Dhalgren (51 page)

"What was it about?" Kid asked.

Pepper's head came forward, hair strings swinging. "You see those scars on Nightmare's shoulder? You seen them scars?" He tried to nod. "Oh, I guess it's blown over now, and they almost friendly. But she got her own nest again, somewhere over in Jackson I heard. And they ain't gonna be together too much any more, I don't think." His head fell back, and he repeated: "I ain't feeling too well."

"What's the matter with you?"

"I dunno. Maybe I ate something bad. Or I got a cold maybe."

"Well, does it hurt in your stomach, or is your head stopped up?"

"I told you, I don't know why."

"What
hurts?"

Pepper shook back hair and sat up again. "How can I tell you what hurts till I know what's wrong?"

"How can anybody know what's wrong till you say what—"

Pepper lurched upright.

Kid started to catch him.

But Pepper didn't fall. Scrubbing at his face with his fist and snuffling, he said, "I been staying with Bunny, but I think she threw me out. Maybe we better go back there and find out, huh?" He let go of the side of the stall. "I think I'm feeling a little better. You know Bunny?"

"I don't think so."

"She dances over in that freak joint,
Teddy's."

"You mean the little silver-haired guy?"

"She's pretty together. A nut. But together." Pepper lurched forward. "I wish I had a God-damn drink of water."

"Come on around to the sink."

Pepper passed unsteadily, staggered around the partition.

Kid followed.

Pepper spun one of the taps and jerked his hand back when the pipes began their complaint. "…nothing's coming out," he ventured.

"Give it a second."

When the trickle had gone on half a minute, Pepper grimaced. "Shit, that ain't big enough to drink." He turned again and staggered for the door. "God
damn
I wish I had some water."

Kid, in amused frustration, turned off the tap and went out. Pepper was wandering up the slope.

Kid watched for a few steps, then turned down toward the commune.

"Hey!"

He looked back. "What?"

"Ain't you coming with me?"

His amusement diminished to minuscule. "No." Minuscule, it still made him wait Pepper's reaction.

"Hey, then." Pepper returned, his stagger now loosened to a bow-legged jounce. "Maybe I better come on with
you,
huh?"

Kid started walking:
Not
the reaction he'd wanted.

Pepper caught up. "Look, we go where you going, then we go where I'm going, huh? That's fair."

"There's a water fountain."

"Naw, naw, man! You're in a rush. I don't wanna hold you up none."

Kid sighed, came to a decision, and bellowed, "GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE!"

Pepper stopped, blinking.

Kid took a breath and walked on, shaking his head. I don't like to yell at people, he thought. And then, smiling: That isn't true—I just don't get much chance.

He came to the trees at the edge of the clearing.

The cinderblocks on the near side of the fireplace had been pushed over. Smoke dribbled into the air. Ashes greyed the grass.

There were no people.

Ten feet from the picnic table lay the torn sleeping bag that nobody used because somebody had been sick in it one night and fouled it with puke and diarrhea.

Puzzled, he walked to the furnace, between tin cans and package wrappers. (On the picnic bench, someone had overturned a carton of garbage.) With his sandal, he scraped away cinders. Half a dozen coals turned up red spots, which pulsed, wavered and went out.

"Lanya?"

He turned, waiting, for her answer, uncomfortable at any noise in this ringed, misty clearing. Even at the height of the project period, there were usually half a dozen people at the fire. A torn blanket lay under the bench—but it had been there all week. The sleeping bags and blanket rolls usually piled haphazard by trees and behind the firewood were gone.

"Lanya!"

A decision to move? But she would have known about that and told him. Save for the overturned cinderblocks of the furnace wall, there were no marks of violence; only junk and disorder. He had come here with her to eat … how many times? He had been quiet and observed his own measured politeness. Momentarily he fantasized that his reserve and preoccupation had been so unbearable to them that they had all, with Lanya cooperating, schemed to abandon him, suddenly and silently. He would have pondered it more than a moment had the idea not urged him to giggle; frowning still seemed more appropriate.

"Lanya?"

He turned to squint among the trees.

When the figure hiding in the brush realized it had been seen, it—it was Pepper—stepped hesitantly forward. "You're looking for somebody down here, hey?" Pepper craned to look left, then right. "I guess they all gone away, you know?"

Kid sucked his teeth and scanned the clearing again, while Pepper judged distances.

"I wonder why they all went away, huh?" Pepper stepped nearer.

Kid's annoyance with Pepper's presence was absorbed in his discomfort at Lanya's absence. He hadn't been that long washing. Wouldn't she have waited—?

"Where you think they all went?" Pepper advanced another step.

"Well if you don't know,
you're
no use."

Pepper's laugh was hoarse, light, and infirm as his cough. "Why don't you come on with me to Bunny's? She lives right behind the bar. I mean, if you can't find your friend down here. Get something to eat. She don't mind none if I bring friends over. She says she likes them long as they're nice, you know? You ever seen Bunny dance?"

"A couple of times." Kid thought: She might have gone over to the bar.

"I never have. But she's supposed to be good, huh? All sorts of weird people hang out in that place. I'm scared to go in."

"Come on." Kid looked once more: And she was not there. "Let's go."

"You coming? Good!" Pepper followed him for a dozen steps. Then he said, "Hey."

"What?"

"It's shorter if we go this way."

Kid stopped. "You say Bunny lives right behind
Teddy's?"

"Uh-huh."
Pepper nodded. "This way, through here."

"Okay. If you say so."

"It's a lot shorter," Pepper said. "A whole lot. It really is." He started, still stiff-legged, into the trees.

Kid followed, doubtful.

He was surprised how soon they reached the park wall; it was just over a hill of trees. The path down to the lion gate must have been more curvy than he'd thought.

Pepper scrambled up the wall, wheezing and grimacing. "You know," he panted from the far side as Kid crouched to vault, "Bunny is a guy, you know? But she likes to be called 'she'."

Kid sprang, one hand on the stone. "Yeah, yeah, I know all about it."

Pepper stepped back as Kid landed on the pavement. "You know," he said, as Kid bounced up right, "you're like Nightmare."

"How?"

"He yells a lot. But he don't mean it."

"I'm not gonna yell at you again," Kid said. "I may break your head. But I'm not gonna yell."

Pepper grinned. "Come on this way."

They crossed the empty street.

"You meet a new person, you go with him," Kid mused, "and suddenly you get a whole new city." He'd offered it as a small and oblique compliment.

Pepper only glanced at him, curiously.

"You go down new streets, you see houses you never saw before, pass places you didn't know were there. Everything changes."

"This way." Pepper ducked between buildings not two feet apart.

They sidled between the flaking boards. The ground was a-glitter from the broken windows.

Pepper said, "Sometimes it changes even if you go the same way."

Kid recalled conversations with Tak, but decided not to question Pepper further, who didn't seem too good with abstractions. In the alley, Kid stopped to brush the glass off his bare foot.

"You okay?" Pepper asked.

"Callous like a rock."

They walked between the gaping garages. A blue car—'75 Olds?—had been driven through a back wall: snapped boards and sagging beams, scattered glass, skid marks across the roadway. The car was impaled in broken wood to its dangling door. Who, Kid wondered, had been injured in the wreck, who had been injured in the house? Hanging over the sill of another smashed window was a blue telephone receiver—hurled out in fear or fury? Accidentally dropped or jarred?

"Uhn."
Pepper gestured with his chin toward an open door.

As they walked the dark corridor, Kid smelled traces of something organic and decayed, which was about to remind him of—when he remembered what, they had already come out on the porch.

Somebody in workman's greens and orange construction boots, on a high ladder against the corner lamp post—it was a woman he had noticed his first night in the bar—was unscrewing the street sign.

Metal ground metal; HAZE ST came out of its holder. From the ladder top she picked up AVE Q, inserted it, and began to screw the bolts.

"Hey?" Kid was both amused and curious. "Which one of those is right?"

She frowned back over her shoulder. "Neither one, honey, far as I know."

But Pepper was crossing toward the unmarked, familiar door. Kid followed, looking around the street, estranged by smoky daylight. "I don't think I've ever been here this time of day before."

Pepper just grunted.

The door they entered was two from the bar entrance.

At the top of the steps, Pepper blocked the cracks of light and thumped with the back of his hand.

"All right, all right. Just a second, dear. It isn't the end of the world—" the door swung in—"yet." Around Bunny's thin neck a white silk scarf was held by a silver napkin ring. "And if it is, I certainly don't want to hear about it at this hour of the morning. Oh, it's you."

"Hi!" Pepper's voice mustered brightness and enthusiasm. "This is a friend of mine, the Kid."

Bunny stepped back.

As Kid walked in, Bunny pointed a knuckly, manicured finger at Pepper. "It's his teeth, actually."

Pepper gave his stained and pitted grin.

"Peking Man—do you know about Peking Man? Peking Man
died
of an ulcerated tooth." Bunny brushed back bleached, silken hair. "Show me a boy with bad teeth and I just feel so sorry for him, that I—well, I'm not responsible. Pepper, darling,
where
have you been?"

"Jesus, I'm thirsty," Pepper said. "You got something to drink? You couldn't get a God-damn drink of water in the God-damn park."

"On the sideboard, dear. It hasn't moved."

Pepper poured wine from a jug with an ornate label first into a handle-less cup, then a jelly jar.

"Have
you
any idea where he was? I know
he's
not going to tell me." Bunny dodged while Pepper handed Kidd the jar.

"You get the glass 'cause you're company."

"You could have poured one for me too, dear. But you're famous for not thinking of things like that."

"Jesus Christ, sweetheart, I thought you had one already working. I really did." But Pepper made no move to pour another.

Bunny raised exasperated eyebrows and went to get a cup.

Pepper doffed his. "You don't tell her where I was. That's for me to know and her to find out." He finished his wine and went for seconds, "Go on, have a seat. Sit down. Bunny, did you throw me out of here last night?"

"The way you were carrying on, doll, I should have." Bunny ducked under Pepper's elbow and, cup on finger tips, returned. "But I didn't get a chance. Have you ever noticed that about people who are dumb in a particular way? In-
sen
-si-tive—" Bunny's eyes closed on the antepenultimate— "to everything. Except one second before catastrophe: Then they split. Oh, they know when
that's
coming all right. I guess they have to. Otherwise they'd be dead. Or missing an arm, or a head, or something." Bunny's eyes narrowed at Pepper (who, on his third cup already, turned to the room, a little more relaxed). "Darling, I could have killed you last night. I could have committed murder. Did I throw you out? If I did, you wouldn't be here now. But I'm calmer today."

Kid decided not to ask what Pepper had done.

"Go on," Pepper said. "Sit down. On the couch. That's where I sleep, so it's okay. She sleeps in there."

"My boudoir." Bunny gestured toward another room, where Kid could see a mirror and a dressing table with bottles and jars. "Pepper's very eager to clear that up with all his new friends. Yes, do have a seat." Kid sat.

"Oh, there've been a
few
times—but you were probably too high to remember those—when you've turned into quite a tiger. Pepper, darling, you shouldn't be so
concerned
about what other people think."

"If I cared what he thought, I wouldn't 'a brung him in here," Pepper said. "You want some more wine, Kid, just take it. Bunny don't mind."

"Actually—" Bunny stepped back into the boudoir door—"Pepper is a part of that tragic phenomenon, the Great American Un-screwed. A lot of talk about how much he
wants
to, but if you want my opinion, I don't think Pepper has gone to bed with anything in all his twenty-nine years that didn't just roll him over in his sleep. And God forbid he wake up!"

"I don't talk about doin' anybody I ain't never done," Pepper said, "which is more'n I can say for you. Why don't you lay off?"

From the couch, Kid said: "I just came around to see if somebody was in Teddy's. I want to—"

"Well, take a look, if you like." Bunny unblocked the door. "But I doubt it. In here. Where you can see."

Wondering, Kid got up and walked past Bunny into the second room. Though nothing was out of place, it gave the impression—with three chairs, a bed, a dozen pictures on the wall, from magazines (but all framed)—of clutter. Oranges, reds, purples, and blues massed in the bedspread. Yellow plastic flowers hung over the back of a pink ceramic dove. Interrupting the floral wallpaper was a black curtain.

"In there."

Kid stepped around a grubby, white vinyl hassock (everything had speckles of silver glitter on it) and pushed back black velvet.