“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, 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 sulphurous 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 centre 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.