At the sound of the first shot, Peter leaped to his feet from the living room sofa, staring around in terror and disbelief. This wasn’t the right way! He started instinctively toward the glass doors leading to the cantilevered deck, wanting to see what had gone wrong, but then the firing started in earnest, and two of the glass panels ahead of him shattered as they were hit. “No no no!” Peter cried, backing away, making patting motions at the outer world with both hands. Not like this! Not like this!
Mike wanted more. Hurrying to stay ahead of everybody else, but at the same time striving to be meticulous, accurate, correct, he squeezed again. Yes! High on the right side of her chest, puffing a ragged red-black hole, straightening her against the glass door when she might have fallen forward. And again, the cartridge leaping from him to her, embedding in her body, thumping in, holding her in place, not letting her fall.
Thump. Thump. Thump. Like spikes into rotten wood, like stakes into soft clay, he pounded the wads of metal into her flesh, watching each bloody crater blossom. Forty or fifty guns were rattling now, light-reflecting glass shards were spraying, the bedroom curtains were whipping and snapping as though in a high wind, other men’s bullets were biting into that body, but it was still first and foremost his. Thump. He spaced them, timed them, placed them to keep her upright, prevent her from falling. Blood and meat obscured the details of her now, someone else’s magnum cartridge swept the top of her head away as though with a scythe, but Mike kept punching, punching, punching into the torso, seven, eight, nine, ten—and the rifle didn’t kick. That was when he knew it hadn’t fired, it was empty, and at last the ragged thing on the porch toppled forward, jerking as it was hit several more times on the way down.
The bedroom was full of buzzing. Angry metal bees swarmed everywhere, stinging and biting, knocking Larry down as he tried to run through the bedroom door into the hall. Eleven bullets struck him, leaving him broken, impaired, profusely bleeding, unconscious, but alive.
Peter, mad with fear, clawed at the carpet, trying to dig down through the living room floor. Blood and saliva ran from his open mouth, tears ran from his eyes, and all he could hear was everything in the world breaking, cracking, splitting, shattering as the bullets flashed through the rooms. He lay chest-down on the floor, gasping, staring wide-eyed at nothing, scrabbling with raw fingertips, shredding his nails, until something burned the back of his neck; a spent bullet, hot from its journey through the air. Screaming, Peter leaped up into the trajectory of half a dozen more.
*
Mike lowered the rifle. The shooting went on and on, like strings of firecrackers on Chinese New Year, the officers around on the roadside firing now as well, pumping hundreds of bullets into the featureless front wall. Mike, breathing heavily, as dazed as though he’d come out of a movie house to bright sunshine, turned and saw Lynsey staring at him in shock, comprehension and rejection.
37
“I want to warn you something,” Koo says. “I did too much USO; when I hear gunfire, I go into my act.” He and Mark are sitting side by side now on the floor at the foot of the bed. In here, the massed shooting outside the house has the lightweight mild quality of dried beans ratting in a coffee can.
“That isn’t the cops,” Mark says. “It sounds like the critics found you.”
“Their aim never was any good.” To Koo’s right, another mirror cracks. “Jesus,” he says, trying to keep the tremor out of his voice. “So far, that’s a hundred forty-seven years’ bad luck.”
They’re safe in this room from all that heavy firing, but it doesn’t feel safe. The occasional bullet penetrates the house deeply enough to hit one of the surrounding mirrors from the back, and then that mirror cracks or splinters, so that by now over half the mirrors are broken, the reflections of the room becoming increasingly fragmented and crazy. With the room’s color scheme of black and white and purple and red, with the furniture piled up against the door and all the mirrors sharding and shattering so that wherever Koo turns he sees reflected the images of disjointed parts of himself and Mark, sometimes weirdly linked, the effect should be nightmarish; but it’s merely ugly and dangerous, and rather trite. Koo says, “I’d be ashamed to tell a dream like this to a psychiatrist.” Putting on the standard comic’s Viennese-psychiatrist accent, he says, “Vot’s dis mit de broken mirrors? Ged adda here, you’ll be coming in mit de freight trains next. Vot are you, some kind a normal or something?”
“In my flying dreams I always go economy fare,” Mark says, “and my luggage winds up in Chicago. What does that mean, Doctor?”
“It’s ein deep-zeeted neurotic re-action. Vot does dis inkblot look like to you?”
“A four-dollar cleaning bill.”
Koo laughs, in surprised pleasure. “Nice,” he says, in his own voice. “Very nice. I don’t think I heard that one before.”
Mark seems highly amused by that: “You only like jokes you recognize?”
“Old friends are best.”
This patter started back during that ludicrous terrifying few minutes when Koo and Mark were braced side by side against the barricading furniture while Peter and the others struggled to push open the door. Much of comedy is a way of trying to deal with tension and fear, both of which Koo now possesses in abundance, so it was in a spirit of whistling-in-the-graveyard that he looked across the barricade at Mark and said, “Maybe we should just take the magazine subscriptions.”
And Mark immediately answered, “Collier’s? Life? I don’t trust these people; keep pushing!”
The jokes and gag-lines have been running ever since, a lengthening routine which almost distracts Koo from the truth of his surroundings and circumstances, and which in any event delights him. Mark delights him. Neither of Koo’s sons—his other sons, he has to be careful about that—neither of them has followed in Koo’s funnyman footsteps. Frank has a kind of salesman’s hearty good humor while Barry sports a self-amused wit, but neither has Koo’s love for or skill with gags. Astonishingly, down inside that raging murderous beast which has apparently always been Mark’s surface persona, there lies a comic. It doesn’t matter if the jokes are good—we’re going for quantity here, not quality—the point is that they’re jokes and they’re delivered with a natural sense of style and timing, and to Koo’s joy and bewilderment he and Mark work well together. This, he thinks, aware of the exaggeration but not caring, must be what Abbott felt when he met Costello, Hardy when he met Laurel. “Well,” Koo says. “This is another fine mess you’ve gotten me into.”
“Hush,” Mark says; seriously, not part of any routine. “Listen.”
Koo lifts his head to listen, and realizes it’s stopping. The war is coming to an end out there. The rattle and clatter of gunfire is reducing rapidly to a mere scattered popping, it’s thinning out, thinning...one last distant crack. “Somebody’s always late,” Koo says.
Mark doesn’t answer. There’s silence, stretching on. Looking around, Koo sees jumbles and shards and geometric segments of the room, all ricocheting back and forth among the fractured mirrors; a crazy quilt in glass. When he raises one bandaged arm, bewildering quick movements flash from the mirrors all around, like a flight of tiny birds. And the silence stretches on. “Peace, it’s wonderful,” Koo says.