Dennis Etchison: The Dark Country

I closed my eyes fast.

Outside, a car came suddenly from nowhere and passed hurriedly by, swishing away down the empty boulevard. She finished the story. I didn't want to hear it, tried to block it out of my ears but she told it through to the finish. It didn't matter to her. She had never been talking to me anyway.

My eyes jammed shut, harder and harder, until I saw gray shapes that seemed to move in front of me. Never before in my life up to that moment could I remember feeling so detached, so out of it. I leaned the heels of my hands against the washer. The quarter slipped from my fingers, clanked against the enamel and hit the cold, cracked cement floor.

The last thing I heard her saying was:

". So afterward I tell the kid to go back to bed, to go to sleep, just to go the hell to sleep, but he can't. Or won't. He just sits there on the floor in the corner, the gun still in his lap, whimpering quietly. That was how I left him, the little sissy…"

Disgusted — tired and sick and disgusted out of all memory and beyond all hope — I forced my things back into the bag and stumbled out of the laundromat. She said something after me but I didn't want to hear what it was.

I pulled my coat up around my ears. I was starting to shiver. I snorted, at no one in particular, at the night and all the people in it, everywhere, the stupid, unthinking people who don't know enough to leave a man alone, just to leave you the hell alone the times when you need it most. There was no place left for me to go, no place at all anywhere in the city. And so, breathing steam, I made it away from there as fast as I could, heading off down the street in the same direction as the car and blinking fast, being careful not to step on any cracks, all the way back to my room. My quiet room.

It was one of those long, blue evenings that come to the Malibu late in the year, the water undulating up to the beach like some smooth, sleepy girl moving slowly under a satin sheet. I must have been staring, because the bartender leaned over and pushed the empty glass against the back of my hand. "Another?"

"Vodka," I reminded him. The sky, out by the point that shelters the Colony, was turning a soft, tropical orange of the kind one expects to see only on foreign postage stamps. The edge of the water lapped the pilings below the restaurant. An easy, regular rhythm, like the footsteps outside on the pier.

He reached for a dry napkin. "Live around here?"

"A few months," I told him. It was still true, for the moment, at least. I hoped he would let it pass. I didn't want to go into the alimony and the rest of it, not now.

He had the Rose's Lime Juice in his hand. The way he handled it, I could see he hadn't been at this too long. He was young, still in his twenties; I wondered how he had got the job with all that sun-bleached hair. "Should've seen it back about May, June," he said. He picked up a cherry, one of the green ones, but I held up my hand and he put it back. "All that sand out there?"

I turned back to the window and looked with him.

"Rocks," he said. I heard the rough ice cubes drop into the glass. "Right."

"Out there, I mean. Boulders like you never seen. Like the moon or something. Five, six feet of sand must've washed in over the summer."

He was right. I remembered the beach below the sun deck of our newly leased house: the sand slick as a wet peach as far as we could walk at low tide, and piled in solid around the posts; and I remembered waking one morning to find it gone, washed out from under us during the night, everything but the rocky underpinnings, all the way out to the tide pools where mussels held to the sharp erosions, crusted hard against the beaks of the circling gulls. Now, the season and the waterline changing, it was all coming back. I remembered, and he was right.

The drink was up. I started on it. The kitchen wouldn't be serving for another hour and the room was still empty, even here at the bar. There were a couple of too-young waitresses making like they were busy, wiping off the plastic menus and refilling the little bowls with sugar packets. I sat watching them in the light of the sunset, their figures silhouetted against the empty panes, but I knew all about the game and I didn't feel up to it. They looked like nervous laughs and weekends at Mammoth and a taste for cold duck, and when they joked at each other under their breaths the sound came to me above the piped-in music: telephone voices just out of the shower, brittle as window glass, unexpectedly cold, and transparent.

There wasn't much left of the drink so I turned on the stool for one last view. I knew I couldn't see my place from here, buried past a stretch of big rich ones, but I tried just the same.

"Which one?"

The voice was so flat, so toneless, the thought occurred that it might have been my own. I drained the glass against my teeth and put it down. The bartender was twisting some bottles of Bud in shaved ice. He flicked his eyes in what I took to be the direction of the color TV, but it wasn't on. It never was. I leaned in, trying to see past the end of the bar.

She was back there at the small table, the one you never notice against the wood. I wouldn't have spotted her at all except for her eyes, the way the whites reflected the dim light coming through the stained glass porthole on the side door.

They were huge, very wide-set, as if drawn by a Forties comic strip artist; I couldn't place the style. They were not looking at me. I squinted anyway, trying to see into the shadows. But she was not looking at me.

Something small and white lifted to her lips. No, I thought, or maybe I muttered it. Not this time, and I did not reach for the matches on the bar.

Then she did something I wasn't ready for, something that had a little class, just a little, at least. She went ahead and lit the cigarette, without the look, the wait. And suddenly I felt bitter in the throat at myself as well as the game, at the whole thing, just the whole damn thing.

"The lady," said the bartender. "I think she's talking to you."

She still wasn't looking at me. "What did she say?" "Don't ask me, man," he said, and he winked. That settled it for me. No way. "No way," I said.

He shrugged. I climbed off the stool. He was watching but I wasn't going to give him the next act. "Set up one more," I told him. "I'm going to the head."

"Sure," he said. You know how he said it.

I took a couple of steps. Then I remembered about the head. (A varnished plaque on the door: BUCKS.) It was back there, down a hall between the cigarette machine and the pay phone. The hall next to the small table.

Well, the hell with her.

I passed the table. I was about to turn into the hall, but I couldn't resist checking her out, just once. Call it a flaw in my character, an itch in the place you know you can't scratch but can't stop yourself from trying, every time.

There was something I recognized. Maybe she reminded me of the types in the class Beverly Hills saloons with the Boston ferns hanging from the ceiling, the ones I've seen as I passed by outside the glass: twenty-nine going on forty, skin diet-taut, a streak bleached into the hair; a look that says that she's got a C-note folded in her bag and that she's waiting, just waiting. This one had the expression, I guess, but that was all. Her hair was black, no streak. Not shiny black, but dull, more like what's left in the grate a minute before the fire goes out. Drawn back along the sides of her head, but not tight, not a cheap face-lift, not like she cared. Her skin was white, but not kept from the sun like some courtesan; it was the kind of pale you get when you don't care enough to go outside.

And there were the eyes. They set me on edge. They were too extreme, like something you learn never to expect in this life: gilt on the lily, egg in the beer, too much, much too much for the way they tell you things are supposed to be.