“No way. You can’t even dive.” I walked away and sat on the couch, and let my brother think about how he hurt me. “OK,” he said, “but it might be a while.”
“Promise on Baron,” I said. That was the name of our dead dog. He had lived with us at our old house when our parents were together. I didn’t remember getting Baron but I remembered losing him. I remembered him limping a lot for weeks. Then one day, after school, I came home and he simply wasn’t there. My brother knew I loved that dog. When Baron was alive, my brother made fun of me for treating a dog like a person, for tucking him in at night, telling him about my day at school when I got home. But the day Baron went, it was my brother who, against our dad’s orders, fetched Baron’s old toys out of the trash and gave them to me. To keep in secret.
“Promise on him,” I said.
“I promise.”
* * *
After cereal, we played with our G.I. Joes, something my brother was excellent at. While my playing was based on plots from cartoons or movies, my brother created his own stories, which lasted hours, took over the entire apartment, and contained several startling plot twists. I tried to copy what my brother did, but my characters never sounded real, and quickly ran out of things to say. I could never tell as good a story as my brother. Days after we played, I would find men hiding in the cracks between the couch cushions, or dangling from a shower curtain ring. These men, my brother would explain, were the last survivors of a clan long thought dead, who when the time was right would rise out of the shadows and avenge the murder of their people.
I finished my playing early like usual so I could watch the rising action of my brother’s plot. A good guy hung by one hand from the edge of a dresser while the head bad guy stepped on his toes. The villain looked on and laughed.
“Why do you let the bad guys win?” I asked him.
“Because you never see that,” he said.
We went to bed an hour after we should have gone to bed. We tried to sleep in our room but it was too hot without the A/C on. It was off because it was broken. In the meantime, we had the box fan in the corner of the living room. So we slept out there with the big fan inches from our faces. At the bottom of the fan were three roaches. Two were dead and one had one leg. I felt bad for them, but my brother said there were worse places to die.
“Remember,” I said, “you promised.”
“So did you,” he said. He was talking about Chris, how I said I wouldn’t tell anyone, no matter what. “Now go to sleep.”
* * *
I had forgotten that the next day was the weekend, which meant we would be going to our dad’s duplex. My mother drove us across the city in the morning, on her way to work. Some weeks, for easiness I guess, our dad would meet her at a halfway point, a corner station or public park. It was like a prisoner exchange. Our mother would stay in the car, windows up, and watch us walk from her van to our dad’s police cruiser. Our dad, still in uniform, would stand behind the open driver’s door and when we got close, say, “My boys.”
This day our mother dropped us off at the duplex and drove away when she saw that we got in OK. Our dad was not inside. We called for him and ran upstairs to his bathroom, his shut bedroom door. We froze and listened for movement, heard nothing. My dad’s bedroom, like the woods, like the pool at nighttime, was off limits.
We retreated from the room and checked the refrigerator for something to snack on, knowing there would be little. Our dad never planned ahead. Our mother said he once read somewhere to live each day like it’s your last, and took it a bit too literally. A pound of beef thawed on the fridge’s middle rack. A sports drink stood next to the meat, with maybe a sip left. In the crisper there were eight cans of beer, three slices of cheese, and two packets of fast-food ketchup. That was it. If this was the last day on earth, why stock up on groceries?
We shut the fridge door and the whole place felt empty.
“Hey, I’ll pitch to you,” my brother said. “Remember our promises?”
* * *
Our dad didn’t come home until after dinnertime, after my brother and I played outside for over an hour. There was an old people’s home across the street, and we liked to use its chain-link fence when we played home run derby. We liked to smash the ball over the fence and imagine we were real stars. Later, when we were back in the duplex, hopping on the couches and pretending the carpet was lava, my brother reminded me that he had kept his promise. About pitching. And that I’d better keep mine. Or what? I had joked, but before my brother could make any threats, empty or otherwise, the storm door creaked open, announcing the arrival of our dad.
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.