Someone, then others, were laughing.
Kid walked, registering first the full wildness of it, the spreading edges; but only at the working street lamp at the far corner, realizing it was humor’s raddle and play.
Two black men, in the trapezoid of light from a doorway, were talking. One was drinking a can of beer or Coke. From across the street, a third figure (Kid could see the dark arms were bare from here, that the vest was shiny) ambled up.
The street lamp pulsed and died, pulsed and died. Black letters on a yellow field announced, and announced, and announced:
JACKSON AVENUE
Kid walked toward them, curious.
“She run up here…” The tall one explained, then laughed once more. “Pretty little blond-headed thing, all scared to death; you know, she stopped first, like she gonna turn around and run away, with her han’ up in front of her mouth. Then she a’ks me—” The man lowered his head and raised his voice: “‘Is George Harrison in there? You know, George Harrison, the big colored man?’” The raconteur threw up his head and laughed again. “Man, if I had ’em like George had ’em…” In his fist was a rifle barrel (butt on the ground) that swung with his laughter.
“What you tell her?” the heavier one asked, and drank again.
“‘Sure he’s inside,’ I told her. ‘He better be inside. I just come out of there and I sure as hell seen him inside. So if he ain’t inside, then I just don’t know where else he might be.’” The rifle leaned and recovered. “She run. She just turned around and run off down the block. Run just like that!”
The third was a black scorpion with the black vinyl vest, his orchid on a neck chain. It’s like, Kid thought, meeting friends the afternoon the TV had been covering the assassination of another politician, the suicide of another superstar; and for a moment you are complicit strangers celebrating by articulate obliteration some national, neutral catastrophe.
Remembering the noon’s light, Kid squinted in the dark. And wished he were holding anything else: notebook or flower or shard of glass. Awkwardly, he reached back to shove the books under his belt.
The three turned to look.
Kid’s skin moistened with embarrassment.
“…She just run off,” the black man with the gun finally repeated, and his face relaxed like a musician’s at a completed cadence.
The one with the beer can, looking left and right, said, “You scorpions. So you come down here a little, huh?”
“This is the Kid,” the black scorpion explained. “I’m Glass.”
His name, Kid thought (he remembered Spider helping with Siam’s arm on the rocking bus floor…): It isn’t any easier to think of them once their names surface. They might as well be me. Surfaced with-it was a delight at his own lack. But that joy still seemed as dull and expected as a banally Oedipal dream he’d had the first night he’d been assigned a psychiatrist at the hospital.
“You the Kid?” The man hooked the can’s bottom on the top of his belt buckle. “You fellows gonna come down here and give us protection?”
“Yeah, they all shootin’ up black people now, you come on down to Jackson.”
Far inside, other blacks were talking and laughing.
“What happened?” Kid asked.
Glass stepped over closer to Kid. (Kid thought: I feel more comfortable. He probably does too.) The others moved to accommodate the shift.
“Someone been shooting up down here?” Glass asked. “That was this afternoon?”
“Sure was.” The barrel went into the other hand. “Like a sniper, you know? Ain’t that something. I mean, this afternoon, with that thing hanging up there.”
“What happened?”
“Somebody climbed up on the roof of the Second City Bank building down on the corner, and started shooting people with a gun. Just like that.”
“Did he kill anybody?” Kid asked.
The man with the can pursed his lips to a prune.
The man with the gun said: “About seven.”
“Shit!” Kid said.
“Like he got four people together, you know—bip, bip, bip, bip. The woman wasn’t dead yet, but she couldn’t move very far. A little later some people came out to help them, ’cause they thought he’d gone. But he stood up again and picked off three of them. Then he run.”
“It was a white boy, too.” The other gestured with his can. “And he gonna come all the way down here to shoot niggers.”
“The woman died, hey…when?” Glass asked.
“A little later. She didn’t say nothing about the guy did the shooting though. Some others saw. That’s how they know he was white.” He grinned, finished the can, tossed it. “You scorpions gonna—” it clunked and bounced—“gonna come down to Jackson and give us some protection? Keep them crazy white motherfuckers from shooting up people in the street?”
The gun came up. “We don’t need no scorpion protection,” and a deprecating: “Shit.”
“That’s good,” Kid said. “Because we don’t protect anybody.” This all sounds sort of familiar. Didn’t somebody get shot from a roof…
The two men looked at each other, looked uncomfortable.
Glass repeated, finally, “That’s not what we do.”
The man with the gun slid the barrel up to his shoulder. “Naw, we don’t need no protection.”
“We don’t need no motherfuckers standing on the roof of the Second City Bank building shooting people, either.” The other man’s hands moved on his belt to finger the buckle, as though he wished the can back. “You know, without having no doctors. Or undertakers.”
“What’d they do with them?” Glass asked.
“Put them in a house way down there. And after about three or four days, people gonna start crossing the street when they was going past that stretch.”
The man with the gun didn’t laugh. “What you scorpions doing over here? ’Cause that sun comes up—” the butt clacked down on the concrete—“you gonna come on down here?”
“George told me to come down and see him,” Kid said. “I saw him over at Reverend Amy’s church and he told me to come down and visit.”
“Yeah,” Glass said. “We comin’ to see George.”
After a while one said, “Oh.”
“Well, go on in,” the other said. “Sure, go on inside. He’s in there.”
“Come on,” Kid said to Glass.
Halfway down the hall, Glass said, “You think he ever had a gun before? The way he was banging it around, he gonna shoot off his ear or his nose or his head or something.”
“Or my head,” Kid said. “Yeah, I was thinking that too.”
Three lanterns hung together. Their magnesium-white light harshened the battleship linoleum, the institutional yellow walls. Through an iron elevator gate, Kid could see a web of shadow on the cinder block.
He knew he reacted, but could not tell by what it showed. “Where to put the bodies? I’m not going to like it when I run into that a third time.”
Glass was watching him.
“Why’re you wearing your orchid around your neck? When I first saw you the day we broke into the department store, you had it in a piece of leather.”
“I know,” Glass said. “But you were wearing yours that way.”
“Oh. That’s what I thought.”