“Forget it? Forget it, hell!” Sullivan roared. “It’s your damned ideas they’s stealin, Cap’n, and I won’t stand fer it!”
Someone farther back in the house, lost in the dark, shouted, “Sit down, you dumb bastard, and shut your trap!”
“I’ll shut
The shouter replied, “I’d truly like to see you try!” but Sullivan was not paying attention to him. In a surprisingly graceful leap he mounted the stage and advanced on Hamlet, grabbing him by the big round frilly collar around his neck and jerking him close. “You got yer hands on my book, you dirty lyin dog, and I want to know how!”
“Sullivan, get the hell down here!” Bowater shouted, but his voice was lost in the chorus of boos and shouts from the already restless audience.
“I swear,” Sullivan said, drawing back a fist, “I’m gonna beat your brains out if you don’t start talkin.”
Hamlet held up his hands to ward off the blow, shook his head in silent pleading. Bowater wondered if the Theatre Troupe of the South had received such treatment at the hands of the crowned heads of Europe. Most likely, if the crowned heads were at all discriminating.
“Get off the stage, you fat ox!” shouted a man just behind Bowater.
Hieronymus Taylor turned on him. Taylor was on his feet, as were most of the audience now. “You want him off, you go get him off!” Taylor shouted. “If you got the grit!”
“Grit? I’ll show you grit!” The man bounded over the seats and clambered up onstage. The friends he left behind urged him on as if he were a fighting cock in a ring.
Bowater glared at Taylor. “Just tryin to be helpful,” the engineer said, grinning.
“You’re going to see the result of your helpfulness here any second!” The mood was ugly, explosive, the audience filling the dark theater with taunts, curses, orders for Sullivan to get the hell offstage. The cast of the play had spilled out from behind the curtain, but now they were backing away as they gauged the atmosphere in the place.
The man from behind Bowater gained the stage and charged at Sullivan and Sullivan punched him in the face with his right hand even as he maintained his grip on Hamlet’s frilly collar with the left. The man hit the stage and his friends howled and jeered. He bounded up and flung himself at Sullivan again.
Bowater sensed a shifting in the crowd, the mob closing in, pulled by the action on the stage, which they were enjoying much more than they had the previous performance.
Sullivan let go of Hamlet, who quickly retreated, stage right, and turned to the man flailing him with his fists. The attacker was sinewy and tough, but a fraction of Sullivan’s size. Sullivan grabbed him by the crotch with one hand, the shirt collar with the other, and with apparently little difficulty hoisted him aloft, charged for the edge of the stage, and flung him clean over Bowater’s head and into the outraged faces of his cronies.
That was the moment when the whole place erupted. Like an army crazed for blood and ordered to charge, the audience swept forward, climbing over seats, charging down the aisles. Bowater raced to the stage with Taylor thumping after him. They turned, backs to the raised platform, ready to meet the onslaught.
One of the men from the seats behind them charged and Taylor caught him in the midriff with his crutch and doubled him up, then dropped him with a roundhouse. Bowater ducked a wild swing, shoved the man back, thought,
From behind and up onstage came a wild shout, a kind of prolonged crazy yelp, a hair-raising battle cry, and three hundred pounds of Mississippi Mike Sullivan sailed overhead as he flung himself bodily onto the massed and charging crowd. A dozen men went down with Sullivan on top of them, a heap of flailing arms and legs, flying slouch hats, and cracked boots kicking the air and one another.
Bowater took a painful punch in the chest but managed to work an elbow to his assailant’s jaw before the follow-up landed.
Taylor wielded his crutch like a quarterstaff and his expression was maniacal. “Come on, come on, you bastards!” he shouted to the crowd at large, jabbing and swinging, felling a teamster with a blow to the side of the head, taking a fist in the jaw. Grinning and cursing, he worked the crutch with surprising efficiency, deflecting arms and legs, striking with quick jabs and sweeping blows.
Sullivan was roaring like a bull, knocking men right and left, but even as he shouted Bowater could see the smile working on his face.
There were knots of fighting men all over the theater, and Bowater realized as he fended off a punch with his left, jabbed with his right, that it was not hundreds against three, it was a free-forall, all hands in, a chance to settle old scores or beat up on someone new or just release some tension in a debauchery of violence.
He saw someone balance on the back of a chair, above the mob, then launch himself into the air. He hit Sullivan square in the chest, and the two went down in a heap, taking half a dozen with them. To his right Bowater heard a strangled voice. “You… son… of… a…”
He turned. Some scraggly-looking peckerwood had climbed up on the stage, got an arm around Taylor’s neck, was choking the life out of him, even as he tried to fend off all comers with his crutch.
“Damn you!” Bowater vaulted up onstage, the tails of his gray frock coat swirling around his legs. The man choking Taylor was kneeling down, and Bowater gave him a brogan in the ribs that sent him sprawling. Upstage he could see Claudius and Laertes kicking the hell out of Hamlet, who lay curled on the boards with his arms over his head, while Gertrude screamed at them to stop.
Bowater was wondering if he should interfere, for the sake of art, or let them go for the same reason, when he was hit with a flying tackle, waist high, and went down hard on the stage. He kicked his way free, taking several blows as he did, sent his unknown assailant flying with a well-placed foot to the chest.
The shouting seemed to build, there was a new quality to it, and Bowater looked out toward the house but he could see nothing beyond the footlights. He could hear feet pounding, men running in or out or both. He heard the word “Cops!” shouted above the tumult, and then there was someone else trying to take a jab at him and he could think of nothing but self-defense.
He was a dirty-looking fellow with only a few teeth, and they were not much to talk about, a slouch hat that had somehow remained on his head, filthy dungarees. He was small and scrappy, looked mean. He caught Bowater in the stomach and doubled him up. Bowater crossed his forearms in front of his face and they caught the uppercut that he knew was coming. The arms saved Bowater’s teeth, but still the force of the blow flung him to the stage.
He rolled stage right. The man kicked at where he had been but his foot found only air. Bowater kicked out at the leg he stood on and dropped him like a bail of cotton.
At his right hand, Bowater saw a sword-Claudius’s sword, by the looks of it, which must have been ripped from the actor’s belt. He wrapped his fingers around the grip, flicked his wrist, and the scabbard flew off, revealing a dull, tarnished, rust-splotched blade, but a blade nonetheless.
Bowater scrambled to his feet, came on guard just as his attacker was ready to charge. The man stopped, eyes on the still-sharp point that hovered inches from his face. The man grinned and drew a bowie knife a foot and a half long, with a hand guard, like the men aboard the
“Is there some reason you feel the need to fight me?” Bowater asked. “Isn’t this a bit absurd?”
The man shrugged, as if the question were too weighty, and lunged with the knife. But there was no way he was getting past Bowater’s defense, because now they were fighting in the manner to which Bowater was born.
He parried, knocked the big knife aside, brought the blade up so the assailant, wide-eyed, was staring at the point mere inches from his throat. Bowater need only straighten his arm and the man was dead.
The man backed away, took a new grip on the bowie knife, tried to see how he could get past that snakelike blade. Shoes pounded across the stage but Bowater did not dare take his eyes from the man. And then a voice shouted, “Put up your weapons, put them up! That’s a police order!”
Without even a beat the man with the bowie knife turned and fled backstage, a blue-clad officer chasing behind. Bowater tossed the sword to the stage and it clattered at the feet of another policeman, who was pointing a gun at him. The policeman looked him up and down and said, in a tone of pure contempt, “Look at you, an officer, brawling like a regular plug-ugly. You should be ashamed.”
