You know how to swim. Flynn doesn’t. Halfway across the Fox River, his hand slips out of yours and your younger brother is sucked away in a black rush.
A fast river will swallow a child as easily as a child may swallow water. The Ph.D.—who is some sort of uncle—raised you and Flynn up from little, but for all practical purposes, you were Flynn’s father and mother both. You shared a bedroll and you shared meals. When there was not enough, you gave Flynn what was on your plate and made do with hot tea.
After the Ph.D. beat him, you would tell Flynn stories to make him stop crying. You told him about all the money you’d both have when you were older, described the mansion you would own on Lake Michigan, the Rolls-Royce you would gallivant around in. You told him how every day would be like Christmas. It is mind-boggling to think a boy you loved and saw every day—whose hair you combed and shoes you tied—could be taken away like that. Could just be lost. You meet up with the Ph.D. at a juke joint in Peru, Indiana, called the Hully Gully.
“He is better off than the likes of us, lad!” the Ph.D. tells you. “He is having fried eggs in the morning and fried chicken at night in the Barnavelt orphanage!
He accepts the loss of Flynn with his typical equanimity, assuring you that the current will have brushed him back in to shore, where he was undoubtedly snapped up and hauled to the reformatory.
“A cute little dickens like him will be adopted in the blink of an eye. It is just a matter of time before a couple of Huckleberries open their homes to him… and their wallets!” Nothing is said of Soapy and nothing is heard of him again, not on this side of the prison walls, and not on the other. In the years to come, though, the Ph.D. will tell you—usually after a few drinks—that a friend saw your little brother in a tailored suit, walking into a private school in Chicago, hand in hand with a busty nanny in her teens. “I heard when she hugged Flynn goodbye, there was a moment it seemed like he might smother in those titties of hers! The sly rascal! She is tucking him in at night now but it will be the other way around soon enough!” The Ph.D. can no more hold in a lie than a person can hold in a sneeze, but it has been a long time since he could fool you. He couldn’t put one over on you if his life depended on it. Flynn isn't waking up in a four-poster bed somewhere. He's in the bed of the Fox River and he's never leaving it. 2