It was a big smile punctuated with troubled eyes. He hadn’t touched his beer yet. Then the smile faded and he rubbed the dark shadow on his cheek, which was becoming visibly gray.
“Have you ever been in the presence of evil? Real evil? I mean, real evil?”
They were sitting at one of those small high tables with the high-backed stools that were placed in those nooks and crannies where they couldn’t put a regular table for those people who wanted to order snacks and drafts of beer. They were next to the popcorn machine, and the smell of popcorn accompanied their drafts as they sipped.
“I can tell you haven’t. If you have to think about it, you haven’t.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because if you’ve ever been in the presence of evil, you don’t forget it.”
His friend looked hard at him, then lifted his beer and took a long sip.
“I’ve known some people who, when I just think of them, kinda fill me with creepy feelings. When you asked, I was thinking about this here one person in particular, about which of the things she did was the most bitchy.”
“No, no. Bitchiness is not evil. If that’s what you’re thinking, then not. You don’t know. Period.”
“Who the hell cares, anyway? Why are you asking me this?
“I haven’t thought about it in a long time. But something recently brought it up, and it’s been on my mind. It bothers me.”
“Tell me about it. But I think this here woman I knew about was pretty evil. She was bitchy. But you have to kinda know what I mean to know how bad she was. I mean evil. If we mean the same thing by the word, she was it.”
They were long-time friends. One was a widower, the other divorced. They both had hair showing signs of aging—thinning, more gray now than their natural colors. They were both fit and strong yet, hard working, tan. Not like office men, who grow soft and pale from years of living inside suits and ties all day.
After high school they went separate ways, though they ran into each other from time to time. Now that both were living the single life, their renewed friendship became a great solace to them. For the last year they have been getting together Friday nights after work. They’d meet at the Moonlight, have a couple beers, then order a meal, have a few more beers, and call it a night. If one of them didn’t show up, the other would know something came up with him, and he’d have a meal and go home. Mostly, this didn’t happen, though, and they’d spend their Friday nights together. It was what they looked forward to during the week.
“Before you tell me about your bitch, let me tell you what happened the other day.”
They paused and looked at each other, sipping their beers.
“I’m all ears,” the one said.
“OK. It was Saturday, and I was leaving the supermarket with my groceries for the week, and I see this guy coming from the parking lot. He was pretty old, wearing those blue bib-overalls you sometimes see farmers wearing. He had a rag hanging out of the back pocket. Stout. Arms bare. Big hairy arms. Dirty white tee-shirt under the overalls,…”
“OK, OK, I get the picture. So what about this guy?”
“Well, I’d seen him before, a couple years ago. No, I think it was more like three. Anyway, at that time, I was newly bachelored, know what I mean? Getting on best as I could. I’d lost the house sometime before and taken an apartment.
“This guy was living there then, I mean, in the same building. Always wore the same thing, you know, those overalls. He’s got a voice sounds like a snarl, deep and gravely. I’d hear him growling at his wife all the time, calling her horrible things. ‘You fucking cunt,’ ‘You dried up hole,’ things like that.
“I mean like, the woman was maybe seventy years old, on the heavy side, like him, but quiet. I don’t recall ever hearing her voice. One day out in the parking lot, I’m pulling into a spot getting ready to get out of the car, and I see this guy right near me, I mean he had to see me pull in, had to know I was right there, I see him haul off and sock that woman right in the face. She falls against the car and he backhands her, again right in the face.
“Her head hit the door of the car so hard I heard it still inside my own car. Then he does it again. Only it’s an open-handed slap this time. Then he growls something at her and stomps away and leaves her there.
“I get outta the car and rush over to her, thinking she’s maybe gonna collapse or something, old as she is. But she’s leaning against the car, kinda dazed. So I ask her if she wants me to call the police or something, maybe take her to the hospital, and she starts up, like I’m gonna strike her myself, and she waddles fast as she can into the building.
“That same day, maybe only an hour later, I’m in my apartment. The window’s open because it’s nice outside, and I hear this guy—no mistaking that voice—carrying on again in the parking lot.
“First thing, I reach for the phone, meaning to call the cops, then look out the window. What do I see? This son of a bitch is out there with a dog. I’ve never seen him or his wife with a dog before, so I don’t know where the animal came from.
“But he’s out there in the parking lot cursing this dog, and all at once he lets go a huge kick at it, catching it underneath, right in the belly. The poor thing starts yelping, more like screaming, and he seems only to get more pissed off at it, and lets go with another kick, then another.
“Hell, I punch 911 and they can hear him beating that dog, it’s screaming and yelping so loud. By the time the cops get there, the dog’s dead. I tell them he does the same thing to his wife. After that they’re gone. I mean, I don’t see him and his wife anymore.
“But then I see him walking into the supermarket, and you know, he sees me, too. Ugly bastard, that guy is. He squints real mean at me as we pass. He knows I called the cops that day. Really gives me the creeps. I half expected him to come at me, but he didn’t. He recognized me, but I’m not sure he placed me, you know. If he remembered where he knew me from, well, let’s not go there. Even now—look at the hair on my arm!—he gives me the creeps.”
“A lot of men, even women, are brutal like that,” his friend says. “That’s kind of low-grade evil.”
“What do you mean low-grade? When someone makes the hair on your arms stand up? Low-grade? I hate to think what that creep would do if he remembered I was the one who called the cops. I’m just glad I don’t live in those apartments anymore. I guess the cops hauled that guy away. I mean, there is a penalty for beating even a dog to death. Maybe they just let that guy out. Low-grade? He scares hell out of me. How low-grade is that?”
They sat for a while silent, sipping their beers. Overhead, the fans whirled, in the corner opposite them the TV played a baseball game, and people crowded up to the bar, mostly twenty-somethings, fresh-faced and happy, jabbering. Off in the corner someone pushed coins into the video poker machine.
“OK, so tell me about this bitch.”
They were both looking at the ball game on the TV. When they looked at each other again, the one recalling the woman smiled, lifted his beer, and emptied his glass. The young woman who waited on them came over and asked if they wanted another round. That settled, he said,
“I use to know her only to say hello to. It was my wife who obsessed about her, my wife and her circle of friends. There were five or six of them, and they used to get together maybe once a month over one or another’s house, usually in the morning, and they’d have coffee together. What they did was talk, mostly, but they would also plan up vacation ideas. Like they would say, What would it cost to go to Yellowstone for a week? Or maybe go on a cruise, or go to Las Vegas ? Then they would each do some checking, come up with different plans, you know what I mean? They took it all very seriously. We never went on any of these vacations, not together, I mean, as a group, though my wife and I took up one or two of those vacation ideas, the little ones. My wife was tight with our pennies. But they got a lot of pleasure from doing it, though. Annie could have told you how much any vacation you could think of would cost.”
He got emotional thinking about it. His friend didn’t flinch from it, just the opposite. His face went all still and they locked eyes.
“Too late now to take her anywhere special. We never had the money for a real vacation, anyway.”
“My wife took one vacation too many,” the other said, cracking a smile.
“All my regrets,” he replied, then raised a fist, which the other met, knuckles to knuckles.
“So, who was the bitch?”
“She was one of these women. Annie would spend hours on the phone after one of these meetings talking with all the others about this one, her name was Virginia . Soon as she hung up the phone, it would ring again. And if it didn’t ring in, say, half a minute, she’d be punching buttons herself. Then she’d have to tell it all over again to me when I came home that evening. I used to say to her, ‘Why do you all listen to her? Why don’t you stop calling her when you get together?’ and she’d say, ‘We can’t not call her! What would she think? She’d think we were snubbing her.’ ‘So?’ I’d say, ‘that’s what you’d be doing. So what?’ And she’d give me that look, you know, like, what kind of monster are you?”
“Huh, my wife…, well, never mind. Why drag all that stuff up again? I know bitches.”
“Maybe. But this here woman, this Virginia, she wasn’t just a bitch. She was bad. She was really bad. My wife sometimes was breathless telling me about her. Poor thing. She was a good woman, Annie was.
“A good woman’s hard to find. Bitches, now, they’re a dime a dozen.”
“You just don’t know. This here Virginia , she had a stepson. The boy was the son of her first husband by his first wife. I guess that woman died, and after some years he married this here Virginia , then he died. So she come by that boy unnaturally, know what I mean? The poor boy’s natural grandparents, his real mom’s parents, wanted him, wanted him real bad, but this Virginia wasn’t hearing of it.
“She didn’t want that boy, no way. What she wanted was to keep him from his grandparents, but I think it was more than that. What she wanted was to use him to torture those poor people. Oh, she didn’t abuse the boy, though I don’t think there ever was any love in her for him. She had a right to him, that’s what made her do the things she did. But she never cared two cents for him.”
He paused then, sipped the beer, and looked his friend straight in the eyes.
“That woman, she used to tell her little group of friends everything she did to those poor people. First, she got a lawyer. His job? To keep the grandparents from getting visitation rights, which is all they wanted at first. They wanted that boy to come stay with them once in a while. Then she gets a court order to keep the grandparents from calling the boy on the phone and then another to keep them away from him out of doors, like ‘scheming’ to ‘bump’ into him at the mall or something. All the women, they’d just clam up when this here Virginia ’d tell them the latest installment of her horrible doings.
“Then one day the boy gets a letter from the grandmother, telling him that his grandfather is dying, and telling him he should come to see him and where the hospital is, it would mean so much to his grandfather, all that sort of thing. This here Virginia would have none of that. She tells the ladies around the table that she wrote back to the old woman telling her the boy would be too upset and she won’t let him go. Better to forget about him. She sends the boy for a month’s vacation to her own parents’ place in Iowa , the farm, you know. So he’s not only not going to see his grandfather in the hospital, he’s not even going to be in town. Boy, did Annie get all bent outta shape over this story. All day she spent on the phone talking about it with the other women.
“Anyway, then the grandmother decides, after her husband is gone, all she’s got left in life is this boy, and she’s going to fight this here Virginia . That’s when Virginia gets really nasty.”
“But what’s the point of all this? I mean, like, what’s the harm in the boy seeing his grandparents?”
“That’s what I’m saying. There could be no harm. Only good could come from it.”
“But I don’t see what this Virginia gets from all this keeping of the boy away. I mean, what’s the point of it?”
“It’s like I said, she just used him to hurt the old couple.”
“But why’d she want to do that? She didn’t really know them, did she?”
“Never even met them. They were not a part of her husband’s everyday life after they were married. Before he died, he used to take the boy to see them, but never with her. I guess maybe there was some sensitivity there, know what I mean? Maybe there was a reason in that. But there was really no reason. Except to torment them.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Yea, I know. This is real evil. Harder to understand. This here Virginia , she beat up that old woman. But not with her fists, and not for any reason you or I could understand. Now your old guy, the one in the overalls, he kicked a dog to death, beat his wife. He was a bastard, is one still, more likely than not. But this here Virginia , there was no barking to get her bile up, no one saying or doing anything or otherwise provoking her. That grandmother had every reason to feel the way she did. Only natural. She loved her grandchild. Why destroy her for love? Do you get a sense of her, now?”
“Is that what she did? She destroyed that poor old woman?”
“You can’t believe.”
“Tell me. I think you’re right. This Virginia , she’s not a bitch. No way. Even bitches have hearts.”
“You can’t believe.”
At that moment the waitress came back and, knowing them, asked if they were ready to look at menus. They said they were and, for a while, they concentrated on ordering their meals, watching the game on TV., and noting who was or who wasn’t there among the regulars that evening. They had finished eating and were sipping beer again. Turning the cuffs up on his tan shirt, the one in bluejeans said, “So, tell me about what that woman did to the poor old grandmother. What was her name? Virginia ?”
The waitress came to the popcorn machine just beside the table they were sitting at and began to put more kernels in the popper. The smell of buttered popcorn wafted across the table. They both breathed it in.
“Yea, the bitch. Virginia ,” the other said after the waitress left. “My wife Annie, she was really upset about it all. She and her friends in this here club would meet only once a month, so the story came in over a long period of time. Each month it was something new, something worse than the month before. All the other women would spend the month between gabbing, gabbing, gabbing about this horrible Virginia . I got it all, of course, at night, whenever there was a new installment. It did no good telling Annie to shun that woman. She wouldn’t. Upset as she got, she still, they all did still, invite her to every one of their meetings.
“This woman tells them at one meeting that the boy’s grandmother has got a lawyer to see her lawyer about setting up a meeting between them to talk about the boy and who was going to keep him. This was not supposed to be a court thing, you know, but something private, something supposed to be friendly. Just to talk.
“‘Well,’ she says, ‘I’ll show them what “friendly” means. ‘What’ll you do?’ one woman asks her. ‘I have my ways,’ she says and doesn’t explain. Turns out, she begins to tell the boy some pretty big lies about the grandmother, really scares him, makes the poor old woman out to be a monster. She fills his head with these lies, and then she tells him that the lawyers want to take him away from her and make him live with the grandmother. The boy is terrified. When she takes him to the meeting at the lawyer’s office, the boy screams at the grandmother, lets on that he’s terrified. The lawyers, seeing him carry on like that, they’re all agog. They just know what this here Virginia has been up to, and the grandmother, she’s sick to death over it.
“The thing is, what to do about it. The two lawyers, they begin to cooperate, you know, in the boy’s interest. Things look bad for this here Virginia . But she’s not about to give up.’
“Now, wait a minute. You’re getting ahead of me here,” his friend says, interrupting the story. “There’s something you’re not telling. How did your wife and her friends get to know that this Virginia told those lies to the boy? She didn’t tell them that at their meetings, did she?”
“No, you’re right, I left out a few things. They did find out about the lying afterward. I’m just putting the story in the way it happened, not the way Annie and her friends found out about it. At the time it was happening, this Virginia, always coming to the meetings all prepared to do or talk about what they had agreed to at the last meeting, she would just tell them about the meeting with the lawyers, about it’s not going well, then about how things changed, then about that wicked old woman getting her comeuppance. It was afterward, when the boy finally ran away from both his grandmother and this here Virginia that the truth came out. And by then, Virginia , well, her story came out. It had to, you see, when they got hold of the boy again. He told everything the way he knew it. Then everybody knew what this here Virginia was up to. It was all in the newspapers.”
“When did all this happen,” his friend asked, wondering how come he never heard about it. If it was in the newspaper, he should have.
“This all happened about two years before Annie took ill. That would make it maybe four years ago? That sounds right.”
“Huh, well, I was having my own hard times then. No wonder. So, go on. What’d she do when the lawyers got wise to her?”
“She tells the boy that the grandmother poisoned his mother, her own daughter, you see, then she poisoned his father, and that that’s the reason they died, and then she poisoned his grandfather, too, and now she wants him.”
“She really tells the boy this stuff? Really? Man, that’s gall, isn’t it?”
“It’s the truth. She tells him his grandmother is evil. Now that’s enough to make your head spin, isn’t it? Anyway, she tells him that his grandmother makes everybody believe she is just so sweet and loving, but that she, this here Virginia , is the only one who knows the truth about her. The boy mustn’t listen to anyone, because they are all deceived. As soon as he begins to live with his grandmother, if the lawyers have their way, she will begin to poison him. He won’t feel it at first, she tells him. What he will feel is that he’s getting sick, like he just wants to stay in bed all the time. Then he’ll die, and nobody but her, this hear Virginia , will know the truth. And how can she live after that? Knowing what happened to him? It’ll be the death of her, too. So the grandmother will end up killing them both.”
“And the boy, he believes all this? I mean, really? It’s such a load of crock!”
“Hell, she had that boy so scared he didn’t know what to do. Running away seemed like the best way to him to keep both himself and his stepmother alive. Sure, he believed it all. Why wouldn’t he?”
“Gives me the creeps. I still don’t see the point behind it all. Why this Virginia would even want to do these things, I mean screwing up that boy and depriving his grandmother of him like that. What does she gain by it all?”
“I can see where you’re coming from. You think people do the things they do for reasons, like, if they have nothing to gain from doing something they just don’t bother doing those things. Like, for example, why would I try to become friends with the mayor of this here town if I had nothing to get out of the friendship? I mean, I don’t know the guy. I would have to have some reason to get to know him, and that reason would make sense of my going out of my way to do that. That’s the way people are.”
“So? Don’t you see that there’s something missing from this story?”
“You mean what this here Virginia thought she was going to get out of all the horrible things she did?”
“Precisely.”
“But if you think about it, there was really nothing for her to get out of all her lies. Like what? Keeping the boy? If she wanted that, she might just as well have let him visit his grandmother. After all, that’s all the old woman wanted at the beginning.”
“Was there any money involved? I mean, did his father leave him anything when he died?”
“Nobody ever heard of any. I’m pretty sure if there was money involved Annie would have heard about it, the way those ladies gabbed everything to death. No, I don’t think there was any money to be got from her lies.”
“So the boy runs away. What happens then?”
“Well, he’s just a kid, like maybe nine or ten years old. The police find him pretty quickly. I think it took them just about a week to find him. But the boy becomes hysterical when they catch him because he thinks they’re going to turn him over to his grandmother.”
“Man, what a mess. I see it. I do. The nicer she tries to be to him, the more she comes across as a monster. Wow! How could a person turn the world inside out like that? Kind of scares even me!”
“See what I mean about ‘evil’?”
“Yea, she takes the prize this Virginia does.”
“You’re old guy, he’s scary. But he’s an everyday type. Low-grade. This here Virginia , now, she was a class act, wasn’t she?”
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