When he looked out the window again, Baylor was nowhere in sight.
‘Fucker’s just tryin’ to draw fire,’ said the man who had shot at Baylor. ‘Sammy’s fast today.’
‘Yeah, but he’s slowin’ some,’ said a lazy voice from the darkness at the rear of the bar. I do believe he’s outta dope.’
‘Hey,’ said Mingolla. ‘Don’t kill him! I know the guy. I can talk to him.’
‘Talk?’ said the lazy voice. ‘You kin talk till yo’ ass turns green, boy, and Sammy ain’t gon’ listen.’
Mingolla peered into the shadows. A big sloppy-looking man was leaning on the counter; brass insignia gleamed on his beret. ‘You the captain?’ he asked. ‘They told me outside to talk to the captain.’
‘Yes, indeed,’ said the man. ‘And I’d be purely delighted to talk with you, boy. What you wanna talk ’bout?’
The other men laughed.
‘Why are you trying to kill him?’ asked Mingolla, hearing the pitch of desperation in his voice. ‘You don’t have to kill him. You could use a trank gun.’
‘Got one comin’,’ said the captain. ‘Thing is, though, yo’ buddy got hisself a coupla hostages back of that wall, and we get a chance at him ’fore the trank gun ’rives, we bound to take it.’
‘But—’ Mingolla began.
‘Lemme finish, boy.’ The captain hitched up his gunbelt, strolled over, and draped an arm around Mingolla’s shoulder, enveloping him in an aura of body odor and whiskey breath. See,’ he went on, we had everything under control. Sammy there…’
‘Baylor!’ said Mingolla angrily. ‘His name’s Baylor.’
The captain lifted his arm from Mingolla’s shoulder and looked at him with amusement. Even in the gloom Mingolla could see the network of broken capillaries on his cheeks, the bloated alcoholic features. ‘Right,’ said the captain. ‘Like I’s sayin’, yo’ good buddy Mister Baylor there wasn’t doin’ no harm. Just sorta ravin’ and runnin’ ’round. But then ’long comes a coupla our Marine brothers. Seems like they’d been givin’ our beaner friends a demonstration of the latest combat gear, and they was headin’ back from said demonstration when they seen our little problem and took it ’pon themselves to play hero. Wellsir, puttin’ it in a nutshell, Mister Baylor flat kicked their ass. Stomped all over their esprit de corps. Then he drags ’em back of that wall and starts messin’ with one of their guns. And—’
Two more shots.
‘Shit!’ said one of the men by the window.
‘And there he sits,’ said the captain. ‘Fuckin’ with us. Now either the gun’s outta ammo or else he ain’t figgered out how it works. If it’s the latter case, and he does figger it out…’ The captain shook his head dolefully, as if picturing dire consequences. See my predicament?’
‘I could try talking to him,’ said Mingolla. ‘What harm would it do?’
‘You get yourself killed, it’s your life, boy. But it’s my ass that’s gonna get hauled up on charges.’ The captain steered Mingolla to the door and gave him a gentle shove toward the cordon of MPs. ‘’Preciate you volunteerin’, boy.’
Later Mingolla was to reflect that what he had done made no sense, because—whether or not Baylor had survived—he would never have been returned to the Ant Farm. But at the time, desperate to preserve the ritual, none of this occurred to him. He walked around the corner and toward the retaining wall. His mouth was dry, his heart pounded. But the shaking in his hand had stopped, and he had the presence of mind to walk in such a way that he blocked the MPs’ line of fire. About twenty feet from the wall he called out, ‘Hey, Baylor! It’s Mingolla, man!’ And as if propelled by a spring, Baylor jumped up, staring at him. It was an awful stare. His eyes were like bull’s- eyes, white showing all around the irises; trickles of blood ran from his nostrils, and nerves were twitching in his cheeks with the regularity of watch-works. The dried blood on his chest came from three long gouges; they were partially scabbed over but were oozing a clear fluid. For a moment he remained motionless. Then he reached down behind the wall, picked up a double-barreled rifle from whose stock trailed a length of flexible tubing, and brought it to bear on Mingolla.
He squeezed the trigger.
No flame, no explosion. Not even a click. But Mingolla felt that he’d been dipped in ice water. ‘Christ!’ he said. ‘Baylor! It’s me!’ Baylor squeezed the trigger again, with the same result. An expression of intense frustration washed over his face, then lapsed into that dead man’s stare. He looked directly up into the sun, and after a few seconds he smiled: he might have been receiving terrific news from on high.
Mingolla’s senses had become wonderfully acute. Somewhere far away a radio was playing a country-and- western tune, and with its plaintiveness, its intermittent bursts of static, it seemed to him the whining of a nervous system on the blink. He could hear the MPs talking in the bar, could smell the sour acids of Baylor’s madness, and he thought he could feel the pulse of Baylor’s rage, an inconstant flow of heat eddying around him, intensifying his fear, rooting him to the spot. Baylor laid the gun down, laid it down with the tenderness he might have shown toward a sick child, and stepped over the retaining wall. The animal fluidity of the movements made Mingolla’s skin crawl. He managed to shuffle backward a pace and held up his hands to ward Baylor off. ‘C’mon, man,’ he said weakly. Baylor let out a fuming noise—part hiss, part whimper—and a runner of saliva slid between his lips. The sun was a golden bath drenching the street, kindling glints and shimmers from every bright surface, as if it were bringing reality to a boil.
Somebody yelled, ‘Get down, boy!’
Then Baylor flew at him, and they fell together, rolling on the hard-packed dirt. Fingers dug in behind his Adam’s apple. He twisted away, saw Baylor grinning down, all staring eyes and yellowed teeth. Strings of drool flapping from his chin. A Halloween face. Knees pinned Mingolla’s shoulders, hands gripped his hair and bashed his head against the ground. Again, and again. A keening sound switched on inside his ears. He wrenched an arm free and tried to gouge Baylor’s eyes; but Baylor bit his thumb, gnawing at the joint. Mingolla’s vision dimmed, and he couldn’t hear anything anymore. The back of his head felt mushy. It seemed to be rebounding very slowly from the dirt, higher and slower after each impact. Framed by blue sky, Baylor’s face looked to be receding, spiraling off. And then, just as Mingolla began to fade, Baylor disappeared.
Dust was in Mingolla’s mouth, his nostrils. He heard shouts, grunts. Still dazed, he propped himself onto an elbow. A short way off, khaki arms and legs and butts were thrashing around in a cloud of dust. Like a comic-strip fight. You expected asterisks and exclamation points overhead to signify profanity. Somebody grabbed his arm, hauled him upright. The MP captain, his beefy face flushed. He frowned reprovingly as he brushed dirt from Mingolla’s clothes. ‘Real gutsy, boy,’ he said. ‘And real, real stupid. He hadn’t been at the end of his run, you’d be drawin’ flies ’bout now.’ He turned to a sergeant standing nearby. ‘How stupid you reckon that was, Phil?’
The sergeant said that it beat him.
‘Well,’ the captain said, ‘I figger if the boy here was in combat, that’d be ’bout Bronze Star stupid.’
That, allowed the sergeant, was pretty goddamn stupid.
‘ ’Course here in Frisco’—the captain gave Mingolla a final dusting—‘it don’t get you diddley-shit.’
The MPs were piling off Baylor, who lay on his side, bleeding from his nose and mouth. Blood as thick as gravy filmed over his cheeks.
‘Panama,’ said Mingolla dully. Maybe it was an option. He saw how it would be… a night beach, palm shadows a lacework on the white sand.
‘What say?’ asked the captain.
‘He wanted to go to Panama,’ said Mingolla.
‘Don’t we all,’ said the captain.
One of the MPs rolled Baylor onto his stomach and handcuffed him; another manacled his feet. Then they rolled him back over. Yellow dirt had mired with the blood on his cheeks and forehead, hitting him with a blotchy mask. His eyes snapped open in the middle of that mask, widening when he felt the restraints. He started to hump up and down, trying to bounce his way to freedom. He kept on humping for almost a minute; then he went rigid and—his gone eyes fixed on the molten disc of the sun—he let out a roar. That was the only word for it. It wasn’t a scream or a shout, but a devil’s exultant roar, so loud and full of fury it seemed to be generating all the blazing light-and-heat dance. Listening to it had a seductive effect, and Mingolla began to get behind it, to feel it in his body like a good rock ’n’ roll tune, to sympathize with its life-hating exuberance.
‘Whoo-ee!’ said the captain, marveling. ‘They gon’ have to build a whole new zoo for that boy.’
After giving his statement and letting a corpsman check his head, Mingolla caught the ferry to meet Debora
