Dhalgren (71 page)

Kid wanted to protest, decided no; offer to come too?

She touched Denny's arm. Her nose and ear were shadowed: the incredible disk had lowered so that what remained was small enough that everyone around them, beneath a folded elbow, behind a heel on reddened tile, under frayed denim where a sleeve had been torn off, or within and behind the curves of flesh in flesh of the ear, had once more grown shadows. She looked afraid.

Lanya stood, and people stepped apart.

Denny, like someone just awakened, clambered from the rail, and, blinking about him (at the others as much as Kid) followed her.

Denny left, and people closed around.

"When it goes down…" the pimply scorpion began.

Kid, and the two people who held his hand, looked.

Something white had dried on his mouth. His lashless lids were pink and swollen.

The two looked away.

"When it goes all the way down, there won't be any fuckin' light at all, again… ever." He shook his head, scuffed his boots, rocked on the doorsill. "Black as a fucking bitch… yeah!"

They've gone, Kid thought. No light at
all?

Fifteen minutes later, when it
had
set completely, the sky had returned to its ordinary grey.

He woke… alone?

Someone was climbing to the loft ladder.

He struggled to choose between dreams and… the rest. Because they had all left the muraled house, and wandered back to the nest. Milly had talked to him, aimlessly, in the sloped street, mostly all surprised that he was the same Kid everybody had been talking about, and how glad she was to know that she knew him, till he'd decided she was trying to put the make on him and had gotten angry. "Get the fuck out of here, you stupid bitch!" he'd yelled in the street and made to hit her. She'd run away; he'd laughed, loudly, till he was staggering. Copperhead had come up to him and beat him on the shoulder, laughing too. "I didn't like that one either. Shit, you can have one of mine…" He'd kept laughing, so he wouldn't have to speak, thinking with perfectly maniacal pride: I have, I have already—

"Kid, are you okay?" Denny's ears were lit from behind and below. His face was dark.

"Yeah…?"

Denny came up over the edge.

"They're making food—" and at the word, Kid smelled it—"inside. Nightmare and Dragon Lady just came back. You sleepin'?"

"Come—" and at the word, Denny, all shoulders and chin and elbows, wedged against him—"here. Yeah." He held the warm knobby shapes and lay there smelling grease and a hot, vegetative stench that defined no food he recognized; but he liked it anyway.

"Lanya's got a nice place," Denny said.

"Yeah?" Kid thought: he's so light; but his edges are sharp. "You ball her again?"

"…Yeah." Denny said. "In her room, at her house. I guess that was all right."

Surprised, Kid opened his eyes. Cracks cross the dim ceiling. "Oh." He shifted Denny to the side. "You got more energy than I do. I was tired when I got back here."

"She's got a nice place," Denny repeated. "Real nice."

"Why'd she want to go?" He nubbed his rough chin for the itching.

Denny squirmed to get comfortable. "To see about her class, she said." Denny squirmed again.

"Class?"

The L about the window shade had finally taken on the deep color of evening.

"Her kids. She's been looking out for this group of kids, you know? About eight and nine years old. Black kids mostly."

"No, I didn't know." He let his lips purse to a tent where, with the help of air, they were off his teeth. Well, he
hadn't
seen her much.
How
many days gone? She'd said she had a place, yes; "No, I didn't know."

He frowned at the top of Denny's head.

"I like her," Denny said. "I like her a lot." Denny's face came up from under the hair. "You know, I think she likes me too?"

"Guess she does," Kid said. "Did she check… her class?"

"No," Denny said. "Not while I was there. She was going to. But we got to fuckin' around again. Screwin', you know. She said she was going to, after I left. If she didn't go to sleep first. I think she was pretty tired."

Kid looked at the ceiling again. "How long she had the kids?"

"A couple of weeks," Denny said. "That's what she told me. She said she likes it. They meet a little way from her place. That's real nice."

"What's it like?" A couple of weeks? He was too exhausted to be upset.

"Real
nice." Some of Denny's hair brushed and caught on Kid's chin.

"Well, you're good for something, cocksucker. Hey!" Kid bunched the muscles of his leg under Denny's stiffening groin. "No, man. Fuck off. I don't want to now."

Denny pulled himself back on all fours. "You better go eat something, then. They don't got that much. They'll eat it all."

Kid sat, nodding. "Yeah, come on." He climbed groggily down, and stood in the doorway.

Why (watching Denny climb) did she tell him all that about her new place, and her class, and not me? Why didn't I ask? he answered. He could smile at that, finally.

"Come on." Denny took Kid's elbow and led him down.

Halfway up the hall, Kid sucked his teeth and pulled free. It was a gentle pull; but Denny's head leapt away at the motion, frightened and anticipatory, despairing and wild. Without looking at him particularly, Denny stepped back to let him through.

"Jesus Christ!" Nightmare exclaimed, turning with a full plate in his hand, gesturing first, then scooping with his fork. "Wasn't that something this afternoon? I mean, wasn't that too much!" He filled his mouth and spoke on, scattering little pieces. "We heard about you chasing out the niggers! Hey—" he gestured to Dragon Lady who sat against the wall—"we heard about what he did to those niggers."

"Shit," Dragon Lady said dryly, and looked at Kid only from the corner of her eye. "I don't care what he do to any God-damn niggers."

"I didn't even know they were in the house," Kid said.

Dragon Lady took another mouthful. "Shit," she repeated, and pried with her spoon tip through what was on her plate.

"Give 'em something to eat," Nightmare yelled toward the kitchen.

"Baby!"
Dragon Lady bellowed; her shoulders shook; nobody stopped doing anything.
"Adam!"
She flung the words up like grenades. "Bring some more
food
out for 'em!"

"Here you go!" Baby,
still
naked, pushed between the people at the door, leading (dangerously) with steaming plates.

"This is yours."

Kid ignored the dirty thumb denting what must have been a hash of canned vegetables (he pulled the fork out from where it had been buried: corn, peas, okra, fell off) and (he tasted the first mouthful) meat. (Spam?) Baby gave the other plate to Denny. He returned to serve Cathedral, Jack the Ripper, Devastation, all sitting about silently.

Copperhead, not served yet, watched from the couch, and grinned and nodded when Kid looked at him.

"Here you go." Adam shoved a plate at Copperhead. He took it, saluted Kid with a fork with twisted tines, then dropped his shoulders and shoveled.

Denny's girl friend (should I find out her name?) with a coffee cup of the hash, came out of the kitchen, crossed to sit right by Denny on the floor and made a big thing of not looking at Kid. The girl in the pea jacket, next to Copperhead on the couch, occasionally picked food from Copperhead's plate with a spoon: Copperhead more or less ignored her.

"You had a party?" Nightmare exclaimed in answer to a question Kid hadn't heard asked. "We
ran!
Adam, Baby, the Lady, and me! I was so scared I didn't think I was gonna make it. Shit, I'm still scared."

The last laughter to trail away was Dragon Lady's gusty chuckle.

"We were in the park." Nightmare waved his fork above his head; more people sat down. "Baby, Adam, Dragon Lady, and me. You know the old weather tower in the park?"

(What, Kid wondered, had George been doing in the brazen light of the noon?What had June?)

"When it began, I mean after it began—first we thought that whole side of the city was on fire—after we could see what it was—" he shook his head at somebody who started a comment—"no, no, I don't
know
what the fuck it was. Don't ask me. After we could
see
it, we went up the steps to watch. Didn't we?"

Dragon Lady sat, smiling and shaking her head, which, when she noticed the shift of attention, changed to nodding: the smile stayed.

"We just climbed up there and watched the whole thing. Go up. And go down." Nightmare whistled. "Jesus Christ!"

We live, Kid thought; and die in different cities.

"You were out there in it," the scorpion in vinyl asked, watching, "until it was all over?"

Copperhead protested: "We watched it going down—"

"All over?" But Nightmare's mouth hung open, mocking his interlocutor. "What's all over?"

Adam rubbed the chains on his chest: the rest were still.

"You think it's all over?" Nightmare demanded.

The blond girl in the pea jacket held her spoon in both hands tightly between her knees. "When it went down," she said, "it was just like regular day again… here. And then it was light for four or five hours till it was time to get dark." She looked back over her shoulder at the black glass; the brass lion on the windowsill watched the night from beneath his bulbless stalk.

Dragon Lady's laughter built in the silence.

"Shit." Nightmare filled his mouth again and yelled at his plate: "You don't know if the sun is ever gonna come
up
again! We could all be burned up to death by tomorrow. Or frozen. What were you saying, Baby, about maybe the earth got pushed off its orbit or something like that, maybe into the sun, or out past it—"

"I didn't say that." Baby looked down at himself, pimply chest, uncircumcised genitals, bowed knees, dirty feet; his nakedness for the first time was out of place. "I wasn't sayin' it that serious-"

"There'd be an earthquake if that happened." Brown Adam, with his Philadelphia accent, held his chains in his fist. "I told you that. A big earthquake, or a tidal wave; both maybe. Nothing like that's happened. And there'd have fo be if the earth got pushed somewhere—"

"So maybe—" Nightmare looked up—"in ten minutes there's gonna be a big fuckin' earthquake!"

Then the lightbulb hanging from the ceiling dropped to quarter dimness.

Kid tried to swallow his heart; it threatened to burst and fill his mouth with blood.

Someone was crying again.

Kid looked to see if it was Denny. But it was another scorpion (Spider?) on the other side of Nightmare. Denny's face, even in the yellowish half-dark, was cut with blades of shadow from his hair.

"Oh, come on!" Smokey edged from behind Thirteen's shoulder: "Look, it used to do that four or five times a day when we stayed here."

In the kitchen something hummed: the light returned to full brightness.

Nightmare ate doggedly.

No one else did.

"You guys make up any more of this shit?" Nightmare nodded toward Adam and Baby. "It's good." Then looked around. "You don't know if it's over or not."

"I could use some more," Dragon Lady said.

Baby came forward with his hands out for their plates.

"The mistake—" Kid surprised himself by speaking, took a mouthful to stop, but went on anyway—"isn't thinking that it's finished." I'm imitating Nightmare, he thought, then realized, no, I'm doing what Nightmare did for the same reason. "The mistake is thinking it began this afternoon."

"Right on, motherfucker!" Nightmare shook his fork for emphasis.

Kid took another mouthful, and thought: I may throw up. And then thought: No, I'm too hungry.

"We got some more out there in the big pot," Adam was saying. "Why don't you guys go out and get it till it's all gone."

A shadow made Kid look up from the last of his eating.

Adam stood there, hand out for Kid's plate, about (Kid realized) to burst out crying too. Kid gave it to him.

Nightmare, Dragon Lady, and me get served first, Kid reflected as Baby brought his seconds. Well, Copperhead seemed at ease.

Finished, Kid put his fork on the floor and stood up.

"Hey, where're you going?" Copperhead asked, no belligerence, all bewilderment.

"Taking a walk."

On the bottom step of the house, he noted two streetlights in the distance. Burn up at any minute? Or freeze at the advent of an ice age, twenty minutes to completion? The air was the same excruciatingly bland temperature it had been night after night after night. The door opened behind him: Denny looked out.

"I want to go over and see Lanya's place," Kid said, turning. "You want to show me the way?"

"I… I can't," Denny said.
"She's
upset. And she wants to talk… to me."

"Fuck you, cocksucker." Kid started down the block. "See you later." (He wasn't angry at all.) That was pretty good. Halfway to the corner, however, he realized Denny would be the only way to find Lanya's new place. (Then he was.)

He could try the bar. But if she had a house now, what was the chance she'd be at
Teddy's
tonight?

He looked back, ready to yell to Denny to get the fuck on down here.

The door was closed.

And I
still
don't know her name!

He took a breath between his teeth. Maybe he'd find Lanya at the bar.

At the corner of the hill; surprised at how many street lamps—perhaps one out of five—worked in this neighborhood. The one diagonally across the street gave enough light to make out the charred walls of the big house. (The stronger burned smell had made him stop.) The columns supporting the balcony over the door had charred through, so that the platform, with its rail of lions, hung askew. Even so it took Kid a whole minute to be sure what house it was. Only houses he could see around confirmed it.

Four, five, six hours since they had screamed and laughed and yelled inside it?

Chilled to gooseflesh in the neutral air, he hurried away.

"…definitely
saw
it?"