Dhalgren (66 page)

She leaned away, "You sure?" and kissed him. "I'm glad too."

He kissed her—harder, longer, losing himself in it (as his hand hung, lost in air and metal; he bunched his fingers, loosened them) till he felt the thing in her shirt pocket, cutting.

He pulled back: Next to her harmonica was his pen.

She said, because she saw him looking, "The bartender at Teddy's told me to give it to you. He said you dropped it there—" and then he kissed her (it still cut) again; but he held on.

She pulled away, once more, wrinkling her nose. "Something smells good." Looking around, she went to the living-room door—he followed—leaned through with one hand on the white frame. "Hey, Nightmare—is there any more of that coffee?"

"You want some, sweetheart?" which was from Dragon Lady. "Help yourself."

Kid watched her cross the room, leaned back on the frame.

She squatted to fill a cup—looked in it first; someone must have used it, but she shrugged—from the enamel pot. Once she glanced back at him, pushed hair from her forehead, grinned. She picked up the cup and returned. The warmth inside him still grew.

On the couch, Denny's girl and Copperhead were going through some sort of toasting game, clicking brims and laughing.

Nightmare was saying, "I can't hang around this place all day! Hey, Dragon Lady, you gonna come with me? I mean I can't hang around—"

A woman stuck two brown arms from under a blanket, with quivering fists, waking.

Dragon Lady and Adam were whispering about something, dark brown and light brown heads together. Adam rubbed his chains.

Suddenly Baby came up. Among the faint fuzz of a new moustache, his nose had run all over his upper lip. Clutched in scrawny, filthy-nailed fingers was a cut-glass bowl, caked at the edges with sugar. "You want some?" He gestured with his chin toward the tablespoon handle.

"No thanks," Lanya said.

Kid shook his head too. Baby said, "Oh," and went away.

Lanya held up the cup for Kid to sip. His hands came up to guide hers. A blade ticked the crock, so he took that one away, felt the ligaments in the back of her hand with the other.

Coffee slapped bitter back across his tongue; he swallowed. Steam tickled his nostrils.

She blew; she sipped; she said, "It's strong!"

"Hey, Baby! Wait—come on back here, Adam!" Dragon Lady bawled, turning, jangling. "Come on, now!"

Through some door, not the kitchen's, a lot of people came into the house.

Lanya frowned, blinked.

A lot of people came into the room. Coffee, chocolate, and tamarindo faces, hands, and shoulders swung by, turning, as chains from long or stocky necks swung under several hairdos of beachball dimensions. Two of the men were arguing, while a third, his arm supple as a blacksnake, waved and shouted to quell them: "Com'on, man! Come on, now, man! Come on—" A minimal half-dozen white faces were occluded or eclipsed before Kid could fix them. Most, blacks and others, Kid recognized from the Emboriky run. A dark mahogany guy in a black vinyl vest stopped by the couch to regale Copperhead, while a diffident white, vestless and a scorpion only from the chains (his belly and chest were scarred with a single, long pucker, still-scabbed and pink), stood by, waiting to speak. In trio, they seemed oddly familiar. The black in the vinyl was the one who'd been friendly to him in Denny's group in the department store.

A hand the color of an old tire suddenly landed on Lanya's shoulder, another on Kid's; the close-cropped head bobbed between them; the long black body, under the swinging vest flaps and hanging chain loops, was sour with sweat, the breath, over small teeth and a heavy, hanging lip, sour with wine. "Shit…" drawled in two syllables.

"Hey, Ripper," Lanya said, "get
off!"
Kid was surprised she knew his name.

But Ripper—yes, it was Jack the Ripper—got off.

A stocky white girl with a tattooed arm was talking to Nightmare when two more blacks joined the colloquy, loudly. Nightmare, louder, cut over: "Man, I can't hang
around—"

"Come on," Kid said to Lanya. "I want to talk to you."

Lanya's eyes flicked from the room to Kid's face. "All right."

He gestured with his head for her to follow.

Stepping around one person and over another, they went into the hall.

The noise erupted and trundled and careered.

Looking for the room with Denny's loft, Kid pushed open the second door he saw. But there was too much light—

Siam on a crate by the green sink, said, "Hey!" and put the newspaper over his lap. He looked at Kid with a smile that fell apart into awed confusion. "I was… was reading the paper." At the edge of the bandage over his hand, the flesh was scaling. Siam offered his brown smile again, thought better, took it back. "Just reading the paper." He stood; the paper fell on the floor. The boards had once been painted maroon.

There was neither glass nor screening in the wide porch window. The city sloped away down the hill.

"You can see… so far," Lanya said at Kid's shoulder. She took another sip of coffee. "I didn't realize you could see so far from here."

But Kid was frowning. "What's that?"

Beyond the last houses, beyond the moiled grey itself, at a place that might have marked the horizon, a low, luminous arc burned.

"It looks like the sun coming up," Lanya said.

"Naw," Siam said. "It's the middle of the afternoon. Maybe it's…" He looked at Kid again, stopped.

"Maybe it's a fire," Kid said. "It's too wide for the sun."

Siam squinted. The arc was reddish. Beyond the gash of the park, a few houses were touched here and there with a copper that, in the haze, paled almost to white gold. "Sometimes," Siam said, "when you see the moon real close to the horizon, like that, it looks much bigger. Maybe the same thing happens to the sun, sometimes?"

"But you just said it was the middle of the afternoon." Kid squinted too. "Besides, it's
still
ten times too wide." He looked back at Lanya. "Let's go."

"Okay." Lanya took his hand, the bladed one, slipping her fingers between the metal, to hold two of his.

They went back into the hall.

The room with Denny's loft didn't have a door.

"If there's nobody in here," Kid said, "we can talk."

"Want any more coffee?"

"No."

She finished half the cup (while he thought how hot it must be) and put it down on a cluttered ironing board behind the motorcycle.

"Get up in the loft."

She climbed, looked back. "Nobody's up here."

"Go on."

She crawled over, first one tennis shoe, then the other disappearing.

He came up after her.

"Look," she said, as he got his other knee over, "I came by because I wanted to apologize for being so— well, you know. Running off like that. And acting so angry."

"Oh," he said. "That's okay. You
were
angry. I'm just glad you come." One fist balled on the blankets, he settled to his haunches, watching her silhouette against the windowshade. "How did you know I was here?" He wanted to put his head in her lap; he wanted to nuzzle between her legs. "How did you find me, this time? Who saw me wander up here this morning and came running back to tell you?"

"But this is where they said you'd been for—"

"I know!" He sat back, laughed sharply. "I've been gone another five days! Right?"

Her silhouette frowned.

"Or six. Or ten… people have been talking about me again, saying how I've been living it up here, running with the scorpions, making my rep." He wanted to cup her warm cheeks in his rough, ugly hands. He said, and his voice suddenly became rough, ugly: "I've seen you every day since I met you…" He dragged his hands, bladed and unbladed, into his lip, where bone and muscle and chain and leather and nerve and metal, all mixed up, lay, heavy and confused and gripping. "I have!" He said, swallowed. "That's what it
feels
like. To me…"

She said: "That's one of the things I wanted to talk about. I mean, after I left you asleep, in the church, I thought maybe you'd want to
know
some of what happened while you… were away. You told me you went looking for me at the park commune. I thought you'd want to know what happened there after that guy with the gun—"

"I—" fingers and metal and harness moved in his lap—"I don't… I mean, I live in one city." He moved but couldn't lift. "Maybe you live in another. In mine, time… leaks; sloshes backwards and forwards, turns up and shows what's on its… underside. Things shift. Yeah, maybe you could explain. In your city. In your city, you're sane and I'm crazy. But in mine,
you're
the one who's nuts! Because you keep telling me things are happening that don't fit with what I
see!
Maybe that's the only city I can live in. Some guy with a gun? In the park?" He laughed, harshly. "I don't know if I
want
to live in yours!"

She was silent; once he saw her head jerk at some idea; but she decided not to say that one, seconds later decided to say another: "You say you saw me… last night, at the church? And then before that, yesterday… morning? In the park? All right. I'll accept that's what it looks like to you, if you'll accept that it doesn't seem that way to me. All right." She gestured toward his knee, did not quite touch it. "I'm curious about your… city. But some time soon, ask me about what goes on in mine. Maybe something's there that can help you."

"You have my notebook?"

"Yes." She smiled. "I figured you were so out of it, you just might leave it behind on the floor. You've written some strange stuff in there."

"My poems?"

"Those too," she said.

Which made him frown because some of this warmth, still unresolved, was connected with wanting to write.

"I'm glad you have it. And I'm glad you came to see me. Because I—"

Footsteps below.

And Denny's head came up over the loft edge. "Hey, look. This is—oh. You." Denny crawled up over while someone else climbed.

She stopped with her head just visible, and recognized Kid with a frown that faded to resignation, then climbed the rest of the way, breasts swinging in blue jersey.

"Um… this loft is theirs," Kid said to Lanya.

"It's his," the girl said. "It isn't mine. All the junk up here is his. We just came to get away from the mob."

"You see," Kid said, "instead of telling me what's been going on while I was there, you should be finding out what's been going on here."

"Sure," Lanya said. "What?"

"I been balling these two, for one thing.
That
seemed like days…"

Denny's chin jerked.

The girl sighed a little.

"Denny's a good fuck," Kid said. "She is too. But sometimes it gets a little hectic."

"Denny…?" the girl said.

Denny, sitting back on his heels, darted his eyes from Lanya to Kid.

"Maybe," Kid said, and suddenly his hands came apart, "we all could ball again. I mean the
four
of us. That might work out better—"

The girl said, "Denny, I'm supposed to be going some place with Copperhead and his friends. I
told
you that before. Look I gotta …"

"Oh," Denny said. "Well, okay."

"You sure?" Kid asked the girl. "I mean, the whole idea was because I thought maybe it would make
you
feel better if…"

The girl poised at the edge of the loft. "Look," she said. "You're probably trying to be very nice. But you just don't understand. It isn't
my
thing. Maybe it's his." She nodded toward Denny. "I don't know… is it yours?" That was to Lanya.

"I don't know," Lanya said. "I've never tried."

"I don't mind somebody
watching,"
the girl said, "if it's a friend. But what we were doing," she shrugged; "It isn't me." She got down from the platform, paused again, just a head showing. "Denny, I'll see you later. Goodbye," with the same tone Kid remembered from the sixteenth-floor apartment in the Labrys. A second later she tripped on something, gave a startled, stifled, "Shit…" and was gone.

Kid looked from Denny to Lanya, back to Denny. "We…" he started. "We were just… we figured we'd use your loft because, well, there were so many other people around. Like she said; the mob."

"That's okay," Denny said. He crossed his arms. "Is it okay if
I
watch?"

Lanya laughed and sat back against the window edge. A scar of light from beside the shade lay on her hair.

Denny looked at her. "That's what I like to do. Sometimes, I mean, since it's my place. He knows."

"Sure," Lanya said. "That's reasonable." She nodded, laughed again.

"We were just using it to
talk,"
Kid said.

"Oh," Denny said. "I just thought because you were saying we should all… you know. All of us."

"You
do
live in a strange city," Lanya said. "Maybe I do too." She looked at Denny. "Where do you live?"

"Right here." Denny frowned. "Most of the time."

"Oh." After a moment, Lanya said: "You two've been at it? Why don't you two make it then—" she moved her tennis shoes from beneath her, raised her knees, dropped her meshed fists between—"and I'll watch. I've been in the other room when two guys were balling. But I've never been in the same bed. The idea sort of turns me on."

Kid said: "I just meant—"

"I
know," Lanya said. "You want Denny and me to ball, and
you
want to watch. Well—" she shrugged, tossed her hair and grinned—"I think you're cute—" at Denny. "I wouldn't mind that."

"Gee," Denny said, "I don't know if…" and shifted into some other emotional gear: "because you see that's what we were…" and into another: "before. It was okay. But…" He went forward on his fists, lowered his haunches. "It's just that it wasn't her…" He glanced over the edge. "Like she said. And I'd never done it
that
way either."

"Oh." Lanya said, pushing her elbows together.

Kid thought: I
still
don't know her name. "Hey," he said to Lanya. "Come here."

Lanya pursed her lips, hesitated with stiffened arms; then they unstiffened. She came forward.

"You too, motherfucker." Denny practically fell against his side. Kid caught the boy's neck in the crook of his arm. The blades swung beyond Denny's face, dim in half light. Kid pulled his arm tight around Lanya's shoulder, his hand an epaulet over blouse, collar bone, muscle.