Retribution (8 page)

“Throw it away,” Jeannie said. She was putting a vacuum cleaner into the trunk. “That's not who you are. I know who you are, Rex,” she said.

Benny put the card with the man's name in his back pocket. “Don't take the vacuum cleaner, Momma,” he said. “You can't take the vacuum cleaner. It's not ours.” His mother didn't seem to hear him, so he turned and looked the other way now—into the darker half of the sky. But he could still see the shadows of the man, his mother and little brother. They were giant evening shadows that stretched across the road and on into the desert. Every motion of the dark forms seemed absurdly large and forceful. His mother's shadow was still loading the car up, lifting massive, vague objects that shook the shape of the Impala as she loaded them. It's too much, Benny thought, to be taking. These massive objects. She should put them back, leave them where they lay. He watched his little brother's shape lift the gun and say, “Put your hands up, Daddy. You're sitting next to Momma in the front seat.” The man's shadow was the largest—a strange, wobbly tower.

“Okay,” it said.

When Benny turned around again, he saw his mother pull the man's wallet from his blazer and dig out the cash. “You've been working, Rex.” She was counting the money. “You've been working a lot.” She sounded so happy.

The man was buckled into the front seat now and Bo was careful to keep his gun on him. “Where are we driving to?” the stranger asked.

“We're going to Mother's,” Jeannie said. “We're going to have Thanksgiving at Mother and Daddy's—and you better hope they forgive you.”

*   *   *

They stopped at a gas station with a minimart on the outskirts of a little town. Something was wrong with the man behind the counter, who could take their mother's money but couldn't seem to hear her when she asked what direction Montana was in. He had a speech impediment and seemed to be saying, “That way. That way.” They bought a can opener and four cans of baked beans with plastic spoons, a six-pack of Coke, and a loaf of Wonder bread, which they never usually bought because you paid for the name, their mother said. But this was her special treat. Though the beans were cold, the boys were hungry and ate them quickly, dipping folded pieces of white bread into the black sauce and beans. They had forgotten to get something for Black, who whined from hunger. When it got dark and they had finished eating and felt full and tired, the moon came out and its bone-colored light fell into the car and made the man's face look chalky and dead. “Is he all right, Momma?” Benny asked.

“Daddy's a little tired. That's all,” she said.

Benny's little brother was wide awake, alert, and holding the gun to the sleeping man's head. “You can put your stupid gun away now,” Benny said.

“No way,” Bo said.

Every now and then the man would twitch and begin dreaming again out loud in his sleep. He kept saying the name Wanda. He seemed to be calling her.

Bo asked, “Momma, who's Wanda?”

Without answering, she pushed and nudged the man out of his dream. Once, she hit him hard enough on the shoulder to wake him. His eyes shot open and he began making frightened, whimpering sounds at the sight of his hands in the moonlight. The blood on them was dried and black and the broken fingers bent off in a way that made Benny's stomach feel hot and sick. The man kept whining, until Benny got into the front seat and covered the wounds up in the pair of white tube socks that he had just taken off his own feet. The stranger's hands looked like paws now—simplified by the stupid white socks. He was quiet and went back to sleep. When he woke again, he was shivering. His arms, his legs, his face wouldn't stay still. He said, “Please, I'm cold.” Bo said he was cold, too. The moon had gone down and it was black and the world outside the car felt like winter. They stopped at a rest site, where Black and Bo got out to pee while Benny covered the man and his bloody shirt in piles of new sheets and blankets and a comforter he got from the trunk. The man's head seemed orphaned and small above the bulky pile of blankets. He looked at Benny. His face was still trembling. He said, “Water, please. Water.”

Benny slammed the door, cutting the man's voice off, and walked into the parking lot, where he heard his mother talking to an old man in a cowboy hat who was looking at the stars and saying their names out. “That there's the polestar. See it, lady? And there's the Big and Little Dipper. Orion's over there.” Benny began to feel dizzy with staring at the sky and trying to see names in the cold dust.

His mother said, “Mister, could you tell me where I am?”

He said, “Where you are?”

“What state I'm in.”

“You're in Utah, lady.”

She said, “Oh. That's not really where I wanted to be.”

The man seemed offended. “Utah's a beautiful state, lady.”

There was silence between them.

“Maybe you could help me,” Jeannie said. “I got to find a beauty parlor first thing in the morning.”

The man asked her, “A what?” and she told him again. “Well,” he said, “there's beauty parlors in Utah. You bet there is.” But he didn't seem to want to talk to her anymore and returned to the stars.

On the road again, Benny fed the stranger water from an empty Coke can he had filled in the rest room. He drank all the water and still said,
“Thirsty, thirsty, thirsty.”
The stranger woke up several times in the night, speaking odd words and phrases and names of people Benny had never met. Before morning, when the dark outside was hollow and blue, Bo woke and wanted his daddy to speak with him. He put the gun to the man's head and said, “Say something to me, Daddy.” The man said something, repeating it several times. It was barely audible, and Benny and Bo at first thought he was saying, “I'm your friend. I'm your friend.” But it soon became clear to them that he was saying, “I'm afraid. I'm afraid.” Then it was morning and the sun burned at the desert's edges until the cold yellow day was above them again. The man woke and could no longer speak. Benny was in front, working a sort of head bandage out of napkins for the stranger's wound. He had to hold the man's head to keep it still and could smell the stranger's exhaustion and the stranger's blood, which were warm smells. But they were cooling down, getting cold now. The napkins didn't work. They made the man's head look white and papery, too fragile to be fixed. “Momma,” Benny said, “this isn't Daddy. You know this isn't Daddy.” He put the stranger's head down again and it fell off the seat rest and leaned over the bloody glass of the side window. “We've got to go to the hospital, Momma.”

They came into a small town, driving too fast. When they turned corners, the deadweight of the man's head rose and smacked the glass. “Momma,” Benny said, “find a hospital, please.” She was looking for something. When she found it, she pulled over and told Benny to come with her and for Bo to watch Daddy and Black in the car. She sounded exhilarated and frantic. “This is going to work for us, boys. After I'm done, Daddy's never leaving us again.” She counted the bundle of money, pocketed it, then walked Benny into the beauty parlor, holding his hand tightly enough to make the joints in his fingers crack and hurt.

The shop was a bright pink color inside and stank of hair sprays, perfumes, things acidic and barely breathable, of suds and warm water and of the stiff hair of two old ladies who sat under large jug-shaped dryers, each reading a magazine as the machines worked on them. Bright yellow light-bulbs surrounded all the mirrors and long fluorescent cathode tubes buzzed white light down from the ceiling. There were no shadows in the room, and all the objects—the barber's chairs, the bottles and tubes of soap, Benny, his mother, the two old ladies, and the magazines they read—were doubled, tripled, multiplied in the mirrors. Benny was glad to be holding his mother's hand now, because he felt dizzy in this bright circus of images. The only hole in it was the glass door of the entrance, through which Benny could see Bo sitting in the car with the handgun to the stranger's head.

The hairdresser entered the room through a curtain in the back. She was a huge woman, wearing a purple-colored barber's coat. Her hair was high and long, the same color of reddish purple as her coat. Her makeup looked fresh, still wet on her face. She said, “Come over here, honey.” She sat Benny's mother down in one of the pink thrones and he sat behind them. His mother's eyes filled with tears at the sight of her dirty face and the dry mess of her hair. The hairdresser handed her some tissues and said, “We're gonna polish you up, honey. Don't you worry. You're gonna feel better.” She lowered his mother's head into the sink now, shampooed her and soaped her face. The large woman was looking at Benny. “Your boy have a nosebleed or something? It's amazing how much boys can bleed. Mine scrape their knees, cut themselves, hit their heads. Bleed and bleed. Nothing hurts them.”

She left for a minute to release the old women from the dryers. One of them was waving a bony hand at Benny and he felt himself waving back. “So cute,” the old woman said. They paid and hobbled off, looking behind them at Benny and his mother.

Then the large woman was standing in front of Benny with a steaming washcloth in her hands. The cloth was incredibly white. “Put your arms out, sweetie,” she said. It was hard to breathe in the woman's perfume, and her beauty—her large hair and painted face—seemed too bright, electric, almost dangerous. But the hairdresser's plump hands were forceful and warm as they squeezed his fingers. One of them gripped his shoulder and she wiped his face in the warm cloth. “That feels better, doesn't it?” It did.

Benny was looking at the large posters of beautiful women taped to the mirrored wall in front of him—women with blond hair like wings or with roped and braided hair. Their faces were new and smooth and cosmetic. Some of them had men holding on to them. “You like them?” the woman asked. She wet his hair and combed it back twice. She laughed. “Ready for church.” The cloth in her hands was soggy and red with blood now.

He said yes. He did like them.

“We're gonna make your momma just as pretty as that.” Benny watched as the woman clipped his mother's hair down, cut and combed and arranged it. The blow-dryer was a tubular white handgun that made his mother's hair fluff into feathery crests. The beauty was happening to his mother now. It was a fragile, warm-looking sheath of fluorescence surrounding her head. “You looking forward to turkey day tomorrow?” she asked Benny. The woman reclined the pink seat a little to do his mother's makeup. The instruments she used were sharp little brushes, barbed and strange. She said the colors out loud as she applied them. “Now some turquoise around the eyes, with some dusky purple at the edges. We're giving you the soft evening look, all right, hon? The right colors for autumn. That's what I've got on today. I think you'll like it.”

When she sat Benny's mother up again, he saw that the hairdresser and his mother had the same face now. It was a pretty face, but not his mother's. The face was hurt and angry around the eyes, which were tender and purple. “You like it?” the woman asked him. He nodded. “Well then, tell her you do, sweetie,” she said. “I don't think any of them know what we need.” She was speaking to his mother. “You got to tell us some nice things sometimes, sweetie.”

He said, “I like it.” He hoped that neither woman heard the fear in his voice.

*   *   *

When Benny and his mother walked out of the beauty parlor, a gray sky was pushing down on the little town. Black was lifting his leg on parking meters at the end of the street, and Benny wanted to know why the dog was loose. He knocked on Bo's car window and felt a warm pissy smell hit his face when Bo rolled the window down. The little boy had put his gun away. “Black peed in here. I had to let him out so he wouldn't pee anymore. It wasn't his fault.” Bo seemed tired and his voice was small and weak. “Don't you hurt him, Benny. It wasn't his fault. He doesn't need to be punished.”

Since their father had left, Benny was the only one ever to punish the stupid animal when it needed it. “The car's not the place for the dog to pee, Bo.” He went after it, calling its name. The animal must have heard the anger in his voice, because it was dodgy and tried to elude Benny's hand when he grabbed it by the collar. The dog's mouth let out a stinky smoke of breath in the cold air and its wet eyes begged for mercy. It was Bo's dirty animal—spoiled, no good anymore. Bo had fed it so much people food that it wouldn't eat its own dry dog food now. It slept in Bo's bed with him and lounged on the old couch in their living room and didn't even know it was a dog. It thought it was human, and its wet eyes were saying that to Benny now. I'm like you. I'm like you, they said. He hit the animal three times with the palm of his hand, then let it go. It tried to come back twice, wagging and penitent, but Benny kicked at it until it ran down the street and stayed away.

When he got back to the car, he saw a group of men gathering on the other side of the street, talking and looking at the blue Impala. Inside the car, his mother was holding the man's head in her hands. It was the first time she had touched him. Benny closed himself into the pissy stink of the Impala. “Daddy doesn't talk or move or anything anymore,” Bo told him.

“Shut up,” Jeannie said. She held the man's face directly to hers. “Open your eyes, Rex.”

She wasn't careful where she put her hands. Benny wished that she would be more careful, because the way she was holding him must have hurt him. “Look at me, Rex,” she said. When the man's eyes didn't open, she opened them with her thumbs, but they didn't seem to see her. “Rex, damn it! Here I am.” She was whispering.

“How come you didn't bring Black back?” Bo asked.

“He won't come.”