Retribution (4 page)

“I think we should talk,” I told her. “That's why we came on this trip together.”

She said, “I'm tired, Gordon. Just give me a little time.” She dozed off and I watched her sleep. Her face was soft and beautiful until it began to twitch in a dream. Ahead, a dark blue storm built up. By the time Ruby woke, the storm had cleared and the land was mute and colorless with new snow. I imagined looking down on the red dot that was us breaking through the silent white plains of America. This gave me a large God feeling. But that was lonely. So I looked into the future and saw Reno—the felt tables and the whirl of slot machines. Blackjack dealers stood behind their chips, their eyes feline, like dark gems, and when they looked at you, your future felt small. But I remembered
chance.
I remembered that anything could happen in my country.

“Tell me something, Ruby,” I said. “If I were a billionaire, would you marry me?”

She blinked at me slowly. Her eyes were still stupid with sleep. “I had scary dreams,” she said. “Please don't be an asshole, Gordon.”

So I gave her a few more seconds to recover. “I just want to hear the truth of it from you, hon. That's all.”

She sighed and pulled up a fallen bra strap from inside her shirt. She was fed up with herself and didn't try to hide it. “I always fall for assholes. I don't know why, and there's nothing I can do about it, but I always end up with the assholes. And if an asshole had money, that might make him a little less of an asshole. You know what I mean, Gordon?”

What I loved about Ruby was the way she accepted things. She bent to the world and made me feel less anxious about trying hard. I hated to try hard. It wore me out and made me angry at everything. And I loved the way that she could dislike herself with such ease. Why wouldn't she have me? Why wouldn't she take me and give me children and a gentle future and something to work hard for?

“Like about how much do you think I would have to have to be less of an asshole?”

“Oh, Gordon, don't make me answer questions like that.”

But I acted vulnerable and said, “Please, hon. I'd just like to have an idea of what your needs and wants are.”

“A million,” she said. “Maybe a little more or a little less. I don't know.”

I put my sunglasses on and the world turned three shades grayer. I wanted to hide in the dark for a while.

We had been wrong about Reno: It was farther than we'd thought—still hundreds of miles down the interstate when we reached the steak house called Mom's, where the thing that I'm going to tell about happened to me. It was late afternoon and more bad weather had lumped up to the west and was moving in on us again. Inside the restaurant, candles in red glass jars shed a bloody light over the tables. Thick burgundy carpet covered the floors and walls. A huge velveteen depiction of a bullfight hung above the cold black pit of the fireplace. It was a dark, tender interior, like the inside of somebody's stomach. Except for a small family eating at one of the booths—a middle-aged man, an old woman, and a little girl—the restaurant was empty. As we passed the family, the girl looked up at me. Her eyes seemed dark, without any whites in them. We ordered steaks and scotch from a young blond waitress whose breasts were unpleasantly large, dangerously mounted on her small body, giving her a lopsided, unstable look. I felt bad for her and tried not to notice.

“Have as much scotch as you want, honey,” I said. “After this, we're going to find us a Super-Eight and take the Jacuzzi suite just to make things special.” I wanted her to look forward to a mildly drunk evening—just drunk enough to make us happy and to make our mood sexy. “We'll be good to each other tonight. I think we owe it to ourselves.”

But Ruby was already on her second scotch, and it was starting to make her mean. “Don't think I don't see how you're looking at our waitress, you bastard.”

“It's not what you're thinking,” I told her. “It's just that—she's so—you know.…”

“It's just that you want to bang her, Gordon, isn't it?”

“Jesus, Ruby.”

A few booths away from us on the other side of the aisle, the man was trying to feed the old woman. “Come on, Mother, you've got to eat your meat. You haven't taken two bites.” He had cut her steak into tiny pieces and lifted the fork to her mouth. “Open up, Mother. Please, Mother.”

“The problem with you is that you're not even human, Gordon. Look at me when I'm speaking to you. You're not capable of tenderness or care. You're not capable of basic, human things. You know that?” Ruby was drunk in a very unattractive way. The word
bitch
flashed through my mind again, but I told myself that I loved her and that everything would be all right if I could somehow convince her to marry me.

“You've got to eat. If you don't eat, I worry. All you do is make trouble for me. Now open up.” The man seemed desperate, and I wanted that old woman to eat. I wanted the family to sit in peace. I thought that was very little to ask. I thought that the day could give me at least this one thing that I wanted.

“Where are you, Gordon?” Ruby held her head sideways in a hand above her drink. “You're sitting across from me, but you're somewhere else. You're not here, are you?”

I said, “I'm here. I'm here.”

Our waitress came and placed our steaks in front of us and then stood back gazing at me. She wore this fearful, excited look. “You're Barry Manilow, aren't you?” I didn't say I wasn't. Ruby laughed in my face, but the waitress kept looking at me in a way that made me feel admired by a whole world of unknown people. I signed a menu for her. When she read my signature, she said, “You spelled your own name wrong,” and she walked away, knowing that I was a liar.

“You poor thing, Gordon. You're so desperate.” Ruby laughed and cocked her finger at me, which was her way of saying she had you. “It's those sunglasses. They make you look less worthless, Gordon. You could almost be a famous person.”

“Look, Ruby, I don't need to hear this kind of talk from you right now. I'm trying to feel good about myself, and you've got me all wrong. I care for you, hon. Give me a little credit, all right? Now let's not think about the past. Let's think about right now. Let's be decent to ourselves and have a good time.” I put out my hand. I wanted us to shake on it.

“Jesus, Gordon. You sound so sappy.”

I stood up. “I have to take a piss, all right?”

The bathroom was small, lighted by a naked bulb. I stood above the toilet in the smell of urine and ammonium chloride, holding myself and slowly realizing that nothing was going to come. It was going to be an unsuccessful piss. Across from me, in a cracked mirror, I saw that Ruby was right about the sunglasses. There was something suddenly gorgeous about my jaw, something valuable and glistening about the lower part of my face now that the upper part was canceled by two chilly lenses of mirrored glass. I got that God feeling again—powerful and distant—and kept it as I walked back into the restaurant and sat down across from Ruby. “I'll be whoever the hell I want to be,” I said. “I'll be Barry Manilow. I'll be anybody I want.”

Her face had a happy, conniving expression, as if she knew a hell of a lot more than I ever would. “Our neighbors heard the little exchange with the waitress, Gordon. Only they didn't hear the last part.” She laughed. “They just heard that you were famous and they want you to sign their napkins or something.”

I looked over at them and saw the man motioning and waving for me to come join them.

“What you waiting for, Gordon?”

“All right,” I said. “You want to come with maybe?” I hated to meet new people alone.

“It's all yours, star,” she said, cocking her finger at me again.

I chased a bite of steak down with some scotch, then got up and left Ruby.

“Hi,” I said.

We shook hands, and before I could say anything, he lowered me down next to him in the booth. He was a little overweight, balding—his naked pate shone like polished copper in the red light—and he smelled of the steak he was still chewing as he spoke to me. “So, we heard that you were Barry Manilow.”

I didn't say anything.

“We really appreciate you coming over here to talk to us.”

The girl sat across from me, holding a naked Barbie doll in her arms. She might have been five. She said she had met a famous person in a restaurant before—Ronald McDonald. He had given her a coloring book. Did I have anything to give her?

I put on a fake smile. “I'm sorry,” I said. When her face went sad, I pulled out a dollar bill and gave it to her.

“Hey,” the man said. “You don't have to give us money.” So I took it back, and the little girl cried.

“Jesus,” I said. “This isn't working. Look, I'm not really anyone, okay?” I took my sunglasses off and showed him. “I'm sorry, pal.”

“Oh,” he said. His face lost its color and his smile left. He put his head in his hand, like it was just more deadweight to hold up, and said, “Well, who are you, then?”

“Gordon,” I said.

“Gordon?” he said, as if the bite of steak he'd just put in his mouth didn't taste right. And I had to agree with him. That name didn't sound like there was much of anything on the other side of it.

“Yeah,” I said, “Gordon.”

“Look, it's not as if I'm anyone, either. Shit, my name's Dave. Dave,” he said again, putting out his hand. We shook, meeting each other a second time. “So what is it that you do, Gordon?”

I looked for a way out of the conversation that was about to happen. But Ruby had grabbed the waitress and was telling her a few troubling things over at our table. “Did you see the way my boyfriend was looking at you?” she was saying. “He's about as slithery as they come.”

“Restaurant management,” I said.

“Got woman troubles, uh?”

Ruby was talking pretty loudly, and Dave and I could hear everything she was saying.

“I'd rather talk about restaurants, if you don't mind.”

“Restaurants,” he said. “Well, I'm a steak lover myself. But I'm sort of sick. The old ticker don't tock so well.”

“Talk?” I said.

He patted his fat chest and began taking out lots of little pills from lots of little pill bottles. “My heart, you know.”

“Sure,” I said.

“The doctor says that Daddy shouldn't eat steak. But he eats steak anyway.”

The girl seemed to like me enough now to talk to me again.

“You bet,” he said, “I love steak. And I'd like to know how they can ask a sick man to keep on living without the things he loves.”

He was selling a kind of superpowered cleanser now and eventually wanted to break into Amway products—selling tube socks and things out of his home. From a bag next to him, he took out a bottle of the stuff he sold.
CLEANAWAY
, it said in large, scary red lettering.

“All this cleaning power for only nineteen ninety-nine. You make a stain, Gordon, any goddamn stain you want—chocolate, berries, blood, wine, vomit—any goddamn stain, and this'll clean it right up.”

But he sounded angry when he said that, and I wondered why his own white shirt was marked by what seemed to be old, soiled-in food stains.

“She,” he said now, looking at his mother, “won't eat two bites of her steak. Good Idaho beef, and she won't take two bites.” The old woman didn't say anything. She sat next to the girl in a sort of trance, looking down at the unfinished meat on her plate, so that I could see only her bun of flaxen white hair. “Well, I will,” he said, taking her plate and huddling over it, sopping the bloody juices up with a hunk of bread and forking the nuggets of cut steak into his mouth.

I looked over at Ruby again, hoping to get away from Dave finally, but she was still speaking to the waitress. “He made me feel like a mud puddle last night,” she was saying. “A woman wants to feel like a lake. She wants to feel like an ocean. Am I right? But instead, I feel like a dirty creek with his little minnow waddling up me.”

I tried not to hear her and reminded myself that I was meeting somebody and I liked him—sort of—and he seemed to like me and I was feeling like, Who the hell really needs Ruby?

“Woman trouble,” Dave said, exposing a mouthful of dark meat and bread. “You got it. And let me tell you, Gordon, I know what that's like. Six months ago my wife went batty and left me. She just stopped buying groceries and let the milk rot in the fridge and our little Lilly here run wild and the toilet bowl turn brown. Brown!” he said again. “She called me a little boy. Do I look little to you, Gordon?” I shook my head. “Well, she thought so. She said she wasn't the whole world's mother. The last thing she needed, she said, was a fifty-year-old boy.” He was getting excited as he spoke, a little short of breath and wheezy, and his face grimaced.

“You okay?”

“I'm not little, am I?” he asked.

In fact, the word for what Dave was was
fat.
He was fat, unhealthy, lonely, and living somewhere—he hadn't said where yet—in Idaho, which was the gray, snowy emptiness outside our window.

“No,” I said. “You're not little, Dave.”

He popped a few more pills and opened a packet of Alka-Seltzer into his water. “I kind of wish I hadn't eaten that second steak.” He stacked the plates, pushed them away from him, and gave me a look of honest regret.

“Who's there?” The old woman looked up and began staring at me. Her skin jiggled and a web of saliva shimmered inside the oval of her mouth. “Who's there, David?” She must have been mostly blind. “Is that your brother Luke? That's you, isn't it, Luke?” Her hand paddled toward me, opening and closing and roaming in the air until it found my cheek. It smelled soapy and clean and was surprisingly warm. “My baby,” she said.