Bad Company by Virginia Swift Page A

Vedauwoo.
    “Nope,” said Brit. “She went for all kinds, as long as they were gross. This particular one wasn’t a regular, just some skank passing through, and from the look of it she was planning to take him home with her that night, or go to his motel, or whatever.”
    Nattie, punching “end” on one call, pressing more buttons and getting ready for “send” on another, chimed in. “Dwayne and I were down there too, and it was downright embarrassing. She was making a spectacle of herself. Disgusting.”
    Sally heard Delice mutter something about pots and kettles, and Sally said, “So what do you think, Dee?”
    “Yeah, I saw her,” Delice admitted. “And it wasn’t the first time. Sometimes when I was bartending I had to cut her off when I thought she was getting too wasted for her own good. It never seemed to help. She’d get surly, or she’d get all baby-faced and hurt, but one way or the other, it seemed like the whole purpose was to hook on to some loser for the night. It was like Russian roulette.”
    Sally had run women’s centers, had volunteered for rape crisis hotlines. She knew something about that kind of sexual compulsiveness in women. She tried to put the question delicately. “Mary,” she said, holding both of her friend’s hands, looking straight into her eyes, “is there any suggestion that when she was a kid, some man may have messed with her?”
    And now Mary looked truly wretched. “I’ve thought about it.” She swallowed. “But maybe she was just looking for somebody to be nice to her. It wasn’t like she had it easy at home, no matter what my sister tried to do. That Bone Bandy is one nasty-ass motherfucker. Pardon my French, but that’s the God’s honest truth. He’s little, but he’s mean as a rattlesnake and twice as twisty. Tanya stayed with him more than twenty years, and I’ll never understand why, as long as I live.
    “Before they were ever even married, when they were still just going out, she came to the apartment Dickie and I were renting, with a black eye and a bloody lip. Said that time he’d accused her of going around on him, and just lost it. Tanya claimed she was through with him, but he showed up maybe an hour later with a bunch of roses, swearing never to do it again, and she fell for it. The next time he’d hit her hard enough to knock out a couple of teeth. After that they left town, and I barely heard from her at all.”
    “They say that women who stay with abusive men get to be, like, prisoners in their house,” Brit said. “Like in The Burning Bed. ”
    “The guys scare the life out of them,” Delice said. “You can always tell those shitheads. I’ve seen couples come in my bar, and they have a few pops, and maybe get into an argument, and the man will grab the woman’s arm and squeeze it, or maybe give her a little slap. The worst ones are the quiet ones, the ones who twist a finger or think they’re causing pain in a way nobody can see.”
    “It takes a hell of a lot of guts to leave,” Sally said. “When you’re living with that, and you think the alternative might be that he’ll just kill you.
    “Did Monette’s father beat up on her?” Sally asked.
    “I don’t know,” Mary admitted. “One of the few times I talked to Tanya, she told me she’d decided she could take whatever he dished out, as long as she could protect Monette. But that was a few years ago. And then the last time we spoke she’d called to tell me that Monette was thinking about moving down here, and asked me to keep an eye on her. I asked her how it was going, and she said about as good as could be expected. I shouldn’t have left it at that, but I did.” Mary teared up.
    “What could you do? She was up there, and you were down here,” Delice said. “What Mary hasn’t told you, Sal, is that she went up to Newcastle half a dozen times after they moved up there, and tried to convince Tanya to leave the son of a bitch and come back home with her. Tanya