“We can’t,” I said.
“Watch us,” my brother said.
“You just do what you want, don’t you?”
“Yes. And I do what you want too, but are too baby to do.” He pushed a door open and slid in without a sound. I thought about whether to follow, but couldn’t make up my mind. A good undercover cop wouldn’t hesitate, I knew. He would follow the mark wherever the mark went, do whatever the mark asked, until the line between right and wrong became blurred, and the cop began to wonder if there really was a good side and a bad, or if wrongdoing, as one bad movie had said, was in the eye of the beholder.
After a minute the door swung open and my brother’s head poked out. “You have to see this,” he said before disappearing into the back again.
This time I did what a good cop would do, what I thought my dad would have wanted me to do. I followed him. I snuck through the door and hid behind an icebox that hummed like our box fan. I peeped around and took everything in, memorized the exits. The kitchen was dirtier than I had imagined. Old mop strings shed during the last scrub stuck to the floor. All the metal had a rust to it, and the walls and ceiling were yellow when it was clear they wanted to be white. We walked through a maze of boxes, stacked into towers that nearly touched the ceiling. My brother stopped me when we came to a corner and put his finger to his lips.
“Shh,” he said. “Do not disturb.” He waved me around the corner, and I stepped out in the open and saw what he wanted me to see. It was Sandy, sitting on a stack of huge sacks of popcorn kernels. Or, Cornbread sat on the sacks and Sandy sat in his lap, her back twisted, so I couldn’t see what their faces were doing. Cornbread held her in his big arms, like my mother did when she wanted to pretend I was still a baby. Sandy rocked with him, cooed, moaned, and didn’t shiver when Cornbread’s hand drew circles on her naked knee.
I immediately thought of Rick and my mother, the night of the party. Cornbread’s arms flexed harder, holding Sandy tight. Sandy’s legs kicked in the air like she was swinging on a swing set, trying to get higher and higher. I watched for a moment longer, and walked away, in sort of a daze, until I reached the cafeteria, where my brother was waiting, laughing. “I know,” he said. “It’s stupid, isn’t it?”
“I guess,” I said, though I couldn’t put into words what I just saw, or what seeing it made me feel.
“Don’t you get it?” my brother whispered. “Nobody’s watching. Rick’s gone. Mom’s working. Sandy and Cornbread are, well, you saw.” He smiled at me, though in a way I didn’t completely recognize. “We have the whole course to ourselves, dummy. We can do whatever we want.”
He got up and walked out the cafeteria’s side door, and I followed him outside, unsure what he meant. What could we do now that Rick was gone that we couldn’t do while Rick was here, except relax, not worry about his leg pinch?
We went around back, down the long hill that led to the golf cart garage. The air was thick and dead. Coming in from the daylight, I rubbed my eyes to help them adjust to the darkness, while keeping up with my brother as he weaved from row to row, snaked through the endless sea of carts.
“What are we doing?” I said.
“We’re doing what we always do,” my brother said.
“I don’t want to play hide-and-go-seek.”
“Who said anything about that?” he said, and started to walk faster, to take sharper and more surprising turns. I tried to track his feet, but he was running now, darting toward the back, where it was all dark.
I had to stop to catch my breath. “Wait up,” I said, but I could no longer hear my brother’s footsteps. “Where are you?” The entire garage was still, buzzing with silence. Everything looked like it could come to life. “I told you I’m not playing.”
I wound my way through several more rows. It got so dark that when I closed my eyes, there wasn’t much of a difference. “Come out! I don’t like this!”
No one returned my words. I sat down in the middle of a row and wondered what would happen if this was it. If I was a dead boy. I imagined my face on a flyer tacked to the bulletin board at my dad’s police station. The other officers would pat my dad on the shoulder, console him as he stared at my picture on his break, his face blank. They’ll find him, Alan would say. They always do. When they did find me, when I was discovered by Cornbread or, more likely, Rick, my mother would collapse over my body. Don’t touch him, she would say, running her hands through my hair, over my skin, which would be pale and pruney, like I had drowned in the pool. Don’t any of you touch him. And Rick would slowly back away, slinking back into the shadows, because he had never had a son and couldn’t know what to say. He would have to leave my mother alone.
I brought my legs to my chest and put my head down.
“Hey, c’mon,” a voice said. “What are you doing?”
I looked up and saw my brother.
“Get up, would you?” he said. “I want to show you something.”
* * *
“It’s a cart,” I said.
My brother had picked me up and walked me through rows of carts, leading me to what he wanted to show me. I held on to his shirt until we passed through what felt like the garage’s center, where it was lighter and any sound echoed. We took turns hooting and shouting, letting our voices disappear into the dark, only to return to us a second later, tinny, like we were talking through a can.
“Here it is,” he said, and sat down in a random cart, the last one in its row. I sat next to him in the passenger side, my butt on the edge so my feet could touch the floor.
“I don’t get it,” I said.
“Look.” He pointed at the ignition, where someone had left a key. “It’s Rick’s. This is his cart.” A green rabbit’s foot dangled from the key ring, bright and unreal. I remembered something similar dangling from Rick’s car keys. “Haven’t you ever noticed? He always leaves his keys in his cart, like an idiot. But now everybody’s gone. Now’s our chance.” I reached out to touch the rabbit’s foot, which I had been too afraid to do in Rick’s car. My brother slapped my hand away. “No way,” he said. “You’re too dumb to drive.” He took a deep breath, moved his hand to the shifter, and put the cart in reverse. “If anyone’s going to get us out of here, it’s going to be me.”
He twisted around so he could see what was behind him, and put his arm behind my neck, like our dad used to do to our mother when he drove our family around.
“Here we go,” he said, and put his foot to the pedal.
The cart jerked backward. Fast, out of control, its little motor roaring.
“Shit!” my brother yelled. He kicked at the brake, and just as sharply as we started, we stopped, slamming me back into my seat.
A bead of sweat dripped off my nose and into my mouth, salting my tongue. For a moment I sat there, taking in what had just happened. I glanced over at my brother, who had both hands on the wheel, staring at it like it was an alien ship. The ship had crash-landed thousands of years ago, and we were the stupid humans foolish enough to think we could make it fly.
“Maybe we should stop,” I said.
“We haven’t done anything. Not yet.”
I grabbed the rabbit’s foot, combed back its hair to find its skin. I reminded myself that Rick was gone. He wasn’t working today. And with him out of the picture, there was no one here to punish us.
“Are you sure?” I said.
“Yes,” my brother said. “Now’s our chance to get out of this dump.”
I scooted back in my seat. I took a breath, held on to the railing, and told my brother that I was ready. He put the cart in drive and inched us away from the wall. He drove slowly until the garage exit was in sight, like our mother did in school zones, even in the summer. But once we got out in the open, out of close quarters, he put his foot down hard and started to drive just like Rick.