Sole Survivor Read Online Free PDF Page A

mirrors with such force that Joe half expected those silvery surfaces to disintegrate.
    “Was he actually watching the Koreans play chess or pretending?” Joe asked.
    “He was watching this place and talking to the cream pies.”
    “Cream pies?”
    “Couple of stone-gorgeous bitches in thong bikinis. Man, you should see the redhead bitch in the green thong. On a scale of one to ten, she’s a twelve. Bring you all the way to attention, man.”
    “He was coming on to them?”
    “Don’t know what he thinks he’s doing,” said the kid. “Loser like him, neither of those bitches will give him a shot.”
    “Don’t call them bitches,” Joe said.
    “What?”
    “They’re women.”
    In the kid’s angry eyes, something flickered like visions of switchblades. “Hey, who the hell are you—the pope?”
    The acidic yellow air seemed to thicken, and Joe imagined that he could feel it eating away his skin.
    The swirling sound of flushing toilets inspired a spiraling sensation in his stomach. He struggled to repress sudden nausea.
    To the boy, he said, “Describe the women.”
    With more challenge in his stare than ever, the kid said, “Totally stacked. Especially the redhead. But the brunette is just about as nice. I’d crawl on broken glass to get a whack at her, even if she is deaf.”
    “Deaf?”
    “Must be deaf or something,” said the boy. “She was putting a hearing aid kind of thing in her ear, taking it out and putting it in like she couldn’t get it to fit right. Real sweet-looking bitch.”
    Even though he was six inches taller and forty pounds heavier than the boy, Joe wanted to seize the kid by the throat and choke him. Choke him until he promised never to use that word again without thinking. Until he understood how hateful it was and how it soiled him when he used it as casually as a conjunction.
    Joe was frightened by the barely throttled violence of his reaction: teeth clenched, arteries throbbing in neck and temples, field of vision abruptly constricted by a blood-dark pressure at the periphery. His nausea grew worse, and he took a deep breath, another, calming himself.
    Evidently the boy saw something in Joe’s eyes that gave him pause. He became less confrontational, turning his gaze once more to the shouting gamblers. “Give me the twenty. I earned it.”
    Joe didn’t relinquish the bill. “Where’s your dad?”
    “Say what?”
    “Where’s your mother?”
    “What’s it to you?”
    “Where are they?”
    “They got their own lives.”
    Joe’s anger sagged into despair. “What’s your name, kid?”
    “What do you need to know for? You think I’m a baby, can’t come to the beach alone? Screw you, I go where I want.”
    “You go where you want, but you don’t have anywhere to be.”
    The kid made eye contact again. In his bruised stare was a glimpse of hurt and loneliness so deep Joe was shocked that anyone should have descended to it by the tender age of fourteen. “Anywhere to be? What’s that supposed to mean?”
    Joe sensed that they had made a connection on a profound level, that a door had opened unexpectedly for him and for this troubled boy, and that both of their futures could be changed for the better if he could just understand where they might be able to go after they crossed that threshold. But his own life was as hollow—his store of philosophy as empty—as any abandoned shell washed up on the nearby shore. He had no belief to share, no wisdom to impart, no hope to offer, insufficient substance to sustain himself, let alone another.
    He was one of the lost, and the lost cannot lead.
    The moment passed, and the kid plucked the twenty-dollar bill out of Joe’s hand. His expression was more of a sneer than a smile when he mockingly repeated Joe’s words, “‘They’re women.’” Backing away, he said, “You get them hot, they’re all just bitches.”
    “And are we all just dogs?” Joe asked, but the kid slipped out of the lavatory before he could hear the