by Gil Brewer
I started to light the cigarette and heard the cars coming. They were traveling damned fast, and then headlights swept across the trees. I heard somebody yell something I slowed the Merc, fumbling with the cigarette. A sedan barreled around me and grated against the front of the Merc. I hit the brakes hard.
“Hey, cop!” a young voice yelled. “Hey, there—cop!”
Chapter Thirteen
INSTANTS LATER they swarmed on me. I wasn’t even able to see how many cars there were, only that there were many. Headlights shot all over the place, and blinked out. I had stopped the Merc.
“What’s the idea?”
“Hey—cop! What’s the idea?”
They streamed out of cars. I saw them coming at me. I tried to pull the car around past the one in front of me, but the sedan moved ahead and blocked my path.
“Cops drive beat-up Mercs now?”
“Yeah. They got it rough. Real rough, man.”
I opened the door and made a run for it. Somebody stopped me with a fist. All the cars lights were out now. I heard a girl laugh. I saw a face; it was a horrible laughing face. The laughter was curiously muffled, the face worse than any face could possibly be. Huge ears stuck out of the head, the eyes were like apples with slits in them, the mouth a crooked crazy gash, the nose sticking out like a clown’s. Halloween masks. Masks of every description, that’s what they were wearing. I snatched at the mask on the face of the guy who’d hit me.
“Easy, cop.” He backed away. I went after him.
Somebody tripped me. I flattened on the cold cement.
A girl laughed shrilly in the darkness.
“What’ll we do?”
“You know what we’ll do. Watch it, he’s getting up.”
I came to my feet and stood there. There was no use trying to run. The voices were young and they were tall, short, broad—all sizes, wearing clothes. That’s all you could tell. Halloween masks.
“Well, let’s don’t stand here.”
“Enjoy it, cop—enjoy it. Get with it, cop.”
They had to be from the Swanson place; where else could they have come from? I looked at them and they began to form a circle around me. They closed in slowly, nodding and jerking their heads at me, and it was incongruous. You couldn’t believe it. The masks were for fun, only not now—not now.
“Where you headed, cop?”
I wanted to say something to them, only what do you say? What was there to say, because you could sense something of what they felt. They were ready for something; something was all planned and they laughed and giggled and chuckled behind the masks, nodding those crazy faces at each other.
“Cop—what’s up?”
“What’s up, doc?”
One of them reached in tentatively and I smacked at his hand. Something struck me in the back of the neck, twice, sharply. It had been aimed for my head and missed.
They looked at each other, heads bobbing.
Girlish laughter came from the cars.
“Come on, we’ll take him in the woods.”
“Into the woodsy woods with him.”
“You wanta go into the woods, cop?”
“Yeah, cop—how you like that? Shall we take a little walk into the woods? Down by the water in the moonlight?”
I turned sharply and started walking for my car. One of them leaned into a hell of a punch at my gut. I caught his hand and spun him and pitched him on the ground. I grabbed at the mask, caught it, tore it off. A young face stared up at me. I let loose and somebody grabbed my arms. Two of them had me. I had never seen that face down there before. He got to his feet slowly, watching me. Then he grabbed the mask that still dangled from my hand and carefully put it on. Nobody had spoken during this. It was almost a kind of rite. He finished putting on his mask and the ones holding me didn’t let go. He stepped up and kicked me hard in the groin. I doubled over with the pain; it shot all through me in crazy hurting. He kicked me again, this time in the shin. They held me up, and I tried to turn against them. He had kicked me as hard as he could and I felt sure it was the end then.
“Hold him up, for Christ’s sake.”
“You hold him up. He’s heavy’s hell.”
“Let’s walk him down there, then.”
I tried to pull against him, feeling the pain in endless roaming waves. They dragged me toward the thick undergrowth off the road. They crashed into the woods, dragging me. I got my feet going then, and walked. One of them tripped me up and kicked me as I started to fall.
“Kill him. Tear the hell out of him, the son-a-bitchin’ cop.”
“He ain’t no cop, you fool.”
“You think he’s a cop?”
“Say, cop—are you a cop?”
They laughed. I lay there in brambles, waiting. There was nothing to say, nothing to do. I would fight them if they touched me again, but there were at least ten or twelve of them.
“On your feet, cop.”
I didn’t move.
“He wants to be urged,” a very young voice said. “Let’s urge him, men—urge the cop!”
One standing near me leaped into the air and landed with his feet on my stomach. If it had been his heels, he would have broken me. But I tightened every muscle in my body. As it was, he knocked the wind out, and I couldn’t breathe—I lay there gagging for air.
“Get him—bring him along,” a more determined voice said.
They silently dragged me further along.
“There’s the bay, now.”
“Let him go.”
They dropped me. I was breathing again now, not that it helped much. I could smell the nearness of the bay, hear fish jumping in the water. I rolled over and saw the moonlight shining on water out there. Trees hulked around us and the ground was damp and soggy.
“He out?”
“Nah, he’s not out. I see his eyes. Look at him move, like a snake. You move like a snake, cop. Are you a snake?”
“He’s a snake.”
“Do snakes have backbones?”
“Nah. Snakes don’t have backbones.”
“Let’s bust his damned back an’ make him a real lousy crawling snake in the grass.”
Two of them jumped on my back. My face went into the soggy earth. I lay there, hurting all over. I tried to get up and couldn’t. One of them said, “Wait, you guys. Maybe he is a cop.”
I held my breath.
“Let’s find out?”
“Check.”
They crowded down around me and hands began to go through my pockets.
“Wrist watch.”
“Right.”
“It’s a Bulova.”
“Well that don’t make him a cop. Hell, I got a Bulova.”
“Are you a cop, too?”
“Throw it away.”
“I did.”
“Like hell you did. Let’s see.”
“It’s gone.”
They tore at my clothes. My pockets were empty.
“Hell, he ain’t even got a wallet. Some cop.”
“Ten bucks. A ten-dollar bill.”
“Here, cop—look!”
I got to my knees and looked. The guy stood in front of me. He held the ten-dollar bill down by my eyes and slowly tore it up. Then he threw the pieces into the air and they fluttered down.
“Kick the bastard.”
They kicked me for a while, then grew tired of that.
“Cop—make-believe cop—whatever the hell you are. You better get the hell home and stay there.”
They laughed at that. One of them reached down and grabbed my jacket and twisted it off my arms.
“Coat,” he said.
I couldn’t move. Every time I budged, they kicked me. I began to get the idea and lay still. I was one flaming mass of pain.
“Tear it up.”
There was a rending and stuttering of cloth.
Hands tore my tie off, then my shirt. I felt my shoes ripped off and my stockinged feet got tromped into the earth. Somebody caught hold of my socks and y
anked them off. I tried to hug the earth. I didn’t want to be kicked any more.
“Rip ‘em up. What you can’t rip, throw.”
They ripped and threw. There was a great deal of panting and cursing. Every other word was emphasized with a familiar verb.
I heard things land in the water far out. Those were my shoes.
“There went your shoes, cop.”
“Quit calling him cop. Let’s invent a new name.”
“Get his pants.”
They tore my pants off. I tried to fight for my pants, but one of them hit me in the face, then stood on my throat. They held my pants up and I saw them up there.
“Tug o’ war!”
“Right, men.”
Two grabbed one leg and three the other. Several of the rest made a move to help, but by then it was done. There was a short, hard rip, and the pants tore in two.
“Done.”
“He ain’t got no pants. What the hell!”
“Shorts!”
Hands snatched and tore my shorts off and other hands ripped them up. I came to my feet then, rushing them. One of them stepped from among the rest and waited as I tried to get by him. He swung and I plowed into him, running in a sea of pain.
“Cop!”
I caught him in the face, the bone of my fist against nose. It crunched. He sat down and began to yell terribly. Then he began to cry.
“Kick the son of a bitch. Kill him!”
They piled on me again and in a moment I was on the ground and it was very quiet. I would not move again for a while.
“He’s naked,” one of them said. “Look at him. Stark, mother naked. Imagine.”
“Big son of a bitch, ain’t he?”
“What?”
“You said it. Say—call the girls.”
“What?”
“Go get the girls. They’ll want to see this.”
“You sure?”
“Call the damned girls!”
One of them ran thrashing off through the under-brush.
“I’m tired out.”
“So am I.”
“Wait’ll the girls get here. Wait’ll they see him.”
“Say. Maybe we could get Gert to—”
“Nahhh!”
“Why not?”
“Well, hell—”
“I think it’s a good idea. How about you guys? We could get Gert and sic her on him. She would—you know she would.”
“Here they come.”
“I still think it’s a good idea.”
“Why not Ellie?”
“Jesus.”
“Well, why not?”
“Christ, we can’t. That would be the end.”
“Well, I’m tired. We oughta have some fun out of this.”
“Get the bottle.”
“I got one right here.”
“I got one, too.”
“Let’s have a drink.”
I heard a gurgling and bottles were uncapped. I heard somebody coming, crashing along, and it was very silent. A girl laughed. Then another. I heard them come across the ground toward me and tried to roll onto my chest. One of them leaned over and grabbed me. They pitched me on my back and two of them stood on my arms. I was weak as a cat, and couldn’t move anyway. I looked up. Feminine legs moved toward me in the moonlight. There was every type of leg, some nice, some not so nice. The girls were in shorts, Bermuda, short shorts, dungarees and skirts. Some had on high heels, some saddle shoes, some moccasins.
“Look, girls. Have a look at Mister Cop!”
It was quiet.
“Wow!” one girl said.
There was a great deal of laughter.
“I don’t want to look, Johnny!”
There was a loud crack. “Look, bitch! An’ you mention a name again, you’ll be with him and I mean with him not with him. Get that? Now, go over there and look at him. Say something to him.”
“Gimme a drink first, Joh—”
“What’d I say?”
I forgot about them. Halloween-faced girls leaned above me. They made comments and gradually their voices began to alter slightly. They milled around me.
One of the girls leaned down and pinched me with her fingernails. Her fingernails bit into my skin and she continued to pinch.
“That’s it. Give it to him, girls! It’s your turn, now.”
The pinching stopped and they stepped away. The guy standing on my right arm moved and I flipped to my left. I got kicked in the chest for the trouble and lay on my back again, looking up at the sea of faces.
“Work him over, girls! Wouldn’t you like that?”
One girl bent down and slapped my face.
“Come on. Give it to him. You know how.”
“Wait,” one said. “Hey, Gert.”
“Huh?”
“Come over here a sec.”
“What you want?”
“How’d you like to have some fun with him?”
One of the girls said, “Sure, Gertie—go ahead.”
There was a great deal of snickering. I tried to see who Gert was, but couldn’t. I couldn’t raise my head. The pains in my groin had subsided.
“Go on, Gert. Show us how.”
“I don’t want to.”
“Do it anyway. We’ve watched you before, ain’t we?”
“I know—but that was different.”
“How different?”
“I don’t want to.”
“I want to burn him,” a girl said.
“Huh?”
“Cigarette. You know.”
“Go ahead. Now, listen, Gert. Get down there with him and show him how he’d like it. Go ahead, Gert—we’re tired. You can have some fun and we can have some fun, too.”
A willowy girl in a fluffy white skirt stood over me. She had long blonde hair tumbling like a cloud over her shoulders. She was smoking, looking down at me, and only her eyes were covered with a black mask.
“Go ahead,” somebody whispered.
She leaned down.
“Hello, honey,” she said softly. I smelled a strong, sweet odor of wine. She was very dainty, as she moved. “Do you like me, honey?”
I just looked at her. She had beautiful lips, very dark against her face, well-formed, her teeth gleaming.
“Do you love me, honey? Say you love me, honey. Come on—would you love me?” She knelt on one knee and her hand caressed my cheek, the other holding the cigarette. She leaned all the way down and kissed me on the mouth and I felt her tongue probing. Then her cigarette ground into me. It went into my belly. She ground it in and kept kissing me. I yelled right in her mouth. She jerked up, sitting over me and looked at my belly, brushed the burning ashes off.
“Atta girl! Give it to him again.”
Then I heard someone come crashing through the woods. He stopped, winded.
“Hey, you guys,” he said, his breath coming raggedly. “Knock it off. They’re patrolling up five blocks. They’ll be along in a hurry.”
“Oh, hell,” a girl said.
“Were you going to?”
“Yes. I was. Damn it.”
“Hurry up—we gotta get him out to the pier.”
“Get the cop to the pier.”
“Can’t we leave him here?”
“Hell, no, man. You know we can’t. You know what we gotta do. Them’s orders.”
I was limp, exhausted from pain. I didn’t care much what happened, yet this business of the end of the pier sounded no good at all. I tried to think, but it was too much of an effort.
They grabbed me and started dragging and carrying me across the ground, along the water. They walked silently now, until the girls came along. They held me up and I walked on rubber legs.
“He’s doing fine, all right. A real man.”
“You said it,” a girl said.
Then I saw the blonde walking along beside me. She got in front of one of the guys who held my arm, her white skirt fluffing out.
She was breathing hard, rapidly.
“D
id you like that, honey?” she said. “Did you?”
They took me out on the long cement pier beyond the hotel at the edge of Jungle Acres.
“Hold him up—feet and hands.”
They got me up and started swinging.
“Over he goes—one—two—three!”
I spun through the air and landed in muck, hard. The tide was out. I couldn’t move. I was buried in muck from the bay and it stank.
“Now, you cut out all this fool cop stuff, you down there,” one of them called. “This is just to kind of teach you a lesson. We want a cop, we’ll ask for one. You go home and stay home. It’s better that way.”
They went away. Their voices and laughter faded.
Chapter Fourteen
ALL I COULD THINK ABOUT was that damned car, the Merc convertible. I felt that if they had smashed that up, it was the end. That alone suddenly became the most important thing in my life. There was nothing else in my life; it was an empty stinking black void with a car in the middle of it.
I tried to move, finally. The pain in my groin had almost entirely gone away. The kick hadn’t been nearly so bad as I’d supposed. I knew they hadn’t marked me up much, either, and there were no bones broken.
I lay there, crumpled half on my side in the black muck, and looked up at the end of the pier. The pilings were encrusted with barnacles and oysters up to, and above, the waterline. The tide was out, but if I lay here long enough, it would come in. That would be pleasant. It would be cool, and it would wash me clean, and I could sink through it, down and down.
I stared up at the sky. It was clear, and the moon was still riding up there. The stars were seen in perspective, the night air was that clear.
I began to move each part of me. I lifted my arms out of the stinking muck, and propped myself up, slowly. Then I put one foot under me, and the other, and started to stand. I fell flat in it again. I tried again, and got to my feet.
Right away, I started for dry land. Ten feet in under the pier I struck harder ground, and another few staggering steps and I was among the fiddler crabs. I kept moving, and as I moved, I began to feel better. My belly began to smart where the blonde had dug that cigarette in.
I came up onto the grass and stood there looking down at myself. I was muck, dripping with it, from head to foot.
Walking along the grass above the water, the stink of fish and sulphur had become almost a part of me. I knew we hadn’t come far up toward the pier. The grass was beaten down a little father along, and I followed it in and found where I had lain. I looked around. There were pieces of torn clothing here and there. I had no shoes. My shirt was a thing of tattered rags. My coat likewise.
