Page 112 of Hang on St. Christopher

“Fuck it, I don’t see any gun,” Pete said, and leaped over my fence and swung the baseball bat at me. The bat was very heavy, and it was easy enough to step out of its arc and hit him on the back with the hurley stick.

“Baseball is a very fine game,” I said. “But if you’re not used to playing it, wielding a heavy bat can unbalance you.”

“You’re a Fenian bastard, so you are!” Pete said, and swung again.

This time, he almost bloody got me, so I had no choice but to whack him on the top of the head with the hurley. Hard.

He went down like a ton of bricks.

I went for Jonty. Yeah, I know, Gandhi, the Buddha, all that jazz, but I mean, who can resist beating up a Nazi?

He went to swing his bat, but it banged into the car and fell out of his hand. I picked it up. He looked at the hurley stick and looked at me.

“Run,” I said.

He took off down the street as fast as his legs would carry him.

One of the remaining henchpeople dropped his bat and took off after him. His mate, however, did not.

He was a big guy. Six-five, 225. Prison tats. Hard man. He looked as though he knew how to swing a baseball bat. Had been swinging baseball bats into kneecaps since he was fourteen.

He stepped away from the car to give himself some room.

“Sex Pistols fan, are you?” I asked him.

“Aye.”

“‘God Save the Queen’—is that what you were playing? You like that one?”

“It’s good.”

“You know what the key line is in that song?” I asked him as we began circling around each other in the middle of the street.

“What?”

“You’re probably thinking it’s ‘there’s no future for you.’ And certainly the Sex Pistols were no strangers to simple statements of nihilism. But I don’t think that’s it.”

“Come here so I can beat your brains out,” the big man said, and I circled, carefully, out of arm’s reach.

“Maybe you’re thinking it’s ‘God save the Queen: the fascist regime’? I don’t think so. John Lydon understood the difference between oligarchy and fascism even then. I think that was just in there for the rhyme and the fact that it scanned so beautifully. And don’t say ‘Is this the UDA, is this the IRA?’ That’s a different song completely; you’ll just be an idiot if you say that. No?—”

The big guy swung at me, missed, and reverse-swung and missed again but not by much.

“No, the key line is, ‘there is no future in England’s Dreaming.’ You know what the Dreaming is, right?”

“It’s something to do with Australians,” the big man said.

“That’s right. The Aboriginals are an old culture. They’re migratory. They follow what they call Dream Lines through a mythological landscape here on Earth. And what Lydon is saying in that song, I think, is that England has to recapture or reimagine its own mythological past so it can have a better future. Man can live in the desert, but he cannot live in a spiritual desert.”

“Very interesting,” the big skinhead said, and swung his bat vertically down toward my skull.

I dove out of the way and the bat swished through the air and hit the Volvo’s roof. The big man was getting too close for comfort. I set down my beloved hurley stick and took the Glock out of the back of my trousers.

I pointed it at him and he dropped the bat and put his hands up.

“I hope I’ve given you food for thought,” I said.

“Aye. You have.”