Rest Stop.pdf

Rest Stop

He supposed that at some point between Jacksonville and Sarasota he did a literary

version of the old Clark-Kent-in-the-phone-booth routine, but he wasn’t sure just

where or how. Which suggested it wasn’t very dramatic. So did it even matter?

Sometimes he told himself the answer to that was no, the whole Rick Hardin/John

Dykstra thing was nothing but an artificial construct, pure press agentry, no different

from Archibald Bloggert (or whatever his real name might have been) performing as

Cary Grant, or Evan Hunter (whose actual birth name had been Salvatore something-

or-other) writing as Ed McBain. And those guys had been his inspiration…along with

Donald E. Westlake, who wrote hard-boiled “caper” novels as Richard Stark, and K.

C. Constantine, who was actually…well, no one really knew, did they? As was the

case with the mysterious Mr. B. Traven, who had written Treasure of the Sierra

Madre. No one really knew, and that was a large part of the fun.

Name, name, what’s in a name?

Who, for instance, was he on his biweekly ride back to Sarasota? He was Hardin

when he left the Pot o’ Gold in Jax, for sure, no doubt. And Dykstra when he let

himself into his canal-side house on Macintosh Road, certainly. But who was he on

Route 75, as he flowed from one town to the other beneath the bright turnpike lights?

Hardin? Dykstra? No one at all? Was there maybe a magic moment when the literary

werewolf who earned the big bucks turned back into the inoffensive English professor

whose specialty was twentieth-century American poets and novelists? And did it

matter as long as he was right with God, the IRS, and the occasional football players

who took one of his two survey courses?

None of that mattered just south of Ocala. What did was that he had to piss like a

racehorse, whoever he was. He’d gone two beers over his usual limit at the Pot o’

Gold (maybe three) and had set the Jag’s cruise control at sixty-five, not wanting to

see any strobing red lights in his rearview mirror tonight. He might have paid for the

Jag with books written under the Hardin name, but it was as John Andrew Dykstra

that he lived the majority of his life, and that was the name the flashlight would shine

on if he was asked for his operator’s license. And Hardin might have drunk the beers

in the Pot o’ Gold, but if a Florida state trooper produced the dreaded Breathalyzer kit

in its little blue plastic case, it was Dykstra’s intoxicated molecules that would wind

up inside the gadget’s educated guts. And on a Thursday night in June, he would be

easy pickings no matter who he was, because all the snowbirds had gone back to

Michigan and he had I-75 pretty much to himself.

Yet there was a fundamental problem with beer any undergraduate understood: You

couldn’t buy it, only rent it. Luckily, there was a rest stop just six or seven miles south

of Ocala, and there he would make a little room.

Meanwhile, though, who was he?

Certainly he had come to Sarasota sixteen years before as John Dykstra, and it was

under that name that he had taught English at the Sarasota branch of FSU since 1990.

Then, in 1994, he’d decided to skip teaching summer classes and have a fling at

writing a suspense novel instead. This had not been his idea. He had an agent in New

York, not one of the superstuds, but an honest enough guy with a reasonable track

record, who had been able to sell four of his new client’s short stories (under the

Dykstra name) to various literary magazines that paid in the low hundreds. The

agent’s name was Jack Golden, and while he had nothing but praise for the stories, he

dismissed the resulting checks as “grocery money.” It had been Jack who’d pointed

out that all John Dykstra’s published stories had “a high narrative line” (which was

agentese for a plot, as far as Johnny could tell) and suggested his new client might be

able to make $40,000 or $50,000 a whack writing suspense novels of a hundred

thousand words.

“You could do that in a summer if you found a hook to hang your hat on and then

stuck to it,” he’d told Dykstra in a letter. (They hadn’t progressed to using the phone

and the fax at that point.) “And it would be twice as much as you’d make teaching

classes in the June and August sessions down there at Mangrove U. If you’re going to

try it, my friend, now is the time—before you find yourself with a wife and two-point-

five children.”

There had been no potential wife on the horizon (nor was there now), but Dykstra had

taken Jack’s point; rolling the dice did not get easier as one grew older. And a wife

and kids weren’t the only responsibilities one took on as time slipped quietly by.

There was always the lure of the credit cards, for instance. Credit cards put barnacles

on your hull and slowed you down. Credit cards were agents of the norm and worked

in favor of the sure thing.

When the summer-teaching contract came in January of ’94, he had returned it

unsigned to the department head with a brief explanatory note: I thought this summer

I’d try to write a novel instead.

Eddie Wasserman’s reply had been friendly but firm: That’s fine, Johnny, but I can’t

guarantee the position will be there next summer. The man in the chair always gets

right of first refusal.

Dykstra had considered this, but only briefly; by then he had an idea. Better still, he

had a character : The Dog, literary father of Jaguars and houses on Macintosh Road,

was waiting to be born, and God bless the Dog’s homicidal heart.

Ahead of him was the white arrow on the blue sign twinkling in his headlights, and

the ramp curving off to the left, and the high-intensity arc-sodium lights illuminating

the pavement so brightly that the ramp looked like part of a stage set. He put on his

blinker, slowed to forty, and left the interstate.

Halfway up, the ramp branched: trucks and Winnebagos to the right, folks in Jaguars

straight ahead. Fifty yards beyond the split was the rest stop, a low building of beige

cinder block that also looked like a stage set under the brilliant lights. What would it

be in a movie? A missile-command center, maybe? Sure, why not. A missile-

command center way out in the boonies, and the guy in charge is suffering from some

sort of carefully concealed (but progressive) mental illness. He’s seeing Russians

everywhere, Russians coming out of the damn woodwork…or make it Al Qaeda

terrorists, that was probably more au courant. The Russians were sort of out as

potential villains these days unless they were pushing dope or teenage hookers. And

the villain doesn’t matter anyway, it’s all a fantasy, but the guy’s finger is

nevertheless itching to push the red button, and…

And he needed to pee, so put the imagination on the back burner for a while, please

and thank you. Besides, there was no place for the Dog in a story like that. The Dog

was more of an urban warrior, as he’d said at the Pot o’ Gold earlier tonight. (Nice

phrase, too.) Still, the idea of that crazy missile-silo commander had some power,

didn’t it? A handsome guy…the men love him…looks perfectly normal on the

outside…

There was only one other car in the sprawling parking area at this hour, one of those

PT Cruisers that never failed to amuse him—they looked like toy gangster cars out of

the 1930s.

He parked four or five slots down from it, turned off the engine, then paused to give

the deserted parking lot a quick scan before getting out. This wasn’t the first time he’d

stopped at this particular rest area on his way back from the Pot, and once he’d been

both amused and horrified to see an alligator lumbering across the deserted pavement

toward the sugar pines beyond the rest area, looking somehow like an elderly,

overweight businessman on his way to a meeting. There was no gator tonight, and he

got out, cocking his key-pak over his shoulder and pushing the padlock icon. Tonight

there was only him and Mr. PT Cruiser. The Jag gave an obedient twitter, and for a

moment he saw his shadow in the brief flash of its headlights…only whose shadow

was it? Dykstra’s or Hardin’s?

Johnny Dykstra’s, he decided. Hardin was gone now, left behind thirty or forty miles

back. But this had been his night to give the brief (and mostly humorous) after-dinner

presentation to the rest of the Florida Thieves, and he thought Mr. Hardin had done a

fairly good job, ending with a promise to send the Dog after anyone who didn’t

contribute generously to this year’s charity, which happened to be Sunshine Readers,

a non-profit that provided audiotape texts and articles for blind scholars.

He walked across the parking lot to the building, the heels of his cowboy boots

clocking. John Dykstra never would have worn faded jeans and cowboy boots to a

public function, especially one where he was the featured speaker, but Hardin was a

different breed of hot rod. Unlike Dykstra (who could be fussy), Hardin didn’t care

much what people thought of his appearance.

The rest-area building was divided into three parts: the women’s room on the left, the

men’s room on the right, and a big porchlike portico in the middle where you could

pick up pamphlets on various central-and south-Florida attractions. There were also

snack machines, two soft-drink machines, and a coin-op map dispenser that took a

ridiculous number of quarters. Both sides of the short cinder-block entryway were

papered with missing-child posters that always gave Dykstra a chill. How many of the

kids in the photos, he always wondered, were buried in the damp, sandy soil or

feeding the gators in the Glades? How many of them were growing up in the belief

that the drifters who had snatched them (and from time to time sexually molested

them or rented them out) were their mothers or fathers? Dykstra did not like to look at

their open, innocent faces or consider the desperation underlying the absurd reward

numbers—$10,000, $20,000, $50,000, in one case $100,000 (that last one for a

smiling towheaded girl from Fort Myers who had disappeared in 1980 and would now

be a woman in young middle age, if she was still alive at all…which she almost

certainly was not). There was also a sign informing the public that barrel-picking was

prohibited, and another stating that loitering longer than an hour in this rest area was

prohibited—POLICE TAKE NOTICE.

Who’d want to loiter here? Dykstra thought, and listened to the night wind rustle

through the palms. A crazy person, that was who. A person to whom a red button

would start to look good as the months and years snored past with the sound of

sixteen-wheelers in the passing lane at one in the morning.

He turned toward the men’s room and then froze in midstep as a woman’s voice,

slightly distorted by echo but dismayingly close, spoke unexpectedly from behind him.

“No, Lee,” she said. “No, honey, don’t.”

There was a slap, followed by a thump, a muffled meat thump. Dykstra realized he

was listening to the unremarkable sounds of abuse. He could actually see the red hand

shape on the woman’s cheek and her head, only slightly cushioned by her hair (blond?

dark?), bouncing off the wall of beige tile. She began to cry. The arc sodiums were

bright enough for Dykstra to see that his arms had broken out in gooseflesh. He began

to bite his lower lip.

“Fuckin’ hoor.”

Lee’s voice was flat, declamatory. Hard to tell how you could know immediately that

he was drunk, because each word was perfectly articulated. But you did know,

because you had heard men speak that way before—at ballparks, at carnivals,

sometimes through a thin motel-room wall (or drifting down through the ceiling) late

at night, after the moon was down and the bars were closed. The female half of the

conversation—could you call it a conversation?—might be drunk, too, but mostly she

sounded scared.

Dykstra stood there in the little notch of an entryway, facing the men’s room, his back

turned toward the couple in the women’s room. He was in shadow, surrounded on

both sides by pictures of missing children that rustled faintly, like the fronds of the

palm trees, in the night breeze. He stood there waiting, hoping there would be no

more. But of course there was. The words of some country-music singer came to him,

nonsensical and portentous: “By the time I found out I was no good, I was too rich to

quit.”

There was another meaty smack and another cry from the woman. There was a beat of

silence, and then the man’s voice came again, and you knew he was uneducated as

well as drunk; it was the way he said hoor when he meant whore . You knew all sorts

of things about him actually: that he’d sat at the back of the room in his high school

English classes, that he drank milk straight out of the carton when he got home from

school, that he’d dropped out in his sophomore or junior year, that he did the sort of

job for which he needed to wear gloves and carry an X-Acto knife in his back pocket.

You weren’t supposed to make such generalizations—it was like saying all African-

Americans had natural rhythm, that all Italians cried at the opera—but here in the dark

at eleven o’clock, surrounded by posters of missing children, for some reason always

printed on pink paper, as if that were the color of the missing, you knew it was true.

“Fuckin’ little hoor.”

He has freckles, Dykstra thought. And he sunburns easily. The sunburn makes him

look like he’s always mad, and usually he is mad. He drinks Kahlúa when he’s in

funds, as we say, but mostly he drinks b —

“Lee, don’t,” came the voice of the woman. She was crying now, pleading, and

Dykstra thought: Don’t do that, lady. Don’t you know that only makes it worse? Don’t

you know he sees that runner of snot hanging out of your nose, and it makes him

madder than ever? “Don’t hit me no more, I’m s—”

Whap!

It was followed by another thump and a sharp cry, almost a dog’s yelp, of pain. Old

Mr. PT Cruiser had once more smoked her hard enough to bounce the back of her

head off the tiled bathroom wall, and what was that old joke? Why are there three

hundred thousand cases of spousal abuse in America each year? Because they

won’t…fuckin’…listen.

“Fuckin’ hoor.” That was Lee’s scripture tonight, right out of Second Drunkalonians,

and what was scary in that voice—what Dykstra found utterly terrifying—was the

lack of emotion. Anger would have been better. Anger would have been safer for the

woman. Anger was like a flammable vapor—a spark could ignite it and burn it off in

a single quick and gaudy burst—but this guy was just…dedicated. He wasn’t going to

hit her again and then apologize, perhaps starting to cry as he did so. Maybe he had on

other nights, but not tonight. Tonight he was going for the long bomb. Hail Mary fulla

grace, help me win this stock-car race.

So what do I do? What’s my place in it? Do I have one?

He certainly wasn’t going to go into the men’s room and take the long, leisurely piss

he had planned and looked forward to; his nuts were drawn up like a couple of hard

little stones, and the pressure in his kidneys had spread both up his back and down his

legs. His heart was hurrying in his chest, thudding along at a rapid jog-trot that would

probably become a sprint at the sound of the next blow. It would be an hour or more

before he’d be able to piss again, no matter how badly he had to, and then it would

come in a series of unsatisfying little squirts. And God, how he wished that hour had

already gone by, that he was sixty or seventy miles down the road from here!

What do you do if he hits her again?

Another question occurred: What would he do if the woman took to her heels and Mr.

PT Cruiser followed her? There was only one way out of the women’s room, and John

Dykstra was standing in the middle of it. John Dykstra in the cowboy boots Rick

Hardin had worn to Jacksonville, where once every two weeks a group of mystery

writers—many of them plump women in pastel pantsuits—met to discuss techniques,

agents, and sales, and to gossip about one another.

“Lee-Lee, don’t hurt me, okay? Please don’t hurt me. Please don’t hurt the baby.”

Lee-Lee. Jesus wept.

Oh, and another one; score one more. The baby. Please don’t hurt the baby. Welcome

to the fucking Lifetime Channel.

Dykstra’s rapidly beating heart seemed to sink an inch in his chest. It felt as if he had

been standing here in this little cinder-block notch between the men’s room and the

women’s for at least twenty minutes, but when he looked at his watch, he wasn’t

surprised to see that not even forty seconds had passed since the first slap. It was the

subjective nature of time and the eerie speed of thought when the mind was suddenly

put under pressure. He had written about both many times. He supposed most quote-

unquote suspense novelists had. It was a goddam staple. The next time it was his turn

to address the Florida Thieves, perhaps he would take that as his subject and begin by

telling them about this incident. About how he’d had time to think, Second

Drunkalonians . Although he supposed it might be a little heavy for their biweekly

get-togethers, a little—

A perfect flurry of blows interrupted this train of thought. Lee-Lee had snapped.

Dykstra listened to the particular sound of these blows with the dismay of a man who

understands he’s hearing sounds he will never forget, not movie-soundtrack Foleys

but a fists-hitting-a-feather-pillow sound, surprisingly light, actually almost delicate.

The woman screamed once in surprise and once in pain. After that she was reduced to

puffing little cries of pain and fear. Outside in the dark, Dykstra thought of all the

public-service spots he’d seen about preventing domestic violence. They did not hint

at this, how you could hear the wind in the palm trees in one ear (and the rustle of the

missing-child posters, don’t forget that) and those little groaning sounds of pain and

fear in the other.

He heard shuffling feet on the tiles and knew Lee (Lee-Lee, the woman had called

him, as if a pet name might defuse his rage) was closing in. Like Rick Hardin, Lee

was boots. The Lee-Lees of the world tended to be Georgia Giant guys. They were

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