“Her name rhymes with moon, and she—” Kid’s right fist clamped, fingertips and knuckles scraping his jeans—“she killed her brother for you: George? She had your poster, all big and black and naked and he saw it, her little brother. He saw it and was teasing her—you know how little brothers are, George? He was teasing her and he was gonna tell on her, you see? He was gonna tell her mother, tell her father: only she was afraid if he did, they’d know—know that it wasn’t just a picture; know that she’d found you once; know that she was trying to find you again. See, they’d already threatened to kill her older brother. Already. And he’d run away. So she pushed him, her little brother, down the elevator shaft—sixteen, seventeen, eighteen stories down…! I don’t quite…remember!” Kid shook his head. Something that was not pain pulsed in it, pulsed in it again. “Oh, Christ, there was…blood! I had blood all over me. I had to pull him out of the basement, by the armful! And carry him back upstairs. After he was dead. But…it was for you! That’s why she…that’s why she did it! That’s why I…” What pulsed became pain. “She told me herself. She told me that she was afraid he was going to tell. And that she…” Kid stepped away, stepped again, because the first step was unsteady and he had to catch himself on the second. He looked back.
George watched, as if from a long hall whose walls moved with indifferent faces, black and brown.
His eyes will explode like blooming poppies, Kid thought. His teeth will erupt like diamonds spat by the mouthfuls. His tongue will snake the yards between us, nearly touch my mouth before it becomes pink smoke. Steam in two columns will hiss down from his nostrils…
George stared with—and recognizing it, Kid suddenly turned away, lurched away—the indulgence reserved for the mad.
Is this, Kid thought (saying, “Hey, I’m sorry, man…” and patting someone’s shoulder he’d just bumped), one of those moments that, momentarily, will slip out of mind to join my purpose, age, and name? He made it between those two; then somebody, laughing, steadied his arm and handed him on. He came up against the thin metal bars with his cheek and both hands, clutched them, leaned back, looked up:
Someone was coming down the spiral stairway. The fat, bald man (whose skin looked now more like oiled wrapping paper) in the bib-overalls descended, by Kid, stepped from ringing, black, triangular steps that circled the central pole, up around, and up through the open square in the balcony floor—
When Kid looked down again, the man was working sideways through the people wandering about the center of the room.
“You all right?”
“Yeah, I…” Kid looked around.
“Good.” Glass, with a bobbing walk, almost slow motion, came toward him. “I was just wondering. You know…?”
“I’m all right…” But he was cold; the sweat was drying on his neck, his forearms, his ankles. “Yeah.”
Glass ran his thumb along his belt. Vinyl flapped back from the appendectomy scar in his dark, matte skin, swung over it again.
Multiple Caucasian laughter fell down through the spiral railing.
Glass and Kid looked up together, looked down together.
A lantern high on the wall brushed soft highlights on Glass’s arms, slapped harsh ones on his vest, and slipped a line of light along an orchid petal against his chained and chain-lapped chest so bright Kid squinted.
“You wanna go see?” Glass said.
“Sounds like the kids from the park.” Kid pressed his lips, glanced up again; suddenly he swung around the rail, started up the steps, one hand on the gritty pole, one trailing on the banister. Glass, behind him, kept bumping Kid’s fist with his fist on the rail. The toe of his boot caught Kid’s bare heel one step before the top.
From the shadowed kiosk at the head of the aisle, Kid looked down the balcony’s raked seats. He heard Glass breathing inches behind his ears.
They sat—six, no seven of them—just back from the balcony raiclass="underline" The blond woman in the third row, leaning forward to see between the shoulders of the two men in front, was Lynn, the woman he had sat next to at the Richards, the woman from whom he had wrested the gun in the Emboriky.
A tall, curly-haired man sat beside her, his hands locked around the barrel of a rifle. He leaned forward, the barrel tip higher than his head; he looked almost asleep.
Another man was still laughing.
Another was saying, “Where is that damn woman’s dog? Hey—” He half rose, looked over the empty seats: “Muriel! Muriel—”
“Oh, for God’s sakes, Mark, sit down!” Lynn, in her green dress, said.
Another man, in a worn suede jacket, said: “I want to know where that damn woman is. She was supposed to be back…” The last of his sentence was lost in laughter and applause from below, that must have had something to do with the Reverend; but Kid could not see her from here.
And one man had cuffed the man next to him. The other woman, in an off-the-shoulder peasant blouse, was trying to separate them, laughing.
A seat away, scuffed shoes on the back of the seat ahead, knees jack-knifed in shiny slacks, and a rifle across his chair arms like a guard bar on the seat of a carnival ride, sat Jack. While the others joked and laughed, Kid could see his hollow, unshaven cheek pulse with swallowing as he balanced his chin on his joined fists and brooded down on the milling blacks.
“Ain’t some of those guys look awfully familiar?” Glass whispered, too loudly, it seemed, near Kid’s ear. But none of them turned.
Kid glanced back—“The department store…”—and saw Glass nod before he looked away.
Widely scattered in the dark balcony (there were only two lanterns that someone had set up about twenty yards down the balcony rail; all the other light came from below), perhaps a dozen people lounged in the ply-backed seats. The bolts in the wrought metal braces holding the seat, in front of Kid’s knee, to the dusty floor were half out—
“What’s she saying? Can you hear what the preacher lady’s saying down there?”
“Oh, come on! You can’t hear anything up here except noise! I want to go downstairs and wander around the party!”
“You want to go down there, with all of them? Go on, then!”
“That guy down there looks all right…Who is he, anyway?”
“The white guy over there?”
“That’s who I was pointing at, wasn’t I?”
“Man—” The curly-haired one dragged the barrel back against his chest. “We could really just pick them off from here. Just like—” He suddenly raised his rifle to his eye. “Pow!” he said, then glanced over and laughed. “Just like that, right? Wish I knew which one was George Harrison.” He sighted down the gun again. “Pow…” he whispered.
“Cut it out,” the man who was Mark said. “We just snuck in here to see what was going on.”
The curly-headed man leaned forward and called, “Hey, Reb? Don’t you think we could stir up a little excitement down there with a few well-aimed ones—just for target practice, mind you? What you think of that idea, Reb?”
Jack said, soberly and not looking over: “All you folks got some strange ideas. Everybody I met since I come here got strange ideas.” Not soberly, came to Kid as a second thought: Jack’s voice had the slurred gravity of a very grave drunk.
“Why do you two want to bring guns to a place like this for anyway?” Mark said.
“They had guns,” the curly-headed man said, putting his rifle butt back on the floor. “You see the way them niggers tried to kick us out, because we had guns? Now that’s not right. They had guns, we had guns—all men are created equal. Didn’t you know that?—Hey, get your hand off!”
“I just wanted to see it,” the woman in the peasant blouse said. “Besides, I’m a better shot than you, anyway.”
“Yeah?” the man said. “Sure you are.” He hung his curly head back against the barrel.
“Well, I am!”
“Which one is Harrison?” one of the other men said. “You know, they all do look alike.” He laughed. “At least from up here.”