Retribution by John Fulton Read Free Book Online Page A

fantasized about doing something irresponsible like this and now she did it. She handed him her bag with the two brass zippers that jingled like change when she walked. It was the middle of the day; if he turned out to be cruel, she would scream.
    They began walking down the crowded streets and the crowds seemed to part for them. When he asked her about herself, she immediately began lying. Her lies were extravagant and alarmed her a little.
    â€œMy father was in the diplomatic corps,” she said. “We lived in many places.” She listed a lot of these places, careful not to mention White Plate, North Dakota. She did not mix any truth with her lies. Her lies were pure and dark. “But our favorite place was Iceland. We loved that country more than any other.”
    â€œIceland?” he said. He must have been in his mid-thirties. Still, she noticed a sudden boyishness in his face. He was curious. He wanted to know more about her. “Do you speak the language?”
    â€œIcelandic?” she said. “Oh, yes. We lived there for years. My first boyfriend was Icelandic. I read Shakespeare in that language.” She laughed uncomfortably. He must have known these were lies. But he didn’t let on. Maybe his manners were too good for that.
    â€œSpeak some Icelandic for us,” he said. They walked through narrow stone streets that smelled of urine and lemon peels. Everywhere in the city, the stone buildings were the shabby brown color of history.
    Icelandic was an easy language to invent. It felt like butterflies coming off her tongue. “I said,” she said, “that Italy is a generous country.”
    He took her to a beautiful hotel where the man behind the front desk seemed to love him in that loud Italian way. They gestured as if they were directing traffic and their feminine manner—emotive and silly—put her at ease. The hotel clerk was balding and pudgy and his gray mustache was as fat as a bird. He said “pretty girl” to her in a heavy Italian accent that made him seem harmless and a little stupid.
    Their room number was 317. Before she entered the room with him, she decided to let this happen. The sun was muted by drawn curtains that emitted a lavender-colored light. The bed stood in the center. It was high and canopied and white and its headboard was huge and embellished with fine touches of architecture and its thick oak frame smelled like a forest.
    She tried to say his name in proper Italian but could not. The consonants were soft and the vowels were fast water in her mouth. She tried and tried to say it until the pretense that she had any linguistic talent whatever was up. He must have seen her lies now. Nonetheless, she lied to him about her name, too. One last beautiful lie, she thought. She called herself Margaret, a French name that came out of her mouth like a long sheet of fabric. He said it back to her in his strange accent and she felt rare and different from herself. She felt purely imagined, as if she had entered a story.
    He took her from behind, which she had not expected from someone whose manners were so refined. He gently pushed her into one of the hulking bedposts, entering her more deeply and saying her name into her ear—Margaret—and caressing her breasts and the back of her thighs. He kept saying her name as if this were another way of entering her, and she tried not to remember White Plate, North Dakota. She tried not to remember her mother laundering her father’s and little brother’s clothes—folding their briefs from the Valley City JCPenney into stacks as white as chemicals. She tried not to think of Eddy, her ex-boyfriend, and Eddy’s father’s truck, which stank of cigarettes, hide, and muddy boots. A bumper sticker on the tailgate said, NUKE ’EM . Another said, I WAS MADE IN AMERICA. YOUR IMPORT CAN’T SAY THAT . This was supposedly the voice of the Chevy truck speaking, which was weird, very