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Victory
1977
Eighty of us crowded behind a chalk line in the shade of huge evergreen oaks draped with a few dying wisps of Spanish moss. In a jumble of uniform colors --- powder blue, puke yellow, rising-sun red, Orange Crush --- all of us wore old-style basketball tops and bottoms, except for two runners from a New Orleans day school who looked girlish in green ultralight nylon minishorts. I overheard the starter tell the line judge, "Most of 'em white boys look like they come out of a concentration camp." The line judge laughed. A strong wind kept gusting off the lake and the damp air felt colder than the forty-four degrees on Father Callicot's key-chain thermometer. Short, balding, wearing a goatee, thin mustache, and a black suit with a clergy dog collar, Callicot stood on the line smiling like an evangelist at the six of us with Episcopal Knights in scroll across our gold jerseys. He put the thermometer in his pocket and placed his hand on my shoulder. "You're the next state champ. I don't need to tell you a thing."
"Gee, thanks." I rolled my eyes and stared down the fairway toward the lake.
"Circle up," Callicot said, and we formed a wheel, holding our right arms to the center and stacking our hands on top of the coach's. "Our Father, let us run like the wind ahead of this pack of heathens from across the state of Louisiana."
"Amen," the other Knights said automatically as I shouted, "Hallelujah! Running for the Lord!" Everyone laughed except for Father Callicot. We broke the circle and the team formed two lines behind me and my brother Nick.
I smiled at Nick. "Don't let that coon ass from Point Coupe outkick you today."
Nick hated these moments before a race. At home, sitting on the roof of our house, he'd prayed it would storm, but the afternoon sky was clear except for columns of smoke rising over the river from the Exxon refinery. Nick said without conviction, "He's going to eat my dust."
I just held my fists out in front of me at the edge of the line. "Runners on your mark." The starter raised the gun over his head. A handful of students and parents yelled from the sidelines and then there was silence
I'm going to win. I'm going to go faster than ever before. I'm going to push through the pain. I'm going to win.
Nick looked queasy. His hands trembled. I gave him a fierce look and whispered, "You can take him."
"Set."
Pikh! Lost in the wind: the firing of the blank, the muted cheers of the spectators. Barefoot, Ford led three other black runners from cane plantations to the head of the pack, which funneled from the chalk line into a narrow stream along the center of the fairway.
After the first quarter mile, on the rise of a tee, Ford and I were out front, running side by side.
I glanced back. Nick was twenty runners behind.
"Think you can beat me today, Ford?" I said his name like he did --- Fode.
"Beat you here last year." Ford's head bobbed up and down, almost touching my shoulder.
"You're natur'ly more powerful than us. That's what I heard."
I kept my voice from sounding too winded.
"Tell me sompin new."
"No way any white boy could run barefoot."
"Too much shag carpet."
"And you've got a big dick and an extra tendon in your leg."
Ford looked up and grinned. "Yo' mama knows about one of them things."
"The dick or the tendon?"
"The tendon." Ford laughed, breaking his smooth stride. I accelerated a yard ahead before Ford realized I was pulling away.
Nick was back there watching me gradually shrink into the distance. Nick trained harder than anyone in the state, while I showed up hungover Saturday mornings and kicked his butt. Outclassed by big brother, who knew you so well, even what you were thinking.
At the half-mile mark Father Callicot squawked in his high voice, "Right on time!"
Rounding a corner coming out of magnolia trees, I looked over my shoulder and I was ten yards ahead of Ford and twenty ahead of the pack. Nick was idly picking off the competition, composing a poem for the school mag:
Hemmed by runners on every side,
Pain ingrained on every face,
I hurt more with every stride,
I must increase the pace.
Breaux, the tall Cajun from Point Coupe, was loping along behind Nick, using him to break the icy headwind off the lake. Nick had never beaten the Cajun, though the last three races he'd been within seconds. Nick lacked the killer instinct --- he didn't believe he could beat him and therefore he didn't.
I led the first lap around the golf course with nobody pushing me. Ford was my only competition and I'd broken his spirit by beating him the last five races of the season. There was no one left but the clock.
By the third lap the pain had set in for even the strongest. This was the pain Nick dreaded from the night before. This was much worse than the pain of practice which Nick dreaded through every school day during fall cross-country and spring track season. Nick wanted to turn down the pain, slacken off just enough to secure fourth place, and ride out the last five minutes of agony. Nick distracted himself from the pain by reciting his poems. I burned it like gasoline, turned it into rage.
Father Callicot yelled my time at the two-and-a-half-mile mark. Dad was dressed just like Callicot. Mom wore a plaid wool coat. Little Harper had on my letter jacket, which hung to his knees and hid his hands in the sleeves. Dad cupped his hands, yelled, "You're breaking the record!" My girlfriend, Robin, was hopping up and down in her cheerleader getup.
Long rolling strides glided me along the fairway. A half minute back Nick and Breaux were crossing the creek. Ford had gained a yard, so I turned, fixed my eyes on the fluttering plastic ribbons of the chute, and switched into overdrive. The kick was the consummation of the pain, a purity beyond thought. I gave a rebel yell and leaned forward, my mind filled by an imaginary sheet of liquid flame racing before me across the grass. The tape broke across my chest, the judge shouted a new state record, and I raised my arm in the Black Power salute like the brothers who lost their medals in the '68 Mexico City Olympics, then careened through the chute, tripped, and almost knocked down one of the cane poles at the end. I picked myself up, turned around.
Ford was decelerating down the chute, hadn't even bothered to kick. Smiling as he reached me, I stuck out my palm for a soul slap but he looked away and jogged off toward a couple of black coaches from Ascension.
I limped along the edge of the fairway toward the long string of runners. Nick and Breaux were shoulder-to-shoulder coming down the homestretch. Nick was drowning in the pain of his lungs and arms and legs all shrieking, begging him to slow down. Breaux broke away, doubled the length of his stride, gained a yard.
"Kick, Nick! Kick! Kick! Kick!" I shouted, sprinting toward him, just out of bounds. "You can take him! Take him! Kick!"
Nick screamed a lame-ass version of my rebel yell and pulled even with Breaux, who was wavering, flapping his arms like broken wings, while Nick's were pumping smoothly like pistons. Both their faces were twisted, their tortured breathing audible across the fairway.
"You've got him, Nick." I was running flat out trying to stay with him.
Neck and neck, twenty yards from the chute with Breaux not slowing, Nick's pain fused into a sense of inevitable defeat. He just couldn't outkick Breaux. He never could. Black spots floated before him in the gray air. He felt faint. My voice was hoarse from shouting. "You can take him, dammit! Don't give up!"
"Go, Nick!" Mom yelled from the finish line.
"Come on, son!" Dad yelled.
"Go, dammit, go!" Little Harper squealed, and Mom did a shocked double take.
Nick heard the cheering as from a long distance and forced his knees higher. The black spots bloomed bigger, obscuring the mouth of the chute. We were all out of focus. He heard me yell, "Breaux's fading. Now, brother! Now!" Suddenly believing he could take him, clawing deeper than ever before into the primal instinct, Nick broke through the pain and edged past Breaux into the chute. His momentum carried him a few feet more, then he nearly tumbled but caught himself and moved along like a blind drunk. I grabbed him before he fell coming out of the chute.
"I took him out!" Nick gasped.
"Yeah. You dusted him." I slapped him on the back. "I been telling you all season you could beat him." I opened my hand wide the way Dad used to when we were tiny, and said, the way he used to, "Put 'er there, pal." Nick smiled and clasped my hand.
Coach Callicot scurried over to congratulate us, and Nick, copying me as usual, said, "Thanks be to Jesus."
Breaux passed us, heading for an underfed, bony-faced girl with puffed-up blonde hair, and I called out, "Hey, coon-ass boy, best you get used to staring at the back of Nick's jersey."
"Fuck you, rich boys. Wait for track season." Breaux's chest was all bowed up.
"Hell, we ain't rich," Nick, the diplomat, said. "Just go to a rich school's all."
"That's right, Breaux. We're all bros," I called out.
"Bonjour, Monsieur Breaux," Dad said, coming up from the side. He was as tall and slender as the muscular Cajun runner whom he patted on the back. In the twenty-five years since he was a quarter-miler at Sewanee, he had run five miles at first light while saying his daily prayers.
Breaux's chest fell and he humbly shook Dad's hand. "Bonjour, Père Rutledge."
"Coon-ass Catholics have an inbred respect for clergy," I whispered to Nick as Dad inquired after Breaux's family, and I suddenly felt bad about being mean.
"My boys." Mom, a foot shorter and ten years younger than Dad, bobbed up and down, beaming like a lighthouse. "My champions. Where are your warm-ups? You'll get pneumonia."
The other runners were crowding through the chute. "Come on, Nick, let's go congratulate the losers. I'm going to miss Ford."
"Shouldn't you wait for your warm-ups?"
"Robin'll bring 'em, Mom," I said over my shoulder, placing my arm around Nick's back. "It's going to be just you and Breaux next year. You saw you can beat him today. Don't ever let him beat you again. Drive him down. That's what I did to Fode. Hell, his kick used to be twice as fast. I just beat the spirit out of him."
"The Machiavellian approach." Rubbing his arms, Nick shivered and looked around for Robin. "Where's your girlfriend? I'm freezing to death."
After a race I never felt the cold. "You're my wingman, Nick. Couldn't have a better wingman."
"I've got a better one." Nick looked straight at me. "I got the best wingman in Baton Rouge."
1989
Cage
I struggle not to see, not to hear, to hold on to the vision which melts away into red darkness. Then I open my eyes. Black water slowly swallows the sun. The beach is bathed in faint pink light and the ocean breeze combs the tall sea grass like invisible fingers through thick fur. I'm not sure how long I've been dreaming on this dune. Waves roll in endlessly, rushing back and rolling in again. Silently I pray, Where are you, Nick? Are you with me? Don't abandon me now out here on the edge of night. I'm not the boy I used to be. Can you forgive me? A falling star streaks across the paling sky. I tell him, "Little Harper's coming tomorrow, but he's all grown-up now. Bigger than you and me. He's the only one of us who's as big as Dad."
"Harper?" a soft voice whispers in the wind. "Who's Harper?" I turn and watch as her hair darkens, the lines across her forehead disappear, and the flesh beneath her chin draws taut until she's the age when she brought me into this world. "Cage, do you hear me?" the girl asks, smiling like she's about to burst out laughing.
I realize that she is the girl who gave me the acid and I cast around my head for her name. "Do you hear me?"
She laughs. "Where were you?"
"Tripping," I say.
"No shit, Sherlock. You were gone."
"Time tripping." It's too difficult to explain. "Did I tell you you look like my mother? She's very beautiful."
"That's a line."
"That's the gospel truth. Same raven hair and angelic face. Just like my mama in the full bloom of youth."
"There is something very, very wrong with you."
"And you are very, very intuitive. Where are you in school again?"
"Sarah Lawrence."
"I forgot. I'm very, very impressed."
"Let's go." She lifts a half-empty bottle of Rolling Rock, stands up, and reaches her hand down to me. "We're out."
"I like your spirit." I rise and brush the sand from my pants, then brush off her small, flat ass. She laughs and pushes my hand away. I pick her up by the waist and she tilts forward, kicking her feet and giggling as I carry her over the dune. "Were you ever a cheerleader?"
"Hell, no." She twists free.
"I dated a cheerleader in high school. A homecoming queen. I was just thinking of those provocative uniforms. Imagine dressing up the prettiest girls in tight sweaters and tiny miniskirts and having them jump up and down, bouncing their boobs and flashing their crotches at all the middle-aged dads in the crowd. It's perverse."
"Are all southern boys as crazy as you?" she asks, smiling.
I stop walking. "What do you think?"
"I hope not."
Harper
In late May after my freshman year at Tulane, I leave the South for the first time. I'm worn-out from exams and partying but too excited to sleep, since I've never been so far north and never been to an East Coast resort island. I'm nervous about going someplace full of rich Yankees who might take me for a hick but I'm also thrilled to spend time with Cage. It's just like him to get me a cool summer job. He's ten years older and has always been the ideal big brother. On the long flight from New Orleans to Boston, I remember times he took me fishing and hunting and how when I was in high school he would come to Baton Rouge nine hours from Vanderbilt in his ancient Oldsmobile just to cheer me on during championship meets, the way he would run along the field beside me, urging me to run faster. And I did. Broke the freshman half-mile record when he was driving me on. Cage is a very cool brother.
Indirectly Cage was responsible for my first sexual experience. When I was fourteen, I met him over Mardi Gras in Pensacola, where we stayed in a house with some of his college friends. We were deep-sea fishing on his friend's boat. One night a girl named Katy took me to a bar and we shot tequila. She had long curly hair and huge breasts and a really sweet smile and I could hardly believe it when she started kissing me at the bar after last call. We got in her car and she stuck her hand down my pants, the first time a girl had touched me there. I gathered up courage and unzipped her jeans and in a matter of seconds I was looking right at that object of long speculation. I'd only seen them in magazines. I didn't know what to do, so I started lapping it, my head bobbing up and down like a puppy. Suddenly she came to her senses and pushed me away. She hardly said a word to me for the rest of the week. Remembering Katy always makes me wince with humiliation and lust.
I was never close to my other brother, Nick, who was eleven months younger than Cage. He was always nice to me but we never did much together. He thought of me as his annoying little brother, a pest, not as a comrade. Nick was in grad school at Berkeley. He wanted to be an ecologist. In July it will be two years since his car crash on the Golden Gate Bridge late at night. A drunk nailed him head-on in the wrong lane. They both died. I wanted to sue the guy's insurance company but Mom and Dad said, We're not that kind of people. No one should profit from this tragedy. I had just turned seventeen. Mom and Dad were out of town on a spiritual retreat and Cage was the one who found out first. He went out and got Nick's ashes. He told me that the reports said Nick was over the limit, too, though it obviously wasn't his fault. Still, we never told Mom or Pop.
Nick crashed two months after my parents moved from Baton Rouge to Memphis, where Dad was consecrated the Episcopal bishop of Tennessee. It was the last move after six different cities. Dad's first church was a tiny one in Thebes, the farming town outside Nashville where Mom comes from. Cage was born there. Nick came along when Dad was a chaplain at Georgia Tech in Atlanta. Then the family moved back to Tennessee, Knoxville, and I was born in Bristol. We moved to Roanoke, Virginia, before I could walk and then to a big church in Baton Rouge a few years later. Mama told me that Nick, who'd been alienated in Roanoke, came out of his shell and became as popular as Cage. Nick surpassed him academically, though he never beat Cage running.
They were competitive and they were as close as two brothers could be. Nick quietly looked up to fast-talking, quick-witted Cage. To Nick, Cage was a romantic hero.
Nick's death sent Mom into a tailspin. Except for attending the small early Sunday morning service, she dropped out of all the church activities. She dropped all her charitable work. She dropped the workshops she did in inner-city schools for the botanical garden, giving children their first opportunity to grow a plant. One by one, she dropped out of everything and spent more and more time in her own garden. I'd stayed on in Baton Rouge as planned to finish my senior year at Louisiana Episcopal, living at my best friend's home in our old neighborhood, so I didn't witness much of this, but Dad told me that for a time she was sleeping through the days and gardening at night. Then, after about a year and a half, she reentered society, took up where she left off, and was as active as ever.
When Nick died, Cage was at Vanderbilt two semesters short of an M.B.A. and a law degree, a tough year-round program. He was making mainly Bs and a few As. The next semester he logged all Cs and at Christmas he announced that he was taking some time off, going to Mexico for a couple of months and then up to Nantucket, where a friend from Sewanee was going to renovate his parents' house. By the end of the summer a dozen homeowners had asked him if he would shut up their houses and open them up in spring, repairing anything that had been damaged during the winter storms. In late August he was still promising Mom and Dad that he was going back to Vanderbilt for his last semester. Then, when school was about to start, with twelve grand in the bank from Nantucket, Cage flew to Memphis and announced he was on his way to Mexico for the winter to write a novel. Mom and Dad were furious that he would jeopardize his degrees and Mom demanded that he pay them back for some of the school costs instead of heading off to surf and smoke pot.
The next day Cage caught the train to New Orleans and spent the night at a hotel in the Quarter, took me out to get drunk on hurricanes before he caught a plane for Cancún. That was the last time I saw him.
The single-engine prop plane from Boston flies through so much rain and fog that I don't glimpse the ocean until we're almost to the island. Cage isn't in the arrivals area. I check the restaurant and then wander outside and stare at the parking lot, which is empty except for an old, rusty Bronco.
"Are you lost?" says a deep bass voice from the doorway behind. Startled, I turn around expecting to see a big black guy. Cage gives me that wide, winning smile that girls always fall for. I hardly recognize him. The last time, he still resembled the clones at Vanderbilt with their short hair and oxford cloth shirts and pleated khakis. Now he looks like Indiana Jones. He has a deep tan and long, sun-bleached hair. He's wearing an earring, a leather jacket, faded blue jeans, and suede cowboy boots. He hugs me and claps me on the back. "Welcome to Nantucket."
"Damn, Cage, you look . . . different."
"I am." He winks. "And it looks like you've been burning the candle at both ends."
"Well, I'm just glad school's out for the summer."
"School's out forever." Cage strums a couple of chords in the air, then picks up one of my duffel bags and starts for the Bronco. "A girl gave me some acid yesterday. We tripped on the beach. I had some kind of memory vision. You were in it. Just a punk in your St. James uniform standing along the edge of the LSU course with Mom and Dad at the cross-country championship senior year." Cage talks rapidly, crossing the parking lot with long strides. "I typed it out last night when I was coming down. You should check it out. It's not bad. I wasn't tripping any longer, I just had so much energy I couldn't sleep. I was like Jack Kerouac banging along on my old Royal. You know what Capote said about Kerouac? That's not writing. It's typing." Cage laughs and runs his hand through his hair.
"Remember the first time I did shrooms?" I say, trying to connect. "We were hiking in the Smokies. I was fifteen. Nick was worried I would trip first with the kid who'd transferred to Episcopal from L.A., Buzz Vanderpost, and freak out, so we decided to do them together. At the last moment you changed your mind. You didn't ever want me to trip. And you and Nick started fighting by the campfire. I was afraid one of you was going to get burned."
"In the end we gave you such a small dose you didn't get off." Cage snorts, lifting the rear door of the truck open. He throws the duffel in the back, walks around to the driver side. "That was back when we suffered from the romantic delusion that psychedelics could reveal inner truth. And we listened to rock lyrics like they were poetry. Imagine looking for truth from a drug-addled pop singer." Cage climbs in the car and rests his head on the steering wheel for a moment, then turns and looks at me, and he has tears sliding down his cheeks. "I miss him, Harper. Two years now and not a single fucking day goes by when I don't mourn him."
"Y'all were close." A miserable little laugh catches in my throat. "Like brothers."
"Irish twins." He starts the car. "That's what we were --- two brothers born within a year."
The island is still cold in May. Driving from the airport toward town, we pass heath moors and cranberry bogs. The Algonquin Indians, Cage says, believed the island was made by Mashop, a mythical giant so large he could only sleep comfortably along the shore of Cape Cod. One night, restless and irritable from sand in his moccasins, he kicked one of them off. It landed not so far offshore and became Martha's Vineyard. Later in the night he kicked the other moccasin harder and it formed Natockete, "the far-off place."
The town's deserted, so we park right in front of a seafood place on the edge of the harbor. A dark-haired hostess about my age recognizes Cage when we stroll in, her blue eyes lighting up like candles.
"Charlotte, I want you to meet my little brother, just arrived from Sin City, you know, the Big Easy, Nah Ahlens." Cage drapes his arm over my shoulder. "He was working as a stripper on Bourbon Street, pulling in more money than a Nantucket plumber. His name's Harper. He's kinda shy."
Charlotte laughs. My cheeks feel hot. I mumble, "Hi."
"You can call him Long Schlong John. That's his trade name."
"Shut up, Cage." I elbow him in the ribs.
"You in college down there?" Charlotte presses two menus to her chest and leads us to a booth. "What's your major?"
"I don't know."
"Whatcha going to do with that?" She sets the menus on the table.
"Strip, I guess," I say, sitting down.
"Bring him to our next party." She smiles at Cage, touching his arm for a second. The moment she's gone, another waitress, redhaired this time and with an Irish lilt, slams down two glasses of water, puts her hands on her hips, and says, "What happened to you, Cage? I waited three hours at the Chicken Shack."
Cage just sits there smiling at her until her tight-set mouth breaks into a grin.
"Molly, sweet Molly, my leprechaun Molly, I told you I might get hung up finishing off that job 'fore the owners arrived today. This, by the by, is my little brother, Harper."
"Fair family resemblance." She studies him, then me. "You a naughty lad like your brother?"
"He's not naughty," Cage answers for me. "He's nice."
"Won't be for long under your evil influence. So what's your fancy tonight?"
Cage tilts his head and narrows his eyes.
"From the menu."
As she walks toward the kitchen, Cage says, "You're in for an exciting summer. A southern accent breaks a lot of north Atlantic ice."
"Yeah, with you as my wingman, I might --- "
For a moment Cage looks as if his eyes are tearing up. He takes a deep breath. His voice sounds far away: "What do you remember most about Nick?"
I stare at the small candle burning in an orange glass on the center of the table. "I try not to think about him but I did on the plane today. He wasn't outgoing like you. He was serious, quiet, and when he spoke, it made you pause. He was the star of the family. I struggled to make Bs and he was at the top of his class. I was always jealous. What do you remember?"
Molly sets down two mugs of beer, gives Cage a hard look, shaking her head, then walks off without a word.
"The way he used to quote poetry." Cage takes a big swallow.
"Yeah." I laugh. "He told me poetry was the best way to get in a girl's pants. He also said that there's a special place in hell for guys who use great poetry to seduce innocent girls."
"Then that's where you'll find Nick," Cage says.
"Remember that time outside Giamanco's in Baton Rouge? You said something about Claudia Parlange, remember her? Nick hit you in the face and the next moment y'all were rolling around on the parking lot. Dad whisked Mom and me into the car and drove off. We left you slugging it out. You had to walk home."
"Brothers will fight. Law of nature. But brothers ought to always back each other up, that's what Granddad used to tell us. Even over women." Cage sticks his hand across the table. His grip is strong, a carpenter's.
"I'll stick by you, Cage," I say finally.
"There was this French guy at Sewanee named Gilles du Chambure. He was a big, handsome rugby player who'd gone to a fancy school in England. He was the most dashing and sophisticated guy any of us southern boys had ever seen. I used to type papers for him." Cage is telling this to Robert Wirth, a Wall Street guy with a huge house on the beach where Cage is building a new deck. "Every girl fell for Gilles before he even opened his mouth. Then, when they heard the accent, they just about started taking off their clothes in the middle of the pub. I used to take him rock climbing and he was about the best friend I had. After college I'd get an occasional postcard from London and then Hong Kong. He was that kind of guy."
Smiling and nodding, Wirth opens another bottle of beer. Cage shoots his empty bottle across the deck into a trash can and takes the fresh one.
"So, summer after my second year in law school, Nick gets us both jobs with the forest service in Montana. We're out cutting trails and fire lines. There's one pretty girl at the headquarters named Caroline whom I'm flirting with every time we're in Missoula, and she's promising to catch a supply truck to our camp when she gets a week break toward the end of the summer. I'm marking off the days on a calendar like a prisoner." Cage shakes his head. "The idea of her arrival is the only thing that keeps me going through August. You know, it's a funny thing what deprivation will do. A girl who'd hardly turn your head on Nantucket starts to look like a goddess out in the mountains."
"I hear you." Wirth laughs.
"About two days before she's coming, I twist my ankle so badly I can't walk. I just sit in a camp chair and read and dream about Caroline." Cage stretches out on his back along a large wooden table. "The night before she's due I can't sleep, so the next day I'm napping when she calls out my name and I look up and she's standing there in the door of the tent, a vision of beauty." Cage lifts his neck and visors his forehead with one hand like he's peering through into glare. " 'Come here, Caroline, and give me a hug. I can't stand up.' " He props himself up on one elbow.
" 'God, you're a sight for sore eyes.' She comes over and kneels by my cot and gives me a hug. I'm thinking, Hallelujah, praise the Lord, the two-backed beast will be sleeping in this tent tonight. Then I look over her shoulder and who do I see standing in the doorway of the tent with a big, guilty smile on his face?"
Wirth guesses, "Nick?"
"Nah, it was someone I hadn't seen for years."
"It was Gilles." I laugh. "Fucking Gilles du Chambure." "Under normal circumstances I would have been jumping off the cot to give Gilles a hug. But all I can manage, knowing that I'll be awake again, listening to the two-backed beast moaning from a spare tent, is, 'Oh, hey. Great to see you, um, guy.' "
I look at Cage with unabashed admiration. He's obviously Mr. Popularity on the island. From the lumber stores to the inner circles, everyone's charmed by him. And while Wirth spits out a mouthful of beer, laughing at another of Cage's stories, I think this guy --- my big brother --- really has it all wired.
Excerpted from CAGE'S BEND © Copyright 2008 by Carter Coleman. Reprinted with permission by Warner Books, an imprint of Time Warner Bookmark. All rights reserved.
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