Carnell, my ass.

Luther walked gingerly through the glass and tried to keep to the edge of the crowd, but within minutes he’d been forced toward the center again. It was no longer a group of people, it was a living, thinking hive that commanded the bees within, made sure they were all anxious and jangly and hungry. Luther pulled his hat down tighter and kept his head down.

Dozens of people, all cut up from the glass, keened and moaned. The sight and sound of them incited the hive even more. Anyone wearing a straw hat had it wrenched from his head and men beat the shit out of one another over stolen shoes and bread loaves and suit jackets, most times destroying the very thing they tried to possess. The packs of sailors and the soldiers were roving enemy squads, bursting out of the herd in sudden explosions to pummel their rivals. Luther saw a woman pushed into a doorway, saw several men press around her. He heard her scream but he couldn’t get anywhere near her, the walls of shoulders and heads and torsos moving alongside of him like freight cars in the stockyards. He heard the woman scream again and the men laugh and hoot, and he looked out at this hideous sea of white faces stripped of their everyday masks and wanted to burn them all in a great fire.

By the time they reached Scollay Square, there had to be four thousand of them. Tremont widened here and Luther finally broke from the center again, made his way to the sidewalk, heard someone say, “Nigger got his own hat,” and kept moving until he ran into another wall of men pouring out of a shattered liquor store, draining the bottles and smashing them to the sidewalk and then opening replacements. Some inbred-looking short sons of bitches kicked down the doors of Waldron’s Casino, and Luther heard the burlesque show in there screech to an end. Several of the men came right back out pushing a piano in front of them, the piano player lying belly-down on top, one of the short sons of bitches sitting on his ass and riding him like a horse.

He turned to his right and Old Byron Jackson stabbed him in the bicep. Luther fell back against the wall of Waldron’s Casino. Old Byron swung with that knife again, the old man’s face a feral, terrified thing. Luther kicked out at him, then came off the wall as Old Byron lunged and missed, the knife sending a spark off the brick. Luther cuffed him in the ear but good, bounced the other side of his head off the wall.

“The fuck you doing this for?” he said.

“Got debts,” Old Byron said and came at him in a low rush.

Luther banged into someone’s back as he dodged the thrust. The man he’d bumped grabbed his shirt and spun him to face him. Luther jerked out of the man’s grasp and kicked behind him, heard the kick connect with some part of Old Byron Jackson, the old man letting out an “oof” of air. The white man punched him in the cheek, but Luther had expected that and he rolled with it right into the crowd still dancing out in front of the liquor store. He broke through them and leapt up onto the piano keys, heard a smattering of cheers break out as he vaulted off the keys and over the piano player and the man riding him. He landed on the other side and kept his footing and got a quick glimpse of a guy’s shock at this nigger dropping out of the sky and then he pushed into the crowd.