Retribution (3 page)

She said, “I don't know. Who's your mom?”

“Marsha Larsen.”

“I don't remember the name of the lady he's with. She's pretty, though.”

I said, “She's got shoulder-length hair. It's black.”

“That's not her,” the little girl said. “This lady has short red hair.”

I remembered that Mom had gone to the hairdresser that afternoon. She'd probably had a cut and gotten her color changed. “That's her,” I said. “Is she there?”

The girl handed the phone over. “Hello.”

“I told Dad about the Mustang.”

“Who's this?” the woman asked.

“Michael,” I said. “It's Michael.” A key turned in the front door then and Mom walked in. She was with a man—probably Jim—and I said, “I'm sorry,” to the woman on the phone and hung up.

*   *   *

The snow was really coming down now. It covered the streets and sidewalks, and the houses in our neighborhood were quiet, shut up inside the glow of their windows. On the walk from our place to Winnie's, Mom was edgy, excited. She kept slipping in her little pointy shoes and Jim had to hold her up. “Why did you have to spill the beans, Mikey?”

I said, “I don't want to talk about it in front of him.”

She fell, and Jim picked her up. “Ouch! Ouch!” she said. Then she looked at me. “I don't think you're acting very grateful.”

When we got to Winnie's, Mom said, “Ha! We beat him. We got here first.” We were standing on the front porch in a halo of snowy light when Winnie answered the door. She was a skinny woman with curly dark hair and high cheekbones. “Bill's coming for the Mustang,” Mom said.

Winnie Howell flipped on the yellow garage light, and the waxy red paint of the Mustang glowed as our nervous shapes glinted and slid across it. It was kind of miraculous how the car was still there, untouched, recoverable. “This
is
a beautiful car,” Jim said. He was sort of caressing it. Jim had that newscaster look, like the orthodontist—aging, slim, and knowledgeable. He probably kept a decent bank account, too. Mom's new hairstyle was weird, cut close to her head, feathery and mulchy, so that her face seemed larger, crisp with makeup. She had been spending all sorts of money—for clothes, jewelry, hairstyles—on the strength of what the Mustang would bring in. Every time I glanced at her that night, I was shocked by how odd and different she looked, and I turned away again.

Mom slid into the driver's seat and started the car. Winnie said, “I don't want to be here when he arrives.” She was shivering in the yellow light. At the mouth of the garage, the storm made a sucking sound.

“Get in,” Mom said. “We'll all go out for a drink or something.”

Mom craned into the windshield as she drove. “I can't see anything,” she said. Normally, she wouldn't have driven in this weather, but she was determined to get the car out of the neighborhood, out of Dad's reach.

“Drop me off at home, please,” I said. “I don't want to go for a drink.”

“Party pooper.” Mom's voice sounded mean. She slowed down and came to a stop in front of our home.

“Sarah's been calling,” I said. “She says someone she owes money to is going to hurt her.”

“She's just crying wolf,” Mom said. Then her tone changed. She was trying to be nice, I guess. “Mikey got his braces on today. Show Jim and Winnie your braces, Mikey. Give us a smile.” Jim and Winnie looked at me. Mom's face was a weird green color from the glow of the dash. I didn't want to show these strangers my teeth. But I did.

“Very handsome,” Winnie Howell said in this fake voice.

*   *   *

On New Year's Day, three days after I'd had my jaw corrected, Dad showed up on the doorstep. Mom was at work. Sarah had already taken off, and I wore this huge bit in my mouth, with a space in it for a straw. My mouth would be wired shut for more than two weeks. I ate mostly thin milk shakes and soup and drank a lot of fruit juices, even though it hurt to suck on a straw. I couldn't talk. I carried around a pad and pen and I tried to communicate with these things. The world seemed extremely loud to me, full of noise and words, as if I had become some kind of silent focus where all this sound gathered and blared. It was strange to be home alone and hear the phone ring. Sometimes I answered it and heard the voice on the other end say, “Hello … hello. Is anybody there?” At these times, my mouth felt large and muzzled. “Helloooooo,” the caller would say. I felt pushed away from them in this insulated world of silence and injury. Eventually they or I hung up.

I told myself that this would make a difference, that this would change something. I would have a straight, corrected mouth forever after this.

“Jesus, kid!” Dad said. “What happened to you?” I wrote the explanation out and showed the pad to him. He said, “Oh, braces. Good for you. Good for you.” He was grief-stricken and wasn't worried about money or even about his car yet. He had lost his license for several months because of his poor driving record and wouldn't start wanting his car back until he knew that he couldn't have Mom. Then he wanted his car.

We took a cab to a diner called Lambs. Little woolly lambs stood on the front of the menus, cute and vulnerable-looking, despite the fact that they were also featured inside the menu as a dish. The waitress was very cautious—people pitied me, thought I was fragile—and set the milk shake in front of me as if it were an explosive. I waited for it to melt a little, thin down.

Dad said, “I'm trying to change. Tell your mother that, will you? I'm feeling under control. Look at me, Mikey. I look good, don't I?” He wore freshly laundered clothes and so much cologne that the abrasive scent of it hovered in the air—all things I was supposed to tell and tried to tell Mom later. But his face was swollen and his hands shook as he lifted his orange juice. “She's seeing other men, isn't she?”

I wrote “I'm sorry” on my pad and showed it to him.

“So she is seeing other men?”

I showed him the words on the pad again.

“Tell her that I'm going to that group—AA, right?—and that I sit there and say, ‘My name's Bill and I'm an alcoholic.' Will you remember to tell her that?”

I wrote “Sure, Dad” and showed him the pad.

“Good kid,” he said. He laughed. “How are you going to tell her anything? Look at you. You can't say two words.” Then, right out of nowhere, he said, “I love you, kid,” and I looked at my pad and pen and didn't know what to do with them.

When he reached out to touch my cheek, I blocked his hand with mine and wrote out another message: “Not my face, Dad. It hurts.”

“Oh God, kid,” he said, taking my shoulders and squeezing them so hard that I felt the trembling from his swollen hands enter me. “We'll be okay, won't we?”

*   *   *

I stood in front of my house, watching Mom and Winnie and Jim turn the corner in the Mustang, and thanked God I wouldn't have to sit around while they had their stupid drinks and asked me to smile for them.

When I walked in the front door, the phone was ringing. I knew it couldn't be Dad, not yet. He would be driving across the city in a cab. Ben had gone down to the basement, and, from the kitchen, I could hear him burrowing into some boxes. He was somewhere beneath me. I could hear the small, struggling sounds he made, creepy sounds, and I moved into the living room. Ben would disappear in the basement all night sometimes, not emerging until the next day. He liked the closeness of it, the dark down there.

It was Sarah on the phone. “Look,” she said, “these people who want to hurt me have knives, Mikey. They may not kill me, but they're going to cut me.”

I felt my face heat up. I hated her for doing this to me. “Don't give me that shit, Sarah. We all know what you're up to.”

“Jesus, Mikey,” she said. Her voice had become defensive and vulnerable. “What's your problem?”

I hung up the phone and started to put my hat and coat back on. I thought maybe Dad would be at Winnie's by now. I didn't want to talk to him and I didn't want him to see me, but I wanted to see him. The phone began ringing again. I closed the door and locked it. Outside, snow flurried in the bright circles of streetlamps. Trees bent sideways, cloaked in white. I put my gloved hands to my mouth because it hurt from too much goddamn talking.

At Winnie's, I stood behind some bushes across the street and waited. I felt the snow fall and gather on my lashes and hat and become heavy on my coat. The roads and walks and lawns lay buried and mute and the air was a chilly lunar color from all the white. The shapes of parked cars stood crystallized beneath snowdrifts. Everything had been softened, erased. Dad's cab pulled up and he stumbled out of it and ran to the garage door. A huge orange coat covered him up, its bright color burning in the white air. His footprints curved awkwardly through the snow. He was drunk, fucked up. He looked into the little windows of the garage, then looked away. “Oh God,” he said. He pounded on the garage door.

I stayed behind the bushes. I thought of Tasha, Dr. Ellis's blond assistant, and how we could disappear together, live in abandoned school buildings and beneath docks in California, the way Sarah had disappeared with Marcus. Or maybe we would live in a house, the way people should live. A house on a stupid green hill somewhere. And I would learn her language, the only language we would speak together.

I had screamed a lot—I was conscious and could hear the bones in my face crack—when they broke my jaw. I screamed even though I felt nothing. I screamed at the distant snapping of my own bones. Dr. Ellis grimaced from the effort—my jaw hadn't broken easily. “We're going to make you a handsome set of teeth,” he said. My face floated out into the room, rising to the ceiling because of all the dope they'd given me. Tasha stood behind Dr. Ellis, her blue eyes clear and glowing, beautiful, so beautiful that I knew I could never have her. I tried to picture it anyway—the green hill, the house in which we sat at our table in a roomful of yellow light, speaking to each other in her language. I spoke it perfectly, a stream of delicate foreign words coming from me as I said things to her, graceful and true things, that I could not imagine saying in any language that I understood.

C
LEAN
A
WAY

It happened in a steak house somewhere near the Idaho-Nevada state line. I was with Ruby, my second girlfriend after my third divorce, on a long weekend trip to Bayview, Idaho, a little mountain town with a view of a lake, where we were going to try to save our relationship of five months. But we got caught in a blizzard and had to turn around.

That night we stayed in a little town with an Indian name I no longer remember. The motel was called the Apache. It had a TV, but the picture was bad. So we got ourselves a bottle of scotch and some ice and I told her I wanted it to work for us. I told her I was tired of February—of the cold, short days. I was tired of being lonely in Boise, where I managed a Tommy Tom's barbecue restaurant—a good, steady job, I reminded her. I opened the little box and showed her how the diamond sparkled in the yellow light of the motel room and said, “Please, Ruby, please.” When that stone ignited in the palm of my hand, I felt young again, like I could afford new love. The dark outside stuck to the little window of our room, and we were reflected in its black glass. Ruby put on the ring without saying yes or no. Then we drank too much and I called her a bitch, later remembering only the anger and not the reason. We made love anyway, with the reading lamp throwing a dirty sheet of light over Ruby's face. The room stunk of Lysol and the liquor we had spilled on the carpet. I mounted her and looked away at the orange curtains. “It doesn't feel right if you do that,” she said. “Look at me, please.”

I looked at her. But Ruby kept her eyes open during sex, in a way that made me feel creepy and exposed. I asked her to close them,
please,
and she said, “I need to see you.” So I looked away again, concentrating on a wide stain over the curtains while I came. Then I rolled over and lay on my back, breathing and feeling, for a moment that didn't last long enough, less like I needed to marry Ruby or anyone. It was an open, easy feeling inside me, as if a bird were flying in the wide spaces between my penis and my head and would never land.

In the morning the liquor pressed against my eyes. My body felt heavy and filled with dirty, tired organs. My penis was soft, but capable of ten thousand more stupid, desperate erections. I was forty-one and my mother was already dead. I remembered my two boys—my only kids—living in Salt Lake City with my second wife. But the thought of them did not make me feel proud or accomplished. The newest thing in my life then was a red Camaro I had just bought. It had dark tinted windows, a hood scoop, and a spoiler on the back. But now that the car was mine, I felt cold and unhappy toward it.

That morning, Ruby gave the ring back. She said, “I'm sorry, Gordon. But we weren't sober.” She put her head in her hands and shook it. “My friends keep telling me to get out of this. They ask me if I enjoy being treated like shit.”

We were standing out by the Camaro, and after Ruby said this, there was a long, awkward silence, out of which the dead yellow desert surrounding the little town seemed to roll into the February sky and on into Idaho. I felt the need to say something. “Love is complicated, Ruby.” Ruby closed herself into the Camaro, and I sensed her, behind the dark glass, sitting in a space away from me. I didn't want to be in front of the Apache motel anymore. I got in and drove away from that place.

The way to Bayview was blocked by snow, so we decided to drive south to Reno. The silence between us was awkward. Once, I drove fast enough to scare her into speaking. “Please, Gordon. I don't like this. Slow down.” I did—a little—but I didn't mind her being scared.