East is East

He was standing there, fuming, when he felt a pressure on his arm and all at once he was staring up into the puffy face of another artist, a great big fluty-voiced ass of a woman with a cast in one eye. “What’s this all about?” she gasped. “What’s happening?”

He couldn’t help himself, he couldn’t—he felt himself slipping, three toes over the line and whatever you do don’t pull that ripcord. “What the fuck you think is happening,” he snarled, jerking his arm away from her. “It’s Armageddon, they’re fucking dogs out there, eating human flesh. Wake up, bitch.” The rage was racing in his veins as he watched her shrink away from him.

But what now? The sheriff had disappeared into the house, Aberclown’s big speckled face was coming up on his left like something out of planetary alignment and the deputies were standing around with their thumbs up their asses—son of a fucking bitch. He’d been all packed and ready to go, he’d stowed his gear and chowed down his last hunk of overcooked barbecue and a couple warm Budweisers in somebody’s greasy back kitchen, and he was looking forward to kicking back at home, smoke some weed, take the boat out, maybe look up that waitress from Shucker’s—what was her name, Linda?—and now he was going to have to start all over again.

Just then the lights went on in the house, a spill of silver washing over thirty pairs of dress shoes. Turco squared his shoulders and looked round him: here he was in a crisis situation and what the hell was he doing about it? He was just standing around like the rest of the shitheads, his feet cemented to the flagstones: in a minute he’d have a drink in his hand and before you knew it he’d be an artist himself. “Lewis!” It was Aberclown—now he had a hand on him, it was feel-up-Turco night. “Lewis, we’ve got to get—”

“Get shit,” Turco said. “Get fucked.”

It was at that moment that Dershowitz threw back her head and laughed—laughed—whooping like the ringer in a comedy club, bending over to pat her breastbone and give her tits a good shake for everybody to see. And the rest of them—the surfer boy with the cute little bleached forelock and the old guy with the hairy wrists—they were laughing too. This laughter—these artists

with their drinks in their hands and their twenty-five-dollar haircuts and their clean white sculptured teeth—it was too much to take. “Lewis,” Aberclown was saying, “Lewis, I’m talking to you—” but it didn’t register.

Turco came at them without warning, catching the old guy with an elbow that doubled him up in his own puke and drilling the beachboy with a single shot to the sternum that sent him sprawling, and then he had her, the bitch, had her by the hair, the glass shattering on the flagstones at her feet and her hands caught fast behind her. “Where is he?” he demanded, barking, raging, jerking at the knot of her hair as if he were climbing rope. “Where the fuck is he?”

The moment lingered like a shock wave, and then they were on him—Aberclown, the hairy old geek and the beachboy, the fag with the flattop, everybody, even the lame-ass deputies—and he hurt at least one of them with a chop to the groin and he nailed another with a side-blade kick, but the bitch broke away from him and they got him down by sheer force of numbers. They were yammering like dogs, he couldn’t hear them, everybody in on the act now, and she was coming at him like a Harpy, kicking him over and over again with the point of a sharp-toed little red shoe. “My father’ll make you pay for this,” she yelped, makeup smeared, sunglasses gone, “you bastard … if Saxby was here …”

Saxby? Who the hell was Saxby? Not that it mattered, because Aberclown had him all wrapped up in his orangutan’s arms and there were about fourteen bodies attached to his, hustling him out onto the lawn and into the shadows that were closing over the trees like the curtain falling on the very last act of a play. Or not just a play, a tragedy.