Cote Smith - Hurt People

Another sound, this one from beyond our walls. It was the early chirp of a bird, calling to one of his buddies. My mother’s window was open, and I could feel the morning breeze fly by, puffing out the window’s thin curtain. I breathed in the air, which smelled of chlorine, tasted like the pool.

I turned to the mess of covers in my mother’s bed. It was dark in the room, blacker than the hall. “Are we still going to the pool?” I said. The lump didn’t respond. “Mom.” Nothing. I bumped the bed with my hip. “You promised,” I said. “We’ve got new moves to show you. You’ve got to see our new moves.”

When there was still no movement, I put my hand on the blanket where I thought her hip would be, but the covers caved. I felt all around, before diving into the cold blankets. She wasn’t here. She was supposed to be, but she wasn’t. I looked at the alarm to try to make sense of this. Its double zeros looked like surprised eyes.

I walked to the kitchen, knowing my mother wasn’t there. My brother was there, though, sitting at the table, eating a big bowl of cereal.

“I used the last of the milk,” he said.

“Where’s Mom?”

He pointed his spoon at a sticky note on the fridge. She had arranged her words like a poem.

Boys, Rick is sick.

Had to run to work. Should be home

after lunch. Stay inside. Sorry

NO POOL.

I Love You.

I crumpled the note in my hand. “She said she would be here.”

“What do you care, stableboy? Dad’s picking you up later anyway.”

I sat down and stared at my brother’s cereal. “That isn’t milk,” I said. “I hate this.”

“I know,” my brother said.

“Rick was fine last night.”

“I don’t know.”

“She told me.”

“That’s your problem,” my brother said. “You’ve got to stop listening to her. She just says things.” He stabbed a few flakes. “So does Dad. You know he’s the one who messed up Rick? Yeah, I heard them talking last night. Rick was here until like two, begging. What a fucking baby.”

He took a final violent bite of cereal. Two G.I. Joes from a forgotten plot lay in the middle of the table. I made the Army guy my dad. The guy with the metal head, I turned into Rick. Metalhead wouldn’t tell my dad what he knew about the Stranger, so my dad had returned to the golf course, confronted him in the cafeteria, or in the golf cart garage. My dad said, Listen, Metalhead, you know what the Stranger has done, what he’s promised to do. Stop playing games. Metalhead scoffed, twirled his keys around his finger, the rabbit’s foot a green blur. I could help, he said, but I also could not. So the Stranger wants you out of the picture? Seems to me that’s something we have in common. And maybe my dad would lunge for him then. Or maybe he’d ask him one more time, politely, with respect, before Rick — before Metalhead — told him to pound sand. You don’t get it, he would say. I don’t like you. I’m not like you. When I get ahold of something good, he would say, putting two fingers in my dad’s face, shaping them into snake fangs, which would paralyze my leg a few days later — when I get what I want, I don’t let go.

“Dad pushed him,” my brother said. “That’s all I know.”

A moment later there was a knock on our door, our dad telling us to let him in.

“What will you do?” I asked my brother. “When I’m gone.”

A worm of a smile wiggled its way across my brother’s face. He stood up, patted me on my shoulder. “The stableboy is gone, so I guess I’ll ready the horses.”

* * *

My dad put me in the cruiser. As I waited for him to walk around and get in the driver’s side, I looked out at our apartment building, its dull brown bleached light by the sun. Tall maples curtained the front windows. I tried to see through those curtains, through those walls and into our apartment, to guess what my brother was doing.

I saw nothing. I felt like I’d left recess early, and everyone was having fun without me.

I shook my head. I put Sandy’s words in my mind and told myself my brother would be fine. Where would he go? Where can anyone go? When my thoughts began to clear, I saw the smoking lady, this ghost of early summer, by the dumpster. She was smoking and talking to someone. I couldn’t tell who, not until my dad backed out and pointed the car away from the Frontiers. We drove too fast for me to be sure, but I was almost positive the person the smoking lady was talking to was Chris.

* * *

That night I was tucked in. I was put to bed and promised to. My dad wasn’t going out. Not tonight. He patted the blanket and asked if I wanted a story. No, I told him, which wasn’t true. I wanted a story, just not from him.

In the middle of the night I was woken by water rushing through the pipes above the bed. My dad must’ve used the bathroom upstairs. Minutes later, he was standing over me. Son, he whispered. Son. He couldn’t see me, or tell if I was sleeping, and for a moment I studied him, the way he waited, impatiently, his arms crossed, his body in full uniform.

“I have to run to work.”

“Now?” I said. The word came out as more whimper than whisper.

“Yes, it’s an emergency.”

“Is it him?”

“Don’t know what it is yet.” I sat up, but held the blanket close. “You’ll be fine,” he said. “I’ll lock the door and you’ll go back to sleep.”

“What if he comes?”

“He won’t. He’s far away.”

“But—”

“Listen, if it is him, then that means he’s not here, right? He can’t be two places at once. No one can.”

He patted me one more time and left, ascending the cheap, squeaky stairs.

* * *

I woke up the next morning with the world lapping around me. I ran upstairs to see my dad, to have him sit me down and say, Son, we got him. But the upstairs was empty. No notes, no poems, nothing. I made peanut butter toast and tried not to think about the worst possible things. I stayed away from the basement, where the spiders lived. I stayed away from the stairs, which led to my dad’s room, which led to his closet, and to the tape.

My dad came home a half hour later. The Stranger tip had been a bust. Some bored teen playing a prank. I pictured a swarm of patrol cars swooping in on the battery factory, only to find nothing. Or they found a boy, my brother, grinning, hands up in a fake apology.

But my dad had to go back to work. The false lead had angered the Chief, who didn’t want to spend his last damn days on the job chasing a ghost. My dad needed to work hard, to work the morning after the night, if that’s what it took.

“Are you close?” I asked him.

“I think so,” my dad said. “Now grab your bag. I’ll take you home.”

* * *

The feeling in my chest was the lake without the dread. It was more excitement than fear, more last day of school than first. My dad could not drive fast enough; the streets were eternal. There seemed an unending number of houses and buildings, all in my way, all telling me to slow down, asking in Rick’s voice, Where’s the fire? Maybe that’s what the feeling was, inside my chest. Something I had to put out, that would burn until I saw my brother and told him the Stranger was nearly caught. There was nothing to worry about.

When we finally pulled into the parking lot I forgot to tell my dad goodbye. I didn’t answer when he said, Your mother’s waiting inside, right? and I didn’t say I loved him. There was no time, there was a fire. There was me slamming the cruiser door, me sprinting the sidewalk, shouldering through the pea-green door. The stairs were as long as the city’s streets. They belonged to a tower, not a two-story apartment. I braved through. I climbed the ladder higher and higher, ignoring the flames, the thick musk of the smoking lady’s smoke. And then I was at the door, and I was ready for whatever great thing was about to happen.