The Bad Angel Brothers Read online

  Dedication

  To Sheila

  Epigraph

  I had to admit that to me each person’s worst instinct seemed the most sincere.

  —André Gide, The Immoralist

  A brother is as easily forgotten as an umbrella.

  —James Joyce, Ulysses

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Part One: Two Lunches 1: The Rejection Ritual

  Part Two: Brotherhood 2: Parallel Lives

  3: The Black Creek

  4: Little Miss Muffat

  5: The Rescue

  6: Free Gold

  7: Tower House

  8: Nonattachment

  9: Diversification

  10: Vita

  11: Homecoming

  12: The Soul of Kindness

  13: Pro Bono

  14: Risk and Reward

  15: The Geology of Home

  16: The Compass

  17: Mother

  18: Another Path

  19: Junior Wife

  20: Shalapo

  21: The Quest for Cobalt

  22: The Bush Track to the Border

  23: Roadblocks

  24: Scavengers

  Part Three: The Bad Angel Brothers 25: Fracture and Cleavage

  26: Monologues

  27: A Fart in a Mitten

  28: Inclusions

  29: The Refuge Chamber

  30: Ipsissima Verba, You Asshole!

  31: Holidays

  32: Billable Hours

  33: An Act of Purification

  34: Justifiable Fratricide

  35: Cornered

  Part Four: The Last Lunch 36: Scarred for Life

  About the Author

  Also by Paul Theroux

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Part One

  Two Lunches

  1

  The Rejection Ritual

  You’re seldom suspicious when you’re happy, and so I didn’t realize that the whole awful business was about to start when Vita said, “It’s been ages since you had lunch with Frank. Why don’t you two grab a bite?”

  Whenever Frank was asked a question he hated to answer he’d say, “Look in the mirror and ask yourself that.” I was tempted today, but I smiled at my lovely wife, while I contemplated my hateful brother.

  As the kind of lawyer he was, Frank had a whopper license, and it helped, because he told awfully long, rather dubious stories. It was sometimes the same story, or nearly so. Now and then it was one I had told him, and he later told it back to me, inserting himself, with embellishments, not remembering it was mine. Talkers who repeat themselves pay no attention to their listeners—they’re at an imaginary podium, waving their arms, broadcasting to a crowd, and are usually themselves bad listeners, if not completely deaf. Many people found Frank’s stories amusing, others called him a bore, and said, “How do you stand him?”

  He’s a high-functioning asshole, I wanted to say, but instead, to be noncommittal, “He’s my big brother.” I was not a talker. I was the elusive brother, the geologist, who’d left home to be a rock hunter, and an adventurer in the extractive industries.

  Yet I was often fascinated by Frank’s stories. You don’t have to like someone to listen. When I was in the mood, I heard him repeat them, noting how he changed them in the telling, what he left in, what he omitted, the exaggerations, the irrelevancies, the new details, the whoppers.

  The nun who caught him smoking. In one version she told him to confess it as a mortal sin and lingered outside the confession box to hear him bare his soul to the priest. In another, she forced him to kneel on a broomstick a whole day as punishment. In the one I liked best, the nun handed him his unsmoked half pack of cigarettes and made him eat them. But I knew that because of wheezy lungs Frank had never smoked.

  The one about his being brutally murdered in Florida by a drug gang, his bullet-riddled body discovered in a Miami mansion, his face mangled beyond recognition. Our parents got the call, on a weekend when Frank was on vacation, and they were devastated. Turned out, the man had Frank’s stolen passport on him. A great story, but untrue.

  Another: his saving the life of my high school friend, Melvin Yurick, whom he’d found bleeding at a campsite in the local woods, Yurick having gashed his hand with a hunting knife. In Frank’s telling, by rescuing Yurick he’d altered the course of history, because later Yurick became a billionaire, as a pioneer innovator in digital media. The story was mine—it was I, hiking with Yurick, who’d stanched the blood on his gashed hand and helped him home. The part about Yurick becoming a billionaire was true, though.

  I listened to know Frank better, because even as a child I found him tricky, cruel, dangerous, and unreliable, as well as (people can sometimes be their opposites) direct, kindly, reassuring, and helpful. There was so much of Frank, and he was so contradictory, the whole of him so overwhelming, I had to deal with him in pieces. Although he made a convincing enough pretense of being my friend, I knew he didn’t like me.

  He was a local hero, Frank Belanger Esq., Injury Law, a successful attorney in our town of Littleford. Because of our name (school kids are such mockers of names), we Belanger brothers were known as the Bad Angel brothers. Frank was a tough opponent but a good ally, very wealthy from the accumulation of contingency fees from personal injury and medical malpractice suits. Whiplash windfalls, he called them. He made no secret of his ambition, crowing to me when we were kids, I want to be so rich I can shit money! He defended wounded, usually poor people; so justice was money, punishment was money, reward was money, morality was money, love was money. His admiring clients quoted his well-known remark, with approval, I bite people on the neck for a living.

  He’d plagiarized that, and other wisecracks, from a ruthless lawyer he’d worked for, named Hoyt. I was no match for Frank’s sarcasm and his competitive nature, or his killer instinct. I had left home to escape his shadow. My work as a geologist kept me away, at first in the West, then in the wider world, a spell in Africa, later—my cobalt years—in the Northwest. Earlier, when I married Vita, I bought a house in town and returned more and more frequently as my mother aged and was cheered by visits. Vita, who’d grown up in the unregulated sprawl and improvisation of South Florida, found the solidity and order of New England a reassurance. And this was also a chance for our son, Gabe, to attend my old high school and be a Littleford Lion.

  Usually, when he heard I was in town, Frank insisted on our meeting for lunch, always at the Littleford Diner—he’d once owned a part interest in “the spoon,” as he sometimes called it, short for “the greasy spoon.” If I was free I tended to agree, because seeing him, hearing his stories, I was able to gauge the temperature of our relationship. Family members have a special untranslatable language, of subtle gestures, finger play, winks and nods, little insults, odd allusions and needling words, that are devastating within the family yet mean nothing to an outsider.

  But when Vita urged me to have lunch with him, I smiled—and equivocated. And a few days later I said flatly no, because of the way Frank himself asked in an e-mail, framing it as a demand, putting Lunch in the subject line, with the date and time, and the message, Be there.

  I had left home to avoid orders like this. Mineral prospecting and exploration could be frustrating and expensive—I had started out with an old van and a dirt bike, taking samples of gravel from dry riverbeds in the Arizona desert, testing them for surface gold. I liked the freedom, and now and then I hit pay dirt. Early on, I was a one-man company, so I could do as I wished, and later with money acquired technology and dug deeper. In the years when I traveled internationally I specialized in in
dustrial diamonds in Australia and emeralds in Colombia and Zambia. My contracts were sometimes with major conglomerates, which helped develop the claims, but even at my busiest I was never subjected to any rigorous oversight. My success rate spoke for itself, I was trusted by the companies that hired me, and if I happened to be given orders, they were tactfully phrased. No one in the extractive industry ever loomed over me and said, Be there.

  As a child I was given commands by my father, and when he died, Mother was the order giver. Now that she was fading, it seemed that Frank had begun to be the dominant one in the family.

  I disliked his insistence, his barking an order, so I did not reply to this lunch invitation. I was well aware that my silence would annoy him, since he was used to being listened to and, more than that, obeyed, always getting his way.

  I was in my study, at my desk when Vita pushed open the door and said, “Got a minute?”

  This is always for me a daunting question, but it was especially worrying that day. Vita and I had been going through a marital transition. It had begun when I formed a mining company to conduct an extensive search in Idaho for a source of cobalt—ethical cobalt as opposed to the free-for-all in the Congo, small children sitting in mud in remote Kolwezi, clawing at ore-bearing sludge. The Idaho search area was vast, the high-tech equipment others had trained on it had been expensive. This is not the place to describe nuclear magnetic resonance imagery or satellite technology in prospecting, but these had been used, without finding the coppery deposits that indicate a source of cobalt.

  I knew the area, I had prospected nearby in my early dirt-bike days; the landscape had distinctive features and a morphology—a shapeliness, an attitude—I could read. More telling than that, I could sense it: some ores have a distinct taste and smell, their presence pulses in the ambient air and can be pinned down in the word geologists often use, its facies—the gestalt of complex rock formations. I was away for months and the result was a deposit that would lead in time to the most productive cobalt mine in the United States. Riches: cobalt is the essential element in the battery of every smartphone, every computer, every electric car, every gizmo.

  My success also signaled a crisis in my marriage. In recent years, with each of my prospecting trips—trips I had taken all my married life—Vita had drawn away. Before the cobalt strike I’d been in the Zambian Copperbelt, pioneering the mining of high-quality emeralds. I was gone for months at a time and on each home leave saw a growing distance between Vita and me; with her objecting more and more to my absences, I knew I’d have to work to regain her trust. What made this hard was that, although I always returned, I made the mistake of the committed—the single-minded, the selfish—traveler, who regards travel as a mission. I stopped coming all the way back. I was distracted by a new venture. Having seen the exploitation of children mining cobalt in the Congo—a subject that Vita herself was outraged by, as a board member of the agency Rescue/Relief—I became involved in the mining of ethical cobalt in Idaho.

  Then something unexpected happened. Vita did not scold me for being away. She said she happened to be preoccupied, she clucked and went about her business; and if you were outside this marriage looking in you’d feel all was more or less well, because so little was said, two busy people, life returning to normal, no raised voices, the marriage ticking away.

  But that ticking, which was in fact a silence, something like acceptance, was ominous. It seemed to indicate that we were too far apart to talk—not a peaceful silence but a shadow of distrust, and now I felt our marriage was hollow and unrepairable.

  I didn’t have another woman. I had work and prospects. My business was booming—I was content. But I was alone.

  No anger, no yelling. It was not hatred, because hatred is passion, and passion means caring. It was worse than hatred. She was indifferent and loveless. She simply didn’t care.

  I had returned home to find a different Vita. She reminded me that she had asked me not to take the Idaho contract, that she was (as she put it) “perimenopausal,” and hadn’t I been away long enough in our marriage? I told her that although I constantly referred to what I did as “my work,” I did not regard it as work. I loved being active, I enjoyed the challenges of being outdoors—of bad roads and tent camps—hauling technical equipment into the wilderness, to locate a mother lode. It was treasure hunting, involving risk and expense. And my months of diligent prospecting in Idaho had paid off.

  Vita was not impressed. I said, “It wasn’t easy—I missed you.”

  “I told myself you were dead. I got on with my life.”

  “The strike was huge,” I said. I never uttered the word cobalt or said that substance was in high demand as the essential metal in every serious battery on earth. I never mentioned how much money I was making. I explained that my contract included a sharing clause. It meant I had to make a personal investment on the front end, but I would profit on the back end, if we were successful.

  And so it happened. It was still early but the cash flow was considerable, which was the reason I could go home more frequently. But I had stayed away too long. I came home to a different house, to a wife I scarcely recognized, and—sadly—one who scarcely recognized me. I could see the upset in Gabe, obviously torn. Vita had worked on him. He was different, too—sad, confused, watchful and, when I tried to hug him, squirming out of my grasp. The worst of it was that he had been accepted to law school, and I could not share his joy.

  My great strike in Idaho, Vita now a wealthy wife, and successful in her own career, Gabe on the Dean’s List—three great developments. I felt we had every reason to be happy.

  That was the situation when Vita pushed the door open and said, “Got a minute?”

  I happened to be busy mapping a further Idaho claim, but I put it aside because of this delicate time and said, “Sure. Have a seat.”

  “I’ll stand.” She folded her arms.

  “What’s on your mind?”

  “Did you get a message from Frank?”

  I smiled, hearing her speak his name, because whenever I heard it I was on my guard.

  “Yes, a week ago, after you suggested it, he e-mailed me about lunch.”

  “You didn’t reply.”

  “I’m—ah—crafting a response,” I said. It was a typical Frank expression, like his others, In this fashion and At this juncture and I’m thinking it over mentally. Then I said, “How do you know I didn’t reply?”

  “He’s waiting.”

  “Okay—I’ll tell him. I’m not going. I’ve heard enough from him.”

  “You really ought to go, Cal.”

  I remembered his message: Be there. And Vita was repeating this command, punctuating it with my name.

  As a geologist in seismic locations I knew that shaky ground was something actual, and undesirable, and often dangerous. I’d just had another great commercial success, but I’d returned to uncertainty in marital terms. And with Vita standing there, and my fearing a long discussion that would become a harangue possibly ending in tears, I knew what I must do. I wanted to stay happy.

  “Okay, I’ll go.”

  “You might learn something.”

  The lunch he’d proposed was in the week of my birthday and, as I’ve mentioned, the period of one of my greatest successes as a prospector—ethical cobalt. Frank was a man of insinuations, of subtle gestures and sly asides, and long ambiguous stories rather than explicit statements. But, as always in these lunches, it helped to know where I stood, and he had what Vita often called “lunchtime charm.”

  “Fidge,” he said, rising from the booth to greet me. I was at the diner on time, but obviously he had come earlier—his coat was arranged on a hanger rather than slung on a hook.

  Fidge was my childhood nickname. I’d been a restless, fidgeting youth. Apart from Frank and our widowed mother, no one else in the world used this name for me. It was like an obscure password. I was not Pascal, or Cal, to any of them: I was Fidge, with all that name implied.

  Ra
ther than a handshake, Frank gave my fingers a saucy little slap, cuffing them with the back of his hand and not a word but a snort-honk of recognition.

  “Hi, Frank, how you doing?”

  I sat across from him in the booth by the wall and took a menu out of the rack near the ketchup bottle and condiments. He sat with his hands folded in a prayerful posture and lowered his head. Did he remember my birthday? Did he know of my success in Idaho? And what stories was he going to tell?

  He lifted his head to stare at me with his odd lopsided face. It was divided into two vertical planes, the right part, cheek, jaw, portion of forehead—enlarged by his baldness—and cold eyes, swagged downward in a frown; the left part of his face uplifted in a smile, the contradictory face you see in some Greek masks. When the facial droop on his right side was saying no, his left side—eye and crinkled forehead—was insisting yes. I imagined this complex face, with its built-in stare to register righteous surprise, very intimidating to a witness and very persuasive to a jury. His angular expression operating independently, he actually had two faces, one opposing the other. As for the set of his jaw, his bared teeth were also at odds, as though he was biting open a pistachio. He seldom smiled but when he did his mouth had, ironically, the goofy gape of a pistachio nut.

  Poor guy, you think, but no. His was not an affliction, it was a boast that set him apart as someone special. What had begun in his teenage years, after a spell of mumps, as a mild form of Bell’s palsy, Frank had discovered to be an asset, and he somehow contrived to remain uncured—his face fixed and asymmetric, and looking, he once told me with pride, like a pirate. Something else: I always felt that he was scowling at me furiously behind this face.

  As his brother I often studied my face in the mirror and talked to myself, to see if my face was separated in the same lopsided way. But it wasn’t, and I concluded that Frank’s had become like that over decades of equivocation, the way a habitual smiler acquires laugh lines, or a doubtful one a permanent scowl.