I was halfway down the stairs before I realized there was a car in the alley. I recognized the new Buick. It belonged to Wes, the pharmacist, Mary’s Wes. The engine was running, the parking lights were on. As I reached the bottom of the stairs, I could see two people sitting in the front seat, Wes and Mary.
I felt sick. I wasn’t afraid of him, but I was embarrassed for him. I’d followed Pamela all kinds of unlikely places over the years. Sometimes, when I needed to see her, it was like a fever coming over me. I wasn’t quite aware of what I was doing. I was all raw need. And then I’d see her and it would be all right. Just seeing her was enough.
There’s a kind of symmetry to love affairs ending in cars. That’s where most of them start and have since the days of the Model-T. You start out necking and then it gets more serious and then pretty soon you’re going all the way. You read a lot of magazine articles about how men are always walking out on women, but I know an awful lot of men who’ve been walked out on, too. Whenever I hear one sex or the other trying to stake a claim on virtue, I generally leave the room.
They sat there in the alley light, the Buick handsome and imposing, sleek as all hell. You could faintly hear words spoken. Gentle words. And those hurt more than the harsh ones. A lot of times, you don’t mean the harsh ones. You just kind of blurt them out unthinkingly. But the gentle ones, man, those are the killers: the considered words; the I-don’t-want-to-hurt-your-feelings words; the final words.
Then the driver’s door opened and Wes awkwardly got out of the car and shouted over the rooftop. “C’mon, you son of a bitch, let’s get this over with!”
I don’t know which surprised me more, that he wanted to fight or that he was sloppy drunk.
He came around the back of the car, slipping and sliding in stumbling drunken anger, throwing his fists up like old John L. Sullivan in the days of bare-knuckle fighting.
“You son of a bitch!” he said.
Mary burst out of the passenger door.
“Wes! Wes! Stop it! Stop it!”
“You son of a bitch!” he yelled at me again.
I’d have to teach this boy some new swear words.
I stood next to the garbage cans and watched Mary try to stop him from coming at me. At first, she seemed to do a pretty good job. He put his gloved fists down, anyway. He looked lost and frantic, the way drunks get when the booze is turning ugly in them.
Then he went around her. She grabbed for him but slipped and went down on one knee on the ice.
And then he was there in front of me. His fists came back up and he started swinging. He caught me a square one right on the temple, surprising me. There was some ego involved, too. He was a stuffy man and stuffy men shouldn’t be able to throw punches like that.
Mary was screaming at him again and then it was all frenzy because he leaped on me and started choking me.
You know how it gets in fights-all kinds of things going on at the same time, little explosions of anger and fear and confusion, the neighborhood dogs suddenly starting to yowl, sweat and blood and snot covering my face. That was when I kicked him in the balls. I know that’s something that heroes never do, take those dirty little shortcuts that frequently mean victory, but he was too big and I was not exactly a great fighter. I got him good, real good. He screamed and then he started to flail backward. Mary grabbed him to keep him from falling and then he lunged to the right of her and started throwing up. You never see this in movies, the vomiting, but a lot of parking lot puking goes on after two drunks have at each other.
Then he went facedown in the snow and Mary screamed and sank down beside him and started rolling him over so she could see his face. When she got him on his back, he started crying and it was so miserable, that sound-^th tears went all the way back to his childhood-and I felt like shit for so many reasons all I could do was walk away, around the side of the house to my car and drive away and head out for Darin Greene’s place.