Cote Smith - Hurt People

Never in a million years.

Aimed the gun right at me.

You were right. Something is wrong.

These were the words my dad said to my mother. After he walked my brother to the basement, his holding cell, and dared him to move. My dad stretched the cord to the stairs, where he sat with his head in his hands, mumbling words of apology into the receiver as he finished the story. I didn’t say anything. I was so shocked. Never had a gun pointed at me. Yeah. Mm-hm. No, I don’t think he knew what he was doing. He looked afraid. Like he’d realized what he’d done.

My dad pulled the phone away from his face, and from my spot on the couch I could hear my mother’s voice. I couldn’t understand her words but I could hear their force. The way she launched them at my dad like missiles. I pictured my mother on the other end, pacing the entire apartment with the cordless space phone, not bound by any tether. I saw her going into our vacant bedroom. Going out on the porch, staring at the moon. When she said all the mean things she could think to say, she gave my dad his punishment. His sentence, she would say, for being so thoughtless.

* * *

“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.

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.