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.”
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…?”