Dhalgren (55 page)

"You carry it," Nightmare said. "I ain't gonna help you. Let's get out of here."

"There're still people up there with guns?" Copperhead took his hand from his jaw to gesture at the dark mezzanine.

"Kid scared 'em away," the black called D-t said.

Nightmare turned and bellowed so loud his knees and elbows bent:
"All right, motherfuckers! Here we are! You wanna shoot us, go on!"
He glanced around at the others and giggled.
"God damn it, go on, pick us off!"
He started forward.

The unshaved, pimpled scorpion hefted the lion up on his belly, turned his chin away to avoid the shade, and followed.

"You up there, you better get us now! Come on, you mangy motherfucker, you chicken-shit assholes! You ain't gonna get another chance!"

This, Kid thought walking between a tall, thin black (named Spider) and the heavy one (called Cathedral: Kid slowed to let Copperhead get a step ahead of them so he could see him), is insane. Laughter: only a fragment blurted. Two of the others looked at him. Grinning, Kid shook his head.

"You up there, you better shoot!"
Nightmare bawled at the mezzanine railing.
"You don't, you some real scroungy cocksuckers!"
He unscrewed his face and said to Priest, who walked next to him:

"I heard you over on the other side, hollering. What were you doing?"

"There was somebody in there. I don't think he had a gun. I chased him up the—"

"You better do it now, you son of a bitch!"
Nightmare turned back to the guy beside him. "Yeah?…
Do it, you do it, cocksucker, if you're gonna do it, do it now!"

"—chased him up the stairs."

Lady of Spain had kicked in the board bottom of a display case. Copperhead looked up, with consternation and surprise, and put his boot through the glass case in front of him, first the top shelf, then the bottom, then once on the other end; glass and watches scattered the rug. Gasping, he loped to the next.
Crash!
and
crash!
and
crash-crash-crash!
All their eyes, Kid noted (trying to recall what it meant), are red glass.

Another thin black frowned toward Kid, his lids narrowing over blank crimson balls. He looked about Denny's age.

"You real chicken-shit up there, you know!"

CRASH-CRASH!

"You ain't worth shit, god damn it!"

CRASH!

"Eat my shit…!"
Nightmare looked around and smiled.
"Up your ass!… Fuck you!"

Lady of Spain pushed a whole case over; it smashed into the one behind it. She grinned at Copperhead who didn't see; others laughed.

"They got the door locked." Someone jiggled the handle.

"Here you go…" Nightmare said, grabbing for the lion.

"Hey, no—"

Glass exploded over the pavement. The grey street was momentarily obscured by myriad bright prisms. "Come on!"

Kid stepped gingerly across the shards, remembering: On broken glass, go flatfooted.

The white, unshaven scorpion stood (among others moving) looking at his lamp. The marble base was in two pieces, the shade crushed. Finally he stooped, caught up the injured object—a marble chip fell but the cracked base stayed amazingly together—and shuffled on, kicking glass.

"Come on…" Denny tugged Kid's arm.

Kid started walking again.

"A God-damn bus!" which hove around the corner. "How do you like that!"

Some stood in the street now, waving their arms.

The bus pulled to the curb. Nightmare at their head, they crowded between the folding doors. Shoulders collided. Through them, Kid saw the bald, black driver's worried face.

"You gonna take us
home!"
the thin black was saying, while the others tried to push past. "Now that's convenient, brother! You gonna take us—!"

"AHHHH—!" shrill and directly into Kid's ear.

Kid flinched and turned (A gun crack?
There!)
and grabbed the scorpion opening and closing his mouth and falling. Hooking the post by the front seat with the elbow of his bladed arm, Kid swung the wounded youth inside. As he fell, the unshaven guy (and some others) no longer holding his lion, clambered over them—"Watch it—!" Crouched at the top of the bus steps, Kid saw the crushed lamp shade leaning against the sill. He grabbed the socket stalk, wrenched the whole thing up into the bus and as the doors closed he heard
ping-CRACK!
The bus was moving:
ping-CRACK!

He stood—everyone else was crouched in seats or between them.

Even the driver was hunkering over his wheel.

Outside, Kid saw the figure in a third story window of the sandstone wall (right beside the gold
i
in
Emboriky)—
sighting along the rifle, eye to the finder.

The broken marble cut at his shin, joggling. Thirty pounds? As he pulled the lion up onto his forearm (so not to blunt his orchid which stuck from underneath) the bus lurched. "Here." The stubbled face turned up from the seat and blinked. "Here."

The scorpion wrapped his arms around it—the shade came completely off and joggled around the post—dropped his face, then raised it, at the gasping.

Kid turned, holding the back of the seat.

Denny stopped at the feet of the wounded scorpion.

A woman in a grey hat, jammed against the window next to Nightmare, said, "Oh dear! Oh, he's terribly hurt—" then put both hands flat against the pane when Kid looked at her, and began to cry. Then she stopped, faced forward again with her eyes closed.

From a rear seat: "Say…"

No one said.

"…what
happened
to you guys?"

No one answered.

Kid took off his orchid and poked a prong around for his belt loop till he saw (remembering) it had broken. So he hung it from his chain and squatted.

"Annnnnnnn
—waa! They got my… arm. I…
Annnn!"

Denny looked up: his very blue eyes were bloodshot.

"Annnnnn
—ah. Awww?… Oh, hey. Awwwee…!"

Warm blood touched Kid's toes and spread.

"You want to make a tourniquet or something…" Denny suggested.

"Awwwwwwww—
Ahhh
…"

"Yeah."

"Here!" The colored girl in the front seat leaned forward holding a scarf, and almost dropped it when Kid reached. The scorpion panted like a woman in childbirth while Kid tightened the looped cloth on the handle of a knife one of the others gave him. "You gotta loosen it," he told Spider who was helping. "Every five minutes or so. So he doesn't get gangrene or something." Then he sat back on his heels, jogging with the bus. The driver looked back, then turned a corner.

Nightmare, forearms across his knees, was watching them with interest. "You really into this hero bit. Tourniquet, huh? That's pretty good. Yeah, I like that."

Kid stood, about to look disgusted: pain shot up his calves from the minutes spent crouched. So he didn't look anything, walked to Denny's seat, and sat.

Across the aisle, the old man with his head in his coat collar, who had been on the bus when it had been going in the other direction, pretended to sleep.

"You okay?" Denny asked. "You look…"

Kid turned to the boy (two others, a scorpion and a passenger, were just turning away): Denny rubbed beneath his nose, blinked his blue—

The memory of crimson eyes in the
Emboriky's
lobby made Kid open his mouth: the eyes that watched now, intently and compassionately, became horrible as the discovered significance of what he had forgotten. Surprise blotted another memory—he felt it fade from his mind, struggled to keep it, failed—of something passed in a looking glass. What could he have seen in a mirror? Himself? Nothing else? I'm mad, he thought: like echo,
This is insane,
he had said there. Stripped of context—what
had
happened in the department store?—he shook before what it could have signified. Why did I say,
This is insane?
Something shook in him. His head waggled.

"Kid… ?" which Kid was desperately aware was not his name.

Denny's hand had been on his forearm. He knew because now it moved away. Released, he tried to remember having been held, fixed by the warmth that was fading, had faded. Denny rubbed his upper lip again.

Breathing heavily, Kid sat back in the jogging seat.

Outside, movie marquees passed in cryptic cavalcade.

Under high, electric notes, low, wet ones burbled and troughed and erupted. A metallic chord; another metallic chord. Between them: tape-hiss.

Kid cleared his throat; it became a cough.

"Yes?" Reverend Tayler held her pencil by both ends. "Can I help you?"

"I'm hungry," Kid said. "Um…" He pulled his hands from the half-door's sill. "Some… somebody told me you used to have a free supper here?"

"Oh, we discontinued that some time back—" Behind her, like revolving eyes, the spools turned.

Kid took a breath. "Yeah, I know…"

"Did you fall… or hurt yourself?"

"Huh? No, I… no."

"You're just hungry?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"Really, we're not providing that service any longer, you see. It was far too…" Now she let her eyes drop, sucked her teeth, and considered: "Well, perhaps coffee? And…" She looked up. "Maybe there's something… and you can sit down for a little while."

"Yes, ma'am."

Wheels and swivel roared and squeaked through the music as she pushed away her chair. "Come with me." She stepped to the door, fluttering black robes.

He stepped back while she came through, followed her across the vestibule—"Now, you understand I'm not establishing a tradition. Just this once: I am
not
opening up the Evening Aid Program again. This is for you tonight. Not for your friends tomorrow."—and down a stairway.

"Yes, ma'am."

At the bottom, Reverend Tayler turned on a caged worklight hung on a nail. A high windowsill, level with the street outside, went from blue to black. The heavy cord curved up the steps. "Let's see what we have."

Columns fanned thick shadows across the basement auditorium. Folding chairs were stacked by one wall. A half-collapsed sofa sat by another. Before the closed curtains of a stage was an upright piano, its works bare.

"We're having a service this evening in the chapel upstairs. In just a little while. Maybe if you feel up to it, you can come upstairs to the chapel and join us."

Another high window was open. The slight gust made him look instead of answer. Three leaves jittered to the sill's edge; one spun, before falling. It ticked down the wall, clicked on the piled chairs, to stop at the scuffed linoleum, like an erratic tick-tocking at last run down.

"In here." Reverend Tayler waited by another door.

Inside, she snapped on another worklight.

Across a long, newspaper-covered table, Kid saw a wall hung with pots, potato mashers, colanders, and shelves stacked with thick, church-kitchen crockery. "We were able to get bread for a while, I mean in large quantities. So we could make tinned meat sandwiches—that's when we had Evening Aid. But we lost our source. Without the staff of life, such a program dries up quickly. Beans take too long to cook and I didn't have the help for it." From a wall cabinet she took a can dotted with white paper where the label had been removed. "Beef stew."

He took it from her.

"Taking the labels off," she explained to his questioning expression, "is one minor way to discourage pilfering. I don't like to put locks on things. Snoopers look in on shelves full of blank cans, and don't know whether it's rat poison, motor oil, or green peas, I just have to remember what's where." She tried to look sly. "I have my own system. You must know how these camp stoves work if you've been here any length of time…?"

"Yeah," wondering whether he should explain that he'd learned, however, on a camping trip when he was twelve.

"The urn there is hot. I keep it going all day. I'm sure I'm drinking too much coffee. Can I more or less leave you on your own? I've got to get back to my notes."

"Sure. Thank you, ma'am."

"Wash things up; and let me know when you leave?"

He nodded.

At the kitchen door, she frowned, dark and broad. "You're sure you didn't have some sort of accident? I mean, you're all smudged up there on the side."

"Huh? … oh, I'm all right now. Really."

Setting her lips at a blunt, black roundness, she nodded curtly, and left.

Looking over the pans and pots, he thought:
No can-opener,
and panicked.

It lay beside the stove.

He twisted and twisted till the last metal scollop popped, and the can-top, lapped with gravy, began to sink. He looked at the stove, at the can; then something happened in his gut. He went in with fingers, shoved grease, meat, and vegetable chunks into his mouth, licked cold gravy from his hand, wiped what ran on his chin with his forefinger and sucked that.

His stomach bubbled, clamped twice, hard, and he had a mouthful of gas still tasting of Bunny's wine. Anticipating nausea, he stopped, for several deep breaths. Then he took the can out, sat on the sagging sofa, and pushed his hand back into the ragged ring.

He chewed and licked and swallowed and sucked and licked.

When the coppered inside was clean except for the bottom corner for which his middle finger had been too thick, he returned to the kitchen, rinsed the can, and let black coffee steam into it from the urn's plastic spigot. Hot tin between his hands made him aware of his dry left, his sticky right.

Back on the couch, holding it between his knees, he watched the steam and grew sleepy, tasted (hot, bitter) some, decided he didn't want it, and let his eyes close…

"Yes, he's right here," Reverend Tayler was saying.

Kid blinked awake. He
had
put the coffee on the arm of the sofa before he drifted off.

"I don't think he's feeling too—oh."

Kid took the can in his fist to hide behind sipping—tepid.

"Ah," said Mr Newboy. "Thank you."

Kid set the coffee on the arm again.

"Ah," Reverend Tayler repeated, but in such a different tone Kid only identified the similarity seconds later, "you got yourself something to eat?"