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"They came for hjm during the day. I was the only one home,except for him.
"He was in the big room, the ballroom, at the front door, givingthese two nien the runaround. I was out of sight in the kitchen,hardly listening. I might have been studying Wynken, I'm not sure.
Anyway, very gradually I realized what they were talking about outthere in the ballroom.
"These two men were going to kill Blue. They kept telling him invery flat voices that everything was okay, and please come with them,and come on, they had to go, and no, he had to come now, and no, hehad to come along quickly. And then one of them said in a very low,vicious voice, 'Come on, man!' And for the first time Blue stoppedjabbering in hippie platitudes, like it will all come around, man, and Ihave done no evil, man, and there was this silence, and I knew theywere going to take Blue and shoot him and dump him. This had alreadyhappened to kids! It had been in the papers. I felt the hair standup on the back of my neck. I knew Blue didn't have a chance.
"I didn't think about what I was doing. I completely forgot aboutthe gun in the kitchen drawer. This surge of energy overtook me. Iwalked into the big room. Both these men were older, hard-lookingguys, not hippies, nothing hippified about them. They weren't evenHell's Angels. They were just killers. And both sort of visibly saggedwhen they discovered there was an impediment to dragging myfriend out of the room.
"Now, you know me, that I am as vam as you are probably, andthen I was truly convinced of rny special nature and destiny, and Icame glistening and flashing towards these two men, you know,throwing off sparks, making a dance out of the walk. If I had any ideain my head, it was this: If Blue could die, that would mean I could die.
And I couldn't let something like that be proven to me then, youknow?""I can see it.""I started talking to these characters very fast, chattering in a kindof intense, pretentious manner, as if I were a psychedelicphilosopher, throwing out four-syllable words and walking right towardsthem all the time, lecturing them on violence, and implying that theyhad disturbed me and 'all the others' in the kitchen. We were havinga class out there, me and the others.'
"And suddenly one of them reached into his coat and pulled outhis gun. I think he thought it would be a slam dunk. I can rememberthis so distinctly. He simply pulled out the gun and pointed it at me.
And by the time he had it aimed, I had both hands on it, and I yankedit away from him, kicked him as hard as I could, and shot and killedboth men."Roger paused.
I didn't say anything. I was tempted to smile. I liked it. I onlynodded. Of course it had begun that way with him, why hadn't Irealized it? He hadn't instinctively been a killer; he would never havebeen so interesting if that had been the case.
"That quick, I was a killer," he said. "That quick. And a smashingsuccess at it, no less, imagine."He took another drink and looked off, deep into the memory of it.
He seemed securely anchored in the ghost body now, revved up likean engine.
"What did you dp then?" I asked.
"Well, that's when the course of my life changed. First I wasgoing to go to the police, going to call the priest, going to go to hell,phone my mother, my life was over, call Father Kevin, flush all thegrass down the toilet, life finished, scream for the neighbors, all ofthat.
"Then I just closed the door and Blue and I sat down and forabout an hour I talked. Blue said nothing. I talked. I prayed,meanwhile, that nobody had been in a car outside waiting for those two,but if there came a knock I was ready because I had their gun now,and it had lots of bullets, and I was sitting directly opposite the door.
"And as I talked and waited and watched and let the two bodies liethere, and Blue simply stared into space as if it had been a bad LSDtrip, I talked myself into getting the hell out of there. Why should Igo to jail for the rest of my life for those two? Took about an hour ofexpressed logic.""Right.""We cleaned out that pad immediately, took everything that hadbelonged to us, called the other two musicians, got them to pick uptheir stuff at the bus station. Said it was a drug bust coming down.
They never knew what happened. The place was so full offingerprints from all our parties and orgies and late-night jam sessions,nobody would ever find us. None of us had ever been printed. Andbesides, I kept the gun.
"And I did something else, too, I took the money off the men.
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