Dhalgren (126 page)

She came up between us, screaming: "Ahh
hhhhhhhh—Annnnnn!
Don't touch me!
Ahhhhhhhhh—
don't
touch
me, nigger"! She staggered and reeled in our grip. I didn't see her look at either of us. "Ahhhhh—I
saw
what you done!—that poor little white girl what couldn't do nothin' against you! We
saw
it! We
all
saw it! She come lookin' for you, askin' all around, askin' everybody where you are all the time, and now you take her, take her like that, just take her like you done! And see what's happened! Now, see! Oh, God, oh help me, don't touch me, oh, God!"

"Aw, come
on!"
George shouted again as once more she started to collapse. He pulled again; she came loose from my grip. The coat stung my hands. As I dodged away, she was still shrieking:

"Them white people gonna get you, nigger! Them white men gonna kill us all 'cause of what you done today to that poor little white girl! You done smashed up the store windows, broke all the streetlights, climbed up and pulled the hands down from the clock! You been rapin' and lootin' and all them things! Oh, God, there's gonna be shootin' and burnin' and blood shed all over! They gonna shoot up everything in Jackson. Oh, God, oh,
God,
don't touch me!"

"Will you shut up, woman, and pick up your damn junk," George said.

Which, when I looked back, seconds later, was what she was doing.

George, ten feet off, squatted to haul up a slab of rubble that rained plaster from both sides, while another woman tugged at a figure struggling beneath. A handful of gravel hit my shoulder from somewhere and I ducked forward.

Ahead of me, turning and turning in the silvered wreckage, Reverend Amy squinted up, fists moving about her ears, till her fingers jerked wide; the up-tilted face was scored with what I thought rage; but it swung again and I saw that the expression struggling with her features was nearer ecstasy.

I climbed over fallen brick. The orchid rolled and bounced on my belly.

The blind-mute was sitting on the curb near the hydrant. The blond Mexican and the brick-haired Negress squatted on either side. She held his hand, pressing her fist, the fingers rearranged and rearranged, at each contact, against his palm.

I reached among my chains, found the projector ball, and fingered the bottom pip.

The disk of blue light slid up the rubbly curb as I stepped to the sidewalk.

They looked up, two with eyes scarlet as blood-bubbles.

The mute's sockets (he poked his head about) were like empty cups dregged with shadow.

There was a sudden stinging in my throat from the smoke; smoke blew away. I shouted: "What are you doing?"

The Mexican dragged his boots back against the curb. The woman put her other hand on the mute's shoulder.

I watched their movements of surprise. Translated to their hands on the blind-mute's arms, it gave him his only knowledge of me. His face tilted forward; his hand closed on the woman's—my knowledge of what he knew. Thinking: It takes so little information… Though I am cased in light and their eyes orbited with plastic, in the over-determined matrix, translated and translated, perhaps his knowledge of me is even more complete.

I was frightened of their red eyes?

What does my blue beast become behind scarlet caps!

People shouted.

I shouted louder: "What's going on? What's happening? Do you
know?"
and ended coughing in more smoke.

The brick-haired Negress shook her head, a hand before her mouth, hesitant to quiet me, pinch her own lips close, or push me away. "Somebody put a bomb in… Didn't they? Isn't that what they said? Somebody put a—"

"No!" the Mexican said loudly. He tugged the blind-mute's shoulders. "There wasn't any—anything like that…" He got the blind-mute on his feet.

I turned to see men and women stumbling toward me, against the luminous mist. And something behind the mist flickered. I lurched into the street.

"There wasn't any bomb!" the man or the woman behind me shrieked. "They
shot
him! From up on the roof. Some crazy white boy! Shot him dead in the street! Oh, my God—"

Something warm splattered my ankle.

Water rolled between the humped cobbles, bright as mercury beneath the discharges on the collapsed, black sky. The street was a net of silver and I sprinted across it, catching one woman with my shoulder who spun—shouting—her scraped face after me, almost lunged into another man, but pushed off him with both hands; a sudden gust of heat stung the roofs of my eye-sockets. Lids clamped, I got through it and more dust, catching my boot-toe on something that nearly tripped me. I coughed and staggered with the back of my hand over my mouth.

Something went over the back of my neck, so cold I thought it was water. But it was just air. Eyes tearing, my throat spasming and hacking free of the dust caught in it, I staggered through it a dozen steps, till somebody grabbed me and I came up, staring at another black face.

"It's Kid!" Dragon Lady shouted to somebody and got her arm around me to keep me from falling.

A few steps behind her Glass turned around to see me. "Huh?"

Beyond him, against a screen of slowly moiling clouds, the side came off a twenty-story building, collapsing slowly away from the web of steel. But that must have been five blocks down.

"Jesus Christ…!" D-t said, then glanced back at me. "Kid, you all—?" and the sound got to us, filling up the space around us the way a volcano must up close.

The brunt of it past, I could hear people behind me still shouting: Three different voices bawled out instructions among some fifty more who didn't care.

"God damn it!" D-t said. "Come
on!"

Someone had strewn coils of what looked like elevator cable all over the sidewalk. It was greasy too; so after the first dozen steps across it, we went into the street.

And the shouting behind us had resolved to a single, distant, insistant voice—"You wait, God damn it! You hear me, you motherfuckers
wait
for me!"—getting closer—"Wait for me, God damn it! Wait—!"

I looked back.

Fireball, fists pumping, bent forward from the waist and head flung back, ran full into Glass, who caught him by the arm. Fireball sagged back, gasping and crying: "You wait for me, God damn it! You damn niggers—" he sucked in a breath loud as vomiting—"why didn't you
wait!"
He was barefoot, with no shirt; a half dozen chains swung and tinkled from his neck as he bent, gasping, holding his stomach. In a pulse of light I saw he had a scrape down his jaw that went on across his shoulderblade as though something had fallen on him while he ran. His face was streaked with tears that he scrubbed with the flat of his fist. "You God damn fuckin' niggers, you
wait
for me!"

"Come on," D-t said. "You all right now."

I thought Fireball was going to fall down trying to get back his breath.

Somebody else sprinted up the street, out of the smoke. It was Spider. He looked very young, very tall, very black, very scared. Breathing hard, he asked: "Fireball okay? I thought a damn wall fell on him."

"He's okay," D-t said. "Now let's
go!"

Fireball nodded and lurched ahead.

Glass let him go and moved beside me. His vinyl vest was hazed across with powdered plaster. "Hey," I said, "I've gotta find Lanya and Denny. They're supposed to be going back to the nest—"

"Oh, God damn, nigger!" Fireball twisted back to stare. His face was smeared filthy, and some of it was blood.
"Leave
them white motherfuckers alone, huh? Don't you think about
nothin'
except your pecker?"

"Now
you
just get yourself together!" Dragon Lady pushed Fireball's shoulder sharply with the heel of her hand; when he jerked around, she took his arm like they were going for a stroll. "Let's you just cut this 'nigger' shit, huh? What you think
you
are, a red-headed Indian?"

Glass said: "We don't got any nest; not any more."

"They got any sense," D-t said, "they gonna be trying to get out too. Maybe we meet up with them at the bridge."

"What happened to the others?" I asked. "Raven, Tarzan, Cathedral? Lady of Spain… What about Baby and Adam?"

Dragon Lady didn't even look back.

"You were the last one out," D-t said to Spider. "You see 'em?"

Spider looked from D-t to me and back. "No." He looked down where he was holding onto the end of his belt with his lanky, black fingers, twisting a little.

"Maybe," Dragon Lady said, letting go Fireball's arm but still not looking back, "we gonna meet 'em." I could tell she was frowning. "On the bridge. Like he says." Or something else.

I walked another five steps, looking down at the wet pavement, feeling numbness claw at me. My fingers tingled. So did the soles of both feet. Then I looked up and said, "Well, God damn it, the bridge is
that
way!" Which is when this incredibly loud crackling started on our left.

We all looked up, turned our heads, backed away all together. Spider broke, ran a dozen steps, realized we weren't coming, and turned back to look too.

Four stories up, fire suddenly jetted from one window. The flames flapped up like yellow cloth under a bellows; sparks and glass tumbled down the brick.

Two more windows erupted. (I hit my bare heel on the far curb.) Then another-as far apart as ticks on a clock.

We ran.

Not down the way I said because that street was a-broil with smoke and flickering. At the end of another block, we turned the corner and ran down the sloping sidewalk. There was water all over one end.

D-t and me splashed into it, watching the high brick walls, and the billowing clouds between them, shatter below our feet.

Ten yards in it was up to my knees and I couldn't really run. We slushed on. Glass, arms swinging wide in a wildly swaying stagger, moved ahead of me, dragging fans of ripples from the backs of his soaked pants. Then the street started sloping up. I splashed toward the edge.

What it felt like was something immense dropped into the street a block away. Everything shook. I looked back at the" others—Fireball and Dragon Lady were still splashing forward—when, in the center, was a swell of what looked like detergent bubbles. Then steam shot straight up. The water's edge rolled back from Fireball's dripping cuffs, leaving his wet feet slapping the glistening pavement.

Glass back-tracked to grab Dragon Lady's hand, like he thought she (or he) might fall.

The geyser spit and hissed and the water bubbled into it

We went around the next corner together.

I could see the bridge all the way to the second stanchion. Here and there clouds had torn away from the black sky. Something was burning down between the waterfront buildings. We rushed across fifty feet of pavement. Just before the bridge mouth, it looked like someone had grenaded the road. A slab of asphalt practically fifteen feet high jutted up. Down the crack around it, you could see wet pipes, and below that, flickering water. Above, that amazing, loud lightning formed its searing nodes among the cloud canyons.

"Come on," I said. "This way!"

Metal steps lead up to the bridge's pedestrian walk. The first half dozen were covered with broken masonry. Glass and Dragon Lady charged right up. Plaster dust puffed out between the railing struts. Fireball stepped carefully on the first three steps, then grabbed both railings and vaulted up three more. His feet were caked with junk and he was bleeding from one ankle.

"Get goin'!" D-t crowded behind. "Get goin'!"

Spider and me went up the narrow steps practically side by side.

At the top, Spider got ahead and we ran along the clanging plates maybe fifty yards when something…
hit
the bridge!

We swayed back and forth a dozen feet! Metal ground against old metal. Cables danced in the dark.

I grabbed the rail, staring down at the blacktop fifteen feet below, expecting it to split over the water a hundred feet below that.

Beside me, Fireball just dropped on his knees, his cheek against the bars. Spider put his arms around the dead lamppost, bent his head and went,
"Ahhhhhhhhh…"
like he was crying with his mouth open—which, five seconds later, when the shaking and the creaking died, was the only sound. Dragon Lady swallowed, let go the rail, and took a gasping breath.

My ears were ringing.

Everything was quiet.

"Jesus God," D-t whispered, "let's get off o'—" which was when everybody, including D-t, realized
how
quiet

Holding the rail tight, I turned to look back.

On the waterfront, flames flickered in smoke. A breeze came to brush my forehead. Here and there smoke was moving off the wind-runneled water. And there was nobody else on the bridge.

"Let's
go
…" I stepped around Fireball, passed by Dragon Lady.

A few seconds later, I heard Glass repeat: "Well, let's go!" Their footsteps started.

Dragon Lady caught up. "Jesus…" she said softly beside me. But that was all.

We kept walking.