'Ease it up, Will. You're gonna lose him again,' the man with the silver beard said.
'It ain't Will's fault. All the sod's got to do is flap 'is fouking 'ole for us,' the man at the generator said.
'Electricity's funny, Will. It settles in a place like water. Maybe it's his heart next,' the man with the beard said.
Will Buchalter was shirtless, booted in hobnails. His upper torso tapered down inside his olive, military-style dungarees like the carved trunk of a hardwood tree. His armpits were shaved and powdered, and, just above his rib cage, there were strips of sinew that wrinkled and fanned back like pieces of knotted cord from the sides of his breasts. He sat with one muscular buttock propped on a battered desk, his legs crossed, his face bemused, lost in thought under the brim of his Panama hat.
'What about it, Dave?' he asked.
My head hung forward, the sweat and water streaming out of my hair.
'Answer the man, you dumb fouk,' the porcine man in the black T-shirt said, and lifted my chin erect with a wood baton. His skin was as white as milk.
'Don't hurt his face again, Freddy,' Buchalter said.
'I say leave off with the technology, Will,' the man called Freddy answered. 'I say consider 'is nails. I could play a lovely tune with 'em.'
Will Buchalter squatted down in front of me and pushed his hat to the back of his head. A bright line of gold hair grew out of his pants into his navel.
'You've got stainless-steel cojones, Dave,' he said. 'But you're going through all this pain to prevent us from having what's ours. That makes no sense for anybody.'
He slipped a folded white handkerchief out of his back pocket and blotted my nose and mouth with it. Then he motioned the other two men out of the room. When they opened the door I smelled grease, engine oil, the musty odor of rubber tires.
'Freddy and Hatch aren't the sharpest guys on the block, Dave. But armies and revolutions get built out of what's available,' Buchalter said. His eyes glanced down at my loosened trousers. He picked up one of the generator's wires and sucked wistfully on a canine tooth. 'I promise you you'll walk out of it. We have nothing to gain by hurting you anymore or killing you. Not if you give us what we want.'
A bloody clot dripped off the end of my tongue onto my chin.
'Go ahead, Dave,' he said.
But the words wouldn't come.
'You're worried about the Negro?' he said. 'We'll let him go, too. I promise I won't let Freddy get out of control like that again, either. He's just a little peculiar sometimes. When he was a kid some wogs took a liking to him in the back room of a pub, you know what I mean?'
He placed his palm across my forehead, as though he were gauging my temperature, then pressed my head gently back into the post. His eyes studied mine.
'It's almost light outside,' he said. 'You can have a shower and hot food, you can sleep, you can have China white to get rid of the pain, you can have a man's love, too, Dave.'
He brought his face closer to mine and smiled lopsidedly.
'It's all a matter of personal inclination, Dave. I don't mean to offend,' he said. He looked at the smear of blood and saliva across his squared handkerchief, folded it, and slipped it back into his pocket. Then the light in his eyes refocused, as though he were capturing an elusive thought. 'We're going to take back our cities. We're driving the rodents back into the sewers. It's a new beginning, Dave, a second American Revolution. You can be proud of your race and country again. It's going to be a wonderful era.'
He shifted his weight and settled himself more comfortably on one knee, like a football coach about to address his players. He grinned.
'Come on, admit it, wouldn't you like to get rid of them all, blow them off the streets, chase them back into their holes, paint their whole end of town with roach paste?' he said. He winked and poked one finger playfully in my ribs.
'I apologize, it's a bad time for jokes,' he said. 'Before we go on, though, I need to tell you something. In your house you said some ugly things to me. I was angry at the time, but I realize you were afraid and your only recourse was to try to hurt and manipulate me. But it's all right now. It makes our bond stronger. It's pain that fuses men's souls together. We're brothers-in-arms, Dave, whether you choose to think so or not.'
He got to his feet, went to the desk, and returned with a nautical chart of the Louisiana coast unrolled between his hands. He squatted in front of me again. In the shadow of his hat the spray of blackheads at the corners of his eyes looked like dried scale.
'Dave, the sub we want had the number U-138 on the conning tower. It also had a wreathed sword and a swastika on the tower,' he said. 'Is that the one you found? Can you tell me that much?'
A floor fan vibrated in the silence. I saw him try to suppress the twitch of anger that invaded his face. He put his thumb on a spot south of Grand Isle.
'Is this the last place you saw it?' he asked.
The red, black, and white flag puffed and ruffled against the cinder-block wall in the breeze from the fan.
His hand slipped over the top of my skull like a bowl. I could feel the sweat and water oozing from under his palm.