When he rounded the corner of the block, near the top of the hill, a figure detached itself from the still torrent of vines which had engulfed a retaining wall on the other side of the street. Russ found himself wishing that he’d taken his gun out of the case. Then something about those jerky, uncoordinated movements reassured him that this was one of his own kind. A moment later he recognized his partner.
“You got the piece?” Pat asked him.
“Piece?” Russell queried vaguely.
“The gun, man! C’mon, let’s go!”
Pat was transformed, taut and wired like one of life’s natural go-to guys. Despite his narbo outfit, the suit a size too small by the looks of it, you could sense the energy he was giving off. Just being around him made Russell feel woozy from lack of sleep, stale air and too much thinking. He opened the suitcase and handed Pat one of the revolvers, pocketing the other himself.
“We’ll cruise by a couple of the other houses first,” he said. “Set up our cover.”
Pat waved impatiently.
“Fuck that, man! Let’s just do it! Get in, get out, don’t screw around.”
His air of urgency was so strong that Russ hesitated, a moment too long to insist.
“OK,” he murmured.
It was all wrong, he knew, letting the initiate lead like this. On the other hand, Pat’s mood might change again at any moment, leaving him with a cowering wimp on his hands. Better to ride the moment.
They set off along the side street running parallel to McDaniel. Up here there didn’t seem to be so many people out on the porches. In fact many of the houses looked abandoned. Maybe they were going to clear the area and put up more projects. Pat strode along, humming some staccato melody under his breath. Russell could hardly keep up. He glanced curiously at his partner.
“You been drinking?”
“I had a shot with a greeny back,” Pat replied carelessly. “Man, that stuff sure works, you don’t use it all the time.”
“That’s way out of line!” Russell snapped. “You know we’re not supposed to do drink or drugs when we’re-”
“Hey, what is this? ‘The floggings will continue until morale improves?’ Don’t treat me like a little kid.”
“Hold it right there!”
Russell gripped his partner’s arm and pulled him around.
“You want me to call this whole thing off right now?”
Pat shook his head quickly.
“OK! Then remember I’m in charge here. I don’t want to go down because you’re too snockered to stick to the game plan.”
They rounded the corner into Carson Street-322 was the sixth house on the left. Russell opened the suitcase again. The copy of The Watchtower was lying right on top, but the pamphlets seemed to have wriggled down to the back somewhere.
“Hey!” said Pat.
The beam of light falling on the suitcase from the streetlamp behind was suddenly cut off.
“Hand it over, motherfucker!”
Russell straightened up, still holding the magazine. There were three of them, no more than fourteen or fifteen years old by the looks of it, all black. The one who had spoken had a body like a barrel. He was wearing a Star Trek T-shirt and a pair of jeans which looked two sizes too big even for him. He and one of the others had pistols, the third a knife.
“We’re just children of God,” Russell found himself saying, holding up The Watchtower like a sign. “We’re spreading the word of the Lord in this neighborhood.”
The squat guy waved his chunky snub-barreled automatic.
“I don’t give a fuck who you are, honky! Hand over your shit or your ass is history!”
That was all they’d needed to do, Russell realized a moment later, when it was too late to do anything. Just hand over their wallets and watches and the suitcase and let the three youths run off with them. Instead, Pat pulled his pistol and shot the guy in the chest and stomach.
“Christ Almighty!” cried the other gunman, a skinny kid in tight red pants and a basketball jersey.
Russell could have taken him there and then, but he hesitated a second too long, knowing he wasn’t empowered to kill them. There was a flash of steel, then a grinding sound as the knife hit one of his ribs. Another shot, much louder, sent Pat spinning away. Then something huge hit Russell harder than he had ever been hit before. He tasted blood, mixed in with the dirt of the street. There were other sounds, other sensations, but he had no names for them. It didn’t matter. Pretty soon they faded, like everything else.
12
At that point, of course, I still thought I had a choice. Not just about staying or going, or even falling in love, but about things like how I spent my time. So I was disconcerted to find that, like all the others, I was expected to attend a lecture on the poetry of William Blake every afternoon.
The lectures were given by Sam. That first one lasted two and three-quarter hours, and seemed even longer at the time. I learned later that they often were longer, particularly when things threatened to fall apart. The one Sam had given on the day after the news about Dale Watson came through apparently lasted well over six hours, starting right after lunch and going on until well after dark. I didn’t understand then, of course, that Sam was struggling to retain control, and that his labored exposition of Blake’s so-called prophetic books was merely a means to this end. This was just one of many things I didn’t understand.
My only previous contact with Blake’s work had been in a class I took at college. Like a lot of people back then, I’d been seduced by the idea that Blake was an acidhead born ahead of his time. All that stuff about seeing the universe in a grain of sand, we’d been there, done that. Hell, we’d seen it in an empty Coke bottle, a crumpled cigarette packet, a capsized cockroach. We were old hands at relative reality, and although Blake had never actually dropped himself (but it was hard to score good shit back then) and tended to maunder on at times (but it could have been really neat if Pink Floyd had set it to music), we decided in a slightly patronizing way to add the old buffer to our gallery of proto-hippies like Huxley, Hesse and the rest. We knew where he was coming from. It also didn’t hurt that the professor who taught the class was young and hip and, according to the student guide, graded generously.
As I said earlier, it was there that I had first run into Sam. We wrote our final papers together over a thirty-six-hour period, with the help of twelve tabs of high-grade amphetamine we had pooled our money to score, knowing we would never get the damn things finished any other way. Sam managed to scrape by with a passing grade, although only after I had gone through his paper and suggested numerous changes and additions. It was therefore all the more of a shock to see him stride into the hall after lunch that afternoon and launch into a lengthy exegesis on a passage from Jerusalem in front of the assembled company. There were nineteen of them in all, six men and thirteen women, ranging in age from the mid-forties to a girl who looked no more than sixteen, if that. So I was doubly chagrined to discover that the one person I wanted to see, and if possible sit next to, was not there.
For some reason, Andrea didn’t appear. No one remarked on her absence, and I didn’t know anyone well enough to ask where she was. This was a bitter blow. She hadn’t been at lunch either, and I had been counting on seeing her at the lecture, given that attendance was apparently obligatory. That was certainly the impression I had got from Mark when he approached me while I was finishing up my bowl of Rice-a-Roni.
“Right after this we have the reading. Stick around. Maybe you’ll learn something.”
“It’s never too late, they say,” I replied lightly.
His hard, glazed gaze transfixed me.
“Some people, it’s too late when they’re born.”