Dirtbags by Eryk Pruitt

pulled her over atop him and put his mouth on hers.
    “Calvin—” she started, but the mouthful of tongue kept her from saying more, and she struggled a bit, softly at first, but ended up slapping him good across the face. He let her free, and she pulled quickly away. “What are you doing?”
    “Sorry,” he grumbled. “I thought I was receiving signals from you.”
    “Signals?”
    “Like you wanted it,” he said. He fingered the gravel behind him blindly for the knife. “I didn’t mean no harm by it.”
    “What kind of person lures a woman out to some secluded place with a fake relapse, just to make time with her?” Corrina asked.
    “What kind of person meets an addict out in the middle of nowhere?” Calvin shot back, more than a little defensively. He looked up and down the road. Still, no one for miles.
    “I do it because no one else will,” Corrina said. “The people running that clinic don’t care about nothing except whether or not your insurance carrier will pay for treatment and how much. But sometimes I feel like I’m just wasting my time.”
    “Maybe that’s what you get for putting so much faith in a bunch of junkies,” Calvin said. “I personally couldn’t be bothered to give half a shit about a person.”
    “There are plenty people with that attitude already.” Corrina gazed best she could into his eyes. “I’m trying to do something different.”
    Calvin’s fingertip found the blade, but he ignored it for the moment. He looked at Corrina and wondered what she was up to. She wasn’t much to look at, in his opinion. She had a good enough body, although undernourished, but her face betrayed her heritage. If her parents weren’t close kin, somebody in her immediate lineage was, and that sin had come to call upon her facial features. His own wife Rhonda—for all her faults—was perhaps more pleasing to the eye, but Calvin saw something more in Corrina. Something that caused his own breathing to stutter and his body to draw closer to hers as they sat there on that darkened road.
    “You have a lot of anger inside you, Calvin,” she said. “That’s never done anyone any good.”
    “Maybe,” he said, “but I’m of the opinion that hate can be a good tool, in the right hands.”
    “The right hands?”
    “Sure. Somebody that knows how to use it.” For a second, his fingertip lost the knife blade, and he tensed, jerked himself closer to it, found it again.
    She smiled. “That’s the easy way out, Calvin. To just give in and hate. And it may very well work for you, but I ain’t got time to focus on those kinds of things. I aim to get my son back, and all the hate in the world ain’t going to help me with that.” She tucked stringy strands of hair behind her ear and wiped below her nose. “Besides, what could you possibly have to hate so much?”
    Calvin took a deep breath and opened his mouth and the words that vomited forth came with such ease that they shocked even him. He talked of hating people who had money, and those who didn’t. He hated blacks, Mexicans, foreigners and, just to keep things even, white people. He hated gay folks and straight folks and especially those who didn’t yet know which way they went. He hated people who asked for directions. He hated people with dogs, and those with cats. He said this, he said that, he named names. There was plenty he had to hate, he told her, and he aimed to do it right and complete.
    “That’s a horrible shame,” Corrina said, “that you would carry so much hate inside you.”
    “And you aim to tell me you ain’t got no one to hate?” Calvin said. Using his forefinger, he inched the knife closer to him. Slowly. Quietly. “You aim to tell me that and have me believe it?”
    She shook her head. “Certainly not,” she said. “I can hate. I’m not perfect.”
    “And what do you hate?”
    “Liars,” she said. She puffed out her chest. “I hate liars and insurance companies. Liars, insurance