The Spiked Heel

“I don’t know how it happened, I swear it. But they’re on the floor now, Griff, circling around those goddam benches. Everything’s stopped, Griff, everything, the whole floor, Prefitting everything. They’re circling around, and Charlie’s got a cutting knife in his hand, and Steve is swinging that heavy mallet we use for stamping dies, I swear to Christ, Griff, one of those stupid bastards is going to get killed. I tried to talk to them, but they won’t listen, they just keep circling like two goddam tigers or something. Griff, I thought maybe you could talk to Charlie, he knows you and he likes you and maybe he’ll listen to reason, otherwise we’re gonna have a lot of goddam blood down there, I can promise you that. Griff, the girls in Prefitting are all screaming like a bunch of—”

“Come on,” Griff said.

5

They didn’t wait for the elevator. They took the stairway down to the eighth floor, racing down the steps, passing the fire hose in the corridor, and then coming out into the Cutting Room. The floor was deathly silent. There were no screams and no sounds of machinery. The silence hung over the floor like a deep black mist, impenetrable and ominous.

The cutting benches were hidden behind a wall of people, men from the Leather Room and the Cutting Room, women who had left Prefitting to join the ring of spectators, runners who had stopped their work to watch the fight. Everyone on the floor seemed to have crowded into the Cutting Room.

“Where are they?” Griff asked.

“Through there,” Jored said, sweating. “Come on, break it up, let us through here, let us through!”

The workers parted silently. From somewhere on the other side of the ring, a voice shouted, “Slash the son of a bitch, Charlie!”

Griff looked up quickly, trying to locate the voice. He saw a ring of sweating faces, and he was suddenly aware that he himself was sweating. He shouldered his way through the men, smelling the sweat on them, and smelling this other thing, this blood lust that was reflected in the shining eyes and drawn mouths. The blood lust gleamed in the eyes of the women, too. They may have been screaming a few moments before when Jored had left the floor, but they weren’t screaming now, not with their mouths and their throats. They were screaming in a different way, a scream that started somewhere deep in them and worked its way through their blood, rushing like a fever, hot and raging, putting the shine on their eyes, bringing the saliva to their lips. The scream was a black evil thing that cried for blood. The scream was the “Olé” of a bullfight, dark in intent, ravenous for blood. The fight was a flesh-and-blood explosion of petty hatred, and as they watched the fighters, their own hatreds, petty and large, rushed to their brains and their eyes, and they longed for the purging cleanser that was blood.

He saw this in their eyes, and he was suddenly afraid, because he liked Charlie, and he knew what the goading of a crowd could do to a man with a knife in his hands.

“Cut ’em off for him, Charlie!” one of the men shouted, and then a woman standing near one of the benches bellowed, “Get him, Steve. Crack in his skull!”

He burst through the fringe of the ring, and he felt like a man who had swum underwater in an ocean of blood. He breathed deeply for an instant, and then his eyes focused against the sunlight glaring through the windows, and two images stood out starkly against the leering, hungry background of faces.

Charlie was wearing a T-shirt, soaked with sweat now, the shirt sticking to his muscular back and chest, the perspiration spreading in dark blots outward from his backbone, outward from his armpits, like devouring amoebae that nibbled at the whiteness of the shirt. His dark curling hair was matted to his brow. The sweat clung to his brow and rolled down the bridge of his nose, clung there in droplets until he shook them off, and then cascaded past the hard firmness of his set mouth, dotting the floor. He was tense and tight, the biceps of his arm bulging with the coiled-spring tautness of his body. He held the cutting knife in his right hand, his fingers firm on the handle, the moon-crescent blade glittering in the sunlight. He kept his left hand out in front of him, the fingers wide-spread, like a wrestler circling for a hold.

Three feet from him, Steve Maiches stood, a heavy metal-based mallet tight in his hand. He wore a blue denim shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbows, crisp red hairs curling on his heavy arms. His eyes were green and slitted, his red crew cut bursting from the top of his skull like a rigid pictorial display of his anger. He crouched over, waiting for an opening, waiting to swing the mallet, waiting like a medieval knight with a mace in his hands. His lips were skinned back over his teeth, and his teeth were clenched tightly together, and Steve Maiches was not kidding, Steve Maiches was not kidding at all.

“Hit the bastard, Steve!” someone shouted.

“Come on, Steve, swing that thing!”

“Get him, Charlie.”