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color. The film jerked and froze at the frame with the lifted nightstick. The film rolled. All the sound was screaming. Yes, that was Ben Orton in the doorway. What Cliff Kerlee shouted was “… legal petition from the voters, taxpayers, citizens of this community. What does he mean—refuse? Who the hell does he think he is?” He struggled in the hands of the officers. Tendons stood out in his scrawny neck. The cameraman focused on the steps where deck shoes, rubber sandals, dirty bare feet trampled the long pages of ballpoint signatures. Kerlee screamed, “Pig! Arrogant straight! I’ll kill the fat—” An electronic tone replaced the words writhing out of the beard. Kerlee went down out of sight. Signs and shaggy heads shifted. And then there were the target numbers again and the bright white blankness of the screen.
    “Thanks,” Dave called.
    “There’s more,” Cecil answered. “Just a second.”
    It was out of chronological order. A week earlier? He’d heard of it but that was all. Microphones poked at Ben Orton’s square jaw. He wore a cap with a badge on it. The gold-braided bill cast a shadow in the harsh sunlight. He jerked slightly with surprise and took off the cap. His hair was close cropped. And his mustache. Both gray. The television people had backgrounded him with a hibiscus bush. The red flowers looked as if they were reaching for him. His voice was outdoor high with a whine to it.
    “People wouldn’t sign these petitions if they knew what homosexuals are really like. Police officers know that—how these weirdos live their lives. Alleys. Public toilets. Back rows of dirty theaters. What they do—with men they never saw before. Anybody. It’s not just that they’re mentally sick. They spread germs. You get people like that in your police-department locker rooms—you could have your whole police force down with venereal disease. Is that what the people want that are signing these petitions? Well, I can tell you, it’s not what the police officers want—or their wives.”
    Someone unseen interrupted with a question. The wind took it away before the microphones could catch it. Whether Orton heard it was impossible to tell. He said:
    “Leave that out if you want to. The whole idea is ridiculous, any way you look at it. What man you know is going to want to be stuck in a patrol car eight hours a day with some pervert? And suppose there’s trouble—and trouble is what that patrol car is out there to stop. Can you picture some homosexual charging a house where some crazy is shooting guns out the window? I’d hate to see the face of the mother who’s signing one of these petitions today when she finds out later a homosexual police officer has been sent to find her lost six-year-old son.”
    Dave unfolded from his seat, went up the short aisle and the short steps, and looked into the projection booth. Cecil was hunched on a green metal stool in the small work light of one of the projectors, reading a paperback book on electronic journalism. Out in the tinted darkness, the voice of Ben Orton went on: “That mother isn’t going to thank Sacramento for passing that bill. She isn’t going to thank the city attorney for enforcing it. She isn’t going to thank the Civil Service Commission that made me put that queer into a job where—” Dave said, “I came for the funeral. The build-up is good but it’s too long.”
    Cecil laughed, tossed the book away, got off the stool, and sped up the reels of the projector. A loose end of film flapped. He knocked a switch and touched the wound-up reel with a long, pale-palmed hand until it quit spinning. He jerked the reel off the machine and dropped it noisily into a can. “One funeral, coming up,” he said, and pried the lid off another can.
    Dave went back to his seat. But what came up this time was Daisy Flynn seated in a little blue armchair between Cliff Kerlee, in a jumpsuit, and a gray-haired man Dave thought he knew, who wore a hand-loomed