Lamb

At the funeral, Lamb watched alone as they lowered a sealed casket into a deep, empty rectangle framed by artificial turf. It seemed to him there was neither father nor burial involved. Afterward he parked his truck in the lot between a liquor barn and a dollar store and stood by the bus-stop bench in his black suit and dead father’s Cubs hat, an unlit cigarette between his lips. He scanned the horizon and the ground for something green, for a place where he could press his cheek against warm grass or dirt, for anything like a loophole, a chink, a way out. Nothing before him but the filthy street and bright signs announcing the limits of his world: Transmission Masters and Drive Time Financing and Drive-Thru Liquors and Courtesy Loans and Office Depot and a Freeway Inn and a Luxury Inn and a Holiday Inn. If there was something beneath, something behind, it was hidden from him. Even his father had been hemmed in, jarred off, sewn up. They’d sewn his lips together.

In the story that was his life even just a summer ago—God—a thing can get only so big before it dismantles itself, as if in accord with some inarticulable law of the universe everyone knows but unwittingly forgets. Even in places as small and clean as a newly remodeled kitchen in eggshell white and stainless steel, it was true. Granite counter-tops, beveled glass gilded from the outside by light at the end of day; two fingers of gin in a tumbler; newspapers and mail piling up on the island in the kitchen; Cathy in gold eyeglasses trimming the tapered ends of French green beans; Elizabeth Draper’s blue necklace of tiny glass beads in his silk-lined pants pocket; Linnie ringing his cell phone; his cuff links flashing every time he lifts his glass; a fax coming in from Wilson; nightly news from the flat-screen in the sunken living room; John Draper grinning sheepishly at the door wanting him out on the driveway or in the garage for a beer; Cathy’s sister bleary-eyed and wrinkled pulling up in her Volvo: hi, David. All of that, and what was there now to hold him up?

Lamb rubbed his temple and thought he might sit down right there in the parking lot, wait to see who’d come for him or who would ask him to move, but when he turned away from the wake of traffic to light the cigarette, he saw the girl.

She was coming toward him in a lopsided purple tube top and baggy shorts and brass-colored sandals studded with rhinestones. She carried a huge pink patent-leather purse and was possibly the worst thing he’d seen all day. Scrawny white arms and legs stuck out of her clothes. The shorts hung around her pelvic bones and her stomach stuck out like a dirty spotted white sheet. It was grotesque. It was lovely. Freckles concentrated in bars across her cheekbones and down the tiny ridge of her nose and the slightest protruding curve of her forehead just above her eyebrows. There were huge freckles, pea sized, and smaller ones. Some faint, others dark, overlapping like burnt confetti on her bare shoulders and nose and cheeks. He stared at her. He had never seen anything like it.

“Hi.” She had a little gap between her front teeth, and her eyes were wide set, and she had one of those noses with perfectly round nostrils. She was a pale little freckled pig with eyelashes. “I’m supposed to ask you for a cigarette.”

Behind her, huddled near the trash can up against the brick wall of the CVS, two girls were watching in a bright little knot of bangles and short shorts and ponytails. He looked at the girl. Her chewed and ratty fingernails. Her small feet in shoes two or three sizes too big for her. Her mother’s shoes, he supposed. He felt a little sick.

“What is this?” he said. “Some kind of dare?”

The girl tipped her head, put her hand up to her eyes to shield the sun.

“What grade are you in?”

“Seventh.”

“Don’t they teach you anything?”

She shrugged. Behind her the girls were laughing.

“Was this your idea?”

Shrug.

“Whose was it?”

“Sid’s.”

“Which one is she?”

The girl turned around and her friends became suddenly still. “The one on the right,” she said.

“The blonde.”

“Yeah.”

“Sid like Sidney.”

“Yeah.”

Sid knew she was being studied. She pushed back her hair and stuck out her hip.

“She in seventh grade too?”

“We all are.”

“She looks older.”

“I know.”

David Lamb reached into his pocket for the cigarettes. He looked up at the cameras above the CVS, cameras that were pointed at the doors and at the parking lot. He shook one out and gave it to her. She turned back toward her friends with the cigarette in her hand and giggled.

“Well, go on,” he said. “Put it in your mouth and I’ll light it. A lady doesn’t light her own cigarette.” She put it between her lips and raised her eyebrows. “That’s it. Now steady. Don’t look at the cigarette, look at me,” he said, touching the lit end of his own cigarette to hers. “Inhale. Go on. Draw it in.” He straightened and she puffed.

“Now,” he said, “what do I get in exchange?”

She held the half-lit cigarette between two fingers and wrinkled her forehead. “I don’t have anything.” The girl looked uneasy. She lifted her hand, as if to offer back the cigarette.

“No money?”

She shook her head. “What’s in that purse?”

She lifted it a little, remembering it. “Makeup,” she said. “Nothing.” Her eyes darted sideways, as if she knew she was in a place she shouldn’t be. Behind her the blond girl said something to the other, and they laughed. This ugly kid before Lamb obviously the brunt of their joke. Stupid. And reckless. Had they any idea who he was? Why he was standing there alone in a black suit? What kind of heart, if any, hung inside him? And how was this not a joke on him? He took a long pull on his own cigarette and put it out on the bottom of his beautiful polished shoe. The girl watched him flick out the last shreds of tobacco and put the soiled filter in his pants pocket. There was no wind, no birds, no one calling. The sky hung low and white and warm like the ghost of something.

“Don’t you wish you’d been born sooner?” he said, looking over her head at the grease-stained asphalt. The freckled girl watched him take the cigarette from her hand, ash it, and return it to her fingers. She meant to go back now—but she leaned back a little on her heels, staring up at him.

“Tell me something. Do your friends frequently put you up to things like this?”

“I guess.”

He nodded down at his suit. “I just buried my father.”

“Oh.”

“Ever been to a wake?”

She scrunched up her nose at him.

“It’s like a funeral.”

She shook her head. He studied the part in her hair. Pink stripe of skin through hair so pale it was almost white. “Listen,” he told the girl, “your friends are laughing at you. You know that, don’t you?”

She pulled up the sides of her purple top, one side at a time. It slipped down.

“I’m going to give you a tip, okay? A favor.”

She shrugged and lifted her fingers as if to say: but you already gave me the cigarette.

“No,” he said, “this is something you’re not going to forget. I’ll give you this whole pack of cigarettes, okay?” He took them out of his pocket and made a big show of dropping them into her purse. Her friends were watching now. He had their attention. “In exchange, you let me play a trick on your friends. On Sid. Teach her a lesson.”

“I don’t know.” She squinted her eyes. “What kind of trick?”

“Let’s scare them.”

“How?”

He took the girl’s bare arm just above the elbow and she jerked back, as if suddenly awake. Everything quickened. The sky seemed brighter, traffic faster. “Let’s pretend,” he said low, talking fast, already pulling her toward his Ford, “that I’m kidnapping you. I’m going to pull you, just like this—” She dropped the cigarette and tripped over the long ends of the sandals. “And I’m going to walk you to my car,” he said, pulling her along. “You’re not going to scream, but you’re going to look back at them. Okay? So they know you’re afraid.” Inadvertently the girl did exactly as he said. “Now don’t freak out,” he said. “We’re just scaring your friends. They deserve it, right? I’m not going to hurt you.”

“No,” she started. “Wait.” He opened the driver’s side of the navy blue Explorer and lifted and sort of pushed her over into the passenger seat. It was all done in less than ten seconds. She smacked her head against the window and cried out.

“I’m teaching you a lesson, right?”

She put her hands against the inside of the window and looked at her friends, who stood frozen, the ends of their ponytails hung limp in the thin air.

Lamb pulled the door shut and locked it and started the engine. “You’re not hurt, are you?” She shrank against the door, holding her head. “I’m taking you home,” he said. “I’m just taking you home. What’s your address?” She faced the window and pulled on the door handle again and again and again, knocked and knocked, and she looked back at him over her shoulders. Her eyes were huge. Then they were free and clear, out of the parking lot and onto the four-lane.

“Where do you live?” he raised his voice, gained speed. “Tell me which way.” They passed a KFC, a BP. She told him in a trembling voice and he repeated it, pointing over the tops of the stores to three apartment buildings. The girl nodded. He scolded her the whole way, playing it angry. His hands were shaking on the wheel. The backs of his thighs wet. He yelled at her like he thought a father would have done.

“I could be taking you somewhere to kill you. You know that?”

She clung to the door on her side.

“It was a dumb thing to do, coming up to me like that. Wasn’t it?”

She pulled at the handle again and again.

“Say something.”

“I’m sorry,” the girl whispered. “Please.” She was terrified. Well, good. It was true, what he’d said. He could be taking her off to kill her. He could do anything he wanted. Her lips drew in toward her gapped teeth. “Now just stop it,” he said. “Just stop it.” And when he saw where she lived, near the freeway behind a gas station off six lanes of traffic—and for the second time in the minutes since she’d first approached him—a feeling of pity for her was eclipsed by the shock of knowing he, too, was on the losing end of all this. After all, here he was. It was a moment they were trapped in together.

“Don’t let your friends push you around like that,” he said. She stared at him and tugged on the door handle. “And put some clothes on.” He looked her up and down. “I mean, what are you supposed to be? Who decided you were going to be this way—all stupid and… dressed like that?”

“Please,” she whispered. She was white.

“Now wait,” he said and pulled into the square lot before the entrance of her building. He unlocked the doors and she fell out. “Wait a minute,” he said. He had her purse and waved it. “Keys?”

She crawled up onto her feet and stepped away from the car, a body’s length away, and looked at the purse.

“Give it to me!”

“Now wait a minute.”

“Calling the police!” Her voice was shrill. Lamb glanced around. It was an accusation. A warning. But only because she was humilated. Lamb saw her taking it all in: his expensive suit, the Ford Explorer, the leather seats, his clean haircut, his smooth face, everything clean, everything expensive, everything easy. He handed her the purse and she took out the cigarettes and threw them at him.

“I’m not a bad guy,” he said. “But I could have been.”

Her eyes were lit up with hate.

“Good,” Lamb said. “That’s good.” There was some little filament of heat in this girl that he had not expected, and he was relieved to see it, relieved to be surprised by something. By anything. Across from the apartment building a traffic light turned green and a car honked and the traffic moved again. A middle-aged man with a huge gut and a brown mustache stood at the glass doors watching them.

“Maybe I should come in and tell your folks what happened,” he said.

“Nobody’s home.” Of course they weren’t.

“You have sisters? Brothers?”

“I have friends.” She flung her words like stones.

“That’s right,” Lamb said, nodding. “You think they went in that drugstore to tell someone what happened?”

She looked at him, her eyes reducing back to their stupid blue. “No.”

“Me either.”

He watched her face fall. He knew what that was. He knew about the room she was shrinking into. “I could make up any old story to tell them,” she said.

He thought about it. Imagined what the stories could be. He looked at her bare arms and legs, her stapled, makeshift tube top slipping down her narrow chest. “Tell them I took you shopping.”

“Oh, that’s good.”

“Okay, then.”

“Okay. Bye.”

They looked at each other a second, two, and she stepped away, slammed the door shut. She turned and walked up to the building. A latchkey kid. The sort who got C’s in school. Not a pretty kid, not an athletic kid, not a smart kid. Just a skinny, slow-blooming kid desperate to keep up with her friends. Quick to make new ones. Stupid. Maybe she’d learned something today. Maybe he’d done her a favor. What’d it matter? Girl like her.