Love Ain't Nothing but Sex Misspelled (33 page)

When it was almost directly overhead, Lew Steiner rose to a kneeling position and hurled first one black powder bomb, then the other, with tremendous force. The first bomb went straight, directly up into the air, passed over the cockpit of the machine, and tumbled back wobbling, to hit the top of the wall, bounce and exp}ode on the other side. The reverberation could be felt in the wall and the ground, but no rifts appeared in the brick. The second bomb crashed into the side of the machine and a deafening roar split up the even sussuration of the 'copter's rotors. The machine tottered on its course, slipped sidewise and lost minor altitude, but was compensated, began to climb, and just as it hurled itself away in a slanting curve, a projectile tumbled dizzily, end-over-end from the machine.

Then the 'copter was gone, and they watched the projectile falling straight for them. Gyp Williams began screaming, "Fire, fire, hit it hit it hitithitithitit ..." and they all poured flame into the sky, missing the tear gas bomb as it fell a few yards from their enclosure, exploded, and sent rolling clouds of tear gas straight toward them.

The vapors struck, and they began to feel the sting of the chemicals, and their eyes went blood-red in a moment, and Don Karpinsky fell on his side, clutching his face, crying like an infant. Lew Steiner grabbed up another bomb from somewhere, and hurled it at the empty yard, a motion of wanton fury and impotence that no one saw, himself most of all. Gyp Williams refused to cry. He dug his broad face deep into the dirt and enjoyed the cool feel of pain from gravel and sod, but the stinging was terrible and his grunts of feeling were strangely intermingled.

The others recoiled, tried to protect themselves, and knew the guards would attack in this moment. They could hear them coming, rebel yells of victory and bloodlust strung out rustily in the air. And over the battle cries, the malicious rattle of the machine gun as Chocolate sprayed the yard in steady, back-and-forth sweeps. Blind to everything, tears running out of his burning eyes, knowing only that he had the power to cut them down, the young man with the livid scar continued his barrage, building a wall of death the guards in their white uniforms could not penetrate.

And after a while, when the belts were exhausted, and the guards had gone back to cover, when the gas had blown away, stringers of mist on a late afternoon breeze some God had sent to prolong their passion, they all lay back with eyes crimson and streaming, knowing it had to be over soon, and hoping the second group would finally, please dear Lord, blow that frigging gate!

"Man, how long, how long." Nigger Joe spoke to the advancing dusk. "How long this gotta go on. It seem like I been livin' off misery all my life, you'd think it'd end sometime, not just keep goin' on and on and on."

Simon Rubin sat up and looked at him, and there was compassion in his lean, ascetic face.

"How many lives I gotta lead, steppin' down into the gutter for some 'fay cat? How many times I gotta be called 'Boy', an' when'm I gonna get some memories I wanta put away to think back on, another time?" His eyes were lost in the twilight, set deep under bony eyebrow ridges, but his fierce voice was all around them, very soft but compelling. "Even in here they makin' me be somethin' I ain't. Even in here I'm tryin' to get away, get some life, what's left to me, and they got me down with my face in the dirt; they don't know. Man, they'll never know. I can remember every one them cats, makin' jokes, pokin' fun, sayin' things, a man's got to have pride, that's what matters, just his goddamn pride. They can have all the rest of it, just gimme the pride. An' when they come 'round takin' that too, then you gotta raise up and split some sonofabitch's head with a shovel ..."

Simon Rubin's voice came sliding in on the semi-darkness, a cool soft fabric covering tiny sounds of crickets and metal clanking on metal from somewhere out there. "I know how you feel, Joe. There are a lot of us in that kind of ghetto.

"Only for some of us it gets worse, even when it gets better. You knew your kind of hate, but it was diiferent for me."

Gyp Williams snorted in disgust. "Sheet, man, when you Jewish cats gonna come off that kick? When you gonna stop lyin' on yourself, man, that you been persecuted, so you know how a black man feels? Jeezus, you Jewish own most of the tenements up in Harlem. You as bad as any the rest of them cats." He turned away in suppressed fury, turning his anger on the machine rifle, whose bolt he snapped back twice quickly.

Simon Rubin began speaking again, as though by the continuing stream of words he could negate what Gyp Williams had said. "I wanted to get into dental college, but they had a quota on Jews. I didn't have the money or the name to be in that quota, so I went out for veterinary medicine. I got set back and set back so many times, I finally said to hell with it, and I changed my name, and had my nose fixed, and then I married a gentile.

"It even worked for a while." He smiled thinly, remembering, out of his not-very-Semitic face. "And then one night we had a fight about something, I don't remember what, and we went to bed angry, and in the middle of the night I turned to her and we started to make love, and when she was ready she began saying over and over in my ear, 'Now, you dirty kike, now, you dirty kike ...' "

Simon Rubin buried his face in his hands.

Don Karpinsky asked, "Simon ... ?"

"So ... so I know how you feel Joe," Simon finished. "I hated myself more than she could ever hate me; and when they sent me here for her, because of her, what I did to her, I gave them my name the way I came into the world with it. So I know, Joe, believe me, I know."

Nigger Joe started to turn away, his thoughts turned inward. He paused and looked directly at Simon Rubin: "I'm sorry you feel bad, Simon," he lamented, "it's just I been in chains four hundred years, and all that clankin' makes me hear not so good. I'm sorry you got troubles, man."

And their contest of agonies, their cataloguing of misery, their one-up of sorrow was cut short as the loudspeaker blared from across the yard, from the Administration Building.

"Hey! Hey over there!"

It was the main loudspeaker, mounted on the Administration Building, where the guards were waiting to come for them, holding out--it was now obvious--until their nerves were raw.

"Hey, Simon ... Lew ... all the rest of you ... this is David, do you hear me, can you hear me, all of you?"

Gyp Williams fired off a long flaming burst, and they could hear the tinkle and shatter of window glass when it hit. It was an answer, of sorts.

"Listen, we can't blow the gate. We just can't do it, you guys."

Chocolate looked at his companions. "Hey! That's David, the one who was with the second group, what's he doin' in there with them?" Gyp Williams motioned him to silence. They listened.

"They've got the gate staked out, listen you men! They have it fixed so we can't get at it. Simon! Lew Steiner! All of you, Gyp, Gyp Williams, listen! They said they won't punish us if we go back to our cells. They said they won't demand payment, we can go right on like we were before, it's better this way, it isn't so bad, we know what we can do, we know what they won't let us do! Simon, Gyp, come on back, come on back and they won't make any trouble for us, we can go on the way we were before, don't rock the boat, you guys, don't rock the boat!"

Gyp Williams rose to both knees, somehow manhandling the heavy machine rifle against his chest, and he screamed at the top of his voice, throwing his head back so his very white teeth stood out like a necklace of sparkling gems in his mouth-- "Sellout bastards!" and he fired, without taking his finger from the trigger, he fired and the flames and heat and steel and anguish went cascading across the yard, hitting unreceptive stone and gravel and occasionally one of the already dead would leap as a slug tore its cold flesh.

Finally, when he had made it clear what their answer was to be, he fell exhausted behind the sandbags, where he would die.

In that instant of minor silence, Simon Rubin said, "I'm going back." And he got up and walked across the yard, his head down, his hands locked behind his head.

Don Karpinsky began to cry, then, and Chocolate slid across to him, trying by his nearness to stop the fear and the fury of being too brave to live, too cowardly to die without tears. No one behind the barricade moved to shoot Simon Rubin. There was no point to it, no anger at him, only pity and a deep revulsion. And the guards in their immaculate white did not shoot him. Back in their world he was infinitely more valuable, as a symbol, a broken image, for the others who might try to free themselves another time.

They would point to him and say, "See Simon Rubin, he tried to rock the boat, and see what he's like?"

Behind the barricade Nigger Joe turned to Lew Steiner and the crying kid who had not fled with Simon Rubin.

"There's that's how much your people understand." He condemned them all.

And Lew Steiner said, "There were half a dozen of your boys in that second group, Joe. My back aches again, you feel like doing that thing?"

Nigger Joe chuckled lackadaisically, slid over and began thumbing Lew Steiner's back.

They were like that, waiting, when the final assault began. The high keening whine of a mortar shell came at them like the doppler of a train passing on a track, and it landed far down at the end, where Chocolate caught it full, and split up like a ripe, dark pod. He was dead even as it struck, and the other four fell in a heap to protect themselves from screaming shrapnel.

When the ground had ceased to tremble, and they could see the world again, they tried not to look toward the end of the barricade, where a brown leg and a torn bit of cloth showed from under the heap of rubble, from under fhe fallen sheets of metal. They tried not to look, and succeeded, but Gyp Williams's face was now incapable of even that half-bitter, knowing smile he had offered before.

Another whining shell came across, struck the wall above them and exploded violently, with Lew Steiner's howl of pain matching it on a lower level.

The shard of twisted metal had caught him in the neck, ripping through and leaving him with a deep furrow, welling out wetly, black-red down his shirt and over the hand he raised to staunch the flow. Nigger Joe tore his shirt down the front and made a crude bandage. "It ain't bad, Lew, here, hold this on if you can."

The four of them turned back to see the first wave of white-uniformed guards breaking from the cover of the Administration Building and another group from around the end of the Laundry.

They came on like a wide-angled "V" with a longarm grenade hurler at the point. Gyp Williams turned loose with the machine rifle, and swept the first attackers; they fell, but one of them got off a grenade, and it sailed almost gracefully, a balloon of hard stuff, over and over into the enclosure. The earth split up and deafened them, and great chunks of steel and stone cascaded about them. It was enough to ruin the machine gun, and send Don Karpinsky tumbling over backward, his body saturated with tiny bits of steel and sand. He lay sprawled backward, eyes open at the sky of free darkening blue, over the wall he would never climb.

They huddled there, the three of them left--Gyp Williams, Nigger Joe and Lew Steiner, still clutching the bloody rag to his neck.

The guards in their white uniforms would not let them go back to the cells. They knew the ones who were weak enough to keep from rocking the boat, and they knew the ones who had to be destroyed. These three were the last of the ones who had sought their freedom and their pride. They would be killed where they lay, when the ammunition had run out and all the strength was sapped from them, not only by the fighting, but by the ones who had betrayed them, the ones who had said it was better not to make trouble.

And as waves of faceless, soulless attackers streamed toward them across the dead-piled yard, no more intent on the particular men behind the barricade than they would have been about any other vermin who threatened them, Gyp Williams said it all for all three of them, and for the few strong ones who had found peace if not pride: "We all of us down in the dark. Some day, maybe ... some day."

Then he managed somehow to get the machine rifle steadied, and he fired into the midst of them, screaming and running with their immaculate white uniforms the badges of purity and cleanliness.

But there were just too many of them.

There were always, just too many of them.

--New York City, 1961

A PRAYER FOR NO ONE'S ENEMY

"Did you get in?" He turned up the transistor. The Supremes were singing "Baby Love."

"None'a your damn business, man; a gentleman doesn't talk." The other one peeled a third stick of Juicy Fruit and folded it into his mouth. The sugary immediacy of it stood out for a moment, then disappeared into the wad already filling his left cheek.

"Gentleman? Shit, baby, you're a lotta stuff, but you aren't one of them there." He snapped fingers.

"D'jou check the plugs 'n' points like I said?"

He switched stations, stopped. The Rolling Stones were singing "I Can't Get No Satisfaction." "I took it into Cranston's, they said it was in the timing. Twenty-seven bucks."

"Plugs 'n' points."

"Oh, Christ, man, why don't you shine up awreddy. I'm tellin' you what Cranston said. He said it was in the timing, so why d'you keep sayin' plugs 'n' points?"

"Lemme use your comb."

"Use your own comb. You got scalp ringworm."

"Get stuffed! Lemme use your damn comb already!"

He pulled the Swedish aluminum comb out of his hip pocket and passed it over. The comb was tapered like a barber's comb. Gum stopped moving for an instant as the other pulled the gray shape through his long brown hair in practiced swirls. He patted his hair and handed the comb back. "Y'wanna go up to the Big Boy and get something to eat, clock the action?"

"You gonna fill the tank?"

"Fat chance."

"No, I don't wanna go up to the Big Boy and drive around and around like redskins at the Little Big Horn and see if that dopey-ass chick of yours is up there."

"Well, whaddaya wanna do?"