Cote Smith - Hurt People

“I put it away,” he said. “We’ll watch the rest tomorrow. Now go be with your brother. Boys sleep in beds.” My dad and my mother both had sayings like these, things they said to us over and over. When my brother and I were mad at either of our parents, we used these sayings to make fun of them.

Downstairs, the only light came from a lamp I had to feel my way to in the dark. I clicked it once for its lowest setting so I wouldn’t wake my brother. He was sleeping with his mouth open. I wondered if I slept that way and decided to ask my brother tomorrow if he would draw a picture of me while I slept. I worried about swallowing spiders. We had seen lots when our dad first introduced us to the basement. He had a second bedroom but it was too small, and my dad said he didn’t want his boys living in a closet, even if it was just for the weekends. Boys don’t sleep in closets. Boys sleep in beds.

I turned off the lamp and tried hard to sleep with my mouth shut. I closed my eyes and saw visions of Chris, spiders, prisons. I saw my mom and dad and ghosts and ghouls.

* * *

My brother snored me awake. He was a super-loud snorer. I didn’t know what time it was, but whenever I woke up in the middle of the night I made myself go look around wherever I was. I thought that then, when the world didn’t expect me to be awake, I could catch the world doing something it didn’t want me to see. A secret only I would know.

I used my brother’s snores as cover for me upping the creaky steps. At the top I put my head to the door, like I’d seen in movies. I heard giggling. I opened the door a sliver and saw my dad, slouched, shirt off, snoring on the living room couch. The TV was on and a half-eaten block of cheese sat gross on the coffee table. The room smelled familiar, fruity, like our city’s one department store.

I waited for my dad to wake and do something strange, a weird act I would relay to my brother the following morning. He would give me his full attention and say, And you actually saw that with your own two eyes? Yes, I would say, I was very lucky.

My dad dropped to his side on the couch and hugged his body. He did not shiver, but he looked small and cold. I wanted to cover him up with a blanket, but there were no extra blankets in the house, only the one in his bedroom, where I was forbidden.

The air conditioner shut off. At the same time the TV cut away from its sitcom family to dead air. The new silence made me feel exposed, so I took a step back and crouched on the basement stairs. The stairs were made of a plastic wood and dug into my bony knees. I poked my head around the doorframe to continue watching my dad. I didn’t want to miss the revelation.

The air conditioner clicked on and off several more times and still nothing happened. I made my arms into a pillow and rested my head. My mind started to wander. It went back to all the other moments I had crept on stairs, spied on people. Reflecting, I ended up falling asleep, dreaming of my parents fighting.

We are living in our old nice house.

I am watching TV downstairs with my brother, my elbows on my pillow, hands holding my head. It’s late and the TV is the only light. We are watching his favorite game show. The one where the host makes the contestants do filthy things like bathe in beans if they can’t answer a question correctly. The host is always smiling, but also likes to zing the contestants when they give answers that aren’t even close.

I am not really watching the show; I just want to be with my brother.

The show ends. Without a word, my brother turns the TV off. The room goes dark. Before my eyes can adjust, my brother runs upstairs, taking them two at a time. I am left in the dark and my heart beats panicked. Down the hall is my dad’s office. The door is halfway open when it’s supposed to be closed. Red curtains cover the office window well, level with the earth. When the moon is bright, like it is in this dream, it shines through these curtains and colors the entire room blood-red.

In the dream I shield myself with my pillow and run upstairs as fast as I can. I try to take two stairs at a time like my brother but fall and burn my knee on the carpet. In a movie I am for sure dead. But in my dream I am OK. I put the pillow on my shoulders, and take it easy taking the rest of the stairs.

When my head is almost level with the second floor of our house, I hear my mother’s voice. She is loudly whispering an argument. I flatten my body on the stairs, my eyes peeking over the floor’s horizon. My mother is standing at the sink, her back to my dad, who is sitting on a stool at the kitchen bar. He is wearing a softball cap, and his head is up, waiting for its turn to talk. It is clear they have been arguing for some time now.

“It’s this place,” my mother says. “These prisons. I feel like I can never get away.”

“Away?” my dad says. “Is that what you want? You want to get away from me?”

“No,” she says, though in the dream her voice is unsure. “That’s … that’s not what I want.” She shuts the sink off and dries her hands, holding on to the rag long after the wet is gone. “I just need to do something.”

“Oh, what. What could you possibly need?”

My mother throws the rag at my dad, but it’s mostly dry and falls short of his face. “Don’t talk to me like that,” she says. “You’re not here. You’re out there. And you come home and I ask where have you been and you say at work.”

“So,” my dad says. “I have two jobs. Where else would I be?”

“Oh, c’mon. You smell all beery when you get home. And then you try to roll on top of me?”

“So sometimes I go throw darts.”

“See. You’re fuzzy with details.”

“Details.”

“You know what talking to you is like?” my mother says. “It’s like, it’s like when I ask one of the boys to do something simple, and I can tell that they understand, they understand what I want them to do, but they don’t do it. Instead, they do something very similar, but not quite right, just to show me that they have power too. Like the other day, I asked your eldest to draw a tree before we left for the park. But he doesn’t really care if we go to the park. He kind of wants to play in the backyard by himself. So you know what he draws? He doesn’t draw a tree. He draws a bush.”

My dad takes his hat off and throws it at the stove, right by where my mother is standing.

“You want me to draw you a tree? I’ll draw you a goddamn tree.” He is no longer pretending to whisper. “Hand me that marker. I’ll draw right on my arm. See? Here. Look. This way everybody knows that even after I work all day at two different jobs, when I come home I still do whatever my wife wants.” He stabs a marker I recognize as my own into his upper arm. He grips it with all of his fingers, like a kindergartener, or like a felon holds a knife.

“That’s not what I want,” my mother says. “That’s not what I want.”

“Then I don’t know what you want,” my dad says. “Everybody wants something. I see that every day. Speeders want off with a warning. The Chief wants more tickets on Main Street.” He doesn’t look at her while he talks. He draws on his arm, filling in the shapes. “You’re the only person I don’t know. I don’t know what you want anymore. I don’t know what you could possibly want. We have two good boys. We have a house. I am working. I don’t know what you want.”

“That’s not what I want. That’s not what I want.”

“Maybe I have to tell you,” my dad says. “You can’t decide for yourself, so I have to tell you.” He slowly walks around the kitchen counter displaying his colored arm. “Look at this. This is what you want.” He comes too close to my mother and she puts out her hand. He flexes his drawn-on arm at her. “Is this what you want? This is what you want.”