Dhalgren (80 page)

Nightmare rolled his wet, red underlip back into his mouth, and nodded. His left eye, Kid noticed again, had the slightest cast.

The water puddling in the sink shook beneath the crusty faucet.

"I thought it would be sort of interesting to see what would happen if one of you brainy, crazed types was running things for a while. All the brainy niggers in Bellona had sense enough to get out. We don't got too much to choose from so we might as well make it interesting, right? I ain't gonna stay in this fucking fog hole the rest of my life. It's a real gas being Nightmare, you know? But I'm gonna get back to St. Louis, get me a little foreign car, do some work in the gym, and put two or three ladies back to work for me, and I'm gonna be Larry H. Jonas all over again. And I hope I don't ever hear about no Nightmare no more. If somebody shouts it out on Sixth Street, I'm gonna walk down Olive. I've done too many things here I'd just as soon leave here." He stood up. "You strip off the Nightmare, and I
got
me a name. I know people. In St. Louis." His hand slid up to his shoulder, big fingers working. "So I figured I'd leave you here. Besides, Denny likes you. That little cocksucker's got a head on his shoulders. Not like some of these dumb nuts. You don't look like you mind." Among the links sagging on his chest, bright beads caught more light than there was to catch, winking and dying and winking.

"Hey, that scar on your shoulder?" Kid asked. "You and Dragon Lady getting on pretty good?"

"Like a bitch. Sometimes." Nightmare's face twisted a moment about his broken tooth. "And then sometimes—" he frowned—"well, you know." After the faucet dripped three more times, he turned to leave, but paused to look over his shoulder. "You want to talk about anything else?"

"No." Kid said. "That's all."

Nightmare left.

Across the hall was a room Kid had never been in. He opened the door.

Dollar, silhouetted before the torn window shade, turned. The lion peered by his hip from the sill. The taste of burning at the back of Kid's throat flooded forward, into an amazing stench: on one of the overlapping mattresses was a charred halo around a crater two feet across of ashes and burned cotton. Newspaper and magazine pictures had been pasted over one wall; many had been ripped off again.

One of the three blacks sitting on the floor glanced at him. The little blond girl shrugged her pea jacket back up her shoulders and pulled it across her breasts.

"What are you… I mean, hey, man…?" Dollar stepped up unsteadily. "Kid, look, you're supposed to be an all-right guy, huh? You don't gotta hurt me. Please? Man, I ain't never done nothing like that before in my life, you know?… You want me to…?" He took another step. "Hey… what are you trying to do? Huh?" His hand strayed in the chains around his neck, twisted in them.

"Whatever it is," Kid said, "it looks like I'm doing it." All the muscles in his face felt tight: he went back into the hall.

Noise was coming from the front room. Nightmare's laughter rose. Dragon Lady's cut across it.

As if they'd suddenly heated, Kid pawed beneath the back of his vest and, from his belt, pulled loose the books. Both were creased. The face of one was rubbed and dirty. So was the back of the other.

"Hey, come on, come on, sweetheart!" Nightmare hollered. "What are you trying to do to me, huh? What are you trying to…" and exploded in laughter.

"I just asked," Dragon Lady announced with hysterical deliberation, "if you wanted some more God-damned coffee…" The last syllable became a shriek, tumbling in counterpoint to Nightmare's laugh, till both splashed into the cistern of mirth.

Kid took refuge in the bathroom.

Pants about his knees, he sat. A fugitive bubble in the gut cramped his abdomen; the cramp faded. He broke wind and knew he was empty.

He turned the books over, flipped through one, then the other. He wanted to read one poem, at least, through. A minute later, he realized he'd actually been deliberating not which poem, but in which book to read it. Was the discomfort in his belly a ghost of the gas? No.

A book in either hand, he joggled them.
Time
had been spent writing these. The time was mornings with his forehead wrinkled and the grass obligingly silent beyond the blanket's edge; was evenings at the bar with candlelight scoring bottles with their different contents at different heights like pistons in an engine; was a broken curb on either side while he sat with the ballpoint burning his middle finger. Writing, he had not thought to retrieve any of it. But the prospect of publication had somehow convinced him magic was in process that would return to him, in
tacto
(not
memorium),
some of what the city had squandered. The conviction was now identified by its fraudulence, before the inadequate objects. But as it died, kicking in his gut, spastic and stuttering, he knew it had been as real and unquestioned as any surround: air to a bird, water to a fish, earth to a worm.

He was exhausted, with an exhaustion that annihilated want. And all he could conceive of wanting was to try again; to make more poems, to put them in a book, to have that book made real by reproduction, and give that hallucination another chance!

He had nothing to write. He could not imagine what another poem of his would be, how it might lilt, or even look. Is that, he wondered, why they call it "creation?" The texture on the eye, the corrugation on the air around him had absorbed all. There was nothing left (…about what you see about you, what's happening to you, what you feel. No.) No. Something had to be… created. As these had been.

A muscle in his shoulder tensed.

He'd once been scared of things like that: (…a blood-clot breaking loose from the vein wall to race toward the heart, jamming a valve!) Habit commenced a shiver.

He caught up his breath, and his pants, and the books from where he'd dropped them. The leering mannequin, chained and bloody, leaned against the tank and smiled benignly up at Kid's left nipple. Kid scratched it, put the books back under his belt, and went out.

In Denny's room he took two rungs of the ladder at once. His chin gained the loft. "Hey, wake up!" Denny didn't, so he climbed up the rest of the way, kneeled astraddle, and took hold of the boy's head. "Hey!"

"God damn—!" Denny tried to roll to his back. One arm shot out and waved. "What the fuck are you…"

"Come on, get up!" Kid's hands clamped, and Denny's came back to grasp his wrist.

"Okay!"
Denny said, his cheeks pushed together, distorting his voice. "Shit, man. I'm getting up, all right…?"

"You got to take me to Lanya's place." Kid raised his leg and sat back. "You know where it is, huh? You took her there. You know!"

Denny grunted and pushed himself up on his elbows. Boots and chains by his head lay on a crumple of green. His vest's leather edge fell back from a pinkened line across one waxy pectoral. "Yeah, I guess so."

"Get the fuck up, cocksucker." Kid gestured. "I want to go see her."

"Okay, okay." Denny reached back for his boots and started to put them on. Once he glanced up and said, "Shit!"

Kid grinned at him. "Move your ass."

"Fuck you," Denny said dryly and ducked his head through rattling links. "Come on." He swung his feet over the edge and jumped.

Kid swung over the ladder while Denny bobbed erect in the doorway.

"What's all the rush for?" Denny asked. "Hey, stop pushing me, will you?" as Kid shoved him into the hall.

"I'm not hurting you," Kid said. "Did you know Dollar beat some kid to death with a pipe?"

"Huh? When?"

"Yesterday."

Denny tried to whistle. It squeaked at the beginning and was all air. "Dollar's a crazy motherfucker, you know that? I mean he always was crazy. Hell, all the white guys in the nest are nuts."

"Sure." Kid herded Denny toward the hall door.

"Why'd he do it?"

Kid shrugged. "I dunno."

The hall door opened. Thirteen (Smokey behind) stepped inside, looking around as though he expected something… different, "Hey, Kid! Oh, hey man, I got to talk to you! You know Dollar? Well, we just got here, but… somebody told me yesterday he got a bar, from a police lock, and beat some kid to—"

"GET OFF MY ASS!"
Kid said very loudly in Thirteen's face, hefting his fist. If I keep this up, he thought, I'm going to hit somebody. "Now just get off my ass, will you?"

Thirteen, one hand against his green tank top (the "13" tattoo stretched wide), had backed against one wall, and Smokey, wide-eyed, against the other.

Kid put his hand on Denny's shoulder. "Come on. Let's go!"

They stalked between them and out the door; it swung to behind.

"… just watch out. Oh, yeah, you just better watch out. I know. I know." He wagged his finger, backed away, talked Spanish. Then: "They gonna
get
you—"

"Look, man," Kid said. "Will you—"

"It's all right. It's all right. You just watch out, now. Please? I'm sorry. I'm sorry." His thick neck sweated. He tugged at the wool. "I'm sorry. You just lemme 'lone, huh? They gonna…" Suddenly he looked around, turned, and lumbered into the alley.

"Jesus Christ." A smile hovered about Denny's face. "What… was that about?"

"I don't know." One book had fallen on the sidewalk. The other leaned against the curb.

"I mean this guy just comes up and starts to push you like that. I thought you were gonna hit him." Denny nodded heavily. "You should've hit him. Why'd he just want to come up and start messing on us like that?"

"He didn't mess on you any." Kid picked up the books and put them back under his belt.

"He's just crazy or something, huh?"

"Come on," Kid said. "Yeah, he's… crazy."

"Jesus Christ. That's really funny. You ever see him before?"

"Yeah."

They walked.

"What was he doing then?"

"Just about the same thing… one time. The others? He was pretty normal."

"A nut," Denny pronounced, and scratched his groin inside both pants pockets. "She lives over there. I thought you knew already. She didn't tell you?"

"No."

Denny wrinkled his nose. "All this shit in the air. I don't think it's very healthy, you know? What's the matter?"

Kid had stopped, to hook up a section of the chain across his stomach. A glass circle distorted the pad of his thumb into a zebra's flank: dirty troughs whorled the flesh.

"She lives right over there," Denny reiterated, warily.

"All right."

In step, they angled into the street.

"She got a nice place."

A tension held, suspended: Kid wished he could examine it more closely: defract, reflect, magnify…

They turned the corner and went down the empty street. "Looks like rain, doesn't it?" Denny said.

"It always looks like rain."

"It doesn't feel like rain."

"It never feels like rain."

"Yeah, you know, that's right?" Denny hopped up the concrete steps, holding the aluminum rail. "It never does!"

Kid followed, surveying the three-story facade. Denny thumbed the bell.

"They live on the top floor. The first two floors are empty so people won't think anyone's in the building."

"It's a good idea not to attract attention, I guess." Kid contemplated asking who was the rest of "they" when footsteps clacked on a stairway.

"Who is it?" asked a woman. Voice familiar? He wondered from where.

"I'm a friend of Lanya's. I'd like to see her."

The peephole darkened. "Just a second."

The door opened. "You know, I didn't recognize your voice at first," Madame Brown said. "How have you been, Kid?" She took in Denny: "Hello. It's nice to see you again… Denny, isn't it?" Her neck glittered.

"Lanya's living with you?" Kid, shocked, was unsure why.

"Um-hm.
Why don't you come inside?"

Somewhere above the first landing, Muriel barked.

"Hush!" Madame Brown commanded the air. "Hush, I say!"

The dog barked three times more.

"Come in, come in. Pull the door behind you. It locks itself."

They followed her up the steps.

"I think," she let fall behind, "Lanya's asleep. Even with her school we've both been having an incredible time keeping to any sort of schedule. I don't know when she went to bed. I suspect it was rather late."

"She'll want to see me," Kid said. He frowned at the back of Madame Brown's red rough hair.

"Oh, I'm sure she will."

They rounded the first landing.

Muriel, visible now, barked again.

"Hush! Now hush up! These are people you know, dear. It's Kid. And Denny. You played with Denny for hours the last time he was here. Don't carry on like that." She reached for the dog's muzzle; Muriel quietened. "Did I say Lanya was asleep? I doubt it after all that.
Naughty!
Naughty!"

Denny was looking up and down and sideways—not like somebody who'd played there for hours. Candlesticks were everywhere: three on a small table beneath a framed portrait, an iron brace full in the corner, two more on the windowsill between white curtains dulled by the sky behind.

"You got electricity here?" Kid asked.

"In two rooms," Madame Brown explained. "Oh, the candles? Well, we're so near Jackson, we thought we better have them around, just in case."

Two rooms away, unlit: a wall of books, a desk, an easy chair.

"That's my office in there," Madame Brown commented on Kid's stare.

Which brought his eyes to more candleholders in the next room. "Um… this is really a nice place."

"There're some marvelous houses all through this area, if you just look. They're not hard to find at all. Though I suppose we were lucky with this one. Most of the furniture was already here."

"The rent must be a steal," Kid said, "if you don't mind the neighborhood."

"Oh, we don't pay any—" After an emotionless moment (Kid stopped and Denny bumped into him) she laughed, loudly, shrilly. "By the way, congratulations on your book! Mary Richards showed me a copy the other day. She just tells everybody about how she knows you now."

"Yeah?" He'd intended the smile to be cynical; but pleasure pushed him into joyous, goofy sincerity. "She does?"