Ian

He was a little shit, no question. Large hazel eyes with long, dark lashes, and heavy black hair across his pale impish face. Almost beautiful, his face holds a measure of angelic charm, but anger seeps through the pores of his skin.
When holding his sister down in the upper hallway, and pressing her cheek into the blue and green shag carpet, his eyes gleam with an almost religious fervor. He pushes her arm higher, and holds it behind her back. Tender skin twists over bones and muscles, blood rising, welts appearing.
The tears on her face, the screams in the air. I sat in the room nearby, hand to my mouth, watching this classic scene through the open door, an older (though not the oldest) brother picking on a the youngest sister. A not-so-little girl whose pudgy form provided a soft seat for this twisting torture. She was my so-called friend, two years older than I.
I dash past the scene, down the shag-covered stairs. Stairs that often, in the right sleeping bags, provided an improvised slalom. One at a time -- sometimes head first, sometimes on our butts, fast and exciting. We yelled, pleased by the sounds of our voices bouncing in time with our behinds -- until we hit the wall at the bottom, and tried to crawl into the pantry at the left, or the kitchen on the right, before the next sledder crashed down on top. Sometimes we didn’t make it in time, and the people pile at the bottom of the stairs would become a mass of squirming limbs encased in slippery sleeping bag fabric. Our yells of “Get off!” and “Move it, you cow!” reaching a frantic pitch as our hands pushed to clear space on our crowded landing pad.
Sometimes we’d race in those bags, Heather and I. She almost always beat me, the drag of her extra pounds overcome by the extra momentum they gave her. At the bottom we would turn back and struggle to climb the stairs. Worm-like, our feet still in the bags, we’d lose our footing and slide giggling back to the bottom, rug burns on our elbows.
In no mood for sledding, I enter the kitchen that night, looking for help. The table is covered with empty Budweiser cans, ZigZag papers, matchbooks, a heaping ashtray in the center like some kind of altar. The leavings of people who didn’t care anymore. Smoke hangs heavy in the air, afternoon light comes through the side door. Talking over Heather’s screaming, the adults trade their latest tidbits back and forth across the table, savoring the taste of our town’s misery, soothing their own like menthol on bitter tobacco.
Barbara sits, the years hanging on her like weights; they drag down her arms, her skin, her breasts, her mascara-circled eyes, the black heavy on her lids. After five children and a divorce, I wondered, had she ever been attractive? She sits on a cheap old kitchen table chair, the naugahyde cracked, pinching her unprotected legs. I cast my eyes down, avoided her tiredness, her naked irritation with the world.
But before, while laying in the living room, in one of the sleeping bags I rode down the stairs, I looked up at the TV -- I knew it was too late to worry about innocence. The voice on TV is muffled by a mask, but I knew he wasn’t Gene Kelly, and there was no rain. The images are just pictures flashing through my mind. I had no vocabulary for these sights and sounds. At age five I know, consciously, that if I continue to watch this I’ll change somehow.
I rested my head down on the pillow, and gazed at the faces focused in on the TV. Anitra, Ian, and Heather all stare, the flicker reflected in their eyes. They lapped up the stream of strangeness, of oddity and twisted metaphor. Their starved psyches are like dry kitchen sponges, flat, rough, easy to break. They soaked in the images, absorbing them like a puddle of orange juice on the linoleum.
When I last saw the house it was a skeleton, stripped inside and out, with only a roof left. I thought that soon no one would remember all that went on in that house. I smiled.
A lull in the conversation when I enter. A tired look, a glance up the stairs. “Do I need to come up there?” she wheezes mechanically in the direction of the stairs, blowing a puff of gray air (she exhaled no other kind, it seemed) over my head. A dutiful “No, Mom” returns in chorus, satisfying her, and she turns back to her gossip, cigarettes and beer.
I want to scream at her to make them stop. I want to scream at her, I want her to stop it all.
Upstairs I know that he is still sitting on her, holding her mouth closed, whispering threats in her ear. Making sweet promises of the pain he’ll inflict, if she doesn’t keep her fucking mouth shut. His practiced whisper, breath warming her ear, makes her feel sick to her stomach.
I’ve seen it before. He is unpredictable. When Ian comes into a room, I never know if he will be nice or torturous. He sits at the boiling point, triggered by the lightest breeze of irritation.
Once while we stood outside, he ran at her from behind, arms outstretched, a horrible look of enjoyment on his pale face. In my mind he is still in mid-flight about to jump. His body is flying over the garden lounge chair, his arms about to close over her shoulders, and push her to the ground. I can never bring myself to warn her. I know if I tell her, he’ll come after me. Secretly I also think that she deserves what she gets sometimes, that night especially. She had practiced her version of his torture on me earlier.
The moment of frozen attack passes and her face changes to terror. She crashed to the ground. He dug his knees into her sides, held her down. In that moment I’m sorry I ever believed she deserved this.
Not her first attack, and certainly not her last.
But tonight I focus on the linoleum, the divorcee’s cherry red toenails, a stark contrast to the black soles of her worn flip-flop shoes. I raise my face, looking at her tired profile, her short, badly-dyed “red” hair -- the bitchy Lucille Ball look. She feels my stare, turns and looks at me, no sympathy in her dark eyes. Survival of the fittest, they say to me.
I look at the clock and turn back. At this moment, although I might wish her ill sometimes, I feel unable to leave this house, unable to abandon Heather. But I must. Time to go. The stairs stretch before me, the teal and blue shag carpet combed over the edges.
As I slowly pad up the stairs, her silent sobbing is tangible in the atmosphere of the upper landing. Glossy pages turn, crackling with static. I steal a quick glance, over the top edge of the stairwell. His room -- plastered with posters, no windows. The converted closet is his lair underneath the eaves. He assumes a casual air, peering through the comic book, and I know to show no fear.
His deep blue t-shirt shows off the sinister beauty of his pale skin, which glistens with anger. His anger bounces off the slick surfaces of the girlie and car posters, seeping out of the doorway, staining the carpet. Anger at his parent’s divorce, at his sister, at the world.
A year or two down the road, we go camping out at Goblin Valley and explored the twisted, bulbous shapes of the rocks. He had discovered puberty by then, and was convinced that all the formations were sexual. “Cock rock” sat above our campsite, “Tittyville” to the left after entering the park, and whenever there was a hole in a rock he pretended to fuck it. He sniggered and said that he hasn’t found quite the right “cunt” formation yet, but, “all in good time.” A dirty old man at 13, he had already surpassed all of my expectations for his potential
I crouch down, and ease past the closet, toward her doorway. Heather is crying now, softly. She’s the only one he can pick on, the only one who is soft enough to take his anger. She picks on me in turn, the closest thing to a little sister she has.
Heather sits with her back to me, gazing out of the window. I know she feels betrayed by her family. Her mom cares only that the house is quiet, not about what goes on in the silence. Fading dusk turns her room a pale violet. The Scholastic poster of a kitten on the wall is her only decoration. My toes feel the bumps in the carpet, buried artifacts of child’s play. A Lego, a penny, an impossibly delicate blue Barbie doll shoe, crumbs, dirty band-aids.
She won’t speak, so I gather my doll clothes, and pack them away. A blue and white polka-dot Barbie dress, my favorite, is on her doll. I strip her naked, taking it back. Heading back downstairs, the laughter in the kitchen boils up, hurting my ears. The pink plastic handle on the doll case squeaks as I step quietly down the familiar stairs. I hope to exit before Ian reawakens. They don’t even notice as I walk by, my bare feet picking up tiny motes of dust and crumbs off the smooth kitchen floor.
On the front steps, I wait for my mother to come and take me away. The town stretches before me, cottonwoods, umbrella willows, and the one huge old oak that towers above all the small houses. The sun has dropped behind the red rock cliffs, leaving the town in deep lavender shadow, the sky still carrying the colors of sunset, warm pastels illuminating the mountains behind town.
I hear the rumbling muffler on our old Ford Falcon, before it noses into the driveway. I run to the car, welcoming my mother’s smiling face as she leans over and opens the door to me.