Retribution by John Fulton Read Free Book Online

on the other side of the window, gouging at the dark and burning through the picture of my sick face, and I didn’t feel so well anymore.
    A man with a bloody towel pressed to his forehead had just been rushed into a swinging door when I arrived at the hospital. I stood in front of the old woman and the little girl in a white hallway. A fat woman dressed in a pink sweatsuit and taking up two plastic waiting room chairs was the only other person there. I couldn’t see what her emergency was and wondered if there was something wrong inside of her, at the center of her huge pink body. I hoped for it, because we began to seem like the only emergency in Idaho. I wanted there to be more injured people, a small mob of desperation and bright hysteria, anything to keep this strange blur of urgency going. A woman doctor sprinted by in sneakers, the wings of her lab coat flapping as she turned the corner and disappeared in white light. I looked for some softer color and found the little girl’s yellow dress. But when I walked up to her, she turned away to talk to her doll in a space that was safe from me.
    â€œLuke … Luke?” The old woman’s head pivoted. She was lost and I wanted to help her find herself. I wanted her to know I was there.
    â€œHere I am.”
    Her face saw me, then pulled away. “I don’t know you,” she said.
    I headed toward the glass doors of the exit at the other end of the hall. But it seemed like a very long walk. On the way, a doctor stopped me. He was dressed in the green fatigues of a surgeon and was wiping his hands and forehead with a cloth so white, it seemed to burn with a fluorescent, chemical heat.
    â€œI’m very sorry, Mr.”—and he called me by a surname that I decided to forget forever. “I’m very sorry.”
    Outside the night was close around me and pressed down on the road where I walked. Toward morning, the sky turned a deep blue—like a huge feeling that I could not see the end of—until I began to think that I was at the bottom of it, making the universe pulse and ache. I thought about praying and almost called out the name of God—but what name would that be?—when Ruby pulled over and I saw, in the purple morning air, the red Camaro, which really was, when you thought about it, as good as anything else to call your own. Ruby leaned over, opened the door for me, and I climbed out of the cold morning and into her arms. Yes, I told her. He would be just fine. They were transferring him to his hometown hospital and he would live on for some years more. The sun rose like a piece of smashed fruit as Ruby began the six-hour drive to Reno. “You’re all right, Gordon,” she said. And later that day, my fourth marriage happened, a little longer and a little better than the other ones.

I CELAND
    Sarah arrived in Florence late on a summer afternoon. The air smelled of fuel and spoiled food and it was so hot that the stone walls dripped and the yellow light shimmered like foil. In the streets, children ran half-naked and jumped into a large fountain, above which a Greek-looking statue of a man stood holding a trident. She walked sideways because of the weight of her bag and felt weak and tired and nearly incapable of hunting for a cheap hotel room. A man approached her—he seemed to walk out of nowhere—an Italian who spoke perfect English with a British accent. The accent impressed her—she was from North Dakota. It made her think of cooler climates, of decency and good manners and those unarmed, benevolent policemen who wore cone-shaped hats and blew shrill whistles in the streets of London.
    â€œMay I?” he asked.
    â€œNo,” Sarah said. “That’s all right.”
    â€œPlease,” he said. He put his hand out. He smelled of laundered cottons, of tonics and rosemary and orange liqueur. His face was long and narrow and his eyes were dark, like polished stones.
    She had