‘Now. Now. Now.’
Yet Dove stood with his weapon, gaping at that helpless head; and couldn’t lift the hand.
The cripple’s face, when he uncovered at last, was smeared by blood down the whole left side where the spittoon’s edge had ripped above and below the eye. Dove held out his own bandanna, for no one else offered Schmidt help. And watched while the half-giant daubed the blood off his face till he could see again. Then he touched the bandanna’s ends together as if to apologize for soiling it, and returned it to Dove. ‘Thank you son,’ he said.
Perhaps it was his tone that made Dove think that was it. For he pushed his way into the crowd. ‘The fight’s done,’ he said.
The crowd closed ranks.
‘The fight’s only begun,’ he heard Schmidt behind him say. ‘Get your best hold, son.’
And reached.
Dove leaped onto the small table at the bar’s far end and crouched upon it, trembling in the legs like a panicking puppy up there. Schmidt hurled the table with a single twist, sending Dove sprawling comic-strip fashion, all arms and legs, while the spittoon went clanging like a clock gone insane. The cripple held Dove face down to the floor, steadying him as he floundered. Then lifting him between his great hands, gave his hands that twist of a coiling spring. Dove hit the floor on his side, one arm outflung and the other across his eyes. Schmidt straddled the outflung arm by riding the platform over it and lifted the other off Dove’s eyes. When he let it go it fell loosely, as something unattached, an arm without a bone.
‘He’s had it,’ somebody said.
It was true: they crowded in to see. Whether stunned by his fall or fogged by fright, he lay like some animal whose final defense lies in complete helplessness, eyes bright and unseeing, open to anyone’s blows.
Schmidt looked down at the face suddenly like a child’s. Then he brought back his right arm till its knuckles touched the floor behind him. There were two men standing who could have put a foot upon it. But one stood looking down at the way the knuckles stretched the sunburnt skin. And the other said, ‘Cold as a frog,’ nothing more.
‘Faking,’ was Schmidt’s answer to that, and brought the arm high in a full-swinging arch – and down.
It broke with a soft and sogging sound, the very bones went oof.
‘I like to get up close to accidents,’ Kitty Twist pushed in, and put her ear down to Dove’s broken mouth, that was trying to speak though swallowing blood.
‘If you let me go,’ Kitty Twist heard him say, and repeated it for those not so lucky as to be as close as herself, ‘he says if you let him go—’
‘I’ll say a prayer for you—’
‘—he’ll say a prayer for you.’
‘Tell him to save his prayers,’ Schmidt told her, ‘I want to know where my wife is.’ He looked down at Dove. ‘Don’t think you can scare me with a little blood,’ he said.
Dove’s head wobbled weakly from side to side, still denying all.
And though, when Schmidt’s fist was raised again everyone thought ‘relent’ – panders and cripples and fallen girls, yet when it fell all felt a heartbroken joy. As though each fresh blow redeemed that blow that his life had been to him.
Later, a woman who saw that the face on the floor was no longer a face but a mere paste of cartilage and blood through which a single sinister eye peered blindly, recalled: ‘When I seen him on the floor unable to rise and fight back, it went right through my mind – Murdering. Murdering. Why give him a chance?’
And when it was done Schmidt looked all around like a man in a lifting daze. He looked at them all as though there were something they knew he did not know. As if he did not understand the blood that was fouling his hands.
Kitty Twist knelt to put her thin arms around the cripple’s neck, and her lips were almost on his before he pushed her off, his eyes glassed by disgust.
‘Get this man help and open the doors,’ he commanded, and the doors were opened just in time to let the last of daylight in.
Schmidt saw the day and the open door. Yet he sat his platform without a move until Dockery said, ‘Get him out of here.’
And eagerly then, its tension relieved and its contempt wakened, the crowd went for the half-giant as though he were just some sort of thing. One shoved him from behind. Another hauled him by his hair. While another began kicking the little wheels that only a minute before he had feared; but that now didn’t move fast enough to please him. While that same poor bitchified prey, Kitty Twist, spat down the nape of his neck.
And he took it, Schmidt took it, he took it all. Like a statue of grief with a sorrowing air, as though he had done nothing more than their own work for them: a saint of the amputees.
Out of the speakeasy that had outlived its time, through the final door of a dead decade, they wheeled the deposed hero that once had been a man. Onto a downhill street.
Somebody gave the platform a shove. And waited a minute, with others who waited, to watch the thing reel from one side of the walk to the other, gathering speed as it lost control, making uphill trudgers dodge like dodging a drunken wrong-way driver – when it hit the telephone pole not one laughed. They merely stood watching to detect, from their distance, some movement from that crumpled lump, half on the curb and half on the street. But saw no movement at all.
Inside they heard the juke box begin—
And returned inside with the executive air of men ready, if need be, to vie with one another for whatever was best for the public welfare.
On Saturday nights the backland squatters came into Arroyo by Model T and by cart, but most came by foot. Some had shoes and some had none. But booted or barefoot they all shambled; and the woman stayed just a step behind all the way. She would have her shawl drawn across her mouth to keep the dangerous night-damp out and he would be breathing into a handkerchief or bandanna; after the Mexican manner.
But when they got into town there was so much talking to be done they forgot all about the dangerous air, or perhaps the air inside the city limits was made of better stuff. For the women chattered through all the stores, pointed in the windows with other wives or went to see a movie starring Rod La Roque. They all tried to get the old man to the movie too, whether he would or no: that much less chance of his getting drunk was the point.
He seldom fell for that. He sent her in and shambled off to the courthouse steps to hear if the preacher had anything to say he hadn’t said on a thousand other Saturdays.
An uneasy rumor was going around that the old man wasn’t as strong against the Pope as he once had been. In fact he didn’t seem as strong against anything as he once had been. The wrath and the fire that had been as good as a free shot of tequila seemed to have gone out of Fitz.
Was it whiskey or weariness that had caught up with him? Or just that, since Byron had been buried, there was nobody left to heckle him? Whatever it was, when he led them to the uttermost edge of Damnation now and forced them to look over the terrible rim, the fall they saw was no more than a foot or two into a coal yard of rain-wetted cinders with a few rusty beer cans lying about. Broken gin bottles lay among the dead slag that held promise of neither flame nor fire. They sniffed for the assurance of sulphur on the air: and smelled nothing but marigold that grows in old dumps.
Marigold mixed with the scent of blown dust that they knew so well it had no more scent than air. The old man had not really taken them anywhere.