Retribution

by John Fulton

  “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.

  THE TROUBLED DOG

  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.

  “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 ou
r 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.”