Page 28 - Contrast1968

"He's alive, John. His neck's broken."

I had guessed it before he said it. I bent ~own to
touch the horse's lllane,already thick with clotting blood,
and felt pitifully helpless.

"There's not much we can do for him." He said it
hollowly, almost like an automaton.

"Well we can't just leave hi. here," and regretted
my harshness almost immediately when I saw Martin, tace
ashen, looking down at the gun. He just stood there holding
it in both hands as though it were some loathsome crawling
thing he had found under a rock.

"He's still alive. Jesus God why couldn't he have
just killed hiaself and had it over with?"

He was trembling and personally I couldn't figure
it. The horse was a beauty, of course, but Martin had only
taken him out a tew times before and besides had never shown
much feeling toward any of his father's animals. He had
killed before, tossing it off easily, shooting the wild dogs
with laughing bravado the past year.

"Christ, John, my hands won't hold still. You'll
have to do it." And handed the gun toward me.

(A wild colored sudden spinfeeling trees and hills and
sky chasing each other around in a bright circle and it's so
hot the sun is blinding .. and the pavement is White and bits

of glass sparkling up you can almost see the steam coming oft

it with a dime in your hand just enough for a Coke down in
one Swallow only the store seems so far away and then between
tall buildings in the heat and the sun and the alley you see
it and you aren't thirsty and you aren't walking just standing
and' scared and he is lying there thrashing and throatholding
and not stopping the spirting that is allover and everywhere
and blotting out the sun even just a kid a spic probably both
ot them two spic kids in sloppy clothes one on the ground with
his life spilling out red into a butcher's back alley and the
other standing admiring his work until he shoves the gun at
you and you si.ply treeze for a long minute before you drop
the cold slimy thing and run run run your lungs on fire trying
to make it home knowing you won't and then you double up and
fall and it's allover you drowning in it your own toul stink-
ing mess and the wet windless heat envelopes you.)

Martin pressed the pistol on me and I took it reluctant-
ly, but said nothing, preferring to stare in Silence at the
moaning horse. Its eyes looked back at me blindly, the stream