Dhalgren (41 page)

Kidd said: "You're sure that's today's paper?" which was the third time he'd asked John that over the last hour.

"Sure I'm sure." John picked the paper up off the picnic table. "Tuesday, May 5th—that's May-day, isn't it?—1904. Faust brought it by this morning." He folded it back, began to beat it against his thigh.

"Tell Milly when she gets back thanks again for the clean shirt." Lanya tucked one side of the rough-dried blue cotton under her belt. "I'll bring it back later this afternoon."

"I will. I think Milly's laundry project—" John mused, beating, munching—"is one of the most successful we've investigated. Don't you?"

Lanya nodded, still tucking.

"Come on," Kidd said. "Let's get going. I mean if this is really Tuesday. You're sure he said Tuesday now?"

"I'm sure," Lanya said.

("Nope, you're still doing it wrong, now watch: I take them from you crossed and I give them to you uncrossed." His fingers smudged to the second knuckle and bunched at the base of the charred batons, came forward. Hers, smeared equally, hesitated, went back to fiddle with oae another, started to take them again. She said: "I just don't get it. I don't get it at all." Fewer laughed this time.)

"So long," Kidd said to John, who nodded, his mouth full.

They made their way through the knapsacks.

"That was nice of them to feed us… again," he? said. "They're not bad kids."

"They're nice kids." She brushed at her clean, wrinkled front. "Wish I had an iron."

"You really have to get dressed up to go visit Calkins' place, huh?"

Lanya glanced appraisingly at his new black jeans, his black leather vest. "Well, you're practically in uniform already. I, unlike you, however, am not at my best when scruffy."

They made their way toward the park entrance.

"What's the laundry project?" he asked. "Do they have some place where they pound the clothes with paddles on a rock?"

"I think," Lanya said, "Milly and Jommy and Wally and What's-her-name-with-all-the-Indian-silver found a laundromat or something a few days ago. Only the power's off. Today they've gone off to find the nearest three-pronged outlet that works."

"Then when did the one you have on get done?"

"Milly and I washed a whole bunch by hand in the ladies' john yesterday, while you were at work."

"Oh."

"Recording engineer to laundress," Lanya mused as they passed through the lion gate, "in less than a year." She humphed. "If you asked him, I suspect John would tell you that's progress."

"The paper says it's Tuesday." Kidd moved his thumb absently against the blade of his orchid he'd hooked through a side belt loop; inside it, the chain harness jingled, each step. "He said come up when the paper said it was Tuesday. You don't think he's forgotten?"

"If he has, we'll remind him," Lanya said. "No, I'm sure he hasn't forgotten."

He could press his thumb or his knuckles against the sharp edges and leave only the slightest line, that later, like the other cross-hatches in the surface skin, filled with dirt; but he could hardly feel it. "Maybe we'll avoid any run-ins with scorpions today," he said as they crossed from Brisbain North to Brisbain South. "If we're lucky."

"No self-respecting scorpion would be up at this hour of the morning," Lanya said. "They all sleep till three or four, then carouse till dawn, didn't you know?"

"Sounds like the life. You been in Calkins' place before, you keep telling me. It'll be okay?"

"If I hadn't been in there before—" she slapped her harmonica on her palm—"I wouldn't be making this fuss." Three glistening notes. She frowned, and blew again.

"I think you look pretty good scruffy," he said.

She played more notes, welding them nearly into melody, till she changed her mind, laughed, or complained, or was silent, before beginning another. They walked, Lanya strewing incomplete tunes.

His notebook flapped his hip. (His other hand was petaled in steel, now.) He swung, in twin protections, from the curb. "I wonder if I'm scared of what he's going to say."

Between notes: "Hmm?"

"Mr Newboy. About my poems. Shit, I'm not going to see him. I want to see where Calkins lives. I don't care what Mr Newboy says about what I write."

"I left three perfectly beautiful dresses there, upstairs in Phil's closet. I wonder if they're still there."

"Probably, if Phil is," he said from within his protections.

"Christ, no. Phil hasn't been in the city for… weeks!"

The air was tingly and industrial. He looked up on a sky here the color of clay, there the color of ivory, lighter over there like tarnished tin.

"Good idea," Lanya said, "for me to split. I got you." Slipping her hand between blades, she grasped two of his fingers. Even on her thin wrist, turned, the blades pressed, rubbed, creased her skin—

"Watch out. You're gonna…"

But she didn't.

Over the wall hung hanks of ivy.

At the brass gate, she said, "It's quiet inside."

"Do you ring?" he asked, "or do you shout?" Then he shouted: "Mr Newboy!"

She pulled her hand gingerly away. "There used to be a bell, I think…" She fingered the stone around the brass plate.

"Hello…?" from inside. Footsteps ground the gravel somewhere behind the pines.

"Hello, sir!" Kidd called, pulling the orchid off, pushing a blade into a belt-loop.

Ernest Newboy walked out of shaggy green. "Yes, it is Tuesday, isn't it." He gestured with a rolled paper. "I just found out half an hour ago." He did something on the inside of the latch plate. The gate clanked, swung in a little. "Glad to see you both." He pulled it open the rest of the way.

"Isn't the man who used to be a guard here anymore?" Lanya asked, stepping through. "He had to stay in there all the time." She pointed to a small, green booth, out of sight of the sidewalk.

"Tony?" Mr Newboy said. "Oh, he doesn't go on till sometime late in the afternoon. But practically everybody's out today. Roger decided to take them on a tour."

"And you stayed for us?" Kidd asked. "You didn't have to—"

"No, I just wasn't up to it. I wouldn't have gone anyway."

"Tony…" Lanya mulled, looking at the weathered paint on the gate shed. "I thought his name was something Scandinavian."

"Then it must be somebody else now," Mr Newboy said. He put his hands in his pockets. "Tony's quite as Italian as you can get. He's really very nice."

"So was the other one," Lanya said. "Things are always changing around here."

"Yes, they are."

They started up the path.

"There're so many people in and out of here all the time I've given up trying to keep track. It's very hectic. But you've picked a quiet day. Roger has taken everyone down town to see the paper office." Newboy smiled. "Except me. I always insist on sleeping late Tuesdays."

"It's nice to see the place again," Lanya consented. "When will everybody be back?"

"I would imagine as soon as it gets dark. You said you'd stayed here before. Would you like to wait and say hello to Roger?"

"No," Lanya said. "No. I was just curious."

Mr Newboy laughed. "I see."

The gravel (chewing Kidd's calloused foot) turned between two white columned mock-temples. The trees gave way to hedges; And what might have been an orchard further.

"Can we cut across the garden?"

"Of course. We'll go to the side terrace. The coffee urn's still hot I know, and I'll see if I can find some tea cakes. Roger keeps telling me I have the run of the place, but I still feel a little strange prying into Mrs Alt's kitchen just like that—"

"Oh, that's—" and "You don't have—" Kidd and Lanya began together.

"No, I know where they are. And it's time for my coffee break—that's what you call it here?"

"You'll love these!" Lanya exclaimed as they stepped through the high hedge. "Roger has the most beautiful flowers and—"

Brambles coiled the trellis. Dried tendrils curled on splintered lathe. The ground was gouged up in black confusion here, and here, and there.

"—What in the world…" Lanya began. "What
happened?"

Mr Newboy looked puzzled. "I didn't know anything bad. It's been like this since I've been here."

"But it was full of flowers: those sun-colored orange things, like tigers. And irises. Lots of irises—"

Kidd's foot cooled in moist ground.

"Really?" Newboy asked. "How long ago were you there?"

Lanya shrugged. "Weeks… three weeks, four?"

"How strange." Mr Newboy shook his head as the crossed the littered earth. "I'd always gotten the impression they'd been like this, for years…"

In a ten-foot dish of stone, leaves rotted in puddles.

Lanya's head shook. "The fountain used to be going all the time. It had a Perseus, or a Hermes or something in it. Where did it get to?"

"Dear me," Newboy squinted. "I think it's in a pile of junk behind the secretary cottage. I saw something like that when I was wandering around. But I never knew it had anything to do with the fountain. I wonder who's been around here long enough to know?"

"Why don't you ask Mr Calkins?" Kidd said.

"Oh, no. I don't think I would do that." Mr Newboy looked at Lanya with bright complicity. "I don't think I would do that at all."

"No," said Lanya, face fallen before the desolation, "I don't think so."

At the brim's crack, the ground, oozy under thin grass, kept their prints like plaster.

They passed another vined fence; a deal of lawn, and, higher than the few full trees, the house. (On a rise off to one side was another house, only three floors. The secretary cottage?)

Set in the grass a verdigrised plate read:

MAY

From the five fat, stone towers—he sought a sixth for symmetry and failed to find it—it looked as though a modern building of dark wood, glass, and brick had been built around an old one of stone.

"How many people does he have here?" Kidd asked.

"I don't really know," Mr Newboy said. They reached the terrace flag. "At least fifteen. Maybe twenty-five. The people he has for help, they're always changing. I really don't see how he gets anything done for looking after them. Unless Mrs Alt does all that." They climbed the concrete steps to the terrace.

"Wouldn't you lose fifteen people in there?" Kidd asked.

The house, here, was glass: inside were maple wall panels, tall brass lamps, bronze statuary on small end-tables between long couches covered in gold velvet, all wiped across with flakes of glare.

"Oh, you never feel the place is crowded."

They passed another window-wall; Kidd could see two walls covered with books. Dark beams inside held up a balcony, flanked with chairs of gold and green brocade; silver candlesticks—one near, one far off in shadow— bloomed on white doilies floating on the mahogany river of a dining table. "Sometimes I've walked around thinking I was perfectly alone for an hour or so only to come across a party of ten in one of the other rooms. I suppose if the place had a full staff—" dried leaves shattered underfoot—"it wouldn't be so lonely. Here we are."

Wooden chairs with colored canvas webbing sat around the terrace. Beyond the balustrade the rocks were licked over with moss and topped by birches, maples and, here and there, thick oaks.

"You sit down. I'll be right back."

Kidd sat—the chair was lower and deeper than he thought—and pulled his notebook into his lap. The glass doors swung behind Newboy. Kidd turned. "What are you looking at?"

"The November garden." Arms crossed, Lanya leaned on the stone rail. "You can't see the plaque from here. It's on top of that rock."

"What's in the… November garden?"

She shrugged a "nothing." "The first night I got here there was a party going on there: November, October, and December."

"How many gardens does he have?"

"How many months are there?"

"What about the garden we first came through?"

"That one," she glanced back, "doesn't have a name." She looked again at the rocks. "It was a marvelous party, with colored lights strung up. And a band: violins, flutes, and somebody playing a harp."

"Where did he get violins here in Bellona?"

"He did. And people with lots and lots of gorgeous clothes."

Kidd was going to say something about Phil.

Lanya turned. "If my dresses are still here, I know exactly where they'd be."

Mr Newboy pushed through the glass doors with a teawagon. Urn and cups rattled twice as the tires crossed the sill. The lower tray held dishes of pastry. "You caught Mrs Alt right after a day of baking."

"Hey," Kidd said. "Those look good."

"Help yourself." He poured steaming coffee into blue porcelain. "Sugar, cream?"

Kidd shook his head; the cup warmed his knee. He bit. Cookie crumbs fell and rolled on his notebook.

Lanya, sitting on the wall and swinging her tennis shoes against the stone, munched a crisp cone filled with butter-cream.

"Now," Mr Newboy said. "Have you brought some poems?"

"Oh." Kidd brushed crumbs away. "Yeah. But they're handwritten. I don't have any typewriter. I print them out neat, after I work on them."

"I can probably decipher good fair copy."

Kidd looked at the notebook, at Lanya, at Mr Newboy, at the notebook. "Here."

Mr Newboy settled back in his seat and turned through pages. "Ah. I see your poems are all on the left."

Kidd held his cup up. The coffee steamed his lips.

"So…" Mr Newboy smiled into the book, and paused. "You have received that holy and spectacular wound which bleeds… well, poetry." He turned another page, paused to look at it not quite long enough (in Kidd's estimate) to read it. "But have you hunkered down close to it, sighted through the lips of it the juncture of your own humanity with that of the race?"

"Sir…?"

"Whether love or rage," Mr Newboy went on, not looking up, "or detachment impels the sighting, no matter. If you don't do it, all your blood is spilled pointlessly… Ah, I suppose I am merely trying to reinvest with meaning what is inadequately referred to in art as Universality. It
is
an inadequate reference, you know." He shook his head and turned another page. "There's no reason why all art should appeal to all people. But every editor and entrepreneur, deep in his heart of hearts is sure it does, wants it to, wishes it would. In the bar, you asked about publication?" He looked up, brightly.