Brotherly Love - Pete Dexter

by Pete Dexter

  His jacket and pants are tossed across the foot of the bed and he dresses in the dark, listening to the sounds of his skin passing through his pants legs, of his own breathing. He fits his feet into the cold sneakers without putting on his socks, and ties the laces in double knots. He stands up and walks into the hall, and then goes down the stairs too.

  At the door he stops; he has never been outside alone at this time of the morning. He weighs the darkness outside against the darkness in the living room; he touches the place where the door meets the frame and finds his father has not closed it completely, not wanting to make the noise.

  Peter opens the door. His father’s car is parked across the street; in front of it is the green car with the antenna mounted on the trunk. The windows of the car are fogged; a policeman is inside.

  He holds himself still and looks across the yard to Victor Kopec’s house. Nothing moves. He takes a few steps and then stops, afraid of making the smallest noise.

  He hears a bus somewhere in the distance, and then a dog, farther off still. The sounds relieve him.

  He moves again, walking away from the house until his line of sight clears the edge of Victor Kopec’s porch and he sees the front door. There is a lamp above it that Victor Kopec keeps on even during the day, and in the orange light he sees that this door is not flush against the frame either.

  When he steps again, the surface beneath his tennis shoes changes and he finds himself standing on the bare spot where the convertible uprooted the tree. He moves off the spot—he has avoided it since the accident—and then, faintly, hears a drowning voice inside Victor Kopec’s house.

  "Fucking God," it says.

  A moment later something breaks on the floor, and then the house is quiet. Peter stands a few feet behind the bare spot in the lawn and waits. Time passes, he doesn’t move. He stares at the front door and wills his father to come out.

  The sky in the east turns pink, a boy comes past on his bicycle, one of his pants legs rolled to his knee to keep it out of the chain, tossing newspapers backhand onto the steps. His bag says Daily News. Something moves inside the police car, moves and settles.

  And then the front door to the house opens, and Peter’s father comes out, carrying Victor Kopec over his shoulder, wrapped in a sheet.

  He walks without hurrying across the street and stops behind the red convertible, the body still draped over his shoulder, going through the keys in his hand to find the one to the trunk. In a moment his knees bend and he lowers himself until he is even with the lid of the trunk. His back is straight and his arm embraces the sheet to steady the load.

  The sheet moves and Peter sees Victor Kopec’s bare feet.

  There is a popping noise and the trunk yawns open. His father bends farther forward and ducks his head, bends until the body drops of its own weight into the trunk of the car. Peter hears a soft thud, almost as if Victor Kopec has sighed; the bumper of the car dips and evens.

  His father straightens himself and looks into the trunk, as if he wants to memorize what is inside it, and then he closes the lid carefully and walks back across the street to Victor Kopec’s front door. He pulls the door shut and locks it.

  41

  Peter sees the blood on his father’s sleeves.

  His father crosses Victor Kopec’s yard and enters his own. Peter hasn’t moved. His father nods at him then, as if he in some way expected him to be there. He returns the nod, the movement strange after holding his head still so long, and then follows him into the house.

  His father walks into the kitchen and turns on both faucets in the sink. Peter watches the muscles move under his shirt as he washes his hands. He wonders if he will have muscles in his back: if the slow, merciless engine that is hidden inside his father is hidden inside him too.

  His father washes his hands twice, the steam coming up over his shoulders, and then carefully cleans out the sink. He shakes his hands and turns to look for a towel. His hands have turned pink in the hot water.

  "Things ain’t the same, Peter," he says.

  His father picks up a dish towel and dries his hands. He watches his father’s fingers roll over each other inside the cloth. He waits for him to finish, and then waits for him to begin something else. He has been waiting since the afternoon of the accident.

  "The men are going to be mad," Peter says.

  His father smiles at him, and Peter sees that he is happy in some way that things are not the same, that something has finally changed.

  It occurs to Peter that his father has been waiting too.

  "Yeah, they are," he says, the smile gone now.

  Peter looks at his hands. "Then what are we going to do?"

  "You’re gonna be all right," he says quietly.

  He looks at his father, waiting for an answer.

  "I did what I’m going to do," his father says. "Now we’ll see what happens."

  Peter thinks of the old Italian Constantine, the way he spoke to his father, his crooked finger pointing up the staircase at him, making a gun. He feels his lip tremble and touches it with the back of his hand, quieting it.

  "There’s nothing settled until everybody’s dead, right?" his father says. "Things can be worked out."

  * * *

  Two hours later—it is eight o’clock in the morning—an unmarked police car rolls slowly up the street on heavy tires, crosses into the oncoming lane and parks close to the green sedan sitting in front of Victor Kopec’s house. The policemen in both cars roll down their windows and then lean into them to talk.

  The traffic coming up the street moves around them until an Allied van which cannot fit into what is left of the street stops in front of the parked car and waits, blocking traffic, for them to finish.

  The policemen don’t acknowledge the truck or the cars backed up behind it, honking.

  Peter watches them from his bedroom. As they talk, the one who has been there all night comes through the car window, his thick forearms crossed against the door. He laughs at something he says—his own joke. Peter’s gaze moves four cars up the street to the spot where Victor Kopec is lying in a sheet in the trunk of his convertible.

  He wonders if his father has taken care of both of the policemen, or just the one he can see smiling in the window of his car. He hears his father in the hallway then, coming to take him to school. He puts his books into a satchel and checks his shirt and tie in the mirror. They walk out of the front door together, in clear view of the police and the convertible, walk across the yard and the street and climb into his father’s Lincoln.

  The policemen don’t seem to notice them, no one seems to notice. The air inside the car is warm and the seat behind Peter’s back is cool and soft. His father puts the key in the ignition, stops for a moment, deciding something, and then starts the engine.

  He looks once to the side, and the car waiting there next to his backs up, making a small opening, and his father takes it, without looking at the driver, and then points his car into the other lane. He stops once to back up, changing directions, and then drives away.

  Peter is almost breathless. Passing right in front of the police, driving away. It makes him think of falling, of the secret stillness of a fall. He turns in his seat to see where they have just been.

  "We could get away," he says. It hasn’t occurred to him before.

  His father nods. "The way you do that," he says, "you stay right where you are."

  * * *

  And Peter and his father stay where they are, and Victor Kopec’s convertible stays where it is too, untouched. It is there the next morning, and the morning after that. And each morning Peter and his father walk past it and the policeman sitting in the green sedan, and get into the Lincoln and drive to school.

  And each afternoon, the man who brings Peter home drives past it before he stops to let him out.

  On the third day the man turns the corner at the park and suddenly speaks.

  "Uh-oh."

  Just that. Peter is in the back seat and pu
lls himself up to see. There is a nest of police cars in front of his house. An ambulance is in Victor Kopec’s yard. Lights are flashing, doors are open everywhere—the police cars, the ambulance, the front door to Victor Kopec’s house.

  The man who drives him home from school slows as he comes to the house, trying to see inside. There are men with cameras and flash attachments standing near the door, half a dozen policemen in uniform holding them back.

  The car passes Victor Kopec’s house and stops. The man who drives it looks back at Peter, not knowing what to do. "You want we should go find your father?" he says.

  He thinks for a moment and then opens the door and climbs out.

  "You sure you don’t wanna . . ."

  He closes the door and walks across the yard to his house. The driver watches him a moment, undecided, and then heleaves.

  A colored man in a suit comes out of Victor Kopec’s house and speaks to one of the photographers. "They was bleeding in there like a pipe broke," he says.

  "Let somebody in," the photographer says, asking a favor.

  The man in the suit shrugs, and all the photographers go past him into the house.

  Peter fits the key into his front door and walks inside. He goes upstairs and undresses, hanging his school clothes over the back of his chair, and then putting on his sneakers and his jeans and his jacket.

  He returns to the front steps and sits down to wait. The police seem to be waiting too. Some of them are sitting on Victor Kopec’s front steps, some are in the yard, talking to each other as they hold back the neighbors. A police car appears, coming across the park, lights on, and the policemen who are sitting down stand up, and the ones holding back the crowd suddenly begin to push.

  "I want everybody in back of the sidewalk," one of them shouts, and the neighbors give ground, a foot at a time, until they are off Victor Kopec’s lawn.

  The police car stops across the street. The back door opens and an angry-looking man in a uniform climbs out, slams the door, and walks through the neighbors to the front of the house. They move for him; he is the chief of police. The boy recognizes him from television; he is as famous as the president.

  The chief climbs the steps and stops there to speak with a sergeant, looking around as he listens to the sergeant’s report, then turns his head and stares directly at the house next door—Peter Flood’s house—and then at Peter himself. Peter stares back.

  The police chief turns and tells the sergeant something else, pushing his finger into his uniform just below his chin, and then walks into the house. The sergeant and some of the men left outside give each other looks, and then follow him in.

  A moment later the photographers exit the house all at once, as if they were blown out; some of them looking back where they have been, some of them holding on to their hats. Peter hears the chief’s voice, yelling at the policemen left inside.

  "I’ll throw you cocksuckers off the roof, you let anybody in here," he says.

  Peter looks at the pitched roof and imagines it. Policemen coming through the air. He does not think the police chief would do that, but the policemen outside the house give each other nervous looks now, as if they are not sure.

  The chief stays inside a long time—perhaps as long as Peter’s father had—and then emerges, quieter now, angry in a different way.

  "You find the body, Frank?" one of the photographers says.

  The chief turns to the photographer but doesn’t answer. Half a dozen flashbulbs go off; he straightens slightly, but offers them no change in expression. In Peter’s experience, photographers always want you to smile.

  When the bulbs have stopped, the chief turns to the sergeant who has followed him into and out of the place and says something Peter cannot hear.

  The police and the photographers turn together and survey the cars parked along both sides of the street. "I think it’s the convertible," somebody says, and the crowd in the yard separates as the chief and half a dozen of the policemen come through on the way to the car. The photographers follow the police, and behind them are the neighbors.

  Peter feels something like a tuning fork in his balls.

  The chief gets to Victor Kopec’s car first, dropping his head even with the window to look inside. He checks both seats and then he walks straight to the back end and stands still, looking at the closed trunk. One of the policemen steps in with a crowbar and wedges it under the lid. There is a popping noise, not much different than the noise it had made when the boy’s father opened it with the key, and the trunk comes open.

  The flashbulbs explode again—more popping—and the photographers crush into each other, fighting to hold their places around the trunk while the policemen push them away and tell them to get back. The chief stands quietly in the middle of the movement and noise, looking inside the trunk.

  Then he turns and stares again at Peter, and then he starts across the street.

  Peter watches him come. Behind him are the other policemen, and then the photographers. The neighbors stay in the street. He hears the sound of the police chief’s polished black shoes on the sidewalk, the creak of the belt that holds his gun, the sound of the change in his pocket.

  The police chief squats, sitting on his heels, and looks into his eyes. Peter smells shoe polish.

  "Where’s your father?" he says.

  Peter shakes his head, and the chief looks over him toward the house.

  "You know where he’s at?"

  One of the photographers steps around a policeman and takes a picture. Peter sees colored circles. The chief turns, still on his haunches, and says, "Get them people out of here," and the other policemen push the photographers back.

  "You know where he’s at?" the chief says again.

  Peter shakes his head.

  "When he comes home, tell him I want to see him. Tell him I’ll be back to see him .... "

  Peter nods, understanding that he is part of it now. He stares into the chief’s eyes.

  The chief rises slowly and looks at Victor Kopec’s convertible. It seems to Peter that the chief is going to say something more, but he reconsiders it and heads back into the street. The reporters walk backwards, just in front of him, asking their questions.

  "Who’s that kid, Frank?"

  The police chief doesn’t answer. "Did the guy have a family? Frank?"

  "Where’s he assigned to?"

  "Frank, did the guy have a family?"

  The chief of police walks to his car without answering the questions, then stops a moment before he gets inside.

  "Lieutenant Kopec was an excellent police officer," he says. "Any further statements will come as the case develops." And then he turns away from the cameras and drops into the front seat of the police car and points, with one finger, toward the other side of the park.

  The reporters shout more questions, but the car rolls out across the grass, leaving tire tracks.

  The reporters come back to the convertible, the trunk is still open. A rope barrier has been set up around it, and investigators in white coats are going through what is inside.

  The reporters look at each other and shake their heads.

  "Frank’s pissed," one of them says.

  They remember Peter then, and come back across the yard, smiling. Peter gets up and goes into his house. In a moment, he hears them knocking on the door. He sits down on the iloor and turns on the television set, loud enough so he can’t hear the knocking, and waits for them to leave.

  Bandstand.

  * * *

  The phone rings sometime after dark.

  He picks it up and presses the receiver against his ear, cold and hard, and listens.

  "Who’s this?" It is his uncle, something in his voice.

  "It’s Peter," he says.

  "Your father there yet?"

  Peter looks across the empty room to the front window. There are lights outside, a policeman is still guarding Victor Kopec’s convertible. Victor Kopec himself is gone now, he watched them lift him out
of the trunk.

  "No."

  "You tell him as soon as he gets in to call me, all right? . . . You understand me? As soon as he’s in the door."

  He hangs up the phone. The television set glows in the corner, lighting the room, and the light changes with the scenes; the whole room seems to blink. He thinks of the reporters who would not go away. He thinks of them talking to each other, laughing on the other side of the door.

  He goes into the kitchen and makes himself a jelly sandwich. As he eats it, he remembers one of the reporters who stood in the front yard pointing at the house, arguing with the photographers.

  "Get a picture, get a fuckin’ picture .... "

  Time passes. Outside a car engine races and stops, not his father’s. A door slams. Peter goes to the window and sees his uncle on the sidewalk. The streetlight throws a shadow across half his face and makes the pockmarks deeper in the lighted side. He imagines a pain which could cause such marks.

  His uncle knocks as if he were in a hurry to get inside. Peter opens the door and he steps through it without a word. He looks around the room—a familiar gesture, but this time he is not thinking he would like the place for himself.

  "He ain’t home?"

  He shakes his head.

  His uncle closes the door as if it were his own house and walks inside. "How come you got it so dark?" he says. He smiles, but something is strained in his voice.

  Peter shrugs. "It doesn’t matter to me," he says.

  His uncle goes to the wall switch and the room is suddenly filled with light.

  "I think you spent too much time alone," he says. Peter understands that is a joke, he doesn’t know what kind.

  He shrugs again and his uncle bends over the television set, and the sound of voices fills the room. Ralph and Norton, planning to get rich. He knows the words by heart.

  His uncle sits on the davenport and lights a cigarette. "You got a beer in the icebox?" he says.

  Peter nods.

  His uncle watches him in a way Peter has seen before—never when his father is there with them, though. "So?" he says, "you gonna get me a beer or what?"