Killing Bryce
Tom Bradley

St. Patrick's Day
Los Angeles, California


Bramley Cross is a sunny residential lane, so quiet that it seems to sigh when each rush hour takes place on the distant freeway viaducts. There is a two-room apartment, beige stucco, balanced on top of a tilted carport on Bramley Cross, and this apartment smells mildewy because a baby lives there. The baby, a boy, is asleep and snoring beneath an open window in the back. He is developing a diaper rash clear down to his dark knees because the mother is out of town.

Two enormous brothers-in-law (also distant cousins) are seated in the sitting room, facing each other from opposite corners. The older and smaller of the two is Bryce Barkdull: twenty-six years of age, over two hundred unemployed pounds of pure muscle and confusion. He has just finished delivering the pat lecture he always delivers to newly arrived out-of-staters, concerning the similarities between the squatty palm tree outside his window and southern California itself, in its entirety.

"Both of them are ugly and useless," he has just sputtered in somebody else's idiom. "Both seem like exotic stuff to your typical middle-American. But look. This god-damned thing doesn't even make cool shade."

There are thumb smudges on the windowpane where Bryce has been pounding for emphasis. In the sunlight they are yellow as the tree's collar of dead fronds. The apartment is cooled by a small aluminum air conditioner lodged in the bottom half of that window, purchased secondhand with State of California unemployment checks, belying his analogy.

He is evidently uncomfortable in the presence of the visitor. It is as if he feels a certain weakness too embarrassing to admit. Through all his blustering, Bryce's eyes betray something vaguely heartening to the larger, younger man.

Samuel Edwine sits in a scratchy overstuffed armchair across the room. He is a musician, a quarter of a century old, six feet, nine inches tall and obese. His skin is cold and damp, his eyes unfocusable, his mind enervated and throbbing with Benzedrine plus a single fixed notion.

Sam has come to Bramley Cross Lane, all the way from London, with the intention of precipitating a family crisis. Maybe, if he can muster the balls and keep his attention fixed on his anger, he will gradually provoke a fistfight, then kill his brother-in-law in self-defense by crushing his head with a lamp or something.

This is because, in Sam's possibly distorted opinion, the large person seated opposite him is responsible for his mother being locked in a psychiatric institution for the third and probably final time of her life. There are other complaints, but that one happens to be paramount at the moment.

Bryce hammers back a de-caf Coke as if it were a beer, holds it up at a studiedly pugnacious angle, inhaling and making guzzling noises for a few moments. Then he lowers his thick blond forearm and says, too casually, "So, how's England?"

Sam sneers, turns his gaze to the east window. His eyes squint, puffy and painful in the sun. His concentration subsides for a moment. An image of a hocked banjo appears in his mind, along with one or two scintillating, Europeanesque phrases.

* * * *

So, how's England, indeed. The only thing that made the place livable for him was his sooty old banjo. And he hocked it.

Underneath all that appropriate soot was a fabulous banjo. An Epiphone, custom-made extra large and fine especially for Sam. It was eight hundred dollars, much better quality than any other busker's instrument (poor slobs), and he flaunted it high upon his gut. It had been a present from his mom on his tenth birthday, way back in his boyhood's America.

In one of her quasi-fugue states his mom had taken him to a franchised music store where they mostly sold Magnavox Home Entertainment Centers. Strung along one wall in the back had been a few extremely shiny trumpets and clarinets. And that's where Mrs. Edwine had led her Sammy, wanting to provide him with the mollification of playing beautiful music with his mouth.

After ten years she still had fresh in mind the sad hours she'd spent nursing her huge, lipless infant through a syringe, shedding tears because Nature had deprived her boy of the one activity which babies love most. And, of course, in her view, she'd been partly responsible: she'd helped Nature along by allowing gestation to take place downwind of nuclear testing sites. Unworthy is what Sam's mom sometimes felt in certain moods: generalized unworthiness. Sammy was her only weak point, and music her only field of ignorance.

So, on birthday number ten, after swinging by the credit union, Mom had yielded to the authority of the half-asleep sales clerk behind the wind instrument counter. She inquired, if her boy could have his pick of any he wanted, what instrument would best suit Sammy's double harelip (repaired)?

The clerk, evidently hung over, had looked slowly up and down at the six-foot-tall child delivered up before him, and had mumbled, "Banjo."

If banjo it was, then fabulous banjo it had to be: customized with inappropriate mother-of-pearl squiggles and squirrels all up and down everywhere, and real secret Freemason symbols on the neck. It was almost physically painful to look at, it was so beautiful. Nevertheless, part of the obligatory game had been for Sam to pretend all these fifteen years that he hated his banjo. He'd left it behind at home. A cousin had secretly shipped it to him once he'd gotten situated at Herne Hill in unfashionable South London.

Somehow, from the way he made his banjo ring through the yellow tile tunnels of London's underground transit system, it was evident that this was exactly where this music belonged, as it were, and Samuel Edwine with it, evident that he'd taught himself to think and to feel and to play inextricably, all at once, down inside of another, similar place underground.

In a basement dug in a salt desert somewhere remote, pipes and heating ducts dangling like stalactites overhead. On a street called Dimple Dell Drive, where he'd spent his formative years lying flat on his back, staring up at the ceiling.

He'd plucked his banjo, or remained otherwise self-absorbed, during the string of nights immediately preceding his mom's first stint in the locked ward, when she lay upstairs in the living room, swamped with barbiturates and bourbon, moaning soft comatose secrets.