Shadow Brother

In 1975, Max’s twin brother Cam disappears in the desert where he is supposed to be on a climbing trip out of the Saline Valley up to New York Butte to celebrate high school graduation, and it’s not until 1976 that the family gives up on him because no one has found his truck, or him for that matter, just some Coke cans left at what might have been his campsite. He’s always been devoted to Coca-Cola and packed twenty-four cans for the trip. Max knows because he helped him pack.

It’s because his truck is missing that the family is sure he’s gone. They think he must have rolled down a ditch or something, but Max tells them that Cam isn’t dead. He can feel his twin like another arm, and they nod and rub his shoulder, and his mother kisses his face, but Max is sure that Cam’s out on an adventure, that he’s off to Portland to start a new life because he always talked about that, and it would be just so Cam to pop off and reappear three years later, so to keep himself company, Max imagines him moving up north and getting a job at a logging company, not as a lumberjack but as a trucker for some reason. In this dream, Cam is driving along through the forest singing along to a Hank Williams song on the radio, one hand on the steering wheel, the other holding a can of Coke.

By 1977, Max’s mother tells him that he needs to move on without Cam.

“He’s out there alive,” Cam says. “I can feel it.”

She places a warm palm on his cheek. “Okay,” she says, “but if he is, I’m sure he’d want you to move on with your life, go to college, fall in love. All of those things.”

Max has been working at the grocery up the street from his house, and he continues to do so for a year until his mother gives him an ultimatum and he enrolls at the local college. “This doesn’t mean I’m giving up,” he says.

“I wouldn’t want you to.”

In 1982, Max earns a degree in engineering, and his dream brother has shifted. Now, Cam has also earned a degree in engineering and is dating a woman who’s gotten pregnant. They aren’t sure that they’re ready for marriage, but Cam is pushing for it. By the end of the year, she has dumped him, but Cam is not the kind of man to let things go. He’s staying around Portland, earning good money, so he can pay child support every month. It’s a good enough job that she can have as much maternity leave as she needs. He hopes that she will take him back, and they can make a family.

By 1985, Max has a good job and a disposable income, and he’s watched enough detective shows on television that he’s thinking about hiring a private investigator, or at least paying his share. He brings the idea to the family on Thanksgiving, asks about it during dinner, which halts the conversation midstream. His cousin pats his shoulder. His father stares down quietly into his bird. His mother says, “Don’t you think that might be a waste of money, honey?”

“He’s not dead. I can feel him still out there.”

“If he’s not dead, then he doesn’t want to see us. What makes you think that he wants you to look for him?”

It’s a good argument, but the Cam of Max’s dream world is ashamed that he has a child and his girlfriend left him. Now, of course, they are back together and have a son and daughter, but it’s been so long that he just feels awkward about contacting the family. He feels embarrassed and trapped.

Max hires a private investigator anyway, which is different than what he expects. Television doesn’t get him ready for the former cop who avoids the kind of machismo and histrionics that fictional detectives always have. He tells the man to check Portland. Cam always had a romance for it. In a month, there is no trace of Cam, so Max’s fantasy of his brother changes once again. Now, he imagines that his brother has moved to Toronto, which is difficult because Max has never been there, so it’s hard to place him on the street, and the dream quickly moves to Houston, where Max and Cam spent a summer together. Cam still has the family, but they’re happier in Texas. He’s working for the city as a civil engineer. He still has his fetish for soda.

In 1995, Max’s father dies, and in 1996, Max’s mother tells him that it’s time for Max to bury Cam, too. She says that it’s been nearly two decades, and they haven’t been easy on him. He’s missing out on life, on his own family, on the things that make the world nice. She asks him to let his brother go.

Over the years, he’s learned how to deflect these questions to a family who thinks he’s not quite right. He says, “Sure Mom. I know you’re right.”

“No,” she says. “I need you to promise me. A real and serious promise.”

“All right,” he says.

“A promise. Right now. I’m not going to be here for you forever. I need an oath.”

So Max looks into his mother’s eyes and says, “I promise.” It feels like a lie, but the idea of the promise festers in his mind. It ruins his fantasy life and his fantasy nephews. It works its way down into him until he loses this part of him that once was so important to him. All summer he tries to return to that place where he can still feel and listen to his twin. In the late autumn, he decides to look for his brother himself.

Max doesn’t go to Houston, but out to the Saline, up the long dirt road that no one seems to ride, up to the top, where Cam would have camped all those years ago. It’s a silent place that looks down over the desert where so many people have disappeared. He sleeps in his Jeep that night, and the next day, he tries to find his way up to the peak but fails in a miserably long day of walking up paths that dead-end and following roads that fall off of cliffs onto the desert floor below. At the end of the day, he calls, “Cam! Cam! Cam!”

Later, he takes one last look around, not hoping to find his brother but just to know this last place of his life. There is the detritus of the sloppy campers that have been coming for a hundred years. Here is a broken hatchet, and there, a fork. Under a creosote bush, Max finds a Coke can, an old one, and he picks it up. This is his twin’s trash after all, and now Max’s responsibility. That’s the thing about having a brother.

Max thinks he’s going to keep this can. He’s going to maybe keep it on his desk at work or on the mantle of the house that he’s going to someday buy for his someday family after he meets his someday wife. His kids are going to ask about it, and he’s going to tell them about his brother, still missing but out there and they’re not going to believe him. No one is going to believe him until one day Cam is going to come through his door with a smile and a story of his twenty years of adventure.

Max smiles to think about it.

Max can’t wait for that to happen.

Max decides that he can’t stop his own life in anticipation of the return, though. He needs his own adventures so he can tell his brother what he has been doing too. When he gets back down to town, he’s going to put away this fantasy life for now. He’s going to play the little game that everyone else has been playing and pretend that Cam is gone for good. He’s going to live in this world as it is until his brother comes back.

So Max takes the can into his Jeep, where he places it on the passenger side seat. He buckles it in because he doesn’t want to lose it, and he weeps all the way home because he’s going to miss this shadow Cam, this person he’s grown to love, this person he’s known longer than he ever knew the real man who was his brother.

JOHN BRANTINGHAM

John Brantingham was Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks’ first poet laureate. His work has been featured in hundreds of magazines, Writers Almanac, and The Best Small Fictions 2016. He has twelve books of poetry and fiction including his latest, Life: Orange to Pear (Bamboo Dart Press). He teaches at Mt. San Antonio College.