More Than Enough

by John Fulton

  My mother glanced over at me. “So am I,” she said.

  Jenny was looking out the back window at him. She waved and he waved back. “I love you, Jenny!” he shouted, the word love and my sister’s name half disappearing in his tired voice.

  “Stop that,” my mother said. “Stop waving at him.”

  Jenny put her head down in the backseat. “I’m closing my eyes,” she said.

  “Jesus,” my mother said, looking in her rearview mirror. My father had sat back inside his cab, which patiently stayed with us on each revolution around that quiet block.

  “He’s not going to go away,” I said.

  “I guess he’s not.” My mother seemed to have given up, and I thought we would pull over and talk to him again. Instead, she just gripped the steering wheel with both hands and turned onto P Street and headed higher up into the Avenues. The yellow cab followed. “We’re going to just go anyway,” she said.

  “Go where?” I asked.

  “To meet Curtis.”

  “With Dad? Dad’s coming to meet him, too?”

  “We’ll see,” she said.

  I turned around and looked at the cab, still following us, and wondered for a minute what might happen between my father and my mother’s lover. I wondered if there would be a fight or a shouting match. I wondered how a meeting between two men in their circumstances would look. I was worried since my father was not a physically powerful man. The only person I had ever seen him threaten was the bum with the black leather shoes, who ended up intimidating him and chasing us away. I didn’t want to think about that. So I sat down low in my seat and tried to forget everything, the way Jenny seemed able to do. The sun had just sunk below the mountains when we drove into the upper Avenues where the roads were especially wide and where the newer, really large houses had been built into the steep sides of the foothills and looked down on the city with their black glass facades. The roads up there were both numbered and named, unlike the lower Avenues, where you just got numbers and letters. Rich people like names, of course, and no doubt they got to choose what they called their streets. The road we drove on then was called Milky Way Boulevard, and the smaller roads off Milky Way Boulevard were all named after planets—Venus, Neptune, Jupiter, and so on—which was tacky as hell, though I wasn’t thinking that then. Instead, the planet names made me think about flying, about being a pilot, which was not something I thought much about anymore because I was fifteen and had poor vision and knew that I wasn’t going to be a pilot. All the same, I thought back to the time, years before while we were living in Tucson, when my father took me to what was called the Bone Yard, a vast resting ground for old U.S. Air Force jets and planes no longer airworthy. The planes had been dismantled and scavenged for parts or, as our air force guide kept saying, “cannibalized” for anything that could still be used. It was a sad and scary place—miles and miles of these aircraft, stripped of their fuselages, cockpits, wings, and wing flaps so that only their metal skeletons lay beneath the desert sun. My father and I watched teams of men in monkey suits slowly tearing apart planes. Some of them wore welding masks, sparks shooting from their tools that made a sound worse—longer and higher pitched—than a human scream. I had to hold my ears and, at times, close my eyes as my father and I watched two men with a huge wrench, which they could only lift and manipulate together, pry the propeller from an old prop plane, place it on a dolly, and wheel it away. That propeller was taller than either man, and they had to work carefully and slowly to lower it. It was like a very large, prehistoric bone, a dead thing. I must have been eight or nine, just a kid, and didn’t like that place at all—the noise and something else that I couldn’t have put into words. It had nothing to do with my simple dream of being a pilot. Nonetheless, my father kept patting me on the back. “Isn’t this something?” he shouted over the racket. “Isn’t it?” I couldn’t tell him that it frightened me. Adults don’t understand the things that bother kids; and I knew I couldn’t tell him how much I wanted to leave, how glad I was when we got in the car and drove away from that odd place. And because the Bone Yard was not the nicest thought to resort to as I drove through the Avenues that day with my mother, I tried to think of something else. I began to picture myself in an oxygen mask and goggles in the cockpit of a fighter jet. I was very careful about it, trying to see all the details—the unimaginably complex panel of switches, levers, and dials in front of me over which, as a military pilot, I would have complete understanding and mastery, of course. I’d be doing twenty Gs very easily, holding something like a large joystick between my legs and blasting right over the mountains. The snowy bald peaks rushed by below me as I left the Salt Lake valley behind, hurtling west at Mach speed, nothing but mountains and an empty, endless stretch of land in front of me. I crossed the deserts of Nevada, the Mohave, and Death Valley and knew I’d reached California as soon as I saw the peaks of the Sierras, which would take seconds to put behind me, doing three times the speed of sound, even though that probably wasn’t humanly possible. To make it possible, I was wearing a special flight suit that combated g forces so that I could keep the air in my lungs, so that my circulation kept going, so that my brain got the oxygen it needed. I kept flying west like that until I came to the ocean, the whole world simplified by water wherever I looked. The sun was in front of me, of course, a red giant on which, at my altitude, I could see on its surface the firestorms I’d read about, great scarlet waves of hydrogen and other burning gases whipping up winds thousands of degrees centigrade. I’d seem to be flying between the blue earth and the red sun, then, and I’d just keep flying like that, between fire and water, not ever turning back. My jet was armed to the teeth with computerized bombs and heat-seeking missiles, with every destructive device that war jets could carry. I just held my course, looking down at my instruments now and then as I followed the sun. It would have been good to stay in that thought for a while, but I couldn’t because I’d reached the edge of the world and it was going nowhere. There was nothing but space and light and water. That wasn’t a place I could stay. So I opened my eyes—only then realizing that I had even closed them—and looked over at my mother. “Please stop,” I said then. “Please just pull over to the side of the road and talk to him.” I had the feeling that when we reached Curtis Smith’s house everything would be decided. Everything would be finished.

  “Just let me do things, Steven. Please. I don’t want you to get involved in this.”

  “Sure,” I said. “I’ll just pretend I’m not here. I’ll do that, okay.”

  “Stay out of it.”

  “You’ve put me in it,” I said. “You’re the one who’s taking us to meet your lover.” But she wasn’t talking to me anymore. She just sat straight and kept driving up that hill. I wondered when we’d reach the top of it. I wondered how high up above the city rich people lived. I wondered how rich Curtis Smith was. I wondered what my father would do against him. Then I had this thought that sometimes helps me, this simple thought. Whatever is the thought. Whatever. One simple word. I’d just say it in my mind and sometimes it’d loosen the whole world up. Whatever, I thought. What-goddamn-motherfucking-ever. That was my thought, and it might have worked had I not remembered that my father had said the same word right after he had had taken the fifty-dollar-bill from my mother, which he shouldn’t have done. It was a cowardly thing to do and a cowardly thing to say. So that thought was no help to me at all, especially now that we turned onto Mars Drive—no kidding—and then into this horseshoe driveway in front of what must have been Curtis Smith’s house. “This is it,” my mother said, parking behind two cars—a black Corvette and a red BMW—that sat quietly gleaming, wet from the rain and impossibly new looking. I felt ashamed of our Buick, the rough, bestial growl of its engine, the oily stink of it, and started to understand why my mother was happy to leave it to my father, started to see that her decision had nothing to do with what a “great find” my father had made when he bought the Buick. Jesus. We were all liars. My whole fam
ily was.

  My father’s cab stopped at the mouth of the driveway and, for a moment, I thought he might turn around and leave. Then, very slowly, the yellow car moved into the driveway. My father stepped out of it while it was still moving so that when he hit the ground he nearly fell and had to struggle to right himself.

  “What’s happening?” Jenny asked, her head popping above the lip of the backseat. Her eyes looked sleepy.

  “We’re here,” my mother said again.

  Jenny turned, saw the house, and seemed to wake up immediately. “Oh,” she said.

  Right away when I looked at that house, I could have only one thought, a thought I did not like at all. Curtis Smith had stolen our dream. That house should have been ours, mine, my sister’s, my father’s and mother’s. All of us together should have had that house. It was made of a natural wood, stained the deep, blond color of butterscotch. Its three stories supported two large balconies furnished with chairs, tables, and yellow sun umbrellas. I couldn’t begin to count the windows, dark-tinted like sunglass lenses and full of a black reflective light even in the bluish air of early evening. The front yard leapt upward some twenty yards, broken only by a row of small trees and oval garden plots, padded with wood chips, that would flower in the spring, and landed at the front step before a set of polished, red-oak double doors with heavy, brass handles and a small window protected by a rake of cast-iron bars in the middle of one door. I kept expecting those doors to open. I kept expecting Curtis Smith to come out. But the house was absolutely quiet. My father was looking up at it. He couldn’t seem to take his eyes off it. “I understand,” he said. He walked slowly backwards, still looking at the house, taking more of it in. He stumbled into the wet dirt of a circular garden and came to a stop. “Financially secure!” he shouted. If anyone was home inside that monstrous and beautiful house, they could hear my father. I thought I could feel them looking down at us through one of the dark windows. I wondered what my father looked like seen from up there. I wondered how clumsy and weak and desperate he would appear.

  “Please don’t shout like that, Billy,” my mother said. We had both stepped out of the car. When Jenny got out, my mother looked back at her and said, “You get back in the car and wait for us. It won’t be long.”

  “Okay,” Jenny said.

  But before she could sit back down, my father said, “I want her to stay out here. I want to say something to all of you. I want Jenny to hear.”

  Jenny looked at my mother for permission. She nodded. “As long as you stop shouting,” she said. “No more shouting. If you shout, she goes back in.”

  “You’re different,” my father said. He was looking at her now with the same shocked expression he had had when looking at that house, as if she were just as unexpected, just as impossible to take in and understand. “You’re cold, absolutely cold.”

  “Do you agree not to shout?” she asked.

  “Okay,” he said. Jenny walked over to my mother.

  “All right,” my mother said, “what would you like to say to us?”

  My father looked back up at the house. He didn’t seem to know what to feel, and I knew then that he was stalling, that he had no plan, no way of remedying this situation, nothing to say, that he was hopeless, really, and was just trying to gain a few minutes. “It’s a beautiful house,” he finally said. I don’t know why he had to say that. He wasn’t speaking with bitterness or sarcasm. He laughed and shoved his hands deep into his pockets and nodded his head at that enormous house. “I guess I come in last, don’t I?” he asked.

  “Maybe you should go, Billy,” she said.

  “Am I supposed to apologize now, beg for forgiveness or something, so that we can all get back together? Is that what I’m supposed to do, Mary?” He was smiling, trying to act as though none of this mattered to him, as if his question were facetious. But his smile was thin, and he couldn’t seem to keep it.

  “No,” she said.

  He looked down at himself and brushed off the front of his wet jeans, even though there was nothing on them. Then he began shivering. “Jesus am I cold,” he said. He just stood there, holding himself.

  “You should go home and change, Billy,” my mother said.

  “I want to know what I’m supposed to do. What should I do, for Christ’s sake, Mary?”

  “You’re shouting,” my mother said.

  “I’m sorry,” my father said in a softer voice now. “So tell me.”

  “There’s nothing to do. I don’t want you to do anything. I just want you to go home now.”

  My father sat down Indian style, the way a kid sits, in the wet dirt beneath him, and beat the ground once with his fist.

  “We’re not going to ask you in, Billy.”

  My father looked up, and I saw that he wasn’t angry with her, that he no longer had the strength to be angry with her. He was shaking his head and pulling his long wet hair back. He tried to hold her gaze, but he couldn’t. He had to look back down. “Is that right?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said.

  We were all quiet for some time, and I looked behind me, because I no longer wanted to look at my father sitting like that on the ground, hugging himself. The section of the sky above the mountains was a glowing pink while another section of it was black with clouds. I faced them again. “She was lying,” I said to him, because somebody needed to say something and because I was pretty sure what I was saying was the truth. “She does too love you. She can’t help loving you.”

  My mother looked at me and I thought I saw anger in her eyes, but her voice wasn’t angry when she said, “That’s not enough. It never changed things. Not in all the years we’ve been together it hasn’t. I could go on loving him forever and it wouldn’t do a thing.”

  My father smiled at me. “Thanks, Steven,” he said. “Thanks for being on my side. Thanks for believing in me.” He looked behind him then at a blue-and-white Salt Lake City Police car that had just pulled onto Mars Drive from Milky Way Boulevard and quietly came to a stop, its motor still running, on the opposite side of the street from us. Its windows were tinted black and reflected a portion of Curtis Smith’s front yard. “I’ll be damned,” my father said quietly, looking over his shoulder at the car. “It looks like your rich friend called the cops on me.” He was worried enough to speak quietly now, too quietly for his voice to be heard by the cops inside that car. I looked at the house again, this time sure that we were being watched and that whoever was watching us had the law on his side and was a powerful person for that reason. “I wish you would go in there and tell your friend not to do that. I am not a criminal, for Christ’s sake.” He looked back at the cop car again and picked up a good-size rock out of the garden dirt beneath him, weighing it in his hand. “I suppose that would be a stupid thing to do, wouldn’t it?” my father said to himself.

  “Yes, Billy,” my mother said. “That would be a stupid thing to do.” He let the rock drop from his hand. “Go now,” she said. She reached out to him with the keys to the Buick. “You take the car,” she said.

  “No!” he shouted. “Hell, no!” The cop didn’t like the sound of my father shouting because she—a lady cop—stood out of her car, walked around to the other side of it, the side closest to us, and leaned against it. She was blond and wore her hair inside her cop hat and had one of those belts with weapons on it. “I am not a criminal,” my father whispered viciously. “I am doing nothing wrong here. Nothing.”

  “This yard doesn’t belong to you, Billy,” my mother said in a soft voice. “This is private property.” You could barely hear the cop’s radio, the static and sounds of voices speaking out of it.

  My father stood up, water dripping from his backside. “I’m not feeling too well,” he said. In fact, he looked sick. His eyelids were purple, and his face was white. He looked too skinny and maybe hungry. “So I’m going to leave. But I’m coming back. I’m not giving up.” He looked at Jenny. “How’s that watch, Jen-Jen?” he asked. “You still like it?”


  “Yes,” she said.

  “What time is it, then?” he asked.

  She looked at her watch, which she hadn’t done for a while now. “It’s thirty-five minutes after six.” She smiled at him, but there was something stiff and formal between them.

  “That’s a very nice outfit,” he said, gesturing at my sister’s new uniform. “Does that mean you made the cheerleader squad?”

  “No,” Jenny said, almost shyly. “I’m on the drill team. I’m a Billmorette now.”

  “Wonderful,” he said. “Congratulations. That’s really…” He couldn’t finish his sentence. He looked at me and then at Jenny again, and then looked quickly over his shoulder at the lady cop, who was watching us. “Does one of you want to come home with me?” he asked. Jenny held more tightly to our mother.

  “They’re going to stay with me for now,” our mother said.

  “I’m just asking for one of them.”

  “No, Billy,” my mother said.

  “Steven can make his own decisions.” He looked at me. “You’re old enough to decide what you want to do.” He was confident that I would come with him. I could see that right away. But he looked so cold and unwell, and I glanced over at the cab and saw that scary driver moving behind the wheel to his music. I didn’t want to get in that cab and I didn’t want to be near my father, near his hopelessness, near his bone-cold chill, near his inability to stop what was happening that day.

  “He’s staying with me, Billy,” my mother said. She put her hand on my shoulder, and I felt her fingers trembling. But I also felt her strength, her determination to keep me.

  “Don’t,” I said. I shook my shoulder free and took a step away from her.

  “Steven,” she said.

  “He can decide for himself,” my father said. “What do you say, Steven?” He looked at me.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “What does ‘I don’t know’ mean?” he asked. “What the hell does that mean?”