The noise grew louder as he neared the entrance to the concert grounds — yelps, cries, curses, screams of drunken laughter and the roar of revving engines. Groups of men with makeshift weapons stalked past him, and boys, some as young as nine or ten, hurried up the road with sacks of stones. A blackened car lay on its side in the middle of the road up ahead, and another burned furiously behind it. He quickened his pace, craning his neck for a glimpse of the Judas in the polo shirt and his obscene little companion. A man in an overseas cap and a chest full of medals shouted something at him, an old woman in rolled-up blue jeans waved a flag in his face, there was smoke in his nostrils and the blood had dried beneath his eyes. He was about to break into a trot when he saw him, Truman, leaning in the window of a late-model Buick. In the same instant he spotted the dwarf too, propped insouciantly against the fender and leering with apparent satisfaction at the conflagration around him.
The Indian kept walking, and as he passed them, he caught a glimpse of the man behind the wheel of the Buick. He knew the face, though he’d never seen it before, knew the humorless mouth and outthrust chin, the eyes like branding irons: it was the face of the man who’d sent him to prison, the face of a. Van Wart. Fighting the desire to glance over his shoulder, Jeremy felt the dwarf’s eyes on him and kept going. He was about to double back — if only he could get this red-headed fink alone — when a horde of vigilantes, led by Truman’s pal with the tire chains, came streaming past him.
Under cover of the diversion — all heads turned, even the dwarf’s, to watch them hurry down the road toward the undefended pasture — Jeremy ducked between two cars, crouched down and waited. A moment later, Van Wart emerged from the Buick, said something to Truman and started up the road toward the barricade at the entrance to the concert grounds. Truman and his pukwidjinny fell into step behind him, and the Indian, after counting to ten, rose up out of the gloom to bring up the rear. He was taking a chance — the mob could fall on him any minute, his skin, his hair, his clothes like nothing they’d ever seen, like some nigger’s or Communist’s — but he didn’t care. Hatred fueled him, and he snaked through the knots of angry men as if he were invisible.
As he approached the barricade, the crowd thickened, dark shapes moving in and out of the static glare of the headlights that flooded the narrow dirt road beyond it. This was the omphalos of confusion and strife, rage stamped on every face, voices reduced to a collective snarl, the mob shoving first one way and then the other. Jeremy almost lost his quarry here — the faces all alike, shirts and shoulders and hats, the crush of bodies — but then he spotted Van Wart conferring with a bald-headed man in an open-collared dress shirt, and just beyond him, Truman and the pukwidjinny. Truman was conferring with no one. He was weaving through the crowd, a man in a hurry, heading up the road and away from the whole messy business of betrayal and bigotry; the dwarf was right behind him, visible only as a sort of moving furrow in the standing field of the mob. He’s getting away, Jeremy thought, and he surged forward, heedless, shoving vigilantes aside as if they were so many straw men. “Hey!” someone shouted at him, “Hey you!” but he never even bothered to turn his head.
By the time Jeremy managed to break free of the crowd, Truman and the drawf were a hundred yards up the road, clots of black against the richer texture of the night. They hurried past a line of stalled and battered cars on the darkened roadway, then angled off on an unpaved lane that wound through the woods in the direction of Peterskill. Jeremy broke into a run. He passed a pair of teenagers bent over a gas can in the dark, dodged a man who stood flatfooted and astonished in the middle of the road, and saw a frightened black face peering from the window of a stalled car; a moment later, still running hard, he was turning into the lane. Immediately, he saw that his luck had changed. The shouts of the crowd were muted here, the road all but deserted: this was the chance he’d been waiting for.
He came at Truman without warning, swift silent steps in the dirt, flinging himself at the shadowy form ahead of him like a linebacker going for the tackling dummy. He caught him in the small of the back — something gave: bone, cartilage, hinges that need oil — and slammed his face down in the dirt. At the moment of impact, the dwarf leapt aside with a squeal and Truman let out a gasp of surprise before the hard compacted dirt of the road sucked the breath out of him. The Indian knew then that he was going to kill this son of a bitch in the polo shirt, this back stabber, this white man, and he locked an arm around his throat and ground his face into the road. When he was done with him, he’d get up and crush the dwarf like an egg.
“Get off!” Truman choked, tearing at the Indian’s arm. “Get… off!”
Shrill, manic, the dwarf leapt up and down in the dirt like a rodent in a cage. “Murder!” he piped. “Help! Murder!”
The Indian tightened his grip.
And so it would have gone — Truman, powerful as he was, taken by surprise, cut down and emasculated before his invisible adversary’s rage, first fatality of the riots … so it would have gone, but for the dwarf. He screamed, and a hundred feet came running, vigilantes by the score, soreheads and rednecks and born-again racists with blood on their hands. That in itself would have been enough, but the little man was wickeder than the Indian could have guessed. He had a knife. Three inches’ worth. Nothing like Horace Tantaquidgeon’s gutting knife, but a knife nonetheless. And he slipped that knife from his pocket, sprung the blade with a soft evil click, and began punctuating the Indian’s back. He dug a full stop first, then a colon; he slashed commas, hyphens and a single ragged exclamation point.
Half a second, that’s all it took. The Indian reared up and slapped the dwarf as he might have slapped a fly, but the moment’s distraction allowed Truman to wriggle free. In the next moment, he was on his feet, gasping for breath and flinging frenzied blows at his assailant, who rose up out of the darkness like a mountain in motion. Wordlessly, without so much as a grunt of effort or pain, the Indian returned the blows. With interest. “You crazy?” Truman gasped, throwing up his arms to protect himself. “You nuts or what?” Behind them, the thin white lances of flashlights and the slap of running feet.
Jeremy felt a weak fist glance off the side of his head, then another. He moved in closer. It was then that he got his first good look at the man he was about to kill. The onrushing beam of a flashlight played across the traitor’s face, and again the Indian felt he somehow knew this man, knew him in some deep and tribal way. Truman must have got a good look at Jeremy too, because suddenly he dropped his hands in bewilderment. “Who the—?” he began, but it was too late for introductions. The Indian lunged for his throat and got hold of him again, both hands locked around the windpipe in an unbreakable grip, a death grip, the grip that leaves the rabbit twitching and the goose cold. Jeremy would have answered the half-formed question, would have answered Truman as he’d answered Sasha Freeman and Rombout Van Wart and anyone else who cared to know, but he never got the chance. All at once the patriots were on him, swarming over him with their sticks and tire irons and chains.
It was Sing Sing and the prison guard all over again. Jeremy held on like the swamp turtle that lent its name to his clan — pummel him, stab him, cut off his head, his grip was good to death and beyond — held on despite the wounds in his back and the fingers jerking at his wrists. Then someone brought a jack handle down across the back of his skull and he felt Truman slipping away from him. Just before he fell, desperate, guided by the turtle, he lunged forward and locked his jaws in the traitor’s flesh — the ear, the right ear — and clamped down till he tasted blood.