Then lying there, bleeding to myself, I heard them talking. I heard noises like make an example of him and do something permanent and I squirmed away across the rubbish like a polite mouse.
I made it around a corner of brick and stood up, hurting my knee on a piece of brown-splotched pipe. There were noises on the other angle of the corner and so I tested if the pipe was loose and it was. I closed my eyes and brought the pipe up and then down.
It felt as if I connected, but I was so numb, I wasn't sure until I unscrewed my eyes.
There was a big man in a heavy wool overcoat and gray homburg spread on a damp centerfold from the News. There was a pick-up slip from the warehouse under the fingers of one hand, and somebody had beaten his brains out.
The police figured it was part of some labor dispute, I guess, and they never got to me.
I suppose I was to blame anyway. If I hadn't been alive, if I hadn't been there to get beaten up, it wouldn't have happened. I could see the point in making me suffer for it. There was a lot to be said for looking at it like that. But there was nothing to be said for telling Brother Partridge about the accident, or murder, or whatever had happened that day.
Searching myself after I left Brother Partridge, I finally found a strip of gray adhesive tape on my side, out of the fuzzy area. Making the twenty the size of a thick postage stamp, I peeled back the tape and put the folded bill on the white skin and smoothed the tape back.
There was only one place for me to go now. I headed for the public library. It was only about twenty blocks, but not having had anything to eat since the day before, it enervated me.
The downstairs washroom was where I went first. There was nobody there but an old guy talking urgently to a kid with thick glasses, and somebody building a fix in one of the booths. I could see charred matches dropping down on the floor next to his tennis shoes, and even a few grains of white stuff. But he managed to hold still enough to keep from spilling more from the spoon.