Anyone I can put inside a red slicker.
W
Once upon a time the brother claimed a calendar’s worth of extracurriculars but I cannot find the evidence. If the brother was on the basketball team, then there would be practices, games, public places to surveil from within a crowd. But if these events existed they were without schedule or record.
Despite these mysteries, the brother is not impossible to track and so I track him.
I follow the brother’s brown car, memorize its license plate. The same model as the man’s in the red slicker, an accidental overlap with dire consequences. The boy’s false schedule buys him freedom behind the wheel, access to all the city from school’s end to curfew, eleven on the weekdays, midnight on Saturday. The brother’s friends are not indistinguishable but at this distance I know them only by their grossest types: there is the fat one and the tall one and the thin one, each more similar than distinct. Always the brother drives, the others fighting for shotgun and the losers crowding into the backseat.
Together they visit certain houses in the zone. The brother stays in the car while the fat one goes inside. I hang back but afterward I roll by the houses again, scan the metal screens over the windows. The game the brother’s playing isn’t basketball but I think I know the rules.
The brother and the brother’s friends drive the neighborhood closest to their school, stop to pick up girls from front porches. They smoke in the car, keep the windows rolled up for blocks before letting the world back in. I think I can hear their laughter but I know I’m not close enough. I never had these kinds of friends but I was once young and dumb too, know the story, know these girls with bad taste.
I watch while the brother and these others get high in his car, get high in lots between abandoned houses, then high in the houses. At first I maintain my distance, stay down the block in the truck. The brother knows my face but the brother never sees me. The obliviousness of youth is all the cover I need. I leave the truck behind, walk into the small trees circling the house the boy and the friends and the girls have found, approach it from the back. I can’t get close enough to look through the windowless walls but I can hear the sounds of laughter from the first floor, then the brother’s voice upstairs, then the sounds of him with one of the girls. A girl, yes, but a girl is not adequate cover. Not proof of anything. There had been girls for me too. There is a girl now and I know better than to believe it means the past is ended.
The brother going to school but not staying all day. The brother cutting out early, leaving at lunch and not coming back. Or else not going at all.
The brother sitting in the fast-food restaurant where the fat friend works, hanging out in the backmost booth. Not buying anything. Sitting there drinking a soda. Thumbs on his cell. Bored but nowhere to go.
The brother at the mother’s house, turning off the light in the boy’s bedroom.
The brother at the father’s apartment, where they have to share the second bedroom.
The brother in the dark with the boy. The brother hurting the boy. Because the boy is in the room. Because the easiest victim is the one at hand.
Before he was taken from me I let the brother bring the boy to my apartment. The brother driving him there even though the brother skipped school. A certain amount of normalcy necessary to retain access to the mother and the father, their separate homes.
There were ninety minutes between the end of school and when I arrived home from work and some days the boy was there, let in with his own key, and some days he was not.
On the days the brother didn’t bring the boy, where did the boy go?
The boy told me the brother took him home but now I know this wasn’t true.
I have to be waiting outside the boy’s school if I want to follow so I leave work early. It’s easier if I don’t ask, and the jobsite is big enough I can just wander off. I’m there on the street when the brother pulls up in the brown car. It’s like watching a reenactment, every time.
The brown car pulls up. The boy gets into the car. The car takes the boy away. And if the destination is harm for the boy, does it matter who’s driving?
What I want to ask: Is he your brother or isn’t he?
What I want to hear: He is and he isn’t.
I would say, I would never want to hurt anyone you loved.
He is and he isn’t.
But I would hurt anyone who hurt you.
He has but what if someone hurt him first. What if he could learn to stop, like you learned.
But I didn’t learn. But look what it cost when I failed.
The night of the brother’s birthday party, I am there too, watching from the evening gloom through the windows of the green house, its lonely outpost upon this neighborless block. Inside the house, the boy attends the brother’s birthday dinner, father and mother and sons reunited again. Chocolate cake, presents, a video game and a pair of sneakers. The celebration ends, the father leaves. I was inside just the one time but I know which window is the boy’s. I shiver and shake and watch for him to appear in the glass. Much later I am sure the boy is asleep but still there is a nightlight burning somewhere in the room. He never told me he was afraid of the dark — a ward, perhaps, against what else he had to fear.
The brother, eighteen at last — but despite his age you had to want to call him a man.
The next week the brother moves out of the mother’s house and I watch him go. He wasn’t their real son and they’d never become close and what other options were there. The mother helps him carry his boxes to the car, hugs him goodbye. At first I don’t know where the brother will go but it isn’t hard to tail him to his new place, an apartment with the fat friend in a worse part of town. I sit in the parking lot and watch his windows, try to imagine a scenario where this is how the case ends. Because if the brother is out of the boy’s life forever, then maybe there is nothing else to do.
The next day I watch as the brother picks the boy up from school. I follow the brown car as the brother drives deeper into the zone, back to the house where he had gone with his friends, his friends’ girls. From a distance I watch the house, watch the silhouettes of the brother and the boy move window to window, climbing to an upper room. It’s not the same room as when he was here with the girl. They’re on the wrong side of the house and I can’t see anything more, can’t hear what is being said or done.
What I want is an excuse, a reason to let the brother go.
Certainly I admit there are blanks in the records.
Certainly I fill in what I can’t prove.
I speculate. I deduce.
I make connections.
What I want for the boy is an end to fear but first I have to leave the boy in danger a little longer. Another crime, like closing the basement door one last time before returning with the hacksaw, before rescuing the boy from the dark of the low room.
I say I want to protect the boy but to do so I cannot imagine any action that is not violence against someone else. And is this limitation found in the world or is it my own most obvious flaw.