by John Fulton
When she sat Benny’s mother up again, he saw that the hairdresser and his mother had the same face now. It was a pretty face, but not his mother’s. The face was hurt and angry around the eyes, which were tender and purple. “You like it?” the woman asked him. He nodded. “Well then, tell her you do, sweetie,” she said. “I don’t think any of them know what we need.” She was speaking to his mother. “You got to tell us some nice things sometimes, sweetie.”
He said, “I like it.” He hoped that neither woman heard the fear in his voice.
* * *
When Benny and his mother walked out of the beauty parlor, a gray sky was pushing down on the little town. Black was lifting his leg on parking meters at the end of the street, and Benny wanted to know why the dog was loose. He knocked on Bo’s car window and felt a warm pissy smell hit his face when Bo rolled the window down. The little boy had put his gun away. “Black peed in here. I had to let him out so he wouldn’t pee anymore. It wasn’t his fault.” Bo seemed tired and his voice was small and weak. “Don’t you hurt him, Benny. It wasn’t his fault. He doesn’t need to be punished.”
Since their father had left, Benny was the only one ever to punish the stupid animal when it needed it. “The car’s not the place for the dog to pee, Bo.” He went after it, calling its name. The animal must have heard the anger in his voice, because it was dodgy and tried to elude Benny’s hand when he grabbed it by the collar. The dog’s mouth let out a stinky smoke of breath in the cold air and its wet eyes begged for mercy. It was Bo’s dirty animal—spoiled, no good anymore. Bo had fed it so much people food that it wouldn’t eat its own dry dog food now. It slept in Bo’s bed with him and lounged on the old couch in their living room and didn’t even know it was a dog. It thought it was human, and its wet eyes were saying that to Benny now. I’m like you. I’m like you, they said. He hit the animal three times with the palm of his hand, then let it go. It tried to come back twice, wagging and penitent, but Benny kicked at it until it ran down the street and stayed away.
When he got back to the car, he saw a group of men gathering on the other side of the street, talking and looking at the blue Impala. Inside the car, his mother was holding the man’s head in her hands. It was the first time she had touched him. Benny closed himself into the pissy stink of the Impala. “Daddy doesn’t talk or move or anything anymore,” Bo told him.
“Shut up,” Jeannie said. She held the man’s face directly to hers. “Open your eyes, Rex.”
She wasn’t careful where she put her hands. Benny wished that she would be more careful, because the way she was holding him must have hurt him. “Look at me, Rex,” she said. When the man’s eyes didn’t open, she opened them with her thumbs, but they didn’t seem to see her. “Rex, damn it! Here I am.” She was whispering.
“How come you didn’t bring Black back?” Bo asked.
“He won’t come.”
“We got to get him,” Bo said.
Their mother let the man’s head drop against the glass and lifted her hands. There was blood on them.
“He won’t come,” Benny said. “He doesn’t want to come.”
“We got to get him anyway.”
But something was happening outside now. The sheriff’s car had pulled up and a man knocked on their window. He said something about an ambulance not coming today. There had been a bad accident on the interstate and all the ambulances were out. They should follow him. He said the word hospital. So they followed the red lights of the sheriff’s car. After they turned the corner, Bo looked back to see Black running after them in the distance. “We forgot Black. We got to stop for Black.” They drove and followed the sheriff’s car, until the dog disappeared behind them and Benny had to pin the little boy to his seat.
“Forget Black,” he said.
At the hospital, the light was yellow and closed in with pain and hurt people. Benny heard two men talking about the accident—something about cars and a station wagon, ice and danger on the roads—and everything was too bad, just too bad, they said. An old woman fell over in the hallway. Benny looked around, but nobody explained it to him. People were traveling fast on beds with wheels. He thought maybe he should be looking for someone. A nurse was in his face, telling him and Bo to sit on the floor and stay there. He looked behind him. Two little blond girls were playing with a doll in a corner. They took turns loving it and gave it a beautiful girl name—a flower name—Lilly or Rose or Violet. They were the only ones that the pain in the hospital did not seem to be calling to. “Everything’s going to be okay,” they told the doll. Benny resisted the urge of ripping the toy away and making them scream for it. The nurse was still telling him to sit. But when Bo slipped past her, she went after him, and Benny was free to move again.
He moved until a woman seized him. She was crying hard, her eyes sudden and shocking, like broken glass. She embraced Benny until his face hurt, pressing against her bones. A man worked his hands between him and the woman and wrenched them apart. “He’s not ours,” the man said. “He’s someone else’s.”
The nurse came back again, angry. Bo was still loose, and she didn’t seem to care about keeping Benny in his seat now. He saw a toy car roll through the crowded feet over the floor and on into the next room. He followed it, wondering when the child who had pushed it would come. He looked around him, but no child came. The car was a bright red color that burned against the white of the walls. It was kicked around until it disappeared in the crowded stomp of feet. He saw two policemen questioning his mother in the far corner. She was crying her soft-evening face off into tissues and dropping it at her feet. The officers said, “The man in your car was dead on arrival. Can you give us his name? We don’t think he’s your husband, lady, and we have to ask you about the goods in your trunk.” Benny reached into his back pocket and felt the soft paper on which the man’s name was printed.
He found Bo in another room. Bo was looking at a scream through the crack in a curtain. The scream sounded like the noise an animal would make. Benny looked through the crack now over his little brother’s shoulder. He saw a small family—a man and a woman holding a boy’s hands. The boy was lying on his back. Benny couldn’t make much of him out. The scream died. Then the boy kicked his legs and it began again. The doctor was pulling a red thread up and down over the boy’s face. He seemed happy. “All done,” he said. “We’re all done.”
The woman and man kept holding the boy. They said, “Everything’s going to be okay.”
“Are those two yours?” the doctor asked, pointing at Benny and Bo.
The man and the woman looked up at them. They were young and pleasant-looking. “No. We don’t know them.”
“Out of here, boys,” the doctor said. “Scat.”
Benny backed off, but Bo didn’t. Bo swung the curtain wide open, unhitched his gun, and bandied it in the doctor’s face. The man and the woman fell back and the boy sat up—a little boy, smaller even than Bo. He was naked above the waist, and Benny saw the delicate bones below his neck. His eyes were groggy, tired of so much pain. “Don’t,” Benny said.
But Bo’s face was a hard, furious mask. He cocked the revolver. “Hey!” he shouted at the boy. “You’re dead!”
The ring of the blanks shut off the sound of pain in the hospital. The fluorescent tubes buzzed in their sockets and a curl of smoke drifted upward from the snub-nosed barrel of Bo’s gun. “It’s a silly toy gun,” a man’s voice said. When the hospital learned that, the pain came alive again and Bo flung his gun away and put his hands in the air.
“Stupid gun,” Bo shouted. A large man clothed in white picked Bo up from his middle and carried him away, kicking and screaming.
When the same man returned, Benny held his hand out with the crumpled card. “It’s him,” Benny said. “It’s the man.”
“What man?” he said.
“We’ve done some bad things,” Benny said. “My mother and brother and me.”
“Sure you have,” he said. He took the card from Benny,
wadded it up, and threw it into a garbage bin as they walked out of the room.
* * *
That day, Benny and his little brother were driven in the back of a police car to a large house with a green front yard and a fenced-in backyard with trees and a swing set. The inside of the police car was black and had the cold smell of bullets and real guns. There was a cage between the boys in back and the policemen in front. Benny’s little brother clung to the cage, snarling, barking, showing his teeth. The men laughed and called Bo Rover. “There are some real crazies out there,” they said. “You just can’t believe what some crazies will do.” One of them turned around and looked at Benny and said, “It’s a lucky thing you and your little brother, the dog, weren’t killed back there. You know that? If I had been there,” he said, “I woulda shot both of you.”
The house belonged to a man and his wife. They were called the Greens. If you wanted them to hear you, you had to call them Mr. and Mrs. Green. That was the rule. There were other boys in the house, too, and you had to get along with them. That was another rule. Benny wanted his little brother to behave and follow the rules, but he wouldn’t. Bo barked and growled, and Mr. Green, a thick man who smelled like a car garage and metal tools, laughed at first. He said he thought little boys were humans and should act that way. Mr. Green patted Benny on the back and called him a good boy. He said, “I know you’ve seen some bad things, Benny. But you’re a good boy.”
The next day was Thanksgiving. The sun came out and thick, shaggy rays of light covered the huge dinner table and made the cooked turkey, the sweet potatoes and broccoli, and Mr. and Mrs. Green shine. Mr. and Mrs. Green looked very thankful for everything. While Mr. Green prayed, Bo growled. Another boy at the table wore a naked Barbie doll chained to his belt buckle. He popped the doll’s pretty blond head off and put it on the table beside his plate. When Bo would only eat his dinner with his face in the food, Mr. Green picked him up by his pants and held him in the air. “If you act like a dog, we’ll treat you like a dog.” He sent him from the table.
Later that night, Bo was furious at the boy with the Barbie doll chained to his belt and bit him, drawing blood where the teeth marks were on his arm. For that, Bo had to sleep alone in the little room in the roof of the house.
Benny didn’t want his little brother to be a dog. All the same, he dreamed that night about the dog in the dog movie that he hated and Bo loved so much. He dreamed of Bo’s favorite scene, when the dog drives his father’s car without asking. It was a longhaired, shaggy dog and the car was a large glossy sedan, more beautiful than any car Benny had ever driven in. The animal sat upright, one paw resting on the wheel, while the other, furry and strange, hung out the open window. A light breeze blew in the animal’s coat and its eyes moved with a great sensitivity to the streets and the laws of the streets, soft, calm, knowing eyes, filled with the human act of driving. Benny knew that Bo was right. The dog was a better driver than their mother. Their mother had been a horrible driver, the worst driver.
In the morning, when it was still dark and no one in the house was awake, Benny went up to the room in the roof and got into the small bed with Bo. His brother had refused to wash or clean himself at all. He smelled salty, humid, warm. Benny drew himself close, curling into the little human animal and wanting the morning to be dark and the day and the light of day never to come, so that he could stay there next to his little brother, the dog, forever.
OUTLAWS
At the beginning of winter, not long after Gary’s fifteenth birthday, his father, William, fell from a ski lift. William had been drinking from minibottles of scotch and smoking dope at the time. William had never been a big drinker. He had made record sales as a furniture salesman that year and had gone up the mountain to celebrate with Howard, William’s closest friend. It was Howard who was the big drinker and smoker. It was Howard who had brought the scotch and dope along. Evidently, the height from which William fell should not have been a fatal height. But he fell the wrong way—at a precise and extremely unlikely angle. The world, Gary thought, must have been working against his father. The sky, the clouds, the rocks—nothing was innocent.
At the funeral, Gary and his mother, Barbara, huddled together at the back of the room. Barbara’s parents were both dead and she had only a few surviving relatives, none of whom were able to attend the services. Barbara wept and said, “Something good is going to happen to us soon. I know it will.” Because they had rarely gone to church, their Presbyterian minister—a man whose voice was oddly small in comparison to his bulk—did not recognize them, though he spoke about William as if he had known him pleasantly for years and described him as a humble man of quiet integrity. Gary found none of these banalities at all comforting.
Howard had come to the funeral and tried to approach them after the sermon. But he was obviously drunk and afraid and he circled back. Dianne, his ex-wife, held him up and said a little too loudly, “We need to go talk to them, Howard.” Dianne was a determined, wiry woman, and an extremely successful real-estate agent. She and Howard had been divorced for seven years, but they maintained what Gary’s father had called “a moody, habitual friendship.” Howard wore a black tuxedo, the collar and jacket of which Dianne repeatedly adjusted for him. Gary didn’t want to have to talk to these two. But they finally came around again and faced Gary and his mother. “We’re very sorry,” Dianne said.
Howard opened his mouth. He smelled of hair tonic and liquor. “I don’t know what to say,” he said.
Barbara looked up at him. “As far as we’re concerned,” she said, “you did this to him.”
* * *
During the winter months after William’s death, Gary’s mother took a leave of absence from the school where she worked as a speech therapist, and neither she nor Gary left the house or each other. They couldn’t easily remain alone in a room or close doors behind them. Barbara roamed through the house in her terry-cloth robe, which was sometimes half-open, so that her underwear showed. These glimpses of his mother startled Gary. He was seeing something raw and unprotected in her. They ate with their fingers from paper plates. They didn’t do laundry. They didn’t clean or bathe often enough. They didn’t answer the phone. They didn’t open mail or shovel snow. They let the winter cover their walks, their driveway, their green Buick. They let it erase things.
Gary tried to comfort his mother. He touched her back and shoulders when she wept. It was scary to give this sort of touch—the sort of touch that adults gave children—reliable and protective, as if he really had this strength. He drew baths for her, put perfumed bubbles in the water, stood outside the closed bathroom door and talked to her while she bathed. “I feel like leftovers,” she said once. Gary wasn’t sure what she meant and didn’t want to know. He guessed that she had looked at herself in there—her nakedness, her aloneness—and hadn’t liked what she saw. “Clean, clean, clean,” he said through the door, in a happy voice that Barbara did not respond to. Her sadness seemed far more dangerous than his own, and when she began to weep in the tub, when she said to herself, “Oh God, look at me,” he walked quietly away from his station outside the door and left her alone with her grief.
Gary had his own grief to attend to. His dead father seemed to be everywhere in the house. He was in the laundry in Barbara’s closet—a heavy, twisted pile with the faint odor of something barely alive, barely festering. He was in the bathroom cabinet—shaving cream, razors, a worn bar of white hand soap sunk in the quagmire of the soap dish, where a few of his curled pubic hairs floated. He was in a family portrait taken last year and sitting on the fireplace mantel in the living room—a pale, pear-shaped man with a soft, malleable face and wet eyes. His body had become increasingly muffinlike, William himself had said, as he advanced into his late thirties. There had been nothing indomitable, defiant, or heroic about him. Nothing in him had seemed to deserve or provoke death.
The strangest remnant of William was a red party balloon that William had inflated and given to Gary as a
sort of joke for his fifteenth birthday because Gary had outgrown balloons. William’s sense of humor had been peculiar, but well meaning. The balloon said HAPPY BIRTHDAY on it. Gary stared through the stretched membrane at the invisible breath of his dead father. He considered pricking it. But that seemed wrong. So he shoved the balloon under his bed and hoped that it could get lost there.
* * *
Three weeks after William’s death, Gary loaded the pile of dirty laundry—it had a distinct, almost sweet smell by then—into a basket and walked a mile and a half in the white January afternoon to a Laundromat called Wash-O-Rama. Inside Wash-O-Rama, the walls were an aqua-green color and the air smelled of dirty socks and detergent and of the babies and toddlers who sat in strollers or lay across the tables on which their mothers folded and sorted wash.
When Gary lifted the wet ropes of his laundry from the washing machine, his father’s clothes were almost beyond recognition. He had washed the whites with the darks and the colors had bled. The drying part of the process seemed less complicated, but Gary felt awkward and self-conscious as he tried to fold one of his mother’s bras.
“Not like that.” This came from a girl, about his age, who sat on the hood of a working dryer, her legs crossed at the ankles. Behind her ankles, several pairs of lavender-and-citrus-colored panties churned in the round hatchlike window of the machine. “Like this.” She made a complicated folding gesture with her hands that Gary couldn’t quite follow. “Here,” she said. She crossed over to him and folded the bra herself, oddly at ease with his mother’s underwear in hand. “The cups fold into each other like that. See?”
