Ten Bottles and A Battle Scar
There’s something about their immortality that scares the shit out of him.
It’s not often that he calls up his younger brothers and invites them to visit, especially to his house and not the pubs in the city. He’s already had a few mugs of Keith’s by the time he gathers the courage and comes up with an excuse to lean on the wall by the phone and rack his brains for their numbers. His memory is shot for those things, and the booklet of numbers that hangs on an old wool string from a nail next to the phone has writing that’s just too damn messy - who d’hell wrode dis crap, anyway? - so he rings his little sister and bothers her for them. She sounds irritated and out of breath, and won’t tell him what she’s doing no matter how many times he asks, his forehead pressed against the grooves of the boards on the wall. He can feel the red lines and notches on his skin when he finally lifts it, and chuckles as he runs his fingers and a cold beer bottle over them. The young woman on the line gets after him for drinking, same as she has for their three hundred years of life thus far, and he chides her gently and tells her he’ll be fine and she finally reads him off the phone numbers. First he tries to punch them in, then realizes that those loud beeping noises are his own fault and he can’t dial them all at once, so he digs through the junk drawer in the kitchen for a pen, instead, and scribbles the numbers on the inside of his wrist. He thanks his sister, tells her he loves her, and hangs up.
The first to arrive brings news of those others who aren’t coming. The man says they’re too busy and too fed up with each other and they’ve got better things to do than get pissed and play a couple of games of Fourty-Eights. He frowns and tosses his brother a beer and the bottle slips from his hand, slick with ice. The shattering glass slices the unsuccessful palm right along the fingers and the blood drips, and he decides Manny makes a pretty good artist with all those splats he’s making on the wood floor, and the beer looks so sad fizzling in a big pool and he wonders if it’s okay to drink it if he uses a straw. Instead he apologises and wipes it up with a balled-up towel and his brother washes the blood down the sink, and he thinks about how his well water is going to taste like copper. They wrap up the cut fingers with a big bandage and keep wrapping it until the hand they’re connected to looks like a big mitten with finger holes, and Manny gets a new, not-broken beer and takes a swig and they fish out the cards with the Canadian flags on the back and they both know that the gashes under the bandages will be almost gone by tomorrow because that’s just how they heal and it scares him.
The second and third arrive almost an hour later, and he grins at them from behind his handful of cards and asks how they like his poker face and doesn’t say anything about the Molson’s shit they’ve brought because they don’t appreciate his beer anyway. The quieter one sets the two-four on the counter and gets himself out a mug from the wide selection in the cupboard, and the other sits on a chair backwards and peers at his brother’s cards as he’s downing his first can and doesn’t comment on the mitten-hand because he’s got his own scars to show off, like the gash at the bottom of his spine that his shirt is displaying because it’s too friggin’ short and he doesn’t tuck it in. He doesn’t know enough about history to say where the almost-butt scar came from, but he fancies his mind with wondering if it’s something that actually hit him or if it sliced into him while he was sleeping or standing or walking down the street. Ralph tells him to pay the fuck attention to the game and he throws his cards down and claims he’s winning since he actually doesn’t know, but none of these hosers know the game well enough to tell either.
It’s almost one in the morning when he decides it’d be a good idea to call his baby brother up, and his companions laugh and ask if they can say hi and Manny tells him to relay a very vulgar message that he’s not sure his tongue can handle at this point. He yells a bright hello and the boy - because he’ll always be short and pale and a little mommy’s boy in his mind - on the other end of the line curses and asks what the hell made him think it’d be okay to call him at midnight, and he replies that it’s not midnight and his time zone sucks and he should be over here because he was invited and he never even comes for tea. The boy shouts at him and all the men behind him and he holds the phone a foot away from his ear and almost cries because he remembers hasn’t just been around his brother since they were tiny and unimportant and he was still allowed to hug him. He tosses the phone at Ralph and it bounces back because it still has a cord and hits him in the nose and the men all laugh and Sask bites into his fifth beer.
When the old clock in the kitchen makes those funny dinging noises that tell them it’s almost three they try to call someone else, but the phone just whines in his ear and Ralph roars that of course the Frenchie had the sense to unplug his phone after the first invitation to come see them, and he’s leaning against the wall on the floor with his feet still in a chair because he wondered what sitting would be like if things were inverted. He slouches against the wall too and swats at the phone that followed him because it keeps dangling in front of his nose and crying like a robotic baby - waa waa waa - and Manny finally grabs it and smashes it back on the receiver and rests his head on the wallpaper. He folds his arms around his knees and Sask says it’s a good thing the kilt is facing the other way and he runs his thumb along some scars on his arms that he forgot about, and Ralph watches him and suddenly starts laughing about the time he decided to climb up one of those bigass power line things and electrocuted himself and fell a hundred and sixty feet to the ground, and didn’t breathe for a really long time until he did again. His twin brother throws a beer can at him, and it’s full, and it hits him square in the temple and Sask is crying but they’re all too tired to make fun of him and he’s covering it up with a manly swig of drink anyway.
By the time the clock decides to announce it’s actually five and not four like they had been arguing about, he’s broken into a few slurry verses of Patty Murphy and wondering why he didn’t invite Benjamin, and they’ve gone into showing off their battle scars and Manny just won’t take off his shirt and show them the slashes on his spine from the Rebellion, even though they’re all making catcalls and nudging him. Someone mentions how they drowned once and they start on natural disasters and Manny growls about floods and how his lungs like collapsing and he starts thinking about the hurricane a few years ago and how it had torn up little bits of skin all over his limbs and how he had gotten funny bald spots that they had all teased him about but probably don’t remember. His stomach hurts and when he lies down the scar stretches out and Sask finally mumbles that he doesn’t remember how many injuries he’s had and they all giggle at him but none of them really do either. He covers his eyes with his arms and asks them seriously how many hurts they remember and how old they actually are and how many times they’ve died the human way and no one can answer so they all stay quiet until the morning sun starts lighting up the room and they all fall asleep, and none of them are worried because they’re not losing any time to be alive by sleeping in all day.
But he wants to be scared of dying because it’s less scary than knowing he might never, so he gets up at seven and sits by the shore and breathes, pretending it's what's letting him live.