Back to Wando Passo, David Payne [little red riding hood ebook .TXT] 📗

room and, coming through the window, muted by the panes, the sound of screams.

THIRTY-EIGHT

Right, then left, then right again. As he made his getaway, there was a lump in Ransom’s throat, a thickness. Pride. A song was playing in his head: “Street Fighting Man.”

“Why did you hit him, Daddy?” Hope asked, crying in the back. “Why?”

The song veered suddenly off-key. In the rearview, he met her streaming eyes.

“I don’t know, Hope. I shouldn’t have. It was wrong.”

Oh, bullshit, said the voice.

“You made him bleed.”

“I know I did. I’m sorry.”

What a crock.

“Why? Daddy, why?”

He hit the brakes and turned to her with harried eyes. “I was afraid he was going to take you, Hope, okay? That’s why. I shouldn’t have done it. I’m sorry I did. Now, let’s not talk about it anymore.”

“I want ice keem, Doddy,” Charlie said.

“I’m going to get you some. But right now, let’s put something on. What do you want?” He shuffled jewel cases on the console like the face cards in a deck. “Here’s Kipper,” he said, dealing, “Dora…The Magic School Bus Blows Its Top—how about that?”

“I want The Lion King,” said Hope.

“The Lion King it is.” Ran shoved in the disc.

Why don’t you quit lying to her and yourself, you wuss? the voice proposed as Ran set off again, uncertain where they were. You aren’t sorry. You enjoyed it. Quit pretending to be nice. And you know why you hit him. You didn’t like his pants…his “trousers”—isn’t that what Claire called them that time? Remember when she tried to make you buy a pair?

“Shut up,” he said halfheartedly, feeling tired, demoralized. As he turned again, the memory assailed him…the prissy little salesclerk in his bow tie and horn-rims, whose handkerchief—which complemented, but subtly differed from, his tie—spilled from his breast pocket in a way that seemed wholly unpremeditated, but which Ransom, on a thousand subsequent attempts, could never quite get right. As they stood before the three-way mirror, in the calculated and revealing light on the sixth floor at Saks, the little man, who seemed so smooth and confident to be a clerk, knelt down and turned the cuff.

“How much of a break do you prefer?”

“You better give me all the break you’ve got,” said Ransom, turning embarrassment, as usual, into a joke. Pushing thirty then, he’d never owned a pair of fitted pants…trousers. By that point in the transaction, he was starting to perspire and also to blame Claire—who was thumbing through the rack behind them, blithely unaware—starting, in fact, to hate her just a bit, and then a little more than that, for putting him in the position, for being unaware.

“The drape is very flattering. This Italian wool has such a lovely hand.” The little man went on.

Ransom tried with all his might to avoid his own reflection in the mirror. When he failed, a reanimated corpse stared back, blue and sweating, desperately in need of a shot of human blood or whatever alchemical elixir it might be that would make him finally, fully human like the little clerk, like Claire, his wife, like all the other people flitting through the store, like all the other people flitting through this life.

“Didn’t like them?” Claire asked, with a light arch of the brows.

They left Saks holding hands that day, but Ransom’s palms were sweating, Claire’s as dry and crisp as the autumn sky they walked into on Fifth. A sky like this one outside Charleston, where dusk was creeping from the horizon upward toward the zenith, away up there where it was still day, a profound ceramic blue, with a first star twinkling like Cupid’s arrowhead dipped in magic fairy dust. And the new moon was his bow, strung and bent, aimed straight for Ransom’s chest. And wasn’t that what he had loved in Claire—her blithe unawareness—even if he’d hated her for it as well? Somewhere deep inside, he’d hoped Claire’s confident belief that life would bring her all good things would rub off somehow, would compensate his secret shame, the sense that he deserved no better than the shotgun shack where he’d grown up and the swift and unappealable correction of his drunken father’s fists. He’d hoped, in short, that Claire might save him from himself. And Ran was forty-five and knew full well that people don’t save other people from themselves. Yet in that secret, childlike place, you see, never fully challenged or expunged, he’d still not quite surrendered the hope that, due to extraordinary need or merit, the gods might grant a small exception in his case. Was it too much to ask? Apparently so, because in all these years it hadn’t happened. Was it too late to think that it still might?

It was. The verdict suddenly came down.

They were on a bridge now, crossing water. Was that the Ashley or the Cooper? Ran didn’t know or really give a shit.

“Life’s not fair, is it?” The voice—poisoned, unctuous—was speaking, like a red-garbed demon with a pitchfork and a tail, into Ran’s right ear, coming from the speaker of the DVD.

“Who’s that?”

Neither Hope nor Charlie answered, their little faces anesthetized as they gazed upward in the rearview, transfixed by what was happening on screen.

“Hope, who’s that talking?”

“That’s Scar, Daddy. Shhh!” She glared and put her finger to her lips.

Well, he’s right, isn’t he? said the voice. Life isn’t fair.

“He does make a certain point,” conceded Ran, as the development began to thin. There were marshes ahead and to the left. The sun in the rearview was bloodred. They must be headed east, he realized, toward the ocean.

It was that unfairness that he and Shanté, once upon a time, had meant to run away from and leave behind. They were going to New York City, where it didn’t matter if your skin was black or if you lived in Bagtown and your name was Hill…But in the end, Delores found them out and shut the kitchen door. When push came, finally, to shove, Ran’s