Hurt People Page 2

  “Yes!” Chris said in a loud whisper. “We don’t want this getting out, do we?” I shook my head. “OK,” Chris said. He put his finger on the symbol, parting the wet hairs around it. His nail looked chewed on, dark with dirt underneath. “Well, the first thing you need to know is that it’s Chinese.”

  There was a disappointing pause. A pool pump clicked on. “That’s all he told me,” my brother said, “and I pretty much already guessed that.”

  “Hey, guys,” Chris said. “This thing hurt. It’s a part of my body. I’m not going to give it away for free.” I began to float on my back. Water found my ears, wooshed sounds around. I knew as much as my brother and no longer cared what the rest of the symbol meant.

  “We don’t have any money,” my brother said.

  Chris laughed. “I don’t want your money. I have my own means.” I swam to the side, hung off the shallow ladder. Chris wiped the sweat from his forehead. “Man, is it supposed to be this hot?”

  “It was only supposed to be seventy,” I said.

  “Is that right?” Chris said. “Hmm. You know, my mother used to give us something special on days like these. You know those popsicles that come in plastic strips? You ever have anything like that?”

  “Yes,” my brother said, “we have those.”

  “You do?” Chris said. “Let’s do this, then. How about one of you gets us some treats, and when you get back, we’ll all share. You share the popsicles, I’ll share my secret.”

  My brother turned to me with his thinking face on. “We’ll both go,” he said, meaning me and him.

  Chris raised his hands like he was being held up. “No, no, no. That won’t work. If both of you leave, I’ll get lonely. I need someone to keep me company. Plus, I don’t live here. I’m not allowed at this pool by myself.”

  My brother’s thinking face grew more serious; lines showed up on his forehead. “He’ll go,” my brother said. “I’ll stay with you.”

  “Why can’t we both go?” I said to him.

  Chris sighed.

  “It’ll be quicker this way,” my brother said. “You’re small and fast. I’ll be right here. I’m not going anywhere.”

  “Fine,” I said.

  “And don’t wake Mom.”

  “I know,” I said, standing up. Chris’s sigh changed into a smile. The sun beamed on his face, coloring his teeth yellow.

  “Hey, little man,” Chris said. “Make mine a red.”

  * * *

  Inside our apartment, my feet were quiet on the carpet. I got down and crawled into the kitchen, like an Army man. I stood up at the fridge and hoped my mother wouldn’t hear when I opened the freezer and ripped three popsicle strips out of the box. When I stepped out of the kitchen, I saw her sleeping silently on the couch. She was still in her robe, which hung loose off her chest and shoulder. I took a few steps to see if she had her swimming suit on, if she had changed her mind and planned to keep her promise. I couldn’t tell until I was at the arm of the couch. From the side, I got a good angle into her robe. I saw the curves of her body. She had nothing on underneath.

  * * *

  By the time I got back to the pool, my body was dry and cold, and my palm was nearly numb from the popsicles. My brother opened his blue one with his fingers; Chris and I ripped ours with our teeth. We did not talk while we ate. We kept the plastic strips in our mouths and pushed the frozen chunks up from the bottom like toothpaste. For the first time, I was able to stare at Chris. His hair was a lighter version of my dad’s. It was dirty blond and long enough that he had to brush it off his forehead. His body was thin and pale, like his face, but not so skinny that his ribs showed, like mine did. He scratched the trail of hair on his stomach, and I wondered if his hands were rough or not.

  When all the ice chunks were gone, we drank the melted stuff left behind. I could feel the sugar on my tongue.

  “Will you tell us about the tattoo now?” my brother said. Chris was leaning back in the pool chair. He sat up after a few seconds, his face scrunched up in pain. He put two fingers to his forehead, between his eyebrows.

  “Ow,” Chris said. “Ow, ow, ow.”

  “What’s wrong?” my brother said.

  “It hurts.” Chris stood up and started stumbling around. “Hurts so bad.”

  “What does? Are you OK?”

  Chris didn’t answer. He dropped his popsicle wrapper and a small breeze took it. Now he had both hands on his head. He pulled his hair and yelled, “Ah! I got the brain pain!”

  “What do we do?” my brother said.

  Chris yelled again in response. His mouth stayed open in pain, showing all the fake red inside, outlining and tinting his teeth. Then, suddenly, he stopped moaning and spit a red pool. My brother and I looked at each other, confused.

  “OK,” Chris said, “it’s passed. The pain has passed.” He was smiling again. It was all an act.

  My brother sat back down. “The tattoo,” he said. He looked at Chris like he looked at me when we were running someplace and he had to stop and wait for me to catch up. Chris stood up and shook his head like a wet dog.

  “Patience, my man. It’s all about patience.”

  “But he got you a popsicle,” my brother said, pointing to me.

  “Yes, he did. But what have you ever done for me?” Chris looked away from both of us and into the woods. My brother didn’t respond. I thought he was thinking of an argument. I knew he had an amazing one in him somewhere. It would be something Chris wouldn’t have an answer for. Chris would open his mouth to say something back, but his brain wouldn’t be able to help. He would apologize and have to tell us what we wanted to know. We would hear what the tattoo meant, say big deal, and return to our mother, victorious.

  “You guys ever heard of the Gainer?” Chris said.

  My brother looked confused. “Is that your tattoo?”

  “No, this is something else.” Chris stepped toward us. “This is my secret pool move.” He lowered his voice and looked at each of us seriously. “You want to see it?” My brother glanced at his list of moves, pinned down by a pool chair, the names written in big bubble letters.

  “Trust me, this isn’t on your little list,” Chris said. “Do you want to see it or not?”

  “I guess,” my brother said.

  “You guess. Well, OK, then get ready.” Chris ran around the pool and jumped on the diving board. He lifted both of his hands to the sky and yelled, “For the Gainer!”

  My brother and I stayed close to each other. The sun shone on Chris, who with his arms raised looked like one of our dad’s old softball trophies, now boxed away in the dark part of his basement. We watched Chris unbutton his fly and drop his jeans. It was the first time I had seen boxer shorts in person. They were as white as his body, and I felt like I should look away, but I didn’t. I was eager to see the move, to be there when the secret was revealed.

  Chris stepped to the edge of the board and rubbed his hands together. A V of birds glided the sky, calling out to one another. Chris took a step back and raised his arms like he was holding a rifle. He mock-shot each bird, one after another, pow! bursting from his lips.

  “Don’t want them telling their little bird buddies, do we?” he said, and laughed. He stepped to the edge again. “OK,” he said, and took a deep breath. “Here we go.”

  I grabbed my brother’s arm, and we watched as Chris bounced once on the board and sprang into the air in a motion we had never seen before. He jumped forward but did a backflip, his body somehow upright as he entered the water. There was a big splash. When it died my brother and I looked at each other like what was that. I wanted to say that that was the most amazing thing I had ever seen.

  A large fly drummed my ear as we stood by the shallow end, waiting for Chris to pop up. After a few seconds, we started to worry. Maybe that super move had taken everything Chris had. Maybe he was a goner.

  My brother fast walked to the deep end. He got up on the diving board and peered into the water below. The trees sho
ok. My brother looked at me like he was about to do something he didn’t want to do.

  “Don’t,” I said.

  “He needs help,” my brother said, and did a few baby bounces on the board.

  “Please don’t.” I had to pee again, even though I just went.

  “I’ll be right back.” He put his arms out to the side, ready to dive. But as he took the final step to the board’s edge, Chris’s head popped up. He shot water from his mouth like a fountain and turned to my brother.

  “You ready to try it?” he said, as if nothing had happened. He swam to the side and got out of the pool, his soaked shorts nearly see-through.

  “I can’t do that,” my brother said.

  “Sure you can. You can do anything, my man, because you’ve got me for a teacher.”

  “What about the tattoo?”

  “Forget the tattoo. This is bigger than that. You get this down, nobody will mess with you. Can’t you see that?” My brother appeared unconvinced. “Fine,” Chris said. “Come here.” My brother walked away from me and stood next to Chris, who put his hand on my brother’s shoulder and whispered something into his ear. I watched my brother’s face change, saw him smile. Chris pulled away and my brother nodded. If a stranger were to drive by, they might think the two were father and son.

  “Now,” Chris said, “are you ready to try it?” Chris patted him on the butt. “OK, then get on up there.”

  My brother hopped on the board. I jumped into the shallow end, to get a better view, and because I was cold and felt far away.

  “You’re not going to master it in one day,” Chris said, “but that’s OK. We got all the time in the world, my man. None of us are going anywhere.”

  * * *

  Our mother never came to the pool. The rest of that day my brother worked on learning the Gainer. Well, Chris made him work on the front dive first. He said my brother had to crawl before he could walk, which meant he had to dive before he could flip. I watched from the border of the shallow and the deep, and throughout the day, stepped closer and closer to where my toes could no longer touch.

  On our way home, my brother and I walked side by side. My towel was wrapped around me like a skirt. My brother’s hung on his shoulders like he was a prizefighter.

  “Did he tell you what the tattoo meant?” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “Will you tell me?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Did he tell you not to tell me?”

  “No, he didn’t.”

  “Tell me.” I had stopped but my brother kept walking. He was almost at our building’s pea-green door.

  “OK,” he said. “But you can’t tell Mom.”

  “I wouldn’t.”

  “Or Dad. Not about Chris, either. That’s part of it.”

  “I won’t.”

  “And you have to make me a sandwich.”

  “OK.” My brother waved me to the door. He cupped my ear and whispered what the tattoo meant, but I didn’t know what that word was. I asked him to explain. He stood up straighter. He said, “You’ll understand when you’re older.”

  two

  I DON’T THINK he knew either. I don’t think my brother knew what the tattoo meant. But we agreed not to tell our mother about Chris. So I couldn’t ask her. When questioned at dinner, over a plate of beans and toast, how was the pool, my brother said “fun” and “good.” I bathed my toast in baked beans and kept my mouth shut. I thought someday I would be able to lie to my mother, but in the meantime I was glad I had a brother.

  The next few days our mother said the weather was bad and unsuitable for the pool. At night, on the local channels, our county was displayed on a small map at the bottom right corner of the screen. We were warned about severe thunderstorms, flash flooding, and told to watch out for the occasional tornado. My mother would stare out our sliding glass door, which led to our small third-floor patio, and say, “Bad weather,” like the weather had purposely done something wrong, broken some rule. This happened so much that week I started to get mad at the weather with my mother. We would boo the weatherwoman when she gave us bad news. And when she dared show her face the day after a mistaken forecast, we pointed our fingers at the TV and said, “You’ve got some nerve.”

  * * *

  My mother had to work the last night of that bad weather run. She ordered us to stay in and lock the doors. We’re under a tornado watch the entire night, she said, so no going outside. After she left, I took her spot at the glass door and whispered, “This is bad. This is bad.” I tried to make my voice sound like my mother’s, but I actually liked it when there was a big flash of lightning. When, if I was looking in the right direction, the world shined a brief light on the pool.

  My brother came out of our room for a big bowl of cereal. He poured what had to be half the box into a large Tupperware bowl. He opened the fridge but I already knew we were out of milk. “Did you drink the last of the milk?” he said.

  I was staring out our sliding glass door, thinking of Chris and watching the rain beat the glass in sheets. “You did,” I said. “You and your huge bowls.”

  My brother came to the door and stood by me. We stared at the darkness together. “Make us some milk,” he said.

  “No,” I said. “You do it.”

  I hated mixing the milk. My mother never said we were poor, now that we were living alone in this apartment, in this part of the city, but certain situations said it for her. Whenever we couldn’t do something it was because there wasn’t the money. And when at school I remarked that the milk in the carton tasted better than the stuff I had to mix at home, I got looks.

  “What if I pitch to you tomorrow?” my brother said.

  “You won’t.”

  “I will. I swear.”

  I didn’t answer him. My brother was always promising things, things that rarely came true, and used those promises to get what he wanted.

  “Fine,” I said. “But you also have to teach me the Gainer, once Chris teaches you.”

  “No way. You can’t even dive.” I walked away and sat on the couch, and let my brother think about how he hurt me. “OK,” he said, “but it might be a while.”

  “Promise on Baron,” I said. That was the name of our dead dog. He had lived with us at our old house when our parents were together. I didn’t remember getting Baron but I remembered losing him. I remembered him limping a lot for weeks. Then one day, after school, I came home and he simply wasn’t there. My brother knew I loved that dog. When Baron was alive, my brother made fun of me for treating a dog like a person, for tucking him in at night, telling him about my day at school when I got home. But the day Baron went, it was my brother who, against our dad’s orders, fetched Baron’s old toys out of the trash and gave them to me. To keep in secret.

  “Promise on him,” I said.

  “I promise.”

  * * *

  After cereal, we played with our G.I. Joes, something my brother was excellent at. While my playing was based on plots from cartoons or movies, my brother created his own stories, which lasted hours, took over the entire apartment, and contained several startling plot twists. I tried to copy what my brother did, but my characters never sounded real, and quickly ran out of things to say. I could never tell as good a story as my brother. Days after we played, I would find men hiding in the cracks between the couch cushions, or dangling from a shower curtain ring. These men, my brother would explain, were the last survivors of a clan long thought dead, who when the time was right would rise out of the shadows and avenge the murder of their people.

  I finished my playing early like usual so I could watch the rising action of my brother’s plot. A good guy hung by one hand from the edge of a dresser while the head bad guy stepped on his toes. The villain looked on and laughed.

  “Why do you let the bad guys win?” I asked him.

  “Because you never see that,” he said.

  We went to bed an hour after we should have gone to bed. We tried to sleep in our
room but it was too hot without the A/C on. It was off because it was broken. In the meantime, we had the box fan in the corner of the living room. So we slept out there with the big fan inches from our faces. At the bottom of the fan were three roaches. Two were dead and one had one leg. I felt bad for them, but my brother said there were worse places to die.

  “Remember,” I said, “you promised.”

  “So did you,” he said. He was talking about Chris, how I said I wouldn’t tell anyone, no matter what. “Now go to sleep.”

  * * *

  I had forgotten that the next day was the weekend, which meant we would be going to our dad’s duplex. My mother drove us across the city in the morning, on her way to work. Some weeks, for easiness I guess, our dad would meet her at a halfway point, a corner station or public park. It was like a prisoner exchange. Our mother would stay in the car, windows up, and watch us walk from her van to our dad’s police cruiser. Our dad, still in uniform, would stand behind the open driver’s door and when we got close, say, “My boys.”

  This day our mother dropped us off at the duplex and drove away when she saw that we got in OK. Our dad was not inside. We called for him and ran upstairs to his bathroom, his shut bedroom door. We froze and listened for movement, heard nothing. My dad’s bedroom, like the woods, like the pool at nighttime, was off limits.

  We retreated from the room and checked the refrigerator for something to snack on, knowing there would be little. Our dad never planned ahead. Our mother said he once read somewhere to live each day like it’s your last, and took it a bit too literally. A pound of beef thawed on the fridge’s middle rack. A sports drink stood next to the meat, with maybe a sip left. In the crisper there were eight cans of beer, three slices of cheese, and two packets of fast-food ketchup. That was it. If this was the last day on earth, why stock up on groceries?

  We shut the fridge door and the whole place felt empty.

  “Hey, I’ll pitch to you,” my brother said. “Remember our promises?”

  * * *

  Our dad didn’t come home until after dinnertime, after my brother and I played outside for over an hour. There was an old people’s home across the street, and we liked to use its chain-link fence when we played home run derby. We liked to smash the ball over the fence and imagine we were real stars. Later, when we were back in the duplex, hopping on the couches and pretending the carpet was lava, my brother reminded me that he had kept his promise. About pitching. And that I’d better keep mine. Or what? I had joked, but before my brother could make any threats, empty or otherwise, the storm door creaked open, announcing the arrival of our dad.