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“I’ll make it brief,” I said. “Get your man out of sight before he gets dusted. Second, I’m going to be back later and bust every one of you for interfering with an officer in the performance of his duty.”
I moved out of the crowd and behind the concrete shell to the far side. Lines had formed in front of the portable bathrooms, and large numbers of people were now drifting out of the picnic areas and the pavilion toward the speaker’s platform. The wind had suddenly died, and the air had grown close and hot, with a dusty, metallic smell to it, and the field lights were white and haloed with humidity against the darkening sky. I kicked over a trash barrel, rolled it snug against the concrete shell, stood on it, and tried to see Vic Benson’s baseball cap among the hundreds of heads in the crowd.
It seemed impossible.
Then I heard a woman scream and I saw people separating themselves from some terrible or frightening presence in their midst, tripping on each other’s ankles, falling backward to the ground. Not twenty feet from me, Vic Benson was racing through the crowd, the way a barracuda would slice through a school of bluefish, a small silver pistol in his upraised hand.
Bama saw him before Bobby Earl, whose back was turned as he signed autographs for children. Her face went white, and her mouth opened in a round red O.
I knocked a woman down, felt somebody bounce hard off my shoulder, crashed across a folding wheelchair, and dove headlong into the small of Vic Benson’s back.
He hit the ground under me, and I heard the breath go out of his lungs in a gasp, and once again I smelled that odor that was like turpentine or embalming fluid, wind-dried sweat, nicotine, smoke rubbed into the skin and clothes. His baseball cap toppled off his head, his dark glasses were askew on his face, and his eyes stared into mine the way a lizard’s might if it were trapped on top of a hot rock in the middle of a burning field.
His lips moved, and I knew he wanted to curse or wound me in some fresh way, but his breath rasped in
his throat like a man whose lungs were perforated with holes. I slipped my hand along his arm and removed the unfired pistol from his fingers.
I thought it was over. It should have been.
But Batist, when he had seen what was about to happen, had plunged through the crowd from the other side, his arms outspread, and had flung both Bama and Bobby Earl to the ground and had landed with his huge weight on top of both of them. People were screaming and shoving one another; photographers and TV cameramen were trying to get Bobby Earl’s prone body, with Batist’s on top of it, into their cameras’ lenses; and three uniformed cops were fighting desperately to get through the rim of the crowd and into the center before a riot spread throughout the park.
Then I realized that most of the people pressed into the center of the grassy area had not seen Vic Benson or understood what he had tried to do. Instead, some of them obviously believed that Batist had attacked Bobby Earl.
As Batist tried to raise himself on his arms, a man on the edge of the crowd swung a doubled-over dog chain at his head, then two of Earl’s bodyguards grabbed him by the belt and began tugging him backward.
“Put that fucking nigger in a cage,” someone yelled.
Then the crowd surged forward, toppling over one another, trampling others who had already fallen to the ground. Between their legs I saw the desperation in Batist’s face as he tried to shield his eyes from a solitary fist that was flailing at his head. A string of saliva and blood drooled from his lower lip.
I tore into their midst. I drove my fist as hard as I could into the back of a man’s thick neck; I ripped my elbow into someone’s rib cage and felt it go like a nest of popsicle sticks; I lifted an uppercut into another man’s stomach and saw him cave to his knees in front of me, his face gray and his mouth hanging open as if he had been eviscerated.
Then they rolled over both Batist and me.
There are moments in your life when you think the last frames in your film strip have just snapped loose from the reel. When one of those moments occurs, you hear your own blood thundering in your ears, or a sound like waves bursting over a coral reef, or hundreds of feet pounding dully on the earth.
Or perhaps the last frame in the strip simply freezes and you hear nothing at all.
Then as though sound and sight, trees and sky and air had all been given back to me, I saw the sunburned police sergeant with the hard, green eyes, knocking people backward with his baton, gripping it horizontally with both hands, swinging it violently from side to side, pushing the crowd back into a wider and wider circle.
Then other cops were in the circle, and you could feel the energies go out of the crowd the way air leaves a punctured balloon. When I got to my feet, I pulled my shirt out of my trousers and wiped my face on it. It was smeared with spittle and blood.
“I’m taking your piece and cuffing you and your friend together till I can get y’all out of here. Don’t argue about it,” the sergeant said.
“No argument, podna,” I said.
He snapped one cuff of a set on my wrist and the other on Batist’s. Batist’s white shirt hung in strips off his massive shoulders.
Bobby Earl was standing among his bodyguards, his double-breasted tropical suit smudged with grass stains. He held a folded handkerchief to the corner of his mouth and combed back his wavy hair with his fingers. I felt the sergeant’s hand tighten under my arm.
“Just a minute,” I said to him. “Hey, Bobby, a black man just saved your worthless pink ass. You and your constituency might think that over. There’s another thought I want to leave you with, too, and I don’t want you to take it the wrong way. But if you ever try to hurt my friend Cletus Purcel again, they’ll have to scrub you out of your garbage grinder with a toothbrush.”
Batist and I walked to a squad car, surrounded by cops, our wrists chained together, our clothes in rags, just as lightning flickered across the sky and raindrops as heavy as marbles began to strike the leaves of the pin oaks above our heads.
Through the back window of another squad car, his arms manacled behind him, Vic Benson’s destroyed face stared out at the cops, the milling crowd, the trees, the park, the slanting rain, the blackened sky, perhaps the earth itself, as though the invisible forces that had driven him all his life had gathered at this place, in this moment, to finally and irrevocably have their way with him.
EPILOGUE
WE TOOK OUR VACATION in Key West in late summer, when the weather is hot and bright, prices are cheap, the streets are empty of tourists, and the Gulf is lime green and streaked with whitecaps as far as the eye can see, and dark patches of water, like clouds of India ink, drift across the coral reefs.
