I left the trailer. Laurel was hugging herself, staring at the empty space where Richard’s Jeep had been. When I told her I was taking a ride, she didn’t respond. Inside the trailer, something clattered to the floor—a pile of books, maybe, or a chair. Malcolm started to moan. Laurel still did not move.
“Mom? Are you going to help him?”
“I guess not,” she said.
I imagined leaving him alone with her. What would happen if he cried and cried and she did not move to calm him? Would he be trapped that way forever? I was scared for him. I was scared for both of us. “I’m going to take him with me,” I said.
She didn’t answer.
AT THE DRAINAGE DITCH, I threw down my bike, sank to my knees, and began to dig. Malcolm stood nearby, uninterested in what I was doing. The ground was surprisingly soft, as if it had been recently turned. My heart sank. I pulled at the loose dirt. Nothing was there. The gun was gone.
Mrs. Poole opened her door. I hadn’t seen her since the night I’d hidden under Kevin’s bed. She seemed taken aback to see us. “This isn’t Malcolm’s day.”
“Where’s Kevin?
“He has a bike now.” She said this in such a way that I wondered whether he had exacted the bike as a bribe.
“I left something in his room. Something for school.”
She sighed and opened the door further and let me and Malcolm pass.
In Kevin’s room, I quickly searched through the desk drawers and behind the books on the shelf, but I did not find the gun. I opened the closet and looked in the dark corners where he had thrown balled-up shirts and orphaned socks.
“What the fuck?”
It was Kevin, standing in his doorway, his face flushed from riding his bike.
“Where is it?” I said, standing up.
“Get out of my room.”
“Give me the gun.”
A strange smile crept across his face. He reached into the waistband of his pants and pulled out the weapon.
Malcolm started moaning softly.
“Shut up,” Kevin snapped at him. He waved the gun. “Get out of my room.”
Malcolm’s moans grew more insistent.
“Get him to shut up!” Kevin said, growing agitated.
“Give me my gun.”
Malcolm started to rock in place. Kevin’s anger and distress grew, and I recognized the look on his face. He was disappearing into someplace dangerous. Malcolm started to flap his hands, and Kevin crossed the room and pushed Malcolm so hard that Malcolm fell back, hitting his head against the wall. The sound of his head striking something hard and unforgiving pierced me; I had heard it night after night for five years. I threw myself at Kevin and knocked him off balance. He grabbed hold of me and brought me down with him. As we fought, the gun fell from his hands. He rolled on top of me and began to shake me. My head struck the floor over and over. He grabbed my throat and began to tighten his grip. I couldn’t breathe. He squeezed harder still. As I began to lose consciousness, I saw the deadness in his eyes. And then a sound exploded in the room. Kevin collapsed on top of me. His grip loosened. Gasping, I turned my head, and saw my brother, holding the gun by his side. It slipped from his fingers and fell to the ground as if it were one of the fake guns from our fantasy games I had fitted into his hand that no longer held his fickle attention.
What I did next, I did without thought. I slipped out from under Kevin. I reached for the gun. I took my shirt and wiped the metal so that Malcolm’s fingerprints would disappear. I put the gun in my own hand and closed my fingers around it. And then it was done.
WE STAYED IN THAT ROOM. I heard the wail of a distant ambulance and the short coyote barks of police sirens. Mrs. Poole wept while she held Kevin. His long body lay across her lap and she cradled his head, brushing the hair off his forehead again and again. His shirt and her hands were covered with his blood. Malcolm crawled next to Kevin and began to stroke his arm just as he had stroked the pelican that lay dying on the shore. I stared numbly at him, wondering if he knew what he had done, wondering if he had meant to kill Kevin, if he had meant to save me.
EIGHTEEN
When the police questioned me at the station, my voice was still raw from having been choked. I was scared, not because I was worried about what would happen to me, but because I did not want to make a mistake and reveal my lie. Laurel was not allowed to be with me, but once, when a policeman left the room, I saw her sitting in the hallway. She wore her faded blue sarong. Her hands rested on the mound of her stomach. Her face was uncommonly pale, her hair unkempt. She looked alone and forlorn and lost. Afterward I was taken to the hospital, where a doctor examined my neck and head, and someone took photographs of my injuries. Malcolm was already there with Richard. His head had been photographed, too. We were finally released from the hospital. My head was bound in gauze.
Once we were home, Laurel and Richard put Malcolm to bed. Afterward, she came through the card curtain and sat down on the edge of my mattress. I looked up at her, and my tears came so suddenly I didn’t have a chance to stop them. She reached for me.
“I’m sorry,” she said, rocking me. “I’m so sorry.”
I remembered those words from years before, when we were at the hospital and Malcolm was bandaged beyond recognition. She had held me and apologized for something I had done, as if the fault were hers.
AT THE DETENTION HEARING, A judge questioned me about the events of the night, and I answered calmly, remembering all that I had said to the police. I was not frightened anymore. Richard and my mother sat in the small courtroom. Mr. and Mrs. Poole sat behind them.
The judge had already asked how I found the gun and I had told him.
“Why did you shoot Kevin?” he asked me.
“Because he was hurting my brother,” I said.
“You would do anything to save your brother from harm?”
“He’s my brother,” I said.
“Did you understand, at the time, that guns kill people?”
I looked at my mother. I could see her shake her head imperceptibly. I knew she wanted me to lie.
“I know about guns,” I said.
“What did you feel when you shot the gun?” the judge asked.
“I felt…I felt…” I stopped. This is a question I had not been asked, and I had no ready answer for it. I had never shot a gun, had never even raised the gun I buried in order to pretend to shoot it. I had only fired sticks in my fantasy games with Malcolm. I thought about what Malcolm might have felt holding that gun and pulling the trigger. Maybe he felt the same way he did when he buried all those birds behind the school.
“I just wanted to make him safe,” I said. “Because there are so many bad things that can hurt him.”
“Yes, there are,” the judge said.
A fantasy scrolled out in my head as rich as any I had created over the years. “And when I shot the gun,” I said, imagining myself in Malcolm’s moment, “I felt like I saw the whole truth of things.”
“What truth?”
“That nothing can really make you safe.”
The judge said nothing. The courtroom was quiet. I looked at Laurel. Her hands covered her mouth. Her eyes were glistening oceans.
I was put under house arrest, then brought back to court for a dispositional hearing, where I learned that Mr. and Mrs. Poole had decided not to press charges against me. The district attorney, after conferring with the judge and in view of the Pooles’ decision, dropped the State’s case. Still, I was not yet free. Because of my action and my family circumstances, the judge ordered me to a therapeutic facility.
I never knew why the Pooles did not care to see the case brought to trial. Perhaps after seeing the evidence of Kevin’s violence toward me and my brother, they reconsidered. Or maybe, after so much struggle, they finally gave up on the dangerous boy they had tried and failed to make their son.
NINETEEN
The seven boys from cottage 8 at the Oak Glen Juvenile Improvement Center sat in a loose circle on
metal folding chairs inside the group therapy meeting room. The chairs were purple and pink, the same colors I had noticed on the outside of the building when I first came to visit Kevin and mistook the place for a department store. I stared between my legs at the cream-colored linoleum squares flecked with red, green, and blue. I started to count the specks but stopped because doing this reminded me of Malcolm, and of how much I missed my home. I had passed the halfway mark of my court-appointed time here. I had one month left.
It was Lenny’s turn to share. He told the story of how his mother dropped him off at his grandparents’ house one day, telling him she was going grocery shopping, and how she never came back. He talked about his grandparents, how they took care of him and bought him clothes and some toys, but he hated them anyway. He hated the way his grandfather chewed his food. Lenny did an imitation of the snicking, mucous sounds of that chewing, which made us boys laugh and take the opportunity to make sounds of our own until Dr. Hall and Dr. Gonzalez told us to quiet down. They reminded us about R.E.A.L.: respect, empathy, attentiveness, and love, the four rules we had to abide by in group therapy if we wanted to succeed and graduate from the center. Lenny continued. He told us that he thought about killing his grandparents in their beds by suffocating them with their own pillows.
As he talked, he focused on the peach-colored wall just beyond where Dr. Hall sat, her grey hair tied up in her customary bun. Dr. Gonzalez, his complexion as bumpy as melted plastic, sat next to her, writing notes on a pad or nodding his head to encourage Lenny to keep going. Both leaders occasionally said they “wondered” this or that about Lenny’s feelings, as they did when any boy told his crime history, as if our stories were fairy tales meant to elicit awe. It was only because Lenny got caught for the lesser offense of stealing his grandfather’s 600 Series Grasshopper lawn mower and trying to sell it to drug dealers, and because it turned out that his grandparents actually did like him, that they didn’t press charges and that he was placed at the center rather than in juvenile detention.
“I wonder how your grandparents would feel if they woke up and saw you were trying to murder them?” Dr. Hall asked. She had a way of saying the most awful things as though she were asking for a medium Coke at McDonald’s.
THE NEXT WEEK IT WAS my turn to share. I told my story as I had told it to the police and the judge. I concentrated so hard on telling it correctly that I began to believe it myself.
“I wonder what you felt when you saw that you had killed Kevin?” Dr. Gonzalez said, his heavy-framed glasses reflecting the overhead fluorescents so that I couldn’t see his eyes.
It was that same question the judge had put to me. The more I was asked it, and the more I thought about it, the more I began to experience myself in that moment as if it actually had been me who killed Kevin. I could feel my hand on the gun, the pressure of the trigger against my finger as I pulled it. I could feel the kickback as the gun fired, could hear the deafening sound of the shot. Each night, when I lay on my bed in cottage 8 listening to the other boys whisper and laugh and occasionally groan, I asked myself the same question I had been asking ever since the day Kevin died. Did Malcolm know what he was doing? Was he guilty? Could he pull a trigger on a gun, feel that power resonate through his body, and be innocent? All the years I had played at war and killing…was it really Malcolm all along who was the better soldier? Was he the one who believed the story of good and evil while I was lost in the confusion of right and wrong?
“Ares, I asked you how you felt when you killed Kevin,” Dr. Gonzalez said.
“I didn’t know what I had done,” I said.
“For how long?” Dr. Hall said.
“For a while. I knew that everything was crazy in the room, everybody yelling and screaming. And then suddenly everything was quiet and nobody moved.”
“How did that make you feel?”
“Relieved.”
“Relieved because Kevin was dead?”
“Relieved because my brother was safe.”
“What about Kevin?” Dr. Hall said.
I looked around. All the other boys in the group were staring at me, wondering what I was going to say. For weeks, I had listened to their stories. One boy had been molested by his uncles and had molested his own brother. Another had been beaten up so many times by his father that he was permanently deaf in one ear.
“I hurt him,” I said.
“Kevin?” Dr. Gonzalez said. “You killed him, Ares.”
“My brother. I dropped him.”
And I told the story. The words flew from my mouth as if they were worried I would take them back if they came out any slower. I described the gas station, the heat, the smell of Malcolm’s diaper. I made a cradle with my arms as though I were holding my baby brother. When I reached the moment when he kicked me, I could feel him slipping through my grasp. I could hear the thunk of his body as it hit the ground.
I stopped, surprised to find myself standing. Everyone in the room was watching me. A look passed between the doctors.
“You feel responsible for the way Malcolm is,” Dr. Gonzalez said.
“I am responsible. It’s my fault.”
The two adults exchanged a look. “I wonder,” Dr. Hall said, softly, “if we can talk about that more.”
THAT WEEKEND, ON PARENTS’ VISITING day, Dr. Hall told me that she was going to have a conference with Laurel first, and that I should wait outside her office. Malcolm, who had come to see me each week, sat in a chair next to me in the hallway, playing with marbles that Laurel had brought to keep him occupied. Now that the truth of what I had done to my brother was out in the open, I was scared that Dr. Hall had decided that I needed to spend more time at the center.
When the door opened, only Dr. Hall appeared. “Ares, why don’t you go inside and spend some time with your mother.”
I rose uncertainly and did what she said. Once I was in the room she shut the door. My mother sat in front of Dr. Hall’s desk with her back to me. She held her head in her hands.
“Mom?”
She turned. She grabbed my hand and pulled me so that I was standing before her. She looked up at me. “Is it true?” she said. “Is it true you told the doctors that you hurt your brother?”
I was too scared to say to her what I had said in the therapy room only a few days earlier. I couldn’t believe that finally, after all these years, she was going to confront me.
“Is that what you think, baby?” she said. She tried to fix a smile on her face, but I could tell that she was fighting back tears. “Do you think you hurt him?”
“I dropped him,” I whispered. “I’m sorry.”
“Kids fall all the time. Didn’t you know that?”
“That’s why he is the way he is.”
“No…no. Why would you think that was the reason?”
“You never gave me another reason. You never took him to a doctor. You said he wasn’t retarded. You said we couldn’t use that word.”
“Oh, no. Oh, no,” she said. I couldn’t tell if she was talking to me or herself. She seemed to withdraw into her thoughts, and her eyes flickered back and forth as if she were watching a film of our whole life up to that point, looking for the moment when mistakes had been made.
“Mom?”
She looked at me. “It’s not your fault,” she said. “You have to believe me. Do you believe me?”
“What’s wrong with him?”
“It’s just the way he came into the world. I thought you knew that. Oh, God. I thought you knew.”
I LEARNED HOW TO SWING on the high rings in the yard. After a few weeks of trying, the blisters on my hands hardened into calluses, and I could glide from one end of the apparatus to the other for what felt like forever. The feeling was exhilarating. I felt free. When I was in the air I thought about playing games with Malcolm, about Sundays in the desert with my mother, about her hand on my head. I never beat Kevin’s record of one hundred passes. It seemed an impossible feat, and there were times when I thought Mrs.
Poole must have exaggerated his accomplishment. I wondered if she had done it because she wanted him to be a different kind of son, and because she wanted to be a different kind of mother, one who could be proud of her child’s small victories just like real mothers were. Sometimes, when I built up momentum on the rings, I imagined I could let go and fly over the wall of the center all the way back to Bombay Beach and my home.
TWENTY
After my release, a reporter from the newspaper in San Diego came to our house. Laurel would not speak to him. She locked the trailer door and threatened to call the police. I sat by the window and watched the young man in beige chino slacks and a white button-down shirt wander beyond our house into the desert. I saw him stop and turn a full circle, taking the measure of the place we lived. He had a pad, which he wrote on, and a camera, which he used to take photos of our trailer. He turned to the desert to take more pictures, but he must not have seen anything he thought would be meaningful to his readers because he never raised the camera to his eye.
The Pooles had moved away by that time, and the young reporter had only been able to interview people with no knowledge about what had happened except for the gossip that had become fanciful as it made its way from one mouth to another. I was amazed by all the students who spoke to the reporter about me with such assurance when these same kids barely knew me. According to the article that was later published, I was a quiet, heroic boy who had saved the life of my innocent, damaged brother who could do nothing for himself. We lived in a poverty I did not recognize, but that the reporter wrote was “singular,” even though our lives were no different from our neighbors. We had what we needed, and my mother knew how to make treasures out of the land that the reporter dismissed as “vacant” and “ruined.”
The God of War Page 18