Retribution (6 page)

I
CELAND

Sarah arrived in Florence late on a summer afternoon. The air smelled of fuel and spoiled food and it was so hot that the stone walls dripped and the yellow light shimmered like foil. In the streets, children ran half-naked and jumped into a large fountain, above which a Greek-looking statue of a man stood holding a trident. She walked sideways because of the weight of her bag and felt weak and tired and nearly incapable of hunting for a cheap hotel room. A man approached her—he seemed to walk out of nowhere—an Italian who spoke perfect English with a British accent. The accent impressed her—she was from North Dakota. It made her think of cooler climates, of decency and good manners and those unarmed, benevolent policemen who wore cone-shaped hats and blew shrill whistles in the streets of London.

“May I?” he asked.

“No,” Sarah said. “That's all right.”

“Please,” he said. He put his hand out. He smelled of laundered cottons, of tonics and rosemary and orange liqueur. His face was long and narrow and his eyes were dark, like polished stones.

She had fantasized about doing something irresponsible like this and now she did it. She handed him her bag with the two brass zippers that jingled like change when she walked. It was the middle of the day; if he turned out to be cruel, she would scream.

They began walking down the crowded streets and the crowds seemed to part for them. When he asked her about herself, she immediately began lying. Her lies were extravagant and alarmed her a little.

“My father was in the diplomatic corps,” she said. “We lived in many places.” She listed a lot of these places, careful not to mention White Plate, North Dakota. She did not mix any truth with her lies. Her lies were pure and dark. “But our favorite place was Iceland. We loved that country more than any other.”

“Iceland?” he said. He must have been in his mid-thirties. Still, she noticed a sudden boyishness in his face. He was curious. He wanted to know more about her. “Do you speak the language?”

“Icelandic?” she said. “Oh, yes. We lived there for years. My first boyfriend was Icelandic. I read Shakespeare in that language.” She laughed uncomfortably. He must have known these were lies. But he didn't let on. Maybe his manners were too good for that.

“Speak some Icelandic for us,” he said. They walked through narrow stone streets that smelled of urine and lemon peels. Everywhere in the city, the stone buildings were the shabby brown color of history.

Icelandic was an easy language to invent. It felt like butterflies coming off her tongue. “I said,” she said, “that Italy is a generous country.”

He took her to a beautiful hotel where the man behind the front desk seemed to love him in that loud Italian way. They gestured as if they were directing traffic and their feminine manner—emotive and silly—put her at ease. The hotel clerk was balding and pudgy and his gray mustache was as fat as a bird. He said “pretty girl” to her in a heavy Italian accent that made him seem harmless and a little stupid.

Their room number was 317. Before she entered the room with him, she decided to let this happen. The sun was muted by drawn curtains that emitted a lavender-colored light. The bed stood in the center. It was high and canopied and white and its headboard was huge and embellished with fine touches of architecture and its thick oak frame smelled like a forest.

She tried to say his name in proper Italian but could not. The consonants were soft and the vowels were fast water in her mouth. She tried and tried to say it until the pretense that she had any linguistic talent whatever was up. He must have seen her lies now. Nonetheless, she lied to him about her name, too. One last beautiful lie, she thought. She called herself Margaret, a French name that came out of her mouth like a long sheet of fabric. He said it back to her in his strange accent and she felt rare and different from herself. She felt purely imagined, as if she had entered a story.

He took her from behind, which she had not expected from someone whose manners were so refined. He gently pushed her into one of the hulking bedposts, entering her more deeply and saying her name into her ear—Margaret—and caressing her breasts and the back of her thighs. He kept saying her name as if this were another way of entering her, and she tried not to remember White Plate, North Dakota. She tried not to remember her mother laundering her father's and little brother's clothes—folding their briefs from the Valley City JCPenney into stacks as white as chemicals. She tried not to think of Eddy, her ex-boyfriend, and Eddy's father's truck, which stank of cigarettes, hide, and muddy boots. A bumper sticker on the tailgate said,
NUKE 'EM
. Another said,
I WAS MADE IN AMERICA. YOUR IMPORT CAN'T SAY THAT
. This was supposedly the voice of the Chevy truck speaking, which was weird, very weird. A year ago, as a senior at White Gate High, she had lost her virginity in that truck. She had gone down on Eddy in that truck, her knees and calves scraping against the pop-tops, gum wrappers, and the torn pages of
Sports Illustrated
littered over the mats. At first he tasted unexpectedly of corn chips, until he arrived at his moment. Then he tasted, Sarah supposed, like all men must taste, a bland, universal taste that finally taught her nothing. Weeks afterward, when she saw Eddy's father driving through the streets of White Plate, poised before the wheel, his face an older, rougher version of Eddy's, she wanted it back. Her name and number were in the boys' stalls in White Gate High. The message said,
SARAH GREENLY TRUCKS
. It's what her mother might have called “the story.” That's how that story goes, her mother might have said. I could have told you that one myself. That's the oldest story in the book. Her mother had wide hips, short curly hair like wood shavings, and blue eyes that had sunk years ago into the rough grain of her skin.

Her orgasm began in a slow fault line down the middle of her body. She felt sweeping and vast, like one of the landscape paintings she had recently seen in European museums, with blue sky disappearing at the far corner of the world and with tiny farmers—so minute, it was almost impossible to think of them—working the huge green land. Nonetheless, Sarah thought of them. She imagined the small houses where they lived, the meals they took together, their soup as black as mud and smoking, the invisible patterns on the women's dresses, the cat the color of old wood curled in the recess of a window, the smells of clay and shit in the air, the spiderwebs in the barn and the buckets of well water, and the thoughts of the farmers and the women and children, the secret thoughts that made their lives worth something. The alternative—not to imagine them at all—seemed cruel. She would not want that to happen to her life.

Afterward, sitting on the balcony, her Italian lover produced a pearl-handled knife. For an instant, she was terrified. She expected to be punished now. But he halved an orange with it and they each ate the pulp out of their halves before he put the knife away. The distance was jigsawed with rooftops and spires, and, on the far edges, the barrels and stacks of industry glimmered and infected the sky with pink. Below, in the courtyard, old men sat in the shadows of oddly shaped trees, eating tiny purple grapes from bowls and playing a game with colored checkers. They considered each move and, from time to time, fingered their gray facial hair in a slow, loving way. Some chewed on cigars, while the air around them curled with smoke. They drank out of little metal cups and looked into the blue air and then considered the contest in front of them again.

“Should I tell you about our history?” he asked her.

“I already know about it,” she said.

“It is a very violent and entertaining history,” he said.

“I know that,” she said.

“Many different families poisoning one another at supper. The dinner table was a frightening place in our Italian past.”

“No,” she said. “I don't want to hear about that.”

Then she said, “I guess you do this with other girls.” She crossed her legs, still feeling the pleasant sensation of having been entered, still feeling a residue of touch on her breasts and thighs.

“Do you really want to talk about that?” He smiled slowly. “Tell us more about Iceland.”

He was more generous than she had expected. He was going to allow her to be as flagrant and fictitious as she wanted. “The first thing you need to know is that the name is a lie,” she said. “Iceland is green as far as you can see. It is green all year long and so flat and treeless that you can see from one town to the next and, in certain places along the continent, from one coast to the next. And even though trees don't grow, wildflowers do. They are always at your feet.…” She kept talking now, hoping that she would not run out of lies before evening, hoping she could lie the time away until dinner, until sundown, lie until she would wake much later that night and leave him, still asleep in the huge white bed, to catch a night train.

“Tell us,” he said, “what it is like to be the daughter of a diplomat.”

“Oh,” she said, “lonely. It's really very lonely.” He stopped smiling then, his face registering the same blank shock that she felt at having run so quickly into even the smallest truth.

T
HE
T
ROUBLED
D
OG

Benny knew that his mother was driving too fast. They had just begun the long trip from California to Montana, where they would visit his grandparents for Thanksgiving, and Jeannie was weaving their blue Impala in and out of traffic, accelerating until the air beat against the car. Benny fastened his seat belt and looked at the faces of the other drivers. They seemed shrunken behind their windshields, shocked and worried as the Impala sped past. “Momma,” he said, “I think we're speeding.”

She was trying to light a cigarette now, but couldn't because her hands were shaking. “We got to get to Grandma's by tomorrow. You don't want to spend Thanksgiving in this car, do you?”

Bo shouted from the backseat. “You're a bad driver, Momma.”

Benny turned around to face his little brother. Bo was short for a boy of seven and had a hard time holding himself up in the seat because his feet didn't quite reach the floor. He sat crouched over Black, their family dog, feeding the animal Cheez Whiz and crackers. “Shut up, Bo,” Benny said. “Momma drives fine. And stop feeding Black. I already told you not to feed the dog
people food.
”

“Shut up yourself,” Bo said. “Momma is too a terrible driver. The dog in the dog movie is a better driver than you,” he shouted over the seat into his mother's ear. He began to talk about his favorite movie,
The Shaggy Dog,
which he owned on video and had watched countless times before their old VCR at home broke down. In the movie, a high school boy tells his mother one day that he wants to be a dog, without school, homework, and house chores, then wakes the next morning to find his wish fulfilled. “Don't you think the dog in the dog movie drives a lot better than Momma can, Benny?”

“Quiet, Bo. Momma drives fine. She drives better than the dog. So don't start with that.” Benny didn't want to talk about dogs with his little brother again. His little brother had wrong, horrible ideas about dogs.

“Let's not talk about the dog movie, hon. Quiet time now,” their mother said. Her face was in a thick twist of smoke from the cigarette she had just managed to light. “Please, Bo. No dog talk. Not today.”

As usual, Bo wasn't listening to anything that Benny and his mother said. “It's the best movie in the world, Benny. The way the dog can talk and the way the words come out of its mouth and the way it drives the car—that's my favorite part.”

“Dogs don't drive and dogs don't talk. It's a stupid movie,” Benny said.

“How do you know they can't talk? Maybe some dogs can.”

“Dogs can't talk, Bo.”

“Can so. Black can talk. Black tells me he's our—”

“Don't say it, Bo!” their mother shouted from the front seat.

Benny heard the raw anger in her voice and wished that his stupid little brother would shut up. Bo told Benny and his mother things that neither of them wanted to hear. He told them how Black talked to him and what Black said. Black said things that you would think a dog might say to a little boy. He said,
I need to pee.
He said,
Feed me, love me, hold me.
He said,
I'm scared.
But he told Bo other things that no dog would say. Sometimes he said,
I'm your father, Bo.

“Dogs do too talk,” Bo said now. “Right now, Black's talking to me. He's saying he's hungry and he wants to stop and eat. Right now, he says. He's hungry. He wants to eat, you hear?”

At the restaurant where they stopped for lunch, Benny stared out the window to where Black was tied up to the car door, howling and fighting against his leash. His mother was counting the cash she had—about fifty dollars—and Benny was trying to calculate how much they would need for gas and food on their trip. He was only eleven and wasn't sure about the cost of things, though he knew that fifty dollars wouldn't buy much. He ordered a hot dog—the cheapest item on the menu—while Bo ordered a cheeseburger with extra french fries, a side of onion rings, a chocolate shake, and an extra-large Coke. Then he ordered a New York strip and a Budweiser beer. “It's for my daddy to eat in the car,” he said.

“Is that all, sweetie?” The waitress wore her hair in a high stack, and a pin on her blouse said
BARB
.

Their mother said no steak and no beer. She even tried to say it in Bo's language, which meant she was desperate. “Daddy isn't hungry for lunch. He's already eaten too many Cheez Whiz crackers.”

Bo pulled a snub-nosed revolver from his trousers, where he always kept it, and slammed it down on the table. Benny had seen his little brother practice behavior like this at home in the bathroom mirror. He had picked it up from TV. “Daddy is too hungry,” he said. He was whispering to make his anger seem more adult, just as men with guns sometimes did on programs like
The A Team
and
Knight Rider.