And still Mark says nothing. Koo looks at him, suddenly apprehensive, and Mark’s head has lowered, he’s brooding with hooded eyes at the floor between his feet. In profile he seems cold and humorless, reminding Koo uncomfortably of the Mark he’d known at first. Suddenly very nervous, not wanting to lose their connection, Koo says, “What’s up?”
Mark makes no response.
“Listen,” Koo says, keeping it light even though his old terror of Mark is rapidly returning, “just ’cause I won’t kiss on the first date, you don’t have to get sore.”
Now Mark shakes his head, with a small brushing-away hand gesture, but he won’t meet Koo’s eyes, and he still doesn’t speak.
“Mark,” Koo says. He feels it all slipping away, and he must hold onto it. “Mark, for Christ’s sake, what’s happening?”
“It’s coming to an end.” And Mark turns to show Koo a painful bitter smile. “It’s all over,” he says. “The law’s on its way.”
“And the west will never be the same again.”
“Neither will I.” Lifting his head, his expression almost playful, Mark says, “I was trying to decide whether to take you with me.”
Koo doesn’t get it, and it alarms him when he doesn’t understand Mark. Peering intently at the boy, he says, “Take me with you?”
“Oh, I’m gone, Koo.” Mark chuckles, not pleasantly, and shakes his head. “I’ve been gone since last night. I just came back to help you with Joyce, that’s all.”
“Take it easy, Mark,” Koo says, and rests his hand on the boy’s forearm.
But Mark shivers and pulls his arm away, as a horse sometimes flinches from being touched. “Better not, Koo,” he says. “I don’t know who I am right now. I don’t want to kill you by mistake.”
As so often before, Koo’s fear of Mark leads him to face the boy directly, insist on the clarifying statement. Heart in his mouth, he says, “The question is, do you want to kill me on purpose?”
“That’s the question, all right.” Mark glances toward the door. “And I don’t have much time to find the answer.”
“Mark, listen, it doesn’t have to be this way. We can work things—”
“Don’t make promises!” The harshness in Mark’s voice shocks Koo into silent rigidity. “What are you gonna do, sign me up with a contract? Make me second banana on your TV shows?”
“I thought I’d let you handle my negotiations with the network.”
Mark grunts in amusement, but then once again shakes his head.
“Listen,” Koo says, putting all the sincerity he can muster into his voice. “We can work something out. You’re not—”
“I will kill you, Koo.” Mark’s eyes as he gazes at Koo are as cold and empty as a northern lake. “If you sweet-talk me to save your life, I’ll strangle you this second.”
Koo blinks and blinks, staring into those clueless blank eyes. Mark wants something from him, he knows that much, but if he tries to give what he wants the boy will accuse him of hypocrisy. And the finish isn’t resolved in Mark’s mind, the old need to kill is still inside him, like snake venom. Whatever Koo does now is wrong, and whatever mistake he makes is fatal.
It’s too much. The seconds go on, and Koo remains impaled here, and at last there’s nothing left to do or say, no more twists and turns. Koo closes his eyes, his head dropping back to expose his throat; finally, after all this time, he’s giving up. “Do what you want,” he says. “Take me with you if you have to.”
“Do you want to be with me?”
Something strange in the wording, and in the boy’s voice, plucks at Koo’s attention, bringing him back from defeat. But he’s too tired, he’s been through too much, he can’t defend himself anymore. He doesn’t move. He waits for it to happen, the hands on his windpipe or whatever it’s going to be.
“Koo? Do you want to be with me?”
Since it doesn’t matter, the simple truth will do: “Yes,” Koo says. His eyes remain shut, his body is limp and relaxed, his voice weak and without inflection.
Mark says, “Your place or mine?”
Koo could never resist a straight line; not even here, on the brink of the grave. In doubt and wonderment, with great reluctance to answer the bell for yet another round, he nevertheless lifts his heavy eyelids, looks at Mark’s expressionless face, and says, “Mine.”
Mark is about to answer, express some mistrust, but then his eyes flicker, and Koo hears it, too: Voices outside the door, coming up the stairs. “Sounds like the cavalry,” Mark says, then glances toward the barricade. “Still, they’ll take a while to get through all that.”
“Mark.”
The head swivels back, the eyes study Koo’s face. “Yes?”
“I’m about to say something stupid.”
“Go ahead.”
“I—” Koo hesitates, tries to find a more self-protective way to phrase it, fails, and goes on: “I want you to love me.”
Mark stares. There are people in the hall, just outside the door, shouting to one another, but Mark and Koo both ignore them. Mark says, “You want me to love you. So I won’t kill you?”
“No. Regardless of anything. I just want it, that’s all.”
“I thought you were smart, Koo.”
“You were wrong.”
“I sure was.”
In sudden rage, Mark says, “You complete schmuck, why do you think I wanted to kill you? It’s because I wanted to love you, you asshole!”
“What?” Koo can’t follow this last turn.
“You’ve been my father all my life,” Mark says; then in sudden disgust he twists away from Koo, scrambling to his feet. “Oh, the hell with it. The hell with you. What made me think you were worth struggling over?”
Mark begins with quick angry movements to dismantle the barricade, pushing the television set away, tossing dresser drawers to left and right. Outside, the voices are calling Koo’s name. “In here,” Koo shouts, as much to recapture Mark’s interest as to answer the voices, but Mark pays no attention. Koo struggles to rise, having trouble because it hurts to put pressure on his arms, and in a hurry because there’s something left to say to Mark. He doesn’t know what it is, but he feels the urgency and he believes the words will come of their own accord if he can ever get up on his damn feet.
But it takes too long. He is barely standing, weaving, when the final pieces of the barricade are shoved out of the way by people on the outside pressing against the door. And now they all burst in, and a pistol butt flashes through the air, and Mark reels backward, blood pouring from his temple.
“Mark!” Koo tries to catch him, but the boy is falling, and his weight drags Koo down onto the floor with him; Koo bouncing at a tangent off the edge of the bed, finishing in a seated position on the floor among all those uniformed legs, with Mark’s bloody head in his lap.
Koo looks down in astonishment. Mark’s eyes are half-open, barely conscious; the blood pulsing from the forehead gash is rich and dark. And the room is filling with people; cops in uniform, plainclothesmen, men with pistols and rifles in their hands.
“Mister Davis! Mister Davis!”
Koo raises his head, seeing a face he saw on television. This face is saying, “Mister Davis, thank God you’re alive! I’m Michael Wiskiel of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”
“Yeah, yeah, I caught your pilot. Is there a doctor in the house?”
“Mister Davis, we’ll get you medical care at—”
“Not for me. For this boy here.”
Wiskiel’s expression, when he looks at Mark, becomes stern, disapproving: “Somebody get that creature out of here.”