Just After Sunset

There was only one other car in the sprawling parking area at this hour, one of those PT Cruisers that never failed to amuse him-they looked like toy gangster cars out of the 1930s.

He parked four or five slots down from it, turned off the engine, then paused to give the deserted parking lot a quick scan before getting out. This wasn’t the first time he’d stopped at this particular rest area on his way back from the Pot, and once he’d been both amused and horrified to see an alligator lumbering across the deserted pavement toward the sugar pines beyond the rest area, looking somehow like an elderly, overweight businessman on his way to a meeting. There was no gator tonight, and he got out, cocking his key-pak over his shoulder and pushing the padlock icon. Tonight there was only him and Mr. PT Cruiser. The Jag gave an obedient twitter, and for a moment he saw his shadow in the brief flash of its headlights…only whose shadow was it? Dykstra’s or Hardin’s?

Johnny Dykstra’s, he decided. Hardin was gone now, left behind thirty or forty miles back. But this had been his night to give the brief (and mostly humorous) after- dinner presentation to the rest of the Florida Thieves, and he thought Mr. Hardin had done a fairly good job, ending with a promise to send the Dog after anyone who didn’t contribute generously to this year’s charity, which happened to be Sunshine Readers, a non-profit that provided audiotape texts and articles for blind scholars.

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…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, agents, and sales, and to gossip about one another.

“Lee-Lee, don’t hurt me, okay? Please don’t hurt me. Please don’t hurt the baby.”

Lee-Lee. Jesus wept.

Oh, and another one; score one more. The baby. Please don’t hurt the baby. Welcome to the fucking Lifetime Channel.

Dykstra’s rapidly beating heart seemed to sink an inch in his chest. It felt as if he had been standing here in this little cinder-block notch between the men’s room and the women’s for at least twenty minutes, but when he looked at his watch, he wasn’t surprised to see that not even forty seconds had passed since the first slap. It was the subjective nature of time and the eerie speed of thought when the mind was suddenly put under pressure. He had written about both many times. He supposed most quote-unquote suspense novelists had. It was a goddam staple. The next time it was his turn to address the Florida Thieves, perhaps he would take that as his subject and begin by telling them about this incident. About how he’d had time to think, Second Drunkalonians. Although he supposed it might be a little heavy for their biweekly get-togethers, a little-

A perfect flurry of blows interrupted this train of thought. Lee-Lee had snapped. Dykstra listened to the particular sound of these blows with the dismay of a man who understands he’s hearing sounds he will never forget, not movie-soundtrack Foleys but a fists-hitting-a-feather-pillow sound, surprisingly light, actually almost delicate. The woman screamed once in surprise and once in pain. After that she was reduced to puffing little cries of pain and fear. Outside in the dark, Dykstra thought of all the public-service spots he’d seen about preventing domestic violence. They did not hint at this, how you could hear the wind in the palm trees in one ear (and the rustle of the missing-child posters, don’t forget that) and those little groaning sounds of pain and fear in the other.

He heard shuffling feet on the tiles and knew Lee (Lee-Lee, the woman had called him, as if a pet name might defuse his rage) was closing in. Like Rick Hardin, Lee was boots. The Lee-Lees of the world tended to be Georgia Giant guys. They were Dingo men. The woman was in sneakers, white low-tops. He knew it.

“Bitch, you fuckin’ bitch, I seen you talkin’ to him, tossin’ your tits at him, you fuckin’ hoor-”

“No, Lee-Lee, I never-”

The sound of another blow, and then a hoarse expectoration that was neither male nor female. Retching. Tomorrow, whoever cleaned these restrooms would find vomit drying on the floor and one of the tiled walls in the women’s, but Lee and his wife or girlfriend would be long departed, and to the cleaner it would be just another mess to clean up, the story of the puke both unclear and uninteresting, and what was Dykstra supposed to do? Jesus, did he have the sack to go in there? If he didn’t, Lee might finish beating her up and call it good, but if a stranger interfered-

He could kill both of us.

But…

The baby. Please don’t hurt the baby.

Dykstra clenched his fists and thought, Fucking Lifetime Channel!

The woman was still retching.

“Stop that, Ellen.”

“I can’t!”

“No? Okay, good. I’ll stop it for you. Fuckin’…hoor.”

Another whap! punctuated hoor. Dykstra’s heart sank even lower. He would not have thought it possible. Soon it would be beating in his belly. If only he could channel the Dog! In a story it would work-he’d even been thinking about identity before making the evening’s great mistake of turning into this rest area, and if that wasn’t what the writing manuals called foreshadowing, then what was?

Yes, he would turn into his hit man, stride into the women’s room, beat the living shit out of Lee, then go on his way. Like Shane in that old movie with Alan Ladd.

The woman retched again, the sound of a machine turning stones into gravel, and Dykstra knew he wasn’t going to channel the Dog. The Dog was make-believe. This