Two steps, two cautious steps, and he found only air. But on the third – well, well, what have we here? – his hand touched a cold tile surface.
‘Whoe-ee!’ he said. It was the urinal: and touching it was like finding gold in a pan of trash. Wasn’t that the sickly smell of disinfectant wafting up from the gutter? It was, oh boy, it was.
Still whooping, he unzipped and started to relieve the ache in his bladder, splashing his feet in his haste. What the hell: he had this illusion beat. If he turned round now he’d find the fantasy dispersed, surely. The saloon, the dead boy, the storm, all would be gone. It was some chemical throw-back, bad dope lingering in his system and playing dumb-ass games with his imagination. As he shook the last drops on to his blue suedes, he heard the hero of this movie speak.
‘What you doin’ pissin’ in mah street, boy?’
It was John Wayne’s voice, accurate to the last slurred syllable, and it was just behind him. Ricky couldn’t even contemplate turning round. The guy would blow off his head for sure. It was in the voice, that threatful ease that warned: I’m ready to draw,
so do your worst. The cowboy was armed, and all Ricky had in his hand was his dick, which was no match for a gun even if he’d been better hung.
Very cautiously he tucked his weapon away and zipped himself up, then raised his hands. In front of him the wavering image of the toilet wall had disappeared again. The storm howled: his ear bled down his neck.
‘OK boy, I want you to take off that gunbelt and drop it to the ground. You hear me?’ said Wayne.
‘Yes.’
‘Take it nice and slow, and keep those hands where I can see
them.’
Boy, this guy was really into it.
Nice and slow, like the man said, Ricky unbuckled his belt, pulled it through the loops in his jeans and dropped it to the-floor. The keys should have jangled as they hit the tiles, he hoped to God they would. No such luck. There was a clinking thud that was the sound of metal on sand.
‘OK,’ said Wayne. ‘Now you’re beginning to behave. What have you got to say for yourself?’
‘I’m sorry?’ said Ricky lamely.
‘Sorry?’
‘For pissing in the street.’
‘I don’t reckon sorry is sufficient penitence,’ said Wayne.
‘But really I am. It was all a mistake.’
‘We’ve had about enough of you strangers around these parts. Found that kid with his trousers round his ankles takin’ a dump in the middle of the saloon. Well I call that uncouth! Where’s you sons of bitches been educated anyhow? It that what they’re teaching you in them fancy schools out East?’
‘I can’t apologise enough.’
‘Damn right you can’t’ Wayne drawled. ‘You with the kid?’
‘In a manner of speaking.’
‘What kind of fancy-talk is that?’ he jabbed his gun in Rick’s back: it felt very real indeed. ‘Are you with him or not?”
‘I just meant – ‘
‘You don’t mean nothing in this territory, mister, you take that from me.’
He cocked the gun, audibly.
‘Why don’t you turn round, son and let’s us see what you’re made of?’
Ricky had seen this routine before. The man turns, he goes for a concealed gun, and Wayne shoots him. No debate, no time to discuss the ethics of it, a bullet would do the job better than words.
Turn round I said.’
Very slowly, Ricky turned to face the survivor of a thousand shootouts, and there was the man himself, or rather a brilliant impersonation of him. A middle period Wayne, before he’d grown fat and sick-looking. A Rio Grande Wayne, dusty from the long trail and squinting from a lifetime of looking at the horizon. Ricky had never had a taste for Westerns. He hated all the forced machismo, the glorification of dirt and cheap heroism. His generation had put flowers in rifle-barrels, and he’d thought that was a nice thing to do at the time; still did, in fact.
This face, so mock-manly, so uncompromising, personified a handful of lethal lies – about the glory of America’s frontier origins, the morality of swift justice, the tenderness in the heart of brutes. Ricky hated the face. His hands just itched to hit it.