Voices in the Dark Read Online Free

it with a sadness that had to do with other things. When she turned to the man behind her, the endless brow of his shaved head shined in her face. With a smile, he stripped down to his Jockey shorts and tensed his stomach into curling muscles, which he displayed challengingly.
    “You can’t hurt me here. I see the punch coming, I can take it every time.”
    “Why would I want to punch you?” she said.
    “You’d be surprised those who’d like to.”
    She watched him flex his arms, the muscles ropes, not a bit of him wasted. His presence was pronounced and emphatic, which made him seem taller than he was. His nude head was the bone handle of his body. The only evidence that he was approaching sixty was the netted skin around his deep-set eyes, like the wingscape of butterflies.
    “Where’s the fag?” he said, and she stiffened.
    “Don’t call him that. I’d find it offensive even if it were so.”
    “Did he leave you?”
    “He’s away for a while. He’ll be back.”
    “A guy like that, you don’t know what he’ll do.”
    “You don’t know anything about him,” she shot back.
    “I got eyes, that’s enough.”
    Bending, he unzipped a rugged gripsack and pulled out a set of camouflage clothes, which was what she wanted to capture him in. His name was Eaton, but he called himself Soldier. Nearly twenty years out of the army, he still imitated the life.
    “I shouldn’t need more than an hour,” she said and watched him reclothe himself into a warrior and blouse his pants with stretched condoms square-knotted at the ends.
    “I got the cap,” he said. “Do you want me to put it on?”
    “No need,” she said, her gaze fixed on him. His ears lay flat as if in babyhood and beyond they had been taped. A violet hue burned through his suntanned scalp. His temple pulsed.
    “Where do you want me?”
    She stationed him in the strong light from the windows, where he stood in a way that looked hostile, not exactly what she wanted. “Relax. Act as though you were waiting in a line.”
    “I was doing that, I wouldn’t relax. I’d want to get to the front.”
    “Okay. Be that way.”
    She perched herself on a high chair, with a sketch pad in her lap and a collection of charcoal pencils in the pocket of the paint-smeared shirt she wore over shorts. Her feet were bare, the toes curled over a rung. Quickly, the edge of her hand scuffing the rough paper, she began sketching him but without verve or confidence, without the fire with which she could pretend she was Goya etching madness, Munch darkening a scream. She tore the sheet from the pad, tossed it aside, and started afresh.
    He winked at her. “I like it better when you do me in the raw.”
    With quick strokes she strove to capture from his stance someone lonely, displaced, and rootless, but produced only caricature. Her nerves were out of order.
    “You got nice toes,” he said, “but you ought to paint the nails. Give ’em character.”
    Her pencil concentrated on his face, weathered and shatterproof, and on his deep-set eyes, which could go conveniently vacant, immunizing him from criticism and insult. Every line in his brow seemed to have a purpose that defied translation. She was better doing women. Women she understood.
    He said, “I know somebody could give you a nice pedicure.”
    “I don’t want a pedicure, Soldier. I just want to get this right.”
    “You’ll never get me right. I’m nobody you ever knew.”
    “You’re commoner than you think,” she declared, shutting the sketch pad and slipping off the chair. “But you’re right, it’s not working. Maybe the next time.”
    “Tell me the problem,” he said, “maybe I can solve it.”
    She pattered to a table, where she opened a leather bag and extracted bills from a wallet, half the usual amount, which she offered up. “Will this do?”
    “Yeah, I’ll accept it.” He deposited the money into a deep pocket. “I know the problem,” he said. “Your friend’s not here,