How It Ended: New and Collected Stories - By Jay McInerney Page 0,154

least be civil.”

The faces of these cops reminded Corrine of the old pictures of Selma and Birmingham.

“It's an outrage, that's what it is.” The speaker was a Waspy middle-aged blonde with a black velvet hair band and a three-quarter-length mink. A bit of an anomaly in this crowd, she put Corrine in mind of an older version of Luke's ex, Sasha, whose picture she occasionally saw in the party pages of magazines.

Up ahead, the crowd was chanting raggedly, the chorus moving fitfully down the column, picked up by the marchers and passed along before it spluttered and died as they reached Sixty-fifth Street, which was also blocked off.

“This is ridiculous,” Corrine said.

“It's all part of the plan,” Washington replied.

“What plan?”

An old guy who was wearing a camo jacket and had long gray hair and a beard was shouting to her over the din. “They don't want us anywhere near the UN, or the cameras.”

“Who doesn't? This is America. This is New York, for God's sake. Who ordered this? The police commissioner? Our squeaky mayor? That asshole in the White House?” The injustice of it infuriated her. The idea that the attack on the city was being used to justify this dubious war was outrage enough.

Glancing up ahead, she could see a huge globe borne aloft by the crowd. About ten feet in diameter, it appeared to be made out of soft fabric.

“Whose streets? Our streets!”

Corrine took up the chant. Her anger was righteous and liberating. She was cold, her ears and toes prickly with numbness. If the cops were trying to incite the crowd to violence, they were doing a good job of it.

“Whose streets? Our streets!”

She was a peaceful person, the mother of two, but she felt like throwing something, breaking something, running amok.

“Whose streets? Our streets!”

Seeing all the angry faces, she had a sudden vision of chaos spreading through the city, smoke rising from the brownstones. …

Finally at Seventy-first Street, they were herded east. As they approached First Avenue, word filtered through the crowd that it was sealed off, which made their progress seem completely futile.

Up ahead, cops on horseback towered over them. She still hoped she might find a level head, establish a dialogue, explain the purpose of their collective mission.

But she sensed anxiety rising around her, an increasing edge of anger and hysteria.

“They're making arrests!”

“Get back! They're charging!”

“You bastards!”

“They hit him!”

The mounted cops started moving forward as the crowd ahead of her fell back, reversing the momentum of the march, until she felt herself pushed back, up against the crowd bottled up on the sidewalk on the south side of the street. A plastic water bottle arced through the air and sailed past the head of one of the cops, shouts of distress, curses and screams rising from the intersection.

Three mounted policemen floated toward them, looming against the sky, and Corrine recognized one of them. All of a sudden the name came to her: Spinetti.

She thrust herself forward against the tide of retreat.

Sitting atop a huge chestnut mare, Spinetti held his billy club aloft, like a torch, the reins held loosely in his left hand, his eyes fixed on a point above or even beyond the crowd.

“Officer!” she shouted. “Officer Spinetti!”

The cop looked around, scanning the faces, holding his club at the ready.

A space had opened up on the street ahead of her. A boy in a puffy blue parka was lying facedown on the pavement, a dark stripe glistening on his flaxen hair, which was so similar in color to her son's that despite the obvious difference in ages, she had to fight back the notion that it was her son, Jeremy, lying there, bloody, on the pavement.

She waved at Spinetti from the edge of the circle that had cleared around the boy and the horse, feeling ridiculous as soon as she did so, not sure what she intended. “It's Corrine,” she said. “From the soup kitchen.”

He regarded her without obvious emotion.

She didn't know what to say. She wanted to break through his blood lust and recall him to his humanity, ask him how this could happen, to remind him that when they met, their country was under attack and the citizenry looked to him and his kind to defend them. She was shivering and it felt as if her jaw were wired shut. “We fed you,” she said finally. “We were proud of you.”

Spinetti stared down at her implacably. Finally he lowered his club, turning his horse and moving back toward the intersection, where