"No, I daren't risk it. I have to be as keyed up as I can."
She stared at him for a long moment. Before she could say anything else, however, he had read her mind.
"You think I'm going to burn myself out, don't you?"
She gave a nod. A very slight nod, as though limiting the gesture could soften the truth behind it.
"Yes: Yes, I think so too," Danty muttered. "But not doing what I feel I have to do-that would be worse." A faint smile followed the words. "But thank you anyhow. If there wasn't someone I could talk to, someone, who cares about me, I'd have gone insane long ago."
He rose, stretching. "Although it's arguable, I guess," he added, "that I already am crazy. Poor Magdal"
"What?"
"'Poor Magdal' I said. Landed with one case for which you can't see any hopeful outcome!"
She pondered that, then shook her head. "No, that's not true. You may burn yourself out, that's a fact. But it would be a very special kind of burning. Goodbye, Danty."
. vu .
"What ch'waiting for" Potatohead muttered, staring at the addle cock blonde with the bare chowbag. He nudged Josh Tatum.
"Poke me one more," Josh said, "I cut out yo' Idaho eyes. She walking this way? She climbing walls? Shee-it."
Josh wasn't a reb and if you'd called him one he'd have carved you for it. They were tight on guns in Cowville but knives, everybody had knives. He was slick from neck to heel in plastic blacker than his skin, and shinier, and his scalp fuzzed an eighty-eight force-grown natural. Same with other, Shark Bance. -Potatohead was shaved and ashamed. But something wrong with the follicles.
"Lakonia," Shark said under his breath.
"Where the shit else? 1 know her."
"What?"
"Name? Name? Piss her name. Peg it, peg it! Chow bare, zip-crotch shorts-eyes, use yo' eyes!"
"Pegged," Potatohead said. "Po' li'1 rich, due fo' kindah- F a surprise." He grabbed Shark's hand and kissed it.
"Kill it! Wannah-a see that? She grunt pigl Spread an' y bar-a walk. Makun quick!" '
"Inta scrap yard?" Shark inquired.
"Scrap yard, yea."
In spite of her resolution Lora felt nervous as she `
approached the young blacks. There was something so
statue-like about them: all three tall, all three dead-faced,.
all three in that strange tight muscle-hugging plastic ....
She liked to feel a boy's skin before she let him unzip--,,
the crotch of her shorts, which was why she preferred
the beach, or in winter the dansoteks where it was always
too hot for heavy clothing.
But this was the thing she had set her mind to, so she
kept on going.
The nearest of them, with the shaven head, stepped into ~a her path. She smiled sunnily at him and said, "Hil"
He looked at her with eyes as dull as pebbles. Then he :y
reached out and touched, not her bare arm, but the fabric of her playtop. Meantime the one .beside him, marginally the biggest, examined her critically from top to toe.
"In there," he said after a couple of heartbeats, and jerked his head towards the scrap yard.
She was taken aback. This wasn't what she'd expected. There should be-well, a bit of chat. Banter. Joking. Some sort of preliminaries)
But they had fallen in around her like military police escorting a deserter, and were forcing her towards the scrap yard gate. There was a gatekeeper's hut. There was no one in it.
Huge clanging noises, and a sulphur stink. Horrified, she found herself shut in by walls of ruined cars rusty bathtubs, mounds of cans crushed into polychrome lumps, while underfoot she walked on painful glass.
"I-" she began to say, ,and they rounded a corner among the piles of metal and were out of sight of anyone.
"Value her," the tallest black said, and the bald one confronted her and took her wrist. He inspected her watch.
"Saw, Josh?" the third said. "No purse!"
"Saw," the tallest said. "Zip up, Shark. Well, Potatohead?"
"Piss and shit! Japanese! Worth around eight-fifty!"
"Foreign, um? Ah-hunhl Anna clothes?"
"Three-fo' hunnad inna sto'. Top getcha maybe fifty. Shorts widda zip-crotch, dustin'-rag."
"Takun fo' pock't. I see coin. Strippun, addle." As though by magic a long knife appeared in Josh's hand and touched Lora's bosom with a cold caress.
"But-but what . . . ?" Words choked her. It wasn't that she didn't understand the order (addle: adolescent; they said that in Lakonia, too). She didn't understand the situation.
Slowly, and with immaculate diction, Josh said, "Strip, cock. We don't want to get blood on those clothes."
She stared at him for a terrible empty moment, thinking: cock means Caucasian, and that's only used by .
It dawned on her at long last what they meant to do. Rob her, and kill her, and hide her body among the scrap.
"Knahf, blabboh. Droppun knahf."
A voice from nowhere. Josh whirled around, eyes vastly
wide. He, they, Lora spotted the speaker almost in the same moment: high on top of the pile of scrap overlooking them, a dark face peering down, cheek cuddled close to the significant tube of a rifle.
"Knahfl" the voice repeated. "O' takun ow-yo' han' wiffa slug, blabboh!"
There was an eternity of frozen silence. All Lora could think of was that only one black man could call another blabboh-"black boy"--and survive.
Then Josh, mouth curled as though he had bitten a lemon, opened his fingers and let the knife fall.
"Addle cock!" the stranger said sharply. "Back slo'tutri pesses-so'sa fahn. Narrunda co'nah-fahn againl"
As in a dream, Lora reacted to the half-understood order, backing around the corner of the stack of scrap.
"Okay," the gunman said, and then added, more loudly and with a forced blabboh intonation: "Ali seeahl Slongzah seeah-Ah c'nitchah! Mango blabboh, mango!"
A gesture with his rifle. And they went.
Half a minute later, while Lora was sobbing into her hands, a tug on her arm. "Move it!"
Gone the blabboh accent, but the same voice. She opened her eyes to see her rescuer-lean, young, dark, not a as black as her captors but black nonetheless-tossing his j
rifle aside. °a
"But they might come after us!" she cried.
"Sure) I said move it, didn't I?" Catching her by the
arm and literally dragging her along.
"But the gun-1"
"Not worth a fart. Picked out of a stack of them over '~ there. Military surplus. Empty! Will you move?"
He led her stumbling through the awful man-made desert of the scrap yard, to a gap in the perimeter fence, down a narrow alley . . . . By that time she was gasping for breath, and barely registered where he was taking her. Then around a corner, and after a quick survey of the street in both directions-just such a street as she'd emerged on to from the hoverhalt-at a quieter pace for another few hundred yards, his arm around her waist now, his hand companionable on her bare skin.
"It's over now," he said, close to her ear. "But you got a scare, that's for sure. You over the legal?"
"Uh . . ." For a moment she didn't understand, although
the coarse blabboh accent had faded from his speech and he was speaking precisely as might any of her friends. Then she saw a bar-sign ahead. Yes, a drink. A stiff shot of-anything. She said so. Her voice not only sounded but felt like someone else's.
In the bar, a couple of black men at the counter gave them a dull once-over, then reverted to their liquor. He brought her brandy, and beer for himself. Sitting down opposite her across a table with a chipped plastic top, he said, "Drink it. Then breathe as deeply as you can, ten times. I'll wait."
It worked, somehow. Maybe, it was the confidence in his tone. Her heart, which had been slamming to be let out through her ribs, slowed to a more normal rate, and she was able to look at her new friend properly. Some tune she didn't recognize battered her ears; she had only just realized music was playing, As though the episode in the scrap yard had not happened, she found herself thinking: Yes, 1 hoped to meet a black boy like this, tough, lean, crooked smile, graceful-moving . . .
And-?
There was a stern reproach in his eyes. He said, "When you come here, learn to pick your kicks."
"I . . ." She swallowed hard. "I didn't think they . . ."
"Yea, yea," he cut in. "But-shit! None of them three looked twice at a girl in their lives, 'cep maybe to peel her down!"
She looked miserably at her empty glass and nodded.
He gave his crooked smile again and patted her hand. "So okay, no harm done. Just don't make the same mistake twice. By the way, my name's Danty."
"Mine's Lora," she said distractedly. "Lora Turpin. Uh-"
But Danty had tensed. He leaned forward. "Not Turpin of Energetics General?"
"Why . . . why, yes. Do you-?"
"Know him? Shit, no. Heard of him, though." And in the manner of an afterthought: "Friends of mine work at EG."
Which she had imagined to be all of Cowville, the building to incorporate the city. She touched her bosom where the point of Josh's knife had rested, and a shiver racked her.
"You not? No? What do you do?"
"My best to be myself," Danty murmured, and sipped beer.
Recognition signals. Landmarks. Like knowing (because a TV program had said so with authority) that only queer blacks close to farming stock called white teenage girls "addle cocks." She said explosively, "Are you a reb?"
"I guess I wouldn't cross the road to contradict you."
She stared at him, and went on staring. Now and then, the other side of New Lake, the son or daughter of some wealthy family put on the reb-style pose. and that was where it stopped-just a pose. According to the social history she had been drilled through in school. every generation for centuries had had its rebs, clear back to the wandering students of the Middle Ages. But something kept on going, fed from a source she couldn't understand. Once, in an essay, she'd spoken of a humanistic counterpart of divine discontent-the phrase borrowed from a book not on the curriculum-and she'd been marked down two grades for saying it.
"You?" he was asking. "You in college?"
"Uh . . ." Remembering with an effort. "I go to college in the fall. Just finished school."
And what would it be like, there at Bennington?
An odd feeling, as though she were two people at once. At home she had been allowed to drink since she was fourteen, so it couldn't be the brandy that had hit her. It must be shock. She half wanted to cry, and half wanted to laugh hysterically.
"And what brought you here?" Danty said.
So she told him: words flooding out, tumbling over each other, confusing the argument she wanted to frame, until she was certain he must think her mentally deranged. Yet he sat there, and nodded now and then, and heard her out.
He said eventually, "You like to night-ride, I guess."
"Oh, yes!" (Black sky, black road, the universe condensed to a pattern of lights, the ever-present expectation -hope?-of "instant death": just add blood.)
"Yes." Nodding. "It's the idea of going somewhere. To look for something you might not recognize if you found it. Only the places you most want to go, they won't let you."
She was about to say that was exactly what she felt,
when she realized with a pang of shame that she'd clean forgotten to tell him something very important.
"Danty! Oh, Jesus! I didn't thank you."
"Not to worry."
"But-1" Now she was shaking all over again, from a different cause. "But you must think I'm awful! And it was fantastic what you did, really incredible Danty, you're kind of a terrific personal"
"I'm myself," he said, and drained his glass.
"But--oh, shit!" Well, it was the only way she knew to say thanks properly, so with her hand hovering over her crotch-zip: "Do you have somewhere we could . . . ? You know!"
"Place but not time. Thanks all the same. Shall I show you to a hoverhalt?" Making to rise.
No, it can't stop here! 1 mean: SAVED MY LIFE! "No, wait" Mind racing. And then inspiration. Oh, yes! lust the right bit to blow the minds, turn up with a black reb! "Hey, look! We have this big party for tomorrow night, this real stand-up-and-grin-if-it-chokes-you affair Can I send you an invitation? I mean-oh, Danty, I do want to see you again!"
He nodded and settled back in his seat, pulling a pen from his pocket.
"Why not? Here's my address, inasmuch as I have one."
Feeling almost ashamed of herself because she hadn't been this excited about a party for years. Lora took ,` special care before her mirror, selecting her best makeup and perfume, then deliberately putting on a dress her father hated. a harlequin rig of lozenge-shaped bits of cloth tacked together only at the corners, which showed as much of her as it concealed.
No doubt that meant that some of Dad's friends would try to feel her up. and she didn't intend to put out for reeky old turds like them. but if Danty did show . . .
"Here's my address, inasmuch as I have one." Wow.
The house-phone rang. It was her mother.
"Lora honey. would you fix me a drink?"
She stamped her small foot. "Can't you send Estelle?"
"Well, she's fixing my hair right now."
"Oh . . . 1 Oh, all right." In a sullen tone. But she was all through dressing, and Peter might show up any minute, . so getting out of the room was not a bad idea-
