Just After Sunset(34)
He walked across the parking lot to the building, the heels of his cowboy boots clocking. John Dykstra never would have worn faded jeans and cowboy boots to a public function, especially one where he was the featured speaker, but Hardin was a different breed of hot rod. Unlike Dykstra (who could be fussy), Hardin didn't care much what people thought of his appearance.
The rest-area building was divided into three parts: the women's room on the left, the men's room on the right, and a big porchlike portico in the middle where you could pick up pamphlets on various central-and south-Florida attractions. There were also snack machines, two soft-drink machines, and a coin-op map dispenser that took a ridiculous number of quarters. Both sides of the short cinder-block entryway were papered with missing-child posters that always gave Dykstra a chill. How many of the kids in the photos, he always wondered, were buried in the damp, sandy soil or feeding the gators in the Glades? How many of them were growing up in the belief that the drifters who had snatched them (and from time to time sexually molested them or rented them out) were their mothers or fathers? Dykstra did not like to look at their open, innocent faces or consider the desperation underlying the absurd reward numbers-$10,000, $20,000, $50,000, in one case $100,000 (that last one for a smiling towheaded girl from Fort Myers who had disappeared in 1980 and would now be a woman in young middle age, if she was still alive at all...which she almost certainly was not). There was also a sign informing the public that barrel-picking was prohibited, and another stating that loitering longer than an hour in this rest area was prohibited-POLICE TAKE NOTICE.
Who'd want to loiter here? Dykstra thought, and listened to the night wind rustle through the palms. A crazy person, that was who. A person to whom a red button would start to look good as the months and years snored past with the sound of sixteen-wheelers in the passing lane at one in the morning.
He turned toward the men's room and then froze in midstep as a woman's voice, slightly distorted by echo but dismayingly close, spoke unexpectedly from behind him.
"No, Lee," she said. "No, honey, don't."
There was a slap, followed by a thump, a muffled meat thump. Dykstra realized he was listening to the unremarkable sounds of abuse. He could actually see the red hand shape on the woman's cheek and her head, only slightly cushioned by her hair (blond? dark?), bouncing off the wall of beige tile. She began to cry. The arc sodiums were bright enough for Dykstra to see that his arms had broken out in gooseflesh. He began to bite his lower lip.
"Fuckin' hoor."
Lee's voice was flat, declamatory. Hard to tell how you could know immediately that he was drunk, because each word was perfectly articulated. But you did know, because you had heard men speak that way before-at ballparks, at carnivals, sometimes through a thin motel-room wall (or drifting down through the ceiling) late at night, after the moon was down and the bars were closed. The female half of the conversation-could you call it a conversation?-might be drunk, too, but mostly she sounded scared.
Dykstra stood there in the little notch of an entryway, facing the men's room, his back turned toward the couple in the women's room. He was in shadow, surrounded on both sides by pictures of missing children that rustled faintly, like the fronds of the palm trees, in the night breeze. He stood there waiting, hoping there would be no more. But of course there was. The words of some country-music singer came to him, nonsensical and portentous: "By the time I found out I was no good, I was too rich to quit."
There was another meaty smack and another cry from the woman. There was a beat of silence, and then the man's voice came again, and you knew he was uneducated as well as drunk; it was the way he said hoor when he meant whore. You knew all sorts of things about him actually: that he'd sat at the back of the room in his high school English classes, that he drank milk straight out of the carton when he got home from school, that he'd dropped out in his sophomore or junior year, that he did the sort of job for which he needed to wear gloves and carry an X-Acto knife in his back pocket. You weren't supposed to make such generalizations-it was like saying all African-Americans had natural rhythm, that all Italians cried at the opera-but here in the dark at eleven o'clock, surrounded by posters of missing children, for some reason always printed on pink paper, as if that were the color of the missing, you knew it was true.
"Fuckin' little hoor."
He has freckles, Dykstra thought. And he sunburns easily. The sunburn makes him look like he's always mad, and usually he is mad. He drinks Kahlъa when he's in funds, as we say, but mostly he drinks b-
"Lee, don't," came the voice of the woman. She was crying now, pleading, and Dykstra thought: Don't do that, lady. Don't you know that only makes it worse? Don't you know he sees that runner of snot hanging out of your nose, and it makes him madder than ever? "Don't hit me no more, I'm s-"
Whap!
It was followed by another thump and a sharp cry, almost a dog's yelp, of pain. Old Mr. PT Cruiser had once more smoked her hard enough to bounce the back of her head off the tiled bathroom wall, and what was that old joke? Why are there three hundred thousand cases of spousal abuse in America each year? Because they won't...f*ckin'...listen.
"Fuckin' hoor." That was Lee's scripture tonight, right out of Second Drunkalonians, and what was scary in that voice-what Dykstra found utterly terrifying-was the lack of emotion. Anger would have been better. Anger would have been safer for the woman. Anger was like a flammable vapor-a spark could ignite it and burn it off in a single quick and gaudy burst-but this guy was just...dedicated. He wasn't going to hit her again and then apologize, perhaps starting to cry as he did so. Maybe he had on other nights, but not tonight. Tonight he was going for the long bomb. Hail Mary fulla grace, help me win this stock-car race.