“Murder,” I gasped.
“Yeah,” he said. “Murder
“God will …” I groaned.
“God’s will,
I’ll be truthful here. I’m not sure if Deacon Ortiz would have killed me if Jeremy hadn’t appeared on the landing behind him. Maybe he was just planning to cause me great pain and murder Raymond’s inspiration. But there, over the deacon’s shoulder, I saw Jeremy Butler. I hadn’t heard him come up the stairs.
I did hear the door behind me open and Raymond shout, “Begone!”
Ortiz did not see Jeremy, but he did see something in my eyes-hope of salvation-and he saw that my eyes were looking over his shoulder. Without letting me go, he turned. Raymond saw a bald giant moving forward, noticed that a marble slab of a man was about to strangle me, and hastily closed his door.
“I know you,” Ortiz said to Jeremy.
“Wichita, 1934,” said Jeremy. “Baseball park. You wrestled Man Mountain Dean in the headline.”
Ortiz considered. I began to pass out.
“Butler,” he said. “You wrestled my brother, Jaime. You broke Jaime’s shoulder.”
Jeremy ambled slowly forward and reached up toward Ortiz’s left hand, which was now only vaguely visible to me as I started to pass out.
“Your brother lost control,” Jeremy said. “He tried to kill me.”
“He wasn’t as good as me,” said Jesus with a smile, giving me a little love squeeze so I’d groan and let him know I was still alive.
“No,” said Jeremy, putting his hand on Ortiz’s wrist. “He wasn’t.”
“And you was old then,” Ortiz said, looking at Jeremy’s hand as it began to squeeze his wrist.
“I was old then,” Jeremy admitted. “But I was not at peace, as I am now.”
Ortiz was grinning widely. Raymond began to play again. Only this time the playing was madness. No tune. Just noise. Screeching noise and anger.
I knew Jeremy was getting somewhere in spite of Jesus Ortiz’s grin because I felt the deacon’s fingers loosen. Not much, but enough so I thought I might be approaching a breath.
“Let him go,” Jeremy said softly.
Jesus shook his head no.
Jeremy’s free hand came up, open-palmed and fast. It caught Ortiz on the side of the head. Ortiz didn’t stagger. He did let me go. He did hiss. But he didn’t step back.
“I think I’ll break your shoulder, old man,” he said as I slid back against Raymond’s door.
My hand caught the handle. I turned it and the damned thing opened. I fell into Raymond’s room and heard him shout, “Where the hell is a human being’s right to priv-a-see?”
My head was a mass of pain. I looked up from the floor where I was sitting and saw Jeremy and Ortiz holding hands. They were facing each other, Jeremy’s right grasping Ortiz’s left and his left Ortiz’s right.
“The hell with charity,” cried Raymond, and started a new tune on his fiddle. It sounded a little too much like “After You’ve Gone.”
Jeremy and Ortiz, their fingers locked, began to dance to the music. At least it looked as if they were dancing to the music. My plan was to leap to my feet find something heavy, and crack Ortiz’s skull. That was my plan, but when I tried to get up I slumped back to the floor, my head waming me of certain disaster if I dared to move.
Jeremy and Ortiz waltzed past the door, grunting, trying to keep their faces from turning red. Ortiz continued to grin. Jeremy showed nothing. Mid-tune Raymond changed to a Strauss waltz to make life easier for the dancing bears. On their next pass they fell through the door and tumbled to the floor, almost crushing me.
“I suppose,” said Raymond, continuing to play, “there would be no point in asking you to leave my abode.”
Jeremy hurtled across the room, crushed a fragile-looking, dirty-pink chair. He was rising slowly as Ortiz got to one knee and then lunged, landing on him and sending him tumbling backward into the old Victrola on a rickety table. The Victrola swayed. Ortiz’s fingers found the flower-shaped speaker and ripped it from the machine.
“Oh, oh,” groaned Raymond. “That’ll do it. No more music. No more hospitality. Out you all go.”
Ortiz was about to clobber Jeremy with the speaker when Raymond hit him on the neck with his fiddle. The fiddle shattered; a piece of it came twanging past my head as I got to one knee. It didn’t really stop Ortiz, who was humming again, but it did distract him for a heartbeat. The heartbeat was enough for Jeremy to bring his head up sharply into Ortiz’s nose.
Ortiz dropped the Victrola speaker and stepped back. His hand moved up to his nose. Blood streamed from between his fingers, but I’ll be damned if he wasn’t still humming. He took his hand down and looked at each of us, his face a bloody mask, his grinning teeth smeared red. Jeremy stepped forward on pieces of crushed furniture. He staggered slightly. Ortiz lunged forward again, arms out. Jeremy went down on one knee and caught the flying barrel of flesh on his shoulder.
“No point asking you not to break anything more, is there?” asked Raymond.
Jeremy had Ortiz on his shoulders now. Ortiz, who couldn’t have weighed less than 240 pounds, was grasping at his opponent’s bald head in search of a forgotten hair. He threw a fist at Jeremy’s back, but Jeremy slowly stood erect. Ortiz’s head went down and his teeth dug into Jeremy’s shoulder. A tic crossed Jeremy’s mouth but he didn’t pause. He hoisted Ortiz over his head and began to spin, slowly at first and then faster.
As he spun, Ortiz stopped biting and began to growl. I couldn’t tell where Ortiz’s blood stopped and Jeremy’s began, and as they spun I couldn’t tell where one man began and the other ended. They were a dizzying blur. My stomach heaved, did more than threaten. I looked around for a vase, a bucket. Nothing. The two men spun and Raymond reached down to help me up, saying, “I’m gonna take this real philosophical. New company’s moving in. New company’ll clean it up. Always be new shows. New sets.”
Suddenly Jeremy stopped. Ortiz flew toward me and Raymond. I pulled Raymond down. Ortiz landed upside down on Raymond’s sofa. The legs crunched and Ortiz lay silent.
“Jeremy,” I said. “You all right?”
“I endure,” Jeremy said softly, catching his breath. “Is he alive?”
I made my way to Ortiz, whose feet were dangling over the top of the sofa, his head tilted downward. His lips were moving and a humming sound was coming out. I touched him. He smiled through red teeth.
“I think his shoulder’s broken,” I said.
Jeremy moved forward and looked down at Ortiz.
“An irony,” he said. Little beads of sweat stood out on his forehead. His clothes and cheek were covered with blood.
“Paddy wagon, funny farm cart, or ambulance?” asked Raymond, moving toward the door.
“Ambulance,” I said.
“I have decided to move to quieter climes,” Raymond said. And he was gone.
“Lucky you came,” I said as Jeremy and I turned Ortiz so that he was in something close to a lying-down position.
“I had a message for you,” he said. “You are …” and then he paused and stared at the wall.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“A breeze just touched the fine hairs on the back of my hand and a voice whispered ‘mortality,’” he said, softly.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“It was both frightening and restful,” he said.
I looked at his bloody face and bulldog neck. Jeremy Butler didn’t always make a hell of a lot of sense to me.
“The message for me?” I asked.
He sighed, opened Ortiz’s right eye with his thumb, examined him for further signs of life, and replied, “Miss Bartholomew asked that you come to her apartment. She says she has information you should have. She gave me her address and number.”
Jeremy reached a hand into his shirt pocket. One of his fingers had been bitten by Ortiz. I could see the indentations from the deacon’s teeth. I took the piece of paper.
“I think you’d best go before the police arrive,” Jeremy said.
