Festival of Deaths(108)

“I’ll buy you dinner when this is over.”

“When this is over, you’ll think of something else to do.”

Out on the street there were the sounds of footsteps. Gregor could hear them clearly through the thin panes of the window. For the first time, he realized he was cold. Terribly cold. He didn’t think the heat was on up here. He knew the window provided nothing in the way of insulation. He listened to the footsteps and said, “Hobnail boots.”

“Or spike cleats,” Jackman agreed. “Doesn’t it figure?”

It did, but Gregor had never understood why. He strained his eyes to see in the dark. There was street-lamp pole right in front of the synagogue’s front door, but the street lamp shed no light. There was no telling how long it had been since the bulb had been shattered by a flying rock. There were no lights anywhere else on the street. The only light there was came from the moon, and that was feeble.

“Here they come,” John Jackman said.

Gregor pulled himself closer to the window and nodded imperceptibly. Two young white men were swinging onto the block from the north, dressed in heavy boots and thick jackets and jeans that looked painted on. Their hair was hidden under dark knitted caps. They brought their own light in the form of cigarettes. Gregor looked again and decided that what he was seeing was joints or else home-rolled. He would bet on joints.

“High,” he whispered to Jackman.

“As kites,” Jackman whispered back. “How much you bet, they get arrested, turns out they got stewed before they ever started on the marijuana?”

“Are they singing?”

They were most definitely singing. Like Sioux warriors or members of the old East Indian militia, they were strengthening their resolve at the start of battle with music. Since they were young men of the twentieth century in the United States of America, every once in a while they would accompany their music on the air guitar. Gregor shook his head again and sighed a little. They were slight, these young men were, small and fragile. Their bones looked as fine as the bones of birds. Gregor was not a believer in the kind of pop psychology that said that all members of racialist groups would be men like this, puny and weak and yearning to satisfy an impossible standard of masculinity. He had met too many who were big enough and strong enough to give long hard pause to Muhammad Ali. Personally, he thought men joined racialist groups when they were too damn dumb to think of any other form of recreation and too damn mean to go to Walt Disney World. As an explanation, it fit just as many cases as the pop psych one.

What the two young men were singing was “Sympathy for the Devil.” Even sitting where he was, and knowing as little as he did about rock music, Gregor could tell they were doing it badly.

“Tone deaf,” John Jackman said. “And with the sense of rhythm of an Eskimo Pie.”

“You have the sense of rhythm of an Eskimo Pie.”

“I know. But I don’t sing except in the shower and I don’t even do that when I have a lady over.”

Gregor didn’t even sing in the shower. When he did, odd things happened to the water. The two young men had reached the front steps of the synagogue now. They were fumbling around in the pockets of their jackets. One of them came up with another joint, lit it, and tried to pass it to his friend. The other pushed it away and found a joint of his own. The one who had had the joint first was wearing a red scarf. The other one was wearing a pair of bright blue gloves. Neither of these details had been clear when the two were still across the street. Since they were clear now, Gregor used them for identification: the first one was Red Scarf; the second one was Blue Gloves.

“Don’t you know anything about AIDS you dumb jerk?” Blue Gloves demanded. “You can get sick to death sucking on somebody else’s joint like that.”

“Nah,” Red Scarf said. “You can’t get AIDS like that. You can only get AIDS letting some faggot pork you up the ass.”

“You can get it by being anywhere near a faggot,” Blue Gloves said. “You can get it just by breathing some faggot’s air.”

“If that’s true, then everybody in town is going to get it. Cause this city is full of faggots and we’re all breathing the same air.”

“Everybody in town is going to get it. That was the plan. The Zionist Underground put the virus in the water and they’re just sitting back and watching the rest of us die.”

“Yeah,” Red Scarf said, “them and the Catholic church. They’re in it together.”

“And the niggers.”

“And the Spies.”

“It’s a worldwide conspiracy,” Blue Gloves said. “I wish I was smarter about all this shit. I get to thinking about it and I get confused.”