With the last of his blood-donor money Mac makes some of the old rounds, and it feels slightly strange, as if he had been somewhere else a long time and come back.
Down Burg Jones there is much walking between the bar and the Stop-N-Go and the laundrymat, bicycles weaving interbout, some waving at Mac, some visibly resentful of the white face. Some just stare, heads turning with the slow-rolling Fury.
Here are no sidewalks, just crumbly footpaths through soft earth on both sides of the tar-surface street. Frame churches and frame houses hardly distinguishable from one another among stunted yards and undernourished vegetation. Deepset in trees off the ragged streets hidden eyes follow Mac's progress.
In the Stop-N-Go he buys his Icee from a white girl much amused at the attention from a group of sub-teen black boys: "C'mon, got horses in my pocket, I swear. None of 'em used."
Mac stands around, glancing at the unbought newspapers. Video basketball plays noisily nearby. A tap on the shoulder points out a sign above the door: No Consumption On Premises. The man is seriously big, seriously black.
Mac sucks the straw, grins, indicates that it isn't beer or anything. He finds his shoulder pushed, his Icee disturbed, and himself getting in the Fury, not entirely under his own locomotion.
There, in the parking lot, bicycles surround him, hands slapping the trunk, doors, hood. It gets a little scary, so many, jeering. This was a first timer, never happened to him before. He's able to drive away, but the bicycles follow him.
He speeds up, cutting down Standifer down by the deep foliage around the sewerage plant. Past the water chemical station, the Lone Star Baptist Church, and Ray's Bottle Tree. It seems that he's lost them. No street lights down here.
His stomach feels jittery.
Across the tracks at South Jackson, cruising near the reformatory and charity hospital. There, suddenly, bikes. Different ones? His leg jerks crazily, startled. Quickly he makes the first sharp right. To get bearings, he looks for a street sign, but none appears. There's the lone pole, the green plates removed.
A strict shortness comes up his throat. Mac does not recognize this street at all. When he was at the warehouse and on terms with Cooper, a bunch of them would get around Mac in a circle and hand out a map and take bets, Cooper daring any to pick an obscure name off the index and see if Mac couldn't name the region and progress and order of each intersection. But Mac does not know this street.
A Dead End sign announces itself, one corner somehow ripped away and paint-faded. A barbed-wire fence and rural field and black woods beyond. It is as if finding himself transported to another place in the world entirely, beyond his realm, grossly unfair. He is trying to reverse when he sees the bicycles, coming. They are around him, slapping, kicking fenders with bare feet. Circling, yelling, calling him out. Voices chant, ancient deep leering sounds that strike at his heart. He can't drive past, the interlopers are so thick.
Later he would consider at length why he had actually gotten out of the car.
One appears to be a kind of leader. Mac makes several attempts to chat, but gets no coherent reply. A nearby porch light comes on, but the screen door remains closed. He is sucking the Icee when they dismount and close in as the bikes fall over heedlessly and his last recognizable utterance is Ret's name shouted, and then blows to the stomach, head, chest. The breathy, greenstick sound of ribs in distress. Within moments Mac is fetal, wheezing. The bicycles leave, chains clanking, and the porch light goes off. No sirens, no two-way radios. No Ret around to hear.
