Retribution

by John Fulton

  The balloon sat in the middle of his bedroom floor, having been jostled from its place beneath Gary’s bed. It had lost air. Without asking, Vickie began tapping the balloon with her hands, and Gary thought how easy it was for her to be in the world without having to know certain things that he knew. He knew what that balloon was. She didn’t. She tapped it until, finally, it evaded her and fell to the floor. “I feel like stepping on it,” Vickie said. “Can I step on it?” Gary nodded his head. Gary said yes. It was not a huge event, but it did seem like a necessary one.

  One nagging thing remained: a cardboard box full of William’s shrunken laundry. Barbara had given his other things away—shoes, boots, coats—but these things were ruined, and she couldn’t give ruined things away, she said. In the mornings, Gary saw the clothes in the hallway, sitting in a pool of sunlight. What these clothes needed was to be thrown away. But neither Barbara nor Gary could do that to them.

  Gary decided that he would try to give them away himself. The Salvation Army was downtown, and Vickie offered to drive him there. She was only fifteen, as was Gary, but edging up against the law excited her. She drove as she did other things, with an easy, adult intuition, one hand on the wheel while she tuned the radio into a country station. A man with a sad, dark pit for a voice sang, “Hold me while you love me, baby. Love me while you hold me.” Barbara was at the movies with a girlfriend that afternoon and Gary had taken the car keys from the top of her dresser. Outside, yellow sunlight pressed down on the white mountains and the icy roadsides. Vickie drove too fast on the interstate, reaching almost ninety-five in Barbara’s apple green Buick. “She goes,” Vickie said. “She really goes.” She took pleasure in this, while Gary worried. He was afraid of being caught. He was afraid—though he couldn’t say why—for the clothes.

  Vickie’s parking skills were poor. The huge green car slanted at thirty degrees from the curb. They had dented the car in front of them. They were leaving marks behind. “Oh God. Oh God,” Gary said.

  “Shush up,” Vickie said. “Nobody saw us.” Indeed, nobody had.

  At the counter where people handed clothing in, the homeless loitered in their knit hats and layered sweaters and coats. They drank coffee out of Styrofoam cups and Big Gulps from the 7-Eleven down the road. Homelessness, Gary thought, was a look that smeared itself onto you. He wanted to believe that all these people needed was a good bath. He wanted suffering to be simpler than it was.

  “We can’t take these,” the man at the counter said. He had a carbuncular nose shot through with burst vessels. “People think that we’ll take anything they want to give us. That’s just not true.” Gary sympathized with this man: Receiving charity all day must make you grumpy. But he also remembered the robber—the urgent need of the robber to take. What Gary felt now was a ferocious need to give. Had he had a gun, he would have made this man take his father’s clothes. He would have said, Take them or die, motherfucker.

  Instead, Vickie and Gary placed the box on a nearby corner and sat at a Wendy’s across the street, drinking coffee and smoking and watching the box to see what the world would do to it. The plastic caps of their paper coffee cups said, CAUTION: CONTENTS MAY BE EXTREMELY HOT. Even coffee cups told you to be afraid. On one flap of the box, Vickie had written in ballpoint pen, “These clothes are for you. Please take.” Gary thought of those strange words: How odd for a box to pretend to say something like that.

  For a long time, nothing happened. People walked around the box. Finally a teenage boy dressed in army fatigues rummaged through it and took a shirt and some pants. He seemed to have friends, who came after him and rummaged, too. The box attracted a circle of young people. Gary felt that some distant desire—not quite his own—had been satisfied now. He felt the world expand a little. Vickie said, “See? Sometimes things just take care of themselves.”

  They drove away in the green Buick that afternoon, leaving no note on the dented car in front of them. They had done well. They had left behind exactly what they had needed to leave behind. “Ha!” Vickie said, accelerating past a green light, the wheels of the Buick squealing, and the force of the engine pulling Gary back in his seat as the huge car lurched forward.

  VISIONS

  It was Halloween and I was about to lose my fourth job that fall, this one as the pool man at the YMCA in Salt Lake City, when a little girl, the first one to jump in after the five P.M. cleaning, came out screaming and seeing nothing but white. She wore a blue one-piece suit with cartoon figures of Donald Duck printed all over it. She was a little blond, blue-eyed girl, a darling little girl, I guess you’d say. I’d never been a genius at math and I’d gotten the ratios wrong. I had a drinking problem, too, and, earlier that day, had taken a quick afternoon break at My Ex-Wife’s Place, a bar about a block away from the Y on State, where I’d put down a few doubles, and gotten back to the pool feeling pretty good and just in time to do the five P.M. cleaning. The paramedics came and pinned down the girl, who, until then, had been running helter-skelter through the arms of screaming mothers. They stuck a needle in her and, in seconds, she lay there at peace, her eyes opened in this glassy stare while the medics waved their hands in front of her. “How many fingers? How many fingers?”

  I kept saying, “Three … three fingers.” But she didn’t say anything.

  “Goddamn you, Mitchell!” Lutz, my boss, said. He’d taken me into his office and was throwing one of those round lifesaver doughnuts into the blue tile wall. Throwing and throwing it. A paper mobile of smiling skeletons—Halloween decorations—hung from the ceiling. “It’s our asses, you know.”

  Outside the office, the little girl’s mother beat at the glass window—the kind with wire mesh run through it—and screamed, “Bastard! Bastard!” with her eyes pushed up to the window, looking at me through the little wires. I said, “Tell her I’m sorry. Will you tell her I’m sorry?”

  Lutz said, “You are sorry, Mitchell,” though, of course, he’d meant a different kind of sorry.

  * * *

  When I got home, my boys were beating the little white things out of an old beanbag chair, and my wife smelled of fish from the tuna casserole cooking in the oven. I turned the oven light on and looked through the little window at the casserole. It was bubbling on top. I got the dishes out and began setting the table, first the plates and napkins, then the silverware. I hoped doing a few simple tasks would save me.

  I’d always thought of blindness as being in the dark. But this little girl saw a light that she couldn’t look into. It was a temporary condition, something the chemicals had done to her, though I didn’t know that then. I imagined her spending the rest of her life in a universe of scorching light. I imagined how the world would flay her every time she opened her eyes.

  My wife said, “The school counselor called about Jordan today. He bit another boy on the face and the boy bled. The counselor says that Jordan is angry about something. The counselor wants to know if everything’s all right at home. The counselor asked, ‘Is everything all right with you folks at home?’” She was shaking a metal serving spoon at me. She must have thought I’d been drinking, the way she looked at me then. The girl with the Donald Duck suit was still screaming in my head. Then I noticed that I had a bottle of Jack in my hand and I remembered how I’d driven from the pool to the liquor store and then home. I remembered how Jack, not the whiskey but the clerk at the liquor store, whom I’d gotten to know pretty well, said, “Up to no good on Halloween, are ya?” and how I’d hated him for saying something that was truer than he knew. I lifted the bottle up between my wife and me now, just to let her know I wasn’t trying to hide anything.

  “Something happened,” I said.

  “You’re so talented,” she said. “You’re so goddamn talented, Mitchell.” This was how Jean referred to my drinking—“my talent,” she called it. It was one of those words that came from her knowing me a little too well and not liking what she knew about me.

  “I blinded a little girl today.” I’d had enough
to drink by then to be truthful.

  She said, “What?”

  I explained it to her as best I could and got choked up and started saying things that didn’t need to be said. “She was wearing this blue swimming suit with little pictures of Donald Duck on it, you know.”

  Then my wife said what I was thinking. “That little girl,” she said. “That poor little girl.”

  I looked down at the floor. The yellow linoleum seemed to teeter. I guess I was learning to what degree bad things could happen to me. On the refrigerator door was a picture my younger boy, Powell, had drawn some months ago. It said “DAD” on it. My portrait had a huge lopsided head and a body of squiggly blue lines with a pulpy gob of red crayon in the middle of my chest that was supposed to be my bleeding heart. He knew me. I saw that my little boy knew me.

  Jean began throwing things into suitcases—her clothes, some towels, some of the boys’ clothes. In between packing things, she said, “You’re just one stupid tragedy after the next, Mitchell.”

  I said, “Jean, honey, look at me.” She didn’t. “I don’t want to hear that you’re leaving me again.” She had left me before, though only for an afternoon or an evening, and she had never packed an actual suitcase.

  “Think of that little girl.” She said that twice, first in a voice that was sad for the girl and then in a voice that was furious at me.

  “I think of her,” I said. “I think of her. I do, Jean.”

  She gripped Powell’s stuffed mule—its name was Heehaw—by the muzzle and shook it at me in a way that looked painful to my little boy’s toy. “This time I’m really leaving you, Mitchell.”

  I said, “What do you need Heehaw for? Heehaw can stay here.”

  “I don’t need Heehaw,” she said. “Your little boy needs him.”

  “But we’re getting better,” I said. “Aren’t we?” This was how we’d always spoken of my problem. We said it was “ours” and that “we” had to deal with it. I liked this way of speaking about it, because things felt like they were being worked on and getting done with two of us putting out the effort.

  But now she said, “We … we!” in a tone of voice I didn’t like the sound of. She threw the stuffed animal into the suitcase and closed it. “You still have your eyes, Mitchell, and that little girl doesn’t.”

  “What do my eyes have to do with this?” But right after I’d said that, I understood her point. “I’d give her my eyes if I could. Really, Jean. I’d give her my eyes. In a minute.”

  Jean held the keys to the Ford truck—our only vehicle—fisted up in her hand. Outside the weather was white and colorless and I felt the evening coming on and didn’t want to have to be the one to stay, to walk through the quiet rooms afterward, alone with what I’d done that day. I tried to pry the keys from Jean’s fist, but she was angrier than I was, and that made her strong. When I finally got the keys, she rode me piggyback down the hall, digging her nails into my neck and kicking my sides with her pink Keds, saying, “You … you … you!” The boys were watching a World War II film. Cannon fire and the choppy sounds of Japanese screamed through our house. When we got to the living room, they turned away from the set and looked at us. Behind them, a Japanese Zero crashed into the sea and their war movie came to a moment of peace in which nothing but ten or fifteen seconds of endless ocean—water and no land as far as you could see—glowed from the screen, so that the air in the darkening room was a fissured, aquatic blue. Powell started bawling and I wanted to calm him down, because I had decided to believe that all of this was going to blow over in a few minutes and we’d be into that casserole.

  “Nothing to worry about, pal,” I said.

  Jean said, “Turn around and watch TV.” They did. She hiked her knees up and pressed them into my ribs, and her nails were still doing a hell of a job on my neck and shoulders. I used the walls of the entryway to try to get her off, but she stayed on until I fell over on the front lawn, where the keys rattled across the brown grass and she scooped them up, brushed the leaves off her jeans, and went back in for the suitcases and the boys.

  I rolled onto my back and saw the chalky sky through the black branches of the elm and started to remember the little girl again and how she hadn’t been able to see the fingers that the EMTs had held up to her and how I had seen them so clearly—three fingers with wrinkled knuckles and brief curls of dark hair growing from the wrinkles—three, exactly three.

  Powell walked over to me and I looked at his blue sneakers, then up at him at this strange angle that made him seem giant, with a large sloping upper body and a head and red face the size of a man’s. He didn’t look like my little boy up there. “Daddy,” he said. “You did something wrong, didn’t you?”

  “Hey, trooper,” I said back to him. His mother hurried by and swooped him up in her arm. “See you soon, little guy. Maybe tomorrow,” I said.

  “No,” his mother said. “Not tomorrow.”

  “He did something wrong, didn’t he?” he asked his mother now.

  I heard Jordan say, in a voice that was pretty angry for a twelve-year-old, “He’s drunk. He’s just drunk.”

  “Don’t use that tone with me, wise guy,” I said, trying to pick myself up off the ground.

  “What did he do wrong?” my little boy asked again.

  I was still trying to stand up.

  “We’re not going to talk about it now,” their mother said. She was tossing my belongings out of the truck cab—a plastic cup, some Coke cans, bottle tops, and a few empty packages of Camels. The wind rose and my things skittered down the street and into the neighbors’ yards. By the time I was on my feet again, my family had already driven down the street and around the corner, on their way to Jean’s parents, who lived on the other side of the valley from us.

  “All right, folks,” I heard the TV say from inside my house. Dusk had come and there was something shabby and unclean about the half-light. All at once, the night seemed to swirl downward like the rush of dirty water down a drain and the windows of the neighboring houses went inward with a clean yellow glow that pulled at you with warmth.

  Hal, my next-door neighbor, walked out of his front door wearing a dark, furry costume, carrying his little girl in one arm and what looked like some sort of head in the other.

  “Hi ya, Mitchell,” he said.

  Janice, his wife, walked out behind him, a husky woman dressed in the black garments of a witch. Her face was large and greasy and not very attractive. “Hi ya,” she also said. They had probably heard or seen some of what had just happened to me and seemed awkward and reticent.

  “On our way to the church Halloween party,” Hal said. “Bob for apples, you know.”

  The little girl in Hal’s arms was dressed in a pink bodysuit and a hood topped with two small animal ears. I guessed she was some sort of rodent—a rabbit, a mouse. The porch light fell over her face and glowed there like a nimbus, an aura. “I don’t like him,” she said, obviously meaning me. “His face is dark.”

  “Shush,” her father said. Then to me: “Kids … kids.” I had no idea what she’d meant, though I felt it—a darkness, some sort of hideous bruise or filth over my face, a mark of what I had become that day, which maybe only the kid could see.

  “My husband’s an ape this year,” Janice said.

  He lifted up the head of that animal on his fist. “See?” he said.

  “I see,” I said, not knowing how to continue a conversation that had started that way and beginning to think that, as bad as my life was, I wouldn’t want to be one of them, though that certainly didn’t mean I wanted to be me.

  I got away from them when the phone rang inside my house. “I’m still at the office,” my boss said. His voice was calm. “I just want to warn you that we’re going to file negligence charges against you, Mitchell.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “You want to know about the girl?”

  “Know about her?”

  “How she’s doing,” he said.

  “No
,” I said.

  “Well, she’s fine,” he said. “We’re still going to fire your ass, Mitchell. But they rinsed the stuff out of her eyes and she sees as well as she ever has, all right?”

  I said, “Sure … sure,” though what he had said didn’t register with me then and wouldn’t register with me until the next morning. Still dressed in my pajamas, I would go out to the garage to dig in the toolbox for a flask of whiskey I remembered hiding once. I pulled out screwdrivers and pliers and a large hammer, but no whiskey, none. Thirsty as hell, I recalled what Lutz had possibly said the night before. I called him up that morning and he said, “Yeah, that’s what I said,” and I was no longer the man I thought I had become the day before. I was like Scrooge on Christmas, only it was Halloween, and I had gotten to see what I might have become and now had a second chance, though what I really wanted then was another drink, a thing I wouldn’t stop wanting until I found out Jean had left me for good and I could visit my kids only if I sobered up, which I finally did.

  But that night, I didn’t know any of this. I had still blinded a little girl. Outside, trick-or-treaters walked through the grainy light of streetlamps accompanied by adults because the year before a boy of eight had been doused by gasoline and lit up only a mile away from our neighborhood, and that frightened people. Jean had been pretty well prepared with six bags of those bite-sized candy bars and I poured the candy into bowls, fixed myself a tall glass of Jack, and sat down in front of the TV. I had decided to watch it with my eyes closed because I wanted to make myself suffer the darkness that I had put that little girl in. I was confused and drunk and I wanted to feel like a better person somehow, the kind of person who struggles to understand the pain he causes others. I knew that sitting in front of the TV with my eyes closed was not a large enough gesture and would do nothing to save me from what I’d done, but I didn’t know what else to do.

  I leaned my head back and felt the darkness cover me like a blanket, lush and heavy from all the liquor I had drunk that night. It pressed thickly against my face, as if it were shaping me and my face was taking on that strange mute aspect of the blind, who never see themselves. I forgot my eyes and I thought, Yes, yes, now you’re blind, Mitchell. Now you’ll never see again. I heard a storm blowing from inside the TV and the sounds of waves and a man’s voice, shredded like a rope about to break, calling another man’s name. “Charlie! Charlie!” it called.