He was younger than Farrell, with a round, firm, deeply tanned face under a surfer’s helmet of crusty white-blond hair. His sideburns were a shade darker, thick and stubbly; his mustache colorless, almost invisible. Farrell saw that his lower lip had been bleeding.
“I don’t think so,” Farrell said.
The young man got out of the car as he started past it. He was stockily built, Farrell’s height but at least twenty pounds heavier. He said, “But you’re going to see her.”
Farrell stared. The man came closer, smiling. “I mean, if you go in there, into that house, you’ll see her. I mean, that’s where she works, isn’t it?”
“Oh, Suzy,” Farrell said without thinking, and immediately wished he hadn’t. The young man’s friendly expression did not change, but rather became fixed on his face, as if he had died. “Suzy McManus, right, you got it, good old Suzy. Well, I’m Dave McManus. Dave McManus. I’m good old Dave.” He caught Farrell’s hand and shook it long and gently, looking straight into the eyes all the while. His own hand was cold and wet and hard.
Farrell had seen pure white drunkenness before, but not often enough to recognize it at sight. He knew the thing itself, however—the freight train rattling and lurching comically from hilarity to slobbering sorrow, picking up speed as it passed through wild, aimless anger straight on into wild sickness; and then, running smoothly and almost silently now, into a dark place of shaking and sweating and crying, and out again with no warning to where a dazzling snowy light made everything very still. McManus neither swayed nor mumbled and hardly smelled of alcohol at all, but Farrell began to back away from him. McManus’s smile widened with each step.