by Cote Smith
* * *
“I won’t be seeing you guys for a while,” my dad said. “Your mother’s orders.” This was after he made his appeal, was denied, and hung up the phone, defeated. We both sat there a while longer, in silence, my dad recovering from the one-sided fight he’d had with my mother. Me, trying to imagine not seeing my dad. No movies. No fast food or cop games. I imagined the Stranger showing up, looking to hurt my brother and me, my mother, what he thought was my dad’s entire family, only to be disappointed when he found my dad, maybe drunk, definitely alone.
“Why’d you tell her?” I asked, somewhat angry.
“I almost didn’t,” my dad said. “But … that’s what the old me would have done. Kept it a secret.”
“What’s going to happen now?”
“Tomorrow you’ll go back to your mother’s. You and your brother.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
My dad wrapped the phone around his neck like a noose, asked himself how he could be so stupid. I wondered if he would be fired. I pictured my dad in the Chief’s office, head lowered in shame while the Chief raged at him like in the movies. My dad hadn’t caught the Stranger, and now this. Again my dad would apologize, and again it wouldn’t be enough. Heads need to roll, the Chief would say. Examples must be made. He would extend an open hand, waiting for my dad’s gun and badge.
“I just don’t know what he was thinking,” my dad said. “Do you? Hey, look at me. Is there something going on with your brother?”
I shook my head no, though the thought crept in of how easy it would be to say yes. How simple it would be to confess everything: what I saw the night of my mother’s party, my brother’s disappearance the night before, my theory about the pool and about Chris. The tape. What a relief it would be, I thought, to tell my dad all these things.
I looked at a picture my dad had on his wall. It was of my brother and me dressed as sailors, though we were so young we could barely walk, let alone steer a ship. My brother had his arm around my shoulder, and instead of facing the camera, he was facing me.
“He hasn’t met any new friends?” my dad asked. “He’s not hanging around any older boys who like to get in trouble?”
I kept my eyes on the picture, swallowed the dry in my throat. “I don’t think so,” I said, and was glad that we were sitting in the darkness.
My dad kept pressing me, asking me what we did the days our mother went to work. Did we go anywhere? We never left the complex, did we? I kept telling him no, we never went anywhere. We haven’t met anyone. We haven’t done anything.
“You’re not lying to your dad?” he continued. “You’re telling the truth? Because I would understand if you weren’t. I know what it’s like to want to protect somebody.”
“I haven’t done anything wrong,” I said. “We don’t know anything. Ask Mom.”
At the mention of my mom, my dad went quiet again. He pulled himself off the stairs and hung up the phone with a resounding clack. He ate a slice of cheese straight out of the wrapper and went upstairs to change. When I heard his door shut, I went and sat at the kitchen table. My dad had left his police pad there, and I flipped through its pages so I could think about the crimes other people committed, the mistakes they made, and not the lies I had just told.
MW wrk.
MW liquor store.
MW home.
MWWR.
MW home.
These were the newest notes, but I didn’t know what they meant. So I flipped backward, to the letters I could decipher. B&E meant breaking and entering. DUI we’d learned in school. BK I didn’t know.
“Brian Kern,” my dad said. I hadn’t heard him descend the stairs. “Or as you and your brother like to call him, the Stranger. Now what did I say about going through my things?”
He grabbed his gun off the table, where he’d left it even after what had just happened. He put it in its holster, his badge on his hip.
“What about the rest?”
My dad snatched the pad from me, closed it. “The rest, you don’t need to know,” he said. “The rest is none of your business.”
“But—”
“I said no, goddammit. Why are you and your brother so hard of hearing?” He grabbed his keys and wallet. “Now go to bed.”
After he left, I sat on the couch wondering why my dad had told me the Stranger’s full name, why that was my business but MW wasn’t. Maybe he wanted me to know who he was in case I ran into him. Or maybe he wanted me to think of him as real, just another human being and not some scary monster out to get me. There are no monsters, my dad once told me. This when I couldn’t sleep after watching a movie about a fish lady who ate her own kids. Mother Guppy, I think it was called. There are only people, my dad said. It’s people you have to watch out for. But I won’t let any of them hurt you. That’s my job. I’m your dad.
This had calmed me at the time but now made things worse. A monster I could imagine, I could hold in my brain and toy with. A person, a real-life human being, I could never understand. Not fully. I could never grasp why my mother was with Rick. I couldn’t understand why my brother kept leaving me for Chris, picking some guy we hardly knew over me, his only brother. A monster wouldn’t do that. It would eat you, spit out your bones, but the only feeling it would ever force you to face was fear.
ten
THE SUMMER BEGAN to fall away. The city inched closer toward a nasty August heat, and the Stranger remained at large. After the battery factory, my brother refused to discuss anything about the Stranger. The only thing that interested him now, it seemed, was Chris.
But for a couple of weeks, Chris was unavailable, or my brother was unavailable to him. The morning after the shooting, our mother handed down my brother’s sentence. In addition to not seeing our dad, my brother was grounded. Sentenced to the apartment for an undetermined amount of time. Maybe forever, my mother said, if he kept going the way he was going. Would there be time off for good behavior? There would not. Not for a crime as serious as my brother’s.
So for what seemed like forever he did nothing. He stayed in our room most of the time, sleeping, reading, or doing push-ups. At first I visited him, pretending I was a variety of people. I pretended I was family, not a brother but a distant cousin, come to show the black sheep support when everyone else had given up on him. I pretended I was a prison guard with a soft heart, the one who’d sneak an extra dinner roll from the mess hall. I pretended I was a detective. My dad’s superior. I apologized for the way our dad had handled the case. That boy sure did bungle it, I said. But not to worry, we know you’re innocent. We know you’d never hurt anyone. And I’ve made it my mission to find the people who did. So tell me the truth: Who did take that gun? Was it Chris? Did he tell you to do it? Or were you learning to protect yourself? Just in case.
“You’re so stupid,” my brother said, two weeks into his sentence. “Stop making shit up and leave me alone.”
He threw a sock ball at my face. The guard should have searched his cell for weapons.
“Prison’s changed you,” I said. “That’s the pen talking.”
My brother shut the encyclopedia he was reading. Not A for anatomy. The letter E, for escape, I guessed. He grabbed a handful of my bottom-bunk sheets. “You think the Stranger’s sheets had dinosaurs on them? This isn’t a prison. It’s a nursery. Now leave me alone, baby.”
He wasn’t going to talk. That was clear. One day his sentence would be served, and what then? I shut myself in the bathroom. I stared into the mirror and pretended the skinny kid with the bowl cut was someone else. A cop. A teacher. A guard. Anyone who knew what to do. Anyone who had an answer.
It’s up to you, the reflection said, in a voice that was and wasn’t my own. You have to do it. Find out what’s going on with your brother. Get him back on the force. It’s the only way.
* * *
I decided to tail him. If my brother wasn’t going to volunteer the answers I wanted, I would have to get them s
ome other way. But after following him around for a day without him noticing or caring, I realized I was more like a guy on the inside than I was a tail. I was the little brother, so it made sense for me to follow. I could walk by my brother’s side, step where he stepped, and who would suspect a thing? To make sure my brother never got too far away, though, I acted like I was a dog and my brother was my owner. Inside the apartment I went room to room with him, plopped on the ground when he stopped, and panted or pretended to sleep. I imagined an invisible leash rung around my neck, and that my brother was walking me, and that we could only be as far apart as the leash stretched.
What I discovered was little. I learned that he didn’t want to talk to me, that if I asked him what he was thinking while he stared out our sliding glass door, in the direction of the pool, at the woods, he had no problem putting me in a headlock, stuffing my head in the crack between the couch cushions. None of this was done in a playful way. He didn’t smile to himself, the way one of his evil men would after drowning some hero’s loved ones in the bathtub. He looked annoyed, and tired of me, of this apartment, the roaches. But we couldn’t go anywhere. Our mother’s boss was on post all week, so she couldn’t take us with her to work. She called every thirty minutes to make sure we were there, and if I answered and said, Yes, we’re doing fine, nothing is wrong, she said, OK, good. I believe you. Now put your brother on the phone. It was times like these I wished we had a second phone. So I could listen in on the other line, hear my mother’s instructions, instead of just my brother’s half. Yes. No. We won’t. I won’t. Goodbye.
A couple of weeks into his sentence we went to the pool. But we didn’t swim. We couldn’t risk losing track of time and not being there when our mother called.
“Have you seen him?” I said. “Do you think he’s gone?”
“No,” my brother said. “He’s not gone. I haven’t been here. So.”
“Will he come back?”
A hot breeze blew over the pool, and my brother put his arm through the pool gate, unlocked it.
“We can’t,” I said.
“I’m not.” He opened the gate but did not enter. “But in case someone’s looking,” he said. “Now they know it’s an open swim.”
I didn’t know what that meant, and my brother didn’t explain. He left the gate open like that, for any chalk kid to wander in and fall in the water, to flail or worse. But I didn’t shut it. I followed my brother like a good spy, and when we went into our apartment the phone was ringing. It’d been only ten minutes, but here was our mother, calling again. I just got this feeling, she said. I just got this feeling that something was wrong.
* * *
Trailing my brother became trickier the Sunday we went back to the golf course with our mother. Normally she didn’t work Sunday mornings. That time was reserved for church. But the past month, we hadn’t made it to a single mass. Instead, our mother slept in, after a long day of work or a long night out with Rick, who wasn’t around when we arrived.
“He had an emergency, so you two have free roam of the course,” she said. She stared at my brother as she spoke. She must have wanted to keep an eye on him, too.
“Emergency?” I said.
“Yes. He wasn’t feeling well. But I expect you to be on your best behavior. Be back at the van before the cannon.”
The cannon belonged to the fort. It fired every day at five, right after retreat was played over loudspeakers planted all over post. My brother and I didn’t own watches, so our mother made us use the cannon to tell time. When the cannon sounded, my brother and I liked to clutch our chests and pretend we’d been shot. Fall to the ground, say woe is me.
We stopped by the cafeteria for a late breakfast. Sandy wasn’t behind the counter or sitting in any of the empty seats.
“She must not be here,” I said.
“She is too,” my brother said. “She’s hiding.” He headed for the metal double doors that led to the kitchen, where we weren’t allowed.
“We can’t,” I said.
“Watch us,” my brother said.
“You just do what you want, don’t you?”
“Yes. And I do what you want too, but are too baby to do.” He pushed a door open and slid in without a sound. I thought about whether to follow, but couldn’t make up my mind. A good undercover cop wouldn’t hesitate, I knew. He would follow the mark wherever the mark went, do whatever the mark asked, until the line between right and wrong became blurred, and the cop began to wonder if there really was a good side and a bad, or if wrongdoing, as one bad movie had said, was in the eye of the beholder.
After a minute the door swung open and my brother’s head poked out. “You have to see this,” he said before disappearing into the back again.
This time I did what a good cop would do, what I thought my dad would have wanted me to do. I followed him. I snuck through the door and hid behind an icebox that hummed like our box fan. I peeped around and took everything in, memorized the exits. The kitchen was dirtier than I had imagined. Old mop strings shed during the last scrub stuck to the floor. All the metal had a rust to it, and the walls and ceiling were yellow when it was clear they wanted to be white. We walked through a maze of boxes, stacked into towers that nearly touched the ceiling. My brother stopped me when we came to a corner and put his finger to his lips.
“Shh,” he said. “Do not disturb.” He waved me around the corner, and I stepped out in the open and saw what he wanted me to see. It was Sandy, sitting on a stack of huge sacks of popcorn kernels. Or, Cornbread sat on the sacks and Sandy sat in his lap, her back twisted, so I couldn’t see what their faces were doing. Cornbread held her in his big arms, like my mother did when she wanted to pretend I was still a baby. Sandy rocked with him, cooed, moaned, and didn’t shiver when Cornbread’s hand drew circles on her naked knee.
I immediately thought of Rick and my mother, the night of the party. Cornbread’s arms flexed harder, holding Sandy tight. Sandy’s legs kicked in the air like she was swinging on a swing set, trying to get higher and higher. I watched for a moment longer, and walked away, in sort of a daze, until I reached the cafeteria, where my brother was waiting, laughing. “I know,” he said. “It’s stupid, isn’t it?”
“I guess,” I said, though I couldn’t put into words what I just saw, or what seeing it made me feel.
“Don’t you get it?” my brother whispered. “Nobody’s watching. Rick’s gone. Mom’s working. Sandy and Cornbread are, well, you saw.” He smiled at me, though in a way I didn’t completely recognize. “We have the whole course to ourselves, dummy. We can do whatever we want.”
He got up and walked out the cafeteria’s side door, and I followed him outside, unsure what he meant. What could we do now that Rick was gone that we couldn’t do while Rick was here, except relax, not worry about his leg pinch?
We went around back, down the long hill that led to the golf cart garage. The air was thick and dead. Coming in from the daylight, I rubbed my eyes to help them adjust to the darkness, while keeping up with my brother as he weaved from row to row, snaked through the endless sea of carts.
“What are we doing?” I said.
“We’re doing what we always do,” my brother said.
“I don’t want to play hide-and-go-seek.”
“Who said anything about that?” he said, and started to walk faster, to take sharper and more surprising turns. I tried to track his feet, but he was running now, darting toward the back, where it was all dark.
I had to stop to catch my breath. “Wait up,” I said, but I could no longer hear my brother’s footsteps. “Where are you?” The entire garage was still, buzzing with silence. Everything looked like it could come to life. “I told you I’m not playing.”
I wound my way through several more rows. It got so dark that when I closed my eyes, there wasn’t much of a difference. “Come out! I don’t like this!”
No one returned my words. I sat down in the middle of a row and wondered what would happen if this was
it. If I was a dead boy. I imagined my face on a flyer tacked to the bulletin board at my dad’s police station. The other officers would pat my dad on the shoulder, console him as he stared at my picture on his break, his face blank. They’ll find him, Alan would say. They always do. When they did find me, when I was discovered by Cornbread or, more likely, Rick, my mother would collapse over my body. Don’t touch him, she would say, running her hands through my hair, over my skin, which would be pale and pruney, like I had drowned in the pool. Don’t any of you touch him. And Rick would slowly back away, slinking back into the shadows, because he had never had a son and couldn’t know what to say. He would have to leave my mother alone.
I brought my legs to my chest and put my head down.
“Hey, c’mon,” a voice said. “What are you doing?”
I looked up and saw my brother.
“Get up, would you?” he said. “I want to show you something.”
* * *
“It’s a cart,” I said.
My brother had picked me up and walked me through rows of carts, leading me to what he wanted to show me. I held on to his shirt until we passed through what felt like the garage’s center, where it was lighter and any sound echoed. We took turns hooting and shouting, letting our voices disappear into the dark, only to return to us a second later, tinny, like we were talking through a can.
“Here it is,” he said, and sat down in a random cart, the last one in its row. I sat next to him in the passenger side, my butt on the edge so my feet could touch the floor.
“I don’t get it,” I said.
“Look.” He pointed at the ignition, where someone had left a key. “It’s Rick’s. This is his cart.” A green rabbit’s foot dangled from the key ring, bright and unreal. I remembered something similar dangling from Rick’s car keys. “Haven’t you ever noticed? He always leaves his keys in his cart, like an idiot. But now everybody’s gone. Now’s our chance.” I reached out to touch the rabbit’s foot, which I had been too afraid to do in Rick’s car. My brother slapped my hand away. “No way,” he said. “You’re too dumb to drive.” He took a deep breath, moved his hand to the shifter, and put the cart in reverse. “If anyone’s going to get us out of here, it’s going to be me.”