Sole Survivor

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 question.
        Although Joe had washed his hands twice, he felt dirty.
        He turned to the sinks again, but he could not easily reach them. Six men were now gathered immediately around the cockroach, and a few others were hanging back, watching.
        The crowded lavatory was sweltering, Joe was streaming sweat, and the yellow air burned in his nostrils, corroded his lungs with each inhalation, stung his eyes. It was condensing on the mirrors, blurring the reflections of the agitated men until they seemed not to be creatures of flesh and blood but tortured spirits glimpsed through an abattoir window, wet with sulphurous steam, in the deepest kingdom of the damned. The fevered gamblers shouted at the roach, shaking fistfuls of dollars at it. Their voices blended into a single shrill ululation, seemingly senseless, a mad gibbering that rose in intensity and pitch until it sounded, to Joe, like a crystal-shattering squeal, piercing to the centre of his brain and setting off dangerous vibrations in the core of him.
        He pushed between two of the men and stamped on the crippled cockroach, killing it.
        In the instant of stunned silence that followed his intrusion, Joe turned away from the men, shaking, shaking, the shattering sound still tremulant in his memory, still vibrating in his bones. He headed toward the exit, eager to get out of there before he exploded.
        As one, the gamblers broke the paralytic grip of their surprise. They shouted angrily, as righteous in their outrage as churchgoers might be outraged at a filthy and drunken denizen of the streets who staggered into their service to sag against the chancel rail and vomit on the sanctuary floor.
        One of the men, with a face as sun red as a slab of greasy ham, heat-cracked lips peeled back from snuff-stained teeth, seized Joe by one arm and spun him around. “What the shit you think you're doing, pal?”
        “Let go of me.”
        “I was winning money here, pal.”
        The stranger's hand was damp on Joe's arm, dirty fingernails blunt but digging in to secure the slippery grip.
        “Let go.”
        “I was winning money here,” the guy repeated. His mouth twisted into such a wrathful grimace that his chapped lips split, and threads of blood unravelled from the cracks.
        Grabbing the angry gambler by the wrist, Joe bent one of the dirty fingers back to break the bastard's grip. Even as the guy's eyes widened with surprise and alarm, even as he started to cry out in pain, Joe wrenched his arm up behind his back, twisted him around, and ran him forward, giving him the bum's rush, face first into the closed door of a toilet stall.
        Joe had thought his strange rage had been vented earlier, as he had talked to the teenage boy, leaving only despair, but here it was again, disproportionate to the offence that seemed to have caused it, as hot and explosive as ever. He wasn't sure why he was doing this, why these men's callousness mattered to him, but before he quite realized the enormity of his overreaction, he battered the door with the guy's face, battered it again, and then a third time.
        The rage didn't dissipate, but with the blood-dark pressure constricting his field of vision, filled with a primitive frenzy that leaped through him like a thousand monkeys skirling through a jungle of trees and vines, Joe was nevertheless able to recognize that he was out of control. He let go of the gambler, and the man fell to the floor, in front of the toilet stall.
        Shuddering with anger and with fear of his anger, Joe moved backward until the sinks prevented him from going any farther.
        The other men in the lavatory had eased away from him. All were silent.
        On the floor, the gambler lay on his back in scattered one and five-dollar bills, his winnings. His chin was bearded with blood from his cracked lips. He pressed one hand to the left side of his face, which had taken the impact with the door. “It was just a