by John Fulton
“Curtis got those for you,” my mother said from behind me.
I put the glove and bat down and faced her. “Doesn’t he know I don’t play?”
“The ward up here has one of the best boy’s teams in the city. He thought you might want to try it out.”
“The ward?” I asked. I understood then. I saw the book—bound in black leather, of course—on the bedside table. It was a Book of Mormon. I picked the book up and opened it to the first page, where it said, “This Holy Book Belongs To.” My name had been written in the space below those words in somebody’s careful handwriting. “Who the hell wrote my name here?”
“That’s a gift from Curtis,” she said.
“Jesus,” I said. “He’s Mormon. He’s a stupid Mormon.”
“Keep your voice down, Steven,” she said. She was worried about Curtis hearing me, I knew. We could still hear them downstairs. It was a cavernous house in which voices traveled easily.
“That means that you’re going to become a Mormon, too.” She didn’t say anything. “But we don’t believe in God,” I said. “We’re atheists, aren’t we?”
“That’s your dad,” she said. “I never said that. I’d like to believe in God, if I could. I told Curtis I’d try. That’s all I promised him.”
“Christ.” I was beginning to understand the little talk about morality Curtis had just given us. “That’s why he won’t have you stay here,” I said. I was beginning to understand why he was so damn nice, just as Janet Spencer and her parents were nice, according to my sister. I was beginning to understand why he didn’t yell or argue, why he hugged his kids, why he nodded and smiled at me, why he didn’t do anything but be nice and pleasant as can be.
“He didn’t insist that I believe,” my mother said. “He said he’d understand if I didn’t see everything the way he sees it. We’re determined to make that work.”
“Jesus Christ!” I shouted.
“Steven,” my mother said, pointing her finger at me. “You should know that Curtis doesn’t appreciate swearing. This is his house.”
“What’s happening?” Jenny asked. She’d walked in my room with this thick purple bathroom towel—her towel—folded over her arm.
“He’s a stupid Mormon,” I said, shaking the book in her face.
“What’s wrong with that?” my sister asked.
I threw the book across the room and looked at my mother. “You swear all the time, Mom,” I said. “We all swear. Our family swears.” This was true. Even Jenny—who liked to act innocent as hell—got away with an occasional shit or damn, though she didn’t often speak like this since she knew it wasn’t girlish. “Jenny swears,” I said, pointing at her.
“I do not,” she said.
“You do, too. You swear whenever you want. Nobody ever told you never to swear. And Mom swears. Doesn’t she?” I asked Jenny.
“I don’t know,” Jenny said.
My mother was looking down at her hands as if they were dirty or something. “I guess I don’t swear anymore,” she said. “That shouldn’t be too difficult to change. If I can quit smoking, I can do that, can’t I?”
I could hardly recognize my mother then—this woman in new clothes and makeup who was going to try to believe in God and was determined to give up foul language forever. “You’re both liars,” I said. “You’re both full of shit. We swear!” I shouted. “Fuck! Shit! Damn!” I was yelling and could hear my words fill the common area of the house.
“Steven Parker!” my mother shouted. She took a swipe at my face with her hand, but missed.
“Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” I shouted. The second time she tried, she slapped me square across the mouth, slapped me so hard that I was quiet for a second and took a step backwards. The hot sting was amazing, and I put my hand to my mouth to cool it.
“Shut up!” she yelled at me. She looked furious. As far as I could tell, she hated me. That stupid bat was behind me, so I picked it up and swung it wildly. I saw her grab her hand.
“Jesus,” she whispered, holding on to herself.
“You hit her,” Jenny said. My sister had backed into a corner and was staring at me.
I didn’t know what to do. I put the bat down, stepped away from it, then picked it up again, and took out the bedside lamp—my goddamn bedside lamp—its blue ceramic belly shattering, its bulb exploding. I turned and knocked my desk lamp from my desk, then smacked my cordless phone across the room and pulverized a small plant on my desk, terra-cotta shards and dirt falling to the carpet. Jenny ran out of the room, and I turned on my bed and began pounding away at that stupid comforter, at the airplanes all over it, pounding and pounding, until goose down floated in the air and rained slowly down as if time had almost come to a stop. I was swearing up a storm, shouting every word and phrase I knew—buttfuck, pigass, bitchfucker, asswipe—letting these combinations of words come out of me because we were the Parkers, and that’s how we talked, that’s who we were—the motherfucking, bitchassed, shitheaded Parkers. I kept on shouting like that until I felt someone’s powerful arms bear hug me from behind. The bat dropped to the floor. I knew it was Curtis Smith. No one else in that house had that kind of strength. I felt his warm breath against my neck. “Steven,” he said, “you quiet yourself.”
“Fuck you!” Then: “You’re hurting my shoulder, you asshole!” I screamed until he let me go. But when I grabbed the bat again, he locked me in another bear hug.
“What did he do?” Andrea asked, peeking into my room. Her frightened little brother peeked his head in, too.
“Get out of my goddamn room!” I shouted at them. They both ran down the hall, and I really let Curtis Smith have it. I called him every name in the book until he lifted me up and squeezed the air out of me. The ceiling tilted oddly. I heard my breathing turn to a wheezing.
“Quiet,” he said in this gentle voice. “You quiet yourself.”
My eyes watered and I could no longer make the words come out. It was silent, and in that silence both Curtis and I could hear the crisp shattering of glass, after which, warm and fast, Colonel Warner’s urine soaked through my coat and dripped on Curtis Smith below me. That was strange. That even scared me. God didn’t exist. God didn’t answer when you called his name. God had no voice. God was a lie. Anyone who’d seen old Colonel Warner on his table would have known that. That old man was in darkness now and a small remaining part of him was spilling out into nothing.
“Jesus!” Curtis Smith shouted. He dropped me on the bed and looked at his arm, glistening with two trails of urine, though he didn’t know that and he was probably very scared. His forearm had been nicked by the broken glass and a fine streak of blood—crimson and surprising—formed in an instant. He probably thought he was disintegrating or self-destructing. “Jesus Christ!” he shouted.
I didn’t want to be bad. I was tired of it already. All the same, it was worth it if only to hear that good man whom my mother thought she loved swear like that in his own fucking house.
Seven
I DIDN’T REMEMBER FALLING asleep or even waking. I just remembered being awake—the sudden violence of sunlight, a hard, yellow pool that stung my eyes and made every dust mote in the air swirl. I blinked and tried to remember a dream—something about Noir whining, about my father walking naked in the street. Why was he naked? He hadn’t seemed to know he was naked. His hair was wet, plastered to his head, and he hadn’t shaved for days. I wanted to tell him that he needed to go inside or dress or do something. But for some reason, he couldn’t hear me and just kept walking barefoot in the street through puddles as cars rushed by. I stopped thinking about that. It was just a stupid dream. I looked around the room, but recognized nothing. My sling was no longer on. It lay over the bed next to me with my red jacket in a tangle of ripped sheets and feathers. The room looked as if a flock of birds had just been slaughtered in it. I sat up and strained to remember. When I saw the white garbage bag on top of a desk, everything returned to me—Colonel Warner, shitting myself, Nurse Brown, Jenny
hating me for what I had done to Mrs. Smith, my mother and Curtis cleaning up the shards of glass, clearing away the things that I had destroyed as I lay over the bed with my face in a pillow, refusing to speak to them until finally they closed the door behind them and left me. God, was that unpleasant to remember. I looked outside, squinting into the sun. A light snow fell despite the fact that I could see no clouds. Outside on the balcony, the wind was bitter, and I hurried back inside. A digital clock on the bedside table said 4:34 P.M. I’d slept through the entire day. No one had woken me. The day had passed, and no one had said anything. I wondered what had happened without me. I wondered what had changed that I could now do nothing about. I zipped my coat up and took my garbage bag from the desk and left that room.
Out in the hallway, I heard the front door slam, and from a second-floor window, I saw Curtis and my mother outside in the driveway where the Buick, its windshield silvered with frost, was still parked behind the Corvette and the red BMW. I hadn’t expected to see the yellow cab out there, too, idling in the cold, with Noir—my good, stupid dog—in the backseat. Noir was sticking his white muzzle up against the slightly cracked window and sucking at the fresh air. No doubt the driver—a bald guy smoking a cigarette as he sat behind the wheel—hated Noir, and I was worried about him, since Noir was overfriendly and would beg for affection from anyone. But I was even more aware that the cab’s presence meant that my father was here somewhere. My mother and Curtis were bundled up in winter coats of the same bright, banana yellow, his and hers winter coats, I guessed. My mother was looking down and to her side, anywhere but at Curtis, who was looking at her as he talked. He kicked one of his feet lightly at the concrete. I couldn’t guess what he’d said to her that made her so suddenly close her eyes and shake her head and put her hands over her ears, the way Jenny so often did when she didn’t want to hear something. “Stop,” I said to the glass in front of me. “Stop.” I wanted to protect her from whatever had made her do that. But I wasn’t out there, of course. Curtis was, and he reached out to her then and touched her. He touched her shoulder, and she pushed his arm away and took a step back. Then he reached out to her again. This time she came to him and they held each other. I didn’t want to look at that, but I did. The sun was out and the sky was this brilliant color of blue, so that you could see everything, you could even see the tiny crystals of ice in the air, a sign that, sun or no sun, it was brutally cold. I watched them holding each other for as long as I could, white breath smoking from their mouths. I didn’t know what that meant, except that something was wrong. I rushed down the stairs and would have gone outside had I not seen my father’s gray winter coat—slack and shapeless with too much wear—on a coat hook in the entryway. I found him in the white living room sitting on the couch opposite my little sister, though they weren’t talking. Their backs to me, they were both staring out that huge window at the city below. My father didn’t look like himself because he was wearing a dark blue suit, something I had never seen him wear before that afternoon. I didn’t say anything for a long time. I just stood at the far end of the living room watching them stare through that window. “Hi,” I said.
Jenny jumped in her seat a little. “Oh,” my father said, turning around to look at me, “it’s you.” His face was very pale, and he was squinting at me and had to shield his eyes with his hand. “Could you stand out of the sun, kiddo? I can’t even look at you.” When I stepped forward, he put his hand down and said, “That’s better. Thank you.” But he didn’t look at me for long. He looked down at the glass of ice water in his hand. “It’s a very nice glass,” he said. He lifted it up and we all stared at it for a moment—a beveled, crystal water glass. “It’s heavy. I was just telling your sister that you can tell quality glass from the weight of it.”
“You look good,” I said. “In your suit and everything.” He didn’t look good, though. The suit was too big for him. It hung on his shoulders and he looked small inside it. You could tell he wasn’t used to wearing clothes like that because he didn’t seem to know how to sit or hold himself or even what to do with his legs, which he just then crossed and uncrossed. He had on his best pair of dress shoes, which were scuffed down to the leather in places. He was clean-shaved and washed, but had nicked himself on his chin and cheek, where two tender raspberry marks showed. I could tell that he was nervous, that he was anxious about his appearance, that he was maybe even worried about how I saw him that day.
“I’ve felt better,” he said. “I’ve felt much better.”
He put his water glass down on the glass tabletop, and I couldn’t help but say, “You’re supposed to put it on the coaster.” I pointed at the coaster.
“Of course,” he said, picking the glass up again. “When you have nice things…” But he didn’t finish that thought. He looked over at the white piano. “That’s some instrument, isn’t it? That’s pretty fancy. A white piano. I thought pianos were supposed to be black.” He looked at me again. “Last night was real quiet without you and Jenny.” He shook his head. “I hadn’t expected things to be so quiet.”
“I didn’t think we were going to stay here. I thought we were going to leave after a while. If we’d known, Jenny and I would have gone with you.” I wanted Jenny to say something, to reassure him that what I’d said was true. But she just sat there looking down at her lap. She wore this very nice pair of tan pants and a blouse the soft white color of that living room. They were new, very expensive clothes. I was sure of that.
He smiled at me. I didn’t understand why he would smile. I didn’t know what that was supposed to mean. “I would have made the same choice, kiddo,” he said.
“I didn’t make any choice.”
“Sure you didn’t,” he said.
“I didn’t want to stay here,” I said. “I didn’t. I didn’t.”
“Okay,” he said. “Okay.”
“You don’t believe me.”
“All right, Steven.” He raised his voice. “I believe you.” But he didn’t. He took a drink of his water. “Your mom tells me you caused quite a ruckus over here last night.”
“What?” I said. “What did she tell you?”
He waved his hand in the air, as if none of what she’d said to him mattered at all. “Nothing,” he said.
“Are we going to go home now—you and me and Jenny and Mom?”
He looked down at himself and laughed. “I thought these people would dress. I thought he’d have something like this on. I guess it looks as if your dad is trying too hard.” He pulled at his suit. He wore a dark blue tie with a mother of pearl tiepin in it. “He’s wearing blue jeans, for Christ’s sake.”
“You look good,” I said again. “Are you going to fight?” I asked.
“Pardon me?” he said. This was not something my father would usually say. This was not his language, and though I had always wanted him to speak differently, more correctly, I did not at all like the sound of those words in his mouth.
