I made little mistakes, sure. A few too many beers when I was underage, a bit of weed here and there. But if I did anything wrong, I only did it to myself. Stealing that money, though, involved my entire family in one way or another. Secrets and lies always do that, always have a way of snowballing. And now, seeing that girl at the convenience store that morning, it hit me hard, knowing that she was getting knocked around because of something I did.
And there’s another reason too, Spence, that I felt so bad after seeing her again. You don’t know how close I came to doing what she wanted to do that day. Truth is, I probably would have let her blow me if I hadn’t seen those boxes in the shower stall. She was messed up but she was beautiful. Plus I was soaking wet and cold and I’d lost my job and felt like a worthless piece of shit. I could have used a little favor. I felt rotten knowing I was probably going to let her do it, but I wanted it, I really did. And then I saw the money.
So when I add up all the ways I’d become less than the man I wanted to be, all the ways I’d brought trouble into the lives of other people . . .
Spence, I sat there in the darkness of Pops’ storage unit with his revolver in my hand and a small fortune at my back. And I thought of how ashamed of me you would be if I did what I was thinking of doing. I thought about you and the rest of the company up on top of that naked hill overlooking the Korengal, taking fire from three directions for most of seventy-two hours because the idiots in charge had issued metal detectors that never made a beep over the plastic mines. I thought about Rainey with his leg blown off, and how he’d always thought he could man-muscle his way through a stone wall if he had to. I thought about you guys hunkered down there in the holes you dug, same as me hunkered down in Pops’ storage unit, and I could picture you, Spence, running around like a crazy mother hen during those long hours, checking on all your chicks, calling out their names again and again and again while you waited for the sound of choppers or missiles or anything else the gods out in the sandbox decided to send.
And I thought about Cindy and me growing up without fathers, and I knew what that would be like for my own girls. I didn’t want that for them. I wanted them to have all the opportunities and all the nice things Cindy and me never got.
And the only way I could accomplish that was to get hard again. I had to stop beating myself up over things I couldn’t change. I had to man up and do whatever ugly things I might be called upon to do.
I wish like hell I could stop thinking about that naked girl. I keep imagining her sucking my dick, and about fucking her on that bare mattress in the meth house. And it’s hard, angry fucking. There’s nothing sweet about it. I even jerk off thinking about her. Then afterward I feel like whale shit, the lowest of the low.
For a while back there in the sandbox I used to jerk off to that other girl, the one you kept Perry from raping. What I never told you about that incident, what I was always too ashamed to tell you, was that before you came into that room and stopped him, I’d been there from the very beginning. I was there when he grabbed her and dragged her into the room, I was there when he ripped off her clothes and pushed her down onto the floor. I was standing there staring at her breasts and her bush and doing nothing to help her. Not so much as a word to tell him to stop.
Then all of a sudden there you are pushing past me and grabbing him and yanking him around just as he’s about to let his pants fall to the floor. You’re screaming, “What the fuck do you think you’re doing, soldier!” and he’s whipping out his Beretta and bringing it up toward your face and that’s when I finally came unfrozen and smacked the M4’s butt into his chest.
Afterward I told you I’d stepped into the room only a nanosecond before you did. I was pretty sure you knew I was lying, but you never once challenged me on it. And I hated myself for that. Both for lying to you and for thinking what I’d been thinking before you showed up.
What makes us act like such animals sometimes, Spence? I don’t want to be an animal. I want to be a man. I want to be a good husband and father and somebody who doesn’t flinch when he looks at himself in the mirror.
Jesus, Spence. What am I supposed to do with all this crazy shit?
That night after talking to the Chinese, and then hunkering down for a while in Pops’ storage unit, and finding my balls, I guess you’d say, I swung by the mall on the way and returned home carrying an armload of books. Why I chose books, I’m not really sure. But I’d been thinking about the times I loved best in all my life, and they were always the quiet times, you know? With the girls, it was when I read to them at night, the three of us crowded onto Dani’s bed, Emma with her head in my lap and me reaching over her to hold Dani’s hand while I held the book in my other hand, and the way the girls smelled after their baths, and Emma’s little mouth when she fell asleep making that shhh, shhh sound against my pant leg.
And with Cindy it was those weekend afternoons when she was pregnant with Dani. She was supposed to stay in bed as much as possible, so I wore out my shoes going back and forth to the library for her. And I remembered how her eyes would light up when I’d come home and dump a load of books down beside her, and then she’d grab one and start reading out loud, and most times I’d fall asleep there lying up against her, the same way the girls do with me, and I’d be thinking as I drifted off how peaceful and sweet our lives together had become.
Anyway, I went home that night with books for everybody. Picture books for Emma and Easy Readers for Dani and a couple of Lemony Snicket books for me to read to them. For Cindy I got a boxed set of paperbacks. We had watched all of those movies about the girl who loves a vampire and a werewolf, and after every one we had the same friendly argument, with me saying how stupid it was to choose a white-skinned soulless dude over a hunky werewolf, and Cindy saying that the pale guy was so tragic and damned that of course the girl would love him better.
Dani and Emma squealed and hugged me when they saw the books, and at first Cindy’s eyes lit up like they used to but then they went dark again and she stood there looking at me until the girls went running off to the living room with their presents.
I said, “You can exchange them if you want to. I know we already saw the movies, so you know how everything ends. I didn’t know what else you might like.”
“It’s not that,” she said. “Today was your last day of work. We don’t have any idea how we’re going to pay our bills, and you spend what, a hundred dollars or more on books?”
“Baby, a hundred dollars isn’t going to make any difference one way or the other.”
“A hundred dollars is four bags of groceries,” she said.
“I wanted to do something to cheer you up is all.”
“It’s not that I don’t appreciate it,” she said.
“But it doesn’t cheer you up, does it?”