Retribution Read Online Free Page B

it hurt from too much goddamn talking.
    At Winnie’s, I stood behind some bushes across the street and waited. I felt the snow fall and gather on my lashes and hat and become heavy on my coat. The roads and walks and lawns lay buried and mute and the air was a chilly lunar color from all the white. The shapes of parked cars stood crystallized beneath snowdrifts. Everything had been softened, erased. Dad’s cab pulled up and he stumbled out of it and ran to the garage door. A huge orange coat covered him up, its bright color burning in the white air. His footprints curved awkwardly through the snow. He was drunk, fucked up. He looked into the little windows of the garage, then looked away. “Oh God,” he said. He pounded on the garage door.
    I stayed behind the bushes. I thought of Tasha, Dr. Ellis’s blond assistant, and how we could disappear together, live in abandoned school buildings and beneath docks in California, the way Sarah had disappeared with Marcus. Or maybe we would live in a house, the way people should live. A house on a stupid green hill somewhere. And I would learn her language, the only language we would speak together.
    I had screamed a lot—I was conscious and could hear the bones in my face crack—when they broke my jaw. I screamed even though I felt nothing. I screamed at the distant snapping of my own bones. Dr. Ellis grimaced from the effort—my jaw hadn’t broken easily. “We’re going to make you a handsome set of teeth,” he said. My face floated out into the room, rising to the ceiling because of all the dope they’d given me. Tasha stood behind Dr. Ellis, her blue eyes clear and glowing, beautiful, so beautiful that I knew I could never have her. I tried to picture it anyway—the green hill, the house in which we sat at our table in a roomful of yellow light, speaking to each other in her language. I spoke it perfectly, a stream of delicate foreign words coming from me as I said things to her, graceful and true things, that I could not imagine saying in any language that I understood.

C LEAN A WAY
    It happened in a steak house somewhere near the Idaho-Nevada state line. I was with Ruby, my second girlfriend after my third divorce, on a long weekend trip to Bayview, Idaho, a little mountain town with a view of a lake, where we were going to try to save our relationship of five months. But we got caught in a blizzard and had to turn around.
    That night we stayed in a little town with an Indian name I no longer remember. The motel was called the Apache. It had a TV, but the picture was bad. So we got ourselves a bottle of scotch and some ice and I told her I wanted it to work for us. I told her I was tired of February—of the cold, short days. I was tired of being lonely in Boise, where I managed a Tommy Tom’s barbecue restaurant—a good, steady job, I reminded her. I opened the little box and showed her how the diamond sparkled in the yellow light of the motel room and said, “Please, Ruby, please.” When that stone ignited in the palm of my hand, I felt young again, like I could afford new love. The dark outside stuck to the little window of our room, and we were reflected in its black glass. Ruby put on the ring without saying yes or no. Then we drank too much and I called her a bitch, later remembering only the anger and not the reason. We made love anyway, with the reading lamp throwing a dirty sheet of light over Ruby’s face. The room stunk of Lysol and the liquor we had spilled on the carpet. I mounted her and looked away at the orange curtains. “It doesn’t feel right if you do that,” she said. “Look at me, please.”
    I looked at her. But Ruby kept her eyes open during sex, in a way that made me feel creepy and exposed. I asked her to close them, please, and she said, “I need to see you.” So I looked away again, concentrating on a wide stain over the curtains while I came. Then