Dhalgren (52 page)

Through cage bars, he saw upturned stools clustering the counter. Under a skylight he had never noticed before—this
was
the first time he had seen the place during the day—the empty booths and tables looked far more rickety: the whole room seemed larger and shabbier.

"Is the bartender there?" Bunny asked.

"No."

"Then they aren't even open."

Kid dropped the curtain.

"Isn't that convenient? I just run right out there and do my thing, then run right back in here, and am shut of you all. Come on back inside. Don't run away." Bunny motioned Kid into the living room. "I really think scorpions are perfectly fascinating. You're the only really effective enforcement organization in the city. Pepper, what was the name of your friend with all the ugly muscles and that lovely, broken…?" Bunny nudged his upper lip with his forefinger "…This one here?"

"Nightmare."

"Fascinating boy." Bunny glanced at Kid. "He's old as I am, dear, but I still consider him very young. (Really, you must sit down. I'm the only one who's allowed to wander around and make everyone nervous.) You scorpions do more to keep law and order in the city than anyone else. Only the good and the pure in heart dare go out on the street after dark. But that's the way, I suppose, the law has always worked. The good people are the ones who live their lives so that they don't have anything to do with whatever law there is anyway. The bad ones are the ones unfortunate enough to become involved. I rather like the way it works here, because, since you
are
the law, the law is far more violent, makes much more noise, and isn't everywhere at once: so it's easier for us good people to avoid. Are you sure you wouldn't like some more wine—?"

"I told him to get it when he wants it."

"I'll
get it for him, Pepper. You may not be a gentleman, but
I
am a lady." Bunny plucked the jar from Kid's hands and went to fill it and another cup. "Just an old-fashioned girl, too shy to dive into the rushing river of worldly fame, too late for the mouse-drawn pumpkin to take me to the ball, too old for Gay Lib—not to mention Radical Effeminism!" Bunny couldn't have been more than thirty-five, Kid thought. "Not in body, mind you. Just in spirit. Ah, well… I have the consolations of philosophy—or whatever the hell you call it."

Kid sat down on the couch beside Pepper.

Bunny returned with the brimming jelly glass. "When you let your little light shine, what great and luminous beast do you become?"

"I'm not a scorpion."

"You mean you just like to dress up that way? And wear a shield around your neck?
Mmmm?"

"Somebody gave me these clothes when I got my others messed up." Kid took the jar and picked up his projector at the end of its chain. "This doesn't have a battery or something. I just found it."

"Ah, then you're not really a scorpion
yet.
Like Pepper, right? Pepper
used
to be a scorpion. But his battery's run down."

"I guess that's what it is." Pepper rattled the links of his shield among his other chains. "I gotta get hold of another one and see."

"Pepper used to be the most charming bird of paradise. Red, yellow, and green plumes—one could almost ignore its relation to the common parrot. Then he began to flicker, more and more, splutter, grow dim. Finally—" Bunny's eyes closed—"he went totally out." They opened. "He hasn't been the same since,"

"Where could you pick up one? A battery, I mean."

"Radio store," Pepper said. "Only the guys have about stripped all the places around here. A department store, maybe. Or maybe somebody's got an extra one. Nightmare's got a lot, I bet."

"How exciting, to anticipate your glowing aspect, to puzzle over what you'll turn out to be."

"Inside here—" Pepper snapped his shield apart— "they got a little thing in here that's supposed to be what it is. But it just looks like a whole lot of colored dots to me. The battery goes in there." He picked at the mechanism with a grey nail—"This one…"—and pried loose a red and white striped oblong with blue lettering:
26½ Volts D.C.,
below a colophon of gathered lightning. "This one ain't worth shit." He flipped it across the room.

"Not
on the floor, Pepper love." Bunny picked up the battery and put it on a shelf behind some porcelain frogs, vases of colored glass, and several alarm clocks. "Tell me, Kid, now that you've found
me,
just who
were
you looking for?"

"A girl. Lanya. You know her: You spoke to her one night in the bar when George Harrison was there."

"Oh, yes: She-who-must-be-obeyed. And you were with her. Now I
do
remember you. That was the night they made George the new moon, wasn't it? The way that poor man has driven all those silly dinge-queens out of their flippy little minds is just
terrible!"

Kid turned his jar. "He has a pretty heavy fan club."

"More power to him, I say." Bunny raised the cup overhead. "But if George is the New Moon, darling,
I
am the Evening Star."

Pepper loosed his consumptive giggle.

"I want to go out and look for her," Kid said. "If she comes into Teddy's after it opens, will you give her a message for—"

"I can't think of any reason why I should. She has a
much
easier time getting hers than I do getting mine. What do you want me to tell her?"

"Huh? Just that I was around looking for her, and that I'll be back."

"Smile."

"What?"

"Grin. Like this." Bunny's bony face became a death mask around bright, perfect teeth. "Let's see an expression of ecstatic happiness."

Kid twisted his lips back quickly and decided this was his last politeness.

To Kid's leer, Bunny returned a wistful grin. "You just don't seem to have any special points of attraction. Actually, I'd put you rather low down on my list. It's completely personal, you understand. I suppose I can afford to tell your girl friend you're looking for her. I will if I see her."

"Everybody's somebody's fetish," Kid said. "Maybe I still got hope?"

"That's
what I keep telling Pepper. But he just won't believe me."

"I believe it." Pepper said from his end of the couch. "You just won't believe you ain't mine."

"Oh, I don't think I'm revealing any embarrassing secrets when I say that you can be very sweet and affectionate once you relax. No, Pepper is just terribly uncomfortable at the idea that anyone could find
him
attractive. It's that simple."

"It ain't happened that often so I'm what you'd call used to it." Pepper squinted into the bottom of his cup, rocked up to his feet, and walked to the counter. He gave Bunny a passing nudge on the arm with his elbow. "Bunny's a good guy, but she's a nut."

"Ow!"
Bunny rubbed the spot, but grinned after Pepper.

Kid grinned too and tried not to shake his head.

"Why are you two here now, anyway?" Bunny asked. "What are the scorpions doing today? Shouldn't you be out working?"

"You trying to kick me out again?" Pepper stooped to open a cabinet and took out another jug which he put on the counter beside the one now empty.

Kid saw four more gallons and decided to leave after this glass. "Where was Nightmare's gang off to this morning?"

"You said you saw them. How many were there?"

"Twenty, twenty-five maybe," Kid said.

"Maybe he's gonna pull that Emboriky rip-off today. How you like that?"

"Oh,
no!"
Bunny put the cup down— "Oh well."— then picked it up again, to sip pensively.

"He's been talking about it for a month, but he wants a whole damn army."

"Why's he need so many people?" Kid asked. "What's Emboriky?"

"Big downtown department store."

"Lovely things," Bunny said sadly. "Perfectly lovely things. I mean it isn't just your run of the mill five-and-dime. I just wish I could have some of their stuff in here. Give some class to this place. Oh, I hate to think of you guys clomping around in all that beautiful stuff."

"Nobody's gotten to it before?"

"Guess not." Pepper said.

"Maybe just a little," Bunny explained. "But you see, now it's 'occupied.' Some kid got killed back a little while ago trying to break in."

"Killed?"

"Somebody leaned out the third-story window," Pepper said, "and shot the motherfucker dead." He laughed. "A couple of other people got shot at, who were just passing by. But they didn't get hurt."

"Perhaps it's Mr Emboriky, protecting his worldly goods." Bunny contemplated the cup bottom, looked over at the fresh gallon, but thought better. "I wouldn't blame him."

"Naw, naw," Pepper said. "It's a whole bunch in there. Nightmare's one of the people who got shot at. He said shots came from lots of places."

Bunny laughed. "Imagine! Two dozen sales clerks valiantly holding off the barbarian hordes! I hope those poor children don't get hurt."

"You think it's the sales clerks?" Pepper asked.

"No." Bunny sighed. "It's just whoever got to the Gun Department in Sporting Goods first."

"Nightmare's got this real thing about it. He really wants to get in there and see what's going on. I guess I would too if somebody'd shot at me out the third-story window."

"You?"
Bunny exploded at the ceiling. "You'd be back here with your head under the pillow so fast! Why aren't you out there with them now? No, no, that's all right. I'd rather have you here safe and sound. If you got your ass full of buckshot, I just know it would be for something stupid."

"I think getting
your
ass full of buckshot is pretty stupid for any reason."

"Fine!" Bunny pointed an admonishing finger. "You just stick to that idea and keep momma happy.
One
honorable man!" Bunny's hand returned to the cup. "Yea, even for the want of one honorable man. Or woman— I'm not prejudiced. That's really what Bellona needs." Bunny regarded Kid. "You look like a sensitive sort. Haven't you ever thought that? Lord knows, we have everything else. Wouldn't it be nice to know that somewhere around there was one good and upright individual—one would do, for contrast."

"Well, we've got Calkins," Kid said. "He's a pillar of the community."

Bunny grimaced. "Darling, he
owns
that den of iniquity in there where I display my pale and supple body every evening. Teddy just runs it. No, Mr C won't pass, I'm afraid."

"You got that church person," Pepper offered.

"Reverend Amy?" Bunny grimaced again. "No, dear, she's sweet, in her own strange way. But that's absolutely
not
what I mean. That's the wrong feeling entirely."

"Not
that
church," Pepper countered. "The
other
one, over on the other side of the city."

"You mean the monastery?" Bunny was pensive as Pepper nodded. "I really don't know that much about it. Which speaks well for it, I'm sure."

"Yeah, someone mentioned that to me once," Kid said, and remembered it was Lanya.

"It would be nice to think that, somewhere inside its walls, a truly good person walked and pondered. Can you
imagine
it? Within the city limits? Perhaps the abbot or the mother superior or whatever they call it? Meanwhile the scorpions play down at the Emboriky."

"Maybe if you went to the monastery, somebody'd shoot at you too."

"How sad," Bunny looked at the jug again. "How probable. That wouldn't make me happy at all."

"Where is this place?" Kid asked; with the memory occurred the fantasy that Lanya, with her curiosity about it, might have gone there.

"I don't actually know," Bunny said. "Like everything else in town, you just hear about it until it bumps into you. You have to put yourself at the mercy of the geography, and hope that down-hills and up-hills, working propitiously with how much you feel like fighting and how much you feel like accepting, manage to get you there. You'll find it eventually. As we are all so tired of hearing, this is a terribly small city."

"I heard it's on the other side of town," Pepper said. "Only I don't even know which side of town this is."

Kid laughed and stood up. "Well, I'm gonna go." He drained the wine, and tongued the bitter aftertaste. Wine first thing in the morning, he pondered. Well, he'd done worse. 'Thanks for breakfast."

"You're going to
go?
But honey, I have enough in here for brunch, lunch, high tea, and
dinner!"

"Come on," Pepper said. "Take another glass. Bunny don't mind the company."

"Sorry." Kid moved his jar from Bunny's reach. "Thanks." He smiled. "I'll come back another time."

"I'll only let you go if you promise me." Bunny suddenly reached for Kid's chest. "No, no, don't jump. Mother's not going to rape you." Bunny put a finger beneath the chain that crossed Kid's belly. "We have something in common, you and I." With the other hand, Bunny lifted the white silk to show the optical chain around a slim, veined neck. "Nightmare and I. Madame Brown and Nightmare. You and Madame Brown. I wonder if I betray it by mentioning it." Bunny laughed.

Kid, unsure why, felt his cheeks heat and the rest of his body cool. I can't have absorbed the custom of reticence so completely in so little time, he thought. And still wanted anxiously and urgently to leave.

Bunny was saying, "I'll tell your girl friend what you said if I see her. You know even if you did have one of those… ahem, smiles I find just too irresistible, I'd still deliver your message. Because then, you see, I'd want you to like me, and to come back. Doing something you wanted me to do would be one way to get that. Just because I'm not a good person—" Bunny winked—"you mustn't think I'm a bad one."

"Yeah. Sure. Thanks." Kid tugged away from Bunny's finger. "I'll see you."

"Good-bye!" Pepper called from the counter where he'd gone for more wine.

Now the street sign said RUBY and PEARL. The ladder and the lady in greens were gone.

He pondered and compared directions, dismissed the park, looked where the mist was thickest (down "Pearl"), and walked. Lanya? remembered his calling, an echo in the dim, an after image on the ear. Here? In this city? He smiled, and thought about holding her. He sorted his dubious recollections, wondering where he was going. It's only, he thought, when we're stripped of purpose that we know who we are.