Dhalgren

5

He woke…

As Kid sat, Denny's hand fell from his. Lanya rolled back a little to press against him again.

Kid's side cooled.

He thought of her side cooling.

He watched Denny, in sleep, rub his stomach where she had just lain. Kid's pants were wedged against the wall. Hanging his feet over the edge, he shook out the rumpled legs. He lifted one knee and set his heel on the board (his ankle was very dirty) to stare at the circling chain. What circled his mind, what had been running there since sleep, was: "…Susan Morgan, William Dhalgren, Peter Weldon… Susan Morgan, William Dhalgren, Peter Weldon…" Pondering, he shook it out.

He pushed his feet out the cuff, got his boot, his vest, his chains, and swung around to the post and climbed down. Raven was gone.

He noticed the silence just as it ended with voices in the other rooms. He could not decide whether it had been a few coincident seconds, or a protracted hush, begun before his waking, ending. Restless, he walked into the hall.

And recognized her blue sweatshirt as she turned into the service porch. When he reached the door, she was going down the steps into the yard. He followed.

Halfway into evening, the sky above the littered and trampled dirt was without feature.

Angel, Filament, and Thruppence, under Copperhead's supervision, were trying to start a fire.

Raven, Spider, D-t, and Jack the Ripper, with Tarzan the one white among them, sat on crates or stood at the back of the yard, passing two gallon jugs, both half empty, and arguing.

She looked up, saw him at the head of the steps, and (he thought) started. "Hi," she said with a very puzzled look and brushed a feathering of hair back from her face.

"Hey." He came down the steps.

She looked at his foot.

It had been a long time since he had even been around anyone who noticed his half-shod eccentricity. He thought about the coming party, found his mind rummaging again through Bunny's tale of the afternoon, and pushed away the discomfort with laughter.

She looked more uncomfortable. "I just wanted to come over and say hello to some of the guys," she explained. "I'm living over there, now," indicated only with a turned head that turned right back. "You know that commune you guys used to hit up in the park? Well, some of the ones from there come over to our place a lot — our house is just girls — but anybody can come and visit."

Kid nodded.

She folded her arms across the full, faded sweatshirt. "This place is—" she looked around the rubble—"is sort of nice."

"You come over here to see Denny?"

She looked down at her baggy elbow. "What do you. want with him? I mean what are you—" she tightened her arms—"going to do with him? I want him back."

Jack the Ripper glanced across the fireplace, glanced away. Kid thought: She has learned, when she lived like this, to hold such converse in a space full of people.

"I want him. What do you need him for?"

He thought she was going to cry, but she just coughed.

"He just isn't that smart. Those poems you wrote? I read them, all of them. When I was in school, we read poetry and stuff and I liked it. I was the smartest person in my class — one of them, anyway. Denny won't read them because he can't even say the words. You ever hear him try to read the newspaper? But I read them. The part about me bringing you the whisky when you were in the bathtub washing off the blood, and saying good-bye? I read about that and I understood it. But the stuff in there about him, if he read it, he wouldn't even get it I bet. What do you want him for, huh? Why don't you give him back?" She began to look to either side. "I'm sorry."

"I don't keep him from seeing you."

"I know," she said. "I'm sorry. I'm gonna go."

She dropped her arms and went around him to go up the stairs.

Lanya, in jeans and blouse, stood in the doorway. The two girls looked at one another. Then the one in the blue sweatshirt sighed. Lanya glanced after her, then looked back at Kid.

Kid frowned.

Jack the Ripper, by the fire now, looked over, his smile between sympathy and complicity, and shook his head.

Kid walked up the steps. "You just get up?"

"Only seconds, I'm sure, after you did. I heard you talking to her when we came out of the porch; so I decided I'd come out and listen. She seems like a nice kid."

He shrugged. "Denny still asleep?"

"Nope."

Kid sat on the step below her. They both had to move legs when Devastation came down to wander over to the fire, to stand with his hands in his back pockets.

"He got up with me," Lanya explained. "We were going to come out and surprise you while you were wandering around looking preoccupied. I told him we couldn't do it if you were anywhere near a pencil and paper. But then, when we got to the porch, we saw you talking to her."

"Where's Denny?"

"He saw her, covered his mouth with both hands — I thought he was going to blurt out something, God knows what — ducked behind me, and ran. I'm not sure if he's locked himself in the bathroom, or just split. No, the bathroom doesn't have a lock, does it? She didn't see him — he made enough noise!" She rested her chin on her fist. "The poor girl. I feel sorry for her."

"Mean little bastard, isn't he?"

"You think so?"

"He is to her. He is to you. To me. I can take it." Kid shrugged. "What are you going to do when he decides one day when you come to see him he doesn't want to see you?"

"Take it, I suppose." She sighed. "He really should have talked to her. How old is he?"

"Fifteen. And she's seventeen."

"You should tell him to talk to her. If they were really all that close."

"Shit," Kid said. "I never argue with people I screw. She seems to think there isn't anything to say. I don't blame her for wishing there was."

"Maybe." Lanya sounded doubtful. "I sort of took a liking to her, just listening. She lives in the girls' house? Now that is a strange bunch. I've been there a few times."

"Dykes?"

"No more than here. Do you think she'd be interested in helping with the school?"

"You're just going to get yourself in trouble."

Lanya laughed. "It's so nice to know there're one or two things about which I am more worldly than you are! I think it's fine to have an occasional knock-down, drag-out… discussion with people you're screwing. I never quarrel with the people the people I'm screwing are screwing. Or were screwing. I make a point of being on the best terms possible. Even if you have a knack for it, sometimes it takes a lot of work. But the trouble you avoid—" she turned down her mouth and tapped her knee three times—"is not to be believed!" Then she tugged his hair. "Let's go look for him."

But Denny had left the house.

Back in the yard the fire had been completed. Lanya volunteered to go with Priest, Thruppence and Angel to the liquor store. When they came back, Kid had taken the door out of the back room and set it up on some boxes for a table in the yard. Others had begun food.

"Come on. I want to go back up in the loft."

"Sure." She squeezed his hand and followed.

When they had lain together, when they had talked quietly a while, when they had begun to make love, he was surprised to find her somewhat listless and distracted; small movements she made silently angered him. Till she said, "Hey, what's the matter? You seem so far away. Come on back," which returned the whole thing to the realm of the humorous.

After that it was very good.

After coming, while he lay there and held her, the smell woke him. His waking woke her. He lifted his head at the sound. A third plate, in raised hands, was pushed over the loft edge. Then Denny climbed up, crawled across them, and began to take off his clothes. "We can eat up here," he whispered, as though they might still be sleeping with opened eyes.

There were lots of frankfurters on the plates.

And vegetable hash.

"Where'd you get off to?"

Denny shrugged. "Just wandering around. Thirteen's got a place right down the block and across the street. Pretty nice." He picked up a frank in his fingers and bit. Juice ran down his forearm and dripped from his elbow to his knee.

Kid licked it off. "You're gonna gimme a hard-on," Denny said and pushed one of the plates to Lanya. "Here. You wanna eat?"

"Sure." She rubbed her eyes and pulled out of Kid's arms. "Where… oh, hey. Thanks!" to the bite of Denny's he offered from his hand.

Remembering not a moment of grace, but a moment laced with it, I am thrown back on a present where only the intensity of the senses can justify this warmth, the look of shadow on her shoulder, light on her hip, a reflection on the blackened glass, light up from below. That is not as good. What have I fallen from, perfected by memory into something only possible, I do not want to falsify any more than that. Now there are only the eyes and the hands to fill out.

They drank some of the brandy he'd had her get for Tak. ("You won't believe my dress, either of you. I know you've seen it, Kid. You still won't believe it.") She said she was going to go home soon, but fell asleep. Somebody yelling in the kitchen once woke them hours later and they all made love again in the dark.

For the second time, from an urge that crossed experimentation with duty, he sucked Denny off; it took twice as long as before. "Don't you think you ought to rest?" Lanya finally suggested.

"Yeah," Denny said. "You rest some."

So he closed his eyes and racked it up to foibles. Still, it was the best time he remembered. He drifted toward sleep, only sad he remembered so little, and closed his eyes.

When the window had gone indigo, Kid opened them. Lanya was kneeling up. "I'm going now," she whispered. So they crawled over Denny, to find their clothes. "But I want some coffee," she mouthed.

"There should be boxes around," Kid said. "We just don't have any pot."

"That's all right. Come on."

In the kitchen, Thirteen and Smokey, with three black scorpions, Raven, Thruppence, and D-t, up the night, sat talking. Kid was surprised when, from the banter, he realized Lanya knew all their names: Even Thruppence's. (He'd had to ask that one several times: "Thruppence, man. Thruppence. That's English for three cents.") And "D-t", he found out, stood not for Delirium tremens but Double-time. A bucket was the only thing really clean so Lanya filled it to make boiled coffee.

"You gonna drink that?" D-t asked her.

"Sure. Bring it to a boil three times, then throw in a glass of cold water. The egg white will make it settle. Then you just pour it off into a pot and keep it hot," for which purpose Smokey volunteered to clean the kettle.

"You just don't let the Spider know you used up two of his good eggs to make that mess."

"Shit," Raven said, "everybody else use 'em."

Kid and Lanya drank theirs black while the rest went through a confusion of powdered milk (someone remembered the box under the table), cup rinsing, and sugar.

"Now that's nice coffee," Raven (his top-knot, now, undone) admitted, gazing into the cup on the table. "It's just as clear! I gotta remember me that." He pouted heavy lips at the steam and shook his head. The hairy beachball swung side to side.

"Yeah," Thirteen said back over his shoulder. "You gonna remember that, Smokey?" who nodded.

Cathedral and Filament had come in sleepily from the other room. Nine people stood drinking coffee in a space that was crowded with four.

"Now I'm just across the street and down the block," Thirteen was saying. "On the top floor. Any of you guys come over who want to. Kid'll tell you, he stayed in my place. I got so many scorpions around, you'd think I was running a nest. But I ain't. I just like to be friendly, you know?"

"You want to stay," Kid told Lanya as they left, "you just go back up in the loft. Nobody's going to bother you."

She rubbed the back of his neck. "There're just some things I have to get done before school. Give Little Brother a hug for me."

Nevertheless, as he walked her home, he was pretty sure what she wanted was another two hours sleep. He asked, "You coming back tonight?"

She squeezed his hand. "Nope. You two can come up and see me if you've got time. For a little while." She squeezed his hand once more.

The gesture became an emblem of her nervous charm.

The paper that day said:

Sunday — July 14th, 1776.

They spent the night at Lanya's.

The next day:

Sunday — June 16th, 2001.

That afternoon tire-colored Jack the Ripper, crouching before the open icebox whose light had just blown, whose insides were crammed, and whose enamel was streaked and stained, looked up and asked, "Say, when you gonna run?"

"Right now!" Inception, impulse, and decision had all fixed between Kid's first word and his second. Kid grabbed the doorway, leaned into the next room and shouted,"WE'RE GONNA RUN…!"

D-t, Spider, Angel, Priest crowded in from the hallway.

California shucked quickly from the sleeping bag beside the couch.

Raven and Glass and Lady of Spain came into the kitchen.

Spitt pushed in through the scorpions crowding the doorway.

They swayed and moved their feet and looked uncomfortably serious.

"Come on," Denny was saying as the others clattered down the front steps. "Hey, you! You gonna come? Get on out here."

Within the house they had almost been able to imagine a lucid city. Now catatonic windows watched them stalk. Their boots crunched and thudded on the pavement. They hurried with lowered brows, staring out from under, looking left and right on the neutral avenues.

Kid remembered, later, breaking the plate window of the Second City Bank building.

Jack the Ripper danced on broken glass and cackled: "Man, we gonna bust up nigger-town, now!"

They didn't.

They shuffled and poked in papers and files and adding machines. Copperhead turned over a desk and stood looking at it, breathing hard, a full minute.

They found neither money nor locked boxes; the only things in the money drawers were paperclips, gummed reinforcements, rubberbands.

Kid climbed back over the brass bars of a teller's cage (the top was a strip of greasy filth; a lot was on his hands now,) dropped to echoing marble, and walked to a group with their backs to him. He shouldered between Tarzan and Thruppence.

Knee on the cushion (he took sharp, shallow breaths), Dollar jabbed an orchid-blade into the leather chair and ripped with caged and quivering fist. More stuffing pushed out. Catching his tongue tip in his teeth, he jabbed and ripped again.

Priest sniffed and took his hands from his pocket.

Filament tried not to clear her throat.

As they walked home, Kid searched his memory of what had occurred on Nightmare's run to the Emboriky. Among the black group strolling at his side Kid noticed blond Tarzan at their center. Raven, his arm around Tarzan's shoulder, was saying, "…your sister? Man, you got you a pretty sister. Tarzan, you got about the prettiest sister I ever seen. You gonna have to get me and that sister of yours together! Oooooo-whee!" On Whee! he yanked at the crotch of his jeans with his free hand and nearly tugged Tarzan over.

"Now what you gonna talk about his sister for?" Lady of Spain asked.

"Aw, shit," Raven shouted over his shoulder, all his hair swaying. "Tarzan and me are friends. That right, Tarzan?" who grinned across the forearm beneath his chin.

"Tarzan," Glass grunted at Kid, "and the fuckin' apes!"

"Hey!" Jack the Ripper punched at Glass' shoulder. "Who's a fuckin' ape, nigger?"

But when Kid and Glass looked back, the Ripper let both legs go bandy, wheeled his arms about his shoulders, and began to bound about and grunt. Chains flew around his head. Now and then he paused to scratch his sides with underhanded flaps.

Copperhead's laugh was louder and harsher than the other's, rising and dying, as though responding to nuances of the performance no one else could catch.

Raven still draped around Tarzan, they staggered on. Raven's expression was now haunted and grim. Tarzan, hands hanging from his pockets and elbows swinging, smiled at the pavement over which they lurched, happily centered in so much attention.

The next day was:

(Headline:)

"You sure you don't want to come?" Kid asked Pepper. Kid's face still stung from shaving.

"Naw." Pepper shuffled nervously before the bathroom door. "Naw, I don't like stuff like that. All them people I don't know. You just go on, tell me about it when you come back. I got some wine, from the liquor store."

"Okay," Kid took his hand from Pepper's shoulder.

Copperhead came out of the bathroom. "Hey, you sure we don't got to dress up?"

"You wear your chains," Kid said, "your lights, and your vest, and you're dressed."

"Okay," Copperhead said. "If you say so. Man, Nightmare sure looks something out there in them red velvet pants. Like a God-damn spade!"

Kid's concession to festive dress, beside washing and shaving, had been to hang his brass orchid from a neck chain. As he walked up the hall-a water drop ran his bare ankle — the Ripper stopped him to whisper: "You really gonna let that boy go up there like that?" which was the third time someone had said something about Baby, who had arrived ten minutes ago, naked as promised (and dirty as ever), with Nightmare, Dragon Lady, and Adam.

"Sure am."

"Oh, man, I gotta see this. I was gonna stay home, you know? But I got to go to this one just to watch."

"He doesn't have anything you don't except a foreskin," Kid said. "Can't you be cool, huh?"

"Oh, sure!" The Ripper beat down the doubt with his wide, black hand, "Sure." He laughed and went on.

In the front room, Nightmare turned around and said something to Kid, mauled beyond comprehensibility by laughter. The others laughed too. His thick braid glistened with dressing. To his leather vest, neck chains, chained cycle boots, and garrison, the velvet loaned a scarlet panache.

"Nightmare," Siam (who only wore a small bandage now) was saying, "you're wearing those pants so low your ass has got cleavage, man!"

"Shit!" Nightmare caressed his great shoulder, "they like to see my muscles!" There was only a trace of the shoulder scar.

Kid glanced down at his own, listening to the laughter.

Dragon Lady, legs crossed, sat on the couch: White levi's, white boots, a silver lame turtleneck, and over it a white levi jacket, sleeves torn off. Her usual chains (a trip to the hardware store?) had been replaced by silver — or at any rate, stainless steel. Her nails were painted platinum. When she threw her head back to laugh, on her big, stained teeth, sweat glistened just below her rough hair. She looked easy, elegant, and terrifying.

Adam, brown and glum looking, sat on the couch arm in his baggy pants and sneakers.

Baby sat on the floor in front of him, one dirty foot on top of the other, arms wrapped around his knobbly knees, a grubby hand on each grubby elbow, smiling like a happy, blond rat.

"Hey! Hey, come on! Now listen to this!" Blonder than Tarzan (who stood, oddly sullen, by the kitchen door), blond as Bunny, Revelation, perched on the back of the chair, turned over the Times and pulled aside his chains. He wore twice as many as anyone else, all brass and copper: "…'late in the afternoon yesterday, stalked through the streets of Jackson, terrorizing residents.' How you like that? So you guys were out terrorizing the spades yesterday? Huh?" His skin was the luminous pink some pale flesh becomes either in great cold or great heat. "…'committing acts of vandalism, the damage for which there is no way to assess, the rowdy band of black and white youths, necks hung with the chains that we have come to associate with the scorpions'—"

"We didn't terrorize nobody!" Denny (black shirt, silver fringe, beneath his vests and chains) sat with his back against the wall. "There wasn't nobody on the God-damn street!"

"That's cause they were all terrorized," Revelation explained. "Don't you see?"

"…'breaking into the Second City Bank'—?"

"Shit," Thruppence said (who had borrowed one of Denny's shirts) "we didn't do nothing yesterday."

"We robbed a fuckin' bank!" Filament (who had commandeered another) countered. "What do you mean we didn't do nothing? We robbed a whole God-damn bank!" She clasped her hands before her chin and looked delighted.

"A fuckin' bank?" Nightmare said. "Man, you're into some heavy stuff."

Spider, the youngest, blackest, and tallest scorpion in Kid's nest, leaned against the wall, rubbing the chains on his stomach, echoing Adam.

"…'It is nearly impossible, given our situation in Bellona, to identify any individuals in such an incident. Our reports are all from people behind locked doors and closed shutters'…"

"I can see all them motherfuckers now," Dollar said, too loud even for this merriment, "starin' at us out the peepholes. Just a-starin'. God damn!"

"…'Their number has been estimated anywhere from forty to preposterous figures in the high hundreds'…"

"You mean," Copperhead demanded with lip-thinning satisfaction, "twenty of us made enough noise so that they thought we was in the high hundreds?" He stood, triumvirate with Spitt and Glass; all three, staunch to dictum, had made no change in dress.

Glass wore his black vinyl vest.

Spitt wore his projector and his scar and his turquoise buckle.

Between Spitt and Copperhead, Kid saw the little girl in the maroon jeans. Her blue blouse was very clean but unironed. She kept raising her hand to flatten the collar, glancing down at herself, and rubbing her collar again. For the first time she seemed pretty. Kid tried to remember what his reaction had been to her before and what had changed it.

"…'in the high hundreds'," Revelation repeated, " 'which we would like to think'—"

"Maybe they ain't talking about you?" Dragon Lady suggested.

"Sure they're talking about us!" Priest insisted.

"We're the only ones who robbed a bank yesterday, I God-damn guess!"

"—'to think preposterous!' " which made Revelation laugh so hard he crumpled the paper.

"We gonna go to this fuckin' party tonight?" Cathedral demanded, catching both door jambs and swinging his bulk into the room. He swung back. The optic strand glittered around his brown neck, creased twice with fat. "What we waiting for?"

Kid grinned, nodded — was astonished at the silence. "Come on!"

They poured after him, laughing and shouting once more, out the front door and down the steps.

Pepper moved aside quickly.

"Change your mind yet?" Kid asked.

Pepper grinned his ruined grin. "Naw, I just don't feel like it, you know? I don't go for that stuff." His eyes flicked from Kid's.

Kid looked too.

From the bottom of the steps, among the milling scorpions, Tarzan watched; with a look of disgust he shook his head, turned away.

"Hey, don't let Tarzan stop you from coming," Kid said, suddenly angry. "I'll put the horsemen—" he nodded toward Copperhead and company—"on him so fast he won't be able to remember—" he started to say: His name—"what he thought it was he didn't like about you."

"Naw," Pepper said. "Naw, that ain't it. I'd just be all … Look, I thought I'd get me some wine, see. And maybe go over and say hello to Bunny. I ain't seen Bunny in a God-damn long time. She crazy, you know? She really a nut. But she's a good guy."

"Okay." Kid grinned back. "You do that."

"Uh…" Pepper said after him, "you have a nice time at the party…"

"Oh, hey…! Hey…! Come on, hey!" somebody shouted as Kid descended among them.

They started up the alley.

"Which way?" Nightmare called over a cluster of black heads in which, like, respectively, a lemon, a cumquat, and a dandelion among plums, were Tarzan's, and Copperhead's and Revelation's.

"Up this way. We have to pick up somebody."

Smoke encysted the corner street lamp in a giant pearl.

"God damn!" Somebody coughed. "How do you guys stand all this!"

(Kid couldn't see her because they had left the doorway's light.)

"You just ain't been here long enough, man! You'll get so you can't breathe without it after a while!"

"Somebody turn on some God-damn lights!" Kid called out, feeling across his chest for his projector. "Come on, huh?"

Dragon Lady's dragon raised, luminous jade, ahead. The mantis and the griffin flared, swaying, with misty penumbras.

An indigo spider flickered, mandibles higher than Kid's head — flickered out once around Copperhead, then gained full brightness like tardy neon.

Glass disappeared inside his newt.

Spitt's beetle glistened up like bottle glass.

Nightmare turned to Kid and grinned. "You got it pretty bright tonight, Kid," and flashed out beneath raised pincers.

The plastic colors opaled in the smoke.

Peacock (that was the Ripper), mantichor, and iguanadon, the spectral menagerie turned up the avenue.