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had lifted Dr. Keating like a marshmallow and put him on the kitchen table.
"We gonna take out you insides like some lukewarm peas outen a can," said Dice. "We gonna split you up like a popped pork sausage. We gonna spread you greasy white intestines outen you belly like so much spaghetti."
"Yeah," said the big one named Bubba.
"Or we can be nasty," said Dice.
"What could possibly be nastier?" whined Dr. Keating.
"Nasty is we don't use the can opener," said Dice.
"Bubba, he use his hand," said the big one named Bubba. He raised a very large and wide thing with fingers on it. Dr. Keating knew it was a hand because one of those fingers was a thumb. And he could see fingerprints. They looked like pottery swirls on kitchen plates. Bubba must have been seven feet tall. The hand could hide a chessboard.
Bubba took a big flat, thick salad knife and put it between forefinger and pinky with the other two fingers underneath. He pressed up with the two middle fingers. The knife snapped.
"What do you want from me?" asked Dr. Keating. He finally understood.
"We thought you never ask. We wants to know who employ you. Who be the man what pay you?" said Dice.
"Yeah," said Bubba. "Dat what we want."
"MUT pays me," said Dr. Keating.
"Who else?" said Dice.
"No one else."
"We know dere be someone else."
"No one else."
Dice nodded. Dr. Keating felt a sharp pain at his bellybutton. He felt his flesh rip. They were bringing the can opener up, digging his stomach open. He screamed in pain.
"Please, please, please. I get money deposited in my bank account."
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"How long?" asked Dice.
"Many years now, five, six. You can't do this."
"Don't be telling this black man what he can do. Dat be 'fringing on my rights dere," said Dice. "You does that and den I gets mean."
"Yeah," said Bubba.
"Please," begged Dr. Keating.
"Now, I don't wants what you been getting paid for for a long time now. I wants de new thing. Who you working for so you be phoning in wrong information?"
"I don't know what you're talking about. Please."
Dice nodded. The can opener moved up a few more inches to just below the chestbones. The white belly gushed blood like a sausage split by the heat of a fire.
"Last chance 'fore we gets mean," said Dice.
"There's nobody new paying me. No one. I tell you. I swear."
"Too late. Now we be's mean."
Dice stepped away to keep anything from getting on his pure white silk suit with the red handkerchief hanging out of the breast pocket, the red handkerchief that matched Dice's new red shirt and red tie and shiny red shoes with the blue neon socks. He had had to hunt all over Roxbury to get the right neon blue. Most of the stores had only the dull neon. Whoever heard of wearing dull neon blue socks with a red shirt?
Bubba reached into Dr. Keating's belly and the two other men who were holding his arms and legs turned their gaze away. Dice stepped back farther. Sometimes Bubba splattered. Bubba was sloppy.
Crack went the ribs, and Keating's eyes widened in shock. Crack went the backbones, and then there was blankness in the white man's face.
"Okay, Bubba," said Dice. "Let's go. He dead."
But there was more cracking. Bubba was taking out the ribs. Then Bubba went to work on the knees. Bubba crushed the knees in his hands like pine cones mashed in a steel vise.
"Bubba, he be dead a while now, Bubba," said Dice.
Bubba took the legs out of the hip joints. 51
"Bubba," said Dice. "He dead. Time to go, sweet fella."
Bubba went for the head. He liked heads. He liked to press them till the eyes popped out.
"All right now, Bubba. You done the head. Les' go now, big beautiful fella," said Dice. "Good. You got de eyes. You always be hiking de eyes. De eyes finish it. Hmmmm. Yeah, good, Bubba, let's go now, precious big fella."
One of the men who had stepped back and had his head turned because he couldn't stand watching Bubba work suddenly felt his head inside something very big. And when he saw large fingers close over his eyes, he knew his head was in Bubba's hands. He tried to let out a big scream, but there was that finger sticking down his throat, and then he thought he heard a very big crack, but then there was no hearing and there wasn't even a thought.
"Bubba, beautiful fella. We got de car. De new car, baby," said Dice, grinning very hard. Bubba had started on their own men.
"Right," said Bubba.
Dice looked around for a place for Bubba to wipe his hands. There were only two places. Dice's suit or the other man they had picked up for the work.
Dice quickly pointed to the other man.
Bubba wiped and the man screamed. Bubba had wiped too hard. Bubba suddenly realized that he had done a wrong thing. His own man was whimpering softly in his giant hands. Bubba looked to Dice. He knew he could trust Dice.
Bubba was the only man from Roxbury who trusted Dice. If people could get close to Bubba, they would have told him that Dice was no good. But people did not get close to Bubba. Only Dice got close to Bubba, and Dice made a living from the big man. The only problem was that Bubba was a victim of enthusiasm. Once he got started, he was like a long freight train; he took a while to stop. It was not that Bubba was es-
52
pecially vicious, Dice thought. It was that those big hands needed something to do once they got started.
Bubba had been six-foot-two and 240 pounds in junior high school. Naturally, he was the greatest thing in the Tiny Tot Football League, the division for boys fourteen and under.
Bubba's football career started and ended there. He could not realize that the play had been whistled dead. Coaches tried jumping on him to teach him, but Bubba could never stop thinking that a tackle was only the beginning.
An opposing quarterback who would never walk again sued successfully, proving that Bubba did not play football, he mugged.
The junior high tried him with the big boys in high school. Bubba put a fullback into a wheelchair for life, by running after the stretcher to finish him off while the fullback looked helplessly up to the sky.
Bubba never made love to a woman more than once.
He tried professional boxing, but he hated the gloves on his hands. Bubba knocked out his first opponent in fourteen seconds of the first round. His manager was delighted, until the referee couldn't get Bubba up off his prostrate opponent.
Frustrated to agony, Bubba tore off the gloves with his teeth so he could get at the other boxer's skull better with his bare hands.
The referee tried breaking a stool over Bubba's head to stop him. Then someone came into the ring with a lead pipe that he brought smashing down on Bubba's big head. The pipe could have splintered a pier piling, it came down with such force. Bubba looked up and scratched his head. The pipe had caught his attention.
When he concentrated, Bubba realized that he was supposed to stop crushing things with his hands. But the concentration was hard for Bubba.
Now in the kitchen of the white man's Cape Cod home, Bubba realized he had already killed one of his own men and was in the process of killing another. The man was half dead. Bubba looked to Dice. 53
"What we do, Dice?"
"You started it, you finish it, big fella," Dice said. "You leave him here, he gonna be singing all songs to de fuzz. He gonna say you did it."
"No. Won' say nuffin," said the man in Bubba's hands.
"He say he won' say nuffin," said Bubba.
"Dey all say dat when you gots dey head in you hands. He won' say nuffin now. He say it plenty looking at dem Boston blues, dem fuzz. Who you friend anyway?"
"You my friend, Dice."
"Who never lie to you?" asked Dice.
Bubba thought a moment. "Ain't nobody never lie to me. Everybody lie to me," he said accurately.