My brother, my enemy

Claude Balzac, DDS, endodontist to the stars, celebrated (and cursed) roue and Casanova, sadistic flosser of others' teeth, ardent and courageous spelunker, self-injector of testosterone, ex-Green Beret, ex-federal prisoner, college fencing champion, polyglot and polymath, arctic adventurer, adoptive father to seventeen largely-delinquent children, identical twin to yours truly, tried to ruin my marriage to the beautiful and spectacularly talented Whiski Rae Shamrock five years ago during a family reunion on Crete. I've not spoken to him since, though I glare at him every day on my walk to work.

We're neighbors, you see, neighbors and enemies.

And brothers. Identical twin brothers. You're familiar with the old saw that blood is thicker than water, surely. It's also sicker than water. Much sicker.

Credit that phrase to Claude and a million other smug punsters. Why he lived on happily in the loving bosom of our mother, Emmeline, and enjoyed the rough-and-tumble paternal attentions of our father, Seminole DeMolay Balzac, while I was forced to reside in an abandoned badger burrow my coyote mother, Ki, expanded, is a mystery I shall never solve, our parents having died in 1981 in the Paris-Dakar Rally when a Cape buffalo gored their Austin Mini's radiator, forcing them to walk to the next check point, which they never reached as they were each killed and consumed by hungry leopards, my father's feet being all authorities could recover of him, while my mother's physical leavings amounted to a single canine tooth.

I myself never saw my mother after my parents exiled me, though I did once briefly encounter my father. Back when we still spoke to each other, Claude professed ignorance as to why I was the Esau and he, the Jacob, in our family. Not that I didn't love Ki—she taught me to catch and eat chipmunks and prairie dogs, to identify other coyotes by the smell of their excrement, and to interpret the yippings of my four-legged peers, which actually constitute a sophisticated language capable of expressing finely nuanced longings and dreams. I've instructed my beloved wife, Whiski Rae Shamrock, in the rudiments of Coyotespeak, and she's caught on enough we can converse in it, and she with my great-great-great canid nieces and nephews, including my favorites, the twins Skeep and Skupp, and Nee-yah the Magnificent, and little Hoodie-toodie who climbs trees and swings from branches like a gibbon, and Roomah who's the size of a wolf and has a cute crush on Whiski Rae, which is so far Platonic and must ever be.

So Ki was a fine and loving mother, and the day I scooted home with a mouthful of chipmunks for our supper and found her moribund and prostrate outside the den, a cruel leg trap crushing her left front leg, and she was already old for a coyote and grizzled about the muzzle and slowed down by dropsy and heart failure, and I knew she was dying, so I bit the heads off the little chippers and carefully sucked out the sweetbreads, kidneys and livers, all her favorite bits, and laid them before her, her strength ebbing, all she could do was lick the steaming organs, and her ancient wise eyes drank me in before winking shut for good, and she was gone to the Great Meadow, where coyotes believe they are transported at the moment of death, I wailed for hours, a cry of anguish and sorrow and anger at my bifurcated life, neither fully man nor beast, able to read only road signs and license plates, and barely remembering my twoleg parents, by then I was sixteen, and I removed the trap and tossed it into the weeds, and placed Ki in our home and sealed it shut with boulders, the buzzards already riding the stiff prairie winds in lazy ascending helices as they waited for their next meal, I knew it was my time now to return to the human world,to return to my birth parents' home, whether to avenge my abandonment or plead for reacceptance I wasn't sure, and though naked and filthy and hairy and dark as an old saddle, and frightened of twolegs, I remembered how to follow streams and rivers back to Sourdough, Minnesota, where I grew up and now again live, and I set off on a journey whence I've yet to return.

A bit about that seminal adventure. I spent an exhausting month traveling at night, mostly, floating rivers, running along banks, crawling through swamps and mud flats, hiding during the day from Man damnable Man. I survived a fierce scrap with a bull skunk, lived off of berries and chipmunk jerky, nearly died of a thousand wasp stings, outran a trio of redneck youth thoroughly pickled on booze and firing shotguns in the air as they chased me through a soybean field, they in a pickup truck, I on foot, they directing the vilest of imprecations at me, impugning my wildness, calling me "freak" and "fur-fucker" and "free-shitter," I was young and fleet and I darted effortlessly from one point to the next, juking and jiving, diving and rolling, leaping and howling, howling like Hell's most ravaged and wretched shade, rending the crepuscular sky, rattling the gloaming, the truck slowing behind me, then stopping, I paused to catch my breath, clawing the earth as a mole might to conceal myself, I heard the shitfaced hicks wondering aloud what they should do, fear now squelching their dumb guttural utterances, I knew then what I must do, I leapt from the loam and charged the yokels, they froze in the truck, I ripped the driver's door off its hinges and pulled that dolt from his seat, he shrieked and begged and pleaded in a tone so shrill not even a weasel could reproduce it, its ringing cowardly sound so offensive to me I ripped off his clothes, bit off his scrotum and spit his dripping testes into the cab. Then I raced into the dark, roaring triumphantly, I loped easily another dozen miles, my stride practically lunar, I felt revivified and ready to confront my family, not as a lowly brute divided between the animal and the human worlds, but rather as some kind of rough native deity who encompassed and embodied both spheres, the livest of beings, Caliban and Prospero alike.

Sourdough beckoned the next morning: the Basilica of St. Messalina the Beaten Virgin's etheral spire spearing the sky; the bell tower of Lost Souls College tolling a matutinal air; Melancthon College's Aimee Semple MacPherson Hall of Geology looming above a bluff along the Sourdough River and casting its formidable shadow on scientific inquiry; the twin grain elevators of the East-Southeastern South Central Farmers' Coop rising stoutly and phallically above a feed store and a filling station. A shudder foundered me and I gasped, a hundred sweet and mean memories crowding together as they rushed into my awareness, twelve lanes of traffic bottlenecked of a sudden into two. My home town. I'm back. I'm in the right place to do the wrong thing. Emmeline and Seminole must die. Claude must be tortured first, then die

I hastened to a Pamida store whose location I recalled exactly. The store was still closed, so I jimmied open the back door and crept in to steal a garment to hide my nakedness, not that I minded the world to see all of God's plenty dangling between my thighs, but to better blend in with the town folk as I stalked my victims. Imagine my shock, after nine years away, to find myself surrounded by the detritus of the consumer culture! I padded silently through the aisles, disgusted by the towers of junk on either side of me, as though I had ventured into some canyon of the damned leading me into the cold, dead heart of hell. A harsh chemical smell greeted me at every turn, its astringent redolence reminding me of Emmeline on all fours scrubbing the kitchen floor after I'd defecated in the corner, and cursing me loudly, I was in first grade and had yet to master the use of the toilet, and she was crying as she swore and abusing me as being willful and retarded and stubborn and unteachable. I'd gotten into similar trouble in my teacher, Miss Butler's, room a dozen times already that year, failing to see why our chow, Baron Lancelot Bouvier Kennedy, could unload himself in public while I must shit in secret, as though that fundamental act committed daily by people as divergent as Pope John XXIII, Joe DiMaggio, Audrey Hepburn and Imogene Coco, was somehow shameful and must be concealed. Yet Emmeline slashed me with a coat hanger she'd dipped into the bleach solution she used on our floor, slashed my buttocks cruelly; and I remembered now the shock of pain that convulsed me at each blow, my fingers retracing the filagree of scars that reminded me daily of my twoleg mother, I sat only on my haunches from that point forward, as direct contact of my bottom with the ground, or a log, still ached. And fury filled me, a rage terrible and splendid in its pure mad incarnation.

Rumbling through the store, bellowing like a bull, I sought to destroy everything around me. I focused my efforts on tipping over shelves, shoving them rudely, the one knocking over the next, and smashing the spilled items, stomping them with my bare callused feet, feet so toughened by my hard feral years they were impervious to damage from broken light bulbs, hunting knives, shattered tumblers, splintered hand mirrors, dinner forks, fishing lures, garden trowels. I raced about, hurling heavy objects, too, chairs and lawn mowers, bicycles, cash registers I wrested from the counters, I flung them thirty feet against walls, they burst apart spilling coins, I cared not for the money, money was man, man, money. I wanted blood, hot, sweet, spicy blood, the taste of which I knew so well, sometimes Ki and I would come upon a hidden fawn, the mother away to graze, and we'd kill the fawn by crushing its neck, ripping the throat and letting the blood spurt into our open mouths, ferric and delicious. Would I sate my murder-lust on the blood of my twoleg kin in such a gruesome manner? Yes!

I tired of material destruction and went off in search of clothing. How cheap and unnatural it seemed! I found and slipped on a pair of red swim trunks, then pulled a purple tee-shirt over my head that was emblazoned with a picture of Porky Pig, whose visage I dimly recalled. A pair of sunglasses and a bucket fishing hat completed my disguise. I tried on some flip-flops, as I'd worn them in summers as a boy, but they pinched my feet and would only slow me down. I needed to move fast in order to exact my revenge on Emmeline, Seminole and Claude and then escape before the police came, as I imagined my family's screams would draw the neighbors' attention, and with it, a call for help.

Another few minutes of sprinting found me crouching behind the plum trees my father had planted in the backyard. The grass beneath them was cool and dewy, and I licked it to wet my mouth, which heavy panting had dried. I steeled myself against an unwelcome tenderness that had sprouted within me as I gazed upon my childhood home. For a moment I almost forgot that my parents had abandoned me—but only for a moment. Seminole's hulking form appeared in the kitchen window directly before me. He'd aged considerably, grown paunchy and jowly, his hair thinning and greyed, his face swollen and tear-stained. He was weeping, with his arms hanging limply down his sides, he seemed boneless and immobile to me, a blob sinking into itself. A sense of keen revulsion now completely supplanted any warmth I had felt, and I crept forward coyote-style for the kill, my focus complete, Ki had taught me well, the time for distraction was after one's belly was full and the flies buzzed incessantly over the scattered remains of a just-finished meal, and we'd repose in our burrow out of the stern prairie sun, it was quiet and delightful, my mother at our den's mouth to protect me against any intruders, unlike Emmeline and Seminole, who exposed me to danger by binding my hands and feet with leather cords, duct tape blinding and shutting me up, they'd driven for hours with me in the trunk, I was overdosed on Dramamine and brandy, the rough ride waking me from my delirium occasionally, the fear a consuming fire from which I couldn't escape, at last the car stopped and the trunk popped open and my father's hands grabbed me by the hair and feet and lifted me from my prison, I could hear him grunting and swearing from the exertion, and I fought back, writhing and kicking until he dropped me, and my mother sobbing and begging God for forgiveness, asking me for forgiveness, and having the temerity to kiss my forehead with lips as cold and beady as a gila monster's, she was venemous herself, and now my wounded rage spiked as I saw my weak father blubbering, blubbering as he hadn't when he kicked me down a rock-strewn declivity in the North Dakota Badlands, I bounced down the hill for what seemed minutes, torn by thorny plants and bruised by stones, I lay at the bottom of a gully for another day and a night struggling the entire time to free myself but failing, I was only seven, of course, and weak, and if Ki hadn't come along and rescued me, I'd surely have succumbed to exposure, this being my twoleg parents' intent. Damn their souls to Hell's Hell!

I was through the kitchen window in a trice, the glass exploding about me, I had Seminole on the floor, his eyes wide with terror and recognition, he said nothing, lying passively, baring his throat, tilting his head back and canting it, his lips mumbling a prayer, not for salvation, but release and death. He was offering himself up to me because he wished to die.

This I'd not expected, and I rose, disgusted, and urinated on his face, as I couldn't deliver him unto the hereafter and spare him from his own misery. Instead I stripped the clothes from my body, dropped to all fours and raced around the house in search of Emmeline and Claude. Much had changed since I'd last lived there, including my own little bedroom, which bore no traces of me, not even a reverential picture of the lost son, I realized then I had no idea how my parents explained my sudden absence to the authorities, certainly this room would arouse suspicions if seen, for one would expect a kind of shrine assembled by the bereaved to honor the departed, yet my old bedroom contained only cactuses, dozens of them, on the floor and the sills and shelves, some tall and twisted, others short and flowering, the room itself nearly impossible to enter it was so overflowing with spiky vegetation, including one tremendous old plant that reminded me of the thief's cross on Golgotha.

I returned to the kitchen, where my father still lay curled and whimpering. "Where are they?" I squawked in an unpracticed tongue. "Where are Emmeline and Claude?"

"The hospital," he croaked. "Claude was savaged terribly."

"How?" I asked.

"His testicles were bitten off by a madman last night. He and friends were out driving when they were accosted. Claude fought off his attacker to spare his friends. He's a hero."

"Liar!" I roared. "He deserved what he got."

"It was you who attacked him, wasn't it? I'm not surprised. You always envied him."

I scooped my father off the floor, carried him to my bedroom and hoisted him onto the cactus cross, the long spines piercing him in a hundred places. A fat roll of twine sitting on a table provided me with the means to fix him securely in place. He moaned and pleaded for me to finish him off. "I regret so much." he whispered hoarsely.

"You regret only that you didn't kill me when you had the chance," I said.

He didn't respond. I spat in his face, said nothing more and left. I began the long trip to South Dakota immediately, not returning to Sourdough for many years, long after I finished college and medical school and residency. The stories I could tell you! And will, probably, if you keep reading my humble blog.

I almost forgot where I started: with Claude, and his failed effort to drive a wedge between Whiski Rae and me. Claude maintained his potency through the years by massive injections of testosterone, which I presume he continues to this day. He made no moves on my dear wife, but rather threatened to reveal to her that I'd castrated him with my teeth, a story which he'd not yet shared with others, owing to embarrassment and perhaps a little shame at how he'd treated me that evening, not that he knew he was chasing his own brother down for what was doubtless to be a thrill-kill. I promptly told Whiski Rae the whole sorry tale, unburdening myself to the dearest wife in the world, who didn't shrink from me as though from some hideous beast, but embraced and praised me for punishing those who tried to ruin my life: my own family of origin. What my mother thought when she came home and found Seminole crucified on the cactus, and learned I had been there and done that to my father myself, and previously had bitten my brother without realizing it was him, is something I've wondered about from time to time. Perhaps Claude knows the answer to this question, but I've pledged never to talk to him again unless he learns Coyotespeak, and probably not even then.