Growing Up Miles - Siblings, Part 1

It's time to introduce my siblings. For the moment, I'll skip my sisters, but I don't think they'll mind. In fact. there's a pretty good chance they'll try to bribe me not to write about them. We'll see.

My brother, Bill, is 6 1/2 years younger than I. That makes him 4 1/2 when we moved to Augusta.

We moved in November. We stayed in a motel until the furniture arrived on a moving truck, but Dad took us to see the house that first night.

It was a two story house built in the mid to late 1800s. It had an attic and a basement. Storm windows. A huge, brick chimney topped the slate roof. A front porch with columns. Electrical fixtures right out of a Frankenstein movie. Somewhere there were bound to be hidden passages.

It was a dark and stormy night, and the power was off at the house. We took the tour by flashlight. It was pretty cool. It was pretty creepy. With no power, barren of furniture, the house was right out of a scary movie. A massive (to us kids) fireplace. Ancient, wooden floors. Dark corners. Cobwebs. What little outside light there was that night cast eerie shadows as branches outside the windows waved furiously in the wind. That wind howled through the chimney, whistled under the doors, rattled the wooden windows in their casings-- windows with old glass that distorted things just that little extra bit Alfred Hitchcock would have loved.

Mom and Dad, of course, were impervious to the mood. I don't recall what the other kids thought. I was excited. I was nervous. It was even money whether we'd find a cut throat like Injun Joe, or a dancing skeleton. Either would have been excellent. I loved every thrilling moment of it.

Then we opened the basement door. It was pitch black down there. A musty smell wafted up the steps into our faces. Here was some serious adventure. Bill darted ahead into the darkness, holding onto the rail, running down the steps, and

Bam! Whap! "Aaahhh!" Bam, Blat! Thump! Roll THUMP roll Bump! Bump!

Silence.

Mom screamed, and drug Dad and the flashlight down the stairs, yelling something like, "My baby! My baby!" Their feet pounded on the wooden steps. My heart pounded in my chest as my sisters and I groped our way down after them, expecting any moment to fall down a well or be nabbed by witches or cannibals.

Suddenly they stopped. I heard Bill laughing. "Do it again! Do it again!" His thick coat and hard head had held up just fine. The steps turned to the right, getting very narrow on the inside. He'd fallen, bounced and rolled to the landing, shot across, bounced off the door to the outside, bounced across the landing and down two more steps to the dry, red clay floor. And loved it. To him it was a carnival ride, the Dark Steps of Doom, and he was ready to ride again, reaching for that brass ring.

Mom decided we should leave and come back when it was daylight.


During the nearly 7 years I lived there my parents changed my brother's and my sleeping arrangements several times, alternating between us sharing a room and not. Why they ever thought us sharing was a good idea I have no idea. At least after a year or so.

Even back in El Paso, when Bill and I were in the same room it could get wiggy. But once I got to about 12 or 13, it was a really bad idea.

Many were the nights Bill would keep me awake when I needed to get to sleep because I had to be up a lot earlier for school than he did. He'd tell stories, cut up, whatever, just to entertain himself. Or to get my attention or taunt me, I'm still not sure which. After a couple of hours he'd start winding down. By then, however, I'd be wide awake. Second wind wide awake. Can't go to sleep for hours awake. Vengefully, cruelly, mad scientist laughingly awake. This was payback time.

Many nights I'd get completely under the sheet and get really quiet. Eventually he'd bite, whether out of boredom or nervousness. "Miles? Are you awake?"

(monotone, bad movie robot voice) "No. This. Is. Space. Robot." Space robots would come for all sorts of heinous reasons, usually involving ghastly death, horrible humiliation, and ultimately the eating of younger brothers. Every now and then Space Robot would beam back out and I'd return, and console Bill, only to be replaced again. Once Bill was too terrified to sleep, but especially to move or talk, I could go to sleep.

Occasionally he'd scream in sheer terror. I became very convincing at either sleeping through it (once awakened, "He must be having nightmares again!") or being startled out of a sound sleep. Falling out of bed was a specialty.

Other nights I'd have a spare, light colored sheet or towel hidden somewhere in or near my bed. As he'd wind down, I could tell when he was almost asleep. Then a ghost would sail across the room. Inevitably, he'd yell, and typically hide under the covers. Exactly like lightning, only without any flash, thunderclap or electrical destruction and ozone, I'd retrieve the ghost, stash it somewhere safe, and be asleep before anyone was there.

But my favorite revenge, my very favorite of all time, was when I hatched a long term plan. We talked off and on for weeks about what lived under our beds-- monsters, witches, ghosts, tarantulas, scorpions, vampires, mummies, invisible brains, and... Space Robots. One night I feigned sleep through probably a half hour of his usual monologue, after which he kind of wound down. (Had I learned this tactic earlier, we'd both have had a lot more sleep and a lot less trauma.)

Once he was in that gentle, quiet, cozy valley between wakefulness and sleep, where moonbeam dreams graze the cheeks and lips of our minds with gentle lover's caress, yet we can still hear, taste, see, smell, feel the real world, I somehow found myself slithering gently off the bed, gliding beneath it, moving Ninja-like across the polished, antique wooden floors.

It was late spring and the windows were open. Far off noises-- a dog barking, a car motor, a door slamming, faint voices-- wafted in on the dark, dreamy breeze along with hints of every flower in Augusta, especially honeysuckle. Starlight and moonlight, as well as a scattered, few ambient rays creeping upstairs from the living room played across the floor. I knew that floor well so I moved without a sound. It probably took me a minute to go six feet. I'm not sure I breathed more than once during that time.

I was beside Bill's bed. I was half under it. I wasn't afraid of anything under that bed. I was the nightmare under the bed, the monster, witch, ghost, tarantula, scorpion, vampire, mummy, invisible brain, and... Space Robot. My hand crept up beside the bed. I recalled exactly how he'd been laying, where his arm was. I grabbed that arm, made some sort of quiet, menacing noise, and yanked down as if to drag him under the bed.

Between the time he started to react and the time the scream came out of his mouth-- perhaps a tenth of a second-- I teleported back into my bed. A tenth of a second later, as his eyes went well past wide open, so open I was certain his eyeballs would pop out of his head, I had snuggled under the covers, resting peacefully. The scream went on. Where did he get all that air from? I jumped up. screaming, twisting, getting the covers all tangled. With impeccable timing, I fell out of bed just as Dad flew into the room. As an afterthought I whacked my (incredibly hard) head against the floor for good measure. (Seriously.)

The light came on. Mom and Dad ran to Bill, then stopped, staring back and forth. One of them (so many details are vivid, but not this one) was holding Bill. I think it was Mom, which means Dad helped me untangle. Having whacked my head, I could play dazed as well as confused. Eventually, of course, they decided Bill was having a nightmare. It took a while, but they got him calmed down, made sure I was OK, got Sharon and Kathleen calmed down (they'd been sound asleep when all Hell broke loose in the room next door), got me back in bed and convinced me to stay there, that it wasn't time for school (it was a Friday night), turned out the light, and headed back downstairs.

I snuggled down under the covers and got really, really still. I wasn't even a Ninja now. I was like a heard of dust bunnies, inanimate, no substance, practically non-existent.

Except to Bill. After a minute or three, a quite voice hissed. "You! You did that! I'll get you for this!"

"Space. Robot. Is. Hungry."

Silence.

It was golden.