by Ed McBain
It loomed in the shape of two young cowboys—both in their mid-twenties, I guessed—who came sauntering out of the men’s room. They were not wearing designer jeans. Their jeans were faded and their boots were scuffed, and they wore cowboy shirts with embroidered pocket flaps and little pearl snap buttons on the flaps and at the cuffs, and they wore great big ten-gallon hats tilted over their sunburned faces and they wore kerchiefs around their necks, a blue one for the blond guy with the mustache, and a red one for the guy with the black beard. It was not unusual to see an occasional cowboy in Calusa. You do not have to ride very far out of town before you come into cattle country. The state of Florida, in fact, counts cattle breeding as among its chief sources of revenue, ranking it fifth after narcotics, tourism, manufacturing, and farming.
The two cowboys, who went directly to the jukebox, looked as if they might be quite at home tossing thousand-pound steers over their respective shoulders. The blond one had to be at least six-four, with the awesome bulk of a wrestler, and the one with the black beard was just as tall, with the hard, lean, muscular body of someone who’d begun lifting weights at an early age, probably in a correctional center someplace. I was willing to bet he had tattoos on both arms. The first thing they did was pour what appeared to be a hundred dollars in coins into the jukebox. The next thing they did was push a multitude of buttons—every button in sight, it seemed—after which the first of their selections flooded the room: the same country-western ballad that had been playing when we walked in. Dale rolled her eyes and said, under her breath, “Oh, no, not again,” and the blond cowboy immediately said, “What’s that, lady?” qualifying him at once as a recipient of the Better Hearing Award, since the din of the jukebox should have drowned out anything but a shout.
Dale, of course, did not answer him.
From the jukebox, smiling, his hands on his hips now, he said again, “What’s that, lady?”
And again, she did not answer him.
He came over to the table. His friend with the black beard was still standing at the jukebox. Dale, as I know I’ve mentioned, was wearing a long green gown she felt was too tight for her. I don’t remember whether she’d decided to put on panties or not. I do remember that she wasn’t wearing a bra, and that whereas the scoop neck of her gown could in no way compete with the outrageous open slash of Leona’s, it nonetheless revealed more of her than might have been appropriate in a tacky little roadside joint. I was wearing a white dinner jacket and a black bow tie, which I had tied myself with great difficulty before leaving the house that night.
I should add that before the fight I had brown eyes and dark hair, and I possessed a face my partner Frank classifies in the “fox” category. (He himself, by his own system, has a “pig” face.) I weighed a hundred and ninety pounds soaking wet, which I was close to being on that humid night. I was an even six feet tall. After the fight, my eyes were black and blue, my hair was as red as Dale’s (or at least a patch of it was, where my head was banged repeatedly against the hatch-cover tabletop), my face looked rather more piggish than it had earlier—and I was short.
“Don’t you like the music, lady?” the blond cowboy said, grinning. His teeth were very white. His eyes were blue.
“The music’s fine,” Dale said without looking at him.
“You don’t seem to like it much, though,” he said, almost apologetically.
“It’s fine,” Dale said.
“Hey, Charlie!” he called over to the jukebox. “The lady likes the music we picked!”
Charlie came over.
“That right?” he said. He, too, was grinning, his teeth flashing brightly against his black beard. “Well, I’m right pleased, ma’am. You like the music, too?” he asked, turning suddenly to me, the same lopsided grin on his face. I realized all at once that they had both been drinking heavily. And I reasoned that the best thing to do with a pair of happy drunks was humor them.
Smiling, I said, “It’s okay, you did all right.”
“Only okay?” Charlie said, and opened his eyes very wide. “He only thinks it’s okay, Jeff.”
“Lady thinks it’s fine,” Jeff said, sounding hurt.
“Lady must be right, then,” I said, still smiling. “Why don’t you go sit down and listen to it?”
“You asking us to leave?” Charlie said, seemingly surprised.
“We’d like to be alone, if you don’t mind,” I said.
“He’d like to be alone,” Charlie said, grinning again.
“Yeah, I heard him,” Jeff said, grinning back.
“Can’t say I blame him, though,” Charlie said.
“Don’t blame him a’tall,” Jeff said, and glanced into the front of Dale’s gown, still grinning.
Like a grown-up scolding two naughty youngsters—which, from my elderly advanced age of thirty-eight, they actually seemed to be—I said, “Come on, fellas, behave yourselves. Go on back to your own table, huh?”
It became immediately apparent that this was exactly the wrong thing to say. The grins dropped from both faces at the same time. Jeff put his hands flat on the tabletop and leaned into me. The reek of alcohol when he spoke was overpowering. A scrap of potato chip clung to his blond mustache.
“We ain’t got a table,” he said.
“We been standin’ at the bar,” Charlie said.
“Then go on back to the bar,” I said.
“We like it here,” Charlie said.
“Look,” I said, “let’s not create a problem, okay? My friend and I—”
“Who’s got a problem?” Charlie said. “You got a problem, Jeff?”
“No problem a’tall,” Jeff said. “Maybe the man in the monkey suit here’s got the problem.”
“You been to the senior prom?” Charlie said.
Dale sighed. “Let’s go, Matthew,” she said, and started to rise.
“Stay put, lady,” Charlie said, and placed his hand on her shoulder.
Dale shrugged it off at once, her eyes flashing. “Let’s go,” she said again.
“You talking to me, lady?” Jeff said. “Where you wanna go?”
“Take you anyplace you wanna go,” Charlie said.
“Matthew....,” she said.
“Matthew don’t wanna go just yet,” Charlie said. “Ain’t that right, Matthew? Matthew’s enjoyin’ this here conversation.”
“Matthew likes talkin’,” Jeff said.
“Matthew’s a big talker,” Charlie said.
“Okay, fellas,” I said, “that’s enough, okay?”
“What’s enough?” Charlie said.
“Lady tells us she likes our music,” Jeff said, “Matthew tells us that’s enough.”
“How was the prom?” Charlie said. He was proud of his little metaphor, eager to trot it out again. “Have a nice time at the prom?”
“What kinda music was they playin’ at the prom?” Jeff asked.
“Did you do a lotta dancin’?” Charlie asked.
“How would you like to dance, lady?” Jeff asked.
“How would you like me to call the police?” I said.
“If you can get to the phone, that might be a good idea,” Jeff said. “Meanwhile, me and the lady’s gonna dance.”
He grabbed her wrist and started pulling her out of the booth. Charlie stepped aside to give them room. I started to get up, but Charlie, with his weight lifter’s muscles, slapped out at me effortlessly, backhanded, and I sat down again on the high-backed wooden bench. I thought, This isn’t happening. This encounter with two redneck cowboys in a shitty little lounge was as far removed from the ordered reality of my life as would have been an elephant hunt in darkest Africa. But Jeff, the one with the potato-chip mustache, was dragging Dale out onto the postage-stamp dance floor near the jukebox, and Dale was calling him a son of a bitch and struggling to release her wrist from his grip, and Charlie—the black-bearded weight lifter—was standing with his back to me and the booth, his hands disdainfully on his hips, throwing his head back to laugh as Je
ff pulled Dale in against him, and I thought, It’s happening, all right. I lunged out of the booth and shoved myself past Charlie, trying to get to where Jeff, the ballroom wrestler, was sliding his beefy hand onto Dale’s behind, Dale yelling and trying to shove him away, and that was when Charlie hit me on the back of the head with both hands clenched together like a mallet.
I staggered forward, my arms wide, my eyes wide, my mouth open, and Jeff released his grip on Dale only long enough to punch me full in the face as I came lurching toward him. I wish I could say that, in the brief massacre that followed, I got in even one solid shot, but I didn’t. As I fell to the floor, I saw Dale lift her knee and take off one of her sequined slippers. I wish I could say that the heel of it connected with Charlie’s head, because that’s where she was aiming it, but he simply brushed her arm aside, and then decided it would be gentlemanly to punch her as hard as he could over the left breast. Dale was screaming as they dragged me over to the booth again and began pounding my head against the tabletop. The waitress was screaming, too. The bartender ran into the back room and started shouting. Somebody—the old man in the yachting cap, I think—was running for the wall telephone.
When the Calusa police officer finally arrived, I was mopping the back of my head with a handkerchief monogrammed with the letters M.H., and Charlie and Jeff were long gone. I told the officer I didn’t know their last names. I told him there had been a blue pickup truck out front, but I hadn’t noticed either the make or the license plate number. I also told him I personally knew Detective Morris Bloom of the Calusa PD, but he seemed singularly unimpressed by this piece of information. The bartender thought he should call for an ambulance. I said, No, no ambulance. The cop insisted that I be taken to a hospital. Dale said she would drive me to Good Samaritan. Somebody else—the old man in the yachting cap again, I think—remarked that there was blood all over my nice white jacket. The last thing I heard before leaving the appropriately named scene of the crime was the waitress sadly saying, “Have a nice day.” I guess she was referring to tomorrow, because the night wasn’t over yet, and it was going to get a hell of a lot worse in the next little while.
It took the intern in the emergency room at Good Samaritan almost a full hour to anoint me and bandage me and assure me repeatedly that nothing was broken. Dale and I left the hospital at close to midnight. She got behind the wheel, pulled her long gown up over her knees, started the car, and drove out onto US 41, utterly deserted now. We sat side by side in complete silence. I felt totally inadequate. I felt like a dope. I felt like a sissy. I felt everything I had been taught to feel as a boy growing up on the wild and woolly streets of Chicago, Illinois. Boys weren’t supposed to cry, but I felt like crying. My head hurt, and my eyes hurt, and my mouth hurt, and I was only grateful that I hadn’t lost any teeth this time around. I wanted to say “I’m sorry,” but I didn’t know what I was sorry for. My mind kept circling the same labyrinth of dead-end thoughts. Should I apologize for being a civilized human being in a world populated by occasional barbarians? Should I apologize for not carrying a deadly weapon, the way so many people in America do? Should I apologize for not being the heavyweight champion of the world?
When I was a boy, whenever my Aunt Nora said anything nasty to my mother, my mother would reply, “Excuse me for living.” Should I apologize for living? What if the reverse had happened? What if I had mopped up the floor with those two goons? Would I be a better man for it than I was now, sitting here in abject silence, nursing my wounds while a woman drove me home? And what was that, huh? Dale had driven me home on more occasions than I could count. Why should it matter now that she was a woman?
They had really reached me, those bastards.
I wanted to kill them.
We passed Marina Lou’s, and we passed Calusa’s redbrick high-school building, and then Dale took a left at the light on Parsons, and we headed inland for my house. We still had not said a word to each other. I kept thinking Dale was thinking I was as inadequate as I myself thought I was. I kept remembering her yanking off that sequined high-heeled slipper and going for Charlie’s head with it. I should have grabbed a knife from the cutlery tray. I should have broken a beer bottle or something. I should have gone straight for the jugular. But I didn’t know how to do such things.
She pulled the car into my driveway.
“It’s on the visor,” I said.
“What is?”
“The clicker.”
“The what?”
“The thing that opens the garage door.”
“Oh,” she said.
She fumbled for it, found it, pressed both buttons in the wrong order, then pressed them again in reverse, and the garage door went up. She pulled the car in, cut the engine, and handed me the keys. I got out, unlocked the door leading into the kitchen, and snapped on the lights.
“I can use a drink,” she said.
“Me, too.”
“I’ll make them,” she said, and somehow even that innocuous comment seemed a reflection on my manhood.
“Sons of bitches,” I said.
“Yeah,” she said.
“People like that in the world,” I said.
“Yeah,” she said.
She brought me my Dewar’s on the rocks. She was drinking a gin and tonic. Just like the one she’d ordered in Captain Blood’s before the universe started spinning crazily.
“Cheers,” she said.
“Cheers,” I said.
I got up to turn on the pool lights. The pool glowed blue and bright in the darkness.
“Feel like a swim?” I said.
“No,” she said.
“Want to go straight to bed?”
“No,” she said, but I didn’t detect anything ominous in her voice at that moment. I thought, instead, that she was saying she wanted to finish her drink first. We’d been heading for her house before the traffic jam had changed our plans, to put it mildly. I hadn’t questioned her when she’d driven directly here from the hospital. I figured she’d assumed that a defeated gladiator might appreciate the comfort of his own bed. Besides, my house was closer, and we were both still shaky after what had happened. It was tacitly understood, I thought, that she would spend the night here with me, as she had so many other nights. “Your place or mine?” was a meaningless question as far as it concerned Dale and me.
“Matthew,” she said, “there’s something I have to tell you.”
Here it comes, I thought.
“I know,” I said. “It’s a hell of a thing when a grown man can’t defend—”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said at once. “You don’t think I admire that kind of macho bullshit, do you? God!”
“Then...what...?”
“Maybe this isn’t the right time for it,” she said.
“Maybe not,” I said. “Can it wait till morning?”
“I won’t be here in the morning, Matthew.”
I looked at her. Her eyes would not meet mine. I might just as well have been Jeff back there at Captain Blood’s, asking her how she liked the music.
“What do you mean?” I said.
She didn’t immediately answer.
“Dale?” I said. “What is it?”
“I want to end it,” she said.
The taxi didn’t come for her until a quarter past two, by which time we had gone over it, and gone over it again, and gone over it yet another time. When the driver honked his horn outside, she went to the front door, opened it, waved to him, and then kissed me. On the cheek. I watched her as she ran up the front walk. I watched the flash of her long legs as she hiked up her gown to slide in onto the back seat. I watched the taxi as it pulled away from the curb. Dale did not look back. I listened to the sound of the taxi’s engine until it faded on the sodden night.
I went back into the living room then and mixed myself a very strong, very dry martini. I did not put an olive in it. I mixed another one the moment I’d finished the first. I sat drinking in my empty living room, watching the
lighted pool outside, replaying in my mind everything she’d said and everything I’d said. First she’d told me she’d met someone else. When I asked her how she possibly could have met someone else when we’d been seeing each other virtually every night of the week, she’d said, “But not every night, Matthew.” I asked her where she’d met this person. I couldn’t bring myself to call him a man. He was still a faceless person, someone she’d met, someone she’d been seeing on the nights she wasn’t seeing me. She said she’d met him at her office, Blackstone, Harris, Gerstein, Garfield, and Pollock, repeating the name of the law firm as if she were a receptionist answering the phone. She said he was a client. She said she was handling a collection case for him. She said he was forty-two years old, a recent widower. She said he’d asked her to marry him. She said she was going to marry him.
I asked her how long this had been going on. I felt stupid as hell asking the question. I felt like a husband whose wife had been cheating on him. She told me she’d met him a month ago. I made some snide remark about him being a fast worker, or something equally inane, I still didn’t know the guy’s name, she hadn’t told me his name—“What’s his name?” I asked. She said that didn’t matter. What mattered was that she loved him and wanted to marry him, and that she felt cheap and shoddy being with me when she felt so committed to him. I think I was beginning to get angry by then, and I said something cruel, which I apologized for a moment later, I said I could certainly understand how shuttling back and forth between two beds might make a woman feel cheap and shoddy, and then I immediately told her I was sorry, and she kept watching me with those glade-green eyes looking a trifle sad and she said something like, “So that’s it, Matthew,” and I told her we couldn’t just end something that had been going on for such a long time, if all she wanted to do was get married, why hadn’t she said so? I’d marry her in a minute if that was what she wanted. She said, “Yes, that’s what I want,” and then she said something as cruel as what I’d said only a few moments earlier, she said, “But it’s not you I want to marry.”