“Oh, shit!” Rufus took his hand off my shoulder. “That’s down by our scow, Red!”

“What you think it is, Rufus?”

Another siren whined across the dark.

The van rolling up now was an ambulance. The spot turning on the roof of the police car, already parked, bled over its white sides.

“Nigger, maybe we better go check this out!”

“Think you’re right, Red!”

Booted and barefoot, the two garbagemen lumbered off along the planks. There was a sudden, clear smell of seawater. It surprised me—till then, Red and Rufus’s smell had just about covered all the warm night.

I watched them hurry ahead.

I was still half-sopped in nigger piss—that what wasn’t my own. I wiped my hands on my pants, wiped my mouth, and wiped my hands again. I had piss in both sneakers. Trickles ran out my hair and down my neck, even though Red had wiped it for me. I pulled my shirt loose off my chest and let it fall back. Then I licked my salty fingers.

It would have been okay if it was Hogg piss.

I tried to remember what he smelled like.

A breeze came up the dock, loaded with the stink of oil and the stuff that floats around dock pilings.

Hogg smelled something like Red and Rufus. Only different. But I couldn’t say exactly how.

As I walked toward the crowd, I could hear people muttering, whispering; I even heard two people laugh.

More than half were boatmen. When I got closer, I saw some white cops shooing people back from the edge of the water. I came up beside the ambulance. An orderly—this young nigger with his head shaved clean bald and wearing wire-framed glasses—in a short-sleeved white uniform, leaned against the ambulance’s turned-back door. Another, this one white, with blond hair back in a rubber band—he had glasses too, but black-framed ones—came up through the crowd.

“You find out what the fuck is going on?” the nigger asked. He sounded disgusted. He didn’t uncross his arms or stand up or even move.

The white one—he wore tennis sneakers that had a flag design on them and red socks—made fists in his white hip pockets and hunched his shoulders. “I don’t know. After all that hurry up and rush but would you wait awhile before you start—”

“It’s more of this Harkner shit?”

“That’s what I heard. But when I asked a cop down there, he just told me to mind my fuckin’ business.”

“If it’s Harkner,” the nigger said, “there ain’t no use to rush. Everybody’s gonna be dead.”

“Yeah,” the white one said. “Not as many people dead, but it’s supposed to be a bigger mess than the Stevens’s place.”