Retribution

by John Fulton

  She looked at his pile and said, “Oops. Looks like you fucked up. There’s a chemistry to laundry, you know.” She sounded superior, but kind. Her hair was dark and her eyes were a muddy color of brown, so soft they seemed to smear. She wore an achingly purple jewel—its color bristled in the white light of that place—pierced in her nose. Gary recognized her from school, where she hung out with a different, harsher set of kids. Gary didn’t really hang out at all. He was a quiet type.

  She put down the bra. “I’m Vickie,” she said. “I’ve seen you around.”

  Gary didn’t say his name. He had just lifted a wool sweater—it had been William’s—out of the pile. The sweater had shrunk in the dryer to about Gary’s size, and the thought that his dead father’s sweater would now fit him was terrible and repulsive to Gary.

  “It’s a weird color,” Vickie said. It had been a charcoal color, but was now a strange vascular shade of red.

  “I don’t like it anymore,” Gary said. The suggestion that it had been his was, of course, a lie. But the truth of the sweater seemed too obscene to tell. “You want it?”

  “Sure,” she said. “It’s sort of different.” She put it on over her T-shirt and modeled it in the reflective glass of the Laundromat windows. She seemed happy with it. It suits her, Gary thought. “I sort of like it,” she said. “Thanks.”

  * * *

  In the middle of February, casseroles began to appear on Gary and Barbara’s front porch. The doorbell would ring and there they were—in glass dishes, covered with foil. Gary dished out a helping for himself and a helping for Barbara. “Come on, Mother,” he said. “You’ve got to eat.” Gary was determined that his mother would eat. He was determined that she would bathe and groom and dress. This new mode of his made him feel strange, not quite himself. Sometimes he faced his reflection in the mirror, an exercise that clarified nothing except that his acne had thickened a little. Sometimes he said “Fifteen … fifteen” to the mirror, trying to make the connection between himself and his age, because lately he had been feeling much older. He put a fork in Barbara’s hand. “Eat,” he said. “Eat.” He had mastered a certain angry but affectionate voice that worked on his mother, and she ate.

  The casseroles weren’t exactly delicious—some lacked salt and pepper; others were undercooked or burned and nearly inedible—but they were small miracles of much-needed food. Gary suspected Vickie of cooking them. Vickie had been easy to get to know. She worked at a 7-Eleven in Gary’s neighborhood, where Gary would spend his nights talking to her. “Not that I wouldn’t,” she told him. “But I couldn’t cook a hole in the ground.” Vickie had a lot of sayings that weren’t really sayings and didn’t make a lot of sense, but that you remembered anyway. Later on in February, buckets from Kentucky Fried Chicken, pizzas, and cartons of Chinese takeout replaced the casseroles. Whoever was showing this charity had given up on cooking.

  Gary took Vickie home with him one afternoon and tried to introduce her to Barbara. But Barbara walked into her room and stayed there. Vickie had a distinctive, fluttering laugh, and she didn’t need much of an excuse to use it. Her laugh had a surprising, chaotic range, almost purposeful, almost musical. After a while, Gary’s mother said from behind the door, “Would you please tell your friend that I’m not feeling well, that we can’t have guests right now.”

  So Gary and Vickie went to a coffeehouse called Alters—they had been spending a lot of time there lately—where college kids lounged around on fat armchairs and couches. Vickie was teaching Gary to drink his coffee black. “It’s cheaper that way,” she said. “All that funny, sweet milky shit costs.” Vickie was also teaching him to smoke. She said, “I don’t care what you say about your health and cancer and all that. If you’ve got a cigarette in your hands, the camera’s on you.” He probably shouldn’t have been trying out these new, bad habits. The curiosity didn’t seem proper, not at this time anyway. But Gary was young and hadn’t done much yet and Vickie was gleeful, transgressive, and kind of sexy. She had taken to his father’s sweater. She wore it three or four times a week now, and it continued to look good on her.

  The sun came out that afternoon. In the middle of winter, there it was, bulbous and artificial-looking. In Alters, the college kids squinted in the brightness, and a large slab of light—buzzing with molecular dust—lay over Gary and Vickie. Vickie said, “Cool. It’s like the world is trying to say something.” Then she said, “I’m sorry. I was laughing in your house. I don’t think your mom wanted laughter in her house. I can’t imagine it—someone just being dead like that.” When Gary didn’t say anything, she said, “Hey, where are you?”

  Gary was thinking about Barbara, trying not to resent her for what she had just done. “Oh, I’m here,” he finally said.

  Vickie and Gary touched fingertips, setting off static sparks as sharp as little teeth. Their open hands touching made a shadow on the wall like scaffolding—a small skeletal shelter. Gary had felt a compulsion toward the truth lately and he needed to tell Vickie a small truth now. “That sweater you’re wearing was never mine,” he said, fingering its red cuff. “It was his—my father’s.”

  “Oh God,” she said, starting to remove it. “I can’t take it. Not if it’s his.”

  “Please,” Gary said. “I don’t want it to be his anymore. I don’t want him to own anything anymore. Please keep it.”

  * * *

  On a Thursday afternoon, at about the time the anonymous food would arrive, the doorbell rang, and Howard—the man who had skied with Gary’s father that day—stood on the porch holding two white bags from Taco Bell. “I’ve been a coward,” Howard said. “I need to tell you that it’s me. I’m the food guy.”

  Although Howard had been William’s best friend, Gary’s mother had never liked him much. Howard was what she called “party-happy.” He was a darester, a sort of domestic stuntman, who’d always brought out a little of the same male bravado in William, otherwise a quiet man. William had kept Howard as a friend—or at least this was Barbara’s theory—because Howard was a version of William’s fantasy self. If William could have been two men, he would have been the stable man who lived with his wife and son, and then he would have been Howard.

  Howard tried to put the bags of food in Gary’s hands, but Gary made no effort to take them. Howard’s shirt was wrinkled and his face was pale and bruised around the eyes from sleeplessness. He smelled vaguely of bedsheets, and Gary wondered how Howard could be anyone’s fantasy self.

  “How were my casseroles?” Howard asked.

  “Bland,” Gary said. He felt suddenly fierce toward Howard.

  “I know I can’t cook worth shit,” Howard said. He sounded sad. “That’s not one of the things I do.”

  “Who’s there?” Barbara asked from somewhere inside the house. Gary told her and she said, loudly enough for Howard to hear it, “Tell him to go away.”

  Gary said, “Go away.” When Howard didn’t go, Gary said, “Please.”

  * * *

  In the last week of February, the weather turned unusually warm for Utah. Winds blew in from the south and it rained and the muggy smell of mud filled the air. Swarms of gnats were born in the gray afternoons. The snow in the mountains melted and ski resorts reported huge losses. Let them lose money, Gary thought. Let them lose all the money in the world.

  At night, Gary would walk the two blocks from his house to the 7-Eleven where Vickie worked. Water flowed in the gutters and Gary felt something loosening inside him and seeping away.

  That night, Gary found Vickie working the 7-Eleven alone. The night manager, a tall, pale, skinny man named Abbott, sometimes let her work the shop on slow nights while he’d go over to Melissa’s, his girlfriend’s, and, or so Vickie claimed, nibble on her toes until midnight, when he would return for the graveyard shift. “I’d like to do it with you sometime,” Vickie said from behind the counter at the 7-Eleven. She looked at him with an adult confidence in her eyes.

  “Do it?” Gary asked.

&nb
sp; “You know,” she said. “Fuck.” Gary could hardly believe she had used that word, though it hadn’t sounded at all derogatory in her mouth. It sounded playful, good-humored.

  “That’s all right,” Gary said.

  Vickie and he were eating cookies from an open box of Chips Ahoy. Vickie ate whole cookies in one bite. She fed one to Gary, caressed the crumbs from his chin, and said, “We didn’t pay for these, you know. We’re stealing. We’re outlaws. How does it feel to be an outlaw?”

  “Worrying,” Gary said. He imagined Abbott coming back from Melissa’s any minute and catching them with the open box of cookies. He felt a rush of guilt and shame. He was no good at small crimes.

  “Don’t worry,” Vickie said, feeding him another cookie. “I know what to do to make it safe. I know what to use and all that.” Then, after he had chewed and swallowed his cookie, she said, “What’s the matter? You scared of it?”

  “Scared of what?”

  “Fucking,” she said.

  Gary was surprised again by that word—how gentle it could sound—and saw no reason why he shouldn’t be absolutely honest. There was something about Vickie that wanted the truth from him again and again. “Sort of.” Then, after a pause, he said, “Very scared, I guess.”

  * * *

  One night something horrible and unexpected almost happened. Gary had been about to open the glass door of the 7-Eleven, when he saw a man pointing a handgun at Vickie’s face. Gary heard the robber repeat the word bitch. The gun in his hand had that dark, monstrous quality of genuine danger about it. Black metal was a terrible thing. Gary did not have to deliberate. He walked in the front door and stood there.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” the robber said.

  “I’m her friend,” Gary said. “I’m not going to do anything. I just don’t want her to be alone.”

  “Take your goddamn hands out of your pockets, then,” the robber commanded. Gary did this. The robber’s face looked like a pale vegetable—cool and raw—beneath the brown panty hose. He looked like any robber Gary had seen on television, except that he was trembling. He seemed afraid of the thing he was doing, and this fear was the real quality about him.

  Vickie kept saying, “Look, I don’t care about this place. You can take whatever you want.”

  Gary had the same thought: Take it all.

  Gary thought that this moment was maybe one of the reasons William had gone. William’s death had allowed Gary to walk into the store that night. William’s death was the terrible thing that made every other terrible thing more likely and less terrible.

  The robber took the cash in the register—two twenty-dollar bills, some ones, and a few rolls of coins—a pocketful of king-size Snickers bars, a liter of Diet Coke, and nothing else. “Are you sure that’s all he took?” Abbott asked, walking in only minutes after the robber had left. “Lucky,” he said. “That’s all I can say. You kids are lucky.” It was true: It did seem like a generous act of robbery, so generous that when the police arrived, Vickie and Gary constructed a story. They said their robber had driven a blue Ford van, when, in fact, he had driven a VW Bug the gray color of rain. They said he had been a Mexican or Cuban or something like that, when, in fact, he had been a skinny, balding white guy. They wanted their robber to go free. They wanted him to be an event that happened to them and then disappeared into the night. They wanted to keep this thing. It was their secret and they had survived it.

  * * *

  At the beginning of March, Gary woke one morning to see Barbara carrying bags of groceries into the house. “You went to the store?” Gary asked.

  “Citrus,” she said, “is so god-awful expensive in the winter months.”

  “You went to the store?” Gary asked again.

  She looked slightly embarrassed now, as if she suddenly realized who had been in control of the household all this time. “Yes,” she said. Her hair wasn’t done. Her face looked raw and weepy and the zipper on her pants was half-open. But there she stood with a bag of oranges and grapefruits so heavy, she needed both arms to hold it up. “I invited Howard and Dianne over for dinner tonight,” she said. “If you want, you can invite your little friend, too. I think we need people again.” That word little—“little friend”—was his mother speaking. It was her old adult way of seeing his younger world as harmless and diminutive.

  He wanted to tell her about her zipper. But he wasn’t sure he could take care of her now. She was piling fruit into the fridge and looked strong. He said, “Vickie’s her name.”

  “That’s a nice name,” she said.

  “You might not like her. She’s kind of bad. She’s a rebel.”

  “If you like her,” Barbara said, “I like her.” That was his mother, too—this stern resistance to disagreement.

  “Maybe,” Gary said.

  That evening, Vickie wore a T-shirt that said GIRLS KICK ASS on the front, and Howard said, “So is that supposed to be a feminist remark? Is it supposed to mean freedom or something?” Howard asked these questions in a tone of honest curiosity.

  “No,” Vickie said. “I don’t think so. It’s just supposed to mean what it says. What do you do to make money?” she asked. Vickie and Howard were trying to have a normal conversation. They were trying to take each other seriously, and it seemed to be working.

  “I sell paper bags and plastic sacks.”

  “He’s got this bumper sticker on his Lincoln,” Dianne added, “that says, ‘I have sacks appeal.’” They all laughed at this. It seemed funny to them, despite the obvious fact that it wasn’t.

  Dianne talked about selling houses, because she had just signed the papers on a house that afternoon. She seemed to like Vickie, though she obviously wasn’t accustomed to dealing with young people. “So is this your girlfriend, Gary? Are you two going steady?” Dianne asked.

  Gary didn’t know what to say, so Vickie answered for him. “Sure,” she said. “But that word’s not really used anymore. I guess you would say that we’re together.”

  Before dinner started, Vickie went up to Barbara and whispered in her ear. Barbara blushed and laughed, then fastened her zipper. Gary was grateful for this woman-to-woman gesture. It seemed easy for all of them to gather here.

  Howard looked self-consciously washed. He gave off an odor of aftershave and his clothes smelled like too much laundry soap. Barbara cooked chicken breasts with a sauce made from combining canned cream of mushroom soup and white wine. She wore her baby blue cardigan, though the buttons weren’t properly aligned. Evidently, her grief was still beyond buttons and zippers. “I thought we should feed you for once,” Barbara said to Howard. His food had kept coming all through February and on into March. Every afternoon, the pizza or burgers or chicken appeared. It was hard to ignore the person who fed you. It was hard for Gary and Barbara to keep thinking poorly of him.

  After they cleaned their plates, Howard and Dianne kept saying to Barbara, “You look good. You really do.”

  “Nonsense,” Barbara said. “I look stricken.”

  Everyone at the table denied this, even though it was true.

  When they finished eating their ice cream, Barbara looked at Howard. “Will you tell us something? Will you tell us what he said just before it happened?”

  Earlier that night, Howard had discovered two six-packs of William’s beer in the fridge and had helped himself. “Just one or two,” he had said. After his fifth beer, he became mournful and vulnerable. “Please, let’s not think about that now,” he said.

  “You’re making a baby out of yourself, Howard,” Dianne said. “Don’t get infantile on us.”

  “He didn’t really say anything,” Howard said. “I wasn’t looking at him at the time. I was looking down at my skis. I saw the little K2 insignia on the tips. Then he made a sort of sighing sound. I’m sorry, but I don’t think I could make that sound for you now. When I looked over at him, he was already gone.”

  Outside it rained. Gary thought the rain was repetitive and similar to all rain t
hat had ever fallen. Howard drank another beer or two and seemed to forget everyone else and wept. To his relief, Gary was able to pity him without disliking him. Just before Howard and Dianne walked out the door, Howard held on to the door frame and said, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

  Barbara said, “It’s okay, Howard,” and she seemed to mean it.

  * * *

  In March the world froze again. The air turned chalky and cruel, though the sun shone, so that the cold was bright and electric, like the inside of a freezer, everything stubbled and crystallized. Barbara walked through the house with intent now, her robe closed tightly around her. She went back to her job as a speech therapist, where she taught kids with impediments how to speak—how to be a part of a community of language and sound. Howard and Dianne came to dinner once or twice a week. Howard was quiet and more contemplative than he had ever been. Barbara didn’t allow him to drink in her house now. That was the rule, and Howard obeyed it.

  One afternoon, when Gary and Vickie were on Gary’s bed “trying things out”—this was what Vickie called it—Vickie discovered the balloon beneath his bed. They had been “trying things out” for a while now, though this time they had gone the furthest. Vickie sat astride him and put Gary’s hands on her breasts. “Kiss them,” she said. Vickie was very unafraid to say things. “Kiss them worshipfully.” Gary didn’t know what a worshipful kiss was, but she seemed to like his kisses anyway. She opened her mouth and made the sounds of pleasure Gary recognized from movies he had seen. He tasted a mix of salt and perfumed soap as he kissed her. “Relax,” she said. “The whole world does this.” Nonetheless, Gary tried not to think of the whole world. She was doing something pleasant to him with her hands. Then they sort of bounced around, until Gary wasn’t sure what was happening and lost courage. Vickie wasn’t worried. The first time doing anything was stranger than you thought it would be, she said. “We’ll get it. It’s like other things: It takes practice.”