by Cote Smith
“What are you doing?” I said.
“Good question,” Rick said. “Let me show you.” He grabbed me by my neck and threw me over his lap, on top of his oil-stained jeans. “Think of it as preventative medicine,” he said, and folded his belt in half in front of my face, so I knew exactly what was coming.
I closed my eyes and prayed for my brother. I hoped that he was faking hurt, that he would sneak up on Rick and put him in a choke hold, a combat move we had sort of learned from our dad, but were never supposed to use. Unless it was an emergency.
“Let him go,” a voice said, soft. It couldn’t belong to my brother. I opened my eyes and lifted my head. It was Sandy. Standing alone, her hair imprisoned by a hairnet, a small frying pan in her hand.
“Oh, mind your own damn business,” Rick said. He wrapped the belt around his good hand, tested the tightness of his grip. “He broke the rules, so he gets punished. He gets the same treatment as me and you.”
“Maybe,” Sandy said. “But that’s not up to you.”
Rick stopped what he was doing. He rested both of his arms on my back and gave Sandy his attention. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means you should leave the punishment to the parents and go on about your business.”
“Oh yeah?” Rick said. He pushed me off him and stood up. “Well, do you see his parents around anywhere?” Sandy slowly blinked her eyes. “Me either,” Rick said. “But I’m here, aren’t I? I’m the one who’s always around, OK. I see these brats more than their goddamn dad.”
Sandy sighed, and for a moment it seemed she could see Rick’s point. “It’s not the same, Rick. You don’t know what it’s like.”
Rick laughed to himself. For some reason, what Sandy said was funny to him. He unwrapped his hand and threw his belt over his shoulder. “Oh, so now you’re an expert. On parenting.” He sauntered over to Sandy, until the two were close enough to kiss. “You. Of all people. Is that right?”
Sandy met his eyes, her jaw clenched. “Don’t.”
“What?” Rick said, his voice dropping to a whisper. “You don’t want to trade parenting tips?”
Sandy squeezed the frying pan’s handle, and her arm veins popped up like little rivers.
“OK, how about a freebie?” Rick said, turning his back to Sandy and looking straight at me. “A free lesson from me to you, Sandy. Here it goes: If you ever have a baby that won’t quit crying, don’t shake it to make it stop.” He turned around, smiled at me. “For God’s sake, I mean, you don’t treat a baby like a jug of juice.”
Sandy’s eyes dropped. She looked at me, biting her lip, as if she wanted to apologize with all her heart for burning my breakfast every day I ever knew her.
Rick licked his lips, proud of himself. “Nope, last time I checked they don’t give out mother-of-the-year awards to a lady with a dead baby on her hands. I’m pretty sure they put people like that in jail.”
Sandy lowered her head. Hit him, I thought. He isn’t looking. Do it.
But Sandy didn’t. She relaxed her grip on the pan, twirled it by its handle, and composed herself. “Are you sure you want to be airing each other’s dirty laundry?” Rick stopped his cocky pacing. “’Cause there are some things I heard about you, you know, things that you probably don’t want getting out.” My mind went to the gas cans Rick filled in secret, when he thought no one was looking.
Rick scratched his sling. “Bullshit. You don’t know nothing.”
“You’re right,” Sandy said. “I don’t. But Cornbread does. He only told me a little, says there’s some code among guys who’ve done time together. But I bet if I really wanted, I could get it out of him.” She rolled her tongue in her mouth, combing her teeth, and her whole body loosened in a way I’d never seen before.
“Go ahead,” Rick said to Sandy, “fetch your magic Negro. Just because we jailed together doesn’t mean he knows shit.”
“O-K,” Sandy said, stretching out each letter. “Hey, maybe I’ll fetch the boys’ mother while I’m at it.” Rick quickly turned around. I couldn’t see his face, but I bet it was filled with fear. “How much does Aggie really know?” Sandy asked, her voice cold. “I’m sure she knows about the stupid things that landed you in jail. But does she know about what you did in prison? The stuff you did to survive?”
Rick walked away from Sandy and me and stood by a tall cafeteria window, his reflection milky in the glass pane. “She knows enough.”
My brother came into the cafeteria, still holding his stomach. The mark on his face where Rick had hit him was easily visible.
“What’s going on?”
Sandy and Rick exchanged a quick look.
“Nothing, sweetheart,” Sandy said, and just like that she reverted to her former self, the ex-con cook who always treated me like I was the world’s most precious metal. “Just having some words with Mr. Rick. But I think we’re done.”
Rick stayed by the window, gloomy. “I was just trying to help,” he said, staring at his reflection, the only other person on his side. I liked to do the same thing when I was alone in our bathroom. I liked to whisper and watch my lips form the words. This is what I look like. This is what other people see.
* * *
Our mother was waiting in the van. Her big blond hair hung out the driver’s window, soaking up the sun like Baron used to do on car rides. She had an hour to drive us home and feed us, she said, before she had to be back at work for the late shift. She didn’t ask why we were late, where we had been, not until the van was parked and we were walking up to our building’s pea-green door. “Why was I waiting?” she said. There were no sounds at the pool. The fireflies were out, lighting up what was left of the summer. “At the golf course, I mean.”
“We were detained,” my brother said.
My mother laughed a tired laugh.
“Detained?” she said. “That’s a funny word for you. Hey, what happened to your face?”
“A golf ball hit me,” my brother said. “I guess it was only a matter of time.” He tried to pull open the building door, but my mother stuck out her long arm and held it shut.
“Hold it. You’re not lying again, are you? Turn around.” My brother slowly spun around, and my mother brushed the hair covering his face. “I’m not ignorant,” she said. “I know there was no siren that day. I canvassed the neighborhood. No one heard a thing.” She cupped her hand on my brother’s cheek and examined him, her thumb tracing his red mark, now a dark bump. I watched her and put my hand to my face, where my head had hit the patio door.
“The Bump Brothers,” my mother said. She leaned in and gently kissed my brother’s bump. “Listen, you don’t have to tell me where you were that day, though you can if you want. Just tell me what happened to your face. And I don’t want another lie. I’ve had enough lies to last a life.”
My brother looked away.
“Rick did it,” I said. “He hit him for no reason. That’s why he has that mark.”
“Rick did?”
“And he was going to hit me, but Sandy stopped him. He was going to beat me with his belt.”
“He hit you,” my mother repeated, sounding more confused than disapproving.
“What do you expect?” my brother said. “Working with prisoners.”
“Ex-prisoners,” my mother said, though that didn’t sound any better. “OK, I’ll talk to him.”
“Yeah,” my brother said, “talk.”
Our mother waited until we were inside the apartment before she said any more. She wrapped a handful of ice cubes in a washrag and sat my brother down at the kitchen table, the ice pack pressed to his face. Across the living room the sliding glass door was open and I could hear a police car’s siren wailing down a nearby street. I pictured my dad racing across town, chasing down some bad guy. The Stranger.
“Listen,” my mother said. “I’m sorry about your face.”
“It’s fine,” my brother said. “Whatever.”
“It’s not fine. Rick is … co
mplicated.”
“We don’t like him,” I said.
“It’s not that simple.”
“He hurt him,” I said. It was a simple statement, but true, and it stumped my mother for a long time. She sat there thinking. She repeated what I said, tried my words out on her lips. He hurt him. He hurt him.
Finally she said, “I’m sorry if Rick ever hurt either of you. But that’s only because Rick has his own hurt.” She took the ice pack off my brother’s bump. The bump looked brighter, bigger. The swelling had gotten worse, not better. “It’s like I always say, hurt people hurt people.”
My brother slapped my mother’s hand off his face, and the ice pack fell to the floor, scattering cubes across the kitchen. “I’m sick of your stupid sayings. You say all these things, but they never mean anything.” He turned his bruised half away from us, showing only the good side, like he was giving us his best mug shot. My mother apologized again. “I don’t care,” my brother said. “Stop saying that. Stop saying you’re sorry. You’re sorry. Dad’s sorry. It doesn’t matter. Things keep happening.”
“I know, I’m sorry.” She put her hand to her mouth, to stop herself from apologizing. But she didn’t know what else to say.
“Forget it,” my brother said. He kicked the spilled ice out of the kitchen and onto the carpet, where it would melt into dark pools I would accidentally step into later. He left. I sat in my chair, watching my mother think things through. Her hand in her big hair.
“He wouldn’t hurt you for no reason,” my mother said. “Rick isn’t perfect, but he’s got a good heart.” I didn’t know what she wanted me to say. If she wanted me to confess about the cart, that wasn’t going to happen. I wasn’t going to betray my brother again. She’d have to get it out of Rick.
“He didn’t deserve that,” I said. “We didn’t do anything.”
My mother nodded. She got up from the table to fix dinner: hot dogs and beans for the third time that week. She dumped the beans in one small pot, started water in another. Normally I would help her get everything ready. My mother would take down three plates and I would put a hot dog bun on each, opening them carefully so they didn’t tear. I would get the ketchup out if we had any and turn it upside down, so whoever used it first didn’t get the runny stuff. I would help my mother keep an eye on the hot dogs, which I knew were ready when they floated to the top, like the dead men we pretended to be at the pool.
But I didn’t do any of these things. I couldn’t make myself want to help. I kept thinking of Rick, of what he would say to us the next time we saw him, and the time after that.
“You’ve got your thinking face on,” my mother said. She shut off the stove and put two plates on the table. One for me, one for my brother. Though my mother sat in his spot, the hot dogs drowning in the plate of beans in front of her. “What are you thinking about?”
I used my fork to make a mountain out of my beans. I dipped one of them in ketchup and it looked like blood. I said I wasn’t thinking about anything.
“You know I meant it,” my mother said, “when I said Rick’s got his own issues. Did you see his sling?”
Yes, I saw it. I yanked it until I made Rick scream.
“Well, it wasn’t an accident.”
“What happened?” I asked. I pictured all the ways Rick could have hurt himself—falling off a ladder, the scoreboard, tripping down the stairs—and I couldn’t help but smile. But my mother wouldn’t say any more. How wasn’t the point, she said. The point was someone hurt him. And now he had passed that hurt to me. To my brother.
“But it better stop there,” she said. “You better stop it before someone stops it for you.”
* * *
Before she went back to work our mother reminded us to take out the garbage. The trash men were coming tomorrow. I scraped the beans and dogs my brother never ate into the kitchen trash and tied the bag shut, replaced the old bag with a new one while my brother waited by the door. Outside, the complex was quiet, minus the buzz of bugs swimming around our building’s exterior lights. The lights were set to a timer that turned them on at dusk, off at dawn. I imagined the bugs dreading the moment the sun started to show, leaving sad when the light went away.
My brother decided to swing by the pool before we went back in. I had never seen the pool at night. Not up close. It was different in person. Its sugary blue glowed brighter, so that the water looked like something from the future. Something one of the men in my brother’s plots would fall into and receive special powers from. My brother didn’t open the gate. He ran his hand over the pool rules sign. No running. No horseplay. No swimming at night. But if that was a rule, why leave the pool lit up and uncovered? Why tempt us little bugs who didn’t know any better?
My brother put one sneaker in the fence and hopped over. He opened the gate, but didn’t wait for me to follow him through. I traced a path around the pool, to the shallow end where it was safe. Where if I fell in I could rescue myself. The water was still. No pumps were on. No wind formed a small tide, crashing waves against the pool’s concrete side. There was no lapping. I got on my knees and bent over the water, until I saw myself staring back up at me. I waved to this other me, and when that wasn’t enough, I reached out to touch my face. I wanted to feel this new water, feel something different. I wanted to wipe away my reflection, which hadn’t changed at all since I studied it in the video store candy case. I was the same as I had always been. The water felt like it always did. Cold. Wet. There wasn’t anything special about it. I sat back and looked up, first at the naked sky, then at the diving board, where my brother stood fully clothed, peering into the pool. The light from the maintenance shed outlined him as a shadow.
“What do you think?” he said. “Should I jump?”
I shook my head, but wasn’t sure if he could see. From behind him, a second shadow emerged.
“I don’t think it’s a good idea,” Chris said. “What good is the Gainer if no one’s here to see it?”
Chris stuck out his hand and helped my brother down from the board. Even though it was night, he still wasn’t wearing a shirt. He gave my brother a hug and said it was good to see him again. He didn’t say the same to me.
“What are you guys doing?” Chris said. “It’s not safe to be out here alone. Not at night.”
He and my brother walked over to where I was sitting on the shallow side. Chris was wearing the same trunks as last time, and had a hat on backward. “Then again, I guess you’re not alone, are you?” Chris said. I could feel him smile, though not with the amount of energy I was used to. He sat down next to me and dipped his legs in the pool, like the first time we met. His tattoo shone in the pool’s light. I stared at his trunks. I wanted to ask about his time as a lifeguard. I wanted him to finish the story.
“Where have you been?” my brother said.
“Oh, here and there,” Chris said. “Trying to sort some things. You know how this world can be. One minute you’ve got it all figured out, the next you feel all wrong.”
He craned his neck to the sky and sighed. And now? my brother said. What was Chris up to now?
“Just looking at the stars, my man. I like to come out when it’s clear like this, check out the constellations. Look.” He put his arm around my brother and pointed at the sky. “There’s the Little Dipper. Ursa Major. There’s Orion. And look at that, he’s doing the Gainer.”
Chris laughed a little, but his laugh sounded fake too. I looked at the stars, but couldn’t see any of the things he pointed to.
“I’m just kidding,” Chris said. “But did you know that Orion is the Hunter? He was a famous hunter who got stung by a scorpion … like this!” Chris turned his hand into a stinger and stung the back of my brother’s neck. “And he died. But the gods really liked him, so they brought him and the scorpion up to the sky. See, there’s Scorpio.” He drew another line with his fingers.
“That’s cool,” my brother said. “What else is out there?”
“Well … oh, I know. Y
ou’ll like this.” He tilted his head into my brother’s, so their faces were nearly touching, their eyes set on the same spot. “You can’t see them this time of the year, but to the right of Orion there are two super-big stars. Brothers.” He planted two fingers in the sky, where the brothers should have been. “See? Those are their heads. And you can’t tell, but they’re always holding hands. Playing, having a good time. Always by each other’s side.”
He wiggled his fingers in the sky, made the brothers jump around.
“What are their names?” my brother said.
“Hmm,” Chris said. “Good question. I forget.”
“Is Orion their dad?”
Chris shook his head. “No. It’s just the brothers. No stupid parents around, telling you what to do, where to go. Isn’t that nice?”
Chris dropped his fingers and leaned back on his hands, and the three of us sat there like that, staring at the stars. I tried to make figures of my own out of the brightest dots, and stories to go with their shapes. Here was my mother, broke down by the van. Here was my father, fired by the Chief. Here was Rick. Here was Sandy. Here was Chris. I picked a star for everyone I knew.
“The cool thing,” Chris said, “is that the stars are the same everywhere you go. That’s what I like. No matter how you feel, no matter if you’re up or down, they won’t change.”
How many things can you say that about? he said. He lay flat on the concrete, his hands resting behind his head. My brother and I did the same, until all we could see was the vast night, a blanket of black pocked with white.
“Chris,” my brother said. “Are you OK?”
“Oh sure, Sir Knight. Sure I am. It’s just…” His words trailed off. “Never mind.”
A wisp of a cloud drifted into frame, pushed by a wind I couldn’t feel. A few minutes passed and more wisps moved in, covering up the brother stars, tucking them in.
“See, that’s the thing,” Chris said. “The stars don’t change, but you can’t say the same about the world around them.” He sat up quickly, as if struck by lightning, or some brilliant idea. “But,” he said, “there are certain places clouds never touch. Places that … that … Why, in my travels, I’ve witnessed constellations few have ever seen.”