“It doesn’t.” They had reached the line of uniformed officers standing near St. Anselm’s front walk. Jackman pulled over the first one he saw, shouted in his ear, and got something that looked like directions. He grabbed Gregor by the arm and pulled him along. “They’ve got a cordon up on the other side of the block,” he said, shouting a little to get heard over the singing. “It’s not doing any good. They’re coming through the side doors of the church and then out the front.”
“Who are?”
“Half the gay men in the city,” Jackman said.
Now that they were right in the middle of the demonstration, Gregor could feel how wrong it was, and not only wrong but ugly. Everything in this place was anger. Even the nuns standing on St. Anselm’s front steps looked angry. Roy Phipps’s people exuded a will to violence so clear and so malevolent, Gregor could taste it. Chickie George was not significantly calmer, and some of the men around him were murderous.
Gregor tugged at Jackman’s sleeve. “You’d better get these people away from each other,” he said urgently. “They’re going to explode.”
Jackman whirled around. “We can’t,” he said desperately. “Don’t you get it? We can’t touch anybody until they start something serious. We just settled a huge lawsuit over gaybashing. And you know what happens if we touch Roy. Roy knows how to use the courts. We can’t do a damn thing.”
It was then that the angels started chanting. “Burn in hell,” they said, and then, louder, “Burn in hell. Scott Roger Boardman is burning in hell.”
Out in the middle of the crowd, Chickie George reached down and grabbed the nearest angel by the crotch. The angel whirled around and hit Chickie in the side of the head with his YOU WON’T BE GAY IN HELL sign. Chickie dropped his own sign and doubled over. Blood was spurting out of his ear. Two more angels dropped their signs. One of them kicked Chickie in the rear. The other aimed a ham-fisted punch to his midsection, and Chickie went down.
“Here we go,” Jackman said.
Somewhere in the lines of police, a whistle went off. The uniformed cops began moving in. It almost didn’t matter. It was almost too late. By now everybody was kicking and screaming and gouging, the angels and the gay men both. A very young woman and a nun in habit came racing off the steps of St. Anselm’s and into the crowd. A man in a clerical collar and black clothes came racing off the steps of St. Stephen’s. They all converged on Chickie George at once, only to be met by one of the angels, a big one, shoving them out of the way with his arms and kicking out at Chickie with his boots. They were big boots with weather spikes in the soles of them. When they hit Chickie’s clothes they tore them and the flesh underneath them. There was blood everywhere.
Jackman grabbed two uniformed patrolmen and pushed them in Chickie’s direction. He followed them. The young woman from St. Anselm’s had got hold of the angel’s sign and was using it to hit the angel over and over again in the side of the head. The angel didn’t seem to notice. He wasn’t bleeding. Other people were. Two or three of the angels were down. So where several of the gay men. You couldn’t move in the street without stepping into blood.
Jackman got to Chickie George with Gregor right behind him. He got hold of the angel and dragged him off, throwing him into the arms of two waiting patrolmen who wrestled him to the ground. The sheet tore and flapped. The angel was wearing the uniform of some gas station somewhere. Gregor leaned over and saw that Chickie was conscious and breathing. He was not in tears.
“We’ve got to get him out of here,” the young woman said. She was in tears.
“Wait for the ambulance,” Gregor told her, having to shout over what now seemed to be a full-scale riot. “He’s been hit in the head. You shouldn’t move him.”
“I’ll kill that man,” the young nun said. “I don’t care what the Ten Commandments say. I’ll kill that man.”
Chickie George rolled over slightly and smiled. “You go, Sister.” His voice sounded like a radio speaker more than halfway to dead.
The man in the clerical collar looked up. “There’s the stretcher. Okay, Chickie, you’re going to the hospital.”
Jackman came back to them. “Listen,” he shouted, “we’re going to give the ambulance guys time to get this guy out of here, then we’re going to teargas. You’ve all got to get out of the street. Get back inside. Do it now.”
“I want to go with Chickie,” the young woman said. One of the ambulance guys grabbed her by the wrist and motioned her to follow him. John Jackman herded the rest of them toward St. Stephen’s through the only break in the crowd any of them could see.