Retribution (15 page)

“No,” I said. “I can't help you. I don't know much about him. I mean, I don't understand him. Not like that.”

“Of course you don't,” she said.

“I'm sorry,” I said.

Then she looked at me again and said something that I would remember her saying a long time after Beaty stopped seeing my father. “Silly, kid. You don't have to be sorry for him.”

*   *   *

We found my father on the porch of the main lodge, smoking and drinking an Irish coffee in the snowfall, his booted feet crossed and his legs stretched out in front of him. He blew a mouthful of smoke into the air. “Is everyone all right?”

“Thanks for skiing with us for once,” Beaty said. She was trying to hide her anger behind a little humor, but it wasn't working. “Would you at least like to say you're sorry, Bill?”

“I'm sorry,” he said. “I thought you two were—”

“Of course you did,” she said, stepping out of her skis. She sat down across from him at the table, lighted a cigarette, and gave him a very unkind look.

When I began to take my skis off, he said, “Hold on, kid. We've got one more run.” Then he turned to Beaty and said, “Hey, I am sorry.”

“Tell me more,” she said.

He spoke to her in a very soft voice now. “We're going out to dinner tonight, aren't we? Aren't I taking you out? Aren't we going to have a Christmas party, just the two of us?”

“Sure,” she said, “and that makes everything okay?”

“Yes,” he said. “I think it does.” She started to laugh then, and so did he. I guessed they had some sort of personal joke between them.

“Your father's full of shit, Malcolm,” Beaty said then, still laughing, still thinking it was all a joke.

But my father did not laugh with her now. He put his drink down and uncrossed his legs. His face had gone hard and he looked at her with a seriousness and coldness that shocked me. “Don't talk about me like that in front of my son, Beaty.”

Beaty stopped laughing and looked down at her hands. She had taken her gloves off and I could see that her fingers were trembling a little. A waiter in an orange ski suit began to approach us, then thought better of it and turned away. “It's okay,” I said. “I don't mind.”

“But I do,” my father said. “I mind plenty.”

“It was just a joke,” Beaty said.

Then my father turned to me and, as if Beaty weren't there at all, said, “One more run, kid?”

I looked at my watch. “It'll be close,” I said. In fact, we had more than enough time. But for some reason, I did not want to leave things as they now stood. I wanted my father to say at least one kind word to Beaty, though he was not even looking in her direction now.

“We'll make it a quick one,” he said, already getting into his skis and going on about how perfect the snow was, how no other snow on earth was this perfect, how this snow was, as far as he was concerned, a goddamn Christmas miracle.

“I'll wait for you down here,” Beaty said.

But my father was already sidestepping for the lift. I wanted to say something to her. “It really didn't bother me,” I said.

But that didn't do much. She tried to smile a little. “It's not a big deal,” she said. “Get on now. He's leaving you behind.”

And because I didn't want to be left behind, I hurried off in his direction.

*   *   *

From the lift, we could see the weather begin to clear and the pillowy haze thin and curl back and uncover the mountain. Here and there, gnat-size skiers struggled to make their descent. My father took a mini-bottle out of his coat, then uncapped it, took a sip, and passed it to me. “A swig, kiddo.”

“If Mom smells that on my breath,” I said, “this might be the last time we ski together.”

“Who says she's going to smell it?”

“Who says she's not?” I said, because he never seemed to think of that possibility. He always just did a thing and maybe thought about it later.

He put the bottle away. “You're looking better on skis. But you're still afraid of the mountain.”

“I'm not afraid of the mountain,” I said. “It's just hard to ski in cruddy weather.”

“You're sounding like Beaty.”

“I'm not Beaty,” I said. Then I surprised myself and said, “You don't love Beaty, do you?”

He laughed out loud. “Now you really do sound like Beaty.” I saw that he wasn't going to give me an answer and I felt the awkward power of having silenced my father. He put his arm around me and pulled me into him until I smelled the coffee and liquor on his breath. “You're a better person than I am, Malcolm.”

“Why do you always do the same thing with women?” I said.

He sat back on his side of the chair then and started rolling another cigarette. “I think I feel a little heavy weather coming from you, Malcolm.”

“It's not heavy weather,” I said. “I'd just like to know.”

He laughed again, though it was a tired and empty-sounding laughter. “I'd like to know, too,” he said. Then he lit his cigarette and smiled at me as if trying to show me that he could still smile. “What am I supposed to say? I'm not proud of myself. I get tired of people. I just do.” Then he paused. “There are some things a person can't help.”

“You got tired of my mother?” I asked.

“That's ancient history, isn't it, Malcolm?”

“I guess,” I said.

“Good,” he said, as if we had solved something. “It's my problem and I've always had to live with it, even though I don't like living with it. You understand?”

“Sure,” I said, though I didn't understand. For a minute, we sat without talking and just looked up the mountain as the clouds continued to clear and expose the unbroken white of the slopes. We could make out the tiny lift house in the distance now, its Plexiglas front shimmering in a brightness that hurt to look at. As we approached the top, the wind picked up to a dull roar, and I wanted to tell him something. I wanted to tell my father that Beaty was right about him, that he was full of shit, and I shouted it out then as we were putting our skis up and getting ready to dismount. But he hadn't heard me, or chose not to hear me. He just gave me one of his crazy smiles, the wind blowing back the crown of hair that spilled out of his hat. “Let's ski, goddamn it!” he shouted. And then we were doing just that.

*   *   *

My father traversed the eastern slope, a white dust rising behind him, and I followed, keeping my eyes on his red parka, until he stopped above a steep shoot about twenty feet across, unskied, and bordered on both sides by thick forest. Where the sun hit the snow, the white sparkled like a fine dust of diamonds, and I had to look away from that glare. “You first, kid,” he said. “Point your skies downhill and go. Can you do that?”

I was tired of that question and leaned forward, kicked my skis over the edge, and felt the hill take me, felt myself slipping, then finding the ground, standing upright, making one and then another turn until I picked up speed.

“Now we're in business,” my father said. I heard his poles clicking behind me and then saw him next to me, rising out of his turns. The rhythm I had then was something new, and it seemed strange and uncertain to me, but I kept it. I held my skis out in front and felt a forward momentum and power that must have been natural to him. We were skiing together now as we came out of the shoot and over the top of a treeless bowl, from where we could make out the entire northern slope, white and unmarred, as it swept down to the tiny lift houses below and the flat, plowed parking lots where the few parked cars were as small as toys.

But my legs had already begun to fatigue. “Stay with me, kid,” he said. He screamed cheerfully, and so did I, despite the fact that I was done feeling cheerful that day. Breathing hard, struggling against the strange, elongated weight of my skis, I looked over at him and saw that his shoulders were square to the hill, that his arms were tacking rhythmically at his sides, that he had already begun to break away from me. I turned wide and bumped into him. “Watch it,” he said, quickly regaining balance and speed. I turned wide again and hit him harder. “Christ!” he shouted. Our shoulders made a dull thud; our skis clattered like sticks. Before he could recover a second time, I hooked my arm around his neck and took him down with me.

*   *   *

When I stood up, I saw him laid out in the snow above me, his hands pinned beneath him and his aviator glasses and red hat resting on the ground at his shoulders. His chin was bloodied and his mouth was a red hole, from which the steam of his breath came heavily. He must have seen it in my face. “Am I hurt?” He spit, then looked down at the flecks of red in the snow.

“Just your chin,” I said.

“Is my lip still there? I can't feel it.” He found his hands and touched it.

“Don't touch it,” I said.

One of his poles was lost and we began digging for it. But his chin bled into the snow where we dug. “Christ,” he said. “I'm bleeding all over. What does it look like?”

“It's not bad.”

“What happened? What the hell did you do back there?”

I didn't answer him.

We left his pole on the mountain and I let him lean on me as we skied down. But he was shaken and fell twice more before we reached the lift house, where they gave him a handful of gauze to hold to the cut and sent us down the mountain on the ski lift. Despite the cold, his lip bled pretty good, and the blood got into his turtleneck and made him look messier and more injured than he was.

“So,” he asked me again, “what the hell did you do back there?” His eyes were glazed and, for the first time that day, he looked weak, physically drained.

“I just turned wide,” I said. “I'm sorry.”

“Why would you do something like that, Malcolm?” he asked. He had lifted the gauze to his eyes and was studying the blood that had frozen into the white cotton.

“Do what?” I said.

“You pushed me over, kid.”

“No I didn't,” I said. It felt terrible to lie to him. “I fell. It was an accident.”

“I felt your hands, Malcolm. I felt you grab me. That's not an accidental thing to do. Was it a joke? Was that it?”

I looked at my watch without seeing the time. I didn't need to see it. “Now we're really going to be late,” I said.

*   *   *

The doctor at the main lodge was a huge bronze-complected man with green eyes and a blond beard and mustache. A small Christmas tree decorated with white strips of gauze, cotton balls, bandages, and a bit of tinsel sat on the table next to the entrance. Beaty and I sat in orange plastic chairs at the edge of the room while the doctor shined a penlight into my father's pupils, then studied the cut. Both my father and I still had our ski boots on, and the room smelled of medicine and damp wool.

“Looks like you took a ski in the face,” the doctor said. “What happened?”

“My boy ran me over,” my father said. He sounded more startled than angry now. “He ran right over me.”

Beaty started to laugh a little, but I didn't say anything, and the doctor must have sensed something, because he winked at me and said, “That's ten points for the boy.”

Beaty laughed some more and looked over at me. “He feels terrible about it. Poor kid.”

My father grimaced as the doctor applied a medicated swab to his chin. “It's going to leave a pretty little scar,” the doctor said. Then he walked my father into the back room, where he was going to stitch the cut up, and Beaty and I were left alone.

Beaty had gotten out of her yellow ski suit and looked good in her jeans and street shoes and her white turtleneck. She smiled at me and said, “What you looking at, Malcolm?” I looked away from her and she said, “Aren't you the shy one?”

“I'm sorry,” I said.

“For what?”

“I don't know,” I said.

“He'll survive,” she said. “You don't have to worry about him.”

“He's not hurt badly,” I said.

“Oh,” she said, “he's hurt badly enough. He'll feel sorry for himself tonight and want all the sympathy he can get.” Then she thought of something else. “Your father and I are going out to dinner tonight,” she said. “He's taking us to the Hotel Utah, to that restaurant on the forty-fifth floor. He reserved a window table for us. We'll have a view of the city lights.” I thought that was a sad thing to do on Christmas Eve, but she seemed happy about it. “I like views. I like city lights. Your father is better than you think. He knows how to do nice things for women.” She smiled, and I understood that she had thought of something then that she couldn't tell me.

“I've got an idea for you,” she said. “I think you and I are in the same position, Malcolm.” I didn't say anything to her, but I noticed that her hand was in my hair, stroking me, and had been there for some time without me thinking about it, and I sat there now, feeling the warmth of her touch and wanting to lie back and maybe sleep a little. “You know how we're the same?”

“No,” I said.

“I don't think we're as guilty for the bad things we do. I think we're only a little guilty. I think, to tell you the truth, that we're mostly innocent. I'm not saying that you ran him over on purpose, kiddo. I'm just saying that if you did, I think it was a fair thing to do. He deserves to get a little bit of what he gives. That's all.”

I leaned into her, closed my eyes, and let her hold me then. “That's okay,” I said. I felt like a small kid again, as if I were seven or eight and everything would be done for me. “It was an accident. I slipped.”

*   *   *

Ten minutes later, I was on the pay phone down the hall, trying to find a way to tell my mother that I was going to be more than a little bit late.

“Where the hell are you?” she asked. My mother was the sort of woman who rarely used words like that.