Titan Books are releasing Fuller's lost final effort on August 12th and we've got an exclusive excerpt for you below. Find your own copy here.
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Word was spreading there was not just a gun but a bomb under the baby's ass. Barricades had been rushed in, hastily erected, barely keeping the crowd back. The Pickpocket Squad was busy. It was a field day for cannons lifting wallets, flipping open shoulder-straps in the press of bodies. One enterprising bookman, a U.S. Army veteran who usually sold off a folding card table by the entrance to the park, had a box of pocket Bibles, going quick at $10 a copy to help pray for the baby. A guitar player with stringy hair and a rainbow strap ad-libbed a song about the baby who pulled the trigger, shot us all. Singing slow, strumming, now on the twenty-third verse, inspiration failing him, upturned baseball cap by his feet showing only a handful of coins, as much copper as silver. Television and newspaper cameras swiveled at each hint of movement, hung down again disappointed when no explosion came.
One news photographer, on deadline and out of patience, ran toward the baby in the carriage. A mounted policeman galloped after him. The crowd roared. Leaping down from the horse, the policeman got the photographer in a half-nelson, took his Nikon away from him.
The balloon peddler worked small groups in the crowd, giving his eyewitness account over and over.
The old cop led Paul off the bench, which another cop was piling high with equipment, and past the barriers, waving frontline people back with his club. They stopped by a tall lamp planted at the curb, the paint along its long metal column peeling.
"This spot belongs to you, Paul. Don't move from it." Paul watched him rejoin the young cop guarding the carriage. Behind Paul, the crowd was swelling. The rumor of gun and bomb under the crying baby was frightening, made people squirm. Even so, they had gathered like locusts to watch.
Paul didn't hate the people in the crowd, but he couldn't understand them. Watching for a baby to die, horribly. Maybe putting themselves in danger too. Why?
Paul turned away, looked over the heads of the cops, into the eyes of the police horse fifteen feet in front of him, a beautiful Blood Bay that made Paul's mind race back...
...to horses staring at him from that big book when his father was trying to get him to talk...and with great effort after four years he managed to repeat the kind of horse each one was... white Albino...yellowish Buckeye...brown Chestnut...golden Calico...
The Blood Bay staring at him was flanked by other mounted police horses forming a half-circle around the carriage. Foot cops stood behind the mounted cops. Behind them all, an ambulance waited, rear doors open. Ivory Face was in it, on a stretcher. But the ambulance didn't rush her to the hospital, so Paul figured she must be okay. They were waiting for the baby. Paul thought about the man, the stranger, who had been put into a canvas bag and driven off. The word jealous came to mind, but this time only the word. He felt nothing. He knew what the word meant. He felt nothing.
There must be a reason that the stranger bothered him.
Why must everything have a reason?
Why was Ivory Face important to him? Every morning for two months when she pushed the carriage past him, she looked at him but he knew that she really didn't see him. She looked right through him as if he weren't there. He didn't exist to her. Like other people, she saw him but didn't see him.
When he was a child, a toddler, one of his teachers had called him a cipher, the word taunting him. Later, when he had learned to read, he looked up the word and it meant zero...nothing.
He remembered the first time he overheard his parents talking about him. He was about three years old. He could hear and see, but he was mute. They had tried to make a sound come from his throat. They couldn't. They couldn't even get a rasp out of him. When he slipped in the bathtub, hurt his finger, he cried tears but made no sound. His parents were worried he'd remain silent all his life. They would never put him in an institution where he'd be with children like him...but they were frightened for him, frightened about what kind of life he would have.
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His thoughts went back to Ivory Face.
Why was he interested in her?
Why must everything have a reason?
Since seeing her for the first time, he'd had her face before him each time he closed his eyes. She was beautiful, but it was more than that. Or less than that. It wasn't about beauty. The look in her eyes: haunted. Hunted. Like there was something waiting for her, just over her shoulder or past the next corner, waiting for her and her baby. Something was causing her pain, was causing her fear. She was maybe twenty years old, twenty-one, but her eyes were so much older. He remembered his mother's eyes, at the end. If I can ease one life the aching, Or cool one pain...
Paul saw someone running at him. Not a photographer this time, a woman. She had broken through the barricade, slipped past the policeman, and was heading for the carriage, $10 Bible held high. One of the cops went to intercept her, keep her away from the scene, and she veered to the side, barreling into Paul shoulder-first. The impact drove him back, and he lost his balance. Then the cop was on her, wrestling her away. Seeing her struggle in the policeman's grip, a man on the other side of the barricade ducked under, shouting, waving a fist in the air. Others in the crowd took up the shout. Paul, on his ass in the dirt, looked up at the faces, previously tense, now angry. He thought: They'd better do something soon.