“I was wondering when the police would get here,” Crandall said. “I called them the moment you arrived. They should be …”
“Thank you for the warning,” Michael said, and started for the door. “It was nice meeting you both, there certainly are some charming and delightful people here in downtown New …”
“No,” Crandall said, and reached into his pocket.
His hand came out with a gun in it.
Everybody in this city has a gun, Michael thought.
And took a step toward him.
“No, please don’t,” Crandall said. “This is a gun, you know.”
“So is this,” Michael said.
You usually knew in that first split second whether the other guy was serious.
In Vietnam, lots of guys had to prove they were big macho killers, had to keep telling this to themselves over and over again because otherwise they’d go weak with terror whenever a leaf rattled out there in the jungle. So one way they tried to prove it was to lean on anybody they thought would back down.
Come to think of it, this may have been the origin of all that Russian roulette stuff in The Deer Hunter. Because lots of times out there, weapons came into play during the showdown process.
Now if you were going to lean on somebody, it was usually better not to choose some guy who weighed three hundred pounds and was built like the Chesapeake and Ohio. Because this man would chew up both you and your rifle and then spit out railroad spikes. So you didn’t go bumping on him, you didn’t go waving your weapon around in his face unless you felt it would be patriotic to get killed by a fellow American instead of a gook.
What you tried to do, if you were looking to bolster your own courage and make yourself feel like a great big macho killer, was you tried to pick on somebody who wore eyeglasses and who looked sort of scrawny and whose middle name was Jellicle, was what you tried to do. Shove your rifle in his face, man. See if you could get him to back down. And usually you knew in that first split second whether you had him or not.
And vice versa, if you were the one who was looking into the barrel of the rifle—as had so often been the case with Michael—you knew immediately whether the guy threatening you would really paint the jungle with your blood if you didn’t back off toot sweet, as they all used to say in their bastardized, learned-from-the-gooks French.
Michael had never backed off.
Even when he knew the other guy was dead serious.
The ones who were all bluff and bravado, you dismissed with a wave of the hand, boldly turned your back on them, went back into the hooch to smoke a joint.
But the red-eyed ones …
The ones who’d had too much of the jungle and were no longer capable of telling friend from foe …
The ones who had murder scribbled crookedly on their mouths …
These were the ones it was essential to stare down.
Because if you backed off from them now, if you let the barrel of that automatic rifle force you to turn away, why then one day they would shoot you as soon as look at you. No warning next time. Just pow when the jam was on, in the back, in the face, in the chest, it didn’t matter, they knew you were nothing but dog shit and they could waste you whenever they wanted to, and wasting you would give them the magical power to kill all the gooks in the jungle. It was like eating your testicles or your heart or whatever Long Foot Howell had told him the Indians used to eat after they’d scalped you.
What you did, you said, “Fuck off, okay?”
And if he didn’t choose to do that, you walked right up to him, and you slapped the muzzle of the rifle aside with the palm of your hand.
And if the muzzle refused to be slapped aside, if those little red pig eyes in the man’s head were telling you that he was going to blow you away in the next count of three, why then what you had to do was kick him in the balls the way Michael had kicked Charlie Wong in the balls only several hours ago. And while the man was writhing on the ground in pain, you stepped on his face hard, which Michael guessed he’d have done to Charlie Wong if Detective O’Brien hadn’t shown up in her sexy underwear, braving the cold and all. And once you’d stolen the man’s face, why then you could turn your back on him the way you did with the other kind, just saunter away into the hooch for a little smoke. Maybe ask him to join you if you were feeling generous. And maybe he’d shoot you anyway one fine day, but chances were he wouldn’t.
The situation here was identical to all those showdowns Michael had survived in Vietnam, where he’d sometimes thought he’d rather face a whole platoon of gooks rather than another red-eyed American trying to show he wasn’t scared.