Dhalgren (49 page)

"Because
you
wouldn't be happy. You wouldn't know what to do there. You wouldn't fit." Then he felt all her muscles, thigh to shoulder, tighten on him. "That isn't
true!
I'm being awful." She sucked her teeth. "Do you know, I was
terrified
to go up to Roger's with you. It had nothing to do with what
I
was wearing: I thought you'd behave dreadfully—you'd either Ooooh and Ahhh the whole afternoon to death, or you'd shut up and be a big silent hole in the day."

"You think I've never been in any nice places before?"

"But you
weren't
like that," she said. "That's the point! You were perfectly fine, you had a good time, and I'm sure Mr Newboy enjoyed it. If anyone spoiled it, it was me with my silly dress. And I'm a mean, small, petty person for worrying about such things in the first place." She sighed. "Do I get points at all for keeping it to myself this long?" She sighed again. "No, I guess not."

He blinked at the wild sky and tried to comprehend: he could follow her logic, though the emotions behind it confused.

After a while she said: "I grew up in some awfully big houses. Some were almost as big as Roger's. When I was at boarding school, once, my uncle said I could have some kids to the summer place for my birthday. It came on a long weekend and they said I could have ten kids up from Thursday night till Sunday afternoon. There was one boy at the Irving School—the boys' school next to ours— named Max, whom I thought was just great. He came from a poor—well, poorish family. He was on scholarship. He was intelligent, sensitive, gentle… and gorgeous—I was probably in love with him! I would have been perfectly happy to take him off for the weekend all by himself. But I had to plan a party: so I planned it all for him. I got two girls who just loved to listen to intelligent boys talk—I wasn't a very good listener at the time, and Max
could
go on. I invited this perfectly dreadful colored boy who Max said he'd admired because he was second on the debating team and never did anything wrong. I scoured four schools for the most marvelous and charming people—people who would entertain him, complement him, offer just the right contrast. No two people from the same clique, you know, who would stick together and make a little indigestible dumpling in the stew. The weekend was dreadful. Everyone had a fabulous time, and for the next two years kept asking me when I was going to do it again. Except Max. The plane ride, the horses, the boats, the maids, the chauffeurs, they were just too much for him. All he said the whole four days was, Thank you,' and, 'Gosh.' About forty-four times each. Oh, I guess we were just very young. In another couple of years he would probably have been a socialist or something and might have attacked the whole thing. That would have been fine! I had people there who could have argued. At least there would have been communication. I don't know—maybe I'm still young." Suddenly she turned over. "I could be the older woman in an eighteenth century French novel right now." She turned back. "Twenty-three! Isn't that awful? And they say the twentieth century has a youth hangup." She giggled against his chest.

"You want to hear a story from me, now?"

"Um-hm."
He felt her nod.

"About when I was twenty-three. Your age."

"Sure thing, gramps. That's about three years after you got out of the mental hospital?"

"No, it's about going to nice places." He frowned. "One summer I was working up and down the gulf coast, as a header on the shrimp boats."

"What's a header?"

"He washes dishes and pulls the heads off the shrimp. Anyway, I'd just gotten fired in Freeport and was waiting around to get on another boat—"

"Why'd you get fired?"

"I got seasick. Now shut up. Anyway, I was sitting in front of this cafe, which was about the only thing there to do, when these two guys in black Triumphs came hauling around the dust. One yells, Did I know where he could get a traveler's check cashed in this God-damn town. I'd been there three days, so I told him where the bank was. He told me, Get in, and I showed him and his friend where to go. We got to talking: he was in law school up in Connecticut. I told him about going to Columbia. He got his check cashed and asked if I wanted to come along with them—which was better than two bucks a night I didn't have, so I said, Yeah. A whole bunch of kids were staying out on this island just off the coast."

"Like the commune?"

"One of the kids' fathers was head of a land development company down there. The company had moved the fisherman who lived on the island someplace else, built a bridge to the mainland, dug a canal, and built a whole bunch of 150 thousand, 200 thousand dollar homes, lawns in the front, swimming pool on one side, garage on the other, and boat house in the back on the canal so you could get your boat out to sea. They were all for the executives of Dow Chemical, who just about owned the city. So prospective buyers could check them out first, the houses were furnished, the freezers were filled with steaks, the closets stocked with liquor, towels in the bathrooms and all the beds kept made. The executives could bring their families in for a weekend to try out the house before they bought it. On Monday, a truck would come by with maids, carpenters, plumbers, and supplies to replace anything that had been used up, to clean out the mess, and fix anything broken. There wasn't anybody on the island, so the doors had all been left open. The kid's father had told him since he was in the area, why didn't he stay there. So the kid, with about twenty of his friends—they went from about seventeen to twenty-five—had moved in. They'd start on one house, drink up all the liquor, eat up the food, destroy the furniture, break the windows, tear up everything they could, then move on to another one. On Monday the maids, carpenters, and plumbers would fix the damages. I stayed with them for two weeks. I'd pick out a room, lock the door, and read most of the time, while all the noise went on outside. Every once in a while, you know, I'd come out to get something to eat—wade through the beer cans in the kitchen, scrape the grease out of some pan and fry a piece of steak. Then I'd go down to the swimming pool maybe if it wasn't too bad and, if there wasn't too much furniture floating in it, or bottles, or broken glass around, I'd swim a while. Pretty soon, when it would get too crowded, I'd go back to my room. There'd be people screwing in my bed, or somebody would've gotten sick all over the bureau. Once I found some little girl sitting in the middle of the floor, out of her head—cocaine all
over
the rug, and that is a
lot
of cocaine: she'd pulled down the drapes and was cutting paper-dolls out of them. So I'd take my book and go lock myself in another room. A couple of days after I got there, the two guys who'd brought me suddenly decided to fly back to somewhere else. They gave me the keys to the Triumphs and said I could have them. I don't even know how to drive. One of them had got the front smashed in by now, but the other one was still good. The police came twice. The first time the kids told them to go fuck themselves and said they were supposed to be there, and the police went away. The second time, I thought it was better I split. When the shit came down, I wouldn't have any rich Texas relatives to run home to. There was one girl there who said she'd buy me a ticket into Houston if I would fuck her and stay on more than five minutes."

"No…"
Lanya giggled against his neck.

"She bought me a bus ticket and a pair of jeans and a new shirt."

Her giggling turned to laughter. Then she looked up. "That isn't really true, is it?" Her smile tried to force , through the dawn light.

After a second he said, "Naw. It isn't. I mean I screwed her and she bought the bus ticket for me. But she didn't put it that way. It just makes a better story."

"Oh." She put her head down again.

"But you see, I know about nice places. How to act in them. You go in, and you take what you want. Then you leave. That's what they were doing down there. That's what I was doing up at Calkins'."

Once more she balanced on her chin.

He looked down over his.

She was frowning. "I think you have that absolutely ass backward. But if it makes you, in your own delightfully naive way, polite and charming, I guess…" She put her head down again, and sighed. "But I wouldn't be surprised if there turned out to be one or two people who came up to my party in Nova Scotia who were also down in Texas a few years later at… yours."

He glanced at her again and chuckled.

Mist made mountains above the trees, made waves that broke, and fell and did not reach them.

His chest was damp from her cheek. She turned her head, tickling him with hair. A leaf, surprising as shale, struck his forehead and made him look up at the half-bare branches. "We shouldn't be trying to do it like this. We're dirty. It's uncomfortable. Soon it's going to get colder, or start raining, or something. Like you said, the commune is sort of a drag. You sit around and watch them waste whatever they have and then you finish up the leavings. We'll get a place—"

"Like the Richards?" she asked, in a tired voice.

"No. No, not like that."

"You think you'd like to put together something like Roger's place?"

"It doesn't have to be all that spectacular, huh? Just somewhere that was ours, you know? Maybe something like Tak's got."

"Mmmm,"
she said. Then once more she raised her head up on her chin. "You should go to bed with Tak again."

"Huh? Why?"

"Because he's a nice person. And he'd enjoy it."

He shook his head. "Naw, he's not my type. Besides, he catches them when they first get here. I don't think he's interested in anything more than the first taste, you know?"

"Oh." She put her head down again.

"You trying to get rid of me," he asked, "like you always think I'm trying to do with you?"

"No." After a while she asked, "Does it ever bother you that you make it with both men and women?"

"When I was fifteen or sixteen it used to bug hell out of me. I guess I worried about it a lot. By the time I was twenty, though, I noticed that no matter how much worrying I did, it didn't seem to have too much effect on who I ended up in bed with. So now I don't worry. It's more fun that way."

"Oh," she said. "Glib. But logical."

"Why'd you ask?"

"I don't know." He moved her to the side. She reached down to touch his hip. Moved her hand across his hip. "I fooled around a few times in boarding school. With girls, I mean. Sometimes, you know, I felt maybe I was a little strange because I didn't do it more. But I've just never been turned on to girls, sexually."

"Your loss," he said, and pulled her shoulder against his.

She turned to taste his neck, his chin, his lower lip. "What you were telling me happened…" she said between her tongue's dartings ". . . at the Richards' tonight… must have been… awful."

"I'm not going back there." He nipped her. "Ever. I'm not ever going back."

"Good…"

Then, from a small movement down her body, he recognized some new thought had come to her mind. "What?"

"Nothing."

"What is it?"

"It isn't anything. I just remembered you told me you were twenty-seven years old."

"That's right."

"But once I remember, just in passing, you mentioned you were born in nineteen forty-eight."

"Yeah?"

"Well, that's impossible… hey, what's the matter? You're going all gooseflesh."

As well, behind his rigid loins was a slab of pain. He pushed against her. The edge of the blanket, caught under them, rubbed across his shoulder as he rocked, till she tugged them free, and made a sound, caught his neck. He held his hips up, probing. She moved her hands down his back, pushed him down, thrust up her tongue under his. He made love taking great, gasping breaths. She took many small ones. Wind wandered back and cooled his running shoulders.

After a laboring release, seething, he relaxed.

How jealous I am of those I have known afraid to sleep for dreaming. I fear those moments before sleep when words tear from the nervous matrix and, like sparks, light what responses they may. That fragmented vision, seductive with joy and terror, robs rest of itself. Gratefully, sunk in nightmare, where at least the anxious brain freed from knowing its own decay can flesh those skeletal epiphanies with visual and aural coherence, if not rationale: better those landscapes where terror is experienced as terror and rage as rage than this, where either is merely a pain in the gut or a throb above the eye, where a nerve spasm in the shin crumbles a city of bone, where a twitch in the eyelid detonates both the sun and the heart.

"What are you staring at?" Lanya asked.

"Huh? Nothing. I was just thinking."

Her hand moved on his chest. "About what?"

"About sleep… and I guess poetry. And being crazy."

She made a small sound that meant "go on."

"I don't know. I was remembering. Being a kid and things."

"That's good." She moved her hand, made that small sound again. "Go on…"

But with neither fear nor anguish, he felt he had nowhere to go.

He came out of sleep to lights and the stench of burning.

The luminous spider above him blinked off: the redhead lowered (and as he did, Kidd recognized him) one hand from the chains hanging to his belly. In the other, this time, was a slat from an orange crate.

An iridescent beetle disappeared from a sudden black face (also familiar) above a vinyl vest, shiny as his former carapace.

The arched pincers of a scorpion collapsed: "Hey," Nightmare said, "I think they're about awake."

Kidd's arms were around Lanya. She moved her face against his neck; then moved it again, sharper, deliberate now, conscious.

Two dozen scorpions (most were black) stood in a ring against the grey morning.

Kidd recognized Denny between one bony, brown shoulder and a fleshy black one.

Then the redhead swung his stick.

Lanya shouted—he felt her jerk against his shoulder. She also caught the end of the slat.

She got to her knees, still holding the stick, her eyes were wide; her cheek kept hollowing.