Dhalgren (39 page)

Kidd shrugged. The soap bobbed away.

Denny nodded. "You interested, you ask Dragon Lady."

"Not that interested." He retrieved it, pushed it between his toes.

"You ask her, she'll tell you if she thinks you wanna know. Dragon Lady, she likes you." Suddenly Denny stood. "So does Nightmare. I'll be back in a second."

Kidd took another drink, and fell to scrubbing again. His nails were lined—ruined rim and bitten cuticle—with brown. He dunked his head, rubbed it, lifted it; dark streaks wormed from the drippings.

"Here you go, kid." Denny came back in with an armful of clothing and sat down again on the toilet. "Now we got
this
pair of pants; and this pair—naw, that's pretty raunchy. I guess these'll fit you. Nice belt, too. I dunno who left all this shit. You think there'd be a shirt in here, you know."

"I thought scorpions didn't wear shirts." Kidd stood up in the loud water to soap his groin.

Denny glanced at him once more. "Shit, I better keep my ass out of your way. You want a black leather vest? That'd look good on you, kid, you know? Scorpions just wear vests, usually. You seen the one I got?"

"How old are you?"

"Eh… sixteen," followed with a questioning glance.

Fifteen, Kidd decided. "I'm practically a dozen years older than you. Stop calling me kid."

"Huh? You are?"

"Yeah. Now throw me that other towel." As he caught it, the door crashed back. Dragon Lady lurched in, dark face twisted, stained teeth bared, shaking a fist with one finger up. "Look, when you go back upstairs, you tell that bitch to cut it out, you hear? It's driving me up the fuckin' wall! God damn, I know it's her kid, but—well, Jesus Christ, she been whining up there a fuckin' hour!" She looked at the ceiling and bellowed: "I mean, go out and take a
walk,
lady!"

"Dragon Lady…" Denny's interruption seemed to take in none of the scorpion's rage.

"We dragged the cocksucker up there for her! She keep it up, I'm gonna go up there and beat the shit out of her, if you don't quiet her down!"

Anger and the cold air: his erection, anyway, was gone: "The
walls
are thin." He rubbed himself with the bunched towel.

"Dragon Lady?"

"What do you want?"

"The… Kid was asking about the run."

Kidd sensed the hesitant disobedience was some acquiescence to previous commitment. But he could not be sure whether the newly implied capital was respectful or mocking.

"Yeah?" Dragon Lady's anger was quickly exhausted.

"Look, lemme out of here and see what I can do upstairs," Kidd said. "We'll talk about it some other time." He wished Mrs Richards would quiet too.

"Oh, yeah. Sure. Try and shut her up, huh?" Dragon Lady backed out again.

"You don't want the vest?" Denny still pawed in the heap.

The crying suddenly rose in pitch. Outside, Dragon Lady said, "God damn!"

"Yeah, I want the fucking vest." Kidd stepped from the tub, reached down, and drained the whisky. Twin warmths of agreement and alcohol turned through him.

Denny, still sitting, was bent almost double, as he sorted the clothing. His belt loops tugged his jeans below his buttocks' crevice.

Kidd sucked his teeth again and toweled his groin. "What's she here for, anyway?"

"Dragon Lady?" Denny glanced up, unbending.

"Yeah."

"You remember when you were here last time, Nightmare was collecting us for the run?" Denny shrugged and fell back to sorting. "Well, she's bringing us back, I guess."

"Oh."

The door opened again. The girl stood there, with a plastic cup this time. "Oh," she said. "I didn't know you were…" That was to Denny who didn't look up. So she said to Kidd, "Denny told me I should bring you another glass after fifteen minutes. Did you finish the first one?"

"You don't give a fuck whether he finished it or not," Denny said, still bent over. "Just give it to him."

"I'm finished."

She blinked rapidly, while they exchanged mug for cup. Then, without glancing at Denny, she left. Kidd drank some more, then put the cup on the tub edge. "Thanks."

Denny still didn't say anything, almost as though embarrassed.

In black jeans and leather vest, Kidd went into the front room.

"Oh, man!" Dragon Lady was saying. "This is just too much—"

The crying was louder here.

"Dragon Lady," Smokey said, rugging at the tassels of her macramé belt,
"why
do you shout things up there like that? It… it isn't necessary!"

"Well," Dragon Lady said, thumb hooked around hers, "if I was making that big a fool of myself, after about an hour, I don't know as how I wouldn't appreciate somebody telling me to cut it out—like they meant it!"

Which Smokey seemed to think was funny; Thirteen's reaction, though, was silent, hand-throwing frustration. He moved, almost protectively, between the two women; Smokey didn't seem to mind.

"Look," Thirteen said, with settling gestures of the palms, "if your neighbor, I mean your own
neighbor
is going through that, you're just obliged,
obliged,
see, to put up with—"

Dragon Lady threw her glass. It missed Thirteen. Smokey ducked too. "Hey, watch…" Thirteen shouted. Pieces of glass rocked on the floor. Wine licked down the wall. Smokey just blinked and looked like she didn't know whether to be amused or angry.

But Dragon Lady launched into doubled-over laughter. "Oh, Thirteen… Thirteen, you are so—" Chains swung, flung back around her neck as she stood. "You are
so
chicken shit!" She laughed again.

Maybe, Kidd thought, scorpions just yelled loud, laughed a lot, and threw things.

"Baby!" Dragon Lady shouted. "Adam! We gonna get out of here, soon…"

"Good-bye," Kidd said, at the door, and went. The girl in the blue sweatshirt who had brought him the whiskey was the only one who said "good-bye". Somehow, though, he was sure it was time to leave. In the hall, it occurred to him he hadn't even noticed if the sick girl were still in her bunk or not.

He carried the nest tables into nineteen-A.

Mrs Richards stood in the middle of the room.

"Um," he said, "I thought I'd bring these, uh, up with me. Since I was coming. You said you wanted them by the…" then went and put them by the balcony door.

"Your clothes," she said. "I was going to give you some of my… son's clothes."

"Oh. I got these…" They were all black, too.

Her hands gripped one another beneath her breasts. She nodded.

"Is June all right?"

She kept nodding.

"I tbought I heard you downstairs, but when I went in, you'd already gone up."

The nodding continued till suddenly she averted her face.

"I'll go bring the rest of the stuff up, ma'am."

He returned with rugs over each shoulder, and dumped them. Mrs Richards was out of the room. On his next trip (he'd considered Bobby's toys, but decided he'd better leave those down there) she passed through and did not look at him. Three more trips and everything (toys too: he took them to Bobby's room and put them in the closet right away) was up.

He sat on the easy chair and opened his notebook. A rusty line still ringed the gnawed lozenges of his nails. He took his pen (clipped to a buttonhole in the vest now) and turned pages. He was surprised how few empty ones were left. He turned to the last and realized pages had been torn out. Their remains feathered inside the coil. The cover was very loose. Half a dozen of the holes in the cardboard had pulled free. He turned back to the furthest-front free page and clicked his pen point.

Then, slowly, he lost himself in words:

Both legs were broken. His pulped skull and jellied hip…

He paused; he re-wrote:

Both legs broken, pulp-eyed, jelly-hipped…

Only somewhere in there his tongue balked on unwanted stress. He frowned for a way to remove a syllable that would give the line back its violence. When he found it, he realized he had to give up the
ed's
and re-order three words; what was left was a declarative sentence that meant something else entirely and made his back crawl under the leather vest, because, he recognized irrelevantly, it was far more horrifying than what he had intended to describe. The first conception had only approached the bearable limit. He took a breath, and a clause from the first three lines, to close the passage; and, writing it, saw only one word in it was necessary, so crossed out the others.

Mrs Richards came into the room, circled it, searching, saw him: "You're writing. I didn't mean to disturb your… writing."

"Oh, no." He closed the book. "I'm finished." He was tired. But he was finished.

"I thought perhaps you were writing some sort of… elegy. For…" and dropped her head.

"Oh. No…" he said, and decided "Elegy" was the title. "Look, you've got everything up here. Maybe I should just go on and leave."

"No." Mrs Richards' hand left her neck to reach for him. "Oh, you mustn't go! I mean you haven't talked to Arthur about your pay, have you?"

"Well, okay." He sat back.

Mrs Richards, all exhausted nervousness, sat across the coffee table from him.

He asked: "Where's June?"

"She's in her…" ended by vague gesture. She said, "It must be awful for you."

"It's worse for you." He was thinking: Her son's clothes? She couldn't have meant Bobby, we weren't anywhere near the same size. Edward's? "Mrs Richards, I can't even say how sorry I—"

She nodded again, chin striking her knuckles. "Oh, yes. You don't have to. I understand. You went down there and brought him—" in the pause he thought she was going to cry—"back. How can
I
say thank you for that? You went down there. I saw you when you brought him up. How can I say—"

"It's all right, Mrs Richards. Really." He wanted to ask her about the structure of light that had been in the elevator car with him; and could think of no way. Momentarily he wondered, maybe she hadn't seen it. But moved his jaws on one another to dispel those implications. "I don't have to wait here, for Mr Richards. I can catch him another time. You might want to be alone with him when…"

The disorganized movements of her face stopped. "Oh no, I want someone here! Please stay, stay for me! That would be—" she began to look around in the seat of her chair—"the kindest thing. You could do."

"All right."

What she looked for, she did not find. "I want somebody with me. I need somebody." She stood. "With me here." Again, she circled the room. "It's so strange, I haven't the faintest idea what I'll say. I wish I could phone him; on the phone it would be so much easier. But I just have to wait. He'll come in the door. And I'll say, Arthur, this afternoon, June backed Bobby into the elevator shaft and he fell down seventeen flights and killed himself…" She looked into the kitchen, crossed the room, looked down the hall.

"Are you
sure
you wouldn't feel better if I went?" He wanted to go, could not conceive her wanting him to remain, even though she waved her hand at him, even though she said:

"Please. You have to stay."

"Yes, ma'am. I will."

She came back to her chair. "It doesn't feel like we live here. The walls are blue. Before they were green. But all our furniture, it's all in the proper place."

"The rugs aren't down yet," he suggested. Well, it filled the silence.

"Oh, no. No, I don't think it's the rugs. It's the feeling. It's the feeling of trying to make a home. A home for my husband and my…" Then she pressed her lips together and dropped her head.

"Look, Mrs Richards, why don't you go in and lie down or something till Mr Richards gets back? I'll put the rugs down," and thought abruptly: That's what she wanted me to say; so
I'll
have to tell him!

Who told the damn kids to take the rugs up anyway? And couldn't remember whether it was him or her.

But she shook her head. "I couldn't sleep now. No. When Arthur comes back… no." The last was calm. She put—pushed her hands into her lap. Bobby's pile of books still sat in the corner… Kidd wished he had put them away.

She stood.

She walked the room once more.

Her motions began definitively but lost focus in a glance—first out the balcony doors, next into the dining room, now toward the hall.

She stopped behind her chair.

"Arthur," she said, followed by what sounded more like a comma of address than of apposition, "he's outside."

"Ma'am?"

"Arthur is outside, in that." She sat. "He goes out every day. I can watch him from the window turn down Forty-Fourth there and disappear. Into the smoke. Like that." Outside the balcony door, buildings were blurred. "We've moved." She watched the fog for the length of five breaths. "This building, it's like a chessboard. Now we occupy a different square. We had to move. We had to. Our position before was terrible." Smoke pulled from the window, uncovering more smoke—"But I didn't know the move would cost so much."—and more. "I am not prepared for this. I'm really not. Arthur goes out there, every day, and works in Systems. Maitland Systems Engineering. Then he comes home." She leaned forward. "Do you know, I don't believe all that out there is real. Once the smoke covers him, I don't believe he goes anywhere. I don't believe there's anyplace to go." She sat back. "I don't think I believe there ever was. I'm very much in love with that man. And I'm very much in awe of him. It frightens me how much I don't understand him. I often suspect that he isn't happy, that going out to work everyday in that—" she shook her head slightly—"that it doesn't give him anything real, the inner things he needs. Whatever it is he does out there, it frightens me. I picture him going to a great empty building, filled with offices, and desks, and work benches, and technician shops, and drafting tables, and filing cabinets, and equipment closets—no people. He walks up and down, and looks into the open office doors. I don't think he opens the closed ones. Sometimes he straightens a pile of papers on somebody's desk. Sometimes he looks through a pile of circuit plans, but he puts them back, neatly. That's all. All day. With no one else there. Do you think any of the windows are broken? Do you think he sometimes turns on a light switch and only one of those long fluorescent tubes flickers, faintly orange at one end? There's something wonderful about engineering, you know. I mean, you go in and you solve problems, you make things, with your hands, with your mind. You go in, and you have a problem to work with, and when you've finished solving it, you've… well, done something with real, tangible results. Like a farmer who raises a crop; you can see that it's there. You don't just push a button, again and again, or put endless piles of paper in the proper drawers. Engineers are very wise. Like farmers. They can also be very dense and stubborn. Oh, I don't know what's out there, where he goes to do every day. He won't talk about it. He used to. But not now I don't know where he goes, every morning. If he walked around the streets all day, I could tell that. That's not it. But whatever it is, it isn't good for him. He's a good man. He's more than a good man; he's an intelligent man. Do you know he was hired right out of his class in college? Oh, they were doing that a lot a few years ago. But it wasn't as common as all that when we were in school. He needs… something—I'd seem like a silly woman if I said 'worthy of him.' But that's what I mean. I've never understood what was out there." She looked again through the balcony doors. "I've suspected, oh, I've suspected that whatever was there wasn't really what he needed, what would make him—happy? Oh, I learned a long time ago you don't look for that. But the thing you do try for—excellence? Contentment? Oh no, oh no: not in a great empty office building, where the lights don't work, where the windows are broken, where there aren't any people."