The Nuck duo with flowers chasing Lenz come around this side and now break away from the car toward them. Now Hester Thrale at Gately’s right periphery breaks away from the cluster and runs for it off into the night across the lawn and behind #4, waving her arms and screaming, and Minty and McDade and Parias-Carbo and Charlotte Treat appear out of Ennet House’s back door across the hedge and mill and jostle amid the mops and old furniture on Ennet’s back porch, watching, and a couple of the more mobile catatonics appear on the porch of the Shed across the little street, staring at the spect-op, all this flummoxing the smaller one so he keeps swinging the Item stiffly this way and that way, trying to keep way more people at potential bay. The two alien foreigners that want Lenz’s map bear down slowly across the Montego’s headlights toward where Lenz is holding Gately like a shield. The larger one that’s so large his luauish shirt won’t even button all the way holding out the mustache adopts the overly reasonable tone that always precedes a serious-type beef. He reads Gately’s bowling shirt in the headlight and says reasonably that Moose still has a chance to keep out of what they’ve got no beef with him, them. Lenz is pouring a diarrheatic spatter of disclaimers and exhortations into Gately’s right ear. Gately shrugs at the Nucks like he’s got no choice but to be here. Green’s just looking at them. It occurs to Gately by White Flag suggestion that who gives a fuck how it’d look, he ought to hit his knees right here on the headlit blacktop and ask for guidance on this from a Higher Power. But he stands there, Lenz chattering in his shadow. The fingernails of Lenz’s hand on Gately’s shoulder have horseshoes of dried blood in the creases between nail and finger, and there’s a coppery smell off Lenz that isn’t just fear. It occurs to Gately that if he’d pulled the instant spot-urine he’d wanted on Lenz this whole snafu wouldn’t maybe be happening. The one Nuck is holding Lenz’s disguise’s mustache out at them like a blade. Lenz hasn’t asked the time once, notice. Then the other Nuck’s got his hand down at his side and a real blade’s gleam appears in that hand with the familiar snick. At the blade’s sound the situation becomes even more automatic and Gately feels adrenaline’s warmth spread through him as his subdural hardware clicks deeper into a worn familiar long-past track. Having no choice now not to fight and things simplify radically, divisions collapse. Gately’s just one part of something bigger he can’t control. His face in the left headlight has dropped into its fight-expression of ferocious good cheer. He says he’s responsible for these people on these private grounds tonight and is part of this whether he wants to be or not, and can they talk this out because he doesn’t want to have to fight them. He says twice very distinctly that he does not want to fight them. He’s no longer divided enough to think about whether this is true. His eyes are on the two men’s maple-leaf belt buckles, the part of the body where you can’t get suckered by a feint. The guys shake their manes and say they’re going to unembowel this craven bâtard here like this sans-Christe bâtard killed somebody they call either Pépé or Bébé, and if Moose has any self-interest he’ll backpedal away from there’s no way it is his duty to get frapped or fropped for this sick gutless U.S.A. bâtard in his womanly wig. Lenz, apparently thinking they’re Brazilian, pops his head around Gately’s flank and calls them maricones and tells them they can suck his bâtard is what they can do. Gately has just division enough to almost wish he didn’t feel such a glow of familiar warmth, a surge of almost sexual competence, as the two shriek at Lenz’s taunts and split and curve in at them an arm’s length apart, walking gradually faster, like unstoppable inertia, but stupidly too close together. At two meters off they charge, shedding petals and unisonly bellowing something in Canadian.
It’s always that everything always speeds up and slows down both. Gately’s smile broadens as he’s shoved slightly forward by Lenz as Lenz recoils backward off him to run from the guys’ shrieking charge. Gately takes the shove’s momentum and bodychecks the enormous Nuck holding the mustache into the Nuck holding the blade, who goes down with an euf of expelled air. The first Nuck has hold of Gately’s bowling shirt and rips it and punches Gately in the forehead and audibly breaks his hand, letting go of Gately to grab his hand. The punch makes Gately stop thinking in any sort of spiritual terms at all. Gately takes the man’s broken hand’s arm he’s holding out and with his eyes on the ground’s other Nuck breaks the arm over his knee, and as the guy goes down on one knee Gately takes the arm and pirouettes around twisting the broken arm behind the guy’s back and plants his sneaker on the guy’s floral back and forces him forward so there’s a sick crack and he feels the arm come out of the socket, and there’s a high foreign scream. The Nuck with the blade who was down slashes Gately’s calf through his jeans as the guy rolls gracefully left and starts to rise, up on one knee, knife out front, a guy that knows his knives and can’t be closed with while he’s got the blade up. Gately feints and takes one giant step and gets all his weight into a Rockette kick that lands high up under the Nuck’s beard’s chin and audibly breaks Gately’s big toe in the sneaker and sends the man curving out back into the dazzle of the highbeams, and there’s a metallic boom of him landing on the Montego’s hood and the click and skitter of the blade landing somewhere on the street beyond the car. Gately on one foot, holding his toe, and his slashed calf feels hot. His smile is broad but impersonal. It’s impossible, outside choreographed entertainment, to fight two guys together at once; they’ll kill you; the trick to fighting two is to make sure and put one down for long enough that he’s out of the picture long enough to put the other guy down. And this first larger one with the extreme arm-trouble is clutching himself as he rolls, trying to rise, still perversely holding the white mustache. You can tell this is a real beef because nobody’s saying anything and the sounds from everybody else have receded to the sounds stands’ crowds make and Gately hops over and uses the good foot to kick the Nuck twice in the side of the big head and then without a thought in his head moves down the guy and lines it up and drops to one knee with all his weight on the guy’s groin, resulting in an indescribable sound from the guy and a shout from J.v.D. overhead and a flat crack from the lawn and Gately’s punched so hard in the shoulder he’s spun around on one knee and almost goes over backwards and the shoulder goes hotly numb, which tells Gately he’s gotten shot instead of punched in the shoulder. He never got shot before. SHOT IN SOBRIETY in bold headline caps goes across his mind’s eye like a slow train as he sees the third Nuck with his cap pushed back and Nuck face contorted with cordite in his good stance with elbow back up drawing a second bead on Don’s big head from #4’s lawn with the bore’s lightless eye and a little pubic curl of smoke coming up from the vented muzzle, and Gately can’t move and forgets to pray, and then the bore zagging up and away as it blooms orange as good old Bruce Green’s got the Nuck from behind in a half-nelson with his hand in the necklace of flowers and with the other hand is forcing the cocked elbow down and the Item skyward away from Gately’s head as it blooms with that flat crack of a vented muzzle. The first thing somebody’s who’s shot wants to do is throw up, which by the way the larger Nuck with the breezeblocked crotch under Gately’s doing all over his beard and flower necklace and Gately’s leg’s thigh as Gately weaves on one knee on the guy’s groin still. The lady yells for Help. Now a meaty thwack as Nell Gunther on the lawn leaps several twirling meters and kicks the Nuck Green’s half-nelsoning in the face with her paratrooper-boot’s heel, and the guy’s hat flies off and his head snaps back and hits Green’s face, and there’s the pop of Green’s nose breaking but he doesn’t let go, and the guy’s slumped forward in the Parkinsonian half-bow of a guy in a quality half-nelson, with the guy’s Item-hand’s arm still up in the air with Green’s arm like they’re dancing, and good old Green doesn’t even let go to hold his spurting nose, and now that the Nuck’s restrained, notice, here comes Lenz barrelling in howling from the hedge’s shadows and leaping and he tackles the Nuck and Green both, and they’re a roil of clothes and legs on the lawn, the Item not in sight. Ken Er
dedy still has his hands up. Gately, still kneeling shot on the Nuck’s sickeningly softened groin, Gately hears the second Nuck trying to slide himself off the hood of the Montego and hops and wobbles over. Joelle v.D. keeps yelling something monosyllabic from what can’t be her window. Don goes to the Montego’s front bumper and punches the large man carefully in the kidneys with his good arm and takes him by the thick foreign hair and slides him back up the hood and begins banging his head off the Montego’s windshield. He remembers how he’d stay in luxury furnished North Shore apts. with G. Fackelmann and T. Kite and they’d gradually strip the place and sell the appointments off until they were sleeping in a totally bare apartment. Green has risen bloody-faced, and Lenz is on the lawn with his heaving topcoat covering him and the third Nuck, and Clenette H. and Yolanda W. are now up and not at bay and circling them and getting solid high-heel kicks into the Nuck’s and sometimes hopefully Lenz’s ribs, reciting ‘Mothafucka’ and landing a kick each time they get to fu. Gately, canted way over to the side, methodically beats his Nuck’s shaggy head against the windshield so hard that spidered stars are appearing in the shatterproof glass until something in the head gives with a sort of liquid crunch. Petals from the guy’s necklace are all over the hood and Gately’s torn shirt. Joelle v.D. in her terry robe and gauze veil and still clutching a toothbrush has climbed out onto the little balcony outside the 5-Woman’s window and into a skinny ailanthus beside it and is coming down, showing about two meters of spectacularly undeformed thigh, shouting Gately’s name by the first name, which he likes. Gately leaves the largest Nuck prone on the idling hood, his head resting in a shatter-frosted head-shaped recession in the windshield. It occurs to Ken Erdedy, looking up into the oak past his upraised hands, that this deformed veiled girl likes Don Gately in an extracurricular way, it would seem. Gately, toe and shoulder or no, has looked strictly all-business this whole time. He’s projected a sort of white-collar attitude of cheery competence and sangfroid. Erdedy’s found he rather likes standing there with his hands up in a gesture of noncombatant status while the Afro-American girls curse and kick and Lenz continues to roll around with the unconscious man hitting him and going ‘There, there,’ and Gately moves backward between the second fellow in the windshield and the first fellow he’d originally disarmed, his smile now as empty as a pumpkin’s grin. Chandler Foss is trying on the third fellow’s plaid hunting cap. There’s a sound in #4 of somebody trying to force a warped window. An Empire W.D.V. is launched with a kind of spronging thud and whistles overhead, climbing, its warning-light wrap of like Xmas lights winking red and green as Don Gately starts to come over in the direction of the lawn and the fellow who appears to have winged him and then veers drunkenly and changes direction and in three one-foot hops is over to the vomit-covered first Nuck, the one who’d called Gately Moose and punched him in the forehead. There’s the slow trundle of the Green T and exhortations from Minty as Gately begins stomping on the supine face of the Nuck with the heel of his good foot as if he were killing cockroaches. The guy’s movable arm is waggling pathetically in the air around Gately’s shoe as it rises and falls. Gately’s hideous torn orange shirt’s whole right side is dark and his right arm drips blackly and seems weirdly set in its socket. Lenz is up and adjusting his wig and brushing off. The veiled girl has hit a rough part some three meters up and is hanging from a limb and kicking, Erdedy staring Copernicanly up her flapping robe. The new Tingley kid sits cross-legged in the grass and rocks as the black ladies continue stomping the inert Nuck. You can hear Emil Minty and Wade McDade exhorting Yolanda W. to use the spike heel. Charlotte Treat is reciting the Serenity Prayer over and over. Bruce Green has his head back and his finger held like a mustache under his nostrils. Hester Thrale can still be heard way off down Warren Street, receding, as Gately wobbles back from the Nuck’s map and sits heavily down in the little street, in shadow except for his huge head in the Nucks’ car’s lights, sitting there with his head on his knees. Lenz and Green move in toward him the cautious way you approach a big animal that’s hurt. Joelle van Dyne lands on her feet. The lady at the high warped window shouts for Helphelphelphelphelp. Minty and McDade come down off the back porch, finally, McDade for some reason wielding a mop. Everybody except Lenz and Minty looks unwell.
Joelle runs just like a girl, Erdedy notes.256 She gets out through the many-angled cars into the street just as Gately decides to lie down.
It’s not like passing out. It’s just a decision Gately makes to like lie back with his knees bent and pointing up into the sky’s depth, which seems to bulge and recede with the pulse in his right shoulder, which has now gone dead cold, which means there will very soon be pain, he predicts.
He waves off concern with the left hand and goes ‘Flesh-wound’ the second Joelle’s bare feet and robe’s hem are in view.
‘Son of a fucking bitch.’
‘Flesh-wound.’
‘Are you ever bleeding.’
‘Thanks for the feedback.’
You can hear Henderson and Willis off in the background still going ‘fu.’
‘I think you can tell them he’s probably subdued,’ Gately pointing off in what he thinks is #4’s lawn’s direction. His lying flat gives him a double-chin, he can feel, and pulls his big face into a smile. His big present fear is throwing up in front of and maybe partly on Joelle v.D., whose calves he’s noted.
Now Lenz’s lizard-skin loafers with grass stains at the toes. ‘Don what can I say.’
Gately struggles to sit back up. ‘You got fucking armed Nucks wanting your ass too?’
Revealing a kind of blackly kimonoish thing under, Joelle has taken off the terry robe and folds the robe into a kind of trapezoidal pad and is kneeling over Gately’s shoulder, straddling his arm, pressing down on the pad with the heels of her hands.
‘Owie.’
‘Lenz he’s really bleeding bad here.’
‘I’m groping to even know what to begin to say, Don.’
‘You owe me urine, Lenz.’
‘I think there’s two of them, like, desisted.’ Wade McD.’s unlaced high-tops, his voice breathy with awe.
‘He’s bleeding really bad I said.’
‘You mean deceased.’
‘There’s one of their shoes in one of them’s fucking eye.’
‘Tell Ken to put his hands down for Christ’s sake.’
‘Oh fucking God.’
Gately can feel his eyes crossing and uncrossing by themselves.
‘He soaking right through it man look at that shit.’
‘This man needs an ambulance.’
Somebody else female says God again and Gately’s hearing warbles a bit as Joelle snaps at her to shut up. She leans down and in, so Gately can see up at what looks like a regular human female chin and makeupless lower lip under the veil’s billowing hem. ‘Whom should we call?’ she asks him.
‘Call Pat’s machine and Calvin. You have to dial 9. Tell them to come down.’
‘I’m going to be sick.’
‘Airdaddy!’ Minty is shouting at Ken E.
‘Tell her to call Annie and the E.M. office down there and do some like strategic thing.’
‘Where the fuck is Security when it isn’t just innocent recovering cars to get towed?’
‘And call Pat,’ Gately says.
A forest of footwear and bare feet and shins all around him, and heads too high to see. Lenz screaming back to somebody in the House: ‘Call a fucking ambulance already.’
‘Regulate the voice, man.’
‘Fucking call about five ambulances is more like it.’
‘Mothafucka.’
‘Ssshh.’
‘I just never saw anything like that.’
‘Nuh-uh,’ Gately gasps, trying to rise and deciding he just likes it better lying down. ‘Don’t call one for me.’
‘This is the straight and narrow?’
‘By doze is fide.’
‘He doesn’t want one he said.’
Green’s
and Minty’s boots, Treat’s purple plastic shower-thongs. Somebody has on Clearasil, he can smell.
‘Seen some righteous ass-kickings in my past, brother, but—’
Somebody male screams back off to the right.
‘Just don’t try and walk me around,’ Gately grins up.
‘Dipshit.’
‘He can’t go in no E.R. with a gunshot,’ Minty says to Lenz, whose shoes keep moving to get himself north of everybody.
‘Somebody turn off the car will you?’
‘I wouldn’t touch nothing.’
Gately focuses at where the Joelle girl’s eyes would be. Her thighs are forked way wide to straddle his arm, which is numb and doesn’t feel like his. She’s bearing down on him. She smells strange but good. She’s got all her weight on her bathrobe’s pad. She weighs roughly nothing. The first threads of pain are starting to radiate out of the shoulder and down the side and into the neck. Gately hasn’t looked down at the shoulder, on purpose, and he tries to wedge his left hand’s finger under the shoulder to see if anything went through. The night’s so clear the stars shine right through people’s heads.
‘Green.’
‘I’b dot touchig dothig, dud worry.’