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'The paint closet? It's made of plywood. You retard, there're upholstery knives in there,' Buchalter said.
'Hatch didn't tell me that. Nobody told me that. You quit reaming me, Will,' Freddy said.
But Buchalter wasn't listening now. He ripped Hatch's Luger from a holster that hung above the workbench and moved quickly toward the door behind the post where I was tied, the muscles in his upper torso knotting like rope. But even before he flung the metal door back against the cinder blocks, I heard more glass breaking, cascading in splintered panes to the cement, as though someone were raking it out of window frames with a crowbar; then an electric burglar alarm went off, one with a horn that built to a crescendo like an air-raid siren, followed by more glass breaking, this time a more congealed, grating sound, like automobile windows pocking and folding out of the molding, while automobile alarms bleated and pealed off the cement and corrugated tin roof.
'He's out the door!' Buchalter said.
'The guy who owns this place uses a security service. They're probably already rolling on that alarm,' Hatch said.
'Y'all had a fucking security service into a place where you meet?' Buchalter said.
'How'd anybody know you'd want to use it for an interrogation? I told you to pop the burrhead last night, anyway.'
'Get out there and stop that noise,' Buchalter said.
'The shit's frying in the fire, it is. Time to say cheery-bye and haul it down the road, Will,' Freddy said..
'Can't you rip a wire out of a mechanism? Do I have to do everything myself?' Buchalter said.
'No, I can drive very nicely by meself, thank you. Since that's me van out there, I'll be toggling to me mum's now. I think you've made a bloody fouking mess of it, Will. I think you'd better get your fouking act together,' Freddy said.
The Luger dripped like a toy from Buchalter's huge hand. The smooth, taut skin of his chest was beaded with pinpoints of sweat; his eyes raced with thought.
Freddy unbolted a door at the far end of the room and stepped out into the gray dawn.
'Fuck it, I'm gone, too, Will,' Hatch said. 'Snap one into this guy's brainpan and clean him out of your head… All right, I'm not gonna say anything else. Don't point my own piece at me, man. It ain't my place to tell you what to do.'
Hatch backed away from Buchalter, then paused, chewing on his beard, his eyes trying to measure the psychodrama in Buchalter's face. He unhooked the Nazi flag from the wall and draped it over his arm.
'I'm taking the colors with me,' he said. 'Will, all this stuff tonight don't mean anything. It goes on, man. We're eternal. You know where you can find me and Freddy later. Hey, if you decide to smoke him, lose my piece, okay?'
Then he, too, was gone into the brief slice of gray light between the door and jamb.
Buchalter's thumb moved back and forth along the tip of the Luger's knurled grip. His tongue licked against the back of his teeth; then it made
a circle inside his lips. As though he had stepped across a line in his own mind, he slipped the Luger into the top of his trousers and bent his face three inches from mine. He twisted his fingers into my hair and pulled my head back against the post.
'I'm stronger inside than you are, Dave. You can never get away from me, never undo me,' he' said. 'I gave Bootsie a gift to remember me by. Now one for you.'
He tilted his head sideways, his eyes closing like a lover's, his mouth approaching mine. The Luger was hard and stiff against his corded stomach. In the next room the burglar and car alarms screamed against the walls and tin roof.
I sucked all the spittle and blood out of my cheeks and spat it full into his face.
His face went white, then snapped and twitched as though he had been slapped. His skin stretched against his skull and made his brow suddenly simian, his eye sockets like buckshot. He wiped a strand of pink spittle on his hand and stared at his palm stupidly.
But he didn't touch me again. He straightened to his full height with a level of hate and cruelty and portent in his eyes that I had never seen in a human being before, then, working his tropical shirt over one arm, snugging the Luger down tight in his belt, one eye fixed on me like a fist, he went out the door into the gray mist. But I believed I had now seen the face that inmates at Bergen-Belsen and Treblinka and Dachau had looked into.
Five minutes later Zoot Bergeron, his face swollen like a bruised plum, sawed loose the rope and leather straps that bound my wrists, and in the wail of the approaching St. Mary Parish sheriffs cars, we slammed the door back on its hinges and stumbled out into the wet light, into the glistening kiss of a new dawn, into an industrial-rural landscape of fish-packing houses, junkyards, shrimp boats rocking in their berths, S.P. railway tracks, stacks of crisscrossed ties, a red-painted Salvation Army transient shelter among a clump of blue-green pine trees, oil-blackened sandspits, gulls gliding over the copper-colored roll of the bay, two hoboes running breathlessly over the gravel to catch a passing boxcar, the smells of diesel and salt-water, creosote, fish blood dried on a dock, nets stiff with kelp and dead Portuguese men-of-war, flares burning on offshore rigs, freshly poured tar on natural gas pipe, the hot, clean stench of electrical sparks fountaining from an arc welder's torch.
And in the distance, glowing like a chemical flame in the fog, was Morgan City, filled with palm-dotted skid-row streets, sawdust bars, hot pillow joints, roustabouts, hookers, rounders, bouree gamblers, and midnight ramblers. Zoot helped me stand erect, and I wiped my eyes on my sleeve and looked again at the two hoboes who had belly flopped onto the floor of the boxcar and were now rolling smokes as the freight creaked and wobbled down the old Southern Pacific railroad bed. Their toothless, seamed faces were lifted into the salt breeze with an expression of optimism and promise that made me think that perhaps the spirits of Joe Hill, Woody Guthrie, and Jack Kerouac were still riding those pinging rails. But the scene needed no songwriter or poet to make it real. It was a poem by itself, a softly muted, jaded, heartbreakingly beautiful piece of the country that was forever America and that you knew you could never be without.
* * *
chapter twenty
At home the next day, I sat in the cool shade of the gallery and listened to Clete Purcel talk about his latest encounter with the Calucci brothers. The cane along the bayou's banks looked dry and yellow in the wind, and hawks were gliding high above the marsh against a ceramic blue sky. I had the same peculiar sense of removal that I had experienced after I was wounded seriously in Vietnam. I felt that the world was moving past me at its own pace, with its own design, one that had little to do with me, and that now I was a spectator who listened to interesting stories told by other people.
'You remember how we used to do it when the greaseballs thought they could take us over the hurdles, I mean when they got the mistaken idea they were equal members of the human race and not something that should have run down their mother's leg?' he said. 'We'd show up in the middle of their lawn parties, have their limos towed in, roust them on nickel-and-dime beefs in public, flush their broads out of town, use a snitch to rat-fuck 'em with the Chicago Outfit, hey, you remember the time we blew up Julio Segura's shit in the backseat of his car? They had to wash him out with a hose, what a day that was.'
