Retribution by John Fulton Page A

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    He found Bo in another room. Bo was looking at a scream through the crack in a curtain. The scream sounded like the noise an animal would make. Benny looked through the crack now over his little brother’s shoulder. He saw a small family—a man and a woman holding a boy’s hands. The boy was lying on his back. Benny couldn’t make much of him out. The scream died. Then the boy kicked his legs and it began again. The doctor was pulling a red thread up and down over the boy’s face. He seemed happy. “All done,” he said. “We’re all done.”
    The woman and man kept holding the boy. They said, “Everything’s going to be okay.”
    â€œAre those two yours?” the doctor asked, pointing at Benny and Bo.
    The man and the woman looked up at them. They were young and pleasant-looking. “No. We don’t know them.”
    â€œOut of here, boys,” the doctor said. “Scat.”
    Benny backed off, but Bo didn’t. Bo swung the curtain wide open, unhitched his gun, and bandied it in the doctor’s face. The man and the woman fell back and the boy sat up—a little boy, smaller even than Bo. He was naked above the waist, and Benny saw the delicate bones below his neck. His eyes were groggy, tired of so much pain. “Don’t,” Benny said.
    But Bo’s face was a hard, furious mask. He cocked the revolver. “Hey!” he shouted at the boy. “You’re dead!”
    The ring of the blanks shut off the sound of pain in the hospital. The fluorescent tubes buzzed in their sockets and a curl of smoke drifted upward from the snub-nosed barrel of Bo’s gun. “It’s a silly toy gun,” a man’s voice said. When the hospital learned that, the pain came alive again and Bo flung his gun away and put his hands in the air.
    â€œStupid gun,” Bo shouted. A large man clothed in white picked Bo up from his middle and carried him away, kicking and screaming.
    When the same man returned, Benny held his hand out with the crumpled card. “It’s him,” Benny said. “It’s the man.”
    â€œWhat man?” he said.
    â€œWe’ve done some bad things,” Benny said. “My mother and brother and me.”
    â€œSure you have,” he said. He took the card from Benny, wadded it up, and threw it into a garbage bin as they walked out of the room.
    *   *   *
    That day, Benny and his little brother were driven in the back of a police car to a large house with a green front yard and a fenced-in backyard with trees and a swing set. The inside of the police car was black and had the cold smell of bullets and real guns. There was a cage between the boys in back and the policemen in front. Benny’s little brother clung to the cage, snarling, barking, showing his teeth. The men laughed and called Bo Rover. “There are some real crazies out there,” they said. “You just can’t believe what some crazies will do.” One of them turned around and looked at Benny and said, “It’s a lucky thing you and your little brother, the dog, weren’t killed back there. You know that? If I had been there,” he said, “I woulda shot both of you.”
    The house belonged to a man and his wife. They were called the Greens. If you wanted them to hear you, you had to call them Mr. and Mrs. Green. That was the rule. There were other boys in the house, too, and you had to get along with them. That was another rule. Benny wanted his little brother to behave and follow the rules, but he wouldn’t. Bo barked and growled, and Mr. Green, a thick man who smelled like a car garage and metal tools, laughed at first. He said he thought little boys were humans and should act that way. Mr. Green patted Benny on the back and called him a good boy. He said, “I know you’ve seen some bad things, Benny. But you’re a good boy.”
    The next day was