Page 37 of By Any Means

The worst part of a fight, he decided, was the awful dizzied unmoored-ness, the blood-dark ignorance of which way was what, where escape hid, so the mere possibility of it was a relief. He ran, limping, tallying more bruises with every step, and found escape three flights later in the morning-sun-lit front door.

There in the doorway, of course, was Laurie, arriving. He stood, one foot on the step, hands in pockets of an immaculate linen suit of a gray that wasn’t his color, his hair neat with pomade. His brown eyes widened as he took in Chary’s sideways stumble across the threshold.

“Holy sh— Chary? Chary!”

His name, used intimately, like nothing. Had Laurie been lying in wait? Had he set him up? The coincidence of their meeting, Laurie following him, now this?

No. Two minutes to noon now, he saw, swiping across the smeary, bloodied face of his watch; Laurie was merely right on time. And his whole person was shocked. Chary’s whole person said to him clearly, even in delirium: safe. Safe safe safe.

“Laurie,” he croaked, not like nothing.

Laurie swore, then he was there beside him, holding him up by an elbow, dragging him across the street and onto the sidewalk opposite, saying things Chary couldn’t hear through the gradual, muting rush of shock.

Chary gripped his sleeve hard and leaned over. He gasped, “Head hurts.”

He was sick in front of some cemetery hortensias and then knew nothing at all.

10

LAURIE

Laurie had seen a variety of disturbing things throughout his career. The stockyards, the slaughterhouse. Men and women caught up in machinery, crunched up and bound by iron teeth; severed fingers and limbs discarded on farm fields; chronic frostbite and gangrene from transient living.

By and large, the world of workingmen wasn’t built for safety.

The sight of Chary Wright collapsing in a bloodied, unconscious heap probably wouldn’t be revisited in Laurie’s nightmares. But for all that, it was damn disturbing. Chary was there and then not, his humanity wiped out in a blink, gone to someplace unknown and possibly painful. His eyelids hadn’t even closed on his journey but stayed slit to whites, unmoving as Laurie sank with him to the concrete as best he could.

“Oh, god.”

Laurie patted at him uselessly, cursing at first in quiet hisses, then louder as it became clear Chary wasn’t coming back immediately.

“Chary, oh, shit—wake up.” He found a roundish, egg-sized contusion on Chary’s forehead, hard and swollen and already blood-red, and another smaller lump at the back of his skull, concealed by his hair. Bad news. He could’ve been dying and Laurie wouldn’t have known until the moment of it, couldn’t do a thing about it but clutch at him and, if he were a religious man, pray.

Chary returned to life abruptly, when the police bells were close and they’d gained a small bystander crowd, who’d all been wondering the same things as Laurie. He launched up so fast, he almost collided with Laurie’s nose before he crawled two steps, trembling, and was sick again, clutching the wrought-iron fencing. Laurie scrabbled after him and, lacking anything else in his power, put his sack coat over his bent-over form.

“Hey,” he said gently, “you’re alive.”

Chary coughed. “Am I?”

“What the hell happened in there?”

Chary shook his head and then said, seventy percent rich boy, “I have a splitting head.” He heaved himself into a wobbly stand and wavered in it, arms out to either side. Laurie drew him away from the fence, coat in hand. The bystanders clapped like Chary was a victor in the ring—at least until Chary turned at the noise, and the blood showed clear. Then they gasped.

Chary said, “What—? Why are there…people…” And then he was down again, his limbs turned liquid as he crumpled down onto hands and knees. Laurie cursed and went with him a second time, wincing when his own knees cracked in protest.

This time, Chary stayed conscious; he laughed. “…applause? Am I drunk?”

Somebody handed Laurie a canteen. He sniffed it—water—and made Chary drink. “Stay down, goddammit.”

“He’s not drunk, is he.” A deep rumble, belonging to the canteen’s owner. Laurie looked up: a short and muscle-bound bodybuilder, with a neat mustache and carefully tended eyebrows, who must’ve been en route to or from the Y.

“No. How d’you know?” Besides the massive goose egg on Chary’s head and the obvious spray of blood, of course⁠—

“Look.” The bodybuilder jerked a thumb to the red-brick tenement Chary had stumbled from.

Four policemen dragged out a bloodied-sheet-bound body on a stretcher.

“Hell,” Laurie cursed. He looked down to Chary, who was on hands and knees, half in his lap. “What in damnation did you do?”