Rough Country

looks like a surfer boy, but he’s a stone killer.”
    “Hey,” Virgil said. “I . . .”
    The drummer, Berni/Raven, came up on Zoe’s side of the table, looking first at Wendy, then at Zoe, and said, “I thought you might be over here.”
    Wendy tossed her hair back, like Marilyn Monroe might have done, and said, “Oh, God, don’t be evil.”
    “I know, you’re just punkin’ me,” the drummer said. She was dressed in black jeans, with a sleeveless black jean jacket over nothing, and heavy dark eye shadow. The name Raven was stitched into the front of the jacket. She looked down at Zoe: “Wish you’d find a friend. He ain’t it, is he?” she said, looking at Virgil.
    “He’s a cop,” Wendy said. “Asking questions about the murder.”
    Berni said, “So ask me a question.”
    Virgil shrugged. “Where were you at eight o’clock last night?”
    “Eight o’clock. Mmm, lying in bed, rubbing myself, thinking about Wendy,” she said. She checked Virgil to see if he was embarrassed. He wasn’t. He did think, No alibi.
    “Do me,” Wendy said. “Give me a question.”
    Zoe blurted, “Don’t do it.”
    “Do what?” Wendy asked, but Virgil was looking into Wendy’s eyes now, and saw that she knew. So he asked.
    “I need to know what Erica McDill said to you night before last. Whether she said anything that might have to do with the murder.”
    “She didn’t see Erica McDill the night before last,” Berni said. “She had to run over to Duluth. . . .”
     
     
     
    THEY ALL STOPPED TALKING. Zoe was staring at Wendy, who looked from Virgil to Berni and back to Virgil. Berni was focused on Wendy, saw the truth on her face, shouted, “You bitch,” pulled back her fist, and plugged Wendy in the left eye.
    Virgil wasn’t moving fast enough; saw the punch coming and started to move, but the punch was already coming and landed with a solid thwack, and some tiny backward part of his brain thought, Good punch .
    Wendy rocked back, her skull bouncing off the back of the booth, her mouth twisting, and then she came out of the booth in a hurricane of fingernails and teeth and the two women surged together and then went straight down to the floor, punching and screaming.
    That answered one of Virgil’s questions: the drummer hadn’t known.
     
     
     
    ZOE WAS SCREAMING at Virgil, “Stop them, stop them.”
    Virgil was reluctant. In his experience, when women break down the social barriers so far that they begin physically tearing at each other, they are dangerous. Men learn social fighting as children; the posturing, the dominance routines, the punch in the nose, the threats to “get you someday,” and everybody goes home satisfied. Women don’t learn any of that: when they fight, they’ll rip the gizzard out of anyone who gets in the way.
    But something had to be done. The women in the room were surging around like a lynch mob in a movie, as Chuck the bartender’s head bounced through them like a fishing bobber on a windy day. Virgil reached into the whirlwind of twisting flesh and grabbed a cowboy boot and yanked Berni out of the pileup.
    Wendy came crawling after her, blood on her face. Berni tried to kick Virgil, and her boot started to come off, and Virgil grabbed her other boot; then Chuck grabbed one of Wendy’s boots and instead of trying to kick him, she did a pure abdominals sit-up, which put her within range, and she slashed him across the forehead with her fingernails. Chuck stumbled back but held on to the boot, and Wendy went with him. Berni was trying to kick Virgil again, so he twisted her feet once, and she flipped over onto her stomach and he put a knee in the middle of her back and pinned her, like a turtle: legs and arms still flailing, but the body was going nowhere.
    The mass of women now got between the two fighters, and Berni was yelling, “Let me up, you motherfucker,” and Virgil could hear Wendy screaming. A bunch of women were looking at Virgil and he said, “Could you help? Please? Hold on to her. Don’t hurt her, just tangle her up.”
    So they piled on, and the women closer to Wendy saw what they were doing, and they piled onto Wendy, which freed up Chuck, who staggered to the bar and pressed a wet towel to his bloody forehead.
    Zoe shouted over the crowd, “Good going.”
    Virgil wasn’t sure how to take that, and shrugged.
    “We leaving?” she asked.
    “She never answered the question,” Virgil shouted back.
    Zoe elbowed her way to his side. “Now