"Don't pick number seventy-seven. Stop."
What does that mean? Was his first thought after reading the words but it came out physically into more like a "huh" noise as he looked at the telegraph in his hand and then looked up at the boy who had delivered it, but he had gone. Outside of the fact that half of the telegraph made sense and the other made none at all the more important question was: who had sent it? Who knew he was here?
Clearly the man who sent him here, who promised to take away his debt if he got the girl, that's the only person who could have sent it, who knew he was here. The rational breakdown of facts and deduction from that break down of his second question did little to quell the uneasy feeling that was currently using his guts as chew toy. Another question: why the nerves? The beautiful city above earth gave off an appearance of nothing but pure sunshine bliss and blue skies, what could be wrong with that? Booker had been to many places, some beautiful, some downright ugly but none of them shone like Columbia. While Booker didn't profess to be a philosopher or a deep thinker, he certainly knew one thing: nothing made by the hands of man could be as perfect as Columbia appeared to be, nothing could be without darkness or ugliness. He preferred to see this outlook on life as realistic rather then pessimistic.
While the ugly he was sure existed in Columbia didn't tarnish the cobblestone streets he walked on, he was sure it had to be lurking somewhere, and that's what he hated - lurking.
Perhaps what happened on the stage moments later brought him some comfort in reaffirming his belief, which was the only good thing it brought him. Perhaps seeing the silver lining in the furry of bullets and bloodshed afterward made him more of an optimist than he originally thought.
It was one of those moments that simply happened. Those simply happen moments tend to occur more frequently with some people than with others, the people who blundered through life who often find themselves not planning ahead get caught in them; the people who don't have control or even the illusion of it. It rarely happened to Booker these days, when they did happen it was in his past when he had little control over his situation. Joining up with the 7th Cavalry Regiment of the United States Army had been his attempt to gain control, only to find that there was nothing that could take it away faster from him than when he put on a uniform. Wounded Knee had been one of those simply happen moments, his actions within that conflict were not. His actions were that of a man angry and hateful, desperate to prove himself to men who's approval he seemed to viciously need. From the 7th Cavalry the more simply happened moments were when he was with the Pinkerton's...
Why had he gone from one hard, controlling master to another? Maybe he liked the violence, maybe he liked the power he seemed to possess, or maybe, and this was not a facet of him that he liked to explore, he liked the loose leash that these institutions kept on him that allowed him to simply say: 'I was following orders.' Booker was no stranger to simply happen moments, so there was no struggle, no glances for a way out. He knew he had no control over them; these events were a sea, wild and untamed, grabbing the actors in them on a whim and dragging them under with their iron grip. The trick was to resurface from them as soon as possible, to collect one's self and move on.
As Booker had discovered after many years, these simply happen events don't always have to be filled with blood and death, they don't always have to tear the world apart. Sometimes they are simple, like the one now, this one involved a simple baseball and luck of the draw.
Despite the abolition of slavery in the United States in the late 1800's after the Civil War, the mindset, and the bigotry, the racism, didn't just disappear, didn't just end as soon as the ink was dry on the surrender papers and on legislation. He had heard stories from the older men in his regiment about the 7th going down South after the great war. They had been sent down to police the Southern towns, to make sure that the new laws of freedom for the slave were obeyed, and they were to: "protect all persons in their rights of person and property, to suppress insurrection, disorder, and violence, and to punish, or cause to be punished, all disturbers of the public peace and criminals."
After entrenching themselves in that peculiar institution for so long, the Northern victors assumed (maybe correctly) that there was no way slavery would simply end in the South without Washington's heavy hand to enforce it, without a military presence, that there was no way that the slave holding Southern families would simply let go of (according to the last census) 3,950,528 slaves, their primary labor force. The war had been over before Booker had been born, but even he felt the effects of it. It all seemed sort of removed from him, even in the stories he had heard over the camp fire by the men who had served before. Lynchings, brutal beatings and burnings, because of the color of a person's skin. Even he felt the sting of bigotry, though his reaction to it was a bit different.
In the end, enacting laws doesn't change the hearts and minds of a people, it just makes them find other ways to keep the status quo. Interracial marriage wasn't only illegal in Columbia but in numerous other cities and states down on the solid earth Booker just left. This, on the stage, however, seemed ... wrong, a sort of celebration in pain and suffering, a public display of the haves over the have nots. It made Booker's already uneasy stomach churn, a sensation he was not used to. Why was this bothering him?
There was no amount of blood or fire that could shake him, he had taken scalps, he had burned women and children with a steady hand and dead eyes. He was a monster, deep down, in the ice cold hollow of his soul, he knew that. It was all right for him to be a monster, life had shaped him into one, this is what he was forced to be as much as he hated it. But now it seemed that all these handsomely dressed men and women wanted to have a taste of what he was, in front of everyone. Perhaps it's one thing to do awful, violent acts, it's another to make it a spectator sport and a community celebration.
His grip tightened, squeezing the baseball in his palm till the leather of the ball fought back with angry abrasion to the rough palm of his hand. Without thought his arm pulled back, like all of his motions in anger, unconscious, driven by something deeper, more primitive and certainly more darker than anything he ever let himself outwardly acknowledge. If they wanted blood then he would give them blood, rivers of it, so they could really celebrate.