Hurt People

by Cote Smith

  * * *

  My brother and I didn’t know how far away the auto shop was, so we didn’t know what to do. Mad at my mother, he wanted to go to the pool, but did we have time, or would he be in the middle of a move when our mother returned and caught us outside with Chris? What lie would my brother tell? Chris could be a special swimming instructor, who traveled around to poor neighborhoods and gave out free lessons. He would teach a range of things. For the beginners, the swimming babies, he would demonstrate the basics—how to wade or float on your back. For the more advanced, like my brother, special meetings would be held at secret times, in private places, where Chris would show moves too tough for anyone but the gifted. The only things Chris would ask in return would be the occasional popsicle strip, and your faith, your commitment, to do whatever he asks, keep whatever secret. That’s not too bad, Chris would say, when you think about all there is to gain.

  We decided to wait inside.

  My brother leaned against the porch’s screen door, seeking relief from the heat, or maybe listening for the pool.

  “What are we going to do?” I said. “We have nothing to do.”

  “You’re going to shut up,” my brother said, his tone taking on our mother’s. “That’s what you’re going to do.”

  He got up and brushed by me, purposely nudging me with his knee as he passed. In the kitchen he took an ice tray out of the freezer and slammed it against the counter, much harder than necessary. He dropped a few cubes into a glass, filled it with cloudy city water, and drank it all without coming up for air.

  “I didn’t do anything,” I said. “Don’t tell me to shut up.” Outside, I heard sprinkles of rain. I slid the glass door shut and faced my brother. He came out of the kitchen with his glass of ice cubes.

  “Oh yeah?” he said. “Watch this: Shut. Up.” He crunched an ice cube with his mouth open. Broken bits littered the carpet.

  “Fine,” I said. “Be a jerk.”

  “I’m not the jerk,” my brother said. “Mom’s the jerk. You’re the jerk. Baby.”

  “I’m not a baby,” I said.

  My brother laughed. “Hm, could’ve fooled me.” He reared his head back to chomp more ice, his teeth gnashing it into chunk after chunk.

  “You’re the baby,” I said.

  “Oh yeah?” my brother said.

  “Yeah. You won’t even ask Chris anything. You’re too afraid.”

  He stopped his chewing and set his glass down on the bookcase. The A book, which showed the woman’s naked anatomy, was slightly pulled out from the last time my brother looked at it when our mother was gone. He took a step toward me and told me to apologize.

  “For what,” I said. “For you being a baby and a jerk? A baby jerk?”

  My brother balled up his hand. “Say you’re sorry.”

  “No,” I said. “It’s not my fault you’re a jerk. A jerk worse than Ric—”

  I didn’t get to finish his name. My brother let out a yell and charged at me. I wasn’t ready for him, and my body flew like my brother’s did when I pushed him into the pool. I heard a loud thud and didn’t realize it was my head hitting the glass door that went to our porch. I was on the floor with my hand held to my head but I didn’t get why. I was crying but didn’t understand that either. I wanted to sleep, but somewhere my dad wouldn’t stop playing a record. The record was a country one and it kept skipping. The singer sang, I’m sorry, darling, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to. Over and over. It sounded like the singer could cry too. I opened my eyes and tried to focus them past the throbbing. The singer reached out to me, still singing I’m sorry, and rubbed my shoulder.

  “I’m sorry,” my brother said. “I didn’t mean to.”

  My mother walked in at that moment and the record went away. She saw the living room, me on the floor and my brother standing over me, and gasped. It could have been a crime scene.

  “What happened? What did you do to your brother?”

  “We were playing is all,” my brother lied. “He wanted to play.”

  “Stand up,” she said to me. She didn’t take out a small notebook to jot case notes down, like she should have. Her eyes were all over the room. “Is your brother telling the truth?” This wasn’t good interrogation technique, our dad would say if this was a movie. You never interview suspects two at a time. Not at the crime scene. You pull them aside and shake them down one by one. Otherwise, one person’s idea of the truth gets passed on to another, until everyone is remembering what happened the same way, even if that memory has big blind gaps, or is one large lie. “Is he?” she said.

  Of course, there were other ways the interview could go wrong. One suspect could use another’s story against him. In my case, I could listen patiently to everything my brother said, true or untrue, then tell my mother no, it happened just the opposite.

  “Well?” my mother said.

  I rubbed my head where a bump was coming up. “I wasn’t playing,” I said. “He shoved me for no reason.”

  “That’s not true,” my brother said. He looked at me like he couldn’t believe I was lying, even if it was just a little bit. “He kept calling me names.”

  “No, I didn’t,” I lied. “He’s been doing this for months. Hitting me all the time. Making me do things I don’t want to do.”

  “Is that true?” my mother said.

  “No!” my brother said. “He’s making it up.”

  “It is too true. He said if I don’t do everything he wants, Dad will never come back, and it will be all my fault.”

  “I never said that!” my brother said, so dumbfounded that he started to laugh.

  “You think hurting your brother is funny?” my mother said.

  “He’s lying.”

  “What’s wrong with his head?” my mother said. “Why is there a red spot? Is he making that up too?”

  My brother turned away. He said he was sorry again, and for some reason didn’t try to further explain himself with the truth. My mother said my brother would be sorry from his room tonight. That was her verdict. The interview was over. The case was closed.

  “You know, I came back with good news,” she said. “The van is fixed. I left it running outside. I wanted to grab you boys and go out for ice cream.” She looked at my brother. “But you made a mess of it, didn’t you?”

  “Who cares about ice cream?” my brother said. “You can’t make everything better with ice cream. Dad sucks. You suck. This city sucks. I hate this damn family.”

  “Hey!” our mother said again, and she looked at me as if to confirm that it was my brother who just said these mean things. “You can go to your room right now,” she said. “I’ll tell you when it’s time to come out.”

  My brother kicked the TV as he stormed back to our room. I didn’t want to look at my mother. I was afraid if she took a good look, she would see right through me, the lies I had created.

  “The van’s still running,” my mother said, her voice quiet. “How about we get some ice cream to put on that bump of yours.”

  I thought about my brother, alone in our room, using our toys to act out the pain he would later put on me. I turned and looked at the glass door. There was a small smudge where my face had hit.

  “Don’t worry,” my mother said. “We’ll get some for him, too. A peace offering.”

  I said OK and we went out to the van. It should have felt good to ride up front.

  * * *

  We went to the same fast-food place my dad took us to, though it was different after dinnertime. All the big men were out of uniform and in their stained jeans. They wore shirts that told you the kind of car they owned, or dreamed of driving. They brought their wives and kids with them, and most didn’t talk to either as they spooned scoop after scoop of ice cream. A few teens entered and exited, laughing, but the men kept straight faces.

  My mother ordered two small cones for here and a sundae to go. The sundae came in a cup with a clear dome lid. I put my hand around the base to feel the warmth of the hot fu
dge racing to the bottom, melting the ice cream. There wouldn’t be much left by the time we got home. “We should have gotten this to go,” my mother said. “That would have been the smart thing.” I nibbled away my cone’s chocolate shell. “Though it’s nice having some alone time with my baby boy. And I’m not sure your brother deserves much of anything tonight.”

  “He’s not that bad,” I said. I took a bite of my ice cream cone, leaning over the booth’s table. The person before us had left an issue of the local newspaper, sports page up.

  “You’re just too sweet,” my mother said. “Always have been. Mr. Marshmallow.” Her words seemed like a trick. She was saying nice things to pile on the guilt, to make me confess about the lies I had told about my brother. But once this story was out, I knew I would only feel relieved until she asked what else I was hiding.

  “How did you get the van back?” I said.

  “I walked down there and gave them all the money I got for our stuff. And when that wasn’t enough, I called your dad. He does owe us, you know. So he showed up and said he would pay the entire bill if I wanted. You know your dad, he has his good moments.” She took a big bite of ice cream, let it melt in her mouth instead of swallowing it whole. “Your brother does too. He’s just getting bigger, growing older, that’s all.” She took another bite and was already down to the cone. “You know, that stuff your brother said about me and your dad…”

  He didn’t say anything. I made it up.

  “… some things are very tough to forgive, let alone forget.”

  My mother held up the remains of her cone. She seemed like she wanted to say more about my dad, but she didn’t.

  “I’m going to run to the ladies’ room. You finish up.”

  She slid out of the booth, and to avoid her glance as she walked away, I studied the sports page in front of me. In the center was a baseball player at bat, swinging for the fences. I thought of the home run derbies my brother and I had, behind the old folks’ home. I thought of my brother home alone, in the field out back, throwing the ball up to himself, hitting homers without me. Then I thought of him hitting with Chris.

  I flipped over to the news. Our city was too small to have a paper with separate sections during the week. There was the news on the front, the sports on the back, and a glossy insert in the middle, advertising sales at Leavenworth’s one grocery store. I licked my cone and scanned the headlines. The top story was on the proposal to build a new public library, a proposal voted down without a single yea. “We don’t have the money,” explained one councilman, whose face was pictured next to the quote bubble, like the whole thing was a cartoon, “not if we want to maintain the correctional facilities.” And as if to further prove the councilman’s point, below the quote was an editorial about the prison break, called “Nothing ‘Strange’ About Recent Escape.” The article blasted the government for hiring “kids” to guard their prisons, teenagers straight out of high school who had few other options for work, and who jumped at the signing bonus offered by the state. What can we expect when we send baby-faced teens to guard the worst? Should we really be surprised that someone like the Stranger would slip through the cracks? The article went on to list the recent escapes from all of Leavenworth’s prisons, never mentioning whether the criminals were caught or not. Never saying if they were still walking among us.

  My mother returned from the restroom. “You ready?”

  “One second,” I said, and carefully tore the article out of the paper.

  “For your brother?” I nodded, and her face seemed to ease. “You guys still love that stuff, huh?” She grabbed the melted sundae. “All right, I guess a little excitement won’t hurt anybody.”

  * * *

  My mother made me sit up front, keep her company as we took the long way home. I didn’t ask why we had to go the long way, but imagined that she felt bad for the van—locked up at the mechanic’s for so long, not knowing when its owner would come to take it home—and wanted to make up for lost time.

  We got off the main street and took one of the side roads, driving deeper into the city, to an area crowded with old houses, big and nice, but scary at night. Each had multiple floors, some with porches on both levels, and were inhabited by people whose families had been here since the beginning, my mother told me. We drove another few blocks, and my mother talked about how these people had watched the entire city grow around them, seen the good and the bad. They were there when the Army rolled in the materials to build the military prison. At first the people weren’t so sure, she said, and from their porches, they eyed the soldiers with suspicion. But the general in charge visited each family, traveling door-to-door to assure them that once the prison was built—by its future inhabitants, the prisoners themselves—nothing would change. No one was asking anyone to alter their ways.

  Years later, there came word that the city was thinking about building a large prison of its own, instead of the state university originally planned. The people got off their porches for this. They took their wives and children down to the mayor’s office to protest, their angry faces burning orange in the lamplight. But when they got there they were told sorry, they could not see the mayor. You can go home, it’s already been decided. The prison would be good for the city’s growth, it was said, good for the economy. In addition to all the jobs created, the inmates themselves would work for free at the nearby coal mines, giving the people of the city more time to spend with their families, more time to do fun things like fish and swim. And unlike a university, which could be afforded by few and came with no guarantees, the prison could always be counted on. Because as long as there were people, it was reasoned, there would be crime, and people to commit crime. And it would be our job to lock these people up, to watch over them every hour of every day and on through the night, to make sure those who had done wrong would never get out to do anything bad again.

  “No one mentioned what the prison might do to the city’s spirit,” my mother said, finishing her history lesson, and I saw another glimpse of why, before my parents split and my mother had to go full-time at the golf course, she wanted to be a teacher. “Sometimes I try to imagine what it would look like if they had built the school instead. How things would be different.” A car sped by, its headlights washing over my mother’s faraway face. “But who knows,” she said. “It would probably all turn out the same.”

  We drove a few more blocks until I had no idea where we were. The van started to smell funny, like someone had poured pancake syrup on the engine. I rolled down my window, looked for a familiar landmark—the unpainted dinosaur at the abandoned fairgrounds, the big hill I never got to sled down—something to show us home.

  “Where are we?” I said.

  My mother wasn’t listening. She was paying attention to the van, which had started to shake as we coasted down a narrow road. The shaking got worse when we stopped at a four-way stop sign. There were no cars around and the houses had their lights off.

  The van gave a big shiver, and my mother patted the steering wheel. “It just needs a little help,” she said. “That’s all.”

  “I thought it was fixed.”

  “It is,” my mother said. “I mean, it’s supposed to be.” But when she pressed the gas, the van didn’t go. The engine gave one last cough and went still. The interior lights and dashboard warnings all came on at once.

  “What? No,” my mother said. She turned the key and pressed the pedal. When that didn’t work, she closed her eyes and opened them again, like that would do something. She punched the horn, sending a sudden noise out into the surrounding silence. After the noise faded, she looked over at me with her blue eyes, her blond hair almost touching the ceiling.

  “Mom,” I said.

  “Please,” she said, facing front again, “be quiet.” She gripped the wheel with both hands, as if any moment the van would come back to life. “I have to figure this out. Damn mechanics.”

  I reached out. “Mom, it’s OK.”

  She slapp
ed my hand away and looked at me hard. “Don’t tell me it’s OK. You don’t have to tell me that.” She leaned over and unbuckled my seat belt. She put on the emergency lights and unlocked the door. “Get out.”

  Outside the air was buzzing with insects, and a strong wind rushed the road. My mother made me sit on the curb where she could see me. “Don’t move,” she said, and popped the van’s hood. She put her hair up with the tie she always kept around her wrist. “I can’t see a blessed thing,” she said. Neither could I. The moon was covered by thick clouds, and we hadn’t seen a streetlight for blocks. I looked both ways down the street. No cars were coming. None of the porch people were walking out with flashlights and toolboxes. There was no one here to help.

  I held my knees and watched my mother work. She touched one part, wiggled another. I knew not to ask her what she was doing because she wouldn’t want to admit that she didn’t know. I wished my brother were here. He didn’t know anything about cars, but he could help me pass the time. He would invent a game, take the scary world that was out there and turn it on its head. We would be dangerous drifters, maybe, a traveling tag team. The night would be afraid of us, not the other way around.

  I grew cold on the curb, so I walked over to the side of the van and peered in. The inside was a maze of dark parts. There was a thick smell of burning.

  “I thought I told you to stay on the curb,” my mother said. An entire arm of hers had disappeared into the engine and her face was wrinkled with strain.

  “What are you trying to get?”

  “What part of what I said don’t you understand?”

  “I want to help.”

  Her arm flinched like something bit her, and she screamed. She held her finger up, put it in her mouth to stop the bleeding.

  “Are you OK?”

  She turned to me angry. “You can’t help, all right? I wish you could, but you can’t. You can barely see over the hood. Now go sit.”

  “Maybe we should call Dad,” I said.