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 Kahlúa 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…fuckin’…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.
So what do I do? What’s my place in it? Do I have one?
He certainly wasn’t going to go into the men’s room and take the long, leisurely piss
he had planned and looked forward to; his nuts were drawn up like a couple of hard
little stones, and the pressure in his kidneys had spread both up his back and down his
legs. His heart was hurrying in his chest, thudding along at a rapid jog-trot that would
probably become a sprint at the sound of the next blow. It would be an hour or more
before he’d be able to piss again, no matter how badly he had to, and then it would
come in a series of unsatisfying little squirts. And God, how he wished that hour had
already gone by, that he was sixty or seventy miles down the road from here!
What do you do if he hits her again?
Another question occurred: What would he do if the woman took to her heels and Mr.
PT Cruiser followed her? There was only one way out of the women’s room, and John
Dykstra was standing in the middle of it. John Dykstra in the cowboy boots Rick
Hardin had worn to Jacksonville, where once every two weeks a group of mystery
writers—many of them plump women in pastel pantsuits—met to discuss techniques,