Mohawk

lip.
    “Ahhh!” John gasped.
    “All better?” Benny handed him a swatch of cocktail napkins.
    The bartender was now looking in horror at John.
    “You’re a witness,” John said. Several other people nearby had already turned their backs.
    “Sure,” the man said. “What happened?”
    “We better git,” Benny D. said when John disappeared into the men’s room. “There’s a phone in there.”
    “I got to go see somebody anyway,” Dallas said. He wished he’d waited until John put the glass down before hitting him, not that he could do anything about it now.
    “You can’t go over there at three in the morning,” Benny D. said once they were out in the parking lot.
    “Drive by,” Dallas said.
    They did, but the house was dark and Loraine’s car wasn’t in the drive.
    “You better stay with me tonight,” Benny D. suggested. “You’re liable to have visitors.”
    “Who cares?”
    “You will. In the morning.”
    “He had it coming.”
    “We’ll call my lawyer in the morning.”
    “Nah.”
    “Nah, your ass. You’re in trouble.”
    “Who cares?”
    At Benny D.’s place, Dallas took the couch. Benny D. strayed in, wearing his boxers and scratching himself. “How ’bout you come back and work for me? I’ll stay out of the garage.”
    “Sure,” Dallas said. “Why not.”

44
    “Mather Grouse,” the voice in the dark had said, and for a moment, Randall Younger was breathless. There was only a quarter moon, no real light, and the voice was so near, so tangible, that Randall at first thought he himself had spoken, not the man sitting on the tire a few feet away. But then a cigarette tip glowed red and faded like a light from a faraway locomotive.
    “No,” Randall said.
    “I know,” the big man said. “I know your name, Randall Younger. And I also know who you
are
. A young Mather Grouse, that’s who.”
    “You told me that once before,” Randall said. He dropped the roach and screwed it into the moist earth with his shoe. Rory Gaffney waved his cigarette, leaving a trail, a red-white smear in the air.
    “A young Mather Grouse.”
    “He was afraid of you,” Randall said suddenly, surprising himself.
    “He didn’t have no need,” Rory Gaffney said. “No need for friends to fear one another.”
    That sounded too much like a question to be true. And yet, Randall knew, it couldn’t be entirely false either. He got to his feet. “My grandfather wasn’t your friend.”
    “No,” Rory Gaffney admitted, as if there were no contradiction. “Mather Grouses can’t have no friends. Can’t fight, can’t talk, can’t fuck. Not really.”
    No, Randall thought, but not because we don’t want to. It’s because our minds keep drifting from the fighting and the fucking, always back to the me—what about me, is this a me I can live with, that I can suffer people to see, that I can suffer myself to see. His grandfather had felt all of this, surely. All Mather Grouses felt it; the same perverse self-consciousness that had driven Randall into the old hospital that day. Concern for Wild Bill Gaffney had come later, after everyone had told him why he had done it and he had believed them. He had been fearless, selfless, they said, never suspecting that what had pushed him forward through the falling debris was in fact fear. Fear that someone would witness him standing there and know he had done nothing.
    He smiled at his self-consciousness now, but at the time it had seemed as if the whole scene had been staged as a test for one Randall Younger. The rest of humanity amounted to little more than a realistic backdrop. No one else had any obligation to enter the crumbling building, the hundreds of people girding it were not on trial. Randall scarcely cared about these props, but would conceal from them at any cost that he was part of their cowardly brotherhood. Of all the people in the world, he had thought, his grandfather would’ve suspected the truth, and when he didn’t, Randall had doubted his own conclusions. Maybe it hadn’t been fear. Maybe what the people said was true. He entertained this possibility for years, until the voice said “Mather Grouse” and the cigarette glowed red in the dark.
    He could see clearly now, his eyes had adjusted. There was a fifth of whiskey nestled in the other man’s groin. “He didn’t have no reason to be afraid, though.”
    “Then why was he?”
    The cigarette inscribed a long arc into the trees, and Rory Gaffney took a swig from the