'Fuck them,' he said. 'Where they going -to go?'
As I pounded down the stairs he was right behind me. There was no one on the second floor. And as I rounded the landing and headed toward the first I saw Susan in the middle of a crowd of men and girls.
April was separated from her by a man wearing dark glasses. His shirt was open nearly to the waist and there was a bright smear of lipstick across the right side of his mouth.
'She's trying to kidnap me,' April was yelling. 'She's trying to take me away. Help me.'
Susan is never graceless and rarely stupid. She made no attempt to argue. Instead she pushed the man in front of her and took hold of April. The man with the shades objected.
'Who you shoving, baby?' he said, and grabbed Susan by the upper arms.
I was three steps from the bottom when he gasped with pain and doubled forward. His hands slid from Susan's arms.
April yelled, 'Help me, please help me.'
The crowd closed around Susan and I hit the bottom stair and started to throw bodies out of the way. Someone punched me on the side of the face and I flailed out with an elbow and shoved somebody else's face and I was beside Susan. Somebody tried to bite my upper arm. I lunged my shoulder into them and they stopped.
'Never mind April,' I said to Susan. 'Get out of here and call McNeely in vice.'
A young woman climbed on my back with her hands scratching at my face. I reached up and pulled her face forward with my left hand and when it was in sight I punched it with my right. Across the hall I saw Hawk pick someone up and ram him backward through the stair railing. The uprights splintered and the railing cracked in two. I jammed my way backward toward the front door, keeping Susan beside me. A fist hit my stomach, another hit me above the eye, and I could feel blood begin to flow. I kicked a groin. I smacked a gray mustache. There was a mass of bodies behind me. I spun. I whacked someone with my forearm, banged two heads together, and wedged me and Susan through the gap that formed when the two people fell. We were against the front door. I put my foot against someone's stomach and shoved, buttressing my back against the door. For a moment there was room. I opened the door and shoved Susan out. The door slammed shut behind her from the weight of thrashing people. Some were fighting. Some were trying to get away. Everyone was drunk and stupid and both and crazy with sex and dope and booze and music and heat and crowd. Vince, Hal's slugger, came charging down the stairs with Hal behind him. He tried to hit Hawk with a brass candlestick and missed, and Hawk hit him three times, his hands a mere blur in the maelstrom, and the slugger went down out of sight in the turmoil of men and girls. Someone tried to choke me. I brought my hands up together to break the grip and then chopped to the side of a neck, where it joined a shoulder. I stepped on someone that tried to bite my ankle, I punched someone in front of me. I half turned and drove my elbow into someone behind me. There was no gender anymore. I made no attempt to figure out if I was hitting men or girls. No sexist I. Someone half got me in the groin and I could feel that sick feeling that only men know, but it was a glancing blow and the feeling didn't get bad. Someone spit on me. Someone hit my shoulder with a hard object. I kneed a crotch and banged a nose. We had roiled through the hall and into the sunken living room, going down the three steps as if riding a wave. A small man with a goatee was picked up and thrown against the wall and I was beside Hawk. He moved as if he were dancing, with a kind of joyful and vicious rhythm. The sweat rolled down his face. His bald head gleamed. There was a cut on his cheek and blood mixed pinkish with the sweat. His arms swelled and relaxed inside the sleeves of his gray flannel jacket. As I jostled against him I could hear him still whistling through his teeth his soft private whistle: 'Stars and Stripes Forever.' A goddamned patriot. Somebody got a good shot into my jaw and my chimes rang for a minute. I hit back, and hit somebody else, and kicked at a kneecap. At my angle I could look into the hall, and as I, put my open hand on someone's yelling face and shoved, I saw Poitras and Amy standing on the stairs halfway down from the second floor, holding hands, looking in, uncertain and scared. I caught a wild roundhouse punch on my forearm and demonstrated a much better way on someone's chin. An ear flashed across my line of vision-I hammered it with the side of my left fist. Don't want to break your hand on a head. I felt slippery with sweat and a little drunk with the fumes and the contact and the way my blood pounded in my head. When I'd seen Susan in the mob there had been an adrenaline spurt enough to launch a space probe. It was carrying me now. Someone jumped at me and I caught it crotch and shirtfront and helped it on past me over my left shoulder. It smashed into two other people and all three went down. Other people stepped on them. Hawk hit two faces simultaneously, one with each hand and I realized he was punching unconsciously in time to his whistle. In a fight things slow down when you are really pumped up, and it all seems like a Sam Peckinpah movie with bodies floating around and blood flowing slowly. I felt loose and warmed up and full of oxygen. I had another cut now, I could taste the blood in my mouth. Not the nose, I thought. The nose had been broken maybe eight times. Maybe this time it would be something else. Somebody waded in toward us with a fireplace poker. He caught Hawk on the shoulder and I grabbed the end and yanked it away from him as Hawk hit him with the dark blur of his quick hands. Hawk had the fastest hands I'd ever seen. He could catch flies even in the summer when they were frisky. A wineglass broke against the wall behind me and I hit an open mouth with two excellent left hooks. I could catch summer flies too, now that I thought of it. The press of the crowd was thinning. I was getting room to maneuver, to pull back and punch full out. Hawk and I had made progress. I drove my heel into an instep and my elbow into a throat. I took a step forward and landed a textbook overhand right and was rocked from behind by someone who hit me on the side of the head with something more than a fist. I turned, ducking as I turned, and saw a furled umbrella upraised and punched in under it and heard a groan and saw it skitter away on the floor as 1 turned back and caught someone's lunge with my open hands at chest level. I shoved him away and he stumbled back and smashed through the French doors. Cold air rushed in and I filled my lungs as I knocked someone's punch off with my right forearm and landed my left on a nose. The nose spurted blood. Better yours than mine.
And then it was over. Hawk and I stood in a small open space with people stumbling, or fallen, gasping for breath and bleeding, in a circle around us. Men and girls with clothing torn, blood-spattered, and sweaty with an occasional splotch of vomit or spit spoiling a shirt, and the cold, clean air streaming in the broken French doors starting to dry the sweat that had even soaked through my jacket. I looked at Hawk. His jacket too was black with sweat across the back. Hawk looked at me and grinned. 'You right, Mitchell sure do know how to throw a party.'
'Lucky he doesn't have any strong friends,' I said. 'I might have got my nose broken.'
'Who could tell?' Hawk said.
There was a loud pounding at the front door and at the same time four cops pushed through the broken French doors and pointed guns at everyone. McNeely had arrived.
Chapter 31
The genie we'd let out of the bottle was a lot bigger than any of us were going to know for a long time. But sitting in Poitras's living room drinking Schlitz beer from a long-necked bottle, I knew my nose was whole. Hawk and I had washed up. And one of the prowl car cops had brought in a first-aid kit and patched us up. The cut inside my mouth would need a couple of stitches. There were a lot of bruises that would swell and discolor. But my nose was hale
