“Keating,” Derek Warford said. “Where’s your friend tonight? Your new buddy. You and him pretty close or what?”
“Get lost.”
“What’s his name, anyway?”
Steve paid for a bottle out of Warford’s six-pack. He bought a couple more. When he had drunk them, he said, “His name’s Wayne Blake. And guess what.”
“What the fuck, Keating.”
“He just had a sex-change operation.” Steve did not know what else to call it.
“Fuck off.”
“He changed his name to Annabel.”
“Get lost.”
“Look at him up close next time you get the chance.”
“You’re full of it, Keating. You need your balls kicked in. That’d be a perfect sex-change operation for you, wouldn’t it, boys?”
Jack’s Corner Shop had a shelf of Hunt’s tomatoes and Chef Boyardee ravioli and Carnation evaporated milk. A shelf of paper towels and toilet paper and maxi-pads and tampons and garbage bags. A rack of chips and Cheezies, and a shelf of batteries and iron-on patches and WD-40, and a shelf of paper plates and plastic knives, forks, and spoons and birthday candles in the shapes of numbers. Beside the hot dog machine stood beef jerky and apple flips from Janes’s Bakery and one jar of pickled eggs and another of pickled weiners, and lotto tickets, and behind the counter there was a meat slicer on which Jack’s wife, Josephine, and his daughter Margaret Skaines sliced three hundred dollars a week’s worth of turkey roll and bologna. The boys of the Battery went there for smokes and slices of Maple Leaf bologna, and this was what Derek Warford was doing the night he saw Wayne, who had spent a half-hour after work up in the place Steve had shown him — Katie Twomey’s verandah — watching the lights on the water. Wayne had parked his van across from Jack’s Corner Shop and walked up the hill. For the past couple of nights he had not seen Steve. But he did not mind quietly watching the lights alone. Steve had been inclined to talk on and on.
Derek leaned against the counter as Margaret Skaines wrapped his slices in waxed paper, and he took a good look at Wayne.
“How’s it going?”
“Not bad.”
“That’s nice to hear.”
Margaret Skaines gave Derek his meat and he paid a dollar forty-nine for it, and he bought himself a couple of Sweet Marie bars that Jack’s had on sale for sixty-nine cents. He unwrapped his first bologna slice, peeled off the plastic rind with its red and blue letters, threw it on the floor, and bit into the pink, then moved closer. Wayne saw his teethmarks in the bologna and the brown ridges in the skin over his Adam’s apple, and he felt a finger of fear. Derek Warford sized up Wayne’s chest, noticing it in a new light.
“Sorry for your troubles there, Wayne.”
“Pardon?”
“I heard you had to go in for an operation. Hope it wasn’t too serious. Hope it wasn’t prostate cancer or nothing.”
Wayne saw that Steve had told Derek something.
“No one likes to go under the knife.” Derek looked at both sides of his slice. He was particular about flies and specks of dust. “Myself, now, you wouldn’t catch me near anything like that. What was it you had done? You didn’t lose nothing, did you?”
Derek leaned close enough to escape the earshot of Margaret Skaines, who was wiping the meat machine with a paper towel and lemon spray. Wayne smelled the lemon mist and the bologna on Derek’s breath as Derek whispered, “You didn’t lose your balls, I hope.”
Wayne headed out of there and got in his van. He did not feel like going back up to Katie Twomey’s veranda now, but he did not want to go home. He wanted to watch the lights on the water because they calmed him, so he drove the van up Signal Hill Road and he parked it in the parking lot beneath Cabot Tower where lovers and tourists parked. On the ocean side you could see nothing because there was so much fog. You would not know an ocean was even there, just a smoky haze that blocked your view. But on the harbour side the fog tapered and trailed in torn fingers, and the green and red and orange ships’ lights and the lights of the cranes and of the arterial road and the churches and the whole city lay spread out, and Wayne looked at those. He did not know Derek Warford had watched him drive up Signal Hill Road, and when six people opened his van doors and got in, it took him a minute to realize it was Derek Warford and his crowd.
“Hey, little girl,” Warford said. He held a beer bottle and waved it in Wayne’s face, and Wayne realized the bottom was broken out of it.
“Come on now, little girl. Take us for a ride down to Deadman’s Pond.”
“Where?”
“Guys. Little girl don’t know where Deadman’s Pond is located.”
The bottle hovered over his face and Wayne thought about beauty, and how he had never had it, and he realized he had been hoping for it to come. He didn’t want a lot of it but he was hoping for some. Just once to look in the mirror and see a beautiful face, even if the beauty was subdued. Even if no one could see it but himself. It didn’t even have to be beauty; it only had to be a fair face. Without the big pores. With creamy skin. Without the remnant of Adam’s apple. With ordinary beauty, the same as Margaret Skaines at Jack’s Corner Shop, or the woman on Old Topsail Road whose little girl had asked if Wayne was a man or a lady. No, that woman had been really pretty. Wayne didn’t need that much beauty. That would be greedy.
“No one took you to Deadman’s Pond before, little girl?”
Derek Warford held the broken bottle over Wayne’s face. “Sure, you just drove right past it on your way up Signal Hill. Most little girls round here, time they get to half your age, know where Deadman’s Pond is. You start her up, that’s right, turn her around, drive down there where you came up, right on, and when you get — no, steady there now — down on the left, that’s it; you need good tires here, I’ll tell you that. Right in here, in behind, keep going, keep going, that’s it, folks, in this nice little hideaway. Park further in, behind there. Turn the radio on now. What the fuck station you got on here? What kind of fuckery is that sound?”
The broken beer bottle had beauty. It had a stag on it, with antlers, and the label had a border of gold and a green part like a ribbon unfurling. Warford held the bottle close enough that Wayne could read the small golden words under the stag. VERITAS VINCIT. Veritas, he thought, must mean truth. What was vincit? Was it anything to do with the word invincible? Was it strength?
“Put her on KIXX Country for fuck’s sake.” Warford said. “Put on some Conway Twitty. Some Cunny Titty. Boys, we got ourselves a little girl who’s never been down here before. I heard she got a real nice set of tits on her. A real interesting cunt too. Someone want to touch her hair? Most times a little girl who comes down here, someone plays with her hair a little bit, gets her going. Girls like it. Hey, Broderick, you check out her hair. Play with it a little bit. Get the little girl going.”
“Fuck off, man. I’m not touching its hair.”
“Fuck you, Broderick.” Derek Warford pulled down Wayne’s hood. “See that hair?” Derek took a handful of Wayne’s hair and twisted it. “Nice head of hair if only a little girl would comb it once in a while.” Derek took a flask out of his jean jacket and handed it around. “Like vodka, little girl? Don’t show up on your breath at all. When you get home to your boyfriend, Steve. Hey, don’t want him to know you were out with us, do you? Where is he tonight? Know what? I think I saw him over by Katie Twomey’s place just after you left. I think he’s over there waiting on her veranda for you come spend another evening with him. Sweet, hey? Isn’t that sweet, boys? You fuck Steve, little girl? You and him give it to her on Twomey’s old planks? Good thing she’s gone out west to visit Brian and doesn’t see what you and Stevie are up to on her property. Take off your bra for us now, little girl. Some of those snaps on them new bras are hard to get off unless you’re the owner. What, you don’t have a bra on? Okay, boys, we need a volunteer. Fifield, what’s wrong with you? Get your — yeah, get the little girl’s shirt off. Yeah. Holy shit, what have we got here? I wonder, is there any hair on the fucking tits? Holy fucking Jesus snapping fucking fucked arseholes. Fifield, undo its belt. Give me a report on what you find.”