Mark Dunn - We Five

“That’s very sweet, Viv, but won’t that get you into trouble with the casino?”

Vivian laughed and shook her head. “With all the money they’re making here? I feel like I work at Fort Knox.”

Will, unlike Jerry, had hung around the casino while payroll prepared his final paycheck, blowing money he didn’t have at the blackjack table. The fleet boss, Mr. Matthews, had gotten word from Ms. Touliatis in Human Resources that several of the gaming floor cocktail waitresses were getting ready to file sexual harassment complaints against the three drivers, and besides, this University of Mississippi frat-boy posse was bad news any way you looked at them. One had just died — actually died ! — from injuries he’d gotten from some kind of fight he’d been in, and then his friend, probably high on Angel Dust or something, had jumped to his death out a goddamned window. In Mr. Matthews’ day, the worst you could say about Ole Miss fraternity brothers was that they were lazy. Case in point: they didn’t lift a finger to keep James Meredith from attending classes at the school, preferring, instead, to keep to their frat houses and guzzle beer while the upright white citizens of Oxford (like Matthews) had to do all the rioting on Ole Miss’s behalf.

Ruth was at the casino too. She was in the changing room for female staff. She was alone. It was late afternoon on a weekday — a slow time. Even the geriatrics had already boarded their senior center buses and were headed back to Memphis.

Ruth was pulling out what few things she’d been keeping in her locker. She was putting them in a grocery bag. She wasn’t aware she was being watched. Will stood in the doorway. He coughed. She turned. “You’re not allowed in here,” she said evenly.

“I’m not in there. I’m standing out in the hallway.”

“Please go away or I’ll get a security guard.”

“How are you gonna do that? I’m blocking the door.”

Ruth put a couple of other things into the bag and slammed the locker door shut. She stood next to the bench, staring at Will. Will stepped into the room, shutting the door behind him.

“We’re not going to do this,” she said, still without a trace of emotion.

“Do what?”

“You know what. Take one more step and I’m screaming my lungs out. I have big lungs.”

“Of course you do. You’re a fat pig.”

“What are you? Ten fucking years old?”

“I have a knife.”

“Show me the knife and I start screaming.”

“I can do a lot of cutting before somebody gets here.”

Ruth expelled a large volume of air through her nose. “That’s the biggest problem I have with men. They’re so fucking, fucking predictable. Whenever anything bugs them, whenever they don’t get their way, they just summon their inner caveman and go ugga-chugga atavistic on everybody’s asses. It gets old real fast, Billy.”

“So then you do think I have something to be upset about.”

“I’m sure you do. It all fell apart, didn’t it? That goddamned game of yours. Two of your friends are dead. I can’t even get my brain around that. The five of you — you all came from good families. You had your tickets written and you screwed it all up because men do that, don’t they? Men never grow up. Mentally and emotionally, they don’t seem to get very far beyond the fifth grade.”

Will grinned. “Oh, that’s me , right?”

“To a tee, Hur-ca-lees. You come in here with your tighty-whities all in a wad because I got you fired from this stupid casino that you didn’t much enjoy working for anyway, but you’re still gonna find some way to take your revenge. What are you thinking about doing, Billy Boy? Are you gonna try to rape me like your friend Tommy raped Jane? Are you gonna cut me all up with that secret knife of yours? Will this make you feel better? What do you want to do?”

“Hurting you sounds like a good plan.”

Ruth walked up to Will. She placed herself directly in front of him. “I’ll tell you what you can do — to get this out of your system. You can slap me. Show me who’s boss. Slap my chubby lady cheek and then feel good about yourself.”

“I just might. I just might slap the fat pig that went wee-wee-wee all over my friends and me.”

Ruth sighed. “They were never your friends, Will. You — none of you — you don’t know the definition of the word ‘friends.’ A lot of men are this way; do you deny it? Self-centered bastards who can’t see beyond their own selfish needs.”

“Men sacrifice themselves for other men all the time. Cops. Firemen. Soldiers during times of war.”

“ Some men. The good men. But the two good men in your little band of brothers are both dead. All that’s left are the dregs.”

“And you’re a conniving, malicious bitch.”

“So slap the bitch. But here’s the thing: I get to slap you back. Because Tommy did rape my friend Jane, and you were probably just fine with it. It’s the same thing you wanted to do to all of us, wasn’t it? To compensate for your little pencil dicks.”

Will smiled his crooked smile. “Well, you pretty much summed it up there, didn’t you?”

“Give me your best shot. It won’t be any more painful than the slaps those two tract house witches used to give me when I was five. But get yourself ready. Because I intend to give back as good as I get.”

They stared at one another for a moment and then Ruth took a deep breath, scrunched in her shoulders and shut her eyes.

Ruth wasn’t bluffing.

Will took this as his opening. He slapped her. It wasn’t a hard slap, but it made a loud pop. And it smarted. Ruth rubbed her reddened check. Then she pulled back and delivered a much more robust open-handed smack to Will’s face.

He waited a moment.

Then he reciprocated.

It went on like this: back and forth — mechanical, without emotion — like two little hinged figurines in lederhosen on a Bavarian clock. Will wasn’t going to stop until he felt Ruth had been properly punished. Ruth wouldn’t stop unless the two of them ended even.

As this was going on Jerry opened the door to the changing room. He thought he had walked into the men’s changing room. Jerry Castle was in a daze.

Will, whose turn it was, paused, his hand poised in the air, and looked at Jerry. Jerry walked over to the bench on the other side of the room and sat down, his gaze unfocused, his look blank, indecipherable.

Will and Ruth resumed, Jerry watching with empty eyes, not really registering.

Thirty minutes earlier, Lyle had succeeded in getting some important information out of a friend who worked the craps tables at Lucky Aces. It turned out that a number of the casino’s employees lived in the same newly built condominium complex about three miles from the casino.

“I need the number for the unit where several of the van drivers live. I want to drop off some cookies my sister made.”

“How come Jane never makes cookies for me ?” Lyle’s friend teased.

“I don’t know, Greg. She don’t make them for me neither.”

“I don’t have the unit number, but I can tell you where they live. They use the pool a lot, and I see them going in and out of one of the apartments next to it. Their door’s downstairs and all the way to the left when you’re standing with your back to the pool gate.”

“Thanks, Greg. I’ll tell Jane to bake you some cookies sometime.”

“Chocolate chip.”

“You got it.”

Lyle hung up and went straight for his pickup. He drove over to the condominium complex. From the cab of his truck he could see the unit that interested him, but there were children playing in front.