Eye For Eye Growing up with an identical twin is neither as much fun nor as weird as some people think. Probably the strangest thing about it is having to share your birthday with someone else in your family, and I know that there are a lot of families who have that without having twins born to them. But it is true what they say about twins - in many cases, there's a good and a bad twin. Paul was the bad twin. I was good. I never wanted to get into trouble. Perhaps I should say that, rather than being the good brother, I was the careful one. I never went out of my way to get into trouble, but when there was something that I had to do that was probably going to get me into trouble, I was as careful as I could to minimize the damage and save my own hide as much as possible. Maybe you think that's noble, or maybe you think it's despicable. I know that, in spite of the fact that I loved Paul, what happened to him was his own lookout. That was something that we shared that we never talked about. Whatever happened, we were on our own. I don't know if it was our upbringing, or the sign we were born under, or what it was, but there it was: we were lone wolves, the both of us. If you think this story is sounding strange - the idea of twin brothers being lone wolves - then just wait. It gets stranger. So far as I know, just about everyone is subject to some kind of animal instinct at one time or another in their life. Some are stronger than others, but all have it, I'm sure. I did my best to control mine, but Paul never did, a fact which expressed itself in flat, cold irony. Because I had a temper that I could barely keep under control - but my brother was always the most relaxed person I knew. It was the summer of our twenty-seventh year, when we began to change. Twenty-seven is an odd age. Ten years before, we had been seventeen, and we both agreed, seventeen was the best year of our lives. It was all a plateau from there - not downhill, but not improving, either. We lived for ten years under the misconception that things would always be as good as they were when we were seventeen. At twenty-seven, too early for midlife crises, we began feigned emotional upheavals that - we thought - signified that we were moving into middle age. After all, thirty was not far off - and seventeen was fading, long gone in our own memories. People think that the early teens and the mid-forties are the ripe time for such upheavals, and perhaps they are, but if there was ever a time for a pseudo-crisis, it was twenty-seven. But I was always the levelheaded one, too, and so it was probably for that reason that when Paul came to me late that summer, ashen-faced and sweating, trembling over what he had done, I almost pooh-poohed it. In my desperation to control my emotions, I downplayed everything - even death. August and hot. Summer had swept over us like a grassfire or like young love, and I spent most of my evenings in my garden, watering, enjoying the coolness of the plants and the moisture in the air. In the northern latitudes, the sun doesn't set in the summer - doesn't disappear behind the rim of the earth for six months at a time. We were not really too far north - scarcely a few miles from the border - but even here, in the height of the summer, twilight would stay in the sky almost until midnight. The nights were hot, too, but not dry and scorching like the days, and I took pleasure in my garden. I was watering one evening, alone with my plants and my thoughts, when Paul appeared in my garden. My mind was elsewhere, but actually, it wasn't the fact that he was there that startled me so much. He sometimes came to visit me in the evening, to sit on my back patio and smoke while the sun went down and I watered. It was his physical appearance that took me by surprise. He was normally a neat, almost fastidious person, but that night, his clothes were torn and there was blood on his face. I felt my heart jump in shock and begin to slam against my ribs. His face was pale, and his lips were set - pressed together so tightly, in fact, that they had all but disappeared. My first thought was that he looked like he was in shock, but now that I think about it, I don't really think he looked like that at all; my mind just couldn't think of another way to rationalize it at the time. When I think about it now, I think he just looked determined. Determined and grim. "What-" I began to ask him, then realized that he was swaying and that he was going to fall in a moment. I lumbered forward, unmindful now of my string beans, and grabbed him under his arms just as he began to totter. He was heavy, and I was straining to keep him up long enough to get him to the iron bench that looks out over my garden, so when he muttered something, I didn't catch it at first, over the sound of my own grunting. I managed to get him to the bench and sat him down. "Lean forward," I instructed him sharply. He didn't immediately comply, merely looked at me with that dazed, shocked look on his face. "Sam�" He spoke my name, and seemed about to say more, but looked as though he couldn't remember what he had been about to say. I pushed against his back - I don't know if the Red Cross recommends that, but I did it - and forced him to lean forward. "Take a deep breath, " I told him. After a moment, he did so, and it seemed to me that he was a little more focussed than he had been a moment ago. The color was coming back into his face, and his hands, which had been shaking, were now only trembling minutely - but that minute tremble somehow worried more than the shakes. He took another deep breath, then repeated what I thought I had heard him mutter before. "What did you say, Paul?" He looked at me, and I realized with shock that there were tears in his eyes. "I said, she's gone, Sam. She's gone." It had been a hot afternoon, one of the hottest on record, and it had been one of the driest summers on record, too. Unlike me, Paul derived what I thought was a kind of perverse pleasure from the heat. I knew where he had been that afternoon, because I knew his habits, but he told me anyway. Between the mill where he worked and the highway where he usually caught the bus for home in the afternoon, there was a long stretch of railroad - three miles, maybe more, and nothing to break it up but the grass that grew up between the ties. Just before the track crossed the highway, it curved around a hill, and I knew that it was a tricky area for engine drivers - they had to slow down, because although visibility after the hill was almost unlimited on a clear day, the hill itself was a major blind spot. I knew all of this because had told me it years before, when he first started walking on the rails - he thought it was fascinating. I thought it was a little weird, him being so fascinated by that lack of control that the engine drivers must have had, but I never said anything about it. I knew that he liked to walk that stretch on hot afternoons, though God knows I could never understand why. He would sometimes directly to my place after he got home, the smell of sawdust still clinging to his body, and the sweat making little channels in the dirt on his dusty face, and I guess I understood why he did that - who wouldn't want to relax their body in a nice, cool garden on a summer evening if they were that hot and dusty? I just never understood why he would go through all that to get there in the first place. He had been stepping out some with a lady friend, a girl who worked at the mill with him. I know that sounds like an archaic way of describing their relationship, but it's the only way I can think of, because there was very little else he did with her, as far as I know, and I guess I really don't know what kind of relationship they had. He was my brother, I know, but in matters of the heart, he played things pretty close to the vest - and I respected him well enough to respect his privacy as well, so I never asked. Her name was Rebecca. As he talked, I could see the two of them together, walking down the tracks, mindful of where they placed their feet, their fingers loosely intertwined, and not talking much. I could smell the creosote in the ties and the grass, stunted between the ties and longer outside the rails. I could hear a lone hawk as it hung in the sky. Paul didn't tell me all of these details, but I saw them as clearly as though I had been there myself. I have that gift, and he knew it, and he also knew that I would see everything, even if he didn't tell me. They walked that way for some time, until� "It was a sinkhole," he said, his eyes dark and unreadable, and I felt a cold finger touch my heart, though I didn't know why. "Between the ties, in the gravel. I guess the motion of the train all those years shook it up or something - I don't know, I'm not a soil erosion expert, I don't know how these things work, I don't know why it was there, I don't know why she wasn't watching-" He was beginning to babble, and I felt that nameless dread again - I'm not a shrink, but I was pretty sure there was something he had to say that he didn't want to say and that he was pretty sure I didn't want to hear, but he had to say it anyways. I shook his arm roughly, but didn't say anything - I didn't know what to say. But it calmed him down a little, and he took another deep breath. Her foot had gotten stuck in the hole, which was right against the rail, and he didn't know how, but it had gotten wedged so tight that she couldn't even slide her foot out of her boot. It didn't hurt much - they were work boots with steel toes and steel plates - but she was immobilized, and there was no way to get her out. He kept talking, but he didn't need to - I could see everything. How he had struggled with her leg and how she had clawed at it until it was bloody, both of them frantic with desperation. How the train's whistle, off in the distance, had first galvanized them, and then spurred them into an even greater frenzy. The hill was throwing back the sound of the train as it approached; there was no way for them to tell how close it was or how much time they had left. And then - But he couldn't tell me about it, the last moment before he jumped clear, and I sensed that it was because he feared that he would be thought a coward, even though the fact wouldn't change whether he spoke it or not. The train needed a mile and a half to come to a dead stop, and the curve of the hill was only a hundred yards off, at most. Paul didn't describe what happened immediately after that - not that I needed or wanted him to, but he said that he grayed out for a while. He figured out what must have happened by deduction. "I guess� I must have walked down the track a ways. I don't remember it, but I guess I must have. I must have caught up with the engineer. He must have been running toward me. I don't know how long I was out, but I remember everything swimming back into focus, and hearing a thick, guttural voice that I didn't recognize, cursing and cursing�" The voice was his own, he told me, but he didn't realize that until later. When everything came back into focus, he was staring dumbly down at the engineer's body. It was laying on the tracks. He guessed that he must have been out for quite a while, because engineer's face was bloody and unrecognizable, and because the blood had begun to dry. With mounting horror, Paul realized that the man was dead, and he couldn't remember anything about it. "There was blood on my hands, and my shirt, and my shoulder ached like I had broken down a door, but I couldn't remember anything about," he said in a low, toneless voice. I drew back now. These were deep, treacherous waters - dark and unrevealing. My heart was pounding, and I knew that Paul sensed my fear. Before I could say anything, he spoke again, in that low, toneless voice. "An eye for an eye." He looked up at me, and his face was haggard. "Isn't that the way it's supposed to go?" I knew he was just desperately grasping at straws, trying to rationalize what we both knew he had done, and I knew he didn't believe what he was saying. But I didn't say anything now. It was all coming clear to me. He was here because he had run from the tracks, and he hadn't gone to anyone else and told them about this. And now he had told me what he had done, and he was expecting me to keep his secret. But I wasn't sure if I could. I don't mean I was driven by guilt or conscience, just that I could see myself being eaten up by it. I could have kept his secret for the rest of my life, but I wasn't sure what it would do to the rest of my life. And what about him? I could picture him cleaning himself up and washing his clothes and becoming sleek and fat and smiling again� and I knew, beyond a doubt, that this would destroy him. And now, for the first time in our lives, I was coming to realize how terrible the distance between us was. Because there was nothing I could say to him now. No-one knew. No-one would ever find out about Paul's part in it, because no-one had seen them leave the mill, and, true to his style of keeping things to himself, no-one at the mill had even know that he was seeing Rebecca. They had thought that she was a loner, like him, and they had never made a connection between the two. They didn't know about Paul's habit of walking on the tracks, because there had been no-one but Rebecca who had ever walked with him. But most of all, in the end, no-one ever found out about it because I didn't say anything. I've kept it to myself all these years. When the night is quiet, and I can hear the train whistle in the distance, I think of her and her misadventure. That's what they called it when they closed the case - death by misadventure. I don't know what they concluded about the engine-driver - I never asked. When the night is stormy and full of rain, I think of her and what she would have been like if she had lived to see Paul the way he is now - calm, happy, relaxed. I sit here now by my open window, smelling the sweet night air. It holds little pleasure for me these days - nothing much does, anymore. I think of her almost constantly, and how strange it is that my brother can sleep while I sit here awake, staring at the bone-white moon, dreaming and dreaming, wishing I could stop dreaming and go to sleep.
Copyright © 2001 Steve Drost |