Dhalgren (89 page)

Kid flung himself against Dollar, spread-eagled them both on the wall. Then his shoulder, still stinging from the plank, exploded in pain, so surprising he couldn't cry out. He just grunted and clawed at Dollar's head. Dollar's teeth came open with a rush of air. He heard Dollar's skull hit the wall twice, and realized he was pounding it. He felt blood dribbling bis arm. Dollar's eyes were unfocused. He was trying to shake his head. His upper teeth were filmed with blood, his lower lip flecked with it.

"You gonna let me take care of him?" Copperhead's voice came out a fifth too low; his words wobbled. "This fuckin' loony is gonna hurt somebody! And then there ain't gonna be no telling. You gonna let us take care of him?"

Kid looked back. Copperhead's bearded chin was buried back in his neck. His freckled fists opened and closed, and he swayed and panted.

"You gonna let us take care of him?"

Dollar rocked his head over the wall. "You tell him to leave me alone!" Tears made the lashes of his. left eye glisten. "I'm gonna kill 'im! He knows it!" Dollar blinked. Tears rolled into the stubble that grew high up his pustuled cheek.

In the stillness, Kid's panic died. What surged in its place was rage. But he could find no words to bellow. He raised his hands and let a roaring breath.

Copperhead blinked and stepped back.

Dollar's eyes stopped rolling.

Kid felt some muscle leaping in his jaw and flexed his mouth to control it. He rubbed his sticky shoulder.

Glass stood in the bathroom door, Spitt, a few steps behind of him. In the open front door, Denny had one hand on the knob and the other on the molding.

Waiting for words to come to him, Kid heard talking.

"…You see that? You see that, the way he did?…" Pepper crowded in the living room door, whispered intently the D-t, who wasn't listening. "…You see the way Dollar went after that nigger, with a damn board? I bet he would've really messed him up, I bet. He better watch out for Copperhead, now, 'cause Copperhead gonna get him. You think he could beat up Copperhead? Huh? If Kid ain't come in to stop it, who do you bet would've got the other one first, huh? If Kid ain't come in…"

Between thin shoulders, heavy with chain, Pepper's face bore its ecstatic, rotted grin.

"You wait, Copperhead," Kid said, "till I tell you to."

Copperhead closed his lips and, more just to move his head than to agree, nodded.

"Go on," Kid said. "Just don't bother with him."

"…Yeah," Copperhead said. His fists opened, "…only 'cause that's what you sayin'…" He turned and walked up the hall; Glass and Spitt shifted their weight.

"I'm gonna
kill
'im! He knows I'm gonna—"

Copperhead turned and barreled back.

Kid hit Dollar on the side of his face with both fists meshed. It was a weak and awkward blow (and his shoulder stung and throbbed beneath the sting) but Dollar crumpled with his hands over his ears.

Copperhead grabbed Kid's shoulders (the pain in the left one went up another level) and got two kicks in around Kid's legs.

"Owe…! Naw…!"

Kid shoved Copperhead back. "Someone get him
out
of here!"

No one moved.

"You two! Get this bastard out of this God-damn nest before somebody kills him!" He turned and put both hands on Copperhead's chest. Copperhead's vest hung down one arm. A chain had fallen over the other. "You leave him alone… otherwise I'm gonna have to bust you too, and then we'll
both
get hurt!"

Behind him there was a scraping and jangling.

He looked over his shoulder. Denny and another scorpion (neither were the two he had yelled at) supported Dollar, who panted, lurched, and couldn't get his feet under him at all. Kid thought: He must be faking. Damn it, nobody hit him that hard.

Copperhead took another breath, swallowed, shook his head, took another.

"…Dollar would have really busted up Copperhead if Kid didn't stop him, I bet? You think he would've killed him? I bet he would've, I mean you see the way he went after Copperhead with that board? Then Kid just runnin' in like that…"

The front door opened; Dollar's feet struggled with the steps.

Kid breathed hard, clapped Copperhead's shoulder and walked past. He tried to atomize the fragments of the action. He felt terribly clear-headed. But for all his clarity, he could trace no motivations through the memories of blows and pain.

He stood on the service porch kneading his shoulder, listening to people moving again in other rooms.

"Kid…?"

The black girl Dollar had been necking with last night (from her clothes, Kid saw, she wasn't a scorpion) tucked under one arm, Copperhead, still breathing hard, stepped onto the porch. Spitt and Glass were wedged behind him.

"What?" Kid squeezed his shoulder again. "What do you want?" The scrape from the plank had done more harm than Dollar's bite. Rabies, he thought; I'm gonna get rabies from the bastard.

"You let us go out and take care of him, okay? He's hanging around the house. He's just gonna try and make trouble. We work him over, and he'll be all quiet and nice again, once he gets better. I don't know what you're trying to do," Copperhead said. "But it won't work no other way."

"I don't care," Kid said, mainly because his shoulder hurt, "what you do with him as long as you do it outside."

Copperhead looked back at the other two scorpions. "Okay," he said thickly. "Come on."

The black girl stood in the doorway alone, fingering the waist of her maroon jeans. "They shouldn't do that," she said, with an accent out of Florida and an expression of concern.

As clear as he had felt moments back, Kid felt that dull now. Mouth opened, he nodded at her.

Later he stalked through the house, ignoring the people who moved around him. He stood at the front door, then suddenly turned and went to the porch, and stood before the door there, not really looking at the yard outside; when he became aware of it, he went into the kitchen.

Outside the screening a girl was asking: "…inside? Do you know if he's in there? The big…"

Kid opened the door.

Her knuckle leaped to her chin. Her blonde hair, caught in a barrette with plastic flowers, slipped off her shoulder as she turned her head.

"You're about eight blocks off Jackson," Kid said.

June shook her head. "I wasn't looking for…"

Raven (one of the scorpions who owned the Harley) rubbed his dirty hands on his vest, squeezed his long, rough hair together, took the thong from between his teeth, and tied a top-knot large as his head. "I don't know what she wants."

"You…
you
live here?" June asked.

Kid nodded. "What do you want? If you're not looking for George, who are you looking for?"

Her hand fell from button to button on her blouse. "My brother."

Kid frowned.

"My big brother, Edward."

"Oh…" Kid frowned harder. "What makes you think you'll find him here?"

"Somebody saw… said they saw… you just…" She looked at Raven.

He had settled his thumb in his belt and stared back.

Kid beckoned her inside with a nod. She came sideways through the door. Because the sink had filled up once more, somebody had put the kettle, sides streaked with hardened soup, in the middle of the floor.

June looked at it.

Kid tried to remember how long he'd been stepping around it.

"Somebody told my mother that they'd… they thought they'd seen somebody who…"

They went into the next room.

"My parents don't know I came," she said. "They wouldn't have wanted me to… come here."

Two black girls turned to watch her. A blond boy came up behind them, leaned on their shoulders, sucked in his lower lip and drawled. "Shit…" The three laughed.

"He isn't one of them?" Kid asked. "Is he?"

She looked at the toes of her black shoes; spots of red spread her cheek.

"You want to hunt around?"

She nodded and hurried ahead to interpose him between the leering scorpions and herself. Two more passing the doorway, the short-haired white woman (with a tattoo on her arm) and D-t, caught her eyes, till she suddenly jerked her head away and closed her mouth.

"Come on, I'll show you around."

In the hallway the girl in maroon levis was talking to Siam. June looked at the photograph with its cracked glass at the same time Siam and the girl looked at her.

It's because, he realized, she stands so far away from me, so nervously, that makes them stare like that. She circles, she still circles, she circles in. Yet she's so far away! It's not even (the realization went on) that she's a pretty girl, but rather that there are over two dozen people living in here and the isolation she demands about her destroys our concept of human space. That their hostility comes out in sexual leers and sexual jibes ("You see that pussy walk through here?" somebody, male or female, he wasn't sure, said in the next room. "Where's my knife and fork?") is a generic response to something far more personal than her gender—though she may not understand that for years. Some people
are
very young at seventeen.

"You don't live in the park any more?" June asked.

"Nope." He looked out on the porch and into the yard. "He's not one of those?"

She shook her head without, he thought, looking.

"Maybe in here." They crossed the hall; Kid opened the door.

It was hot and even Kid sometimes wondered how they slept in the charred half-dark. Four, a girl among them, naked on the big mattress in the corner, sweated inertly, breaths hissing in different rhythms. Cathedral with his back against the wall reading a book whose cover had come off (—
Brass Orchids:
Kid recognized the title page). In deference to the sleepers, he had not raised the shade. The lion, crouched on the sill, read over his shoulder.

Kid stepped forward.

June, her hand loose before her face once more, followed.

The closet door had been taken down and propped up on boxes. An open sleeping bag hung off it onto the floor. A boy and girl, both with long hair, slept there together. Neither were scorpions and the boy (his hand curled against her neck) looked as though he would have slept easier in the commune.

Someone (Angel?) rummaged inside the closet. Things rumbled and fell and growled, punctuated by, "…shit…" and "…God damn…" and "…shit!…" and "…shit…"

Since Kid had last been in the room, someone had hung up a poster of George as the Moon. Around it were a half dozen
Playboy
centerfolds, two covers from Black Garters, and lots of naked women playing tennis at some nudist camp.

June closed her fists so tightly in the skirt of her green jumper, they shook.

This is an act, Kid thought. But then, so is this.

"Eddy?" Her voice was firm for all her quivering arms.

"Huh?… Oh, hey…" It was the square-jawed blond scorpion who'd harassed Pepper. "What are you… just a second." He pushed the blanket off his feet and began to lace his sneakers. He snapped his jeans together and searched for his vest. Hair, light as his sister's, made a crushed and sprung helmet of gold foil too big for his head.

"I've… I've
never
seen anything like this in my life!" June accused, softly. Her face looked as though, expecting milk, she had swallowed orange juice. She actually said: "Eddy… is it really you?"

"Just a second," the blond repeated, got his vest on, and stood, unsteadily on the mattress. He looked too old for Kid's picture of June's other brother. His forehead was creased. His temples were high. Like I'm a baby face, Kid thought, maybe you'd just think he was over twenty-five: but there was a certain youthful unsurety of movement. Like his sister's. Their eyes and upper lips were identical. His lower one was fuller than hers—more like Mrs Richards'. He came toward them. "What'd you come here for?"

"We thought you'd gone to another city, Eddy!" She looked past his shoulder and back. "Oh… if Daddy and Mommy could see you here, in this, like this, they'd just… die… they'd die…"

"What do you want?"

"To talk to you. To see you. To see if you were really… Somebody said they'd seen somebody who looked like—"

"Just a second," Eddy said. "I gotta go to the—I mean I just woke up." He touched his sister's shoulders, then stepped past Kid into the hall. "I'll be right back…"

California turned over on the mattress.

Cathedral looked up from the book.

June's eyes flicked about the shadowed room, caught once on the poster, dodged it. "I liked your book very… I thought it was nice… the part you wrote about us when… no, no!" She said after a moment: "Eddy lives here with you… I mean how long has he…"

Kid shrugged.

"My mother likes your book too," she said after another moment. "She gave it to a few of…"

When she didn't finish, he said: "Say hello for me."

"I wouldn't
dare!"
After a second, she closed her mouth. "Oh, I
couldn't

It isn't worth getting angry, Kid thought. He leaned against the doorway edge. Angel, in the closet, looked out, said, "What…?" got no answer, shrugged, and went back in. I don't answer because there is nothing to say. She turns and stares fixedly at some pile of bedding on the floor she does not really see, sure an answer is demanded of her.

He could walk away and leave her to wait alone.

"Watch it," Glass said behind him.

Kid turned.

"Got it." Spitt hefted Dollar's ankles up under his arms.

"You just put him in there," Copperhead said. "He'll be all right."

June had turned too. Kid was impressed how well, for her nervousness, she looked interested but not hysterical.

Dollar's shoulder hit the door.

"Back him up there, huh?" Glass lifted Dollar roughly by the arm, stepped over, and walked him through.

"…you see that? You see how they done him? He was just hanging around outside, he didn't even run or nothing, when they came after him. Shit, they didn't do that much. Soon as Copperhead hit him the third time he crumpled right up like that. He ain't even got a bloody nose. His eye looks pretty bad, though…"

Below the eye the puffy cheek was scraped. Dollar's arms flopped out on either side. His belt was opened.