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 unravelled 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, face first 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 offence 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 dishonour that his inexcusable behaviour 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.
More people were gravitating to the portion of the beach where Joe had established camp. He considered packing and leaving, but he wasn’t ready to go to the cemetery. The incident in the lavatory had opened the stopcock on his supply of adrenaline, cancelling the effects of the lulling surf and the two beers that he had drunk.