Cote Smith - Hurt People

“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 some 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.