The Vulture Read Online Free Page A

was dressed only in his bathing suit, and blood poured from a slashing razor cut on his shoulder. The towel he was kneeling on was dripping with the fluid from the head of the Puerto Rican girl who had been in his arms short minutes ago. Without really being aware of what I was doing, I seized a beer bottle and began to raise and lower it on the head of the fallen leader’s attacker’s skull: over and over I hit himuntil I felt his blood splatter against my chest and I was sure he was dead.
    Hicks’s eyes sought mine, but I was dazed and unsure of reality. Everything had happened so fast. The Beret that Hicks held in his hand was soaked with blood too. I watched without moving as he rolled the distorted figure of his woman over and pulled a revolver from beneath the towel.
    ‘BAM! BAM! BAM!’ Three times the sound of dynamite split the night in half. Twice it seemed that the noise had been the gun’s greatest effect, but the third time Hicks had aimed at the body I had beaten into a pulpy mass. The form jerked, hung on the edge of the pier, and then dropped into a coffin of water.
    The sound of sirens registered for the first time. Much of the screaming had subsided. There were no enemies left; few of the Berets remained. They had either chased the P.R.’s back toward Tenth Avenue or fled from the Man. Hicks collapsed back onto the towel with the revolver curled under him.
    I touched the girl next to him. She was barely breathing, and the warmth that her body had seemed to possess before had faded as she lost more and more blood. Hicks too was in trouble. I ignored the girl completely and lifted Hicks over my shoulder. I threw the gun, which dangled from his limp fingers, over my head into the river. Blindly I started trotting, running, stumbling toward Chelsea. I was familiar with many of the back alleyways that made up the neighborhood. We would be safe if I made it east of Tenth Avenue.
    I turned under the West Side Highway exit ramp at 20th Street. It seemed that the sirens were coming from every direction at once. I started thinking that Hicks and I would never make it out of there alive. The cops would beat us and say that we died in the gang fight. I thought we had escaped death, only to find it all over again.
    ‘Hey, kid! Kid! C’mere!’
    The words came out of the shadows of the storefront nextto me. It was an old black man, nearly invisible in the inky darkness of the entrance to the shoddy store.
    ‘I wuz lookin’ atcha comin’ down the street,’ he croaked. ‘C’min an’ I’ll hidja.’
    I didn’t raise any objection at the time, but I wondered why he would do this. All of the old people I knew wanted the hoods dead and all gang members lined up against a wall and shot. I got to the partially open doorway, and the old man lifted Hicks from my shoulders. His strength amazed me. I started to protest that I could make it, but I wasn’t really sure that I could.
    ‘Close de do’,’ he said back over his shoulder.
    I reached back for the door, but the sound of the sirens drove me to the threshold again for a final look. Fire engines and prowl cars and ambulances made red a dominant color beneath the shadows of the highway overpass. The acrid smell of the flaming pier was still wedged in my nostrils, painting my mind ugly.
    ‘Jus’ hi’ long you think you kin stan’ inna do’ lookin’ like de wrong enda hell?’ the old man asked.
    ‘I’m sorry, pop . . .’
    ‘I ain’cha pop . . . wouldn’t be pop fo’ no young hoods an’ thugs like you.’
    He was shuffling around in the darkness with a clarity of movement. I couldn’t even begin to recognize any of the hazy forms that presented themselves in the no-light of the store.
    ‘How’s my man?’ I asked.
    ‘Thass whut I’z ‘bout to concern myse’f wit ni,’ was the reply. ‘I’m tryin’ t’fin some dry close fo’ you so you kin go git whut I need. He done los’ a lotta blud, joo know.’
    I knew. Blood had poured from the