Fierce Pretty Things

by Tom Howard

  Genevieve finishes ringing up the sale, and she and Ruby are discussing some finer points of decorating when the tall blond screams from the direction of the Lego corner.

  Ruby finds Cam knocking his head against the wall, mouth stuffed with Lego pieces. There’s a shallow dent in the wall and maybe a smear of blood. No, definitely a smear of blood. Ruby scoops him into her arms and he spits out the Lego pieces and yells that he wants to see Booger-man now.

  “He shouldn’t be unsupervised,” the tall blond says, and takes a photo of the dent and the blood smear. And Genevieve says, “I’ve got bandages in the back,” with some real concern but also some doubt, clearly some doubt.

  “It’s okay,” says Ruby. “I mean, I’ve got tons of bandages in the car.” And this is true, but horrible, because who has tons of bandages in her car? Terrible moms do. Moms who need tons of bandages for their bloody, poop-filled kids.

  “He’s troubled,” the tall blond declares. “That’s clear.” Click.

  “Thank you,” Ruby calls out, not wanting to look like she’s racing for the door, but well, she’s racing for the door.

  Cam digs his fingers into the flesh of Ruby’s arms, and he leans in close so he can scream directly into her ear as they reach the exit: BOOGER-MAN BOOGER-MAN BOOGER-MAN BOOGER-MAN BOOGER-MAN! Ruby pushes open the door with her foot and Cam kicks her in the kneecap, and she screams back at him: “Okay-okay-okay-okay!” He kicks her kneecap again and goddamn that one really hurt and she yells, “Fucking fuck FUCK!”

  The door swings shut behind them. Cam freezes in her arms. Ruby knows without turning around that Genevieve and the tall blond are staring at her. In horror, she has to assume.

  After a few seconds Cam touches Ruby’s face. He says, voice solemn, “Booger-man?”

  “Okay, sure, yeah,” she says. “Okay, hell.”

  She snaps him into the seat and cleans his head and inspects the damage. He’s done worse to himself. She knows he’ll do worse to himself in the future. For a few seconds this thought just sits there in the front of her mind, quietly expanding to fill the whole space.

  Then it fades away, same as always.

  She takes out the notebook and scribbles head-banging thing, plus ate some Legos. She starts the Ghost and speeds out of the parking lot. A few minutes later she turns onto Vine.

  * * *

  Dale is stuck behind a gold Toyota going fifteen miles an hour. There’s time, he thinks. Still plenty of time to get to work. He’s only two miles away. No reason to—okay, twelve. Twelve miles an hour. Because that’s normal, to slow down like that on an empty road on a Saturday morning. Nothing strange about that. Not as if the driver is some malevolent force bent on making Dale late for work, ha ha! Just a totally normal person who has nothing against Dale, doesn’t know that Angel explained just this week that the next time Dale is late for work will be the last time.

  “You are already fired,” is what Angel actually said. “It is destiny, yes? We will let the rope play out, but you are already fired. I tell you this so that next time we skip this part. I will look at my watch like this, and I will shake my head like this, very sadly. And you will take off the Divine Hamburger costume, and you will leave forever. It’s better like this, yes? To have it out of the way.”

  Coop is curled up in the passenger seat, moaning and holding his stomach, his face pressed against the window. “If you could just maybe pull over,” he says. “I’ll throw up, then we’re good to go.”

  “Eight!” Dale yells. Eight miles an hour.

  They’re on Fillmore just south of Third Street, and coming up is a long light, a light that someone should really write to the township about. But they’re going to make it, they’re close enough now, Dale and the gold Toyota, that they can’t possibly miss the light. Unless, oh Jesus, oh sweet Jesus Christ. The light turns yellow and the Toyota’s brake lights flash, twenty feet from the intersection.

  “Thinking it was a bad taco,” says Coop.

  Dale closes his eyes.

  “Pesticides, then. They’re all over everything.”

  It’s occurred to Dale that his brother Cooper’s stomach problems are all in his head, since his brother’s stomach isn’t even technically a thing anymore. But then neither is his head. Coop drank a half-quart of antifreeze when he was seventeen and Dale was ten, dying the same way their father died a couple years before. Even at ten, Dale wondered why they kept storing antifreeze in the garage. Now and then after Coop died he considered throwing it out. It worried him sometimes that he never did.

  He punches Angel’s number. No answer. He imagines Angel staring at the phone and shaking his head at Dale’s number, very sadly. He leaves a message: “So hi Angel, it’s me. Dropped Teddy off with his mom this morning and, uh, there’s a big wreck, horse trailer, and there’s horse parts everywhere, all over the west side, fuck.” Delete. “Angel, it’s me, it’s Dale. Be there soon, practically on time I’m thinking, just got stuck at this train crossing? Again? So anyways, shit.” Delete.

  The morning started fine enough, with Teddy jumping up and down on Dale’s stomach to wake him up, and then they had screaming practice for fifteen minutes. Then they researched catapults. Then breakfast, and while they were having breakfast Dale was thinking about how great it was to be up early with Teddy, and he had to make a point of getting up early more often, even when Teddy was with his mom, and then he noticed the microwave clock blinking and that it said 7:15, and now that he thought about it, hadn’t he woken up at 7:15? And hadn’t they finished screaming practice at 7:15 too?

  The short list of approved excuses at Blessed Burgers does not include unreliable electricity. So Dale threw Teddy in the car with his uneaten pancakes stuffed into a sandwich bag and drove him back to Tammy’s, and on the way Teddy began to stutter. Dale pointed this out to Tammy, who said she was wondering when he’d get around to noticing his own son had a stutter, and Teddy overheard them talking and starting crying and Tammy said great, now he’s full of anxiety and shame because he knows his dad doesn’t like the stuttering. And Dale said well nobody likes stuttering, he just wanted Teddy to be normal was all, and Teddy ran off screaming and Tammy said you just lost yourself another weekend for that remark, Hamburger Man. Plus the support check’s late.

  Coop was there when he got back in the car. Which was great, and he loves Coop, and it’s nice that they’re getting close now since he mostly thought of Coop as someone who punched him for no reason every single day of his childhood. But Coop is dead, and he thinks it’s not a great thing that they hang out so much these days.

  “I could talk to Angel,” Coop says now. “If you like, I mean. Smooth things over and whatnot.”

  “Appreciate it,” Dale says. The light’s still red. He thinks maybe the driver of the gold Toyota has fallen asleep. Or died. It’s nine fifty-three. He pictures Angel staring at his watch, hand poised above a button marked Fire Dale. A weird button to have in the office, ha ha.

  “There are other jobs,” says Coop. “Gotta remember that, buddy.”

  “I just want,” says Dale, and then he doesn’t know what to say. Easier to know what he doesn’t want. He doesn’t want to lose another job. Doesn’t want to be the kind of person who gets fired from a job where he’s a dancing hamburger. Doesn’t want to let Teddy down again. Doesn’t want Teddy to get to the point where he isn’t even let down anymore, because he’s given up expecting anything from Dale anyway. Doesn’t want to start lingering in his own garage, eyeing the antifreeze.

  He wants the universe to conspire, just this once, to be merciful. But he suspects maybe that’s too much to ask for, suspects maybe it’s absolutely a bad idea to ask for that, especially out loud.

  The traffic light’s red eye stares down at him, unblinking.

  Dale imagines there is, somewhere, a cosmic reservoir of goodwill, of plain old good luck. If so, is it doled out at random by the universe, or is there some kind of karmic distribution system at work? He thinks he’s been pret
ty good. Or at least, not evil. It’s not as if he’s ever done anything really terrible.

  “Well,” Coop says, “there was the armed robbery.”

  Damn Lorenzo.

  Lorenzo’s job is to hang in the entryway of the restaurant dressed as an archangel. He greets customers by flapping his wings and saying, “Welcome to the Paradise of Beef!” When they leave, he says, “Have a Blessed Burger day!” Which doesn’t sound so bad, just to hang in the entryway for a few hours every day saying those two things, but the wings have a harness that digs into Lorenzo’s torso and cuts off his circulation, and there’s a heating vent just below him, so he sweats and chafes all day against the harness, and by the time his shift is over he’s soaked in blood and sweat and it’s dripping through the costume onto the floor.

  Lorenzo had the robbery all worked out. They’d go on a Friday night when Foley was working the register and Angel was sneaking off to his secret girlfriend’s house. Foley’s too nervous to press the panic button even during drills, and with Foley’s wife being pregnant Lorenzo figured he definitely wouldn’t be taking any risks. Originally Lorenzo wanted the two of them to dress up as mole rats for the robbery, because he said if they looked like mole rats no one would ever pay attention to their faces or notice any other details. Then he looked up mole rats and said they were pretty horrifying so they’d just wear stockings, as per standard robbery practice.

  They bought guns and stockings, and Lorenzo scouted exit routes and considered robbery dates. Dale, meanwhile, imagined terrible things. He figured it would go horribly wrong and the place would end up a scene of carnage. Many dead, with him standing there covered in blood and flesh and ground beef. So he stashed the gun in his car and hoped Lorenzo would just forget the robbery idea entirely. Then Teddy found the gun one day on the way back to Tammy’s place and put the barrel in his mouth. Dale took it away, dropped Teddy off, threw up a little, and ended up tossing the gun in the river.

  So there’s that. That’s something good that Dale has done. He has narrowly prevented Teddy from blowing his head off with Dale’s gun. Is that the best thing?

  The light turns green. The Toyota, amazingly, turns off.

  Dale steps on the gas and Coop grabs for a handhold as they shoot forward. Half a mile in two minutes. He can absolutely do this. He says thank you thank you thank you inside his head, and he feels a little like crying. Zooms through the next light, and the next, and it’s as if everything is falling into place, as if the universe has just decided it’s done fucking with Dale, at least for today.

  He makes the turn onto Temple and sees the gates coming down and the lights flashing, hears the train whistle sounding. And he knows right away that the universe hasn’t decided not to fuck with Dale. Fucking with Dale is still very much something the universe is going to keep doing, if it’s all the same to you. The train, unlike Dale, is on time. The universe is actually a little mortified, to be frank, that you’d ask it to derail a train for you, just to get to your little hamburger job.

  Dale’s car rolls to a stop. He’s one block from the restaurant. Above the speeding cars of the train he sees the trees rising up over Vine Street Park.

  “Not your fault the train showed up,” says Coop. “It’s like an act of God, I think, is what I’d argue.”

  Dale’s not thinking about the train. He’s thinking about what happened to Teddy’s face when Dale said he just wanted Teddy to be normal. Thinking about finding Coop when he came home from school, lying on the floor of the garage in a pile of vomit. Thinking about Angel. It is destiny, yes? It is better this way.

  “Not your fault,” Coop says again.

  At ten o’clock he steps on the accelerator. The engine roars with the car still in neutral, Dale’s hand on the gearshift.

  “So let’s just not be stupid,” says Coop.

  His eyes are on the trees above the park, sycamores and white oaks that he’d climbed in the days before the antifreeze. Sometimes he played this game in his head as a boy—reach the top and he’d get everything he could ever want. Toys, stacks of gold, a bedroom that looked like a spaceship. To raise the stakes he also imagined terrible things would happen if he didn’t make it to the top. He imagined he and everyone he loved would be punished—cursed, condemned to misfortune and unhappiness for all their days. Just a part of the game. Then he’d start to climb, and right away he’d be gripped with anxiety because of the curse he’d invented. When finally and inevitably he would tire, he’d hang from the branches with bloodied fingers, apologizing in his head to everyone he loved for blowing it and allowing misery to be visited upon them all. And then he’d drop like a stone and forget until the next time that he’d so casually and recklessly gambled away everything, every last thing, and lost.

  * * *

  “Park,” says Cam, when he sees the sign.

  Ruby doesn’t answer. She’s thinking about how a song can mean one thing because of where you were when you first heard it, how they become entangled, the song and that one thing, and they stay like that for the longest time, mixed up together. So that every time you hear the song again, you kind of have to think about that one thing. Even if it’s a horrible thing, and even if it’s a beautiful song.

  Like, for instance, maybe the song was a park.

  Like, for instance, maybe the thing was Uncle Ray. Not really an uncle, Cody used to say. Under his breath but she heard it, and she knew he was saying it to upset her but she didn’t get upset. Not really an uncle was okay with her. You couldn’t marry an uncle, or run off to an island paradise with an uncle, or even kiss an uncle. And she didn’t want to do any of those things, not exactly, not at eleven years old, but she wanted his attention and his affection. Wanted the gifts he brought her—her and Cody both, but always more for her, given in private, delivered with an offhand comment about just stumbling across this little gem and thought of my Ruby, with a wink to contradict the nonchalance and to secretly confirm that yes, the two of them really did share a bond, and who’s to say where it might lead them? And where it led them in the end was here, to Vine Street Park. Behind that pavilion right there. Beneath a brilliant sunlit sky. Oh, that sky. It was the sky that finally dashed any doubt she may have had about the rightness or wrongness of the thing, about the low rumbling of thunder in her guts, because what terrible thing could ever happen beneath such a perfect, azure sky?

  Anyway it was a long time ago, and Ray was dead. Never told anyone, but happy when he died. Sad that she was happy, that such a thing could make her happy. Wishes sometimes, when she wishes, that she could go back to a time when the sky was only a sky and the park was just a park. Wishes the park could be hers again, without being hers-and-Ray’s. Bill tried to take her here once. She said she didn’t like parks and he said who doesn’t like parks? She said it’s just a thing that didn’t make any sense about her, and didn’t he have anything like that about him? And Bill said yeah, probably he did.

  Her phone rings. Ruby looks down, sees the home number.

  “Shit,” she says. Too late, too late.

  “Shit?” says Cam.

  And then the old Ghost says, “Glub-glub,” and Cam screams in delight and Ruby steps on the gas to keep it from stalling. “Not here,” she says, “just please go please please please,” and now she can see the traffic light at Temple, and if she doesn’t have to stop then maybe she won’t stall.

  The light turns red. Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck. She’s barely moving now. Can’t step on the brakes or else she’s done. She’ll have to call Bill and tell him. He’s probably already heading out to the shed. He won’t get to wake up to the curtains and he won’t give her that flinch. Black day coming, Ruby.

  The light’s red but she doesn’t see any cars. Maybe if she just eases through, slow as a bicycle. Maybe just this once.

  “Red light,” says Cam.

  * * *

  It goes like this:

  There’s no sound at all. Just light and heat. And some pain at first, but it’s over pretty
fast. Dale goes through the windshield at sixty miles an hour, and the worst of the pain is in his head, which splits open in two or three places. One last tiny explosion inside his brain and then he’s gone, rising, and he looks down in time to see his body still flying through the air, landing in a heap about a dozen yards away from the crash. A blast of heat pushes him upward, and he spreads his wings to steady himself as he rises above the trees.

  Dale looks down, and sees all kinds of things.

  Sees Lorenzo, stashing a gun in his locker at work, a new plan already taking shape in his head. Sees Angel on his way to visit his wife in the psychiatric hospital. Sees Coop sailing past him, saying I’m sorry Dale, I’m sorry for punching you all those times for no reason and for drinking the antifreeze and you having to find me on the floor like that. Sees a man in pajamas stomping out to the shed in the backyard, sobbing. Sees Teddy sitting on the floor in his bedroom, surrounded by a protective ring of plastic monsters as the room fills up with sunlight.

  Now he sees a woman his age, soaring up from the wreckage. Clawing at the air, trying like mad to get back down to earth, and she looks to Dale like a cartoon bird battling against a hurricane. She screams someone’s name over and over, and Dale feels her fury and her helplessness and he understands that there’s a boy in the car and she’s trying to get back to him, but she won’t. The boy is already lost, and this hurts Dale a little more because the boy reminds him of Teddy. And then another blast of heat and smoke comes, and she’s gone.

  Dale is still rising.

  And now he sees Teddy and Tammy, and he’s with them both. The three of them are building a catapult, and he loves them and they trust that he loves them. And he’s never cruel or impatient or bitter. And every choice he’s ever made is the right one, and he’s never fucked anything up. And he keeps climbing even when he can’t climb any higher, even when his hands are bloodied and everyone has gone home and the last of the daylight has seeped from the sky. He never lets go. He isn’t cursed, and no one he loves is cursed. He is a good man, a kind man. And even when he makes mistakes, he fixes them. Before it’s too late. Always, please, before it’s too late.