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“Do I remember that, Tom? Do I remember? Why, I got to smash the front window, the window, you hear? My Lord, it made a lovely sound! Crash!”
Tom could hear the glass fall in glittering heaps.
“And Bill Henderson, he got to bash the engine. Oh, he did a smart job of it, with great efficiency. Wham!
“But best of all,” recalled Grigsby, “there was the time they smashed a factory that was still trying to turn out airplanes.
“Lord, did we feel good blowing it up!” said Grigsby. “And then we found that newspaper plant and the munitions depot and exploded them together. Do you understand, Tom?”
Tom puzzled over it. “I guess.”
It was high noon. Now the odors of the ruined city stank on the hot air and things crawled among the tumbled buildings.
“Won’t it ever come back, mister?”
“What, civilization? Nobody wants it. Not me!”
“I could stand a bit of it,” said the man behind another man. “There were a few spots of beauty in it.”
“Don’t worry your heads,” shouted Grigsby. “There’s no room for that, either.”
“Ah,” said the man behind the man. “Someone’ll come along someday with imagination and patch it up. Mark my words. Someone with a heart.”
“No,” said Grigsby.
“I say yes. Someone with a soul for pretty things. Might give us back a kind of limited sort of civilization, the kind we could live in in peace.”
“First thing you know there’s war!”
“But maybe next time it’d be different.”
At last they stood in the main square. A man on horseback was riding from the distance into the town. He had a piece of paper in his hand. In the center of the square was the roped-off area. Tom, Grigsby, and the others were collecting their spittle
and moving forward—moving forward prepared and ready, eyes wide. Tom felt his heart beating very strongly and excitedly, and the earth was hot under his bare feet.
“Here we go, Tom, let fly!”
Four policemen stood at the corners of the roped area, four men with bits of yellow twine on their wrists to show their authority over other men. They were there to prevent rocks being hurled.
“This way,” said Grigsby at the last moment, “everyone feels he’s had his chance at her, you see, Tom? Go on, now!”
Tom stood before the painting and looked at it for a long time.
“Tom, spit!”
His mouth was dry.
“Get on, Tom! Move!”
“But,” said Tom, slowly, “she’s beautiful!”
“Here, I’ll spit for you!” Grigsby spat and the missile flew in the sunlight. The woman in the portrait smiled serenely, secretly, at Tom, and he looked back at her, his heart beating, a kind of music in his ears.
“She’s beautiful,” he said.
“Now get on, before the police—”
“Attention!”
