Dhalgren (46 page)

"If you're back down on Jackson, then you got him for a nextdoor neighbor; so you're more or less stuck with associating with him, huh? I just have to be friendly in the bar." Suddenly Tak slapped the table edge: "You know what the problem is, Paul? George is
nicer
than you."

"Huh?"

"No, I mean: I know you both, I like you both. But I like George more."

"Hell, man, I seen those posters Reverend Amy's giving out. I know what you guys in here like—"

"No," Tak said. "No, you're missing the point."

"Like hell I am— Hey, you know?" Fenster turned to Kidd. "Have you ever
read
those articles, the ones in the issue about the riot, and the other issue with the interview?"

"Huh? No, but I heard about them."

"Tak hasn't read them either."

"I've heard enough about them," Tak echoed.

"But here's the point. Everybody's heard about the articles. But since I've been here, I've only talked to one person who actually says he read them."

"Who?" Tak asked.

"George Harrison." Fenster sat back and looked satisfied.

Kidd tilted his brandy. "I met somebody who read them."

"Yeah?" Fenster asked. "Who?"

"The girl he screwed. And her family. Only they didn't recognize her in the pictures." From something that happened on Fenster's face without destroying the smile, Kidd decided maybe Fenster wasn't so bad after all.

"You met her?"

"Yeah." Kidd drank. "You probably will too. Everybody keeps telling me how small the city is. Hey, Tak, thanks for the drink." He started to stand.

Tak said, "You sure you're all right, Kidd?"

"Yeah. I feel better." He nodded at Fenster, then walked, relieved, to the bar.

When Jack said, "Hey, how you doing?" Kidd started. His relief, the shallowest of things, vanished.

"Hello," he said. "Fine. How you been?"

"I been fine." Jack's shirt was wrinkled, his eyes red, his cheeks unshaven. He looked very happy. "I just been fine. How are you? And your girl friend?"

"I'm fine," Kidd repeated, nodding. "She's fine."

Jack laughed. "That's great. Yeah, that's really great. Say, I want you to meet a friend of mine. This is Frank." Jack stepped back.

"Hello." With a high, bald forehead and neck-length hair, Frank had apparently decided to grow a beard perhaps a week ago:
I
give them to you crossed, I take them uncrossed…
yes, that was who it was. Only he had put on a green shirt with milky snaps instead of buttons; and washed his hands.

"This," Jack explained to Frank, "is the friend of Tak's I was telling you about who writes the poems. Only I can't remember his name."

"Kidd," Kidd said.

"Yeah, they call him the Kid." Jack continued his explanation. "Kid, this is Frank. Frank was in the army, and he writes poems too. I was telling him all about you, before. Wasn't I?"

"Yeah, I've seen you around the park." Frank nodded. "Jack was telling me you were a poet?"

Kidd shrugged. "Yeah. A little."

"We been drinking," Jack continued his explanation, "all afternoon."

"And it's night now." Frank grinned.

"This God-damn city. If you wanna stay drunk, it sure is the place to come. You can buy drinks at the God-damn bars and you don't have to pay no money. Or anything. And anyplace you go, people always got stuff to smoke or to drink. Jesus." He burped. "I gotta go water the garden. Be back in a minute." He stepped away and headed for the john.

Kidd felt a wave of disorientation, but the phrases he'd prepared before broke through: "You been looking out for nature boy?"

"He's sort of looking out for me," Frank said. "We're both army deserters. Him, a little more recently. Only I think Jack's getting homesick."

Kidd swallowed. "For the army?" And felt better.

Frank nodded. "I'm not. I left about six months ago. Happy I'm here. I'm getting a chance to write again, and it's a pretty together place."

"You," and at the reiteration he felt toward Frank sudden, surprising, and total distrust, "write poems?" So he smiled.

Frank smiled back and nodded over his glass: "Well, I've been sort of lucky about getting things published, really. The book was just an accident. One of the west coast little magazines puts out good editions of people who contribute. I was lucky enough to get selected."

"You mean you have a book?"

"No copies in Bellona." Frank nodded. "Like I said, even that was an accident."

"You been writing a long time, then."

"Since I was fifteen or sixteen. I started in high school; and most of what you write back then is crap."

"How old are you now?"

"Twenty-five."

"Then you've been one for a long time. A poet. I mean it's your job, your profession."

Frank laughed. "You can't make a living at it. I taught for a year at San Francisco State, till I went into the army. I like to think of it as a profession, though."

Kidd nodded. "You got a lot of poems in magazines and things?"

"Three in the
New Yorker
about a year ago. Some people think that's my crowning achievement. Two in
Poetry, Chicago,
before that. There're a few others. But those are the ones I'm proud of."

"Yeah, I used to read that magazine a lot."

"You did?"

"It's the one that used to have the little curlicue horse a long time ago? Now it just has funny pictures on it. I read it every month in the library, at school. For years."

Frank laughed. "Then you're doing better than am."

"I've seen the
New Yorker,"
Kidd said. "But I neve read it."

Frank's expression changed slightly and noncomittally.

"And I've never published any poems at all," Kidd said. "Anyplace. I've only been a poet a little while, couple of weeks. Since I came here. You probably know lot more about it than I do."

"About getting things published?"

"That too. I mean about writing them, though. It's hard."

"Yes, I guess it can be."

"It's about the God-damned hardest thing I've eve done."

Frank laughed and rubbed his young beard. "Sometimes. You've… only been writing—poems, for a few weeks? What made you start?"

"I don't know. What made you?"

"I suppose," and Frank nodded again, "I had to."

"Do you—" Kidd paused a moment, considering the theft—"do you find Bellona stimulating, making you produce work?"

"About as much as anyplace else, I guess. Maybe little less, because you have to spend so much time scuffling, you know? I was working on a few short things. But I lost my notebook a few weeks back."

"Huh?"

Frank nodded. "Since then I haven't written anyhing. I haven't had time."

"Hey, you lost your notebook!" Discomfort broached fear. "Christ, that must be…" Then his feelings centered. Kidd leaned over the bar. "Hey, can I get the notebook! Huh? Come on! You want to give me the notebook, please!"

"All right," the bartender said. "All right, I'll get it. Simmer down. You guys ready for another—"

"The notebook!" Kidd knocked the counter with his fist.

"All right!" Sucking his teeth, the bartender pulled it from the cage and flopped it on the bar.
"Now
do you want another drink?"

"Oh. Yeah," Kidd said. "Sure."

Besides blood, urine, mulch, and burn marks, there were rings from the bottles he had set haphazardly on the cover. He opened it in the middle. "… This isn't yours, is it?"

Frank frowned. "You found this?"

"Yeah. It was in the park."

Kidd looked over Frank's shoulder and read the listed names, till Frank turned the page.

"Hey, what you doin'?" Jack said behind them. "You showing Frank here your poetry writing?"

Kidd turned around. "Just this notebook I found, filled up with somebody's writing."

"Frank's pretty smart." Jack nodded. "He knows about all sorts of shit. He taught history. In a college. And he cut out on the army too."

"Lots of us have," Frank said, not looking up. "The ones with any sense go to Canada. The rest of us end up here." He turned a page.

"You been having a good time?" Jack put his hand on Kidd's shoulder. "This is the place to have a good time, you know?"

"Fine time," Kidd said. "But I haven't seen you around. Where you been staying?"

"Stayed on a few days with Tak." Jack's hand rose and fell. "He kicked me out after a week when I wouldn't let him suck on my peter no more."

Across the bar Loufer, his cap low on his ears, still talked earnestly with Fenster.

Jack's hand fell again. "They got
girls
in this city! Frank knows this whole house. Full of girls. Real nice girls. We was over there, and…" His grin widened toward ecstasy. "They like Frank a lot." He screwed up his face. "I think that's 'cause he's growin' a beard and things. Or maybe taught in a college."

"They liked you okay," Frank said, still not looking up. "They just didn't know you."

"Yeah, I guess they just didn't know me well enough, yet."

"Say?" Frank looked up now. "You wrote all this—?"

"Yeah—well, no. I mean most of it was written in there when I found it. That's why I wanted to know if it was yours."

"Oh," Frank said. "No. It's not mine."

Kidd turned from under Jack's hand. "That's good. Because when you said you had lost your notebook, you know, I just thought…"

"Yeah," Frank said. "I see."

"We're gonna go out and look for some more girls," Jack said. "You wanna come along?"

"Jack thinks there's safety in numbers," Frank said.

"No. No, that's not it," Jack protested. "I just thought he might want to come and help us look for some girls. That's all. Maybe we can go back to that house?"

"Hey, thanks," Kidd said. "But I got to hang around here for a while."

"The Kidd here's got his own old lady," Jack said in knowing explanation. "I bet he's waiting on her."

"Hey, I'm… sorry it's not your notebook," Kidd told Frank.

"Yeah," Frank said. "So am I."

"We see you around," Jack said, while Kidd (smiling, nodding) wondered at Frank's tone.

Absently rubbing the paper (he could feel the pen's blind impressions), he watched them leave.

Bumping shoulders with them, Ernest Newboy came into the bar. Newboy paused, pulling his suit jacket hem, looked around, saw Fenster, saw Kidd, and came toward Kidd.

Kidd sat up a little straighter.

"Hello, there. How've you been for the past few days?"

The small triumph prompted Kidd's grin. To hide it he looked back at the book. The poem Frank had left showing, had been tentatively titled:

LOUFER

In the margin, he had noted alternates:
The Red Wolf, The Fire Wolf, The Iron Wolf.
"Eh… fine." Suddenly, and decisively, he took his pen from the vest's upper button hole, crossed out LOUFER, and wrote above it: WOLF BRINGER. He looked up at Newboy. "I been real fine; and working a lot too."

"That's good." Newboy picked up the gin and tonic the bartender left. "Actually I was hoping I'd run into you tonight. It has to do with a conversation I had with Roger."

"Mr Calkins?"

"We were out having after-dinner brandy in the October gardens and I was telling him about your poems." Newboy paused a moment for a reaction but got none. "He was very impressed with what I told him."

"How could he be impressed?
He
didn't read them."

Newboy doffed his gin. "Perhaps what impressed him was my description, as well as the fact that—how shall I say it? Not that they are
about
the city here—Bellona. Rather, Bellona provides, in the ones I recall best at any rate, the decor which allow the poems to… take place." The slightest questioning at the end of Newboy's sentence asked for corroboration.

More to have him continue than to corroborate, Kidd nodded.

"It furnishes the décor, as well as a certain mood or concern. Or am I being too presumptuous?"

"Huh? No, sure."

"At any rate, Roger brought up the idea: Why not ask the young man if he would like to have them printed?"

"Huh? No, sure." Though the punctuation was the same, each word had a completely different length, emphasis, and inflection. "I mean, that would be…" A grin split the tensions binding his face. "But he hasn't seen them!"

"I pointed that out. He said he was deferring to my enthusiasm."

"You were
that
enthusiastic? He just wants to put some of them in his newspaper, maybe?"

"Another suggestion I made. No, he wants to print them up in a book, and distribute them in the city. He wants me to get copies of the poems from you, and a title."

The sound was all breath expelling. Kidd drew his hand back along the counter. His heart pounded loudly, irregularly, and though he didn't think he was sweating, he felt a drop run the small of his back, pause at the chain—"You must have been pretty enthusiastic—" and roll on.

Newboy turned to his drink. "Since Roger made the suggestion, and I gather you would like to go along with it, let me be perfectly honest: I enjoyed looking over your poems, I enjoyed your reading them to me; they have a sort of primitive vigor that comes very much from a pruned sort of language that, from looking at the way you revise, at any rate, you've apparently done quite a bit of work to achieve. But I haven't lived with them by any means long enough to decide whether they are, for want of a simple term, good poems. It's very possible that if I just picked them up in a book store, and read them over, read them over very carefully too, I might easily not find anything in them at all that interested me."

Kidd frowned.

"You say you've only been writing these for a few weeks?"

Kidd nodded, still frowning.

"That's quite amazing. How old are you?"

"Twenty-seven."

"Now there." Mr. Newboy pulled back. "I would have thought you were much, much younger. I would have assumed you were about nineteen or eighteen and had worked most of your life in the country."