Sole Survivor (3 page)

A fourth man had joined the cockroach handicappers. He was in his mid-fifties, thirty years older than the other three but trying to be one of them by matching their enthusiasm for pointless cruelty. The gamblers had become an obstruction to the rest room traffic. They were getting rowdy, laughing at the spasmodic progress of the insect, urging it on as though it were a thoroughbred pounding across turf toward a finish line.
“Go, go, go, go, go!”
They noisily debated whether its pair of quivering antennae were part of its guidance system or the instruments with which it detected the scents of food and other roaches eager to copulate.

Striving to block out the voices of the raucous group, Joe searched his ashen eyes in the mirror, wondering what his motives had been when he sent the boy to scope out the men in the Hawaiian shirts. If they were conducting a surveillance, they must have mistaken him for someone else. They would realize their error soon, and he would never see them again. There was no good reason to confront them or to gather intelligence about them.

He had come to the beach to prepare himself for the visit to the graveyard. He needed to submit himself to the ancient rhythms of the eternal sea, which wore at him as waves wore at rock, smoothing the sharp edges of anxiety in his mind, polishing away the splinters in his heart. The sea delivered the message that life was nothing more than meaningless mechanics and cold tidal forces, a bleak message of hopelessness that was tranquilizing precisely because it was brutally humbling. He also needed another beer or even two to further numb his senses, so the lesson of the sea would remain with him as he crossed the city to the cemetery.

He
didn’t
need distractions. He didn’t need action. He didn’t need mystery. For him, life had lost all mystery the same night that it had lost all meaning, in a silent Colorado meadow blasted with sudden thunder and fire.

Sandals slapping on the tiles, the boy returned to collect the remaining twenty of his thirty dollars. “Didn’t see any big guy in a green shirt, but the other one’s out there, sure enough, getting a sunburn on his bald spot.”

Behind Joe, some of the gamblers whooped in triumph. Others groaned as the dying cockroach completed another circuit either a few seconds quicker or a few slower than its time for the previous lap.

Curious, the boy craned his neck to see what was happening.

“Where?” Joe asked, withdrawing a twenty from his wallet.

Still trying to see between the bodies of the circled gamblers, the boy said, “There’s a palm tree, a couple of folding tables in the sand where this geeky bunch of Korean guys are playing chess, maybe sixty, eighty feet down the beach from here.”

Although high frosted windows let in hard white sunshine and grimy fluorescent tubes shed bluish light overhead, the air seemed yellow, like an acidic mist.

“Look at me,” Joe said.

Distracted by the cockroach race, the boy said, “Huh?”

“Look at me.”

Surprised by the quiet fury in Joe’s voice, the kid briefly met his gaze. Then those troubling eyes, the color of contusions, refocused on the twenty-dollar bill.

“The guy you saw was wearing a red Hawaiian shirt?” Joe asked.

“Other colors in it, but mostly red and orange, yeah.”

“What pants was he wearing?”

“Pants?”

“To keep you honest, I didn’t tell you what else he was wearing. So if you saw him, now you tell me.”

“Hey, man, I don’t know. Was he wearing shorts or trunks or pants—how am I supposed to know?”

“You tell me.”

“White? Tan? I’m not sure. Didn’t know I was supposed to do a damn fashion report. He was just standing there, you know, looking out of place, holding his shoes in one hand, socks rolled up in them.”

It was the same man whom Joe had seen with the walkie-talkie near the lifeguard station.

From the gamblers came noisy encouragements to the cockroach, laughter, curses, shouted offers of odds, the making of bets. They were so loud now that their voices echoed harshly off the concrete-block walls and seemed to reverberate in the mirrors with such force that Joe half expected those silvery surfaces to disintegrate.

“Was he actually watching the Koreans play chess or pretending?” Joe asked.

“He was watching this place and talking to the cream pies.”

“Cream pies?”

“Couple of stone-gorgeous bitches in thong bikinis. Man, you should see the redhead bitch in the green thong. On a scale of one to ten, she’s a twelve. Bring you all the way to attention, man.”

“He was coming on to them?”

“Don’t know what he thinks he’s doing,” said the kid. “Loser like him, neither of those bitches will give him a shot.”

“Don’t call them bitches,” Joe said.

“What?”

“They’re women.”

In the kid’s angry eyes, something flickered like visions of switchblades. “Hey, who the hell are you—the pope?”

The acidic yellow air seemed to thicken, and Joe imagined that he could feel it eating away his skin.

The swirling sound of flushing toilets inspired a spiraling sensation in his stomach. He struggled to repress sudden nausea.

To the boy, he said, “Describe the women.”

With more challenge in his stare than ever, the kid said, “Totally stacked. Especially the redhead. But the brunette is just about as nice. I’d crawl on broken glass to get a whack at her, even if she is deaf.”

“Deaf?”

“Must be deaf or something,” said the boy. “She was putting a hearing aid kind of thing in her ear, taking it out and putting it in like she couldn’t get it to fit right. Real sweet-looking bitch.”

Even though he was six inches taller and forty pounds heavier than the boy, Joe wanted to seize the kid by the throat and choke him. Choke him until he promised never to use that word again without thinking. Until he understood how hateful it was and how it soiled him when he used it as casually as a conjunction.

Joe was frightened by the barely throttled violence of his reaction: teeth clenched, arteries throbbing in neck and temples, field of vision abruptly constricted by a blood-dark pressure at the periphery. His nausea grew worse, and he took a deep breath, another, calming himself.

Evidently the boy saw something in Joe’s eyes that gave him pause. He became less confrontational, turning his gaze once more to the shouting gamblers. “Give me the twenty. I earned it.”

Joe didn’t relinquish the bill. “Where’s your dad?”

“Say what?”

“Where’s your mother?”

“What’s it to you?”

“Where are they?”

“They got their own lives.”

Joe’s anger sagged into despair. “What’s your name, kid?”

“What do you need to know for? You think I’m a baby, can’t come to the beach alone? Screw you, I go where I want.”

“You go where you want, but you don’t have anywhere to be.”

The kid made eye contact again. In his bruised stare was a glimpse of hurt and loneliness so deep Joe was shocked that anyone should have descended to it by the tender age of fourteen. “Anywhere to be? What’s that supposed to mean?”

Joe sensed that they had made a connection on a profound level, that a door had opened unexpectedly for him and for this troubled boy, and that both of their futures could be changed for the better if he could just understand where they might be able to go after they crossed that threshold. But his own life was as hollow—his store of philosophy as empty—as any abandoned shell washed up on the nearby shore. He had no belief to share, no wisdom to impart, no hope to offer, insufficient substance to sustain himself, let alone another.

He was one of the lost, and the lost cannot lead.

The moment passed, and the kid plucked the twenty-dollar bill out of Joe’s hand. His expression was more of a sneer than a smile when he mockingly repeated Joe’s words, “‘They’re women.’” Backing away, he said, “You get them hot, they’re all just bitches.”

“And are we all just dogs?” Joe asked, but the kid slipped out of the lavatory before he could hear the question.

Although Joe had washed his hands twice, he felt dirty.

He turned to the sinks again, but he could not easily reach them. Six men were now gathered immediately around the cockroach, and a few others were hanging back, watching.

The crowded lavatory was sweltering, Joe was streaming sweat, and the yellow air burned in his nostrils, corroded his lungs with each inhalation, stung his eyes. It was condensing on the mirrors, blurring the reflections of the agitated men until they seemed not to be creatures of flesh and blood but tortured spirits glimpsed through an abattoir window, wet with sulfurous steam, in the deepest kingdom of the damned. The fevered gamblers shouted at the roach, shaking fistfuls of dollars at it. Their voices blended into a single shrill ululation, seemingly senseless, a mad gibbering that rose in intensity and pitch until it sounded, to Joe, like a crystal-shattering squeal, piercing to the center of his brain and setting off dangerous vibrations in the core of him.

He pushed between two of the men and stamped on the crippled cockroach, killing it.

In the instant of stunned silence that followed his intrusion, Joe turned away from the men, shaking, shaking, the shattering sound still tremulant in his memory, still vibrating in his bones. He headed toward the exit, eager to get out of there before he exploded.

As one, the gamblers broke the paralytic grip of their surprise. They shouted angrily, as righteous in their outrage as churchgoers might be outraged at a filthy and drunken denizen of the streets who staggered into their service to sag against the chancel rail and vomit on the sanctuary floor.

One of the men, with a face as sun red as a slab of greasy ham, heat-cracked lips peeled back from snuff-stained teeth, seized Joe by one arm and spun him around. “What the shit you think you’re doing, pal?”

“Let go of me.”

“I was winning money here, pal.”

The stranger’s hand was damp on Joe’s arm, dirty fingernails blunt but digging in to secure the slippery grip.

“Let go.”

“I was winning money here,” the guy repeated. His mouth twisted into such a wrathful grimace that his chapped lips split, and threads of blood unraveled from the cracks.

Grabbing the angry gambler by the wrist, Joe bent one of the dirty fingers back to break the bastard’s grip. Even as the guy’s eyes widened with surprise and alarm, even as he started to cry out in pain, Joe wrenched his arm up behind his back, twisted him around, and ran him forward, giving him the bum’s rush, facefirst into the closed door of a toilet stall.

Joe had thought his strange rage had been vented earlier, as he had talked to the teenage boy, leaving only despair, but here it was again, disproportionate to the offense that seemed to have caused it, as hot and explosive as ever. He wasn’t sure why he was doing this, why these men’s callousness mattered to him, but before he quite realized the enormity of his overreaction, he battered the door with the guy’s face, battered it again, and then a third time.

The rage didn’t dissipate, but with the blood-dark pressure constricting his field of vision, filled with a primitive frenzy that leaped through him like a thousand monkeys skirling through a jungle of trees and vines, Joe was nevertheless able to recognize that he was out of control. He let go of the gambler, and the man fell to the floor in front of the toilet stall.

Shuddering with anger and with fear of his anger, Joe moved backward until the sinks prevented him from going any farther.

The other men in the lavatory had eased away from him. All were silent.

On the floor, the gambler lay on his back in scattered one-and five-dollar bills, his winnings. His chin was bearded with blood from his cracked lips. He pressed one hand to the left side of his face, which had taken the impact with the door. “It was just a cockroach, Christ’s sake, just a lousy cockroach.”

Joe tried to say that he was sorry. He couldn’t speak.

“You almost broke my nose. You could’ve broke my nose. For a cockroach? Broke my nose for a cockroach?”

Sorry not for what he had done to this man, who had no doubt done worse to others, but sorry for himself, sorry for the miserable walking wreckage that he had become and for the dishonor that his inexcusable behavior brought to the memory of his wife and daughters, Joe nonetheless remained unable to express any regret. Choking on self-loathing as much as on the fetid air, he walked out of the reeking building into an ocean breeze that didn’t refresh, a world as foul as the lavatory behind him.

In spite of the sun, he was shivering, because a cold coil of remorse was unwinding in his chest.

Halfway back to his beach towel and his cooler of beer, all but oblivious of the sunning multitudes through which he weaved, he remembered the pale-faced man in the red and orange Hawaiian shirt. He didn’t halt, didn’t even look back, but slogged onward through the sand.

He was no longer interested in learning who was conducting a surveillance of him—if that was what they were doing. He couldn’t imagine why he had
ever
been intrigued by them. If they were police, they were bumblers, having mistaken him for someone else. They were not genuinely part of his life. He wouldn’t even have noticed them if the kid with the ponytail hadn’t drawn his attention to them. Soon they would realize their mistake and find their real quarry. In the meantime, to hell with them.