Retribution (7 page)

“If that gun's not real,” the waitress said, “it sure looks real.” Benny saw the fear beginning in the woman's large blue eyes. “It's not real, is it?” There was nothing tinny, silvery, or counterfeit about it. It was black and heavy, like a real gun. Bo had picked it up in a toy store three days ago and began looking down its barrel, aiming it, making explosive noises as he pretended to shoot the people standing in line at the cash register. “You're dead! You're dead!” he kept saying. “That's a lot of toy gun you got there, son,” the salesman had said. Their mother refused to buy it, but Bo screamed and hollered—as he did for everything he wanted these days—and finally aimed it at her face. “Buy it for me, Momma.”

“It's just a stupid toy,” Benny said now. “And you can't have the steak and the beer, Bo. We can't afford it.”

The little boy slapped the tabletop with the gun again. “Yes I can,” he said. “I can. I can.”

Benny felt tired. He didn't want to fight with his little brother today. So the waitress walked away to get their food and to get the steak and beer for their father.

After lunch, they pulled up to a gas station, where they let Black out to run a little and stretch his legs. Instead, the dog walked to the side of the station and was sick against the yellow wall. Bo had let him eat the steak too quickly. Benny's mother tried to use her credit card. But the machine kept rejecting it and the small man with the brown face and the red baseball cap with
MACK
on it said, “Sorry, ma'am. I can't take it.” She gave him cash, and Benny watched her count the remaining money—seven bucks. Even Benny knew that seven bucks was not a lot of money.

When they drove onto the highway again, the California desert opened up—a sky full of brush and burnt-out crust and earth in front of Benny and his family. Benny looked behind him, where the emptiness had just swallowed the little gas station. He wanted to see an end to the desert. But there was none.

*   *   *

When the boys woke up, they saw their mother outside feeding quarters into a single pay phone, its bright phone-color blue shining alone in the desert. The boys and Black climbed out of the car and Bo put his little finger through the bullet holes that had been shot into the metal guard around the phone. Somehow the phone had survived. A few yards behind it lay some collapsed white boards that Benny guessed were once an outhouse. A black-and-white sign, also bullet-riddled, stood before the wreckage. Bo read the largest word, sounding out the thick black bars of each letter—D-A-N-G-E-R. It was cold. Their breathing was white smoke in the air and they told their mother that they needed their coats. Still groggy, they walked to the side of the road, undid their pants, and slowly found their penises. Bo needed to go, but he couldn't. “It's too cold. It won't tinkle,” he shouted.

After peeing, Benny left his little brother and walked over to his mother, leaning into her with a large, tired embrace. Her skinny body was trembling. She was talking to his grandparents on the phone and her voice was small, like a little girl's. “It's big out here, Daddy,” she said. “I think I might be lost.”

Benny could make out some of his grandfather's words coming through the receiver above him. “Nonsense … you must know … that's ridiculous.…”

She couldn't tell him which state she was in. “I'm in the desert. That's all I know, Daddy.” His grandfather said something about road signs and his mother said yes, she could see one sign. Only one.

“Well, read me the stupid sign, Jeannie.” The old man had become irritated and began to shout and Benny could hear everything. “Go ahead and read it!”

“‘DANGER!'” she read. “‘No digging. Contaminated soil.'”

There was silence between them now.

“Damn it, Jeannie,” his grandfather finally yelled. “One more try. All you need to do this time is find the sun. Look in the sky and tell me where the stupid sun is, all right?”

Benny and his mother looked up at the sky at the same time. “There is no sun,” she said. Her body began to shake again and Benny moved away from her a little. “We're in the desert. The boys are cold and I forgot our bags at home. All they have is T-shirts and jeans. The sky's gray, Daddy. It's like metal. It doesn't tell me anything.” Jeannie dropped the receiver then and began walking toward the Impala, while Benny stood looking at the black piece of plastic dangling and spinning at the end of its metal cord. The tiny voices of his grandparents called out his mother's name. “Jeannie! Jeannie! Pick up the phone, Jeannie!”

Benny wondered if he should pick it up. But he didn't want to. Instead, he looked over the road where Bo and Black were playing a game of fetch the ball. The ball was a warm sphere of neon red and Benny found his eyes following its spastic motion as it shot into the darkening air. A storm was moving in now. The ball's irregular bounce discouraged the dog's attempts to fix on it and hunt it down. The animal turned circles, toppled sideways, barked and growled at the quick neon color. Bo raced in all directions after it, screaming,
“Fetch! Fetch!”
Cold air blew across the slate-colored landscape while Benny struggled to follow the tiny glow of the ball. Infrequently, a car shot by on the small two-lane road. “Jeannie! Jeannie!” the dangling receiver shouted. Barbed sickles of lightning began to flash in the distance when Benny finally picked the phone up. “Hello.”

“Jeannie?”

“No. It's Benny,” Benny said.

“Get your mother back on the phone this minute,” the old man said.

“She won't come.”

“Benny?” It was his grandmother's voice now. It sounded disapproving and annoyed. “Did your mother get my letter and my check?” Benny had seen the check and read his grandmother's letter, which he found on the kitchen table. The letter said that his mother should go out and clean herself up. Get her hair done, buy herself clothes and makeup and whatever else she would need to keep her husband home if he ever came back. “It is just too bad you had to marry a man like Rex at the age of seventeen,” his grandmother had written. “But we all reap what we sow. So let's just hope that Rex comes home, because you'll never find another one. Men can't be expected to love a divorced woman with two boys of her own.”

“Yes,” Benny said. “She got them.”

“Well, did she go out and fix herself up? Does your mother look pretty now?”

“Yes. She's pretty now.” But that was a lie. Benny knew that his mother had spent more than half of the check on the expensive toy gun for Bo. The rest went to buy gas and food for the trip they were taking now.

“Good,” the old woman said. “You tell her I expect her to look her best when you all come in.”

“Benny boy?” It was his grandfather again and he spoke with a sudden masculine enthusiasm. “You know where you are, don't you? You're not lost, are you?”

Benny was following the warm dot of red as it shot over the road and into a bush. The tone in the old man's voice wanted Benny to say yes. So he said, “Yes, Gramps, I know where we are.”

“That a boy! Now Benny, I'm putting you in charge, all right? It's your job to get your little brother and your mother to Grandpa and Grandma's for Thanksgiving, you hear?” The phone clicked then and a woman's voice that sounded like a computer asked Benny for money. But he didn't have any and the phone went dead in his hand. When he looked up, he couldn't find the red ball anymore and he saw that everything had gone negative in the storm colors. His little brother's white skin glowed and the dog's black color went oily and solid.

“We got to find it,” Bo said. He was on his hands and knees, digging in a bush.

“Get your little butt in this car, Bo,” Benny's mother said. Her voice sounded cruel.

“I won't leave without my ball!” She had to drag him, kicking and screaming, and throw him into the backseat.

“It's just a stupid ball,” Benny told his little brother in the car. But after driving more than an hour into the storm, Benny still felt the loneliness of the plastic toy lost back there.

*   *   *

After the storm, the clouds went pink and purple like burned flesh and the setting sun came out, throwing a violet, acidic light over the desert. Bo said, “Look! A rainbow.” Benny held on to the door handle in the front seat. He had just looked at the speedometer. It said 120 mph. They were driving up and down hills, and at the top of each hill the desert seemed to triple itself. There were almost no cars. More than ten minutes ago, they had passed a green bus driving in the opposite direction, empty except for the driver. Then a purple Cadillac with a fat blond woman at the wheel whipped by them and was gone. Then nothing again. Now, as they reached the top of the next hill, Benny saw the glimmer of a car ahead of them. Sitting beside him, his mother was a purple color in the strange light. He heard his little brother talking to the dog in the backseat. “Is Black hungry again?” he asked. “Momma, me and Black are hungry. We want something to eat.”

“We'll get something next time we stop.”

Benny felt tired and didn't want to look at the endless twilight and the burning sky. But every time he curled up and closed his eyes, one of his mother's hands reached over to caress him. It didn't feel like a caress. The hand was cold and squeezed his face and the back of his neck too hard. She seemed to be holding on to him and her grip felt panicky. “Do you think we're on the right road, Momma?” he asked. “There're not many cars.”

One side of the sky began to get dark and bruised and Bo said, “I don't want it to get dark.”

She said, “I don't want to talk, Benny. You curl up and go to sleep.”

They were getting closer to the car ahead of them now, and Bo, who had just spotted it, shouted, “A car! A car!” Jeannie slowed down as they approached. It was a small Toyota with Nevada license plates. Bo's head shot into the front seat to get a good look at the driver. A bar of rainbow hovered over the Toyota's hood. Inside the car, the light was pink, and when the man driving turned to look at them, the gentle fire of that color seemed to be making him, forging him in front of them.

“It's Daddy!” Bo shouted. Their mother stayed beside the Toyota, squinting across at its driver. “See?” Bo said. “It's him. It's Daddy.”

“The bastard,” she said. “It is him.” They drove out in front of him and Benny felt the scream and power of the Impala's engine rise into his belly in a wave of warm nausea. “It's him,” the little boy said again. Benny's mother pulled up alongside the other car again and hit the brakes, flinging Bo into the front seat. His legs kicked at the dash as the Impala careened into the small white car, hit, and swung out wide to the left. Benny held on, watching the desert and the strange squashed colors of sunset wobble in his window. “What are you doing, Momma?” The sound of the impact had been dull and hollow. The Toyota swerved on and off the shoulder until the man finally recovered the little car and now tried to outdrive them. But they easily shot in front of him and squeezed him toward the edge of the road again. “Got you, you bastard!” Jeannie yelled. In the backseat, Black began whining and barking. Benny looked back at the man's face. It was screaming something mutely at the Toyota's windshield. It was skinny and afraid and maybe had his father's colors. But it wasn't his father. “Momma!” Benny shouted. She looked furious in the purple light.

“Shut up, Benny,” she said. This time the Toyota wobbled, then shot off the shoulder into the desert, where it rolled once before halting in an orange cloud of dust.

When they got out of the Impala to meet him, he was on his knees in the dirt, looking at himself—his hands and arms. Then he looked at his hands again because they were bleeding. His gray suit pants were ripped up one of his legs to the knee and his blue blazer lay over a bush behind him. Little white cards spilled from its torn breast pocket and blew over the desert floor. When he finally stood himself up, he said, “What the…” The man's face hung loose and expressionless. He lifted his hands and showed Jeannie how they were gloved in blood. “Look what you did to me.” His voice wasn't angry. It sounded puzzled. “It hurts,” he said.

“We got you, Rex, and you're not getting away. You hear me?” Jeannie said.

“Yeah,” he said. He was looking around, stumbling, swaying. “What did you call me?” He looked back down at his hands.

Benny felt sick and started backing away from the scene. The stranger's head was bleeding into his white shirt now. The man looked ignorant and weak. Benny didn't want to see him anymore. “Momma, let's go. Let's leave him here and go. It's someone else. It's not Daddy.” The desert was big and he couldn't seem to get away from the wrecked Toyota, the man looking at his hands, the blood. He looked into the distance, where the light was coming from. But he couldn't look into it for long, because the desert was making a gory red mess of the sun as it sucked it down.

“Look at this,” Benny's mother said. She pointed at shiny pots and pans and dozens of squares of carpet in all colors and shags, spread among the bushes. She found kitchen knives, bathroom tiles, hot pads, towels and bed linen, brand-new and wrapped in plastic. She began gathering the stuff and loading it into the trunk of the Impala. “Jesus, Rex, where'd you get all this beautiful stuff?” She held a set of kitchen knives up to the man. “It's beautiful, Rex.”

“Rex?” he said. “Rex's not my name.” He tried to say his name now. “Where's my name?” he asked. He turned around in the desert. One of the small white cards blew at his feet and he pointed at it blowing away again. “There's my name.”

Benny chased it down and trapped it beneath his foot. It was black on white and he read it out slowly.
HOMES AND LIVING
. Then he read the man's name, which was not their father's. “It's not him, Momma,” Benny said.