Sway

by Zachary Lazar

  When the police found Gary Hinman, he looked as though he had been posed deliberately to frighten them. He was slouched in a chair, his torso and the side of his face smeared with blood, his ankles and wrists still tied up with extension cords. There was blood on the linoleum of the kitchen floor, smudged and imprinted with the marks of tennis-shoe soles. Messages had been written on the walls in blood: incitements to rise up, to destroy.

  He was a music teacher — Gary Allen Hinman — a graduate student a few credits short of a master’s degree in sociology. In his living room and his bedroom there was a library of textbooks, Marx’s Das Kapital, several books on Buddhism, transcendental meditation, gardening, jazz. Because his kitchen had been ransacked — all the drawers pulled out, papers scattered on the counters — it looked at first like a drug deal gone bad, just another hippie killing another hippie. There was not much of an investigation until a few days later, when another seven people were murdered in a similar fashion, wealthy people who were not hippies or drug dealers at all. They had been bound by ropes or cords before being stabbed to death, sometimes fitted with a noose or a hood in some elaborate rite of sacrifice. Because the meaning of the killings was impossible to ascertain, it became more ominous. The news brought panic, bewilderment, fascination. When the killers’ faces were at last revealed in newspapers and on TV — offhand or contemptuous or even smiling — they looked beatific, or simply empty, young people severed from all ties to the ordinary world.

  It had started when someone that Gary Hinman had not seen in a long time showed up in a sweat, his face pale, almost gray, a boy who had lived in Hinman’s basement last year for a few months, Bobby Beausoleil, with his white dog. When Hinman let him in, he offered Bobby some tea, but Bobby said no, he’d take a glass of wine, if there was any wine. He hadn’t slept last night, he’d had nowhere to go. He told Hinman that he needed a hundred dollars. He didn’t ask for it, he just insisted that he needed it, his voice quiet, almost resigned. He stood in the kitchen in his borrowed clothes and Hinman didn’t understand what had happened to him, how he had become this vagrant in an army coat, a bruise on his face, circles of sleeplessness under his eyes. He thought of Charlie, the day three months ago that Charlie and Bobby had dropped a used piano off on his porch, something in their manner giving Hinman the first indication he’d ever had that they were anything other than his friends.

  He told Bobby he didn’t have any money, what was he talking about, but Bobby just looked down at his glass of wine, the stem rising from the web of his fingers on the kitchen counter. He insisted that he was in trouble, he needed the money, he owed it to some bikers, Danny and Ray from the Straight Satans, Charlie’s friends. He said that he had sold them some mescaline and now they were saying it was cyanide, it was a burn, they wanted their money back, and what did Gary think they were going to do? Did he think they were just going to let him go? Did he think Charlie was going to just let him go?

  Hinman had a mustache and a beard — marbled and crusted with blood when they found him, blood that looked more like dark syrup — and a bald spot at the back of his head. He looked older than he was. He had had a little bit of a crush on Bobby last year, not sexual but an attraction, a desire to help, and Bobby was always at loose ends, always driving up and down the coast with nothing to eat, no money, this beautiful white dog that he managed to feed and that he loved like a little boy loved his dog, a white Alsatian. He didn’t have a hundred dollars. He told Bobby that he would try to help with at least some of it, but he lived from paycheck to paycheck — Bobby knew that — and he had maybe twenty in his wallet. He grew plants in his garden, corn and beans and lettuces and tomatoes. He had fed Bobby for a couple of weeks last year, different casseroles and soups he would have made in bulk anyway, it wasn’t a problem. A few months ago, he had even bought the used piano from Bobby, the one on the porch. He had always tried to help, and that was why it made no sense now for Bobby to shout at him, angry, but then with tears in his eyes, standing so close, shouting for the money that Hinman didn’t have, knowing he didn’t have it, hating him for the stupidity of not having it.

  And so the pistol came out of nowhere. The blunt force of the pistol grip — the wood and steel against the skull — and then the blood coming down through Hinman’s hair. It seemed to happen almost in reverse. Right before, there was something in Bobby’s eyes that told Hinman that this wasn’t just about money, that it could not be explained by anything as rational as a hundred dollars. Bobby hit him on the side of the head with the pistol frame clenched backward in his hand, not once but three times, cutting open his scalp, hitting him with the gun and then kicking him when he was on the floor. It’s a hundred fucking dollars, Gary. I know you have it somewhere. Don’t be a fucking Jew about this, it’s just a hundred dollars. They just sat there on the floor for a while, neither of them moving, Bobby breathing hard, a glaze on his face as if he was going to be sick. For a moment he seemed to become aware of how things had changed in that kitchen, aware of how they had once been friends, but that was when Hinman knew it wasn’t going to stop, that Bobby was just steeling himself for another round, that Hinman’s own weakness, so naked and exposed, was making it necessary for this to continue. When Charlie showed up a few minutes later with two girls, Susan and Mary, everything began to move forward with a kind of dream logic, each step like some confirmation of what Hinman had always known but was realizing only now.

  Charlie had a knife, almost as long as a sword, in a scabbard at his side. He was wearing a shirt with big, loose sleeves that Hinman recognized as one of Bobby’s. He just stood there with his hands crossed in front of his waist, looking down at them like a bored father: two boys in a fight, blood on the floor, Bobby breathing, Hinman breathing. He didn’t say anything, he just turned his head slowly to one side, as if searching for a better angle from which to judge their inanity. Then he went into the living room and left them there, Hinman watching as Bobby leaned over his knees on the floor, staring into space, trying to think his way through this. The girls stood silently by the kitchen counters, their fingers hooked in the belt loops of their jeans, not sure what was expected of them yet. It wasn’t just a question of money, Hinman knew for sure now. The money was something like an excuse they had all made to help them arrive at this moment. He could see that Bobby wasn’t thinking clearly, sitting there with the pistol in his hand, not moving. Then Bobby left the kitchen and came back with the extension cords and said to the girls, “I have to talk to Charlie for a minute. You watch him. Don’t let him move.”

  He saw his chance then. It was just the girls. They looked as scared as he was. He started twisting himself up onto his feet, his head throbbing and his vision blurred, but he couldn’t do it, he just kicked himself slowly in a meager arc on the floor, his sense of balance gone. A black sheet of pressure forced his eyes shut and pushed out against his eardrums. The girls were screaming, Goddamn it, Gary, why don’t you sit down? Why are you doing this? Why don’t you just do what he said? One of them hit him in the back with a chair. He could hardly feel it through the pain in his head, his eyes closed, his face pressed down against the linoleum floor. She hit him again — groaning, sighing, making a sound of disgust — and now he felt a bar of pain across his shoulder blade. They came back into the kitchen, and Charlie was standing over him, his foot on Hinman’s chest, prodding him a little. He turned to Bobby and told him that this was important, he had to do this right, to call him when it was finished. Then he reached down for the long knife at his side and drew it out of its scabbard, crossing it over his body like a skilled swordsman, the point in the air behind his shoulder, and in the same motion brought it back down on Hinman’s head. It was as if the side of Hinman’s face had been torn out by a rake. He felt nothing but pain. He screamed, but the screaming came from another room. His fingers did not recognize the sticky slime that had been his ear, and it took several minutes before he had returned fully to his body.

  It went on for a long tim
e after that, Charlie gone, Hinman tied up in the chair, the girls crying. It took Bobby eight tries before he finally drove the knife far enough into Hinman’s heart to kill him. When it was over, they wrote graffiti on the walls in Hinman’s blood. They didn’t know why they did this. They had been awake for more than forty-eight hours by then. All of it for a hundred dollars. All of it for no reason at all.

  At every show it was the same, but it was never dull or repetitious, it always seemed new. They would keep the fans waiting, sometimes for as long as three hours, as if to establish in advance that there were two sides, star and fan, and that this was what both sides needed if they wanted the experience in its purest form. Mick would walk onstage first, his vaudeville smile made faintly ironic by his sudden emergence from the darkness. He would shield his eyes with the flat of his hand, trying to see out past the spotlights, pretending to survey the crowd but unable to see them.

  We’d like to thank you all, New York, or Cleveland, or Chicago, or Miami. We’re going to start with a fast one now, a rock-and-roll number, and we’d like you all to get up and groove.

  He would lick his lips, smiling, adjusting the microphone stand without having to look at it. Keith would stand by the drum kit with his head bent down, kicking his way free of his cord. He was so thin by then that it was hard to believe he was alive, the bones of his face as delicate as the bones of a monkey’s skull. He started with a riff of doubled or tripled notes that twisted off in different directions, dissonant almost to the point of randomness. At the first sound, Mick would raise his arms over his head and thrust his pelvis, his face in profile. He would turn back to look at the crowd. Before long, their faces would be mirroring every movement of his face. Even in the upper decks, they would see the red, white, and blue of his top hat. They would see the lavender scarf that fell past his waist, the thin body dressed all in black, the omega sign on his chest. They would climb up on each other’s shoulders, press up against the stage, and sometimes it wouldn’t be enough. Sometimes they would have to get up on the stage themselves, lunging at him, grabbing him by the shoulders or the head, trying to bring him down.

  Their helicopter circled above the fans for several minutes before it landed. Behind them, they could see the traffic backed up for almost two miles, a line of cars cutting between rolling hills that were a grayish tan, like frost-damaged wheat. There was always a surprise at how big a crowd was, but this one looked even bigger and there was no stadium to give it form, just a colorless sprawl, hemmed in on two sides by wire fences. There were the towers of scaffolding for the lights and the P.A., the low black stage with its amplifier stacks, the fans scattered like bits of rag across the fields. From the helicopter, it seemed unrelated to them, a refugee city without plan or logic. They watched and didn’t say anything, looking down at the row of trailers to the side of the stage as the pilot banked to the left and began their descent.

  On the ground, the pool cues were already coming down in sudden flurries, like hunters gathered around prey. From a few yards away, it looked planned, a tactical use of force. All the bikers had them — pool cues and cans of beer. Everyone had seen their share of news footage from Vietnam — the nighttime raids on village huts, the impromptu executions in the city streets — and this was something like that, the freedom to do whatever you were compelled to do, the unresisted urge.

  It was late when Anger came out of the Sloane Square tube station. He started walking up the King’s Road with a shopping bag in his hand, passing huddled groups of nighttime stragglers, closed shops. London still made no sense to him, even after all this time. It was a mix of austerity and nostalgia, history fenced in by concrete, glass, prim rows of Victorian brick. In the streets, the black cabs were like a stubborn denial of time, impossible to take seriously.

  He turned left on Oakley Street and headed southeast toward the river. It looked a little like Greenwich Village, only in front of the buildings there were rows of iron railings interspersed with thick stone pillars that looked almost like fortifications. He couldn’t look at London without thinking about World War II, the devastation. The older the buildings were, the more they brought to mind a ghost city that existed in parallel to the city he was in at the time.

  He saw Bobby laughing, spitting on the floor, utterly lost. By now, the image had become a vague tightness behind his ribs, an emptiness in his stomach. It was with him all the time. He supposed that was how much he was still attached to Bobby, imagining that Bobby was thinking of him too, that they were somehow connected.

  It was so much worse than anything he’d imagined. He would not have foreseen the blood on the walls, the crazy deliberateness, the mutilated bodies. That was how the Lucifer role had played itself out. That was who Bobby was now, the brute fact of his crime. That was all he would ever be.

  He took a right turn onto Cheyne Walk, the only one on the street now. Mick lived in number 48, a white Georgian building three windows wide. On the second story was a wrought-iron veranda that looked almost Spanish, like something out of a Goya painting. There was a streetlamp in front of the gate, which helped him to see the keys in his hand: two ordinary keys, not even on a ring, keys that he might have plucked at random from a junk box. A few lamps had been left on inside the house, but he knew it was empty.

  Once inside, he stood for a while looking at the living room: the tapestried chairs, the low tables, the hammered brass lamps. Everything was almost in silhouette, the light was so dim. He remembered the time a half year ago he had looked at the pictures of the murdered actress, Sharon Tate, and how it had reminded him of the band. He remembered thinking that the murders seemed like the kind of thing that might easily have happened to them. He remembered looking at the picture of the actress on the front page — blond, in her twenties — and thinking how much she looked like Anita.

  They were always so stoned. That was how he’d managed to steal the keys and make copies, returning the originals before anyone even noticed.

  He went upstairs to the library, the place where he’d showed Mick the film three months ago. He took a glass of water upstairs with him. The house was dark and silent, and there was something about the ordinariness of the glass he took that made it more difficult to be there. He put the shopping bag down on the desk beside the reels of film and stood there for a moment before he turned and opened the cabinet. The projector was on a sliding shelf. There was a screen that pulled down over two stacks of bookcases, like something from a spy movie. He spooled the film into the projector and switched off the desk lamp and took a sip of the water. Then he sat there in the dark with the film playing and tried to imagine it: the phone lines cut, Bobby and his friends appearing in the library, breathless, on the verge of laughter.

  We’re here and there’s nothing you can do about it, their faces say. We’re here and we’re not going to leave.

  When they came out onstage, it was dark. The fans had been waiting for almost three hours since the last opening band’s performance. There were Hells Angels everywhere, on the amplifiers and in the middle of the stage, in the front row of the crowd, pushing them back with pool cues and with their motorcycles. Keith bent over his guitar, crouched by the drum kit. They’d heard what it was like from the opening bands, but even now that they could see it for themselves they were still going to try to play their way though it, inured by this point to riots, crowds, warnings, threats. Keith stood upright to hit his first chord, nodding his head. Mick gripped the microphone with both hands, collapsing and rising, collapsing and rising, but by the middle of the first song the stage was so crowded they couldn’t go on. Everyone was looking at a brawl on the ground. Mick stood there in his devil’s suit and top hat, unable to understand what was happening. In his motionless bewilderment, he looked for a moment even younger than he was, a stranded boy in a plastic costume.

  “Everybody just cool out,” he said. “Just cool out. Just stop it.”

  It was hard to see what was going on from the stage, through the lights. Dog
s crossed in front of the microphones. When they started again, they saw girls sitting on their boyfriends’ shoulders, dancing, glitter on their cheeks, smiling or closing their eyes. They saw the raised fists, the shaking heads, and sometimes it almost looked like an ordinary crowd with the usual few scuffles at the edges. They didn’t see the boy pushing his way forward, one of the few black fans in the crowd, dressed in a fedora and a green suit, his girlfriend behind him. They didn’t see it when he brushed against a biker near the stage, not turning around when the biker grabbed his shoulder but readying himself, gathering all the anger of being in this crowd, being black in this white crowd, all of it about to usher in this moment of confrontation. They played an old song about a girl, a pared-down version, bluesy but fast, treble guitars against the batter and crash of high-hat cymbals. The boy in the green suit took one last look at the band, knowing that the bikers had him, and then he drew his gun in a sudden flash, jostled by the crowd so that his raised arm pointed for a brief moment right at Mick.

  An empty space suddenly opened up in front of the stage. It got bigger and bigger. For a while no one would go near it. It got so big that Mick could see the grass between the motorcycles, lit up by the footlights, and for a few seconds there was something close to silence. Keith grabbed the microphone, pointing at some bikers who were still swinging their pool cues, demanding that they stop, but it was impossible to see what was happening beyond the reach of the lights. When they started the song again, there was a moment when Mick caught the eye of some boy who implored him to stop, who mouthed the words in a way that was unmistakable, and Mick stood there looking at him, taking in what he was saying, thinking it over. He had not seen the body on the ground, stabbed in the neck, pummeled to death by pool cues, a seventeen-year-old body in a green suit. He started dancing in a frenzy, shaking his whole body, looking right into the other boy’s eyes, defying him. Even then, there were still people cheering, still people with hungry, solemn stares, still people dancing. There were still people trying to get closer to the stage.