Dhalgren (4 page)

He peered around the building edge.

Three people vaulted from a shattered display window to join two waiting. Barking, a dog followed them to the sidewalk. One man wanted to climb back in; did. Two others took off down the block.

The dog circled, loped his way—

He pulled back, free hand grinding on the brick.

The dog, crouched and dancing ten feet off, barked, barked, barked again.

Dim light slathered canine tongue and teeth. Its eyes (he swallowed, hard) were glistening red, without white or pupil, smooth as crimson glass.

The man came back out the window. One in the group turned and shouted: "Muriel!" (It could have been a woman.) The dog wheeled and fled after.

Another street lamp, blocks down, gave them momentary silhouette.

As he stepped from the wall, his breath unraveled the silence, shocked him as much as if someone had called his… name? Pondering, he crossed the street toward the corner of the loading porch. On tracks under the awning, four- and six-foot butcher hooks swung gently—though there was no wind. In fact, he reflected, it would take a pretty hefty wind to
start
them swinging—

"Hey!"

Hands, free and flowered, jumped to protect his face. He whirled, crouching.

"You down there!"

He looked up, with hunched shoulders.

Smoke rolled about the building top, eight stories above.

"What you doing, huh?"

He lowered his hands.

The voice was rasp rough, sounded near drunk.

He called: "Nothing!" and wished his heart would still. "Just walking around."

Behind scarves of smoke, someone stood at the cornice. "What you been up to this evening?"

"Nothing, I said." He took a breath: "I just got here, over the bridge. About a half hour ago."

"Where'd you get the orchid?"

"Huh?" He raised his hand again. The street lamp dribbled light down a blade. "This?"

"Yeah."

"Some women gave it to me. When I was crossing the bridge."

"I saw you looking around the corner at the hubbub. I couldn't tell from up here—was it scorpions?"

"Huh?"

"I said, was it scorpions?"

"It was a bunch of people trying to break into a store, I think. They had a dog with them."

After silence, gravelly laughter grew. "You really haven't been here long, kid?"

"I—" and realized the repetition—"just got here."

"You out to go exploring by yourself? Or you want company for a bit."

The guy's eyes, he reflected, must be awfully good. "Company… I guess."

"I'll be there in a minute."

He didn't see the figure go; there was too much smoke. And after he'd watched several doorways for several minutes, he figured the man had changed his mind.

"Here you go," from the one he'd set aside for ducking.

"Name is Loufer. Tak Loufer. You know what that means, Loufer? Red Wolf; or Fire Wolf."

"Or Iron Wolf." He squinted. "Hello."

"Iron Wolf? Well, yeah…" The man emerged, dim on the top step. "Don't know if I like that one so much. Red Wolf. That's my favorite." He was a very big man.

He came down two more steps; his engineer's boots, hitting the boards, sounded like dropped sandbags. Wrinkled black jeans were half stuffed into the boot tops. The worn cycle jacket was scarred with zippers. Gold stubble on chin and jaw snagged the street light. Chest and belly, bare between flapping zipper teeth, were a tangle of brass hair. The fingers were massive, matted—"What's your name?"—but clean, with neat and cared-for nails.

"
Um
… well, I'll tell you: I don't know." It sounded funny, so he laughed. "I don't know."

Loufer stopped, a step above the sidewalk, and laughed too. "Why the hell don't you?" The visor of his leather cap blocked his upper face with shadow.

He shrugged. "I just don't. I haven't for… a while now."

Loufer came down the last step, to the pavement "Well, Tak Loufer's met people here with stranger stories than that. You some kind of nut, or something? You been in a mental hospital, maybe?"

"Yes…" He saw that Loufer had expected a
No.

Tak's head cocked. The shadow raised to show the rims of Negro-wide nostrils above an extremely Caucasian mouth. The jaw looked like rocks in hay-stubble.

"Just for a year. About six or seven years ago."

Loufer shrugged. "I was in jail for three months… about six or seven years ago. But that's as close as I come. So you're a no-name kid? What are you, seventeen? Eighteen? No, I bet you're even—"

"Twenty-seven."

Tak's head cocked the other way. Light topped his cheek bones. "Neurotic fatigue, do it every time. You notice that about people with serious depression, the kind that sleep all day? Hospital type cases, I mean. They always look ten years younger than they are."

He nodded.

"I'm going to call you Kid, then. That'll do you for a name. You can be—The Kid, hey?"

Three gifts, he thought: armor, weapon, title (like the prisms, lenses, mirrors on the chain itself). "Okay…" with the sudden conviction this third would cost, by far, the most. Reject it, something warned: "Only I'm not a kid. Really; I'm twenty-seven. People always think I'm younger than I am. I just got a baby face, that's all. I've even got some white hair, if you want to see—"

"Look, Kid—" with his middle fingers, Tak pushed up his visor—"we're the same age." His eyes were large, deep, and blue. The hair above his ears, no longer than the week's beard, suggested a severe crew under the cap. "Any sights you particularly want to see around here? Anything you heard about? I like to play guide. What do you hear about us, outside, anyway? What do people say about us here in the city?"

"Not much."

"Guess they wouldn't." Tak looked away. "You just wander in by accident, or did you come on purpose?"

"Purpose."

"Good Kid! Like a man with a purpose. Come on up here. This street turns into Broadway soon as it leaves the waterfront."

"What
is
there to see?"

Loufer gave a grunt that did for a laugh. "Depends on what sights are out." Though he had the beginning of a gut, the ridges under the belly hair were muscle deep. "If we're
really
lucky, maybe—" the ashy leather, swinging as Loufer turned, winked over a circular brass buckle that held together a two-inch-wide garrison—"we won't run into anything at all! Come on." They walked.

"…kid. The Kid…"

"Huh?" asked Loufer.

"I'm thinking about that name."

"Will it do?"

"I don't know."

Loufer laughed. "I'm not going to press for it, Kid. But I think it's yours."

His own chuckle was part denial, part friendly.

Loufer's grunt in answer echoed the friendly.

They walked beneath low smoke.

There is something delicate about this Iron Wolf, with his face like a pug-nosed, Germanic gorilla. It is neither his speech nor his carriage, which have their roughness, but the way in which he assumes them, as though the surface where speech and carriage are flush were somehow inflamed.

"Hey, Tak?"

"Yeah?"

"How long have you been here?"

"If you told me today's date, I could figure it out. But I've let it go. It's been a while." After a moment, Loufer asked, in a strange, less blustery voice: "Do you know what day it is?"

"No, I…" The strangeness scared him. "I don't." He shook his head while his mind rushed away toward some other subject. "What do you do? I mean, what did you work at?"

Tak snorted. "Industrial engineering."

"Were you working here, before… all this?"

"Near here. About twelve miles down, at Helmsford. There used to be a plant that jarred peanut butter. We were converting it into a vitamin C factory. What do you do—? Naw, you don't look like you do too much in the line of work." Loufer grinned. "Right?"

He nodded. It was reassuring to be judged by appearances, when the judge was both accurate and friendly. And, anyway, the rush had stopped.

"I was staying down in Helmsford," Loufer went on. "But I used to drive up to the city a lot. Bellona used to be a pretty good town." Tak glanced at a doorway too dark to see if it was open or shut. "Maybe it still is, you know? But one day I drove up here. And it was like this."

A fire escape, above a street lamp pulsing slow as a failing heart, looked like charred sticks, some still aglow.

"Just like this?"

On a store window their reflection slid like ripples over oil.

"There were a few more places the fire hadn't reached; a few more people who hadn't left yet—not all the newcomers had arrived."

"You were here at the very beginning, then?"

"Oh, I didn't see it break out or anything. Like I say, when I got here, it looked more or less like it does now."

"Where's your car?"

"Sitting on the street with the windshield busted, the tires gone—along with most of the motor. I let a lot of stupid things happen, at first. But I got the hang of it after a while." Tak made a sweeping gesture with both hands—and disappeared before it was finished: they'd passed into complete blackness. "A thousand people are supposed to be here now. Used to be almost two million."

"How do you know, I mean the population?"

"That's what they publish in the paper."

"Why do you stay?"

"Stay?" Loufer's voice neared that other, upsetting tone. "Well, actually, I've thought about that one a lot. I think it has to do with—I got a theory now—freedom. You know, here—" ahead, something moved—"you're free. No laws: to break, or to follow. Do anything you want. Which does funny things to you. Very quickly, surprisingly quickly, you become—" they neared another half-lit lamp; what moved became smoke, lobling from a window sill set with glass teeth like an extinguished jack-o-lantern—"exactly who you are." And Tak was visible again. "If you're ready for that, this is where it's at."

"It must be pretty dangerous. Looters and stuff."

Tak nodded. "Sure it's dangerous."

"Is there a lot of street mugging?"

"Some." Loufer made a face. "Do you know about crime, Kid? Crime is funny. For instance, now, in most American cities—New York, Chicago, St. Louis—crimes, ninety-five per cent I read, are committed between six o'clock and midnight. That means you're safer walking around the street at three o'clock in the morning than you are going to the theater to catch a seven-thirty curtain. I wonder what time it is now. Sometime after two I'd gather. I don't think Bellona is much more dangerous than any other city. It's a very small city, now. That's a sort of protection."

A forgotten blade scraped his jeans. "Do you carry a weapon?"

"Months of detailed study on what is going on where, the movements and variations of our town. I look around a lot. This way."

That wasn't buildings on the other side of the street: Trees rose above the park wall, black as shale. Loufer headed toward the entrance.

"Is it safe in there?"

"Looks pretty scary." Tak nodded. "Probably keep any criminal with a grain of sense at home. Anybody who wasn't a mugger would be out of his mind to go in there." He glanced back, grinned. "Which probably means all the muggers have gotten tired of waiting and gone home to bed a long time ago. Come on."

Stone lions flanked the entrance.

"It's funny," Tak said; they passed between. "You show me a place where they tell women to stay out of at night because of all the nasty, evil men lurking there to do nasty, evil things; and you know what you'll find?"

"Queers."

Tak glanced over, pulled his cap visor down. "Yeah."

The dark wrapped them up and buoyed them along the path.

There is nothing safe about the darkness of this city and its stink. Well, I have abrogated all claim to safety, coming here. It is better to discuss it as though I had chosen. That keeps the scrim of sanity before the awful set. What will lift it?

"What were you in prison for?"

"Morals charge," Tak said.

He was steps behind Loufer now. The path, which had begun as concrete, was now dirt. Leaves hit at him. Three times his bare foot came down on rough roots; once his swinging arm scraped lightly against bark.

"Actually," Tak tossed back into the black between them, "I was acquitted. The situation, I guess. My lawyer figured it was better I stayed in jail without bail for ninety days, like a misdemeanor sentence. Something had got lost in the records. Then, at court, he brought that all out, got the charge changed to public indecency; I'd already served sentence." Zipper-jinglings suggested a shrug. "Everything considered, it worked out. Look!"

The carbon black of leaves shredded, letting through the ordinary color of urban night.

"Where?" They had stopped among trees and high brush.

"Be quiet! There…"

His wool shushed Tak's leather. He whispered: "Where do you… ?"

Out on the path, sudden, luminous, and artificial, a seven-foot dragon swayed around the corner, followed by an equally tall mantis and a griffin. Like elegant plastics, internally lit and misty, they wobbled forward. When dragon and mantis swayed into each other, they—meshed!

He thought of images, slightly unfocused, on a movie screen, lapping.

"Scorpions!" Tak whispered.

Tak's shoulder pushed his.

His hand was on a tree trunk. Twig shadows webbed his forearm, the back of his hand, the bark. The figure neared; the web slid. The figures passed; the web slid off. They were, he realized, as eye-unsettling as pictures on a three-dimensional postcard—with the same striations hanging, like a screen, just before, or was it just behind them.

The griffin, furthest back, flickered:

A scrawny youngster, with pimply shoulders, in the middle of a cautious, bow-legged stride—then griffin again. (A memory of spiky, yellow hair; hands held out from the freckled, pelvic blade.)

The mantis swung around to look back, went momentarily out:

This one, anyway, was wearing
some
clothes—a brown, brutal looking youngster; the chains he wore for necklaces growled under his palm, while he absently caressed his left breast. "Come on, Baby! Get your ass in gear!" which came from a mantis again.