Retribution

by John Fulton

  “If Mom smells that on my breath,” I said, “this might be the last time we ski together.”

  “Who says she’s going to smell it?”

  “Who says she’s not?” I said, because he never seemed to think of that possibility. He always just did a thing and maybe thought about it later.

  He put the bottle away. “You’re looking better on skis. But you’re still afraid of the mountain.”

  “I’m not afraid of the mountain,” I said. “It’s just hard to ski in cruddy weather.”

  “You’re sounding like Beaty.”

  “I’m not Beaty,” I said. Then I surprised myself and said, “You don’t love Beaty, do you?”

  He laughed out loud. “Now you really do sound like Beaty.” I saw that he wasn’t going to give me an answer and I felt the awkward power of having silenced my father. He put his arm around me and pulled me into him until I smelled the coffee and liquor on his breath. “You’re a better person than I am, Malcolm.”

  “Why do you always do the same thing with women?” I said.

  He sat back on his side of the chair then and started rolling another cigarette. “I think I feel a little heavy weather coming from you, Malcolm.”

  “It’s not heavy weather,” I said. “I’d just like to know.”

  He laughed again, though it was a tired and empty-sounding laughter. “I’d like to know, too,” he said. Then he lit his cigarette and smiled at me as if trying to show me that he could still smile. “What am I supposed to say? I’m not proud of myself. I get tired of people. I just do.” Then he paused. “There are some things a person can’t help.”

  “You got tired of my mother?” I asked.

  “That’s ancient history, isn’t it, Malcolm?”

  “I guess,” I said.

  “Good,” he said, as if we had solved something. “It’s my problem and I’ve always had to live with it, even though I don’t like living with it. You understand?”

  “Sure,” I said, though I didn’t understand. For a minute, we sat without talking and just looked up the mountain as the clouds continued to clear and expose the unbroken white of the slopes. We could make out the tiny lift house in the distance now, its Plexiglas front shimmering in a brightness that hurt to look at. As we approached the top, the wind picked up to a dull roar, and I wanted to tell him something. I wanted to tell my father that Beaty was right about him, that he was full of shit, and I shouted it out then as we were putting our skis up and getting ready to dismount. But he hadn’t heard me, or chose not to hear me. He just gave me one of his crazy smiles, the wind blowing back the crown of hair that spilled out of his hat. “Let’s ski, goddamn it!” he shouted. And then we were doing just that.

  * * *

  My father traversed the eastern slope, a white dust rising behind him, and I followed, keeping my eyes on his red parka, until he stopped above a steep shoot about twenty feet across, unskied, and bordered on both sides by thick forest. Where the sun hit the snow, the white sparkled like a fine dust of diamonds, and I had to look away from that glare. “You first, kid,” he said. “Point your skies downhill and go. Can you do that?”

  I was tired of that question and leaned forward, kicked my skis over the edge, and felt the hill take me, felt myself slipping, then finding the ground, standing upright, making one and then another turn until I picked up speed.

  “Now we’re in business,” my father said. I heard his poles clicking behind me and then saw him next to me, rising out of his turns. The rhythm I had then was something new, and it seemed strange and uncertain to me, but I kept it. I held my skis out in front and felt a forward momentum and power that must have been natural to him. We were skiing together now as we came out of the shoot and over the top of a treeless bowl, from where we could make out the entire northern slope, white and unmarred, as it swept down to the tiny lift houses below and the flat, plowed parking lots where the few parked cars were as small as toys.

  But my legs had already begun to fatigue. “Stay with me, kid,” he said. He screamed cheerfully, and so did I, despite the fact that I was done feeling cheerful that day. Breathing hard, struggling against the strange, elongated weight of my skis, I looked over at him and saw that his shoulders were square to the hill, that his arms were tacking rhythmically at his sides, that he had already begun to break away from me. I turned wide and bumped into him. “Watch it,” he said, quickly regaining balance and speed. I turned wide again and hit him harder. “Christ!” he shouted. Our shoulders made a dull thud; our skis clattered like sticks. Before he could recover a second time, I hooked my arm around his neck and took him down with me.

  * * *

  When I stood up, I saw him laid out in the snow above me, his hands pinned beneath him and his aviator glasses and red hat resting on the ground at his shoulders. His chin was bloodied and his mouth was a red hole, from which the steam of his breath came heavily. He must have seen it in my face. “Am I hurt?” He spit, then looked down at the flecks of red in the snow.

  “Just your chin,” I said.

  “Is my lip still there? I can’t feel it.” He found his hands and touched it.

  “Don’t touch it,” I said.

  One of his poles was lost and we began digging for it. But his chin bled into the snow where we dug. “Christ,” he said. “I’m bleeding all over. What does it look like?”

  “It’s not bad.”

  “What happened? What the hell did you do back there?”

  I didn’t answer him.

  We left his pole on the mountain and I let him lean on me as we skied down. But he was shaken and fell twice more before we reached the lift house, where they gave him a handful of gauze to hold to the cut and sent us down the mountain on the ski lift. Despite the cold, his lip bled pretty good, and the blood got into his turtleneck and made him look messier and more injured than he was.

  “So,” he asked me again, “what the hell did you do back there?” His eyes were glazed and, for the first time that day, he looked weak, physically drained.

  “I just turned wide,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Why would you do something like that, Malcolm?” he asked. He had lifted the gauze to his eyes and was studying the blood that had frozen into the white cotton.

  “Do what?” I said.

  “You pushed me over, kid.”

  “No I didn’t,” I said. It felt terrible to lie to him. “I fell. It was an accident.”

  “I felt your hands, Malcolm. I felt you grab me. That’s not an accidental thing to do. Was it a joke? Was that it?”

  I looked at my watch without seeing the time. I didn’t need to see it. “Now we’re really going to be late,” I said.

  * * *

  The doctor at the main lodge was a huge bronze-complected man with green eyes and a blond beard and mustache. A small Christmas tree decorated with white strips of gauze, cotton balls, bandages, and a bit of tinsel sat on the table next to the entrance. Beaty and I sat in orange plastic chairs at the edge of the room while the doctor shined a penlight into my father’s pupils, then studied the cut. Both my father and I still had our ski boots on, and the room smelled of medicine and damp wool.

  “Looks like you took a ski in the face,” the doctor said. “What happened?”

  “My boy ran me over,” my father said. He sounded more startled than angry now. “He ran right over me.”

  Beaty started to laugh a little, but I didn’t say anything, and the doctor must have sensed something, because he winked at me and said, “That’s ten points for the boy.”

  Beaty laughed some more and looked over at me. “He feels terrible about it. Poor kid.”

  My father grimaced as the doctor applied a medicated swab to his chin. “It’s going to leave a pretty little scar,” the doctor said. Then he walked my father into the back room, where he was going to stitch the cut up, and Beaty and I were left alone.

  Beaty had gotten out of her yellow ski suit and looked good in her jeans and street shoes
and her white turtleneck. She smiled at me and said, “What you looking at, Malcolm?” I looked away from her and she said, “Aren’t you the shy one?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “For what?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “He’ll survive,” she said. “You don’t have to worry about him.”

  “He’s not hurt badly,” I said.

  “Oh,” she said, “he’s hurt badly enough. He’ll feel sorry for himself tonight and want all the sympathy he can get.” Then she thought of something else. “Your father and I are going out to dinner tonight,” she said. “He’s taking us to the Hotel Utah, to that restaurant on the forty-fifth floor. He reserved a window table for us. We’ll have a view of the city lights.” I thought that was a sad thing to do on Christmas Eve, but she seemed happy about it. “I like views. I like city lights. Your father is better than you think. He knows how to do nice things for women.” She smiled, and I understood that she had thought of something then that she couldn’t tell me.

  “I’ve got an idea for you,” she said. “I think you and I are in the same position, Malcolm.” I didn’t say anything to her, but I noticed that her hand was in my hair, stroking me, and had been there for some time without me thinking about it, and I sat there now, feeling the warmth of her touch and wanting to lie back and maybe sleep a little. “You know how we’re the same?”

  “No,” I said.

  “I don’t think we’re as guilty for the bad things we do. I think we’re only a little guilty. I think, to tell you the truth, that we’re mostly innocent. I’m not saying that you ran him over on purpose, kiddo. I’m just saying that if you did, I think it was a fair thing to do. He deserves to get a little bit of what he gives. That’s all.”

  I leaned into her, closed my eyes, and let her hold me then. “That’s okay,” I said. I felt like a small kid again, as if I were seven or eight and everything would be done for me. “It was an accident. I slipped.”

  * * *

  Ten minutes later, I was on the pay phone down the hall, trying to find a way to tell my mother that I was going to be more than a little bit late.

  “Where the hell are you?” she asked. My mother was the sort of woman who rarely used words like that.

  “I hurt him,” I said. “He’s getting stitches. There’s going to be a scar.” I could hear the relatives conversing in the background.

  She didn’t seem to hear a word of what I’d just said. “We’re having dinner right now and you’re missing it.” Then, in a tone of exhaustion, she said, “He’s going to get away with this, isn’t he?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “I’m sorry, Malcolm,” she said. “Sometimes I just want you to hate him as much as I do.”

  “Sure,” I said, feeling ashamed because I didn’t and never would hate him that way.

  * * *

  Beaty was wrong about my father. He didn’t seem to need anybody’s sympathy that night. He sat up straight behind the wheel, turned on the radio, and held an ice pack to his chin with one hand and drove with the other. The canyon road had a dangerous black sheen in the headlights and the radio warned of icy conditions, but none of this worried him, and we drove down the mountain without incident. The sky was clear and a hard, winter color of blue, in which the stars shimmered like foil. Below us was the flickering grid of the Salt Lake City valley, with the partial disk of the moon directly above it. Beaty had fallen asleep and curled into my father’s shoulder. I could hear her soft breathing beneath the sounds of the radio. My father put the ice pack down now and touched his chin.

  “Does it hurt?” I asked.

  “It hurts enough,” he said.

  Then he said, “So what did your mom have to say?”

  I looked over at my father now in the dark cab and said, “She said that she loved me but that that didn’t mean she had to keep forgiving you. She said she would leave that up to me, if I wanted it.” I didn’t know where I’d gotten those words, since they weren’t hers.

  My father handed me his lighter and leaned over toward me in the dark with a cigarette in his mouth that he couldn’t light on account of Beaty sleeping on him. When I lighted it, the soft orange flame uncovered Beaty’s face and she stirred a little and seemed prettier in that light than she usually seemed.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. He took a long suck at his cigarette and the inside of the windshield glowed a hot orange.

  “For what?” I said.

  “About today. About blowing up at you. Let’s just call it an accident, all right?”

  “All right,” I said.

  He looked at me then. Behind the charcoal of his cigarette, I could see the coarse pattern the sutures made in his chin. “I’m sorry that you’re going to be late.”

  “That was an accident,” I reminded him.

  “I’m still sorry,” he said.

  I didn’t remember my father ever apologizing for something beyond his control, and I knew then that he was concerned that I love him and not hate him. He must have understood that it was my choice, that I could do either, and that my hate could injure him in a way that maybe Beaty’s or my mother’s or any woman’s hate could not.

  “You want to smoke this cigarette with me, Malcolm?” he said now.

  “I don’t smoke,” I told him.

  “It’s not just to smoke it. It’ll be our peace pipe. How about it?” We had pulled out of the canyon now and were on the freeway, the road easy and flat, with lanes of reflectors stretching out for miles ahead of us, where the dark was shallow and silvery from the moon and from the city lights. He took his hand from the wheel and gave me the cigarette. It was the first time I would smoke and the first time I understood that my father would love me forever, as best as he could, anyway, which was better than he did with other people. I put the cigarette between my lips, startled because the filter was moist from his mouth—a sour, warm taste that Beaty must have taken into her own mouth whenever she kissed him. I thought of how she desired him then, desired him the way men and women desire one another—a kind of love I knew very little about except that it was dangerous, that people hurt one another and learned to hate because of it. I thought about that and I thought about how I felt safe with my father then, smoking for the first time, inhaling deeply, my eyes watering as I coughed up a lungful of burning smoke and as my father put his hand on my back and said, “Easy there, kid.”

  STEALING

  When the boys’ father came to pick them up at their mother’s and take them for the day, he was not driving his green Ford truck, but a red Porsche that could not have been his. “What do you think, boys?” His voice was huge with aggression and enthusiasm and with a sudden love for himself. He was wearing his monkey suit from the garage where he worked and had the smell of metal tools and the strong flammable odors of oil and gas and gin on him.

  Standing out on the lawn, the boys’ mother was still wearing her pink nightgown, ripped and coffee-stained on the sleeves. It blew in the wind and made her look fragile and discarded, like a candy wrapper. “What do you think you’re doing? That car’s not yours. Boys,” she said, “you’re not going with your father today.” But the boys were already in the car, their eyes looking out at the woman through the dark glass that was made for speed. When she advanced, their father pushed her and she tumbled over the burned yellow grass, and before she could stand again, the little green house had disappeared and the man and his sons were driving on the freeway toward the mountains above the city, then in and out of the tunnels that pierced the mountains, until the buildings and streets of the city were tiny, like sutures, in the valley below.

  The interior of the car had an expensive, feminine smell, a light perfume of leather and freshness. As the man drove, he talked about the car as if it were a beautiful woman who needed him to do something great, something heroic for her. “Listen to her purr, boys,” he said. “We’re not going to let her down. We’re going to give her all we got.”

&nb
sp; Their mother no longer loved the man. Both boys knew that, even the smaller one, who was not yet five. “Where are we going to, Daddy?” this one asked.

  “Oh no you don’t,” the man said. “I’m happy! Happy!” He said the word as if hammering on it. “And I’m not going to let you sour pusses ruin my fun, you hear?”

  The boys kept asking him that same question, but their father only answered them with the figures of their acceleration. “Ninety,” he said. “One hundred. One hundred and ten. One hundred and thirty-five.”

  The speed pushed the boys back in their seats and pressed against their skins like a firm caress, a preparation or a warning for something painful that would soon come. The windows began to tremble and the car beneath them shook as the man held it in a turn and the mountains and the other cars fell behind them. They had passed the timberline and huge treeless lumps of snow rose above them.

  “One hundred and sixty,” he said. He looked over and back at the boys now, trying to hold his speed. “One hundred and sixty-five.” His eyes were dipped inward and were a strange purple color of black. He seemed hungry. “You never went this fast before, did you? Did you?”

  RETRIBUTION

  I

  In the fall, when her mother began dying, Rachel joined the yearbook committee at her Catholic high school and met her first boyfriend. His name was Rand and he was from Germany. Rand’s northern complexion, blond hair, and arctic blue eyes were strange and out of place in Tucson, all red dirt and asphalt grids, big parking lots and little adobe houses. On the first meeting of the Our Lady of Lourdes Yearbook Committee, Mr. Marcosian, the U.S. history teacher and Yearbook Committee coordinator, stood up and said, “It’s our job to catch the personality of this year. Okay, people. Any questions?” Rachel hated being called “people,” hated the sound of that “job,” and thought about dropping out right then. But she needed something to do in the hours after school in order to avoid too much time at her dying mother’s bedside in the late afternoons. Besides, she had seen Rand, one of the boys on the layout committee, and knew she’d want to come back and look at him again.