Retribution by John Fulton Read Free Book Online Page B

weird. A year ago, as a senior at White Gate High, she had lost her virginity in that truck. She had gone down on Eddy in that truck, her knees and calves scraping against the pop-tops, gum wrappers, and the torn pages of Sports Illustrated littered over the mats. At first he tasted unexpectedly of corn chips, until he arrived at his moment. Then he tasted, Sarah supposed, like all men must taste, a bland, universal taste that finally taught her nothing. Weeks afterward, when she saw Eddy’s father driving through the streets of White Plate, poised before the wheel, his face an older, rougher version of Eddy’s, she wanted it back. Her name and number were in the boys’ stalls in White Gate High. The message said, SARAH GREENLY TRUCKS . It’s what her mother might have called “the story.” That’s how that story goes, her mother might have said. I could have told you that one myself. That’s the oldest story in the book. Her mother had wide hips, short curly hair like wood shavings, and blue eyes that had sunk years ago into the rough grain of her skin.
    Her orgasm began in a slow fault line down the middle of her body. She felt sweeping and vast, like one of the landscape paintings she had recently seen in European museums, with blue sky disappearing at the far corner of the world and with tiny farmers—so minute, it was almost impossible to think of them—working the huge green land. Nonetheless, Sarah thought of them. She imagined the small houses where they lived, the meals they took together, their soup as black as mud and smoking, the invisible patterns on the women’s dresses, the cat the color of old wood curled in the recess of a window, the smells of clay and shit in the air, the spiderwebs in the barn and the buckets of well water, and the thoughts of the farmers and the women and children, the secret thoughts that made their lives worth something. The alternative—not to imagine them at all—seemed cruel. She would not want that to happen to her life.
    Afterward, sitting on the balcony, her Italian lover produced a pearl-handled knife. For an instant, she was terrified. She expected to be punished now. But he halved an orange with it and they each ate the pulp out of their halves before he put the knife away. The distance was jigsawed with rooftops and spires, and, on the far edges, the barrels and stacks of industry glimmered and infected the sky with pink. Below, in the courtyard, old men sat in the shadows of oddly shaped trees, eating tiny purple grapes from bowls and playing a game with colored checkers. They considered each move and, from time to time, fingered their gray facial hair in a slow, loving way. Some chewed on cigars, while the air around them curled with smoke. They drank out of little metal cups and looked into the blue air and then considered the contest in front of them again.
    â€œShould I tell you about our history?” he asked her.
    â€œI already know about it,” she said.
    â€œIt is a very violent and entertaining history,” he said.
    â€œI know that,” she said.
    â€œMany different families poisoning one another at supper. The dinner table was a frightening place in our Italian past.”
    â€œNo,” she said. “I don’t want to hear about that.”
    Then she said, “I guess you do this with other girls.” She crossed her legs, still feeling the pleasant sensation of having been entered, still feeling a residue of touch on her breasts and thighs.
    â€œDo you really want to talk about that?” He smiled slowly. “Tell us more about Iceland.”
    He was more generous than she had expected. He was going to allow her to be as flagrant and fictitious as she wanted. “The first thing you need to know is that the name is a lie,” she said. “Iceland is green as far as you can see. It is green all year long and so flat and treeless that you can see from one town to the next