Dhalgren (5 page)

"Shit, you think they gonna be there?" from the griffin.

"Aw, sure. They gonna be there!" You could have easily mistaken the voice from the dragon for a man's; and she sounded black.

Suspended in wonder and confusion, he listened to the conversation of the amazing beasts.

"They better be!" Vanished chains went on growling.

The griffin flickered once more: pocked buttocks and duty heels disappeared behind blazing scales.

"Hey, Baby,
suppose
they're not there yet?"

"Oh, shit! Adam…?"

"Now, Adam, you know they're gonna be there," the dragon assured.

"Yeah? How do I know? Oh, Dragon Lady! Dragon Lady, you're too much!"

"Come on. The two of you shut up, huh?"

Swaying together and apart, they rounded another corner.

He couldn't see his hand at all now, so he let it fall from the trunk. "What… what
are
they?"

"Told you: scorpions. Sort of a gang. Maybe it's more than one gang. I don't really know. You get fond of them after a while, if you know how to stay out of their way. If you can't… well, you either join, I guess; or get messed up. Least, that's how I found it."

"I mean the… the dragons and things?"

"Pretty, huh?"

"What are they?"

"You know what is it a hologram? They're projected from interference patterns off a very small, very low-powered laser. It's not complicated. But it looks impressive. They call them light-shields."

"Oh." He glanced at his shoulder where Tak had dropped his hand. "I've heard of holograms."

Tak led him out of the hidden niche of brush onto the concrete. A few yards down the path, in the direction the scorpions had come from, a lamp was working. They started in that direction.

"Are there more of them around?"

"Maybe." Tak's upper face was again masked. "Their light-shields don't really shield them from anything—other than our prying eyes, from the ones who want to walk around bare-assed. When I first got here, all you saw were scorpions. Then griffins and the other kinds started showing up a little while ago. But the genre name stuck." Tak slid his hands into his jean pockets. His jacket, joined at the bottom by the zipper fastener, rode up in front for non-existent breasts. Tak stared down at them as he walked. When he looked up, his smile had no eyes over it. "You forget people don't know about scorpions. About Calkins. They're famous here. Bellona's a big city; with something that famous in any other city in the country, why I guess people in L.A., Chicago, Pittsburgh, Washington would be dropping it all over the carpet at the in cocktail parties, huh? But they've forgotten we're here."

"No. They haven't forgotten." Though he couldn't
see
Tak's eyes, he knew they had narrowed.

"So they send in people who don't know their own name. Like you?"

He laughed, sharply; it felt like a bark.

Tak returned the hoarse sound that was his own laughter. "Oh, yeah! You're quite a kid." Laughter trailed on.

"Where we going now?"

But Tak lowered his chin, strode ahead.

From this play of night, light, and leather, can I let myself take identity? How can I recreate this roasted park in some meaningful matrix? Equipped with contradictory visions, an ugly hand caged in pretty metal, I observe a new mechanique. I am the wild machinist, past destroyed, reconstructing the present.

"Tak!" she called across the fire, rose, and shook back fire-colored hair. "Who'd you bring?" She swung around the cinderblock furnace and came on, a silhouette now, stepping over sleeping bags, blanket rolls, a lawn of reposing forms. Two glanced at her, then turned over. Two others snored at different pitches.

A girl on a blanket, with no shirt and really nice breasts, stopped playing her harmonica, banged it on her palm for spit, and blew once more.

The redhead rounded the harmonica player and seized Tak's cuff, close enough now to have a face again. "We haven't seen you in days! What happened? You used to come around for dinner practically every night. John was worried about you." It was a pretty face in half light.

"I wasn't worried." A tall, long-haired man in a Peruvian vest walked over from the picnic table. "Tak comes. Tak goes. You know how Tak is." Around the miniature flames, reflected in his glasses, even in this light his tan suggested chemicals or sunlamps. His hair was pale and thin and looked as if day would show sun streaks. "You're closer to breakfast time than you are to dinner, right now." He—John?—tapped a rolled newspaper against his thigh.

"Come on. Tell me, Tak." She smiled; her face wedged with deeper shadows. "Who have you brought John and me this time?" while John glanced up (twin flames slid off his lenses) for hints of dawn.

Tak said: "This is the Kid."

"Kit?" she asked.

"Kid."

"K-y-d-d…?"

"-
i
-d."

"…d," she added with a tentative frown. "Oh,
Kidd
."

If Tak had an expression you couldn't see it.

He thought it was charming, though; though something else about it unsettled.

She reared her shoulders back, blinking. "How are you, Kidd? Are you new? Or have you been hiding out in the shadows for months and months?" To Tak: "Isn't it amazing how we're always turning up people like that? You think you've met everybody in the city there is to meet. Then, suddenly, somebody who's been here all along, watching you from the bushes, sticks his nose out—"

"That's how we met Tak," John said. To Tak: "Isn't it, Tak?"

Tak said: "He's new."

"Oh. Well," John said, "we've got this thing going here. Do you want to explain it to him, Mildred?"

"Well, we figure—" Mildred's shoulders came, officially, forward. "We figure we have to survive together some way. I mean we can't be at each other's throats like animals. And it would be so easy for a situation like this—" He was sure her gesture, at 'this', included nothing beyond the firelight—"to degenerate into something… well, awful! So we've set up I guess you'd call it a commune. Here, in the park. People get food, work together, know they have some sort of protection. We try to be as organic as possible, but that's getting harder and harder. When new people come into Bellona, they can get a chance to learn how things operate here. We don't take in everybody. But when we do, we're very accepting." There was a tic somewhere (in him or her, he wasn't sure, and started worrying about it) like a nick in a wire pulled over an edge. "You
are
new? We're always glad when we get somebody new."

He nodded, while his mind accelerated, trying to decide: him? her?

Tak said: "Show him around, Milly."

John said: "Good idea, Mildred. Tak, I want to talk to you about something," tapping his newspaper again. "Oh, here. Maybe you want to take a look at this?"

"What? Oh…" You
couldn't
worry so much about things like that! Often, though, he had to remind himself. "Thanks." He took the folded paper.

"All right, Tak." John, with Tak, turned away. "Now
when
are you going to start those foundations for us? I can give you—"

"Look, John." Tak put his hand on John's shoulder as they wandered off. "All you need is the plans, and you can—"

Then they were out of earshot.

"Are you hungry?"

"No." She
was
pretty.

"Well, if you are—come, let's go over here—we start cooking breakfast soon as it gets light. That's not too far off."

"You been up all night?" he asked.

"No. But when you go to bed at sundown, you wake up pretty early."

"I have."

"We do a lot of work here—" she slipped her hands into her back pockets; her jeans, torn short, were bunched high on her thighs—"during the day. We don't just sit around. John has a dozen projects going. It's pretty hard to sleep with people hammering and building and what all." She smiled.

"I've been up; but I'm not tired. When I am, I can sleep through anything." He looked down at her legs.

As she walked, light along them closed and crossed. "Oh, we wouldn't mind if you really wanted to sleep. We don't want to force anybody. But we have to maintain some kind of pattern, you understand."

"Yeah, I understand that." He'd been flipping the newspaper against his own thigh. Now he raised it.

"Why do you go around wearing an orchid?" she asked. "Of course, with the city in the state it's in, I guess it makes sense. And really, we do accept many life styles here. But…"

"Some people gave it to me." He turned the rolled newspaper around.

SERIOUS WATER

He let the tabloid fall loose.

SHORTAGE THREATENS

The date said Tuesday, February 12, 1995. "What the hell is
that?"

She looked concerned. "Well, there's not very many people around who know how to keep things running. And we've all been expecting the water to become a real problem any day. You have no idea how much they used when they were trying to put out the fires."

"I mean the 1995?"

"Oh.
That's
just Calkins." On the picnic table sat a carton of canned goods. "I think it's amazing we have a newspaper at all." She sat on the bench and looked at him expectantly. "The dates are just his little joke."

"Oh." He sat beside her. "Do you have tents here? Anything for shelter?" still thinking:
1995?

"Well, we're pretty outdoors oriented." She looked around, while he tried to feel the city beyond the leafy, fire-lit grotto. "Of course, Tak—he's promised to give John some simple blueprints. For cabins. John wants Tak to head the whole project. He feels it would be good for him. You know, Tak is so strange. He feels, somehow, we won't accept him. At least I think he does. He has this very important image of himself as a loner. He wants to give us the plans—he's an engineer, you know—and let us carry them out. But the value of something like that isn't just the house—or shack—that results. It should be a creative, internal thing for the builder. Don't you think?"

For something to do, he held his teeth together, hard.

"You're sure you're not hungry?"

"Oh. No."

"You're not tired? You can get in a few hours if you want. Work doesn't start till after breakfast. I can get you a blanket, if you'd like."

"No."

In the firelight, he thought he might count twenty-five years in her firm, clear face. "I'm not hungry. I'm not sleepy. I didn't even know Tak was bringing me here."

"It's a very nice place. It really is. The community of feeling is so warm, if nothing else." Probably only twenty.

The harmonica player played again.

Someone in an olive-drab cocoon twisted beyond the fire.

Mildred's tennis sneaker was a foot from the nearest sleeper's canvas covered head.

"I wish you wouldn't wear that." She laughed.

He opened his big fingers under metal.

"I mean, if you want to stay here. Maybe then you wouldn't have to wear it."

"I don't have to wear it," and decided to keep it on.

The harmonica squawked.

He looked up.

From the trees, light brighter than the fire and green lay leafy shadows over sleeping bags and blanket rolls. Then ballooning claws and barbed, translucent tail collapsed:

"Hey, you got that shit ready for us?"

A lot of chains hung around his neck. He had a wide scab (with smaller ones below it) on the bowl of his shoulder, like a bad fall on cement. Chains wound around one boot: he jingled when he walked. "Come on, come on. Bring me the fuckin' junk!" He stopped by the fireplace. Flames burnished his large arms, his small face. A front tooth was broken. "Is that it?" He gestured bluntly toward the picnic table, brushed tangled, black hair, half braided, from his shoulder, and came on.

"Hello!" Mildred said, with the most amazing smile. "Nightmare! How have you been?"

The scorpion looked down at her, wet lip high off his broken tooth, and said, slowly, "Shit," which could have meant a lot of things. He wedged between them— "Get out of the—" saw the orchid—"fucking way, huh?" and lugged the carton of canned goods off the table edge against his belly, where ripe, wrinkled jeans had sagged so low you could see stomach hair thicken toward pubic. He looked down over his thick arm at the weapon, closed his mouth, shook his head. "Shit," again, and: "What the fuck
you
staring at?" Between the flaps of Nightmare's cut-down vest, prisms, mirrors, and lenses glittered among dark cycle chain, bright stainless links, and hardware-store brass.

"Nothing."

Nightmare sucked his teeth in disgust, turned, and stumbled on a sleeping bag.
"Move,
damn it!"

A head shook loose from canvas; it was an older man, who started digging under the glasses he'd probably worn to sleep, then gazed after the scorpion lumbering off among the trees.

He saw things move behind Milly's face, was momentarily sure she was going to call good-bye. Her tennis shoe dragged the ground.

Down her lower leg was a scratch.

He frowned.

She said: "That was Nightmare. Do you know about the scorpions?"

"Tak told me some."

"It's amazing how well you can get along with people if you're just nice. Of course their idea of being nice back is a little odd. They used to volunteer to beat up people for us. They kept wanting John to find somebody for them to work over—somebody who was annoying us, of course. Only nobody was." She hunched her shoulders.

"I guess," he offered from the faulted structure of his smile, "you have trouble with them sometimes?"

"Sometimes." Her smile was perfect. "I just wish John had been here. John's very good with them. I think Nightmare is a little afraid of John, you know? We do a lot for them. Share our food with them. I think they get a lot from us. If they'd just acknowledge their need, though, they'd be so much easier to help."

The harmonica was silent: the bare-breasted girl had gone from her blanket

"How'd you get that scratch?"

"Just an accident. With John." She shrugged. "From one of those, actually." She nodded toward his orchid. "It isn't anything."

He leaned to touch it, looked at her: she hadn't moved. So he lay his forefinger on her shin, moved it down. The scab line ran under his callous like a tiny rasp.