The sound wasn’t the sound from our stupid movies. It was a long-lasting pop, one that blasted my ears and rattled my chest, making me feel hollow. It was the sound from the Stranger tape, and with it came everything I tried not to think about. I immediately put my hands to my head, pressing the earmuffs as hard as possible to shut out both thoughts and sound. But this trapped the noise inside me, so that the booms circled from my head to my heart in one continuous terrible loop.
I felt my brother nudge me, and when I looked over I saw that he was shaking with laughter. I didn’t get what was funny until I realized he was laughing at me, his scared baby brother. I opened my mouth. I tried to tell him that he was scared too. He thought of the same things I did, went to sleep each night with the same worry, and just because he had Chris and I didn’t, that didn’t mean he was any safer or better than me.
After every clip was empty, our dad gave the OK to retrieve the targets. The men held up their victims so the fading sunlight could shine through the holes where the bullets had hit. My dad examined each sheet, giving tips to those whose targets went untouched. The hand of one man, who hadn’t hit a single thing, was bleeding badly and in need of a bandage. The gun’s kickback had pinched the man on his first shot. He hadn’t fired a gun since his training, he said. “Well, that’s why we’re here,” my dad said, and grabbed a first-aid kit to patch the man up.
After the man’s bleeding was stopped, our dad came over to see how we were doing. “What do you think, boys?”
I wanted to tell him that I didn’t like this. The noise. The blood. And I didn’t want to be here.
“Can I shoot a little?” my brother said, his eyes fixed on the men and their guns.
“No, son. This is official police practice.”
“Official?” my brother said. “That guy’s wearing a tank top.”
“Some other time,” my dad said, and put his hand to his gun, as if to double-check it was still there. He often did the same thing with his wallet, tapping his back pocket to make sure it hadn’t been picked by a thief.
“Please,” my brother said, “just one round.”
My dad said no, asked my brother if he was hard of hearing. My brother dropped his earmuffs on the ground. He turned around and muttered.
“Excuse me?” my dad said.
“You heard me,” my brother said, his words a little louder.
“Try me again.”
“I said this is stupid.”
“And why is that?”
“Because … they’re shooting paper.”
“That’s a good thing.”
“Yeah, but you’re not even gonna shoot. You’re just gonna stand around and tell everyone else what to do.”
“That’s my job.”
“Then why did you bring your gun?” my brother asked.
My dad looked down at the gun on his side, to where his hand was resting, and it was obvious that he didn’t have an answer. “I just thought you’d want to see what your old man does. That’s all.”
“Yeah,” my brother said, and he turned away from my dad, so only I could see his smile, “but you don’t do anything.”
My dad’s face hardened, and he looked at me as if I could explain why my brother was acting this way. But I didn’t know what to say. I had questions of my own.
An officer called to my dad. They were ready to start the second round. “Just sit down and shut up,” my dad said to my brother. “Next time you can stay at your mother’s.”
On the way home my brother sat in the back of the cruiser with me, and our dad kept glancing at us in the mirror, like we were a couple of criminals itching to escape.
“I have to run you home,” our dad said. “I’m technically on duty now, so…” His voice trailed off as we came to a four-way stop. I knew where we were, and knew that if we went left, it would lead us to Limit Street, which we could hop on and take to our mom’s. We went straight. “You know,” our dad said, “your mother’s told me some things about you. How you’ve been acting.” He was talking to my brother, who shook his head and rolled his eyes, but didn’t say anything. “Hey,” my dad said, “I’m talking to you.”
My brother didn’t respond. When it became clear he wasn’t going to apologize without prompting, or admit to any wrongdoing, our dad didn’t force him. He flipped on the police radio, and the car filled with garbled voices, battling back and forth. I stared out the window and tuned out the radio as best I could, until my thoughts were interrupted by my dad’s voice. He had the radio to his mouth and had joined the conversation. He told the woman to show him responding, but didn’t say responding to what.
My brother ceased his silent treatment. “What was that?”
“Nothing,” our dad said. “Some idiot’s trespassing. I’ve got to run by.”
“Where?”
“The battery factory.”
The battery factory was one of the biggest buildings in Leavenworth that wasn’t a prison or a grain elevator. It was more than five stories tall, and painted a grassy green that had faded over time, after the factory was shut down and everyone lost their job. We’d driven by it only once or twice in my life, but each time we did our dad would shake his head and say what a shame. To my brother, the factory was an unexplored world, one of the few places big enough to house his imagination.
“Are we going?”
“I am,” our dad said. “I’ll drop you boys off first.”
My brother grabbed the barrier in protest. “No way. Take us with you.”
Our dad told him no. He wasn’t taking his kids to a crime scene. Besides, it was nothing exciting. Probably just a couple of lonely-hearted high schoolers looking for a dark place to sneak off to.
“We won’t do anything,” my brother said. “We’ll stay in the car and watch, won’t we?” He nudged me until I said yes. “We just want to see.”
When my dad didn’t shoot him down right away, I knew my brother was onto something.
“Oh, I get it,” our dad said. “So now what ye olde dad does is cool? Is that it?”
We stopped and a red light colored my brother’s wide smile. “We’ll be good,” he said. “I promise.”
Our dad looked in the rearview mirror. I couldn’t see his mouth, but I saw his face rise, his eyes beam. He took a sharp turn, veering off our normal course, taking a side street off Main and up onto Marion, a street I’d never heard of.
It was dark when we pulled up. The streetlights weren’t alive. There were no cars in front of the factory, or dusty bikes lying in the gravel. Whoever trespassed had traveled by foot. Our dad aimed the headlights at the front doors, chained shut with a dungeon lock. It felt like we’d stumbled into a movie someone else had rented. Our dad was the cop in the opening credits, the one who was just doing his job, and everyone knew would get it. Wrong place, wrong time, we would think, right before a monster snatched him from the rafters. I glanced at my brother, who was sitting on his feet trying to get a better view. I didn’t remember a single movie where the worthless cop brought his boys.
“Stay put,” our dad said. “I’ll be back in a second.”
He rolled down our windows a little more than halfway and stepped out of the car. He didn’t approach the chained door with his hand on his holster, like I thought he would. He walked up hands free and tried the doors, held fast by the chain. I kept waiting for the worst possible thing to burst through the doors, but the night remained quiet. Our dad stepped back from the building and looked up, as if the monster had scaled the walls and broken through one of the dirt-caked windows. I pictured the monster bashing the glass with a rock, not his fist, and suddenly the monster became the burglar. A criminal. And because I didn’t know what the Stranger looked like, never got a good look at his face on the tape, in my mind I made Chris play the part.