Jack put one shoe down. Other than that—elbows on the chair, arms across his rifle, chin on his fists, and one shiny knee angling wide—he did not move.
“What is that woman shouting about down there? Jesus…”
Kid looked at Glass, who had stepped up beside him now. Glass, frowning, glanced back at the small group, with a small, disgusted head shake.
Kid gestured down the spiral steps with his chin, turned, and started.
The hall of milling men and women revolved and received him.
“Too much!” Glass said at the bottom, stopping Kid with a warm hand on the shoulder. “I mean, Christ, man…”
“Let’s find George.” Kid took a breath. “We’ll tell him they’re up there and see what he wants to do.”
“They probably ain’t really gonna do nothing…” Glass said, warily.
“Then we find George, tell him there’s a bunch of white people up in the balcony, two of them with guns, who probably ain’t gonna do anything.” Kid wondered which way to go, saw an opening in the crowd, and loped into it.
Behind him, Glass suggested on the run: “Maybe George already knows they’re there?”
“Fine,” Kid said, back over his shoulder. “Then he can tell us that too.”
Three tubs near the wall held the four and five-foot cactuses—the sort Kid had always heard sent roots thirty and forty feet down into the desert for water.
On the nearest, among browned and crisscrossed needles, hung what looked like a pink tissue. Two steps nearer, and Kid saw it was the rag of a flower, wide as his hand, limp on the succulent’s flesh.
Before the furthest, George joked among a loud and jocular group. One woman with arms like brown sacks, wrinkled at elbows, wrists, and knuckles, waved a bottle, offering it here and there, with kisses and explosive shrieks.
Kid glanced at the balcony. No, they were not visible from where he stood.
Kid edged forward into the group. An arm pressed his arm, a hand steadied against his back to steady someone unsteady: He was sweating again. “George—! Hey, George?” He wondered why, and for answer found all the memories of ten minutes ago’s encounter: the compulsive tale of June, his own terror, returning now. “George, I got to—” He took the bottle passed him, drank, passed it on. “George, I got to see you for a minute, man!” Am I afraid of him? Kid wondered. If that’s all it is, then all I know to do is not be afraid of the fear. “George…!”
Harrison had the bottle now. His arm rose, his laughter fell—“Hey now, how you doing, Kid? This here is the Kid. The Kid wants to speak to me for a second—” then the arm fell around Kid’s shoulder—“so I’ll be with you in a minute.” The dark head lowered next to Kid’s with an anticipatory swig, fixing attention.
“Look,” Kid said. “Outside, there was some guy talking about some people getting killed in the street by snipers from the roof this afternoon? Well, up in the balcony, you got about half a dozen white guys—two of them with guns. They’re sitting there joking about picking people off. And they’re particularly interested in which one is you. Now they probably aren’t gonna pull anything, but I thought you ought to—”
“Shit!” George hissed. He raised his eyes, but not his head. “They got three women and a dog with them—?”
“Two…” Kid began. “No, three and a dog.”
“God-damn thick-headed niggers!” George’s breath lurched in sharply. “I told them not to let them crazy people in here with no guns! What the hell they think I put them out there for…unless they done snuck in some other way—”
“That’s what they were saying,” Kid said. “They must of snuck in. And—”
George started to stand.
Kid caught his shoulder and pulled him back down, his mind gone bright with recognition of what was inside of it: “—and George! What I told you—” the sweat started to dry, and as his back cooled under his vest, he knew why it had come—“about June, killing her brother…?”
George’s eyes, the corners blood-heavy, the pupils fading almost evenly into the stained-ivory whites, came close to Kid’s.
“…it wasn’t true. I mean, she did it. But you see, I don’t know whether she did it because of you or not. After he was killed, that’s when she told me he was going to tell, about the poster of you I gave her. She said it was an accident. She said he was going to tell, and then, just by accident…So I don’t know. You see…?”
“You real worried about that, ain’t you?” George straightened. His arm still hung on Kid’s shoulder, the glass bottle moving, as George breathed, against Kid’s chains. “Well that’s why she looking for me, not you. ’Cause I don’t care about that one way or the other. You so busy blamin’ or forgivin’, you gonna drive her crazy. Me, see, I don’t care if she innocent as a little white bunny rabbit in a brand new hutch, or if she done killed her brother, her mother, her daddy, and the President of the United States, cut up the bodies, and danced naked in the blood. What’s it to me? What’s it to her—? Another white man out of the way, that’s all. She might worry about it a bit more than I do, but not much. And, finally, it’s just gonna make both our lives easier—maybe even yours. When she come to me, I do her just the same, both ways. You say she looking? Well, I’m here, man, I’m still here. Hey—!” which was called out across the crowd. George waved the bottle high. “We all getting tired out, now. I think we got to all think about going home.”
The blades clicked on Kid’s chest, turned. Kid said: “You want us to go up and get ’em down for you, George? We’ll take them out of the balcony.”
George looked back at Kid, hesitated with narrowed eyes. “We get my boys up there to cover them. Then we get some people to take them away. My boys let them get in. So they can get them out. I know you guys is pretty handy with them bunch of thorns hanging around your necks, but they got equalizers, and if all men is created equal, we might as well keep it that way. Party’s been going on too long, anyway. We all gonna go home now. So you can oblige me by moving out too, okay?”
Kid grinned, aped an over-polite bow—
“Much obliged to you, there,” George said. “For all your trouble”—and laughed. Kid looked at the cactus in its wooden tub: for a moment he considered throwing himself against it to embrace the spiked, fleshy trunk; which was so ridiculous he merely turned and walked away. They will meet, he thought, by sun, by moons, by laughter or lightning. Why I sweat is because I do not know what will happen to me, then. What will happen to me…
Glass fell in beside him.
After about six steps, Glass said: “What would you have done if he’d said, ‘Why, sure, man! Go on up there and bring the motherfuckers down’?”
“Probably—” Kid dodged a drunk who was going to fall three steps beyond them—“pissed all over myself.”
“Maybe.” Glass laughed. “But then, you’d probably of tried to go up there and get ’em down, too.”
“I don’t think they’d have been much trouble,” Kid said. “I hope.”
The white man coming toward them, shouldering through the blacks and smiling, was Captain Michael Kamp. “Well, hello, there. Now I didn’t think I was going to see you again. I mean, not this evening.” His smile took in Glass.
“Hello, sir,” Kid said. “Good to see you again. But I think the party’s breaking up. They got some problem upstairs. Nothing serious. But there just might be some shooting. And it’s awfully easy pickings from up there.” Kamp’s eyes followed Kid’s up to the balcony and came back, confused and half again as wide. Kid said, “Oh. This is my friend Glass. Glass, this is Captain Kamp.”
“Hello, sir.” Glass put out his hand. “Glad to meet you.”
Kamp had to remember to shake. “What is…I mean?”
“Come on,” Kid said. “Let’s move over this way.”
“What’s going on now?” Kamp followed them. “Now, well…Roger gave me a list of places to hit this evening. I’m afraid I’m one of those guys who likes to drink booze and chase women—the Navy’s favorite kind. While that bar is all very interesting—a very interesting bunch—” he nodded—“really, I thought I might do better, at least on the second part of that, someplace. Like here.” He looked up at the balcony again, while a sudden mass of people moved noisily toward the door and out. “They got some pretty women, too…” Another bunch followed them. “What is it?” Kamp asked.