Every day, when he comes home from school, my kid brother Vern asks if he can wear my old blue coat. He’s only eleven, so I guess I should cut him slack, but it still really gets to me.
“Can I borrow the blue coat, Travis? The jean one? With the sheepskin? Please?”
Does he forget that the answer is the same every day?
“No. Shut up."
“Please, Travis?”
He has these nice sparkling blue eyes. I’ve always been a little jealous of them, ‘cause I’ve got two little balls of cow manure shoved where my eyes should be. They sparkle especially when he’s trying to get something from me, when he’s trying to be all cute. He doesn’t realize that he’s eleven years old, he’s not exactly that cute little kid anymore.
I don’t even answer him. I ignore him and sit down on the plaid sofa and turn on the TV. He doesn’t ask to watch his favorite show, he just keeps on watching that damned blue coat. He knows I know he’s staring at it, too. It’s another one of his methods of persuasion. He thinks that if I know just how obsessed he is, I’ll eventually give it to him. But that’s never gonna happen.
It might seem kind of petty. I mean, I have another work coat that I can wear, a nicer one made of tan canvas, and I haven’t worn the blue one in six years, since I was Vern’s age. It was always a little big on me back then, but I wore it anyway. It has this nice tobacco smell.
Vern eventually gives up and sits down on the couch next to me. He sits pretty close to me, too. But not close enough that I’ll push him away and tell him to back off. He knows just how close he can sit. He kind of sits like me, and it’s weird. He always does that. He crosses his legs just like me, walks just like me, and even chews his cereal kind of like me. But Vern’ll never be like me. For one, he’s a helluva lot cuter. He’s got them blue eyes, and the sandy blonde hair… And I don’t have any of that. I look like our mom. She’s sort of a brainless dolt, and I guess I am too. I didn’t even graduate high school last June. This is my second time being a senior, and it isn’t too cool. I sure as hell hope Vern doesn’t turn out like that.
My mom came home an hour later, carrying a plastic bag of groceries. “Where’s Vern?” she says as she walk in the door, her dull eyes glancing about the room.
I motion next to me, at the sleeping form of old Vern. He’s taking a nap on the couch. He looks cute, in a way, all little and pathetic. His mouth is open a crack and there’s a spot of drool on the seat of the sofa, and that basically ruins any moment of cuteness he has.
“Did he feed the chickens yet?”
I shake my head. “Nah, he basically just fell asleep when he got home.”
She sets the bag down on the counter and pulls out a little blue Styrofoam container, the ones they package the meat in at the supermarket. “And you couldn’t take it upon yourself to get it done? They needa be fed, you know.”
“I know, I know. Just tryin’a teach the kid some responsibility.”
She sighs, and I half expect her to call me a hypocrite or something. She’s been sore ever since I started doing not-so-good in school. She says I’m the one who needs to learn about responsibility, and that Vern’s doing fine. Vern’s always been the favorite.
“Can you wake him up?”
I laugh, lean over and shake Vern’s leg viciously. “Wake up, queer!”
“Travis!”
I sort of ignore my mom, because she isn’t really going to do anything to stop my language, and I keep shaking Vern’s leg until he sits up quickly, rubbing his little blue eyes.
“What? What’s wrong?”
“Go feed the chickens,” says Mom from the kitchen.
Vern jumps off the couch with surprising agility for a little kid who was just woken up from his nap. As he’s walking out the door, he stops at the coat rack.
I already know what he’s going to ask, and it breaks my heart every time.
“Can I wear the jean coat, Travis?”
“No! Go feed the damned chickens!”
He stamps his little Romeo boot on the linoleum. “Mama! I wanna wear the blue coat! Travis don’t ever let me! He don’t got a reason, neither!”
“I gotta reason. Just go feed the damned chickens.”
My mom puts her hand on her hip, sticking out the hip as she does it. She has some boney legs, and it sort of gives me the chills whenever she does something like that. She looks like a walking skeleton sometimes. “Vernon, please go feed the chickens.”
Vern pouts, turns on his heel, and leaves the house.
After he closes the door, I immediately stand up and take a couple steps towards Mom. “Listen, I’m sorry. I just…”
“It’s okay, Travis. It’s your coat. I understand, it’s okay.”
“Maybe I should just take it down.”
She looks up from the packaged meat quickly, frantically. “No! I mean, it’s up there for a reason.”
“I know, I’d never put it away anyway, you know.”
She doesn’t respond, so I walk over to the coat rack and pull off the old blue coat. It smells like stale tobacco, the smell that all the kids at school have whose parents smoke and the smoke stinks up the whole house. I can’t stand the smell of cigarettes. I’ve never smoked in my life. It kills you.
After holding it up to my face a little while, I put it on, and walk down to my bedroom with it. It’s heavy and worn, and the sheepskin lining feels soft against the bare skin on my arms. I used to wear it all the time because it added bulk to my body. I’m naturally a pretty skinny kid. I don’t put on muscle that well. When I wear that old coat, I feel a few pounds heavier, like I can beat up every kid on the road.
I sit on my bed for a couple minutes, wrapping the old coat around my body, trying to soak up every bit of its magic. To be honest, I don’t have many good memories of me in the coat. I’ve only worn it while working like six times since it was passed down to me. And then I just couldn’t bear to wear it anymore. It’s a long story.
Luckily, Vern doesn’t ask about the coat again that night, probably because he doesn’t have any more outside chores to do. At dinner, it’s just me and my mom talking, and all she wants to talk about is school. She always asks me what my “plan” is, how I’m going to eventually graduate and all. I say that there’s no point in me graduating. It’s not like we have any money for me to go to college or nothing. We haven’t really had much money for the last five or so years. But I don’t say that to her face. To her face, I pretend like I’m going to graduate this year and all. But I know I’m not. I’ll go until the end of the semester, and then I’m dropping out for good. I haven’t had a place in that damned school system since I was like twelve.
Vern, on the other hand, seems to be doing pretty good in school. All his teachers like him. They say he’s a pretty sweet kid. The football coach says he’s a pretty swell player, and they’re already scouting him out for next year. They say he’ll end up being like his father, my dad, who was a hot shot in that kind of stuff. I haven’t touched a football in years. It’s pointless. Futile, even, if you want to use a big word.
That night, I just go and lay in my bed for a bit, with all the lights on. I should be doing my homework for Geometry and Current Issues, but I don’t really feel like it. I never feel like it anymore. My whole bedroom is a pig sty, according to Mom. And it’s true. All my dirty work clothes are lying in a heap on the floor. There’s old food there, too. I haven’t put anything away since like kindergarten.
For some reason, Vern decides to come into my room. He just sits down on my bed, even though he knows I don’t like having him come into my room at all. And he sits the same way that I do whenever I sit on the couch. For the first time, I think that maybe he isn’t trying to be like me, and that maybe we aren’t that different after all. But then I look at those eyes and remember just how wrong I am.
“Do you remember when you used to be nice?” He suddenly asks, looking over at me.
“I’m always nice to you.”
“Bullshit.”
I pull my head out of my pillow and look up at the little guy, shocked. “Don’t talk like that! Who do you think you are?”
“I’m Vernon James McClellan, Jr.”
He is so serious that I have to hold back a sudden chuckle. “Alright then, Bud, just don’t swear, alright? For me?”
“If you say so.”
We’re left in this awkward silence, and part of me wants to leave and go watch some TV, but then again I don’t trust anyone alone in my room, even though I know that Vern would never mess up my room at all.
“Well, I remember when you used to be nice. You used to tell me stories. Every evening.”
I shook my head quickly. “I don’t remember none of that shit.”
“You know you did. Can you tell me one now, Travis? I miss it. I miss being a little kid.” His face scrunches up a bit, and it seems like he’s going to cry. I can’t take it, not at all.
“Don’t cry now, Vernie. You’re still a little kid. You’re only eleven. That ain’t that old at all.”
“You told me that you stopped being a little kid when you were twelve!”
“That’s different.”
Nobody talks again for a little bit, and I can tell that Vern is struggling to find something to say.
“Please, tell me a story. An important one.”
I put a pillow behind my back and lean against the wall, staring at my little brother. He was a good looking kid. “Alright, I’m feeling nice. So ask me something, and I’ll tell you the story about it. Anything.”
“Anything, anything?”
I laugh. “Yeah. Even why the toilet’s missing half the seat.”
He laughs too, but then his face suddenly turns serious, and he stares solemnly at me. “I wanna know why I can’t wear your coat.”
What a question. I should’ve guessed that he was going to ask that. Why did it even matter? He has his own damned coat.
For some reason, I say some weird words that I don’t mean to. “Alright. Guess you’re a big enough of a kiddo to know.”
I have no idea why I said that. I didn’t want him to know. It was my story, not his. But then I start really talking, and I tell the whole thing. From the beginning. I tell him all about Dad and the blue coat, how he wore it every day for about three years. How it smelled just like the Pall Mall’s he smoked. How Mom said a part of his soul seeped into the stitching. How, when I put it on, I felt like I was Dad. Big ole buff Dad.
But I think he knew about all of that all along. I think he really did, because after I finish, he walks out of the room silently and leaves me there. A couple of tears even fall from my stupid cowshit colored eyes. Of course Vern gets Dad’s blue eyes. Vern who can hardly even remember Dad.
Vern never asked me to wear the coat again. He never talked about Dad again, and it was back to the same old thing where none of us ever talk about Dad because everyone gets a little teary-eyed, even Vern. But we all know that Dad is still kind of in our house, sitting on the rack in the form of a weathered old jean jacket. It doesn’t matter where Dad really is, because we all know part of him is in our living room. There’s no need to lay around being sad when someone in your life leaves. That’s what futile really is. It’s all about the little things in life, and remembering what you had with someone, or even what could have been. Even if that memory is just some half-drunk man staggering through the door with a big smile on his face and a Pall Mall hanging out of his lips, you have to take advantage of what you are given. Whenever I button up that old jacket, I remember my father’s love for me. And the best part is, I never have to share it. Not even with Vernon. Or Mom. The blue jean coat is always going to hang on the hook in the living room, filling the house with my father’s love.
Anyway, I just want to warn you that I'm kind of new though I'll give it my best shot at it.
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