n!--and the curly-headed little cancers she
wants!"

He lurched toward us, pointing at Lili. "I never knew one who didn't
want to cripple a man if you gave her the chance. Cripple him, swaddle
him, clip his wings, grind him to sausage to mold another man, hers, a
doll man. You hid the Maintainer, you little smother-hen, so you could
have your nest and your Brucie!"

He stopped, gasping, and I expected someone to bop him one on the
schnozzle, and I think he did, too. I turned to Bruce and he was
looking, I don't know how, sorry, guilty, anxious, angry, shaken,
inspired, all at once, and I wished people sometimes had simple suburban
reactions like magazine stories.

Then Erich made the mistake, if it was one, of turning toward Bruce and
slowly staggering toward him, pawing the air with his hands as if he
were going to collapse into his arms, and saying, "Don't let them get
you, Bruce. Don't let them tie you down. Don't let them clip you--your
words or your deeds. You're a Soldier. Even when you talked about a
peace message, you talked about doing some smashing of your own. No
matter what you think and feel, Bruce, no matter how much lying you do
and how much you hide, you're really not on their side."

That did it.

* * * * *

It didn't come soon enough or, I think, in the right spirit to please
me, but I will say it for Bruce that he didn't muck it up by tipping or
softening his punch. He took one step forward and his shoulders spun and
his fist connected sweet and clean.

As he did it, he said only one word, "Loki!" and darn if that didn't
switch me back to a campfire in the Indiana Dunes and my mother telling
me out of the Elder Saga about the malicious, sneering, all-spoiling
Norse god and how, when the other gods came to trap him in his hideaway
by the river, he was on the point of finishing knotting a mysterious net
big enough, I had imagined, to snare the whole universe, and that if
they'd come a minute later, he would have.

Erich was stretched on the floor, his head hitched up, rubbing his jaw
and glaring at Bruce. Mark, who was standing beside me, moved a little
and I thought he was going to do something, maybe even clobber Bruce in
the old spirit of you can't do that to my buddy, but he just shook his
head and said, "_Omnia vincit amor._" I nudged him and said, "Meaning?"
and he said, "Love licks everything."

I'd never have expected it from a Roman, but he was half rig