Hurt People Read online

  A secret, Chris explained, can’t be spoken. Put into words. A secret is a place, or an action. A symbol. Secrets aren’t told. They are shown. Revealed. When you share a secret with someone, they look at you confused—like us with the tattoo, the Gainer. They get mad that they can’t understand. Or they feel hurt that you kept something from them, even though it was for their own good, even though they weren’t ready. That’s why it’s best not to tell. Even the people you love. Especially the people you love. If a secret is a secret, when it’s revealed, it hurts people.

  “What about us?” my brother said. “You told us about the Gainer.”

  “I did,” Chris said. “And the first time you try it will not be pleasant.” Chris walked out of the shallow end, body dripping, emerging like a swamp monster. “But that’s just a little secret. There are much bigger ones. Greater, yes, but more dangerous. Secrets like that should never get out. Do you understand?” he said. “Do you understand what I’m talking about?” My brother looked at me as if I could help, then back at Chris. “So, then,” Chris said, speaking directly to my brother. “If I was to show you more, could you keep it a secret?”

  This time my brother didn’t bother checking with me first. He nodded in silence, as if he too had fallen under the witch lady’s spell. As if she had cast a curse that made him mute.

  “That’s right,” Chris said. “No words.”

  Then he mouthed the Gainer. Then he touched his lips, curved into a grin.

  * * *

  The next morning my brother and I were eating cereal at the table. Our mother came into the kitchen in her lace pajamas. She had her big blond hair in a ponytail and I wanted to yank on it, like I wanted to do to the girls at school. She went straight for the coffee. She kept her back toward us while she waited for the brewer.

  “So what did you boys do last night?” my mother said. My whole body flinched, but my brother responded naturally, like he was the best actor in one of the bad films we watched with our dad.

  “Not a lot. We played hide-and-go-seek for a bit, messed around with toys.”

  My mother let his answer sit there for a while. “That sounds like fun. And you didn’t go to the pool?”

  “No.”

  “I noticed your trunks seem rather wet. Hanging in the tub.”

  Sometimes, Chris said, secrets are hard to keep. Sometimes the truth and secrets don’t get along.

  “Oh, that,” my brother said. He looked down at his cereal, and for a moment I thought my mother had him. But he was just pausing for effect. “I left them there when I took a shower.”

  “Shower,” our mother said. She poured her coffee and mixed in some mixed milk. “OK, good. Because you shouldn’t be out there while I’m gone.”

  “We know,” my brother said.

  “I heard from somebody at work they still haven’t got that prisoner guy,” our mother said. Her voice had the same tone as when our county was under a tornado warning.

  “How did he escape?” my brother said.

  Our mother sat down at the table, her face hovering over her coffee. “What does that matter?”

  “I don’t know. I guess it doesn’t.”

  “If you’re so interested, ask your dad,” she said. “Or read the paper.”

  Our mother often said this if we were asking too many questions, concerning things she didn’t know about or didn’t want to discuss. Pick up a book, she would say, the wannabe teacher. Go read the paper. Never mind that we couldn’t afford a subscription, or that our dad brought a paper home only when he was quoted or pictured. Still, there were other ways. Papers were left behind in public places. If we were lucky, we would find one that way, discover the true story. We had done the same thing after the last breakout, which was only a year ago. We found a paper at the park, and my brother snuck it home under his shirt. After our dad had fallen asleep, my brother took the newspaper downstairs and read the article out loud. It became one of his favorite stories. The escapee was aided by a lady who ran a voluntary inmate dog-training program at the prison. Pups for Perps, my dad called it. The lady would bring in dogs from the city’s animal shelter and pair them with inmates. The inmates would walk, feed, and pet the animals on a weekly basis. The idea was to have both dog and inmate practice being with others before they got out of their prisons and found a new home. But the more time the lady spent with the prisoners, the more she liked them, and the more she became attached, to one man in particular. Soon she found herself shuttling him out of prison, stashing him in the back of the dog shelter’s van, hidden in a kennel. She drove him a hundred miles to his home city, where he picked up some guns and drugs from old friends. But the police were waiting for him. They locked him back up, this time for longer. The lady was also put away, and the article featured her mug shot, above which read the headline “Man’s Best Fiend.”

  “Who knows?” my mother said. “Who knows how these things happen? Who cares? You don’t need to know.” She refused to tell us more. She thought the details would give us very specific nightmares. “Anyway,” she said. “You’re coming to work with me this morning. I don’t want you guys here by yourself. I worry sometimes.”

  * * *

  I liked the golf course. Before I started school, when my mother first got the job because she felt bad that my dad had two jobs, she always took me to work with her. She would buy me fast-food french-toast sticks and tell me not to tell my brother. When I got bored playing with the putting machine in the pro shop, I watched TV in the club’s dining hall under the loose care of the cook, Sandy. She was a middle-aged ex-con secretly dating a large black man named Cornbread, another ex-con, who was in charge of the course’s greens. I had seen them hug once when they thought no one was looking. Whenever I came into the cafeteria, Sandy dropped whatever she was doing and gave all of her attention to me. “There he is!” she would say, in a way that tingled my neck. “Your VIP table is waiting, sir.” Then she would sit me down with a free grilled cheese, pinch my ear, and say, “Anything you need, you let me know. I’ll do my best to keep out the riffraff.”

  When we got to the club that afternoon, Rick was waiting for my mother in the shop. He tapped the imaginary watch on his wrist.

  “Look who decided to show,” Rick said, his lips stretching across his tan face. Rick’s entire body was a dark tan, from spending entire summers taking care of the golf course. He had a thin build, similar to my dad’s, except his came with more of a gut, from all the years he pissed away on whiskey, he once said. Nowadays he drank beer.

  He didn’t see my brother or me at first, but when he did, Rick’s smile went wider.

  “Hey, everybody, look here, it’s the Gabor sisters.” I didn’t understand the reference, but got that the sisters part wasn’t supposed to be flattering. Still, I had to look at Rick’s blond knees because I knew if I looked directly at him my face would start to reflect his smile. I don’t know why. I knew I didn’t like Rick.

  A dying light flashed over our heads.

  “Dammit,” Rick said, “I told Cornbread to change that stupid thing.” I counted the blinks of the light. My dad once told me to count the seconds between the flash of the lightning and the pop of the thunder—that’s how many miles danger was away from me. I tried to do the same thing with the golf shop light. There were big gaps in the flickers. I counted the danger far away.

  “So, girls, what’s the lady outlook look like?” Rick said.

  “OK, I guess,” my brother said, just to give Rick an answer.

  “Just OK? Listen, you maroons.” He squatted down so our faces were even. His blond mustache sat straight, serious, telling us to pay attention. “You can’t settle for OK in life. Haven’t I told you that? You gotta always be looking, keeping your eye out for hot opportunities. They’re not gonna just stroll by your lazy ass and grab you.” He stood back up, and lunged at our mother. “You have to grab them!”

  Our mother shrieked. She punched Rick’s hands away from her ribs. “Hey, cut it ou
t,” she said, but with a smile. The two looked at each other, and the light above their heads flickered off, flickered on. “Boys, why don’t you see what Sandy’s up to?”

  “Yeah,” Rick said, holding on to our mother. “Why don’t you go someplace that isn’t here. Your mother and I have a game to play.”

  “Rick,” our mother said.

  “Oh, sorry. I forgot. We’re saving that for tomorrow.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “What’s tomorrow?” I said.

  An Army man came into the clubhouse and wandered into the pro shop. My mother broke free from Rick. “Go help,” she said.

  “Fine, but tell these two goons I’ll be watching them. They better not mess up my course.” He pinched our mother on the elbow and walked away, a greasy handkerchief dangling out of his back pocket.

  “Anyway,” our mother said, “tomorrow is my birthday. The day you two treat me like a queen.” She circled around my brother and me, slowly, giving her words an air of importance. “And to commemorate this historical moment, we’ll be having a party. At our place. What do you think about that?”

  “Is Rick going to be there?” my brother asked.

  Our mother stopped her circling and looked at the shop. Rick was cleaning the Army man’s club, and the two were sharing a loud laugh. “Of course he is,” my mother said. “All our friends will be there.”

  “Rick’s not my friend,” my brother said.

  “Sure he is.”

  “No, he’s not,” I said. “He pinches people.”

  Our mother laughed. She didn’t understand that we were serious. She didn’t know him like we did.

  “Well, he’s my friend,” our mother said. “And he’s coming over. So you better learn to like it. OK?”

  My brother threw his hands up. “Fine. What do I care.”

  “What do you care? You care because this is my special day, a chance for your mother to have fun. Well-deserved, long-waited-for fun. I think I’ve earned it, don’t you?”

  For a moment her eyes pleaded with my brother, but her mouth twisted into a smirk, like she knew what all her presents were before they were unwrapped.

  “Sure,” my brother said. “Now can we go?”

  “Wait,” she said, and for a moment she stared at us intensely, as if trying to memorize our faces. Finally, her eyes softened. “Yes, you may go.” She dug a hand into her shorts pockets. “Do you want tokens for the range?”

  “No,” my brother said, pulling me away. “We’re fine on our own.”

  * * *

  Sandy had just returned from her break. She smelled of cigarettes and the citrusy perfume she used to cover up the smoke. She was taking inventory. Towers of wax-paper cups were stacked all over the counter. As we made our way across the cafeteria, Sandy unwrapped a sleeve of smalls and started counting out loud. She was up to thirty when she saw us and lost her place.

  “There they are!” she said, throwing her hands up like it was a parade. “Hip hip hooray! Hip hip hooray!”

  My brother rolled his eyes, but my face smiled big. I couldn’t imagine this ever getting old. Sandy pushed the tower of cups to the side of the counter so we could see her better. She was barely taller than my brother, even with her balloon hairdo, a brown and curly perm that stayed the shape of a hairnet at all times. She was a few years older than my mother, and sometimes I liked to pretend Sandy was my mother’s big sister, my favorite aunt. I also liked her because she didn’t like Rick, which I could tell by the way her face changed when his name came up, and by the way the two talked about each other behind their backs. (Sandy was the office gossip, according to Rick, even though the golf course didn’t have an office; Rick, on the other hand, wasn’t given a mean name, but Sandy would plug her nose and wave away stink lines when he walked by.) Whenever the two had to talk to each other, their words were filled with leftover anger. It was like me talking to my brother an hour after a fight.

  Sandy took a small cup and filled it with orange soda. She gave it to us to share.

  “So,” she said, “what are the best boys up to today?”

  She rested her elbows on the counter and put her head in her hands, very interested. We took turns taking sips and told her a little about our plans. The old spots we would hit. The new places we hoped to find. Now that we were older, my mother let us explore the course by ourselves. My brother took this new ability very seriously at first and brought a large sheet of sketch paper to map out the entire confines of the Fort Leavenworth Country Club. I eventually spilled red Kool-Aid on the map while my brother was coloring an oak tree. For that, I did time locked in our toy trunk. With my brother sitting on the top. The map was never mentioned again.

  “Fun,” Sandy said. “That sounds like fun. Just be careful. I don’t want anything happening to the best. Without the best, what would we be?”

  Sandy gave us a refill with a to-go lid and we went out the side door, forgetting to thank her. The side door led to a large practice green we knew to keep off of. We ran around the course, stomping holes where we pleased before catching our breath at a women’s tee. My brother asked if I wanted the last sip of the soda. I said sure, but when he handed me the cup it was empty, and my brother was laughing. Throw it away, he said. You touched it last.

  The trash can was on the other side of nine’s green, which I crept across, praying no golf balls fell from the sky and struck me down—punishment from the golf gods for desecrating their land. What I found wasn’t punishment. It was a gift. On the lid of the trash can was a copy of the city newspaper, the Leavenworth Times. The weekend edition. I threw my cup away and tried to make sense of its stories, but the sections were disheveled and the pages out of order. Then someone yelled fore from far off. Seconds later a white dot thudded at my feet. I tucked the paper under my arm and ran off the green to my brother. Moses coming down the mountain.

  “What’s that?” my brother asked. He took the paper from me and quickly solved its puzzle, putting the pages in their proper order. “Whoa. You see this?”

  He held the paper up, but I didn’t see what was so special.

  “This.” He pointed at the bottom right of the page, at a small article continued from 1A, which was missing.

  “‘Stranger’ Still on the Loose.”

  “Is that the prisoner?” I said. But before he could answer me, we heard the rumble of a familiar motor.

  “Oh no,” my brother said. “Rick.”

  We looked up the hill, but didn’t see him. All we saw were the holes in the ground, the destruction we’d done.

  “Quick!” my brother said. “This way!” He grabbed my wrist and pulled me along, shouting more action language. “Run for your life!” he said, and we ran all the way to the end of the rough, where the course met the woods. We stopped. A barbed-wire fence stood in our way: on it a cracked sign read KE P OUT.

  At our feet several golf balls stained yellow with rain and age sat forgotten, waiting for their owners, who would never come.

  “C’mon,” my brother said. “We have to keep going.”

  We ducked under the barbed wire and disappeared into the woods. The trees were thick, and we struggled to find a path. Half-leafed limbs scratched back as we swam in. The little trees held hands and fought back like their parents. The woods don’t want us here, I thought. This isn’t a place we should be.

  After a few minutes of wandering, we came to a small clearing. I looked up at the trees that towered above us, at the sun, whose rays couldn’t find the ground. This was not a comforting spot. There weren’t any old tires to sit on, no stumps or sizable logs. So I stood there, waiting for my brother to pull out the paper and read what it said. To reveal the story of the Stranger.

  Instead, he snapped off a dead branch and pretended to fence a bush.

  “What do you think about what Chris said?” he said. “About secrets.”

  I stared at the unarmed bush and felt sorry for it. “I don’t know. It’s kinda cool.”

/>   “Yeah,” he said. “Kinda cool. Kinda dumb, but kinda cool.” He stepped back from the bush and tilted his head, considering the best way to kill it. “You didn’t tell Mom, did you? About Chris?”

  “I already told you. You told me not to.”

  “Good,” he said. “Because it would only hurt her. And you don’t want that.”

  He plunged his stick sword into the bush and let out a loud moan, making the dying sounds for his victim. He wiped his hands on his shorts and admired his work. “I’ve taken care of this villain. Now let’s find someplace to read this in secret.”

  We left the clearing. I followed my brother back the way we came. Some of the branches were still bent, others had returned to their old selves. We took a random right and came upon a creek, and my brother and I stood side by side on the little bank. I noticed a gang of tadpoles swimming above the clay-colored creek bed. I crouched to get a better view. The tadpoles chased one another in circles. They had games of their own. I put my hand in the water where the tadpoles played, and they shot away from my fingers like fireworks.

  “… is also known as the Stranger,” my brother said. He had begun reading the article about the prisoner, which apparently continued mid-sentence.

  Kern has been a Kansas prison inmate since 1985, when he was found guilty of the first-degree murder of Morgan Wells.

  In December 1984, Leavenworth police responded to an eyewitness report of a woman being dragged into her home by a white male. Upon arriving at the scene and entering the house, police found Kern with a gun to his head, standing over the deceased Wells and a camcorder. Authorities alleged Kern had set up a camcorder to record the murder of Wells, and planned to kill himself immediately afterward. Authorities arrested Kern before he could shoot himself, however, and he was convicted in March 1985. He was sentenced to life imprisonment for first-degree murder.

  Leavenworth Police and the Kansas Department of Public Safety are assisting the Department of Corrections with the search. Prison officials declined to comment on how Kern escaped, but say he is considered dangerous. Anyone with information on Kern should call the police immediately.