By the time Curtis had managed to get his brother to the muddy shore of the pond, he knew it was too late. Bryan’s eyes were open, glassy, and his face was blue. It had taken Curtis several attempts to dive to the bottom where Bryan had somehow managed to get his foot stuck in a fallen tree branch some eight feet down. Bryan had been down a few minutes already before Curtis even noticed and had stopped thrashing around after the second time Curtis went to the surface for air. Bryan was dead now, Curtis knew, as he struggled to bring them both to land.

         Bryan was sixteen, six years older than Curtis. He was a big boy, played football and lifted weights. Curtis was much smaller. It was a wonder he had managed to get his brother out of the water at all.

         Two hours before, while sitting on the back porch of their grandmother’s house, Bryan had stood and said he was going swimming in the pond on the Miller’s property.

         “Oh, no,” their grandmother protested. “That pond is full of moccasins this time of year!”

         “I’m bored just sitting here,” Bryan said. “Maybe I’ll just walk down and look around for a while.”

         Their father took his cigarette out of his mouth. “Take Curtis with you. It’ll do to get his fat ass walking a bit.” Dad had, for some time now, made the occasional observation that Curtis was sitting around too much, not getting outside, growing plump. Curtis was an average size, had not grown into his weight yet, but it didn’t seem to matter to his father, who had started calling him “fat ass” in public in hopes of shaming the boy to exercise.

         Bryan exhaled loudly. “Come on, Dad. Please.”

         Their father shook his head. “If you wanna go, take your brother.”

         Bryan said, defeatedly, “Well come on then, fat ass.”

         Their mother scolded him. “Be nice. Watch out for each other.”

         An hour later, they reached the pond, located deep in the woods of John Miller’s enormous property. Bryan began taking his shirt off. Curtis, concerned, reminded his brother of what their grandmother had told them about snakes. Bryan sat down and began removing his shoes. He had not spoken to Curtis since he had called him fat ass, had not even turned to look back at him the entire hour hike there.

         “Bryan, please don’t.”

         The older boy stood and began taking off his pants. Curtis was unsure what to do. He looked out into the water.

“How deep is it?”

         “What do you care, you pussy.”

         Curtis ignored the name-calling, happy to have the silence finally broken. “Can you stand in the middle?”

         Bryan took off his boxers and began walking towards the water. “Your fat ass will probably float.” He dove in, began leisurely swimming out.

         Curtis watched for a moment from the high, muddy embankment where the trail ended above the water. He stood up quickly but didn’t move. He took a few steps down, stopped again.

“Bryan? Bryan, how deep is it?”

         The older brother ignored him, swam out further. Eventually, about midway, he stopped swimming and treaded for a second, looked around. Curtis saw him take a deep breath and dive under. Eventually, when his brother still had not resurfaced, he called out to Bryan more and more frantically, and then he took off his shirt and shoes, stumbled down the embankment, and swam out to where he had last seen his brother.

*

Bryan, muddy, lay slumped on his right side, his legs and half his torso still partly submerged. Curtis lay next to him, retching and wheezing from the exertion. He could see his handprint on Bryan’s arm where he had grabbed hold and pulled him through the water. His handprint looked small on Bryan’s bicep.

         For the next few minutes, Curtis screamed out his brother’s name, shook him. He cried out for his mother and father, even his grandmother, though the old woman had told him she did not care for him. She treated him as an unwanted addition, a necessary but useless spare.

         Curtis looked around then, hoping to see someone coming. There was no one. No one would have heard him. No one, after such a short amount of time, would have become concerned yet. Curtis knew then that he was alone. He then thought, out of shock and panic, to run, as fast he could, away from the pond. He only managed to get about halfway up the hill before his legs gave way and he collapsed. He started crying, yelling, “Fat ass! Lazy fat ass!”

         A few more minutes passed as Curtis calmed down. He stared down the slope to the pond, where his brother still lay, perfectly still, half in the water. He stood up and walked down, took a deep breath, and grabbed Bryan’s arms.

         The first tug was hardest because Bryan’s body was in the mud and had to be worked free, slowly. Curtis slipped several times as he pulled, once falling and putting his knee into Bryan’s face. “Sorry! I’m sorry!” Curtis realized that Bryan wouldn’t say anything to him, wouldn’t hit him or hold him down and spit on him again. Bryan wouldn’t do any of that anymore, to Curtis or anyone else, ever again.

         The progress was slow. Curtis tried different techniques to pull his brother up the slope. First, he grabbed the wrists. He tried to turn the body over but was unsuccessful, so he pulled Bryan, face down, for a few feet. He decided against this then, after he noticed the older boy's open mouth gathered mud and twigs. The he tried to hug Bryan under his arms, but he wasn’t able to move him any better. Curtis sat. He listened, hopeful to hear someone coming. Nothing.

         After twenty minutes, Curtis realized that he would never be able to get the body all the way back to his grandparent’s trailer, that the path to the pond was too difficult for him. He decided, then, to just get the dead boy up to the top of the embankment, to dry ground. He thought that seeing their eldest son in the water would be too much for his mother and father, that they would think Curtis had not tried hard enough to help.

         By now, after the shock had worn off and the hard work begun, Curtis was exhausted. He wanted to give up, sit there, cry, and wait.

*

“Curtis,” his mother said from the passenger seat, “wipe your mouth.” She leaned around and handed him a napkin. He dutifully took it, wiped it across his face.

         “How much further is it?”

         “Why? Are you in a hurry to bury your brother?” His father’s voice was hard, breaking.

         Curtis’s mother began crying. “Ben, please. Please.”

         Curtis saw his father look at him in the rear view. There was anger—hate, even—in his eyes. Curtis turned away, looked out the window at the country passing by.

         The funeral had been in town, at his grandparents’ church, the church his father had grown up in. The preacher gave a sermon from the book of James, standing over the young man’s casket, informing the weeping audience that life was but vapor, appearing and vanishing, that all should be prepared to answer to God at any moment.

         The preacher went on to suggest that Bryan had lived a life worthy of facing an angry God, that there was no doubt in his mind that Bryan, even now, looked down upon the people there from a heavenly perch.

         Curtis sat next to his wailing mother, remembering Bryan’s last words, calling him a pussy and a fat ass, wondering whether he should have told his parents, wondering if the preacher knew anything about anyone.

         After the service, after the lines of people all crying and hugging Curtis and his mother and father, after they had eaten all the casseroles brought by aunts and friends and Bryan’s teachers, they watched a few men load the casket into a hearse, got into their own car, and began driving to the family cemetery, some forty minutes away.

         The ride was, understandably, quiet. Other than his mother telling him to wipe some cream of mushroom off his face, no one spoke. Curtis had wondered why his father had not accepted the several offers men had given to drive the family so that the three remaining members could comfort each other. Curtis assumed his father didn’t want to be comforted. There was no other good reason he could imagine.

         The drive consisted of his father gripping the wheel until his knuckles were discolored, smoking, and repeating. His mother, still stunned at what was happening, would occasionally bury her head in her hands and moan her son’s name. Curtis sat in the backseat, watched the cedar breaks and live oaks fly by, adjusted his clip-on necktie, and tried to stay awake.

* 

The graveside service was only for closest family: Curtis, his parents, his Uncle Mike, two cousins, and his grandparents. The preacher was there as well, though Curtis didn’t understand why and had no one to ask.

         The hearse parked as near the grave as was possible and opened its back door. Six men were required to carry it through the cemetery. Curtis’s father, Uncle Mike, Mike’s sons, both college students, and the two gravediggers all lined up and took a place on the handles as the box slid out. The men had only taken a few steps when one of the gravediggers, holding the right front corner, fell. Behind him, in the middle, was Curtis’s cousin Joel, who tried valiantly to maintain his footing but caught his foot on the now prone gravedigger’s torso and fell as well. They all fell, one by one, Curtis’s father last, crying out “no, no, no” as he tried to hold the entire weight himself at Bryan’s head. His mother wailed the way Curtis imagined a hurt dog must as she fell to the ground. The grandparents began rushing to the scene from the graveside—everyone except the useless preacher, now praying again, though Curtis couldn’t imagine what for.

         Curtis had not cried since he had fallen asleep on the pond’s embankment, his big brother halfway up, face down in the mud. He had not cried when his father and mother and grandmother accused him of not helping Bryan, had not cried when the man from the coroner’s office asked him to describe exactly what had happened. He was stoic for the days leading up to the funeral and at the funeral as well. But now, seeing the chaos unfold around him, seeing his father try to move his big brother off the ground, his grandmother screaming into the sky in heartache, he felt the tears finally come.

         He was still crying when he began laughing, pointing at the fallen casket, and the bedlam all around. The tears stopped as he laughed, screaming, “Fat ass! Fat ass!” at all of them.

*