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By Root 258 0

tell myself that Gaylen was not as bad as the people he pondered. I told myself he was studying evil so he would not commit it himself—that if he allowed himself to entertain horrible crimes in his mind, then he would not have to perform them in his life. Maybe I was right, because Gaylen’s reported crimes never amounted to very much— petty thievery and bad checks were about as bad as he got. That, plus a bad habit of fucking his best friends’ wives. I’d like to think Gaylen was too moral or concerned ever to murder somebody, or commit the sort of act of ruin that forever costs another person his or her hope or happiness. And, since he apparently never did commit such acts, I’d like to think it’s because the better part of him won out. Or, if Gaylen did ever pull off the perfect crime, then he also found a way to keep quiet about it— though I think he was probably too much of a drunk to stay quiet about any such thing for long.

I guess I’m not making him seem too appealing here. In truth, Gaylen was a charming, funny, incredibly bright and talented person—easily the best writer the family produced. But Gaylen also had a mean and fairly ruthless side to him, and as far as I can tell, both his good and ugly parts emerged from the same place in his heart. Gaylen wanted the importance and sanction he had once known in childhood, when my father had treated him with love and favor. When the love between them became contorted into hatred, all of Gaylen’s internal reality got upended. The person he had loved most now regularly hurt him in shameless and cruel ways. Such a twist in the world might not only cause you to hate the person you once loved—it might even be enough to make you want to hate and mock the signs and values of love itself.

In any event, crime and darkness weren’t Gaylen’s only obsessions. True, he dreamed of monsters, but he also dreamed of a love that might help him rise above himself. I know, because I saw both the monsters and the hope in the poems that he eventually wrote. Gaylen’s poetry was really something—it spoke about devastation as both choice and fate, about being on life’s outside, headed for a self-willed, expiatory inferno, and it was full of passionate rhythms and startling turns of phrase. Gaylen was proud of the two hundred or so poems he had written, but then one night, when a bitter fight with the woman he loved had resulted in her walking out on him, he opened up a bottle of peppermint schnapps and sat up into the dark hours of morning reading his poems, one after the other. When he was done, he poured the remainder of the schnapps on his sheaf of poems and set them on fire, swearing he would never write another poem until the woman loved him again and he could write something worthy of her. Later, as Gaylen died his painful death, the woman sat beside him in the hospital. When the nurse cleaned out my brother’s nightstand, she found a scribbled poem that Gaylen had been working on, about the difficulties of an impossible love—the last thing he ever wrote. Its opening lines were: “A story can’t be told/Until a story’s done.”

BUT I’M GETTING TOO FAR ahead of things here. Gaylen’s troubles seemed to begin when he was about twelve or thirteen and he started cutting school, sneaking off to hang out in Johnson Creek’s woods with other truant kids. Like Gary, he took to dressing in motorcycle jackets and tried adopting the looks of James Dean and Elvis Presley. (Later, when Gaylen lost his weight, he sometimes looked a good deal like a younger Elvis.) He also took to smoking and drinking. More upsetting to my father, though, was when Gaylen began stealing. Stealing, like drinking, became one of Gaylen’s constants. If my father left any money on his desk or in his pants, Gaylen would take it and then lie about the theft. If he saw something he wanted in a store—a sharp-looking model car, say, or a stylish sport shirt—he would look for a way to lift the item without being caught. If that wasn’t possible, he’d take something from around our home and sell it to a pawnshop. My mother lost many of