Retribution by John Fulton Page B

Thanksgiving. The sun came out and thick, shaggy rays of light covered the huge dinner table and made the cooked turkey, the sweet potatoes and broccoli, and Mr. and Mrs. Green shine. Mr. and Mrs. Green looked very thankful for everything. While Mr. Green prayed, Bo growled. Another boy at the table wore a naked Barbie doll chained to his belt buckle. He popped the doll’s pretty blond head off and put it on the table beside his plate. When Bo would only eat his dinner with his face in the food, Mr. Green picked him up by his pants and held him in the air. “If you act like a dog, we’ll treat you like a dog.” He sent him from the table.
    Later that night, Bo was furious at the boy with the Barbie doll chained to his belt and bit him, drawing blood where the teeth marks were on his arm. For that, Bo had to sleep alone in the little room in the roof of the house.
    Benny didn’t want his little brother to be a dog. All the same, he dreamed that night about the dog in the dog movie that he hated and Bo loved so much. He dreamed of Bo’s favorite scene, when the dog drives his father’s car without asking. It was a longhaired, shaggy dog and the car was a large glossy sedan, more beautiful than any car Benny had ever driven in. The animal sat upright, one paw resting on the wheel, while the other, furry and strange, hung out the open window. A light breeze blew in the animal’s coat and its eyes moved with a great sensitivity to the streets and the laws of the streets, soft, calm, knowing eyes, filled with the human act of driving. Benny knew that Bo was right. The dog was a better driver than their mother. Their mother had been a horrible driver, the worst driver.
    In the morning, when it was still dark and no one in the house was awake, Benny went up to the room in the roof and got into the small bed with Bo. His brother had refused to wash or clean himself at all. He smelled salty, humid, warm. Benny drew himself close, curling into the little human animal and wanting the morning to be dark and the day and the light of day never to come, so that he could stay there next to his little brother, the dog, forever.

O UTLAWS
    At the beginning of winter, not long after Gary’s fifteenth birthday, his father, William, fell from a ski lift. William had been drinking from minibottles of scotch and smoking dope at the time. William had never been a big drinker. He had made record sales as a furniture salesman that year and had gone up the mountain to celebrate with Howard, William’s closest friend. It was Howard who was the big drinker and smoker. It was Howard who had brought the scotch and dope along. Evidently, the height from which William fell should not have been a fatal height. But he fell the wrong way—at a precise and extremely unlikely angle. The world, Gary thought, must have been working against his father. The sky, the clouds, the rocks—nothing was innocent.
    At the funeral, Gary and his mother, Barbara, huddled together at the back of the room. Barbara’s parents were both dead and she had only a few surviving relatives, none of whom were able to attend the services. Barbara wept and said, “Something good is going to happen to us soon. I know it will.” Because they had rarely gone to church, their Presbyterian minister—a man whose voice was oddly small in comparison to his bulk—did not recognize them, though he spoke about William as if he had known him pleasantly for years and described him as a humble man of quiet integrity. Gary found none of these banalities at all comforting.
    Howard had come to the funeral and tried to approach them after the sermon. But he was obviously drunk and afraid and he circled back. Dianne, his ex-wife, held him up and said a little too loudly, “We need to go talk to them, Howard.” Dianne was a determined, wiry woman, and an extremely successful real-estate agent. She and Howard had been divorced for seven