Retribution (11 page)

“No,” Vickie said. “I don't think so. It's just supposed to mean what it says. What do you do to make money?” she asked. Vickie and Howard were trying to have a normal conversation. They were trying to take each other seriously, and it seemed to be working.

“I sell paper bags and plastic sacks.”

“He's got this bumper sticker on his Lincoln,” Dianne added, “that says, ‘I have sacks appeal.'” They all laughed at this. It seemed funny to them, despite the obvious fact that it wasn't.

Dianne talked about selling houses, because she had just signed the papers on a house that afternoon. She seemed to like Vickie, though she obviously wasn't accustomed to dealing with young people. “So is this your girlfriend, Gary? Are you two going steady?” Dianne asked.

Gary didn't know what to say, so Vickie answered for him. “Sure,” she said. “But that word's not really used anymore. I guess you would say that we're together.”

Before dinner started, Vickie went up to Barbara and whispered in her ear. Barbara blushed and laughed, then fastened her zipper. Gary was grateful for this woman-to-woman gesture. It seemed easy for all of them to gather here.

Howard looked self-consciously washed. He gave off an odor of aftershave and his clothes smelled like too much laundry soap. Barbara cooked chicken breasts with a sauce made from combining canned cream of mushroom soup and white wine. She wore her baby blue cardigan, though the buttons weren't properly aligned. Evidently, her grief was still beyond buttons and zippers. “I thought we should feed
you
for once,” Barbara said to Howard. His food had kept coming all through February and on into March. Every afternoon, the pizza or burgers or chicken appeared. It was hard to ignore the person who fed you. It was hard for Gary and Barbara to keep thinking poorly of him.

After they cleaned their plates, Howard and Dianne kept saying to Barbara, “You look good. You really do.”

“Nonsense,” Barbara said. “I look stricken.”

Everyone at the table denied this, even though it was true.

When they finished eating their ice cream, Barbara looked at Howard. “Will you tell us something? Will you tell us what he said just before it happened?”

Earlier that night, Howard had discovered two six-packs of William's beer in the fridge and had helped himself. “Just one or two,” he had said. After his fifth beer, he became mournful and vulnerable. “Please, let's not think about that now,” he said.

“You're making a baby out of yourself, Howard,” Dianne said. “Don't get infantile on us.”

“He didn't really say anything,” Howard said. “I wasn't looking at him at the time. I was looking down at my skis. I saw the little K2 insignia on the tips. Then he made a sort of sighing sound. I'm sorry, but I don't think I could make that sound for you now. When I looked over at him, he was already gone.”

Outside it rained. Gary thought the rain was repetitive and similar to all rain that had ever fallen. Howard drank another beer or two and seemed to forget everyone else and wept. To his relief, Gary was able to pity him without disliking him. Just before Howard and Dianne walked out the door, Howard held on to the door frame and said, “I'm sorry. I'm sorry.”

Barbara said, “It's okay, Howard,” and she seemed to mean it.

*   *   *

In March the world froze again. The air turned chalky and cruel, though the sun shone, so that the cold was bright and electric, like the inside of a freezer, everything stubbled and crystallized. Barbara walked through the house with intent now, her robe closed tightly around her. She went back to her job as a speech therapist, where she taught kids with impediments how to speak—how to be a part of a community of language and sound. Howard and Dianne came to dinner once or twice a week. Howard was quiet and more contemplative than he had ever been. Barbara didn't allow him to drink in her house now. That was the rule, and Howard obeyed it.

One afternoon, when Gary and Vickie were on Gary's bed “trying things out”—this was what Vickie called it—Vickie discovered the balloon beneath his bed. They had been “trying things out” for a while now, though this time they had gone the furthest. Vickie sat astride him and put Gary's hands on her breasts. “Kiss them,” she said. Vickie was very unafraid to say things. “Kiss them worshipfully.” Gary didn't know what a worshipful kiss was, but she seemed to like his kisses anyway. She opened her mouth and made the sounds of pleasure Gary recognized from movies he had seen. He tasted a mix of salt and perfumed soap as he kissed her. “Relax,” she said. “The whole world does this.” Nonetheless, Gary tried not to think of the whole world. She was doing something pleasant to him with her hands. Then they sort of bounced around, until Gary wasn't sure what was happening and lost courage. Vickie wasn't worried. The first time doing anything was stranger than you thought it would be, she said. “We'll get it. It's like other things: It takes practice.”

The balloon sat in the middle of his bedroom floor, having been jostled from its place beneath Gary's bed. It had lost air. Without asking, Vickie began tapping the balloon with her hands, and Gary thought how easy it was for her to be in the world without having to know certain things that he knew. He knew what that balloon was. She didn't. She tapped it until, finally, it evaded her and fell to the floor. “I feel like stepping on it,” Vickie said. “Can I step on it?” Gary nodded his head. Gary said yes. It was not a huge event, but it did seem like a necessary one.

One nagging thing remained: a cardboard box full of William's shrunken laundry. Barbara had given his other things away—shoes, boots, coats—but these things were ruined, and she couldn't give ruined things away, she said. In the mornings, Gary saw the clothes in the hallway, sitting in a pool of sunlight. What these clothes needed was to be thrown away. But neither Barbara nor Gary could do that to them.

Gary decided that he would try to give them away himself. The Salvation Army was downtown, and Vickie offered to drive him there. She was only fifteen, as was Gary, but edging up against the law excited her. She drove as she did other things, with an easy, adult intuition, one hand on the wheel while she tuned the radio into a country station. A man with a sad, dark pit for a voice sang, “Hold me while you love me, baby. Love me while you hold me.” Barbara was at the movies with a girlfriend that afternoon and Gary had taken the car keys from the top of her dresser. Outside, yellow sunlight pressed down on the white mountains and the icy roadsides. Vickie drove too fast on the interstate, reaching almost ninety-five in Barbara's apple green Buick. “She goes,” Vickie said. “She really goes.” She took pleasure in this, while Gary worried. He was afraid of being caught. He was afraid—though he couldn't say why—for the clothes.

Vickie's parking skills were poor. The huge green car slanted at thirty degrees from the curb. They had dented the car in front of them. They were leaving marks behind. “Oh God. Oh God,” Gary said.

“Shush up,” Vickie said. “Nobody saw us.” Indeed, nobody had.

At the counter where people handed clothing in, the homeless loitered in their knit hats and layered sweaters and coats. They drank coffee out of Styrofoam cups and Big Gulps from the 7-Eleven down the road. Homelessness, Gary thought, was a look that smeared itself onto you. He wanted to believe that all these people needed was a good bath. He wanted suffering to be simpler than it was.

“We can't take these,” the man at the counter said. He had a carbuncular nose shot through with burst vessels. “People think that we'll take anything they want to give us. That's just not true.” Gary sympathized with this man: Receiving charity all day must make you grumpy. But he also remembered the robber—the urgent need of the robber to take. What Gary felt now was a ferocious need to give. Had he had a gun, he would have made this man take his father's clothes. He would have said, Take them or die, motherfucker.

Instead, Vickie and Gary placed the box on a nearby corner and sat at a Wendy's across the street, drinking coffee and smoking and watching the box to see what the world would do to it. The plastic caps of their paper coffee cups said,
CAUTION: CONTENTS MAY BE EXTREMELY HOT
. Even coffee cups told you to be afraid. On one flap of the box, Vickie had written in ballpoint pen, “These clothes are for you. Please take.” Gary thought of those strange words: How odd for a box to pretend to say something like that.

For a long time, nothing happened. People walked around the box. Finally a teenage boy dressed in army fatigues rummaged through it and took a shirt and some pants. He seemed to have friends, who came after him and rummaged, too. The box attracted a circle of young people. Gary felt that some distant desire—not quite his own—had been satisfied now. He felt the world expand a little. Vickie said, “See? Sometimes things just take care of themselves.”

They drove away in the green Buick that afternoon, leaving no note on the dented car in front of them. They had done well. They had left behind exactly what they had needed to leave behind. “Ha!” Vickie said, accelerating past a green light, the wheels of the Buick squealing, and the force of the engine pulling Gary back in his seat as the huge car lurched forward.

V
ISIONS

It was Halloween and I was about to lose my fourth job that fall, this one as the pool man at the YMCA in Salt Lake City, when a little girl, the first one to jump in after the five
P.M
. cleaning, came out screaming and seeing nothing but white. She wore a blue one-piece suit with cartoon figures of Donald Duck printed all over it. She was a little blond, blue-eyed girl, a darling little girl, I guess you'd say. I'd never been a genius at math and I'd gotten the ratios wrong. I had a drinking problem, too, and, earlier that day, had taken a quick afternoon break at My Ex-Wife's Place, a bar about a block away from the Y on State, where I'd put down a few doubles, and gotten back to the pool feeling pretty good and just in time to do the five
P.M
. cleaning. The paramedics came and pinned down the girl, who, until then, had been running helter-skelter through the arms of screaming mothers. They stuck a needle in her and, in seconds, she lay there at peace, her eyes opened in this glassy stare while the medics waved their hands in front of her. “How many fingers? How many fingers?”

I kept saying, “Three … three fingers.” But she didn't say anything.

“Goddamn you, Mitchell!” Lutz, my boss, said. He'd taken me into his office and was throwing one of those round lifesaver doughnuts into the blue tile wall. Throwing and throwing it. A paper mobile of smiling skeletons—Halloween decorations—hung from the ceiling. “It's our asses, you know.”

Outside the office, the little girl's mother beat at the glass window—the kind with wire mesh run through it—and screamed,
“Bastard! Bastard!”
with her eyes pushed up to the window, looking at me through the little wires. I said, “Tell her I'm sorry. Will you tell her I'm sorry?”

Lutz said, “You are sorry, Mitchell,” though, of course, he'd meant a different kind of sorry.

*   *   *

When I got home, my boys were beating the little white things out of an old beanbag chair, and my wife smelled of fish from the tuna casserole cooking in the oven. I turned the oven light on and looked through the little window at the casserole. It was bubbling on top. I got the dishes out and began setting the table, first the plates and napkins, then the silverware. I hoped doing a few simple tasks would save me.

I'd always thought of blindness as being in the dark. But this little girl saw a light that she couldn't look into. It was a temporary condition, something the chemicals had done to her, though I didn't know that then. I imagined her spending the rest of her life in a universe of scorching light. I imagined how the world would flay her every time she opened her eyes.

My wife said, “The school counselor called about Jordan today. He bit another boy on the face and the boy bled. The counselor says that Jordan is angry about something. The counselor wants to know if everything's all right at home. The counselor asked, ‘Is everything all right with you folks at home?'” She was shaking a metal serving spoon at me. She must have thought I'd been drinking, the way she looked at me then. The girl with the Donald Duck suit was still screaming in my head. Then I noticed that I had a bottle of Jack in my hand and I remembered how I'd driven from the pool to the liquor store and then home. I remembered how Jack, not the whiskey but the clerk at the liquor store, whom I'd gotten to know pretty well, said, “Up to no good on Halloween, are ya?” and how I'd hated him for saying something that was truer than he knew. I lifted the bottle up between my wife and me now, just to let her know I wasn't trying to hide anything.

“Something happened,” I said.

“You're so talented,” she said. “You're so goddamn talented, Mitchell.” This was how Jean referred to my drinking—“my talent,” she called it. It was one of those words that came from her knowing me a little too well and not liking what she knew about me.

“I blinded a little girl today.” I'd had enough to drink by then to be truthful.

She said, “What?”

I explained it to her as best I could and got choked up and started saying things that didn't need to be said. “She was wearing this blue swimming suit with little pictures of Donald Duck on it, you know.”

Then my wife said what I was thinking. “That little girl,” she said. “That poor little girl.”

I looked down at the floor. The yellow linoleum seemed to teeter. I guess I was learning to what degree bad things could happen to me. On the refrigerator door was a picture my younger boy, Powell, had drawn some months ago. It said “DAD” on it. My portrait had a huge lopsided head and a body of squiggly blue lines with a pulpy gob of red crayon in the middle of my chest that was supposed to be my bleeding heart. He knew me. I saw that my little boy knew me.