Brotherly Love (7 page)

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."

* * *

T
wo 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."

* * *

A
nd 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 pulls
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?"