Sway (21 page)

Hinman had a mustache and a beard — marbled and crusted with blood when they found him, blood that looked more like dark syrup
— and a bald spot at the back of his head. He looked older than he was. He had had a little bit of a crush on Bobby last year,
not sexual but an attraction, a desire to help, and Bobby was always at loose ends, always driving up and down the coast with
nothing to eat, no money, this beautiful white dog that he managed to feed and that he loved like a little boy loved his dog,
a white Alsatian. He didn’t have a hundred dollars. He told Bobby that he would try to help with at least some of it, but
he lived from paycheck to paycheck — Bobby knew that — and he had maybe twenty in his wallet. He grew plants in his garden,
corn and beans and lettuces and tomatoes. He had fed Bobby for a couple of weeks last year, different casseroles and soups
he would have made in bulk anyway, it wasn’t a problem. A few months ago, he had even bought the used piano from Bobby, the
one on the porch. He had always tried to help, and that was why it made no sense now for Bobby to shout at him, angry, but
then with tears in his eyes, standing so close, shouting for the money that Hinman didn’t have, knowing he didn’t have it,
hating him for the stupidity of not having it.

And so the pistol came out of nowhere. The blunt force of the pistol grip — the wood and steel against the skull — and then
the blood coming down through Hinman’s hair. It seemed to happen almost in reverse. Right before, there was something in Bobby’s
eyes that told Hinman that this wasn’t just about money, that it could not be explained by anything as rational as a hundred
dollars. Bobby hit him on the side of the head with the pistol frame clenched backward in his hand, not once but three times,
cutting open his scalp, hitting him with the gun and then kicking him when he was on the floor.
It’s a hundred fucking dollars, Gary. I know you have it somewhere. Don’t be a fucking Jew about this, it’s just a hundred
dollars.
They just sat there on the floor for a while, neither of them moving, Bobby breathing hard, a glaze on his face as if he
was going to be sick. For a moment he seemed to become aware of how things had changed in that kitchen, aware of how they
had once been friends, but that was when Hinman knew it wasn’t going to stop, that Bobby was just steeling himself for another
round, that Hinman’s own weakness, so naked and exposed, was making it necessary for this to continue. When Charlie showed
up a few minutes later with two girls, Susan and Mary, everything began to move forward with a kind of dream logic, each step
like some confirmation of what Hinman had always known but was realizing only now.

Charlie had a knife, almost as long as a sword, in a scabbard at his side. He was wearing a shirt with big, loose sleeves
that Hinman recognized as one of Bobby’s. He just stood there with his hands crossed in front of his waist, looking down at
them like a bored father: two boys in a fight, blood on the floor, Bobby breathing, Hinman breathing. He didn’t say anything,
he just turned his head slowly to one side, as if searching for a better angle from which to judge their inanity. Then he
went into the living room and left them there, Hinman watching as Bobby leaned over his knees on the floor, staring into space,
trying to think his way through this. The girls stood silently by the kitchen counters, their fingers hooked in the belt loops
of their jeans, not sure what was expected of them yet. It wasn’t just a question of money, Hinman knew for sure now. The
money was something like an excuse they had all made to help them arrive at this moment. He could see that Bobby wasn’t thinking
clearly, sitting there with the pistol in his hand, not moving. Then Bobby left the kitchen and came back with the extension
cords and said to the girls, “I have to talk to Charlie for a minute. You watch him. Don’t let him move.”

He saw his chance then. It was just the girls. They looked as scared as he was. He started twisting himself up onto his feet,
his head throbbing and his vision blurred, but he couldn’t do it, he just kicked himself slowly in a meager arc on the floor,
his sense of balance gone. A black sheet of pressure forced his eyes shut and pushed out against his eardrums. The girls were
screaming,
Goddamn it, Gary, why don’t you sit down? Why are you doing this? Why don’t you just do what he said?
One of them hit him in the back with a chair. He could hardly feel it through the pain in his head, his eyes closed, his
face pressed down against the linoleum floor. She hit him again — groaning, sighing, making a sound of disgust — and now he
felt a bar of pain across his shoulder blade. They came back into the kitchen, and Charlie was standing over him, his foot
on Hinman’s chest, prodding him a little. He turned to Bobby and told him that this was important, he had to do this right,
to call him when it was finished. Then he reached down for the long knife at his side and drew it out of its scabbard, crossing
it over his body like a skilled swordsman, the point in the air behind his shoulder, and in the same motion brought it back
down on Hinman’s head. It was as if the side of Hinman’s face had been torn out by a rake. He felt nothing but pain. He screamed,
but the screaming came from another room. His fingers did not recognize the sticky slime that had been his ear, and it took
several minutes before he had returned fully to his body.

It went on for a long time after that, Charlie gone, Hinman tied up in the chair, the girls crying. It took Bobby eight tries
before he finally drove the knife far enough into Hinman’s heart to kill him. When it was over, they wrote graffiti on the
walls in Hinman’s blood. They didn’t know why they did this. They had been awake for more than forty-eight hours by then.
All of it for a hundred dollars. All of it for no reason at all.

At every show it was the same, but it was never dull or repetitious, it always seemed new. They would keep the fans waiting,
sometimes for as long as three hours, as if to establish in advance that there were two sides, star and fan, and that this
was what both sides needed if they wanted the experience in its purest form. Mick would walk onstage first, his vaudeville
smile made faintly ironic by his sudden emergence from the darkness. He would shield his eyes with the flat of his hand, trying
to see out past the spotlights, pretending to survey the crowd but unable to see them.

We’d like to thank you all, New York, or Cleveland, or Chicago, or Miami. We’re going to start with a fast one now, a rock-and-roll
number, and we’d like you all to get up and groove.

He would lick his lips, smiling, adjusting the microphone stand without having to look at it. Keith would stand by the drum
kit with his head bent down, kicking his way free of his cord. He was so thin by then that it was hard to believe he was alive,
the bones of his face as delicate as the bones of a monkey’s skull. He started with a riff of doubled or tripled notes that
twisted off in different directions, dissonant almost to the point of randomness. At the first sound, Mick would raise his
arms over his head and thrust his pelvis, his face in profile. He would turn back to look at the crowd. Before long, their
faces would be mirroring every movement of his face. Even in the upper decks, they would see the red, white, and blue of his
top hat. They would see the lavender scarf that fell past his waist, the thin body dressed all in black, the omega sign on
his chest. They would climb up on each other’s shoulders, press up against the stage, and sometimes it wouldn’t be enough.
Sometimes they would have to get up on the stage themselves, lunging at him, grabbing him by the shoulders or the head, trying
to bring him down.

Their helicopter circled above the fans for several minutes before it landed. Behind them, they could see the traffic backed
up for almost two miles, a line of cars cutting between rolling hills that were a grayish tan, like frost-damaged wheat. There
was always a surprise at how big a crowd was, but this one looked even bigger and there was no stadium to give it form, just
a colorless sprawl, hemmed in on two sides by wire fences. There were the towers of scaffolding for the lights and the P.A.,
the low black stage with its amplifier stacks, the fans scattered like bits of rag across the fields. From the helicopter,
it seemed unrelated to them, a refugee city without plan or logic. They watched and didn’t say anything, looking down at the
row of trailers to the side of the stage as the pilot banked to the left and began their descent.

On the ground, the pool cues were already coming down in sudden flurries, like hunters gathered around prey. From a few yards
away, it looked planned, a tactical use of force. All the bikers had them — pool cues and cans of beer. Everyone had seen
their share of news footage from Vietnam — the nighttime raids on village huts, the impromptu executions in the city streets
— and this was something like that, the freedom to do whatever you were compelled to do, the unresisted urge.

It was late when Anger came out of the Sloane Square tube station. He started walking up the King’s Road with a shopping bag
in his hand, passing huddled groups of nighttime stragglers, closed shops. London still made no sense to him, even after all
this time. It was a mix of austerity and nostalgia, history fenced in by concrete, glass, prim rows of Victorian brick. In
the streets, the black cabs were like a stubborn denial of time, impossible to take seriously.

He turned left on Oakley Street and headed southeast toward the river. It looked a little like Greenwich Village, only in
front of the buildings there were rows of iron railings interspersed with thick stone pillars that looked almost like fortifications.
He couldn’t look at London without thinking about World War II, the devastation. The older the buildings were, the more they
brought to mind a ghost city that existed in parallel to the city he was in at the time.

He saw Bobby laughing, spitting on the floor, utterly lost. By now, the image had become a vague tightness behind his ribs,
an emptiness in his stomach. It was with him all the time. He supposed that was how much he was still attached to Bobby, imagining
that Bobby was thinking of him too, that they were somehow connected.

It was so much worse than anything he’d imagined. He would not have foreseen the blood on the walls, the crazy deliberateness,
the mutilated bodies. That was how the Lucifer role had played itself out. That was who Bobby was now, the brute fact of his
crime. That was all he would ever be.

He took a right turn onto Cheyne Walk, the only one on the street now. Mick lived in number 48, a white Georgian building
three windows wide. On the second story was a wrought-iron veranda that looked almost Spanish, like something out of a Goya
painting. There was a streetlamp in front of the gate, which helped him to see the keys in his hand: two ordinary keys, not
even on a ring, keys that he might have plucked at random from a junk box. A few lamps had been left on inside the house,
but he knew it was empty.

Once inside, he stood for a while looking at the living room: the tapestried chairs, the low tables, the hammered brass lamps.
Everything was almost in silhouette, the light was so dim. He remembered the time a half year ago he had looked at the pictures
of the murdered actress, Sharon Tate, and how it had reminded him of the band. He remembered thinking that the murders seemed
like the kind of thing that might easily have happened to them. He remembered looking at the picture of the actress on the
front page — blond, in her twenties — and thinking how much she looked like Anita.

They were always so stoned. That was how he’d managed to steal the keys and make copies, returning the originals before anyone
even noticed.

He went upstairs to the library, the place where he’d showed Mick the film three months ago. He took a glass of water upstairs
with him. The house was dark and silent, and there was something about the ordinariness of the glass he took that made it
more difficult to be there. He put the shopping bag down on the desk beside the reels of film and stood there for a moment
before he turned and opened the cabinet. The projector was on a sliding shelf. There was a screen that pulled down over two
stacks of bookcases, like something from a spy movie. He spooled the film into the projector and switched off the desk lamp
and took a sip of the water. Then he sat there in the dark with the film playing and tried to imagine it: the phone lines
cut, Bobby and his friends appearing in the library, breathless, on the verge of laughter.

We’re here and there’s nothing you can do about it,
their faces say.
We’re here and we’re not going to leave.

When they came out onstage, it was dark. The fans had been waiting for almost three hours since the last opening band’s performance.
There were Hells Angels everywhere, on the amplifiers and in the middle of the stage, in the front row of the crowd, pushing
them back with pool cues and with their motorcycles. Keith bent over his guitar, crouched by the drum kit. They’d heard what
it was like from the opening bands, but even now that they could see it for themselves they were still going to try to play
their way though it, inured by this point to riots, crowds, warnings, threats. Keith stood upright to hit his first chord,
nodding his head. Mick gripped the microphone with both hands, collapsing and rising, collapsing and rising, but by the middle
of the first song the stage was so crowded they couldn’t go on. Everyone was looking at a brawl on the ground. Mick stood
there in his devil’s suit and top hat, unable to understand what was happening. In his motionless bewilderment, he looked
for a moment even younger than he was, a stranded boy in a plastic costume.

“Everybody just cool out,” he said. “Just cool out. Just stop it.”

It was hard to see what was going on from the stage, through the lights. Dogs crossed in front of the microphones. When they
started again, they saw girls sitting on their boyfriends’ shoulders, dancing, glitter on their cheeks, smiling or closing
their eyes. They saw the raised fists, the shaking heads, and sometimes it almost looked like an ordinary crowd with the usual
few scuffles at the edges. They didn’t see the boy pushing his way forward, one of the few black fans in the crowd, dressed
in a fedora and a green suit, his girlfriend behind him. They didn’t see it when he brushed against a biker near the stage,
not turning around when the biker grabbed his shoulder but readying himself, gathering all the anger of being in this crowd,
being black in this white crowd, all of it about to usher in this moment of confrontation. They played an old song about a
girl, a pared-down version, bluesy but fast, treble guitars against the batter and crash of high-hat cymbals. The boy in the
green suit took one last look at the band, knowing that the bikers had him, and then he drew his gun in a sudden flash, jostled
by the crowd so that his raised arm pointed for a brief moment right at Mick.