Retribution

by John Fulton

  “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.

  “Throw it away,” Jeannie said. She was putting a vacuum cleaner into the trunk. “That’s not who you are. I know who you are, Rex,” she said.

  Benny put the card with the man’s name in his back pocket. “Don’t take the vacuum cleaner, Momma,” he said. “You can’t take the vacuum cleaner. It’s not ours.” His mother didn’t seem to hear him, so he turned and looked the other way now—into the darker half of the sky. But he could still see the shadows
of the man, his mother and little brother. They were giant evening shadows that stretched across the road and on into the desert. Every motion of the dark forms seemed absurdly large and forceful. His mother’s shadow was still loading the car up, lifting massive, vague objects that shook the shape of the Impala as she loaded them. It’s too much, Benny thought, to be taking. These massive objects. She should put them back, leave them where they lay. He watched his little brother’s shape lift the gun and say, “Put your hands up, Daddy. You’re sitting next to Momma in the front seat.” The man’s shadow was the largest—a strange, wobbly tower.

  “Okay,” it said.

  When Benny turned around again, he saw his mother pull the man’s wallet from his blazer and dig out the cash. “You’ve been working, Rex.” She was counting the money. “You’ve been working a lot.” She sounded so happy.

  The man was buckled into the front seat now and Bo was careful to keep his gun on him. “Where are we driving to?” the stranger asked.

  “We’re going to Mother’s,” Jeannie said. “We’re going to have Thanksgiving at Mother and Daddy’s—and you better hope they forgive you.”

  * * *

  They stopped at a gas station with a minimart on the outskirts of a little town. Something was wrong with the man behind the counter, who could take their mother’s money but couldn’t seem to hear her when she asked what direction Montana was in. He had a speech impediment and seemed to be saying, “That way. That way.” They bought a can opener and four cans of baked beans with plastic spoons, a six-pack of Coke, and a loaf of Wonder bread, which they never usually bought because you paid for the name, their mother said. But this was her special treat. Though the beans were cold, the boys were hungry and ate them quickly, dipping folded pieces of white bread into the black sauce and beans. They had forgotten to get something for Black, who whined from hunger. When it got dark and they had finished eating and felt full and tired, the moon came out and its bone-colored light fell into the car and made the man’s face look chalky and dead. “Is he all right, Momma?” Benny asked.

  “Daddy’s a little tired. That’s all,” she said.

  Benny’s little brother was wide awake, alert, and holding the gun to the sleeping man’s head. “You can put your stupid gun away now,” Benny said.

  “No way,” Bo said.

  Every now and then the man would twitch and begin dreaming again out loud in his sleep. He kept saying the name Wanda. He seemed to be calling her.

  Bo asked, “Momma, who’s Wanda?”

  Without answering, she pushed and nudged the man out of his dream. Once, she hit him hard enough on the shoulder to wake him. His eyes shot open and he began making frightened, whimpering sounds at the sight of his hands in the moonlight. The blood on them was dried and black and the broken fingers bent off in a way that made Benny’s stomach feel hot and sick. The man kept whining, until Benny got into the front seat and covered the wounds up in the pair of white tube socks that he had just taken off his own feet. The stranger’s hands looked like paws now—simplified by the stupid white socks. He was quiet and went back to sleep. When he woke again, he was shivering. His arms, his legs, his face wouldn’t stay still. He said, “Please, I’m cold.” Bo said he was cold, too. The moon had gone down and it was black and the world outside the car felt like winter. They stopped at a rest site, where Black and Bo got out to pee while Benny covered the man and his bloody shirt in piles of new sheets and blankets and a comforter he got from the trunk. The man’s head seemed orphaned and small above the bulky pile of blankets. He looked at Benny. His face was still trembling. He said, “Water, please. Water.”

  Benny slammed the door, cutting the man’s voice off, and walked into the parking lot, where he heard his mother talking to an old man in a cowboy hat who was looking at the stars and saying their names out. “That there’s the polestar. See it, lady? And there’s the Big and Little Dipper. Orion’s over there.” Benny began to feel dizzy with staring at the sky and trying to see names in the cold dust.

  His mother said, “Mister, could you tell me where I am?”

  He said, “Where you are?”

  “What state I’m in.”

  “You’re in Utah, lady.”

  She said, “Oh. That’s not really where I wanted to be.”

  The man seemed offended. “Utah’s a beautiful state, lady.”

  There was silence between them.

  “Maybe you could help me,” Jeannie said. “I got to find a beauty parlor first thing in the morning.”

  The man asked her, “A what?” and she told him again. “Well,” he said, “there’s beauty parlors in Utah. You bet there is.” But he didn’t seem to want to talk to her anymore and returned to the stars.

  On the road again, Benny fed the stranger water from an empty Coke can he had filled in the rest room. He drank all the water and still said, “Thirsty, thirsty, thirsty.” The stranger woke up several times in the night, speaking odd words and phrases and names of people Benny had never met. Before morning, when the dark outside was hollow and blue, Bo woke and wanted his daddy to speak with him. He put the gun to the man’s head and said, “Say something to me, Daddy.” The man said something, repeating it several times. It was barely audible, and Benny and Bo at first thought he was saying, “I’m your friend. I’m your friend.” But it soon became clear to them that he was saying, “I’m afraid. I’m afraid.” Then it was morning and the sun burned at the desert’s edges until the cold yellow day was above them again. The man woke and could no longer speak. Benny was in front, working a sort of head bandage out of napkins for the stranger’s wound. He had to hold the man’s head to keep it still and could smell the stranger’s exhaustion and the stranger’s blood, which were warm smells. But they were cooling down, getting cold now. The napkins didn’t work. They made the man’s head look white and papery, too fragile to be fixed. “Momma,” Benny said, “this isn’t Daddy. You know this isn’t Daddy.” He put the stranger’s head down again and it fell off the seat rest and leaned over the bloody glass of the side window. “We’ve got to go to the hospital, Momma.”

  They came into a small town, driving too fast. When they turned corners, the deadweight of the man’s head rose and smacked the glass. “Momma,” Benny said, “find a hospital, please.” She was looking for something. When she found it, she pulled over and told Benny to come with her and for Bo to watch Daddy and Black in the car. She sounded exhilarated and frantic. “This is going to work for us, boys. After I’m done, Daddy’s never leaving us again.” She counted the bundle of money, pocketed it, then walked Benny into the beauty parlor, holding his hand tightly enough to make the joints in his fingers crack and hurt.

  The shop was a bright pink color inside and stank of hair sprays, perfumes, things acidic and barely breathable, of suds and warm water and of the stiff hair of two old ladies who sat under large jug-shaped dryers, each reading a magazine as the machines worked on them. Bright yellow light-bulbs surrounded all the mirrors and long fluorescent cathode tubes buzzed white light down from the ceiling. There were no shadows in the room, and all the objects—the barber’s chairs, the bottles and tubes of soap, Benny, his mother, the two old ladies, and the magazines they read—were doubled, tripled, multiplied in the mirrors. Benny was glad to be holding his mother’s hand now, because he felt dizzy in this bright circus of images. The only hole in it was the glass door of the entrance, through which Benny could see Bo sitting in the car with the handgun to the stranger’s head.

  The hairdresser entered the room through a curtain in the back. She was a huge woman, wearing a purple-colored barber’s coat. Her hair was high and long, the same color of reddish purple as her coat. Her makeup looked fresh, still wet on her face. She said, “Come over here, honey.” She sat Benny’s mother down in one of the pink thrones and he sat behind them. His mother’s eyes filled with tears at the sight of her dirty face and the dry mess of her hair. The hairdresser handed her some tissues and said, “We’re gonna poli
sh you up, honey. Don’t you worry. You’re gonna feel better.” She lowered his mother’s head into the sink now, shampooed her and soaped her face. The large woman was looking at Benny. “Your boy have a nosebleed or something? It’s amazing how much boys can bleed. Mine scrape their knees, cut themselves, hit their heads. Bleed and bleed. Nothing hurts them.”

  She left for a minute to release the old women from the dryers. One of them was waving a bony hand at Benny and he felt himself waving back. “So cute,” the old woman said. They paid and hobbled off, looking behind them at Benny and his mother.

  Then the large woman was standing in front of Benny with a steaming washcloth in her hands. The cloth was incredibly white. “Put your arms out, sweetie,” she said. It was hard to breathe in the woman’s perfume, and her beauty—her large hair and painted face—seemed too bright, electric, almost dangerous. But the hairdresser’s plump hands were forceful and warm as they squeezed his fingers. One of them gripped his shoulder and she wiped his face in the warm cloth. “That feels better, doesn’t it?” It did.

  Benny was looking at the large posters of beautiful women taped to the mirrored wall in front of him—women with blond hair like wings or with roped and braided hair. Their faces were new and smooth and cosmetic. Some of them had men holding on to them. “You like them?” the woman asked. She wet his hair and combed it back twice. She laughed. “Ready for church.” The cloth in her hands was soggy and red with blood now.

  He said yes. He did like them.

  “We’re gonna make your momma just as pretty as that.” Benny watched as the woman clipped his mother’s hair down, cut and combed and arranged it. The blow-dryer was a tubular white handgun that made his mother’s hair fluff into feathery crests. The beauty was happening to his mother now. It was a fragile, warm-looking sheath of fluorescence surrounding her head. “You looking forward to turkey day tomorrow?” she asked Benny. The woman reclined the pink seat a little to do his mother’s makeup. The instruments she used were sharp little brushes, barbed and strange. She said the colors out loud as she applied them. “Now some turquoise around the eyes, with some dusky purple at the edges. We’re giving you the soft evening look, all right, hon? The right colors for autumn. That’s what I’ve got on today. I think you’ll like it.”