Hurt People Read online

  We jumped off the couches, and when he came into the living room, we pretended that we weren’t out of breath, that we hadn’t just been breaking the rules. Our dad, in his all-black police uniform, looked at the crooked cushions and smiled. “Boys,” he said, as if this were an old western and he was greeting us in a saloon. He went upstairs to change. As soon as his door shut, we quickly put the couch and love seat back in order, so that when our dad came back downstairs—this time wearing running shorts with paint on them and a T-shirt older than my brother—the living room showed no signs of foul play. This made our dad smile even wider. “The perfect crime, eh, boys?” he said, and went out back to start the grill.

  Our dad grilled out every time we were over there. Steaks. Pork chops. Hot dogs. Chicken legs. He had a microwave that I unplugged once to see if he would notice. He did, but only because he needed to thaw out some buns for burgers.

  When the food was ready, he made us eat at the table while he ate in the living room and watched TV. It was like eating by a radio. We once asked him why we couldn’t eat in there with him. He said he needed time to unwind after work, and that good folk sit at the table for dinner. It was one of those rules he made us follow but didn’t follow himself.

  “What are we doing tonight?” my brother yelled from the table. “Renting movies?”

  “Only if you eat,” my dad said.

  “Are you going out?”

  “Yes. But don’t worry, you’ll be asleep.”

  He had been going out most weekends we stayed with him, to the bar to throw darts. That’s what he told us, anyway. I tried not to mind because, like he said, we were always asleep by the time he left, and he was usually there by the time we woke. And I never wanted to go with him—though my brother had mentioned it more than once—because I didn’t like the way my dad smelled when he got back, when we saw him in the morning before he showered. I think the smell was what kept my mom in the van when she picked us up on Sunday.

  My brother flashed his teeth at me. “We heard a siren a few days ago. Did any prisoners escape?”

  “Yes,” our dad said. “But only one. Now eat.”

  * * *

  Escapes were not uncommon. With so many prisons, so many prisoners, and so few guards, people were bound to get out. That’s what our dad said. He said the state never had enough money, and the city had even less. So, escapes would happen. My brother and I, we loved it when they did. Even though we knew it meant more work for our dad, more stress at his job, which he would take out on us, we didn’t care. Because it also meant the sounding of the siren. The flashing of cruiser lights. It meant our city, for once, was exciting.

  After dinner our dad drove us down to the local video store, and the entire ride my brother pestered him with questions. Who was the prisoner? What crimes did he commit? How did he escape? As usual, our dad either gave no answers, or funny ones. Who was the prisoner? A criminal. What crimes did he commit? The illegal kind. How did he escape? Undetected.

  A chime rang when we entered the store, and the lady at the counter, who had a thin body and long, pointy face like a witch, lifted her head with a smile and said, Oh, hello. This lady owned the store, and although she had plenty of hired help, still worked every Friday and Saturday night, and always talked to my dad at length, sometimes touching his wrist to drive her point home. She was older than my dad, but didn’t dress like it. Tonight, she was wearing a black T-shirt of some rock band I remembered she and my dad talking about our last time here. The shirt was faded and full of big holes where her pale skin peeked through, and the store smelled different, like strawberries.

  “Hey, I like that shirt,” my dad said.

  “I thought you would,” the witch lady said. She opened her mouth and showed pointy but straight teeth. “I see you brought backup.”

  “Yeah, they love it here,” he said. “Can’t get enough.”

  The witch lady thumbed the fat ring on her pointer finger. “Must run in the family,” she said.

  My dad turned to us. “All right, boys, go pick some good ones.”

  “Yes,” the witch lady said, “and take your time.”

  My brother and I went straight to the horror section. Now that our mother wasn’t around to judge, our dad let us rent any movie we wanted, regardless of rating. The only catch was that we were not allowed to watch the movies alone. Our dad wanted to be there when a mummy gnawed an arm off or a hostage got dropped off a skyscraper. He wanted to remind us that none of it was real, and that if things turned too scary, he was just a couch cushion away.

  My brother chose his movie carefully, sounding out the plot summaries on the backs of the boxes, while I picked mine based on the cover. Tonight, I selected the one where a green, bald-headed monster was popping out of a toilet. My brother’s pick, which he settled on ten minutes later, featured a southern black vampire who “enlists with a heavy heart to fight for the North.”

  We brought our picks to our dad, who was leaning over the counter, still chatting with the witch lady. “These look like winners,” he said, and returned to his conversation. The witch lady took the tie out of her hair, let the black mess fall down. She stretched the tie around her hand and slid it up her skinny arm.

  “What we need is more officers like you,” she said. “Good men. Men who spend time with their boys”—she winked at my brother—“even with a nut on the loose. All the prisoners in the world could escape. They could all do their worst, but if we had more men like you, it wouldn’t matter a bit.”

  “Oh, I don’t know about that,” my dad said.

  “I do. And I know you’ll nab this latest guy too. You grabbed him before and you’ll grab him again. Only a matter of time.”

  “Well,” my dad said, “we’ll certainly do our best.”

  The witch lady nodded and took the boxes into the back to retrieve the tapes. As soon as she disappeared, my dad checked his reflection in the counter’s glass candy case.

  “You put the prisoner away?” my brother said.

  “Yes.”

  “Were you the one who caught him?”

  “Yeah,” my dad said, fluffing his hair. “The first time. But it’s not a big deal. Nothing to worry about.”

  The witch lady returned. She rang up our videos, but only charged us for one.

  “Oh, is there a deal going on?” my dad said.

  “Yes,” the witch lady said, sliding the videos to my dad. “The deal is if I ever need help, you better come running.”

  My dad put his head down and laughed. There was a weird pause as he pulled out his wallet and paid, and by the time he finally said something back, I had stopped listening. I was staring at my reflection, imprisoned in the glass, studying my features and imagining what it would be like to be older. I tried to imagine what I would look like all grown up. Would I take after my dad, or my mother? Or maybe, when I hit a growth spurt, I would look just like my brother. Maybe people would mistake us for twins.

  “I’ll see you out tonight?” the witch lady said.

  “I will see you out tonight,” my dad repeated, as if when I wasn’t paying attention, he had fallen under her spell.

  “We’ll have a good time?”

  “We will have a good time.”

  My dad said ’bye to the witch lady and wished her a good night. The witch lady touched my dad’s hand with her hand.

  “Let’s both have a good night,” she said, adding something like sugar or sweetheart at the end.

  * * *

  I put my movie in and took my place at my dad’s side. Almost all of the movies we picked had cops in them—usually the stupid victim of some supervillain—and our dad liked to point out each thing the police did wrong. That’s not how you hold a gun, he would say. Or, You can’t just barge into someone’s house like that. He would then explain how things were really done, which was always boring and forgettable.

  Tonight, after one bad cop got wasted by a hobgoblin, my dad let out a frustrated smile. My brother and I l
ooked at each other and grinned, waiting for the lecture.

  “Well what did he expect?” our dad said. “Entering a dark room without clearing it. Slice the pie!”

  My brother and I rolled on our sides and laughed. Slicing the pie was one of our dad’s favorites. Any time a cop went running into a warehouse, chasing a criminal or monster, our dad would yell, Slice the pie! Slice the pie! And even though my brother and I knew this was a real police technique, used by policemen to clear an area before entering, we still liked to laugh. At the way it sounded, at how mad the movie made our dad. At the idea that if the policeman had just followed procedure, things would have ended better. You never know, my brother joked. Maybe the goblin would have surrendered, come out claws up.

  When the goblin was done feasting on the cop’s insides, and my brother and I were spent from laughing, a sex scene came on. At this point, like usual, my dad covered our eyes with his hands, but didn’t turn the volume down. I heard a doomed couple exchange deep kisses. I heard saxophones and the tearing of clothes. I heard my dad say, “Kissy kissy.”

  * * *

  I woke up alone and out of place. The TV screen was black, and a pillow had replaced my dad’s chest. I sat up and tried to remember where I was. My dad came out of the kitchen. He had changed clothes. His shirt was tucked in. A button-up. He smelled different.

  “Sleepy time,” he said. “Your brother is downstairs.”

  As he reached out toward me, the dream I’d just had flashed in my mind. The escaped prisoner was on the loose and was coming after my dad. I was dressed as a cop and had been sent to investigate the video store, where the prisoner was last spotted. But I did everything wrong. I didn’t slice the pie or hold my gun right, and the entire time my dad shouted, What are you doing? That’s not what I taught you. You’re going to get yourself killed. Oh no, here he comes. Here comes the bad man.

  I sat up and tried to forget about the dream world. I asked my dad if he had to go.

  “Yes,” my dad said. “People are counting on me.”

  I pictured the witch lady, leaning against a jukebox. I pictured the prisoner, sneaking around town, a shadow creeping closer and closer.

  “Did we finish the movie?”

  “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.”