The thing was, I couldn’t figure out whose fault it was. Why we lost him to the streets. I kept trying to blame someone. I accused everybody. I started with Grandma. She had him watching Gunsmoke and those Clint Eastwood Westerns when he was a little boy. I was too little to remember this, but he’d told me that he’d watch black-and-white dusty Westerns with her when she was alive. I thought maybe that’s where it all started. Mama was guilty too; she let him see those Chuck Norris and Jean-Claude Van Damme movies and, every week, kung fu films on Samurai Sundays. Did this make him think about fighting all the time? Did he want to be tough like those actors? He listened to West Coast classics too, and got a rush every time he heard Eazy-E say, Motherfuck Dre, motherfuck Snoop, motherfuck Death Row.

He soaked up the conflict, let it rush through his veins. I could point my finger at so many people, but now I know better. My brother has always been different from me. When he heard gunshots, he stuck his face against the window. Most people got scared, but that wop, wop, wop of bullets hyped him up.

That summer, the war outside our window gave him a lot to see: our red building constantly going at it with the white buildings on the Low End. It all excited him: the guns, how the dudes in the playground stood like men, shoulders back, face stern, puffing on a cigarette or weed. They were cowboys, and our block, a cowboy camp.

I remember when we were kids, Meechie used to crash his trucks into the wall or other trucks, making so much noise. Then he started having all these guns. First, the neon-colored ones that squirted water. Next he got a Nerf gun with these foam balls. When plastic wasn’t gangster enough, he got a BB gun. It was steel and looked like a real pistol. He didn’t shoot people with it, but he hit things in the house, cereal boxes or my stuffed animals, working on his aim when Mama was asleep. Later, he told me that even before he moved out, even before he left, he never went out without a gun.

“You just feel naked,” he said.