Cote Smith - Hurt People

My brother pushed me away from Chris. He took me under the tree and stared. One more face I couldn’t recognize. What was it saying to me now? He had a plan. Yes. A squint of his eye told me that. But there was more. There was a hardness in his cheeks, a tension I couldn’t translate.

The siren sailed away, momentarily screaming its warning to someone else. Chris asked what we were doing. My brother ignored him. He pressed me into the tree the way Chris had pressed him. He took my head into his hands. He put his forehead to mine and started talking. Whispering things only I could hear. I told myself to keep my head up, my eyes in his. To not look at the scratch marks around his waist, where Chris had desperately dug. On the other side of the silo Chris rose on his toes, trying to spy on our conversation. But he couldn’t hear what we were saying. He couldn’t understand our secret words. Only the long-lost brothers could.

My brother’s plan was this: When the siren sounded again he would run past Chris and into the woods. Chris would chase him. When he did, I would run. I would find my way home, lock the door, and call our dad.

“Got it?” my brother said.

I didn’t nod or shake my head. “I don’t know the way. Where will you run?”

This close, his blue eyes were the size of planets. They didn’t blink.

“I told you. The woods.”

“No,” I said. “Where will you hide?”

He dropped one of his hands and gave me his pity face. My mind had been trying to picture his plan. I saw him bursting past Chris, jumping into the woods again, half naked, desperate, like some sort of caveman. It didn’t make sense. Chris knew the woods better than he did. And he was faster.

Then I realized my brother wasn’t going to hide. That’s what his face was saying. Hiding wasn’t part of the plan. He squeezed me on the shoulder, and more water dripped down his face. He wasn’t meant to escape.

The siren started to return.

“I can come with you,” I said.

“No, you can’t.”

“Why?” I said. “Why can’t I?”

My brother took his hand off my shoulder and turned to Chris. But before the siren was completely back, he turned again and looked at me. He was wearing that smile, that classic brother smile that shot a sinking feeling into my stomach, and I knew exactly what he would say next. It was like the script was already written.

“You’d never make it,” he said. “Out there is no place for a baby.”

He turned and walked away. And I let him go.

Chris was leaning against the silo wall, next to the gap. His arms were crossed and his rain-soaked shirt clung to his skin.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ve tried being patient. Being the good guy. But we have to go.”

Chris put his arm around my brother. He rubbed my brother’s ear with his thumb, kissed his temple.

“Now call your brother,” Chris said. “Tell him he can’t hide forever. Tell him the world won’t wait.”

MY ESCAPE BEGAN with a blur. One moment Chris was embracing my brother, waving me out from under the tree, telling me to hurry up. The train was leaving the station. The next my brother was slipping out of his grasp. He was throwing his bag in Chris’s face and fleeing through the gap, disappearing into the woods. Chris never looked in my direction. He didn’t say, You stay put or else, like I feared he would. Because I didn’t matter. I wasn’t the real prize.

Chris left my brother’s bag and ran into the woods, forgetting all about me.

Alone, a strange calm settled over the silo. The siren left again and I could hear the crackle of branches breaking, twigs snapping in the deep woods as Chris chased my brother. When I couldn’t hear them any longer, I made myself turn and run. I told myself, Don’t think about what you want to think about — run as fast as you can.

I had no idea where I was running. I only knew that when I was following my brother here, the sun was behind me, so now I did my best to put it in front. This was mostly a guess. A family of clouds had moved in, deep gray and heavy with the weight of rain. The clouds swallowed the sun, only let it shine for a second before covering it once more. If I had stopped to think about it, the darkened sky would have worried me. But my mind only let me use the hovering storm as motivation. Hurry, my brain said, before more bad happens.

A break in the trees. A chain-link fence. The sight of the pool, a small miracle. I had run for seconds and I had run for hours. I had run for hours and I had run for days.

I was at the pea-green door. At our apartment. I was inside, the door locked behind me, my heart beating my entire body.

I grabbed the phone, took it to the sliding-glass door, and dialed my dad’s number. As the dial played in my ear, I stared outside at the tops of the trees, waiting for an answer. I tried not to think about sharp branches clawing my brother’s body, mud-covered rocks waiting like land mines. He has nothing, I thought. He’s out there with nothing.

The phone continued to ring. My dad never bothered to get a new answering machine after my mother took the old one, and I imagined the phone hanging on his kitchen wall, repeating its ring throughout the duplex with no one there to pick up. I tossed the phone at the couch. The cushions. The cushion my brother elbow-dropped with excitement when we first learned we could go to the pool.

The pool. Chris. The Gainer.

Then, another blur. My hand was unlocking our apartment door. My eyes were ignoring the smoking lady. My ears were filtering out her words, turning her question into the haunted whisper of a lonely ghost. What … do … my … boy? My legs were carrying me downstairs, outside. The siren was still going, and now I was running around the building, through the back field and to the edge of the woods. Now I stopped. I wiped the tears from my eyes and the world around me unblurred. The burning feeling returned, that lapping feeling that started in my stomach and swarmed my chest. The one that made me feel there was no hope, that made me want to run — to and away from everything.

The siren did nothing to help, and the burning grew larger, but I didn’t run into the woods to extinguish it. I was too afraid. I was scared I would sprint like a madman far into the woods before realizing I had no idea where I had run to, no clue where I was. Then there would be two boys lost in the woods. Two brothers. Tomorrow’s local paper would say we ran away together. One writer would speculate it was because we couldn’t take this place any longer. This city with no good jobs, where the streets were as cracked as the sidewalks, where everyone either ended up directly in prison, as the prisoner or the guard, or became tied to a prison in a hazy way, some way no one talked about or could put a finger on, which made it even worse.

I ran back inside. I called my dad again. I called the golf course. No one answered anywhere. There was only me again. There was the kitchen, its empty pantry. There was my mother’s room, her swimsuit slung over the chair, dry and forgotten. There was our room. Missing toys, missing trunks. But there was the old wiffle-ball bat, long and bright yellow, and unused since that first weekend after the pool. I picked it up. I looked at it like I expected it to tell me something. I told it to give me an answer. What was it doing in here? Why wasn’t it out there, with my brother? It could have helped him. It could have hit Chris. The bat laughed, said it wasn’t talking. I started beating the bed with it. I hit the railing as hard as I could. The bat twanged each time, vibrated in my hands and up my arms. I didn’t care. I wouldn’t stop. Who could stop me? No one. No one could.