Retribution (16 page)

“I hurt him,” I said. “He's getting stitches. There's going to be a scar.” I could hear the relatives conversing in the background.

She didn't seem to hear a word of what I'd just said. “We're having dinner right now and you're missing it.” Then, in a tone of exhaustion, she said, “He's going to get away with this, isn't he?”

I didn't say anything.

“I'm sorry, Malcolm,” she said. “Sometimes I just want you to hate him as much as I do.”

“Sure,” I said, feeling ashamed because I didn't and never would hate him that way.

*   *   *

Beaty was wrong about my father. He didn't seem to need anybody's sympathy that night. He sat up straight behind the wheel, turned on the radio, and held an ice pack to his chin with one hand and drove with the other. The canyon road had a dangerous black sheen in the headlights and the radio warned of icy conditions, but none of this worried him, and we drove down the mountain without incident. The sky was clear and a hard, winter color of blue, in which the stars shimmered like foil. Below us was the flickering grid of the Salt Lake City valley, with the partial disk of the moon directly above it. Beaty had fallen asleep and curled into my father's shoulder. I could hear her soft breathing beneath the sounds of the radio. My father put the ice pack down now and touched his chin.

“Does it hurt?” I asked.

“It hurts enough,” he said.

Then he said, “So what did your mom have to say?”

I looked over at my father now in the dark cab and said, “She said that she loved me but that that didn't mean she had to keep forgiving you. She said she would leave that up to me, if I wanted it.” I didn't know where I'd gotten those words, since they weren't hers.

My father handed me his lighter and leaned over toward me in the dark with a cigarette in his mouth that he couldn't light on account of Beaty sleeping on him. When I lighted it, the soft orange flame uncovered Beaty's face and she stirred a little and seemed prettier in that light than she usually seemed.

“I'm sorry,” he said. He took a long suck at his cigarette and the inside of the windshield glowed a hot orange.

“For what?” I said.

“About today. About blowing up at you. Let's just call it an accident, all right?”

“All right,” I said.

He looked at me then. Behind the charcoal of his cigarette, I could see the coarse pattern the sutures made in his chin. “I'm sorry that you're going to be late.”

“That was an accident,” I reminded him.

“I'm still sorry,” he said.

I didn't remember my father ever apologizing for something beyond his control, and I knew then that he was concerned that I love him and not hate him. He must have understood that it was my choice, that I could do either, and that my hate could injure him in a way that maybe Beaty's or my mother's or any woman's hate could not.

“You want to smoke this cigarette with me, Malcolm?” he said now.

“I don't smoke,” I told him.

“It's not just to smoke it. It'll be our peace pipe. How about it?” We had pulled out of the canyon now and were on the freeway, the road easy and flat, with lanes of reflectors stretching out for miles ahead of us, where the dark was shallow and silvery from the moon and from the city lights. He took his hand from the wheel and gave me the cigarette. It was the first time I would smoke and the first time I understood that my father would love me forever, as best as he could, anyway, which was better than he did with other people. I put the cigarette between my lips, startled because the filter was moist from his mouth—a sour, warm taste that Beaty must have taken into her own mouth whenever she kissed him. I thought of how she desired him then, desired him the way men and women desire one another—a kind of love I knew very little about except that it was dangerous, that people hurt one another and learned to hate because of it. I thought about that and I thought about how I felt safe with my father then, smoking for the first time, inhaling deeply, my eyes watering as I coughed up a lungful of burning smoke and as my father put his hand on my back and said, “Easy there, kid.”

S
TEALING

When the boys' father came to pick them up at their mother's and take them for the day, he was not driving his green Ford truck, but a red Porsche that could not have been his. “What do you think, boys?” His voice was huge with aggression and enthusiasm and with a sudden love for himself. He was wearing his monkey suit from the garage where he worked and had the smell of metal tools and the strong flammable odors of oil and gas and gin on him.

Standing out on the lawn, the boys' mother was still wearing her pink nightgown, ripped and coffee-stained on the sleeves. It blew in the wind and made her look fragile and discarded, like a candy wrapper. “What do you think you're doing? That car's not yours. Boys,” she said, “you're not going with your father today.” But the boys were already in the car, their eyes looking out at the woman through the dark glass that was made for speed. When she advanced, their father pushed her and she tumbled over the burned yellow grass, and before she could stand again, the little green house had disappeared and the man and his sons were driving on the freeway toward the mountains above the city, then in and out of the tunnels that pierced the mountains, until the buildings and streets of the city were tiny, like sutures, in the valley below.

The interior of the car had an expensive, feminine smell, a light perfume of leather and freshness. As the man drove, he talked about the car as if it were a beautiful woman who needed him to do something great, something heroic for her. “Listen to her purr, boys,” he said. “We're not going to let her down. We're going to give her all we got.”

Their mother no longer loved the man. Both boys knew that, even the smaller one, who was not yet five. “Where are we going to, Daddy?” this one asked.

“Oh no you don't,” the man said. “I'm happy! Happy!” He said the word as if hammering on it. “And I'm not going to let you sour pusses ruin my fun, you hear?”

The boys kept asking him that same question, but their father only answered them with the figures of their acceleration. “Ninety,” he said. “One hundred. One hundred and ten. One hundred and thirty-five.”

The speed pushed the boys back in their seats and pressed against their skins like a firm caress, a preparation or a warning for something painful that would soon come. The windows began to tremble and the car beneath them shook as the man held it in a turn and the mountains and the other cars fell behind them. They had passed the timberline and huge treeless lumps of snow rose above them.

“One hundred and sixty,” he said. He looked over and back at the boys now, trying to hold his speed. “One hundred and sixty-five.” His eyes were dipped inward and were a strange purple color of black. He seemed hungry. “You never went this fast before, did you? Did you?”

R
ETRIBUTION

I

In the fall, when her mother began dying, Rachel joined the yearbook committee at her Catholic high school and met her first boyfriend. His name was Rand and he was from Germany. Rand's northern complexion, blond hair, and arctic blue eyes were strange and out of place in Tucson, all red dirt and asphalt grids, big parking lots and little adobe houses. On the first meeting of the Our Lady of Lourdes Yearbook Committee, Mr. Marcosian, the U.S. history teacher and Yearbook Committee coordinator, stood up and said, “It's our job to catch the personality of this year. Okay, people. Any questions?” Rachel hated being called “people,” hated the sound of that “job,” and thought about dropping out right then. But she needed something to do in the hours after school in order to avoid too much time at her dying mother's bedside in the late afternoons. Besides, she had seen Rand, one of the boys on the layout committee, and knew she'd want to come back and look at him again.

It would take months for her mother to die. Months and months. Carol was her name, and she'd been sick for years. She'd recently given up on treatment and decided that she wanted to be at home now, surrounded by her family. Her family wasn't much—Rachel and Rachel's father, Peter. And in the afternoons, when Carol called Rachel to her bed and they talked, Rachel felt both scared and shy. Her mother's bed was huge and bloated with white comforters because she could become unbearably cold. Her father always made sure a vase on the bedside table was filled with fresh-cut flowers, so fresh that, at times, ants from the garden outside still climbed their stalks. On the wall opposite her mother was a small oil painting done by her mother's mother, a woman whom Rachel had never met because she'd died in her fifties from the same kind of cancer that was killing Rachel's mother. In the painting, a small boat sailed out to sea. “I wonder where the boat is going. I wonder what my mother was thinking when she painted that boat,” Carol said one afternoon.

“I don't,” Rachel said. This question didn't bother her because the painting was so poorly executed that it had no perspective, no illusion of distance or space, no place to go. You just saw the flatness of the canvas and the obvious fact that the boat was going nowhere, that the boat was stuck forever in a bad painting.

“I sometimes make up stories about where it's going. I sometimes imagine that I'm sailing in it, that I'm twenty years old again, and that I can take only three or four of my most valuable possessions with me to a deserted island.”

“Oh,” Rachel said, “that scenario.”

“I'd take you along,” she said, smiling. “You'd be one of the three.”

“You said possessions,” Rachel said. “I'm a person.”

“You're a difficult person,” her mother said. Then her mother looked at her with a familiar expression, which meant she had some motherly advice. “Why don't you try wearing a little lipstick sometime. You'd be really pretty with a little color.”

“I'm only fifteen,” Rachel said. “I'm too young to worry about being pretty.” She wished they weren't having this discussion. Her mother, as Rachel could remember and could still see from photographs, had been a beautiful woman before the treatment had mostly destroyed her looks. Her face had caved in; her hair had fallen out. She wore a scarf over her yellowing skull and had a woman come every Wednesday and Friday to draw eyebrows on her face and do her eyes. “Besides,” Rachel added, “the nuns at school don't allow it.”

“Nuns,” Carol said, shaking her head. “I wasn't so easily dissuaded when I was fifteen. We used to put lipstick on right after school and wipe it off just before getting home, so that our parents wouldn't know.”

“I don't care about being pretty,” Rachel said.

“You know,” her mother said, “teenagers are allowed to be a little bad sometimes, to be a little rebellious.”

“That's okay. I don't need to act like that,” Rachel said. But she became suddenly curious about her own mother then. “Did you smoke and stuff as a girl? Cigarettes, I mean. Behind the school building?”

Her mother smiled. “I don't think I should say.” Then she took a drink of water and seemed to change her mind. She was still looking at the boat in the painting. “It was the sixties when I was a girl, and all the fun was just beginning.”

“Maybe I don't want to hear this,” Rachel said.

“Well,” her mother said, “let's just say that maybe I smoked a little. Just a little. I didn't do anything dangerous.”

“You had boyfriends?” Rachel asked.

“Sure,” she said. “I had a few in my time. I was a pretty girl and very vain. No one was good enough for me. You know the type?” her mother asked. She was studying Rachel again, examining her face. “If you ever want to borrow some lipstick, Rachel, you're welcome to go into my bathroom and take some.”

“No,” Rachel said. “I don't think so.”

“It's in the second drawer down. People like pretty girls. They get away with an awful lot, you know.”

“No,” Rachel said again.

Her mother closed her eyes then for a long while in order to concentrate. It was pain, Rachel knew. It sometimes sneaked up on her and made her incapable of anything other than feeling it, fighting against it. Her mother's hand reached out of the covers and grabbed Rachel's arm, as if holding on, and Rachel, not wanting to see the inwardness, the aloneness of her mother's face, looked away and out the window, where the sunlight was broken into leafy patches by the orange trees in the backyard. She heard the roar of a Weed Eater. A bird. Someone shouting in Spanish. Her mother's grip tightened, then released. “Gone,” her mother said. “Better.” She and Rachel looked at each other as if nothing had happened. They never spoke of the cancer, of the pain. “So what three things would you take to your deserted island?” her mother asked.

Rachel thought about that question, and when not one thing occurred to her, she said, “I'm fifteen. How am I supposed to know?”

*   *   *

Rachel was on the photography staff for the yearbook and had been given the duty of following the sports teams, a task she hadn't volunteered for. At the assignments meeting, Mr. Marcosian had just looked up from the piece of paper in his hand and directly at Rachel and said, “How about you, Rachel, for sports teams?”

Matt Lieberman, a senior who had done sports for the last two years, made noises of complaint. “That's my job,” he said.

“Let Matt do it,” Rachel said.

“I'd like a girl to do it for a change,” Mr. Marcosian said.

The only girl on the photography staff, Rachel wanted to turn it down. She hated all the cruelty and prestige associated with sports, and all the big, stupid boys who did them. But she also hated to be the center of attention, and twenty other people were staring at her then. “Okay,” she said.