Danny Paul & Joe

Danny Paul is Joe's older, wilder brother. He's always in trouble and in jail. The cops know him well. Joe tries to stay out of trouble, but sometimes being Danny Paul's kid brother is enough trouble.

            I don’t like the police. They always make me feel afraid and nervous. I get the jitters, kinda like I am doing something wrong when I’m not doing nothing at all. So, I just don’t like the police. And I really didn’t like them when they were all over the yard at my house last week. Walking in and out the front door. Putting their yellow ‘POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS’ tape all over everywhere. Blue lights were flashing, and I kept thinking I would have a seizure and an ambulance with even more flashing lights would come and carry me out of there and to the hospital across town. But, no matter how much I sat staring at those flashing lights, I never seized. Not even a slight flinch.

            They tried to talk to me lots of times though. At first, it was this round, heavy cop with thick gray hair and a salt and pepper mustache that came over to me where I was sitting on a tree stump at the edge of the yard. I don’t remember what they called him, Harry or Larry or something like that. I just stared past him at the blue lights flicking on the white siding of my house. I remember thinking, don’t look him in the eye and never say a word. He will go away soon. That is what Danny Paul always told me to do. So that’s what I did.

            “Did you hear anything? Any loud noises or anything that seemed out of the ordinary to you?” the round cop asked me first.

            I just stared at the lights on the house siding and watched the shadows of the other cops move off and onto the side of the house as if I were at a private screening of a shadow puppets show.

            “Was there anyone else in the house besides your mom and your dad and you?” the cop continued with his questions and I continued watching the shadow puppets. Enter on the left, shadow puppet number one, no hat. Exit on the right, shadow puppet number two with a hat.

            “Son, do you understand what has happened here at all? Do you understand there has been a tragic murder in your house tonight?” he continued to press.

            A murder. Yes, I understood that. I understood it very much, probably more than I should, definitely more than I wanted to. Blue lights flashing on the house. Cops moving up and down the porch steps.

            The cop stared at me a moment longer while his fat hands with his sausage-like fingers rested on his gun belt and gun. He sighed with the same heavy sound Danny Paul always made when he was trying to teach me something and I wasn’t really paying attention. When Danny Paul made that noise I knew it wouldn’t be long until I got a big thump on the top of my head. That always hurt so bad, brought on the terrible headaches and soon I knew I’d be emptying my stomach off in the woods at the back of my house somewhere.

            I jerked my head in his direction and looked him dead in the eyes. I wanted to be sure that sigh didn’t mean the same thing coming from him. I didn’t trust the cops. They’d hit you just as quick as anybody else would hit you. I learned that the day I watched Danny Paul getting arrested for pocketing a bottle of pain pills off Ms. Lorene’s kitchen counter after we had finished cutting her grass and weeds. We were waiting at the kitchen table to get paid while drinking a can of Pepsi she had given us just like always. Except this day Danny Paul happened to be snooping a little at these pill bottles sitting by the sink. Ms. Lorene walked back into the room and Danny Paul just shoved that one pill bottle down in the pocket of his jeans and slid back into his seat quick as anything I ever saw. We went on home after where he took out the bottle and read the label to me.

            “Percocet. That right there is pretty good stuff. Who knew that sweet lady was taking drugs?” He smiled his wide toothy smile as he kept reading the other info on the bottle to himself. “I bet she’s a closet junkie. Them good citizen types are always doing the same illegal s**t as us white trash folks, but we get the bad name for it.” Danny Paul always hated the ones he thought of as better than us, better than our family.

            “Maybe she really has bad pain and she needs them pills for real,” I said looking at the ground, poking a stick into the top of anthill by my foot. “Maybe she has like a bad knee or bad back or something,” I offered.

            “Yeah, well may be. But what about my bad back? And maybe I need these pills for real too. J’you ever think about that? Huh?” he said grabbing the back of my hair and pulling me back hard so that my feet came off the ground and flew up into the air. He shoved me forward again. The hair pulling didn’t really hurt so bad. Not like when he hit me on the top of the head. I’d take almost anything over that. “Well did ya?” he asked again.

            “No, guess not,” I answered looking down at the anthill again.

            “No, guess not,” he mimicked in a mocking, high-pitched tone. “O’course not. You never think ‘bout nothin’, do ya? No! That’s why it’s a good thing you got your big brother around here to do the thinkin’. It’s just a good damn thing, Joe.” He poured two or three of those pills out in his dirty palm and swallowed them dry right then.

            “Yeah, a good damn thing,” I said softly, poking again at the anthill. I wanted to poke Danny Paul, but I didn't. I knew better.

            Still, it didn’t take too awful long before Ms. Lorene noticed that bottle of Percocet missing off her kitchen counter, and by eight PM that evening the police were dragging Danny Paul out of our little house on Russell Street and shaking him down in the yard looking for the pills. Danny Paul was smiling that wide toothed grin again and when the bottle was found in the back of his underwear drawer and the handcuffs were put on him, he just kept on smiling.

            “Boys, boys, calm down,” he said with a little laugh offering no real resistance to the boys in blue. “I only took two of’em. I was gonna give’em back to the old chick. I was just lyin’ there on my bed thinkin’ what if she needs them pills for real,” he went on telling them while they were walking him to the back of the car.

            “No you wasn’t!” I wanted to yell. “I said that! Remember? I was the one thinkin’ that. You were thinkin’ what about you needing them for real. Remember, Danny Paul? Remember?” But I didn’t. I knew better.

            “And I was gonna walk them right back over there to her after that episode of ‘I Almost Got Away With It’ went off. I sure was.” Wide, toothy grin.

            Those cops weren’t listening. And before they shoved him in the back of that squad car, he jerked back a little to look ol’ Deputy Dandy square in the face to tell him again how he was really going to return that bottle of pills. “Looking someone square makes your story a little more believable,” Danny Paul always told me. He looked at him square and he started the telling of his tale again, and just like lightning Deputy Dandy punched him straight up in the nose.

            “What the hell!” Danny Paul shouted as the red oozed down his upper lip and into his mouth covering those bright white teeth.

            “Resisting,” the cop said flatly and shoved Danny Paul into the back seat and shut the door.

            I stared at Danny Paul through the back side window and he stared back at me. Slowly I saw it starting to spread, that wide grin of his, and I knew that punch to the nose hadn’t really hurt Danny Paul. It had caught him off guard, sure, but it hadn’t hurt. And those blue eyes, even in the dark of the back seat of that cop car, screamed to me that he had no intentions of returning those pills to Ms. Lorene. I didn’t feel sorry for Danny Paul, but I worried all night over Ms. Lorene and if the police ever gave her back her pills, or if they had been stored in an evidence locker at the police station. I never found out, but I suspected she went without them Percocets for a night or two.

             I stared at the heavy cop who sighed heavily in front of me. He stared back at me, but I never said a word and he never moved to strike me. Finally I looked away, back to the house and the flashing lights and the cops covering the yard.

            “I’ll be sending someone to take you somewhere to stay tonight,” the cop said, and he turned and trekked back across the yard to where all the action was taking place. Soon he had blended in with the other shadow puppets on the side of the house. I sat silent wondering why had all this happened. But, I knew, just like I knew that Danny Paul was still close. He was close, hiding, and watching all this scene. I couldn’t see him, but he had his wild blue eyes on me. I could feel them. I wanted to tell someone Danny Paul was watching, but I didn’t. I knew better.

Author's Note

This is a completely unfinished piece of my work. I have not written much on this and honestly have no clue where it is going.