Retribution

by John Fulton

  It would take months for her mother to die. Months and months. Carol was her name, and she’d been sick for years. She’d recently given up on treatment and decided that she wanted to be at home now, surrounded by her family. Her family wasn’t much—Rachel and Rachel’s father, Peter. And in the afternoons, when Carol called Rachel to her bed and they talked, Rachel felt both scared and shy. Her mother’s bed was huge and bloated with white comforters because she could become unbearably cold. Her father always made sure a vase on the bedside table was filled with fresh-cut flowers, so fresh that, at times, ants from the garden outside still climbed their stalks. On the wall opposite her mother was a small oil painting done by her mother’s mother, a woman whom Rachel had never met because she’d died in her fifties from the same kind of cancer that was killing Rachel’s mother. In the painting, a small boat sailed out to sea. “I wonder where the boat is going. I wonder what my mother was thinking when she painted that boat,” Carol said one afternoon.

  “I don’t,” Rachel said. This question didn’t bother her because the painting was so poorly executed that it had no perspective, no illusion of distance or space, no place to go. You just saw the flatness of the canvas and the obvious fact that the boat was going nowhere, that the boat was stuck forever in a bad painting.

  “I sometimes make up stories about where it’s going. I sometimes imagine that I’m sailing in it, that I’m twenty years old again, and that I can take only three or four of my most valuable possessions with me to a deserted island.”

  “Oh,” Rachel said, “that scenario.”

  “I’d take you along,” she said, smiling. “You’d be one of the three.”

  “You said possessions,” Rachel said. “I’m a person.”

  “You’re a difficult person,” her mother said. Then her mother looked at her with a familiar expression, which meant she had some motherly advice. “Why don’t you try wearing a little lipstick sometime. You’d be really pretty with a little color.”

  “I’m only fifteen,” Rachel said. “I’m too young to worry about being pretty.” She wished they weren’t having this discussion. Her mother, as Rachel could remember and could still see from photographs, had been a beautiful woman before the treatment had mostly destroyed her looks. Her face had caved in; her hair had fallen out. She wore a scarf over her yellowing skull and had a woman come every Wednesday and Friday to draw eyebrows on her face and do her eyes. “Besides,” Rachel added, “the nuns at school don’t allow it.”

  “Nuns,” Carol said, shaking her head. “I wasn’t so easily dissuaded when I was fifteen. We used to put lipstick on right after school and wipe it off just before getting home, so that our parents wouldn’t know.”

  “I don’t care about being pretty,” Rachel said.

  “You know,” her mother said, “teenagers are allowed to be a little bad sometimes, to be a little rebellious.”

  “That’s okay. I don’t need to act like that,” Rachel said. But she became suddenly curious about her own mother then. “Did you smoke and stuff as a girl? Cigarettes, I mean. Behind the school building?”

  Her mother smiled. “I don’t think I should say.” Then she took a drink of water and seemed to change her mind. She was still looking at the boat in the painting. “It was the sixties when I was a girl, and all the fun was just beginning.”

  “Maybe I don’t want to hear this,” Rachel said.

  “Well,” her mother said, “let’s just say that maybe I smoked a little. Just a little. I didn’t do anything dangerous.”

  “You had boyfriends?” Rachel asked.

  “Sure,” she said. “I had a few in my time. I was a pretty girl and very vain. No one was good enough for me. You know the type?” her mother asked. She was studying Rachel again, examining her face. “If you ever want to borrow some lipstick, Rachel, you’re welcome to go into my bathroom and take some.”

  “No,” Rachel said. “I don’t think so.”

  “It’s in the second drawer down. People like pretty girls. They get away with an awful lot, you know.”

  “No,” Rachel said again.

  Her mother closed her eyes then for a long while in order to concentrate. It was pain, Rachel knew. It sometimes sneaked up on her and made her incapable of anything other than feeling it, fighting against it. Her mother’s hand reached out of the covers and grabbed Rachel’s arm, as if holding on, and Rachel, not wanting to see the inwardness, the aloneness of her mother’s face, looked away and out the window, where the sunlight was broken into leafy patches by the orange trees in the backyard. She heard the roar of a Weed Eater. A bird. Someone shouting in Spanish. Her mother’s grip tightened, then released. “Gone,” her mother said. “Better.” She and Rachel looked at each other as if nothing had happened. They never spoke of the cancer, of the pain. “So what three things would you take to your deserted island?” her mother asked.

  Rachel thought about that question, and when not one thing occurred to her, she said, “I’m fifteen. How am I supposed to know?”

  * * *

  Rachel was on the photography staff for the yearbook and had been given the duty of following the sports teams, a task she hadn’t volunteered for. At the assignments meeting, Mr. Marcosian had just looked up from the piece of paper in his hand and directly at Rachel and said, “How about you, Rachel, for sports teams?”

  Matt Lieberman, a senior who had done sports for the last two years, made noises of complaint. “That’s my job,” he said.

  “Let Matt do it,” Rachel said.

  “I’d like a girl to do it for a change,” Mr. Marcosian said.

  The only girl on the photography staff, Rachel wanted to turn it down. She hated all the cruelty and prestige associated with sports, and all the big, stupid boys who did them. But she also hated to be the center of attention, and twenty other people were staring at her then. “Okay,” she said.

  Her first assignment was the cheerleading squad, fourteen girls, mostly juniors and seniors, whom she found one rainy day after school building themselves into a human pyramid in the Our Lady auditorium, with blue mats spread out beneath them. “Who are you?” Julie Turly asked. Julie Turly was the squad captain and had just attained the peak of the pyramid, balancing herself carefully on the backs of a dozen other girls. She was a beautiful blonde who drove a white convertible Rabbit. Her father was a plastic surgeon. He did breast enlargements, Rachel had heard. And Julie herself was rumored to have performed group sex with Jeff Montoya and Tony Green, two linebackers on the football team. Cruel. So cruel what people said about others. Group sex. What would you do with more than two people? What would just two people do with each other? Rachel hadn’t even kissed a boy. At the same time, she didn’t like these girls and almost hoped the rumor was true. “I’m from the yearbook,” Rachel said, pointing to the camera around her neck.

  “Smile, girls,” Julie said.

  As soon as she got behind the camera, Rachel began to enjoy herself. This was one of the strangest objects she’d ever photographed: a living pyramid of the school’s most beautiful and popular girls, dressed in red and gold, the colors of Our Lady, all smiling fakely, bulging eyes and stretched facial muscles betraying their real strain. “Hurry up, please,” Julie said through her smile.

  “A few more,” Rachel said just when Christi Howard screeched, then screamed from the bottom of the pyramid, and the sky rained red miniskirts and white sneakers as the girls, Humpty Dumpty–like, came tumbling down.

  Two days later, when Rachel developed her first roll of black-and-white film, these last pictures, she felt, were small masterpieces. They showed the girls broken down over the mats, on their stomachs, their backs, or on all fours, hands cupping the places that hurt most. Rachel overexposed their faces a bit, making them glow a bone-colored white, and touched up the dark backdrop of the auditorium until it became primitive and sepia-colored, until it shone black like night against a pane of glass, and Rachel’s squad of cheerleaders transcended their stupid tee
nage vanity in a ghostly chromatism, in which the viewer could barely see that Julie Turly was Julie Turly, that Christi Howard was Christi Howard, that Samantha Woolsey was Samantha Woolsey. They were all just black-and-white figures wearing miniskirts, hobbled and apparently in terrible pain. It was spooky, very spooky, and Rachel was pleased.

  “Look at these,” she said to Rand, who was still in the yearbook office, working on the computer, when she emerged from the darkroom. This was the first time she’d spoken to the quiet, skinny blond boy with tender acne and thick horn-rimmed glasses, who for some reason had caught her eye again and again.

  “Ouch,” he said. “Das schmerzt.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “It means that it hurts them.”

  “Funny way to talk,” she said.

  “I am coming from Germany,” Rand said, his face flushing red.

  “I didn’t mean funny. I meant different. I meant”—she felt herself straining—“nice. I’m going to start off the sports section with this one and call it The Agony and the Ecstasy: Girls Feel Pain, Too!”

  “What’s agony and ecstasy meaning?”

  “Extreme pain and extreme pleasure,” Rachel said.

  She saw from his eyes, watery and magnified behind his thick lenses, that he was thinking. “Die Qual und die Ekstase.”

  “Sure,” Rachel said. “I guess.”

  He wrote the words down in a small notepad. “Thank you,” he said, as if Rachel had genuinely given him something. “Agony and ecstasy,” he repeated.

  “Agony and ecstasy,” Rachel repeated after him.

  He looked at her picture again. “Why ecstasy?” Rand asked. “I don’t see ecstasy. I only see agony.”

  Rachel looked for herself and could only concede. “Yep,” she said.

  * * *

  Mondays and Wednesdays were gory, bloody days. They were driver’s education days. After school let out, Rachel would sit in a darkened room with other sophomores and juniors, including the German boy, Rand, and view the graphic footage of car accidents, which was supposed to scare her into driving safely for the rest of her days. She saw bodies decapitated by steering columns, heads bashed into red mush by dashboards, limbs shorn and oddly lying in shattered glass on the roadside. “Hamburger films,” she’d heard one girl call them. “Fast food.” They showed survivors, too: mothers screaming and holding their faces in the white halls of hospitals, a boy weeping into the camera that zoomed in on the burn scabs on his face, then on the bandaged stump of his right arm as he said, wiping away the tears with his remaining hand, “I was drunk. I never, never should have been driving.”

  One day in the darkened room, Rachel grabbed Rand’s hand and held on. He had hands, after all—fingers intact—and so did she. He seemed to stiffen, then relax, and Rachel felt him turn and look at her. But she stared at the screen, captivated, disgusted. “He was my son, my only son,” a woman said, suddenly unable to speak for grief. Paramedics pounded a needle into the bloody sternum of an accident victim. They beat at his stopped heart with fists. The camera fled upward, away from the scene and into a darkness gouged with the strobing shadows of red and blue from the emergency vehicles below. The lights came on and Mr. Bobs, the driver’s ed instructor and one of the assistant football coaches, stood in front of the class with his football whistle around his neck and his small flinty eyes shining black in the too-sudden fluorescent brightness. He blew on the whistle, and Rachel and Rand and forty or so other students gripped their ears. “Stupidity is death,” he said. “If you think you can outsmart death by being stupid on the road, then you really are stupid.”

  “Jesus,” somebody whispered behind Rachel.

  Everyone seemed to agree that Mr. Bobs was more or less despicable, with his whistle and his red coach’s pants and his super-short haircut, through which his pale scalp shone. He had a bony, bladelike face and wore the sort of small goatee that was popular now with the Our Lady boys and made the juniors and seniors who could grow one look slick and a little satanic, though it just made Mr. Bobs look boyish: a forty-five-year-old adolescent with a pointy spot of hair on his chin. He was horny, too. Rachel was sure that he stared at her breasts during her Wednesday driving lessons, though he pretended to be looking at her hands on the wheel, her feet on the pedals. “Good,” he’d say. “Excellent.” Adjectives that had really been meant, she knew, for her tits.

  “All right, people,” Mr. Bobs said now, “close your eyes. Eyes closed and heads down on your desks. Every last one of you.” Behind him was a huge chalky blackboard, above which the bland white face of a wall clock with a red second hand sweeping slowly around was the last thing that Rachel saw before sealing her eyes. “Now,” he said, “I want you to imagine your own funeral. The guests, the priest who christened you, the family friends, the aunts and uncles.” He paused, then said in a fierce whisper, “Your mother. I want you to take a good long look at her. I want you to see exactly what she’s wearing. Maybe the earrings you gave her one Christmas. Maybe the silly necklace you bought her for Mother’s Day, the one she wears once or twice a year just to be polite or just because she loves you. I want you to be inside her head and feel exactly what she feels as she weeps over your coffin. Do it, people!”

  He paused, and Rachel could hear his breathing, heavy and persistent, as if he’d just climbed a flight of stairs. The fact was, Rachel told herself, that Mr. Bobs was just sharing his torment with them. He was a freshly injured man and not the loud, hard soldier he pretended to be as he stood in front of the class. His wife, Mrs. Judy Bobs, a former English teacher at Our Lady, had fallen in love last spring with Mr. McGuan, the then Our Lady principal. They had fled the school in a bustle of controversy and were said to be living together in California somewhere. Now he was a small, hurt, horny, abandoned man, whose only solace in life was to stare at girls’ breasts and to torture and frighten the kids in his driver’s ed class. “One stupid, selfish prank from you means a life of loss for her,” he said. Rachel refused to think of these things. Instead, she pictured inside the warm, velvety interior of her head absolutely nothing, a dark void, over which she saw the needle of the clock sweeping round and round as she tried not to let Mr. Bobs’s words—dead, mother, funeral, coffin—puncture that deep black covering. But finally she could not resist seeing herself at her mother’s funeral, herself in a baggy white T-shirt and a pair of oversized jeans, looking a little formless in her too-big adolescent clothes, which her mother hated so much. Rachel wouldn’t even look pretty at her own mother’s funeral, though Carol wouldn’t be there anymore to say what she always said: “You’re hiding yourself. You have a nice figure. I can tell you do behind all those clothes. But nobody else can. Nobody can see how nice you are, sweetie.” It would be raining, of course, and her father would stand beside her in his dark suit, sobbing in the sloppy and terrible way that men do when they cry, loud and snotty and gasping for air. Rain water would fall from his matted bangs. Daddy, she’d want to say, but wouldn’t. She would not cry. Not one tear. Not one, she promised herself.

  “Okay,” Mr. Bobs said. “Open your eyes now.” When Rachel did, she had to squint at the brightness, and all she saw was Mr. Bobs, stupid Mr. Bobs, saying, “I hope you learned something. I hope you all now have a small idea of the pain you could cause.”

  * * *

  After the gory films and after the stupid lecture, Rachel and Rand walked outside Our Lady and sat over on the grass, still holding hands. “Gross,” Rand said. “Those films. I’m feeling sick in my stomach.”

  Gross was a word Rachel had taught him just yesterday. Rand was a fast learner. “You didn’t really imagine it, did you? What Mr. Bobs told us to imagine.”

  “I couldn’t not,” Rand said.

  “Your coffin and everything?”

  Rand was picking clumps of grass out of the ground. “Not a coffin. I want to be burned and put in a jar. What is it called in English?”

  “An urn,” Rachel said, hating this conversation.r />
  “An urn,” Rand said. “My mother was crying over my urn. And you?”

  “I was just in a coffin,” Rachel said, lying. “A big, stupid black coffin. It was raining.”

  “Yeah,” Rand said, “I know.”

  “Were there flowers at yours?” she asked.

  “I don’t think so,” he said. Then he seemed sure. “No. No flowers. Just my parents and two really old grandmothers I don’t know very well. And yours?”

  “Sure. Lots of flowers. I hate that man,” Rachel said. But she was already thinking about something else. “What if you could watch those hamburger films without being scared? If you could just do that, you might learn something. Not about driving, but about death.” She was thinking about a boy in one of the films who had been cut out of a VW Bug with the Jaws of Life. He’d emerged bathed in blood, with his eyes wide open, glazed, and just looking at the world, seeming, Rachel thought, to have apprehended something beyond the mess of bent metal and screams and pain. Calm, hugely round eyes.

  “You are not scared at the films?” Rand asked.

  “Yes,” Rachel said, “I’m scared. Definitely scared. But if I weren’t…” Then she said, “Do you believe that God exists?”

  “I believe that the man can’t know this,” Rand said.

  “That’s a funny kind of faith,” she said. A hot wind that smelled of rain and fresh asphalt rose up. In the distance, a thunderstorm darkened the sky. Fall in Tucson often meant sudden, violent afternoon storms. “I hate people,” Rachel said. “I don’t think I can hate people and still believe in God, can I?”

  “Maybe not,” Rand said. “But I don’t think you are hating people, really.”

  “Mr. Bobs,” she said. “I hate him. He’s a horny bastard, you know. He looks at me in the car during driving lessons.”

  “Horny?” Rand asked.