Retribution (12 page)

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.

I lost courage then and opened my eyes. But a commercial had come on and the doorbell was ringing.

*   *   *

I spent the rest of that night answering the door to loud shouts of “Trick or treat!” and greeting bunches of little monsters—vampires, ghouls, hunchbacks, zombies—on my doorstep. At first I felt safe from them. I convinced myself that so long as I couldn't see who they really were behind their costumes, they couldn't see me, either. But I was clumsy with the handfuls of Three Musketeers and Milky Ways, now and then missing the pillowcases and plastic pumpkins that the kids carried their candy in. “You're drunk,” a man said. His little boy had a large trick eyeball molded into the center of his forehead and swung a toy ax in my direction. “You're drunk … you're drunk,” the boy said, mimicking his father and aiming his third eye at me.

After I closed the door, I went to the living room window and watched that man stop on the corner of my lawn, where, in the light of the streetlamp, he grabbed his kid's candy sack, dug out the candy I had just given them, and threw it out on my lawn. The kid kept screaming, “My candy! My candy! My candy!”

I poured myself another glass of Jack and tried to maintain my best holiday mood, though, to tell the truth, I was tired of the monsters coming to my door. The kids seemed too excited about dressing in their evil costumes and acting out their cruel urges. Of course, it was just a game to them, and there was—thank God—the occasional little girl who had chosen to be something—a princess, an angel, a goddess—prettier and happier than she could have been in real life. I favored these girls, giving the Tinker Bells and Snow Whites and Cinderellas and Princess Leias larger handfuls of candy bars and saying about their brothers and little boyfriends, “I don't see why they should get good stuff for being ugly, do you?” even though that kind of comment may not have been in the best spirit of Halloween.

F
IRST
S
EX

On his eighteenth birthday, Henry Black assumed that, despite the passage of one more year and despite his very recent and very first girlfriend, Carol Green, he would remain the same Henry Black as before: a gifted high school mathematician headed from Madline, Idaho, to MIT in the fall, an elder in the Mormon Church, one of only three Eagle Scouts ever to hail from Madline, a decent boy who, until that afternoon as he tutored Carol Green in math, felt he needed only the American ethic to get by in life—hard work, the God of his church, and love—though not necessarily the kind of love that Carol Green expressed when, in one seamless gesture, she knelt on the carpeted floor of her bedroom, undid Henry's pants, and gave him his first ever oral sex immediately after he had shown her how to solve for
x
and
y
in a quadratic equation. Henry Black had known of Carol Green at Skygate High ever since they were freshmen, had seen her smoking her Kool cigarettes out in the parking lot behind the school, had even—to his terror—thought he could just make out the faint seam of her vagina through the very tight jeans that she always wore. But they had not met until two weeks ago, when he finally approached her—she sat three desks over from him in Mr. Bunion's college algebra class, which, Henry knew, she was failing terribly—and offered to tutor her every day after school, not least because she resembled, despite the tight, tight denim she wore, his favorite movie heroine ever, Scarlett O'Hara, whom, since he was eight, he and his mother and older sisters had traveled once a year all the way to the Avalon theater in Salt Lake City, 120 miles over the Utah border, to see once more declare beneath a clod of upheld dirt after an hour and a half of war and love that she would never, never go hungry again, a scene that made Henry weep every time. Carol was the very likeness of her, with her silky brunette waves, her single mole, as fine and black as chocolate, on her left cheek, not to mention the Technicolor purple of her lips, which she got from always chewing on a wad of grape bubble gum. The first time she kissed him—just last week—with her deep-fuchsia tongue, she pulled away and took him in with her green eyes and said, “I've never liked a smart guy before. You're my first one.” Though he hadn't known how much she liked him until this afternoon when she distinguished herself forever from Scarlett O'Hara and pressed him up against her bedroom wall with one hand and helped herself to his privates with her other. He had never witnessed such ease, such simple, straightforward delving into the forbidden as he did then, looking down at what Carol Green was doing for him.