Casually Joe scanned the surrounding beach. The shorter of the two possible cops, the one wearing the predominantly red shirt, was not in sight.
The guy in the green shirt studiously avoided looking directly at Joe. He cupped one hand to his right ear, as if were wearing a bad hearing aid and needed to block the music from the sun-bathers’ radios in order to focus on something else that he wanted to hear.
At this distance, Joe could not be certain, but he thought the man’s lips were moving. He appeared to be engaged in a conversation with his missing companion.
Leaving his towel and cooler, Joe walked south toward the public restrooms. He didn’t need to glance back to know that the guy in the green Hawaiian shirt was watching him.
On reconsideration, he decided that getting soused on the sand probably was still against the law, even these days. After all, a
society with such an enlightened tolerance of corruption and savagery needed to bear down hard on minor offences to convince itself that it still had standards.
Nearer the pier, the crowds had grown since Joe’s arrival. In the amusement centre, the roller coaster clattered. Riders squealed.
He took off his sunglasses as he entered the busy public restrooms.
The men’s lavatory stank of urine and disinfectant. In the middle of the floor between the toilet stalls and the sinks, a large cockroach, half crushed but still alive, hitched around and around in a circle, having lost all sense of direction and purpose. Everyone avoided it — some with amusement, some with disgust or indifference.
After he had used a urinal, as he washed his hands, Joe studied the other men in the mirror, seeking a conspirator. He settled on a long-haired fourteen-year-old in swim trunks and sandals.
When the boy went to the paper-towel dispenser, Joe followed, took a few towels immediately after him, and said, ‘Outside, there might be a couple of cop types hanging out, waiting for me.’
The boy met his eyes but didn’t say anything, just kept drying his hands on the paper towels.
Joe said, ‘I’ll give you twenty Blicks to reconnoitre for me, then come back and tell me where they are.’
The kid’s eyes were the purple-blue shade of a fresh bruise, and his stare was as direct as a punch. ‘Thirty Blicks.’
Joe could not remember having been able to look so boldly and challengingly into an adult’s eyes when he himself had been fourteen. Approached by a stranger with an offer like this, he would have shaken his head and left quickly.
‘Fifteen now and fifteen when I come back,’ said the kid.
Wadding his paper towels and tossing them in the trash can, Joe said, ‘Ten now, twenty when you come back.’
‘Deal.’
As he took his wallet from his pocket, Joe said, ‘One is about six two, tan, blond, in a green Hawaiian shirt. The other is maybe five ten, brown hair, balding, pale, in a red and orange Hawaiian.’
The kid took the ten-dollar bill without breaking eye contact. ‘Maybe this is jive, there’s nobody like that outside, and when I come back, you want me to go into one of those stalls with you to get the other twenty.’
Joe was embarrassed, not for being suspected of paedophilia but for the kid, who had grown up in a time and a place that required him to be so knowledgeable and street smart at such a young age. ‘No jive.’
“Cause I don’t jump that way.’
‘Understood.’
At least a few of the men present must have heard the exchange, but none appeared to be interested. This was a live and let live age.
As the kid turned to leave, Joe said, ‘They won’t be waiting right outside, easy to spot. They’ll be at a distance, where they can see the place but aren’t easily seen themselves.’
Without responding, the boy went to the door, sandals clacking against the floor tiles.
‘You take my ten Blicks and don’t come back,’ Joe warned, ‘I’ll find you and kick your ass.’
‘Yeah, right,’ the kid said scornfully, and then he was gone.
Returning to one of the rust-stained sinks, Joe washed his hands again so he wouldn’t appear to be loitering.
Three men in their twenties had gathered to watch the crippled cockroach, which was still chasing itself around one small portion of the lavatory floor. The beetle’s track was a circle twelve inches in diameter. It twitched brokenly along that circumference with such insectile single-mindedness that the men, hands full of dollar bills, were placing bets on how fast it would complete each lap.
Bending over the sink, Joe splashed handfuls of cold water in his face. The astringent taste and smell of chlorine was in the water, but any sense of cleanliness that it provided was more than countered by a stale, briny stink wafting out of the open drain.
The building wasn’t well ventilated. The still air was hotter than the day outside, reeking of urine and sweat and disinfectant, so noxiously thick that breathing it was beginning to sicken him.
The kid seemed to be taking a long time.
Joe splashed more water in his face and then studied his beaded, dripping reflection in the streaked mirror. In spite of his tan and the new pinkness from the sun that he had absorbed in the past hour, he didn’t look healthy. His eyes were grey, as they had been all his life. Once, however, it had been the bright grey of polished iron or wet indulines; now it was the soft dead grey of ashes, and the whites were bloodshot.
A fourth man had joined the cockroach handicappers. He was in his mid-fifties, thirty years older than the other three but trying to
be one of them by matching their enthusiasm for pointless cruelty and sophomoric humour. The gamblers had become an obstruction to the restroom traffic. They were getting rowdy, laughing at the spasmodic progress of the insect, urging it on as though it were a thoroughbred pounding across turf toward a finish line. ‘Go, go, go, go, go!’ They noisily debated whether its pair of quivering antenna were part of its guidance system or the instruments with which it detected the scents of food and other roaches eager to copulate.
Striving to block out the voices of the raucous group, Joe searched his ashen eyes in the mirror, wondering what his motives had been when he sent the boy to scope out the men in the Hawaiian shirts. If they were conducting a surveillance, they must have mistaken him for someone else. They would realize their error soon, and he would never see them again. There was no good reason to confront them or to gather intelligence about them.
He had come to the beach to prepare himself for the visit to the graveyard. He needed to submit himself to the ancient rhythms of the eternal sea, which wore at him as waves wore at rock, smoothing the sharp edges of anxiety in his mind, polishing away the splinters in his heart. The sea delivered the message that life was nothing more than meaningless mechanics and cold tidal forces, a bleak message of hopelessness that was tranquillising precisely because it was brutally humbling. He also needed another beer or even two to further numb his senses, so the lesson of the sea would remain with him as he crossed the city to the cemetery.
He didn’t need distractions. He didn’t need action. He didn’t need mystery. For him, life had lost all mystery the same night that it had lost all meaning, in a silent Colorado meadow blasted with sudden thunder and fire.
Sandals slapping on the tiles, the boy returned to collect the remaining twenty of his thirty dollars. ‘Didn’t see any big guy in a green shirt, but the other one’s out there, sure enough, getting a sunburn on his bald spot.’
Behind Joe, some of the gamblers whooped in triumph. Others groaned as the dying cockroach completed another circuit either a few seconds quicker or slower than its time for the previous lap.
Curious, the boy craned his neck to see what was happening.
‘Where?’ Joe asked, withdrawing a twenty from his wallet.
Still trying to see between the bodies of the circled gamblers, the boy said, ‘There’s a palm tree, a couple of folding tables in the sand where this geeky bunch of Korean guys are playing chess, maybe sixty-eighty feet down the beach from here.’
Although high frosted windows let in hard white sunshine and grimy fluorescent tubes shed bluish light overhead, the air seemed yellow, like an acidic mist.
‘Look at me,’ Joe said.
Distracted by the cockroach races, the boy said, ‘Huh?’
‘Look at me.’
Surprised by the quiet fury in Joe’s voice, the kid briefly met his gaze. Then those troubling eyes, the colour of contusions, refocused on the twenty-dollar bill.
‘The guy you saw was wearing a red Hawaiian shirt?’ Joe asked.
‘Other colours in it, but mostly red and orange, yeah.’
‘What pants was he wearing?’
‘Pants?’
‘To keep you honest, I didn’t tell you what else he was wearing. So if you saw him, now you tell me.’
‘Hey, man, I don’t know. Was he wearing shorts or trunks or pants — how am I supposed to know?’
‘You tell me.’
‘White? Tan? I’m not sure. Didn’t know I was supposed to do a damn fashion report. He was just standing there, you know, looking out of place, holding his shoes in one hand, socks rolled up in them.’
It was the same man whom Joe had seen with the walkie-talkie near the lifeguard station.
From the gamblers came noisy encouragements to the cockroach, laughter, curses, shouted offers of odds, the making of bets. They were so loud now that their voices echoed harshly off the concrete-block walls and seemed to reverberate in the mirrors with such force that Joe half expected those silvery surfaces to disintegrate.
‘Was he actually watching the Koreans play chess or pretending?’ Joe asked.
‘He was watching this place and talking to the cream pies.’
‘Cream pies?’
‘Couple of stone-gorgeous bitches in thong bikinis. Man, you should see the redhead bitch in the green thong. On a scale of one to ten, she’s a twelve. Bring you all the way to attention, man.’
‘He was coming on to them?’
‘Don’t know what he thinks he’s doing,’ said the kid. ‘Loser like him, neither of those bitches will give him a shot.’
‘Don’t call them bitches,’ Joe said.
What?’
‘They’re women.’
In the kid’s angry eyes, something flickered like visions of switchblades. ‘Hey, who the hell are you — the Pope?’
The acidic yellow air seemed to thicken, and Joe imagined that he could feel it eating away his skin.
The swirling sound of flushing toilets inspired a spiralling sensation in his stomach. He struggled to repress sudden nausea.
To the boy, he said, ‘Describe the women.’
With more challenge in his stare than ever, the kid said, ‘Totally stacked. Especially the redhead. But the brunette is just about as nice. I’d crawl on broken glass to get a whack at her, even if she is deaf.’
‘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.