Page 438 - Some Dance to Remember

408 Jack Fritscher

his life, scaled down, of course, would be forever like that of the Widow
standing, alone in black, with her tiny son, his hand saluting as muffled
dreams drummed across a dazed and weeping landscape.
She had been betrayed by a bullet.
Christ had been betrayed by a kiss.
Ryan rocked with images of betrayal: of draft cards burning up in
defiant flames; of dogs tearing at black bodies on the Edmund Pettus
Bridge in Kick’s Alabama; of priests arrested and ministers murdered; of
American cities on fire; of frightened Vietnamese fleeing their American
saviors on the evening news; of a president refusing to accept another term;
of a president resigning; of an ancient movie-star president nuclearizing
the twilight’s last gleaming; of Contras and mercenaries in El Salvador;
of faces, pious with hatred, from Dade County and Lynchburg, Tennes-
see; of wives beaten and raped by husbands; of countries and continents
dying of hunger; of gay young men dying with a thousand diseases in
their bodies; of a Golden Man smiling his killer smile, posing, posing for
cheering audiences.
Chronology was not his style. Feeling was. Sometimes he forgot to
breathe. Sometimes he remembered he had to pay for the good times.
Sometimes he had that old high-flying feeling of a man who goes starved
to bed. Sometimes nothing mattered. Sometimes everything mattered
too much.
Ryan took the Yellow Brick Detour.
He was smaller, more real in size, than the Famous Widow, who
like him would mourn her love forever, but who, unlike him, was not
approaching the auditorium stage where his victorious lover was posing,
handsome, golden, muscular, brilliant, shimmering with sweat, trium-
phant in the final moments of the Mr. California Contest.
Tidal waves of applause washed him closer and closer to the front
bank of the stage. He felt himself moving in slow motion through air as
thick as celluloid.
The gun was in his hand.
His hand was pulling the gun from the holster of his pocket.
The man he loved more than life itself was turning, in time with the
thunderous music of “Marche Slav,” nearly naked, in the cone of a hot
over-head spotlight, into a magnificent double-biceps shot.
Death excited him now. He had fused with his lover who had fused
with him and together they would fuse—wherefore art thou?—forever
with Death.
“I want...,” he whispered. This time he knew the answer to what he

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