Into the Red Rivers Grasp
he... must have drowned in it...
*Disclaimer: Violence, Self-Harm, and Drug-Use.
I’ll start by saying that I’ve come to remember my brother Paul in a somewhat strange way. He was adopted roughly eight years ago; I was twelve and he was eight. My parents needed another child, an old-world superstition of theirs. I was just excited to have a brother.
Before I knew about his parents, there was never a question as to where he came from. For all I was concerned, kids just popped up out of the blue. He was one of those deliveries that came from a stork, or rose from the dirt like a plant. I didn’t know about bumping uglies or genetics or anything of the sort.
He was my brother, and my parents were his parents. My name is Saul, his name is Paul. I figured it was that way on purpose. His features looked like mine, brown eyes and dark hair – though mine became long and wavy, and his stayed short and straight. We walked in a similar way, a bit of a bounce and with quick strides. Over the years the distinctions became more apparent.
In the summer before the new school year, he turned thirteen and hit a growth spurt. He was taller than me. I was jealous and agreed that he could walk himself to school; it was the first day of his last year at middle school. Taller than me, I thought, a middle schooler.
Before then, he never walked alone – not without my company. I’d get used to being dragged along for his adventures, or bringing him on mine. We enjoyed them. It was me who guided him, who treated him like the child who needed guidance. It was important to me to be able to teach him what I knew. Our parents loved it.
That summer, we spent most of the days walking up the street to the soccer field by the reservoir. It had trails that went into the woods. We’d stay for hours, exploring and adventuring. I would take any moment to teach him what I thought was important for him to know. We squished beetles and I told him the insides were how they made jelly and paint –that, if we had to, we could eat them to survive. I would point to oak leaves or grass and tell him that’s where salad came from. He found everything I said as valuable, always believing me – and I believed me too. He didn’t have a reason not to. He knew I looked out for him. Mostly.
On that first day of school, I got up early and left my bed as soon as I heard my parents leave. We only owned one car and they left even earlier than us to get as much work done before the sun was up. Landscaping. They usually left enough money on the table for us to buy lunch, and that was the routine. They didn’t tell me explicitly, but I knew they wanted me to walk Paul to school; I also knew that the walk wasn’t far for him – just up the hill and around the corner. It was my second year in high school, and his last year in middle school. He knew how to get there. My walk was a long one. I was teaching him independence. Those were my excuses. I left Paul a note, a mission, telling him that it’s time for him to walk alone, to lock the door, and don’t mess up or he’ll be in big trouble! I made my way to school.
It was a few minutes into third period on that first day, when the dean interrupted my class as the teacher was going over the syllabus. He said I was being dismissed. Thinking I was in trouble, the room fell quiet as I stood from my desk and walked out. In the hallway, she asked me if I knew where my brother was. I said I thought he was in school. She nodded, and that was the only question she asked. We walked silently to the principles office.
When we arrived, the principle was standing next to a police officer with his thumbs around his gear belts. I noticed the gun in the holster. The handcuffs. They both turned to me with a strange look on their face. The officer asked me the same question about my brother.
“Is he not in school?” I ask.
The exact words the officer gave me didn’t matter as much as what was implied. My heart dropped when I put the pieces together.
“I’m bringing you home,” he says with a huff, “your parents are already on their way.”
I sat silently and thoughtlessly in the passenger seat, looking out the window as we drove past the streets I walked just a few hours earlier. It was less than a ten-minute drive, but it felt like an eternity.
We got home and he pulled into the driveway. Our pickup truck was haphazardly parked next to another police cruiser. The front door was open. Rushing out of the car before the officer could say a word, I ran into the open house. My mom was sitting on the couch, her head shaking in her hands as she repeated something in a low murmur. Dad was standing with an arm crossed over his chest, holding an elbow while his hand covered his mouth. An officer stood in our living room speaking to them. There was something heavy in the air.
I remained at the foot of the door, motionless and momentarily unnoticed, startled by the words I heard, “…searching, until we find him.”
“Find him?” I asked.
The house turns to me like I had just spoken a curse. From behind, heavy footsteps of the officer and his jingling belt come up the steps and into our home.
“Oh SAUL” my mother screams, leaping from her seat to rush over.
“My baby” she says as she hugs me briefly, quickly moving her hands to my shoulders, her eyes widening into mine – “where’s your brother!?” she asks.
I do not respond. I try, but I know he’s not at school. That’s the only place I can think of. I look into my mother’s red eyes with shame and fear.
“Saul.” My dad starts. I turn to face him.
“When you dropped Paul off, did you see him walk through the doors?”
My heart beats and my eyes move to the floor. I can’t bear to speak the truth. It felt like I’d die.
“…no” I say slowly, my voice cracking.
“Oh, oh god” my mother says, taking her hands from my shoulders to cover her eyes. She backs up and faces the couch, “where can he be” she asks, speaking to nobody in particular.
The officer in the living room speaks up.
“Listen, he can’t be that far… we’ll find him. Do you have any idea where he’d run off to?”
A moment passes without response, and it hits me slowly, “… the woods?” I suggest.
It took less than ten minutes of searching before we found him a little ways off one of the trails. It was a terrifying sight. Kneeled over, digging a hole with his bare hands, nobody noticed what was beside him until my mother frantically ran over to get him. She called out his name, then stopping in her tracks to let out a gut-wrenching shriek. As Paul turned around, bloody stains glowed on his light blue t-shirt as we recognized the wrecked brown corpse of one of the neighborhoods pitbulls. I stopped moving as soon as I noticed it.
“Mom!” Paul yelled.
I felt nothing but fear as I tried racking my mind for answers. For that moment, nobody knew what to think.
He quickly explained himself – that he was walking to school and watched a car hit the dog and just proceeded to drive off. Running to the dog, he watched it suffer and die in his arms. He wanted to bury it. We were relieved, but still didn’t know what to think.
When the officers asked about the car, he said he couldn’t remember anything other than that it was a white pickup truck. They said they’ll do what they can.
It wasn’t until we got home that our parents found the note I left for Paul about walking to school alone. I got chewed out that day, and I walked him to school every day until the school year ended. Things were still pretty normal then; he would tell me about his favorite stories from English class. I loved hearing them. I suggested he start writing down his favorite quotes — to remember them better.
Nobody brought up the event after the fact, but every time I saw that baby blue t-shirt, I swear I could still see the dark stains on it. Glowing. I don’t know how they cleaned it – or why they did – but that shirt to me is where it started.
When the school year ended, the summer came, and Paul suggested we go to the woods. I agreed but couldn’t help thinking back to that day last year. I didn’t bring it up, but maybe I should have. By this time, he had a mini weapons collection of pocket-knives and slingshots. I had gotten into bird watching and brought my binoculars. We were sitting by the reservoir; my binoculars were strapped around my neck and Paul was carving his name into a tree. Over and past the water, a large bird swoops down and perches atop a dead tree. Bringing my binoculars to my eyes, adjusting the focus and homing in on the tree, I watch a falcon as it scans the area. Paul makes a remark about scavenging for rocks, and I casually acknowledge it, trying not to lose my focus. I hear him walking away.
The falcon falls and soars into the sky. In awe I watch, losing him and bringing my binoculars back down. I look around for Paul and notice he’s not anywhere close by. From the trees above, a whistling chirping draws my attention. A common grackle, a small bird with an iridescent neck, yellow eyes, and a black tail. It’s close, but I turn around and bring my binoculars up to see it anyways – it’s a favorite of mine, a New-England classic. The grackle darts its head, puffs its chest and lets out another whistling chirp. Before I could muster a thought of appreciation, it smacks out of focus and falls off the branch – I snap my neck from the binoculars and watch it fall to the ground, twitching and twitching on the dirt. I’m shocked to hear Paul’s voice from the trees edge exclaiming “I got it! I got it!”
“PAUL” I shout to him, standing in fury as I ask him why the HELL he would do that.
He looks at me with confusion, asking me innocently, “well, don’t you want to see whats inside it?”
My stomach turns at the thought. I’m furious and shocked, unable to say a thing in my thoughtless stare, watching as he slips his slingshot into his pocket.
“Well? Dont’cha?”
I told him we were going home, and he looked disappointed. At the time I didn’t know what to tell our parents. Or if I was going to tell them. He asked if I was watching the bird, and if I thought it was a good shot. Truthfully, it was a good shot. And that thought scared me. I walked home silently, my mind racing as he skipped behind me, unable to process if I was overreacting or if he was completely insensitive. I shut myself in my room that night, and when my parents asked if everything was alright, I told them what happened.
The day after, they confiscated his weapons and said he couldn’t get them back until next year. I’m sure that blue t-shirt had been leaking in their mind like how it was in mine. I couldn’t look at him the same after, but he reacted even worse. He started arguments and would frequently run out of the house when he was told to go to his room. It got so bad, so quickly, that a few weeks into summer, they sent him to a camp. It was basically a summer boarding school. When the summer had ended and it was time to get ready for high school, he came back like a stranger in a haze.
He wouldn’t respond to anyone with anything more than a few words. He refused to go shopping for school supplies and would stay up real late into the night. Since his room was next to mine, I would be falling asleep and hear through the wall what sounded like scratching and flicking. Turns out, he stole a kitchen knife and started carving gibberish into his desk. It was quotes from his textbooks, Shakespeare or whatever, or verses from the bible. We didn’t find out until the first day of school — that, and much more.
That day, our parents stayed home from work to make sure we both made it into school. He was still sleeping when we were having breakfast, and so my dad went up to get him. They found him passed out on his desk, an open book and the kitchen knife lying beside his head.
That morning was a nightmare. Mom rushed upstairs, and when she got back down, she told me to get into the car. It was all just screaming from upstairs.
The car ride was long and when I asked what happened, she didn’t say anything. She was looking for something to see on the road, and I didn’t ask again.
It was second period when I heard my name called over the intercom. I was to go to the office. Remembering what happened last year, I was terrified. The teacher gave me a confused look after hearing it and wrote me a hall pass. Walking through those halls I knew there was something wrong, very wrong. I could feel it my bones.
I turned the corner the office and there were three police officers waiting for me. They told me they were taking me to the station. I wanted to ask why, so I did, but they said they couldn’t tell me until later — but I wasn’t in trouble. By this point, all I had were questions and worries, and fears, and fears. Paralyzing fears. I got into the car nearly trembling and they brought me to the station.
Walking in, I remember the smell of products from the janitor cleaning the floor. I found my mother in the back, hysterically crying and clinging onto who I thought was the police chief. Immediately, I felt a swelling in my heart and rushed to cling onto her, nearly toppling them both over as I did. She turned around and choked out the words, “my boy, my boy,” repeatedly as she squeezed me tighter and tighter. I held her up as best as I could, but I felt her falling over me, “my boy, my boy” still choking out of her. In my mind were racing questions and questions; I had to ask, I knew I had to ask, but I couldn’t. Part of me knew I wouldn’t have to. I was happy not knowing until I had to.
When my father went upstairs, he found Paul passed out and drooling over the book, Macbeth, with a black powder and rolling papers beside the kitchen knife. He was furious and shook Paul awake in his shouting. That was when my mother ran up. She saw the knife, the powder, the lazy eyes of Paul staring at my father, and she ran down to tell me to get into the car. She heard my dad screaming at Paul and a banging on the wall, she got the keys and drove me to school without even closing the door.
When she got home, the front door was still open. She said she felt it before she even knew it. Slowly she walked inside. She described the house as haunted and pale, something in the air heavier than lead and even more toxic. There was only one sound echoing between the passing cars from outside and her slow footsteps up the stairs – giggling, a low and distant giggling that covered the sound of our creaking staircase. When she made it up the stairs, an odor emerged. Sulfur, and iron.
She paused at the top, unable to make the decision to go back down or to turn into Paul’s room. She closed her eyes, took a deep breath of the stench, and stepped forward just enough to peek her head around the corner of the door-frame.
What she saw sent her into hysteria. Paul was kneeling with his back to the door, sitting on his calves, his forearms drenched in inky blood and his hands smothering my fathers filleted intestines over his face, wrapping them around his neck, rubbing them against his cheek before turning around slowly with wide, red eyes and revealing his closed smile that sent needles through her pupils and nearly killed her on the spot. They made eye contact, briefly, and he turned back around as she stood unable to even scream. She could only move when he paused, sat up straight, and prepared to stand. Rushing downstairs, she dialed 911 before dropping the phone at the sound of footsteps from above, sprinting through the front door and back into the truck.
When she got into her car, the empty door frame at the front was replaced with Paul’s red figure; red from his fingers to his elbows, a crimson face paint and eyes that blended with it. She put the car in reverse, and Paul stepped forward revealing the kitchen knife from behind his back. He positioned it under his chest, pointing it into his diaphragm before falling over the staircase and onto the blade. He laid limply, and that’s how she left him.
We slept in the station that night. They didn’t tell me what happened until the next day. I could’ve gone not knowing. Over the next couple days, the police helped my mother reach out to Paul’s biological parents. Drug addicts unfit for raising a kid. They blamed my mother for what happened.
We moved from friend’s house to friend’s house, staying away from home until the date of the funeral nearly a month later. Father needed a closed casket, but they asked if we wanted Paul’s to be open. We did. We went home for the first time since that day. It was to get Paul’s suit from his first communion. Mom broke down when we got to the driveway; she asked me to go inside for the suit. It was in his closet, she said.
When I turned the key to the front door, it opened exactly as it always had. When I stepped in, it was just as I left it. There was a faint smell of cleaning products and lemon. I walked up the stairs and stood at the top, convincing myself there was nothing in that room. I face the door, twist the knob, and open it. The scent of bleach was still strong.
I made my way past his bed and past his desk, trying not to look at anything for too long. I open the closet door and Paul’s clothing falls onto me; the blue T-shirt falling to the ground. I kick it away as soon as I see it. I sort through the clothes and find his suit. Hanging it around my arm, I turn to leave. On the bookshelf above the desk, a book glows perfectly in a slice of the suns rays. Shakespeare’s MacBeth. Below it, light stains of scratched and scribbled words litter the woods surface. The largest of those etchings lay in the middle, four words, reaching to me, reading loudly in my ears:
“Blood will have blood”