Retribution (13 page)

“You look scared,” she said now. “Don't you like it?”

“Yes,” he said. He was scared and he did like it, even if he had to force himself not to think of the good boy that he was supposed to be, the honor-role student who had known only the kind of love his mother, Crystal, had given him as a little boy when she put him to bed, asked Jesus in her prayers to forgive them, sinners both, and kissed him, once on each cheek and a third time on the forehead, kisses that had hardly prepared him for the sort of kiss he was receiving now or for the thing that Carol Green, pausing from her work down below, said to him then.

“Do you want me to take off my shirt so that you can see me?”

He didn't get around to answering her question before she pulled her T-shirt—which said,
UNCLE TED'S OIL SHOP, TEN MINUTE FULL SERVICE OIL CHANGE
, $19.95 on it—all the way off, along with her bra.

“There,” she said, taking one of his hands from his side and cupping it just so over the nipple part of her breast. “You can touch me, silly.”

This was a basic truth, about which he was only now learning. He could touch her, in fact was now touching and feeling with his right hand—the one he'd just been solving for
x
and
y
with—the heat of real-in-the-flesh breast. At the same time, he had to listen to her father—the Uncle Ted of the only oil and lube service in Madline—bang around the kitchen.
Slam
went a drawer.
Clop, clop
went Ted's heavy feet.
Slam
went another drawer, after which he—the very man who had lubed and serviced for years the Blacks' Suburban and their Chevy Malibu and Henry's own 1972 GMC Blazer—hurdled his voice, black as cast iron, right at her locked bedroom door. “What you two doing in there?” he said.

Carol took her mouth from Henry's penis. “Algebra!” she shouted back.

Henry was trembling, so afraid that he looked away from the sin they were committing and over at the algebra book, broken open to the page where Henry had just solved three quadratic equations for Carol, each computation aligned in neat columns and numbered so that Carol could learn how it was done, which she hadn't learned. She had instead looked out her bedroom window, where, on that February afternoon, a slate-colored snowstorm slanted down over the fields of mud and cow shit as far as you could see, then looked back at Henry with her eyes as green as the first day of summer and said, “How come equations are so easy for you?”

“It just comes natural.”

“Nature put those numbers in you?”

“I guess,” Henry had answered, which was true. He really had surmised that these numbers, these computations and equations, were his nature, and had not guessed otherwise until she said next, “I want to give you your birthday present now, Henry Black,” enunciating his last name—Black—as if it were a piece of fudge cake she had just closed up in her mouth, consumed, and melted down. He had never heard his name cuddled so at the bottom of a wet, female voice. Then she stood him up and performed the act that was about to change his ideas about everything.

“Stop being so afraid,” she said now, kissing and nibbling at the blade of his hipbone and doing something with her hand—a certain turn, touch motion—that he knew he'd want again and again. “Daddy's not going to do anything.”

“My mother expects me home soon,” Henry said, hearing the fear in his own voice. He didn't know how they'd gotten into this conversation about their parents, but he wanted to leave it—he wanted to leave it fast.

“We're almost there,” she said, going back to giving him his birthday present, while Henry fought off the thought of what his mother was doing for him just then a half mile down the road in her kitchen, where her hands would be covered in the buttery yellow batter of what would soon become his very favorite cake, the one he had always gotten on his birthday, what was called a Lady Baltimore cake, three layers covered in vanilla frosting and sprinkled in coconut shavings, the whole thing as white and formidable as a Victorian petticoat, a towering dessert, though one that he quickly forgot now as Carol said again, “We're almost there!” And then they were there. In the next instant, between her mouth and himself, Henry felt a whole mountain range spring up, over which he fell backward into some kind of flowery meadow of pleasure.

“You love me, don't you?” Carol said. When he opened his eyes again, Carol was wiping the corners of her mouth with her bundled-up T-shirt.

“Uh-huh,” Henry said. And he
did
love her. He felt it inside him, a pink zero-gravity sensation that fled upward from his groin to his head. That was love, and he continued to experience it until she came up and kissed him on the mouth and Henry Black tasted himself, a bland, unclean, biological taste that made him feel sad and dirty, human and ugly, that made him wish he were a cleaner, better boy, and that made him even want to flee Carol Green, who had put her bra and a fresh T-shirt on, as well as a wintergreen Cert in her mouth so that her daddy couldn't smell it. “Sex has a smell,” she said in a hushed voice.

She knew too much about all the wrong things. But it was true. Sex did have a smell, and Henry Black smelled it—perspiration and semen, along with a close, moist odor of groin and skin—somewhere in the room and it worried him and made him still sadder.

“What's wrong, Henry?” Carol asked. “Aren't you happy to turn eighteen?”

She brushed a hand through his hair, a gentle gesture that relieved him so much from the shock of first sex that he spoke honestly now. “I feel sort of dirty,” he said, “and sad, too.” He let himself fall backward over Carol's bed, spent, his hands so numb and lifeless that he couldn't seem to summon the energy to pull his pants up, and instead sat there looking at the terrible whiteness of his briefs scrunched down around his knees, so that all he could do was try once again not to think of his mother, who had bought these very briefs at the Madline Woolworth's and bleached them once a week, folded them, and put them in his top drawer, which smelled of flowers and detergent every time he opened it. No, he was not going to think about her now. He was not going to think about the absolute goodness of clean laundry, folded and shut away in his drawer.

“You think too much, Henry,” Carol said now, lying down on the bed with him. “Besides, you liked it. Your eyes got all fishy and wide. I know that look.” She cuddled up beside him and did the one thing that would stay with him even more than the memory of his first oral sex, the one thing he would remember not just for the rest of his eighteenth birthday but for the days and weeks and years after it. She pulled his pants up and—to his astonishment—gently and thoughtfully arranged his penis beneath the tight hug of his underwear, laying it down along the line of his navel as if she had known all along exactly how it best liked to lie, before lifting her hand, like a strange flower, to her nose and smelling it. “That's you,” she said, smiling at him. “Here.” She put her hand in his face now. What else could he do? He didn't want to. In fact, it was the last thing Henry Black wanted to do on the first day of his nineteenth year, the year in which he would become legally and officially available to die for his country, a fact that somehow bothered him less than what Carol Green was now holding before him. But he was tired and vulnerable, so he did it. So he smelled her hand. So he felt his innocence drain from him. So all the love his mother had given him fell finally and securely into question. Not that it was false. But it and her clean laundry and her many years of Lady Baltimore cakes, as well as Margaret Mitchell's burning fields of love and war, were all just a dream compared to the very real stink of his crotch on Carol Green's palm, which claimed him now. “That's you,” she said again, smiling, as if this fact were a beautiful thing. And maybe it was. He was trying not to cry, and he succeeded, thank God, though he would have certainly failed had she not just then put her hand down and wiped it clean on her bedsheets. For on this afternoon of his eighteenth birthday, Henry Black was not the Eagle Scout, not the good son, not the mathematician on his way from Madline to MIT, not the potential soldier for his country; he was, instead, the smell of his penis on Carol Green's palm. That's who he was. And maybe for one afternoon on a very gray day in Madline, Idaho, that wasn't such a bad thing to be. Maybe it was even the inevitable and human thing to be, which was a thought Henry would have liked to lie on his back with and look at the ceiling for an hour or so while it weighed in him. But instead, Carol said, “Happy birthday, Henry,” for no apparent reason—she was still a mystery to him—before adding one last comment that he had not expected and that left him again staring into the darkness of the unknown. “You're going to have to do me next time.” Then, proving that she could read his frightened mind or that he simply could not hide it, she said, “Don't worry. I'll show you how. It's nice.”

But he did worry, and worried even more when Carol's father knocked—in fact, it seemed more like a pounding—just as Henry was thinking how good it was to have between him and Carol and every adult he had ever known a locked door. “Dinner,” her father said. “Open up,” which was exactly what Henry did not want her to do. He needed one more minute—one more, please—to think of how he was going to face the oil and lube man, the father of the daughter who had just given him what she had given him, not to mention his own family, his father and four sisters, his mother and her towering dessert, above which he would soon sit and hide the new naked spot that Carol had shown him at the back of his soul as the candles that he would blow out smoldered, as a wish for his future formed in him, as his mother would look up at him and say, “Happy birthday, Henry dear,” without ever guessing who or what Henry had become that day. One more minute, please. But Carol Green did not even give him that. Beautiful and unafraid, she leapt from the bed and opened the door.

L
IARS

On the day before Christmas, my father called out of the blue, as was his habit, and begged my mother to let me ski with him that day. This was years ago, when I was fourteen. My father liked to see me on his own terms and on his own time, which was just one of the things my mother hated him for. The thing she most hated him for was his having left her when I was eighteen months and she was a first-time mother of twenty-two, newly arrived in Salt Lake City and lonely and living in a way she had not foreseen for herself.

She had been working with cookie dough when he called, and bits of moist flour clung to the receiver as she told him definitely not. That night, we were having relatives over, some of whom had come from as far as two states away and were staying in the Red Roof Inn downtown. I knew, by the look on her face, that he was making promises to her—crossing his heart and pledging his honor. I heard my father's voice say, “I'll have the boy home by six. No excuses.”

“Look, Bill,” she said, “we're having dinner at six and then we're going to services. He's staying at home.”

My mother looked at me from the side of her eyes. She knew I was listening. I had no other reason to sit at the kitchen table and stare out the window at the falling snow. It had been coming down in heavy sideways sheets all morning and it was hard to see anything beyond it. “You want to go, Malcolm?” she asked. The tone of her voice made it pretty clear that she hoped I would say no. Her mouth was set hard and she had a streak of white flour across her chin where she'd accidentally touched herself.

“I don't know,” I said. “Maybe.”

“Maybe,” she said back at me. “What does
maybe
mean?”

I heard my father say something, to which my mother quickly said, “You stay out of this.”

“Well,” she said, “you want to go or not?”

I said, “You don't want me to go, do you?”

My father tried to say something again, but she held the phone away from her and gagged the receiver with her fist. “It's your decision, Malcolm. He says he'll have you back by six.” We both knew that my father had a hard time keeping promises. “Let's say this,” she said. “We know we can't trust him, right? So let's make you responsible for getting home by six. Can you do that for us?”

“Okay,” I said. “I'll go.”

“By six,” she told me again. “Let's not let him ruin our Christmas.”

Then she said too loudly into the receiver, “He's going.”

After she'd hung up, she looked at me, her folded arms white with flour. “Promise me one thing, Malcolm,” she said. I shook my head. “Don't let them talk about me and don't let them talk down about us going to church.” “Them” was my father and his latest girlfriend, Beaty.

I told her I wouldn't, but she didn't seem to believe me. “Stick up for us,” she said. “Don't let him be a bully.” Then, seeing right through me, she said, “I wouldn't let myself get so excited about this afternoon's ski trip. He might not even show up. You know how he is.”

*   *   *

But he did show up. About an hour after he called, he and Beaty—her real name was Beatrice—came to pick me up in his truck. There was just enough room in the cab for me to squeeze in between them. My father drank coffee from his Duck's Unlimited travel mug and wore a pair of aviator glasses with yellow lenses and smelled like the Dutch tobacco that he and Beaty rolled their own cigarettes with. He had some tools—screwdrivers and pliers—a role of black electrician's tape, and a buck knife in a leather scabbard out on the dash. One of those pine tree air fresheners dangled from the rearview mirror, though it was old and didn't smell like anything. I accidentally stepped on Beaty, who was in her socks, when I climbed in. “Watch it, Malcolm!” she said. Beaty had her thick ski clothes on. Her face was done up and she smelled of a slightly harsh perfume—acidic flowers—and was, I remember, a more attractive woman than my mother, tall and thin, with fine features and a tan complexion, though I didn't much like her looks. I thought she was arrogant, too aware of her appearance, though I'm not sure now that I had any real reason to feel that way.