As one, the gamblers broke the paralytic grip of their surprise. They shouted angrily, as righteous in their outrage as churchgoers might be outraged at a filthy and drunken denizen of the streets who staggered into their service to sag against the chancel rail and vomit on the sanctuary floor.
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 unraveled 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, facefirst 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 offense 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 dishonor that his inexcusable behavior 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, canceling the effects of the lulling surf and the two beers that he had drunk.
Therefore, onto the beach towel again, one hand into the cooler, extracting not a beer but a half-moon of ice, pressing the ice to his forehead, he gazed out to sea. The gray-green chop seemed to be an infinite array of turning gears in a vast mechanism, and across it, bright silver flickers of sunlight jittered like electric current across a power grid. Waves approached and receded as monotonously as connecting rods pumping back and forth in an engine. The sea was a perpetually laboring machine with no purpose but the continuation of its own existence, romanticized and cherished by countless poets but incapable of knowing human passion, pain, and promise.
He believed that he must learn to accept the cold mechanics of Creation, because it made no sense to rail at a mindless machine. After all, a clock could not be held responsible for the too-swift passage of time. A loom could not be blamed for weaving the cloth that later was sewn into an executioner’s hood. He hoped that if he came to terms with the mechanistic indifference of the universe, with the meaningless nature of life and death, he would find peace.
Such acceptance would be cold comfort, indeed, and deadening to the heart. But all he wanted now was an end to anguish, nights without nightmares, and release from the need to care.
Two newcomers arrived and spread a white beach blanket on the sand about twenty feet north of him. One was a stunning redhead in a green thong bikini skimpy enough to make a stripper blush. The other was a brunette, nearly as attractive as her friend.
The redhead wore her hair in a short, pixie cut. The brunette’s hair was long, the better to conceal the communications device that she was no doubt wearing in one ear.
For women in their twenties, they were too giggly and girlish, high-spirited enough to call attention to themselves even if they had not been stunning. They lazily oiled themselves with tanning lotion, took turns greasing each other’s back, touching with languorous pleasure, as if they were in the opening scene of an adult video, drawing the interest of every heterosexual male on the beach.
The strategy was clear. No one would suspect that he was under surveillance by operatives who concealed so little of themselves and concealed themselves so poorly. They were meant to be as unlikely as the men in the Hawaiian shirts had been obvious. But for thirty dollars’ worth of reconnaissance and the libidinous observations of a horny fourteen-year-old, their strategy would have been effective.
With long tan legs and deep cleavage and tight round rumps, maybe they were also meant to engage Joe’s interest and seduce him into conversation with them. If this was part of their assignment, they failed. Their charms didn’t affect him.
During the past year, any erotic image or thought had the power to stir him only for a moment, whereupon he was overcome by poignant memories of Michelle, her precious body and her wholesome enthusiasm for pleasure. Inevitably, he thought also of the terrible long fall from stars to Colorado, the smoke, the fire, then death. Desire dissolved quickly in the solvent of loss.
These two women distracted Joe only to the extent that he was annoyed about their incompetent misidentification of him. He considered approaching them to inform them of their mistake, just to be rid of them. After the violence in the lavatory, however, the prospect of confrontation made him uneasy. He was drained of anger now, but he no longer trusted his self-control.