'Did that bring your daughter back, Mr Lemke Did she come back when Cary Rossington hit the ground out there in Minnesota?'
Lemke's lips twisted. 'I don't need her back. Justice ain't bringing the dead back, white man. Justice is justice. You want to get out of here before I fix you wit something else. I know what you and your woman were up to. You think I doan have the sight? I got the sight. You ask any of them. I got the sight a hundred years.'
There was an assenting murmur from those around the fire.
'I don't care how long you've had the sight,' Billy said. He reached out deliberately and grasped the old man's shoulders. From somewhere there was a growl of rage. Samuel Lemke started forward. Taduz Lemke turned his head and spat a single word in Romany. The younger man stopped, uncertain and confused. There were similar expressions on many of the faces around the campfire, but Billy did not see this; he saw only Lemke. He leaned toward him, closer and closer, until his nose almost touched the wrinkled, spongy mess that was all that remained of Lemke's nose.
'Fuck your justice,' he said. 'You know about as much about justice as I know about jet turbines. Take it off me.'
Lemke's eyes stared up into Billy's - that horrible emptiness just below the intelligence. 'Let go of me or I'll make it worse,' he said calmly. 'So much worse you think I blessed you the first time.'
The grin suddenly broke on Billy's face - the bony grin which looked like a crescent moon that had been pushed over on its back. 'Go ahead,' he said. 'Try. But you know, I don't think you can.'
The old man stared at him wordlessly.
'Because I helped do it to myself,' Billy said. 'They were right about that much, anyway - it's a partnership, isn't it? The cursed and the one who does the cursing. We were all in it with you together. Hopley, Rossington, and me. But I am opting out, old man. My wife was jerking me off in my big old expensive car, right, and your daughter came out between two parked cars in the middle of the block like any ordinary jaywalker, and that's right, too. If she had crossed at the corner she would be alive now. There was fault on both sides, but she's dead and I can never go back to what my life was before. It balances. Not the best balance in the history of the world, maybe, but it balances. They've got a way of saying it in Las Vegas - they call it a push. This is a push, old man. Let it end here.'
A strange and almost alien fear had arisen in Lemke's eyes when Billy began to smile, but now his anger, stony and obdurate, replaced it. 'I never take it off, white man from town,' Taduz Lemke said. 'I die widdit in my mout.'
Billy slowly brought his face down on Lemke's until their foreheads touched and he could smell the old man's odor - it was the smell of cobwebs and tobacco and dim urine. 'Then make it worse. Go ahead. Make it - how did you say? - like you blessed me the first time.'
Lemke looked at him for a moment longer, and now Billy sensed it was Lemke who was the one caught. Then suddenly Lemke turned his head to Samuel.
'Enkelt av lakan och kanske alskade! Just det!'
Samuel Lemke and the young man with the pistol under his vest tore Billy away from Taduz Lemke The old man's shallow chest rose and fell rapidly; his scant hair was disarrayed.
He's not used to being touched - not used to being spoken to in anger.
'It's a push,' Billy said as they pulled him away. 'Do you hear me?'
Lemke's face twisted. Suddenly, horribly, he was three hundred years old, a terrible living revenant.
'No poosh!' he cried at Billy, and shook his fist. 'No poosh, not never! You die thin, town man! You die like this!' He brought his fists together, and Billy felt a sharp stabbing pain in his sides, as if he had been between those fists. For a moment he could not get his breath and it felt as if all his guts were being squeezed together. 'You die thin!'
'It's a push,' Billy said again, struggling not to gasp.
'No poosh!' the old man screamed. In his fury at this continued contradiction, thin red color had crisscrossed his cheeks in netlike patterns. 'Get him out of here!'
They began to drag him back across the circle. Taduz Lemke stood watching, his hands on his hips and his face a stone mask.
'Before they take me away, old man, you ought to know my own curse will fall on your family,' Billy called, and in spite of the dull pain in his sides his voice was strong, calm, almost cheerful. 'The curse of white men from town.'
Lemke's eyes widened slightly, he thought. From the corner of his eye Billy saw the old woman with the trading stamps in her blanketed lap fork the sign of the evil eye at him again.
The two young men stopped pulling him for a moment; Samuel Lemke uttered a short, bewildered laugh, perhaps at the idea of a white upper-middle-class lawyer from Fairview, Connecticut, cursing a man who was probably the oldest Gypsy in America. Billy himself would have laughed two months ago.