Brotherly Love by Pete Dexter

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