gutter. From above, we could spot countless little black lumps and specks, the dead tadpoles who hadn’t yet decayed into nebulous blots of scum. Looking down at what we had wrought, Bill and I felt like bombardiers on a Flying Fortress, gazing through the bombsight as the pattern of our explosions begins to mushroom from the roof of a German munitions factory.

“ ‘Holy shit,’ said Bill…”

My kid brother Bill was a hero in that scene. But Bill — the essential kid brother — never perceived any distinction or heroism in himself. He demurred and accommodated. He put things off. He didn’t have plans. He never gave himself credit for being as smart as me, or as competent as his sister Peg — who died also last month, just two weeks ahead of Bill.

Peg and I saw him more clearly. I saw that Bill, like his siblings, had little tolerance for the ignorant and dull. He surrounded himself with the smartest kids in our neighborhood and in his class — friends named Ehle and McKiernan, Gumtow and Pat Noles who barged through our door eager to match wits with Bill’s overbearing and sarcastic big brother. Bill was a musician of true potential but he deemed himself “just a drummer” and never explored the upper reaches of his talent. He found and dated and loved a girl named Debbie, the prettiest, smartest girl in school — who went on, of course, to grow and learn and succeed, pulling at Bill to come along and share it all.

We won’t know why he let go. We know he always loved her. We know that regret haunted him thereafter and reduced him in his own regard.

No one, really, could convince Bill that he was as strong and able, beloved and admired, as he was. Every aspect of himself that he judged as inadequate, ill-fitted or flawed, others saw as virtue and blessedness.

I fear that Bill saw his affliction as penance for sins long forgiven by everyone but Bill. I fear that Bill saw his diabetic stalker as just another drunken biker he could charm for just a moment ’til he could slip on by, leaving that erstwhile foe to wonder — too late to catch up — “Who was that nice guy?”