Dhalgren (79 page)

"Oh," Kid said. "Where I was last night. It says here something about nobody living there any more."

Faust hefted the bundle on his hip. "Then all I know is that I leave a God-damn lot of papers in front of a God-damn lot of doors, and they ain't there the next day when I come back. Damn, splashing around in all that water in the street yesterday morning!" He squinted back at the window. "It was better this morning though. Hey, I see you again tomorrow. That your book the office is full up with?"

"I don't know," Kid said. "Is it?"

Faust frowned. "You should come up to the office sometime and take a look where they print the paper and things. Come up with me, some day. I'll show it all to you. Your book went in the day before yesterday—" Faust snapped his fingers. "And I put cartons of it in the bookstores last night. Soon as it… well, you know, got dark."

Kid grunted and opened the
Times
again, to look at something not Faust.

"Get your morning paper!" The old man loped down the block, hollering into the smoke: "Right here, get your morning paper!"

What he'd opened to was another quarter-page advertisement for
Brass Orchids.
He left it on the stoop, and walked toward the corner, when a sound he'd been dimly aware of broke over the sky: Roaring. And nestled in the roar, the whine a jet makes three blocks from the airport. Kid looked as the sound gathered above him. Nothing was visible; he looked down the block. Faust, a figurine off in a milky aquarium, had stopped too. The sound rolled away, lowering.

Faust moved on to disappear.

Kid turned the corner.

It's different inside the nest, he thought, trying to figure what should be the same:

The crayoning on the dirty wall—

The loose ceiling fixture—

In his hand, the knobs squared and toothy shaft rasped out another inch—

A black face came from the middle room, looked back inside; shook his head, and went down to the bathroom. Among voices, Nightmare's laugh, and:

"Okay. I mean, okay." That was Dragon Lady. "You said your thing, now what you want us to do?"

While someone else in the hubbub, shouted, "Hey, hey, hey come on now. Hey!"

"I mean now… yeah!" Nightmare's voice separated. "What do you want?"

Kid went to the door.

Across the room, Siam and Glass noticed him with small, different nods. Kid leaned on the jam. The people in the center, their backs to him, were not scorpions.

"I
mean—"
Nightmare, circling, bent to hit his knees—"what do you want?"

"Look." John turned to follow him, holding the lapels of his Peruvian vest. "Look, this is very serious!" His blue work shirt was rolled up his forearms; the sleeves were stained, dirty, and frayed at one elbow. His thumbnails, the only ones visible, were very clean. "I mean you guys have got to…" He gestured.

Milly stepped out of the way of his arm.

"Gotta what?" Nightmare rubbed his shoulder. "Look, man I wasn't there. I didn't know nothing about it."

"We were someplace else." Dragon Lady turned a white cup in her dark hands, shoulders hunched, sipping watching. "We weren't even anywhere around, you know?" She alone in the room drank; and drank loudly.

Mildred brushed away threads of red hair and looked much older than Dragon Lady. (He remembered once thinking when neither were present that, for all their differences, they were about the same age.) Dragon Lady's lips kept changing thickness.

"This is shit!" Nightmare kneaded his arm. "I mean this is real shit, man! Don't load this shit on me. You want to talk to somebody—" His eyes came up beneath his brows and caught Kid—"talk to him. He was there, I wasn't. It was his thing."

Kid unfolded his arms. "What'd I do?"

"You—" Mildred turned—
"killed
somebody!"

He felt, after moments, his forehead wrinkle. "Oh, yeah?" What cleared inside was distressingly close to relief. "When?" he asked with the calm and contrapuntal thought: No. No, that's
not
possible, is it? No.

"Look," John said, and looked between Nightmare and Kid. "Look, we could always talk to you guys, right? I mean you're pretty together, you know? Nightmare, we've always done right by you, hey? And you've done right by us. Kid, you used to eat with us all the time, right? You were almost part of our family. We were gonna put you up the first night you got here, weren't we? But you guys can't go around and murder people. And expect us to just sit around. I mean we have to do something."

"Who'd we kill?" he asked, realizing, they
don't
mean
me!
They mean
us.
The feeling came cold and with loss.

"Wally!" Milly said from the edge of hysteria. "Wally Efrin!"

The name rang absolutely hollow in his mind. Kid searched the company squatting in memory before the communal cinderblock fire over beans and vegetable hash with spam; Wally Efrin? (The short-hair he'd once asked to help him get wood who'd said no because he was too frightened to leave the others? The one who had sat between him and Lanya and talked non-stop of Hawaii? The heavy one with the black hair long enough to sit on who kept asking people whether or not we'd seen his girl friend? One he'd seen but never noticed? One he'd never seen? He remembered Jommy and a half dozen others.)

"Where?" he asked, at her silence. "What'd we kill him for?"

"Oh, for Christ's sake…!" Milly shook her head.

"Yesterday," John said. "Yesterday afternoon. When you were all at that house, with the… sun. Mildred was there—"

"I didn't know about it till after I got home," she said, in the voice one used to make excuses.

"Me neither," Kid said. "So do you want to tell me?"

"No, I don't want to…" Milly exclaimed. "This is really just terrible! This is animal…!"

"You were in charge there, Kid, weren't you?" John asked.

"So everybody tells me."

"Well, it seems that—now I wasn't there, but this is what I've been told…"

Kid nodded.

"…It seems like some of the guys started a fight. And… what? Wally tried to break it up?"

"He may have started the fight," Milly said to the floor, "with them."

"I guess most of the people were upstairs. This was downstairs in the kitchen. He got beat up pretty bad, I guess. Someone hit him a couple of times. In the head. With the bar of a police lock. Then everybody left I guess. Apparently lots of people there didn't even know about it. It was downstairs." John repeated: "In the kitchen. I mean, Mildred didn't know until after she g back and Jommy told her." A movement of John's tanned chin indicated that Jommy was the emaciated boy with a lot of brown hair, and small, pale eyes. (He
had
remembered Jommy; but he had not recognized him…)

"Everybody left him, because they thought he was just knocked out or something. Or they were scared. Then we went back for him. He was dead."

"Who did it?" Kid shifted his bare foot, which was tingling.

Copperhead stood in the kitchen door, one fist on the jamb.

John looked at Jommy who pointed immediately to the scorpion on the couch, the unshaven, pimpley, white youngster: "Him!" who grunted at the accusation and raised his head a little. He was also the scorpion whom the long-haired youngsters had held, crying, on the balcony as the great circle set.

"You kill somebody yesterday afternoon?" Kid asked.

"No!" He said it thickly and loudly and questioningly, trying the answer for effect.

Nightmare sat, now, at Dragon Lady's feet. Head against the wall, he looked from speaker to speaker, with the smile of an enthusiast at a tennis match.

"You beat anybody up?" Kid asked.

"Beat the
fuck
out of 'im!" The scorpion's fists bounced on the couch's rim. "Yeah! With a fuckin piece of pipe. But I didn't know what kind of pipe it was!… or if he was dead!"

"Shit,
I
sure did!" Glass chuckled. "I knew it when you hit the motherfucker the first time. The second, third… all those other times you were banging on him, man, that was just extra."

"You shut the fuck up!" (It was, Kid remembered, the scorpion for whom he had rescued the bronze lion.) "I didn't kill nobody."

"But you
did
beat somebody over the head with a piece of pipe yesterday?"

"Look, I didn't…" He stalled on the word, and stood, fists flailing about his shoulders to beat away the barrier to speech, then yelled, "… didn't kill any God-damn body with no—"

"SIT DOWN, GOD DAMN IT…!"
Kid bellowed, coming away from the door by three steps. That, he thought in the silence, was pretty theatrical. But he was astonished by its efficacy. Twitching behind his face, he felt an embryonic giggle. Both feet and hands were tingling. Shall I
say
the next thing, or shall I
yell
it? (The scorpion was leaning back on the couch, balanced on his fists, his seat not quite on the cushion, an expression not quite on his face.)
"DID YOU BEAT ON SOME KID'S HEAD WITH A PIPE…?"
He'd made the choice to avoid laughing.

The scorpion sank to the cushion. The expression was terror. "I guess so?" the scorpion asked quietly. "I don't know…?"

Kid shook both hands hard, by the hips, to return the feeling. He heard one of the people beside him creak a floor board and catch breath.

"Look," he said to John. Milly, behind him, seemed more frightened than the scorpion on the couch. Little Jommy had an intent expression of cold interest. "Why don't you people just get the fuck out of here, all right?"

"Um …"
John's thumbs had gone beneath the lapels with the rest of his fingers. "You know we haven't had a… trial or anything." He glanced at the scorpion. "Mildred said maybe Wally started it, you know—"

"I didn't see it," Milly reiterated. "Somebody just told—"

Kid breathed in, and was still surprised that it cut the ribbon of her whisper like scissors. "You all get out."

"Now we're not trying to…" John began; Milly, Jommy, and the others had all started for the door. He let go his lapels and followed.

"What'd you do with Wally, huh?" Kid called.

"Huh?" John stopped a moment. "We just left—"

"No," Kid interrupted. "No, don't tell me about it!" He kneaded one fist in the other. Feeling was beginning to return. The gesture sent John pushing against the people in front of him to get out of the room, beating nervously against his leg.

The scorpion on the couch looked very miserable. Clutching his lamp, or on the balcony crying; Kid thought: He's looked miserable every time I've ever noticed him.

"Shit!" Kid said. (Outside, he heard the door close behind the commune deputation.)

The scorpion bounced a little and blinked.

"Aw, shit!" Kid turned and walked out of the room.

Three steps down the hall, Kid heard a noise behind him, and turned.

Nightmare swung around the door jamb, an incongruous grin on his face. "Man, you're too fuckin much!" Nightmare pranced, jingling, in the hall, slapped the wall. "Really! You're too much."

Right behind him, Copperhead came out and asked, "Hey, what you want to do with Dollar in there?" He thumbed back in the room.

So that's his name, Kid thought (Dollar?), while asking, "Huh?"

"You want me to rough him up a little for you?" Copperhead asked. "Yeah, I'll do it. I don't mind doing shit like that. I mean if he . goes around hitting people over the head, he's gonna get us in trouble, you know? You want me to work him over?"

Kid made a disgusted face. "No! You don't have to do anything like—"

"If you
want
me to," Copperhead announced over Nightmare's shoulder, "I'll kill the little white bastard. Or I could just work him over to scare him, you know…"

"No," Kid repeated. "No, I don't want you to do that."

"Maybe later…?" Copperhead said. "When you thought about it?"

"Well, not now," Kid said. "Just leave him alone now."

Nightmare laughed as Copperhead went back into the room. "What were you trying to
do,
huh? Man, you
are
too much!"

"Just find out if he did it. That's all."

Nightmare held his laughter in his mouth; it bellied his cheeks till he swallowed it. "Did you find out?"

From inside, there was a sudden crack and a cry. Voices silenced around the sound of loud sipping:

"Now the Kid told me I'm supposed to wait till later to work you over, cocksucker. But don't give me any shit, you hear? You go around breaking people's heads, I think I'm gonna have some fun breaking yours. Now get out of here."

"I… guess so," Kid said.

"I mean," Nightmare shook his open palms in front of Kid's hips, "I was just wondering if you found
out.
I wasn't there. You was, right? So you should know if he done it or not." He backed away, grinning.

"Hey!"

"What?"

"Come here. I want to talk to you."

Nightmare's arm folded low on his stomach, then raised up his broad chest so that the chains looped across his forearms. "Sure." He tilted his head, warily. "What you want to talk about?"

"I just want to know what—hey, you come on with me."

"Sure," Nightmare said; then his tongue went into the side of his jaw, licking for something among back teeth.

They went up the hall and onto the service porch. Nightmare, arms still folded, stood in the doorway squinting. Dulling smoke hung only yards beyond the screening. Kid asked: "What are
you
trying to do, huh?"

"What do you mean?" Nightmare's forearms slid across one another to tighten toward a knot.

"I mean you. And Dragon Lady and all. How come I suddenly get to be the boss about everything?"

"You do it pretty well."

"But I want to know why."

"Well." Nightmare looked at the floor and let himself fall against the jamb. "It's gotta be somebody, right?" Boards around them creaked.

"But what about you?"

"What about me?" The boards creaked again, though Nightmare hadn't moved. "What you want to know about me?"

"Just why, that's all. You want a new boss—why not one of the spades, or something. I mean what's
with
you?"