“Making my point the best way I can.” He braced one hand on the safe; spun the dial with the other. “You tell me words matter, and that’s true, they do. But actions matter even more.” The door swung wide, and I saw dark metal as Jason stepped aside. “Now, do you understand?”

I did. I didn’t want to.

He pulled out a rifle, cleared the action, and tossed it to me. “That’s an M16A1 rifle, fully automatic and highly illegal. I have thirty of them.” He pointed at other weapons. “Those are CAR-15s.” He pointed again. “Thompson submachine guns, very hard to come by. Those are AK-47s, Russian-made, the good stuff, Colt 1911s, of course…”

“Slow down, man. I don’t understand.”

He dragged a satchel from the safe, rolled back the zipper, and showed me all the cash inside. Thousands of dollars. Tens of thousands. “This is what I do,” he said. “It’s who I am.” He took the rifle from my hands, and racked it with the others. “I’m not a good person. You shouldn’t be here.”

In bed that night, I dreamed of brother Robert. He stepped from the deep jungle, and I saw the hole in his chest, the shattered bone and the ruby-dark stain. When I whispered his name, he looked up, and blackness filled the place his eyes should be. He tried to speak, but his tongue was gone, too; and when he fell at my feet, I knew in the way of dreams that I should lean close, so that’s what I did. I ignored the smell of him and the empty sockets, the night sounds and the grass and the speckled sky. I poured my soul into knowing my brother, but none of that mattered. His last breath was gone, and the knowing of him with it.

I woke from that dream with tears in my eyes, then dressed in the quiet, and slipped outside to cool air and light that was watery and gray. In the car, I thought how strange it was to be born with two brothers, yet be so ignorant of both. I was a child when Robert died, and missed the chance to know him man-to-man. Jason was a mystery, too, and determined to stay that way. That left a distant father and an unknowable mother, the whole situation so fucked up and faceless that when I drove, it was to the quarry, where I hiked to the cliff’s edge, and stood alone to watch the day break as a red sun rose.