Little Brother

The couch was made up with a grimy sheet and a couple of greasy pillows and the cushions had a dented, much-slept-upon look.

We all stood there for a long silent moment, embarrassment overwhelming every other emotion. Darryl’s father looked like he wanted to die.

Slowly, he moved aside the sheets from the sofa and cleared the stacked, greasy food-trays off of a couple of the chairs, carrying them into the kitchen, and, from the sound of it, tossing them on the floor.

We sat gingerly in the places he’d cleared, and then he came back and sat down too.

“I’m sorry,” he said vaguely. “I don’t really have any coffee to offer you. I’m having more groceries delivered tomorrow so I’m running low —”

“Ron,” my father said. “Listen to us. We have something to tell you, and it’s not going to be easy to hear.”

He sat like a statue as I talked. He glanced down at the note, read it without seeming to understand it, then read it again. He handed it back to me.

He was trembling.

“He’s —”

“Darryl is alive,” I said. “Darryl is alive and being held prisoner on Treasure Island.”

He stuffed his fist in his mouth and made a horrible groaning sound.

“We have a friend,” my father said. “She writes for the Bay Guardian. An investigative reporter.”

That’s where I knew the name from. The free weekly Guardian often lost its reporters to bigger daily papers and the Internet, but Barbara Stratford had been there forever. I had a dim memory of having dinner with her when I was a kid.

“We’re going there now,” my mother said. “Will you come with us, Ron? Will you tell her Darryl’s story?”

He put his face in his hands and breathed deeply. Dad tried to put his hand on his shoulders, but Mr Glover shook it off violently.

“I need to clean myself up,” he said. “Give me a minute.”

Mr Glover came back downstairs a changed man. He’d shaved and gelled his hair back, and had put on a crisp military dress uniform with a row of campaign ribbons on the breast. He stopped at the foot of the stairs and kind of gestured at it.

“I don’t have much clean stuff that’s presentable at the moment. And this seemed appropriate. You know, if she wanted to take pictures.”

He and Dad rode up front and I got in the back, behind him. Up close, he smelled a little of beer, like it was coming through his pores.

#

It was midnight by the time we rolled into Barbara Stratford’s driveway. She lived out of town, down in Mountain View, and as we sped down the 101, none of us said a word. The high-tech buildings alongside the highway streamed past us.

This was a different Bay Area to the one I lived in, more like the suburban America I sometimes saw on TV. Lots of freeways and subdivisions of identical houses, towns where there weren’t any homeless people pushing shopping carts down the sidewalk — there weren’t even sidewalks!

Mom had phoned Barbara Stratford while we were waiting for Mr Glover to come downstairs. The journalist had been sleeping, but Mom had been so wound up she forgot to be all British and embarrassed about waking her up. Instead, she just told her, tensely, that she had something to talk about and that it had to be in person.

When we rolled up to Barbara Stratford’s house, my first thought was of the Brady Bunch place — a low ranch house with a brick baffle in front of it and a neat, perfectly square lawn. There was a kind of abstract tile pattern on the baffle, and an old-fashioned UHF TV antenna rising from behind it. We wandered around to the entrance and saw that there were lights on inside already.

The writer opened the door before we had a chance to ring the bell. She was about my parents’ age, a tall thin woman with a hawk-like nose and shrewd eyes with a lot of laugh-lines. She was wearing a pair of jeans that were hip enough to be seen at one of the boutiques on Valencia Street, and a loose Indian cotton blouse that hung down to her thighs. She had small round glasses that flashed in her hallway light.

She smiled a tight little smile at us.

“You brought the whole clan, I see,” she said.

Mom nodded. “You’ll understand why in a minute,” she said. Mr Glover stepped from behind Dad.

“And you called in the Navy?”

“All in good time.”

We were introduced one at a time to her. She had a firm handshake and long fingers.

Her place was furnished in Japanese minimalist style, just a few precisely proportioned, low pieces of furniture, large clay pots of bamboo that brushed the ceiling, and what looked like a large, rusted piece of a diesel engine perched on top of a polished marble plinth. I decided I liked it. The floors were old wood, sanded and stained, but not filled, so you could see cracks and pits underneath the varnish. I really liked that, especially as I walked over it in my stocking feet.

“I have coffee on,” she said. “Who wants some?”

We all put up our hands. I glared defiantly at my parents.

“Right,” she said.

She disappeared into another room and came back a moment later bearing a rough bamboo tray with a half-