Lamb

by Bonnie Nadzam

  “I don’t know.” She squinted her eyes. “What kind of trick?”

  “Let’s scare them.”

  “How?”

  He took the girl’s bare arm just above the elbow and she jerked back, as if suddenly awake. Everything quickened. The sky seemed brighter, traffic faster. “Let’s pretend,” he said low, talking fast, already pulling her toward his Ford, “that I’m kidnapping you. I’m going to pull you, just like this—” She dropped the cigarette and tripped over the long ends of the sandals. “And I’m going to walk you to my car,” he said, pulling her along. “You’re not going to scream, but you’re going to look back at them. Okay? So they know you’re afraid.” Inadvertently the girl did exactly as he said. “Now don’t freak out,” he said. “We’re just scaring your friends. They deserve it, right? I’m not going to hurt you.”

  “No,” she started. “Wait.” He opened the driver’s side of the navy blue Explorer and lifted and sort of pushed her over into the passenger seat. It was all done in less than ten seconds. She smacked her head against the window and cried out.

  “I’m teaching you a lesson, right?”

  She put her hands against the inside of the window and looked at her friends, who stood frozen, the ends of their ponytails hung limp in the thin air.

  Lamb pulled the door shut and locked it and started the engine. “You’re not hurt, are you?” She shrank against the door, holding her head. “I’m taking you home,” he said. “I’m just taking you home. What’s your address?” She faced the window and pulled on the door handle again and again and again, knocked and knocked, and she looked back at him over her shoulders. Her eyes were huge. Then they were free and clear, out of the parking lot and onto the four-lane.

  “Where do you live?” he raised his voice, gained speed. “Tell me which way.” They passed a KFC, a BP. She told him in a trembling voice and he repeated it, pointing over the tops of the stores to three apartment buildings. The girl nodded. He scolded her the whole way, playing it angry. His hands were shaking on the wheel. The backs of his thighs wet. He yelled at her like he thought a father would have done.

  “I could be taking you somewhere to kill you. You know that?”

  She clung to the door on her side.

  “It was a dumb thing to do, coming up to me like that. Wasn’t it?”

  She pulled at the handle again and again.

  “Say something.”

  “I’m sorry,” the girl whispered. “Please.” She was terrified. Well, good. It was true, what he’d said. He could be taking her off to kill her. He could do anything he wanted. Her lips drew in toward her gapped teeth. “Now just stop it,” he said. “Just stop it.” And when he saw where she lived, near the freeway behind a gas station off six lanes of traffic—and for the second time in the minutes since she’d first approached him—a feeling of pity for her was eclipsed by the shock of knowing he, too, was on the losing end of all this. After all, here he was. It was a moment they were trapped in together.

  “Don’t let your friends push you around like that,” he said. She stared at him and tugged on the door handle. “And put some clothes on.” He looked her up and down. “I mean, what are you supposed to be? Who decided you were going to be this way—all stupid and … dressed like that?”

  “Please,” she whispered. She was white.

  “Now wait,” he said and pulled into the square lot before the entrance of her building. He unlocked the doors and she fell out. “Wait a minute,” he said. He had her purse and waved it. “Keys?”

  She crawled up onto her feet and stepped away from the car, a body’s length away, and looked at the purse.

  “Give it to me!”

  “Now wait a minute.”

  “Calling the police!” Her voice was shrill. Lamb glanced around. It was an accusation. A warning. But only because she was humilated. Lamb saw her taking it all in: his expensive suit, the Ford Explorer, the leather seats, his clean haircut, his smooth face, everything clean, everything expensive, everything easy. He handed her the purse and she took out the cigarettes and threw them at him.

  “I’m not a bad guy,” he said. “But I could have been.”

  Her eyes were lit up with hate.

  “Good,” Lamb said. “That’s good.” There was some little filament of heat in this girl that he had not expected, and he was relieved to see it, relieved to be surprised by something. By anything. Across from the apartment building a traffic light turned green and a car honked and the traffic moved again. A middle-aged man with a huge gut and a brown mustache stood at the glass doors watching them.

  “Maybe I should come in and tell your folks what happened,” he said.

  “Nobody’s home.” Of course they weren’t.

  “You have sisters? Brothers?”

  “I have friends.” She flung her words like stones.

  “That’s right,” Lamb said, nodding. “You think they went in that drugstore to tell someone what happened?”

  She looked at him, her eyes reducing back to their stupid blue. “No.”

  “Me either.”

  He watched her face fall. He knew what that was. He knew about the room she was shrinking into. “I could make up any old story to tell them,” she said.

  He thought about it. Imagined what the stories could be. He looked at her bare arms and legs, her stapled, makeshift tube top slipping down her narrow chest. “Tell them I took you shopping.”

  “Oh, that’s good.”

  “Okay, then.”

  “Okay. Bye.”

  They looked at each other a second, two, and she stepped away, slammed the door shut. She turned and walked up to the building. A latchkey kid. The sort who got C’s in school. Not a pretty kid, not an athletic kid, not a smart kid. Just a skinny, slow-blooming kid desperate to keep up with her friends. Quick to make new ones. Stupid. Maybe she’d learned something today. Maybe he’d done her a favor. What’d it matter? Girl like her.

  • • • • •

  That wasn’t kidnapping. It had been a favor, right? A lesson. He hadn’t kidnapped anyone. She was back in her apartment, having dinner with her parents, her girlfriends perhaps chastened of whoring each other out for laughs in parking lots. It wasn’t kidnapping when the kid ended up safely delivered home in better shape than she left in the morning. It was like he found a loose bolt out there in the world and had carefully turned it back into place. It was fine.

  It was six. He was back in the Residence Inn. Across the hall was another man, just like him. Both their beautiful houses for sale. Both their aging wives back on the market. He and this other guy—they even had the same haircut, the same belly just beginning to roll over the same beautiful leather belt. Why was it everywhere he looked he saw an incomplete version of himself? What was he supposed to do? Complete this stranger across the hall? Why was everything such a riddle?

  He was supposed to call Linnie, drive her north along the lake. Spaghetti. Ribs. And walk until they felt the bite of October coming over the water, her eyes an unreal green in the dark. An expensive and well-educated system of reactions and responses, and he knew them all. Had known them, frankly, since years before she was born.

  Damp from the shower, he sat on the edge of the hotel bed in his towel, traffic shushing and the light failing. There was room service: the Caesar, the salmon, the spinach omelet; the steakhouse nearby that would deliver; the sort of French café down the street that’d be empty—he could have a table alone and not be bothered. Or he could find someone to bother him. He took shallow breaths, his thoughts quick images of prepared food, of his father’s translucent hand, himself as he’d looked at nineteen, all his hair dark, Linnie’s young naked body from the front, the back, another plate of food with french fries on it, one image superimposed upon another until suddenly he felt the phone in his hand.

  He called Cathy. He didn’t expect an answer, but he’d hear at least her recorded voice. He wanted to hear that. But on the telephone was no recorded voice, no cheerf
ul greeting—only the broken succession of minor notes signaling that he’d dialed the wrong number, that the number had been disconnected or changed. He paused, closed the phone, and lay back, setting it on his bare chest. His face heated and reddened and he lay still, absorbing the shock of it. This was September. This was going to be their second courting period. He was going to win her back. Linnie would be off with some other slick young guy. Everything would be all knit up by Thanksgiving. The house would fail to sell, and everything back the way it was before. She would forgive him. She always did. They’d build a fire and wear long pajamas and drink tea and she would touch the sides of his face and he would be sorry. And she would forgive him.

  He sat up, opened the phone, and dialed the girl.

  “Linnie. It’s me. Yeah yeah, I know. I know.” He was whispering. “I’m sorry, baby. What? Listen. I can’t talk long. Cathy’s downstairs.” His eyes watered and the darkening hotel room smeared. “Oh, stop it. That’s not true. Linnie. I swear, okay? God’s honest truth.” He spoke very quietly. A man and woman passed outside his hotel room door. “Listen,” he said, “I’m lying here naked on the bed.” He gathered himself in his hand and asked her if she’d talk to him. Five or six minutes. And he promised her they’d have another weekend soon. Yes, Cathy would be going out of town, he’d get them a room somewhere, and he turned his head sideways to rest the phone against his shoulder and he took himself in both hands.

  After he hung up he turned on the TV, then off, and sat up with his towel in his lap. It was dark outside the windows now and he watched his naked reflection in the glass as he dressed. He went alone into the mauve and beige bar downstairs, for a drink. He had three. He couldn’t get the kid out of his head. He hoped he hadn’t hurt her. He hadn’t exactly been thinking clearly. But he hadn’t meant to hurt her. He was not that kind of man.

  • • • • •

  In the middle of the workday at the small firm where he’d worked with Wilson for the last nineteen years, Lamb took his father’s ball cap from the empty chair by his office door and left. He drove through the city, through the warm and thickening haze, returning to the same dim parking lot where he had seen the girl twenty-four hours before. He set himself at the bus stop and was not surprised when he saw her coming down the gummy sidewalk minutes later, in long sleeves and pants despite the heat. Somehow—how?—he’d known she would come. He always knew everything. Nothing in the world ever surprised him anymore, ever. Imagine that. Feeling that.

  “Did you come back for cigarettes?” he asked. “Because I’ve quit since yesterday. I’m on a new plan.”

  No response. Arms crossed, mouth a thin puckered line.

  “Shouldn’t you be in school?”

  “I left.”

  “Was that a good idea?”

  “None of them even called me,” she said. “To see if you’d killed me or what.” Her words made the air tight around them.

  Lamb frowned. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I really am.”

  She sat down on the bench, half an arm’s length away from him. “And after first period? Sid said hey, I heard about what you did with that guy yesterday. She said everybody was talking about it.” The girl looked over at him. “She meant you.”

  “How do you know she meant me? Did she describe me?”

  The girl rolled her eyes.

  “No,” he said. “I mean it. Did she get a really good look at me? Because in case you didn’t notice”—he turned his head this way, then that, so the girl could see his profile on each side—“I’m really old.”

  She almost smiled.

  “Listen,” he said. He scanned her up and down. “I’m glad to see you’ve covered yourself up.”

  She stared at him.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Tommie.”

  “Tommie?”

  “You want to make fun of my name too?”

  “It’s a beautiful name.”

  “No it isn’t.”

  “Sure it is.”

  She shrugged and hugged herself.

  “Listen, Tommie. I’m sorry if your friends are being nasty. It feels like I’m to blame, doesn’t it?”

  Nothing.

  “But look. Here we both are, right?”

  Nod.

  “Why did you come back here?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I thought about you yesterday,” he said. “I was worried I’d hurt you.”

  She stared at the curb.

  “Can I tell you something?”

  “What.”

  “I’ve never seen freckles like yours before. I apologize for staring.”

  “They’re fugly.” She glanced up at him.

  “Well. I don’t know what that means but I don’t like the sound of it. And I myself happen to think they’re striking. Stunning. And you know what else?”

  “What.”

  “I’m an expert on freckles.”

  She smiled. “Sounds like the kind of dumb thing my mom would say.”

  “Look at me. I might be a lot of things, but I’m not a liar, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “There’s precious little truth in this world, and I am one of its most enthusiastic spokespeople. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  He closed his eyes and tipped back his head. “I think,” he said, “there’s still some life running beneath these streets.” The girl said nothing. He looked at her. “Your friends are just scared, you know. Scared and stupid.”

  She shrugged. “Not really my friends anymore.”

  “Were they good friends?”

  “I guess.”

  “You’ve known them since you were kids? Little kids? You’ve lived here your whole life in this neighborhood?”

  The girl nodded.

  “I’m sorry to hear that.” He turned to her. “Look at that face,” he said. “Your face needs a line of broken-toothed mountains behind it. A girl like you needs a swimming hole. A river. Trees and clear skies. Ever go fishing? Or camping or hunting?”

  “With who?”

  “With anybody.”

  “No.”

  “Your mom buys you meat from the grocery store?”

  “Yeah.”

  “On little white Styrofoam trays?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Don’t say yeah, say yes.”

  “Yes.”

  “You’ve never wrestled an animal to the ground and cut out his heart and eaten him in the dark, by a fire?”

  The girl half smiled.

  “Did you ever go camping?”

  “Like sleeping outside?”

  “Like sleeping outside.”

  “No.”

  “What about Dad?”

  “Good question.”

  “Uncles?”

  “Nope.”

  “I’m thinking of taking a sort of camping trip.”

  “Oh.”

  “Did you tell your mother about yesterday?”

  “No way.”

  “You think she’d freak out.”

  “I don’t know what she’d do.”

  “You didn’t say anything because you were embarrassed. Is that it?”

  The girl shrugged. A bus sped up to the curb, brakes hissing and screeching. She leaned back from it. The tall paneled doors folded open. No one stepped on or off. The doors shut and the bus drove away. “What’s your name anyway?”

  He looked at her. “Gary.”

  “I’m glad it’s not Tom.”

  “That would be too weird.”

  “We couldn’t be friends.”

  He checked his watch. “Listen. I need to make an appearance at work again. You want some lunch and I’ll take you home?”

  “Yesterday you said I shouldn’t go up to strangers.”

  “But you just did.”

  “Oh.”

  “You’re a little stubborn, aren’t you?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Yes.”

  “You know something, you’re practically th
e only living person I know.”

  She scrunched up her nose. “What are you talking about?”

  “Come on,” he said “I won’t drag you this time. Your own free will. Let me get you lunch. It’s my way of apologizing if I scared you.”

  “You didn’t scare me.”

  “Yes I did.”

  “It was pretty stupid.”

  “You or me?”

  “Both.”

  “Smart girl.”

  “You’re not going to take me back to school?”

  “Not if you don’t want to go.”

  “Just lunch and home?”

  “Lunch and home. We’ll do a drive-through. Your choice.”

  “Really?”

  “Come on.” The girl stood. “We’re sort of getting to know each other, aren’t we?”

  At the drive-through he felt worse. It was the cheapness of the food, the unwholesomeness of it. He wondered how long the meat in her sandwich had been dead, or if someone behind the counter had spit in it, or not washed their hands before assembling it, and where the chicken had been raised and killed and by whom and for what recompense. The kid couldn’t know what she was missing, the depths to which she was being duped by a world she had no hand in making. She needed something else to steer by. Something other than this. A person who—as it turned out—had both the inclination and resources to do so. It wasn’t anything noble, or grand. He just wanted to do the little things for her, promise her a decent a meal someday soon. “With a glass of milk,” he said. “And grilled cheese and a fresh sliced pear,” he said. “How about that?”

  “My grandma used to make those. She called it toasted cheese. Cut them in triangles.”

  “Oh, that’s good. And did she ever grill it for you outside? Like on a little camping stove by a river?”

  “My grandma? Who never even wore pants?”

  “Someday we’ll do that. You and me.”

  “Good luck finding a river.”

  “I know some rivers.”

  He brought her back to the apartment building, pulled into the lot, and took his sandwich and carton of fries out of the paper sack. “Here,” he said. “You take the bag.” He nodded at the security guard through the windshield, a dumpy-looking kid with a smear of facial hair beneath his nose.