Dhalgren (94 page)

"Oh, sure!" The Ripper beat down the doubt with his wide, black hand, "Sure." He laughed and went on.

In the front room, Nightmare turned around and said something to Kid, mauled beyond comprehensibility by laughter. The others laughed too. His thick braid glistened with dressing. To his leather vest, neck chains, chained cycle boots, and garrison, the velvet loaned a scarlet panache.

"Nightmare," Siam (who only wore a small bandage now) was saying, "you're wearing those pants so low your ass has got
cleavage,
man!"

"Shit!" Nightmare caressed his great shoulder, "they
like
to see my muscles!" There was only a trace of the shoulder scar.

Kid glanced down at his own, listening to the laughter.

Dragon Lady, legs crossed, sat on the couch: White levi's, white boots, a silver lame turtleneck, and over it a white levi jacket, sleeves torn off. Her usual chains (a trip to the hardware store?) had been replaced by silver—or at any rate, stainless steel. Her nails were painted platinum. When she threw her head back to laugh, on her big, stained teeth, sweat glistened just below her rough hair. She looked easy, elegant, and terrifying.

Adam, brown and glum looking, sat on the couch arm in his baggy pants and sneakers.

Baby sat on the floor in front of him, one dirty foot on top of the other, arms wrapped around his knobbly knees, a grubby hand on each grubby elbow, smiling like a happy, blond rat.

"Hey! Hey, come on! Now listen to this!" Blonder than Tarzan (who stood, oddly sullen, by the kitchen door), blond as Bunny, Revelation, perched on the back of the chair, turned over the
Times
and pulled aside his chains. He wore twice as many as anyone else, all brass and copper: "…'late in the afternoon yesterday, stalked through the streets of Jackson, terrorizing residents.' How you like that? So you guys were out terrorizing the spades yesterday? Huh?" His skin was the luminous pink some pale flesh becomes either in great cold or great heat. "…'committing acts of vandalism, the damage for which there is no way to assess, the rowdy band of black and white youths, necks hung with the chains that we have come to associate with the scorpions'—"

"We didn't terrorize nobody!" Denny (black shirt, silver fringe, beneath his vests and chains) sat with his back against the wall. "There wasn't nobody on the God-damn street!"

"That's cause they were all terrorized," Revelation explained. "Don't you see?"

"…'breaking into the Second City Bank'—?"

"Shit," Thruppence said (who had borrowed one of Denny's shirts) "we didn't do nothing yesterday."

"We robbed a fuckin' bank!" Filament (who had commandeered another) countered. "What do you mean we didn't do nothing? We robbed a whole God-damn bank!" She clasped her hands before her chin and looked delighted.

"A fuckin' bank?" Nightmare said. "Man, you're into some heavy stuff."

Spider, the youngest, blackest, and tallest scorpion in Kid's nest, leaned against the wall, rubbing the chains on his stomach, echoing Adam.

"…'It is nearly impossible, given our situation in Bellona, to identify any individuals in such an incident. Our reports are all from people behind locked doors and closed shutters'…"

"I can see all them motherfuckers now," Dollar said, too loud even for this merriment, "starin' at us out the peepholes. Just a-starin'. God
damn!"

"…'Their number has been estimated anywhere from forty to preposterous figures in the high hundreds'…"

"You mean," Copperhead demanded with lip-thinning satisfaction, "twenty of us made enough noise so that they thought we was in the high hundreds?" He stood, triumvirate with Spitt and Glass; all three, staunch to dictum, had made no change in dress.

Glass wore his black vinyl vest.

Spitt wore his projector and his scar and his turquoise buckle.

Between Spitt and Copperhead, Kid saw the little girl in the maroon jeans. Her blue blouse was very clean but unironed. She kept raising her hand to flatten the collar, glancing down at herself, and rubbing her collar again. For the first time she seemed pretty. Kid tried to remember what his reaction had been to her before and what had changed it.

"…'in the high hundreds'," Revelation repeated, " 'which we would like to think'—"

"Maybe they ain't talking about you?" Dragon Lady suggested.

"Sure they're talking about us!" Priest insisted.

"We're the only ones who robbed a bank yesterday, I God-damn guess!"

"—'to think preposterous!' " which made Revelation laugh so hard he crumpled the paper.

"We gonna go to this fuckin' party tonight?" Cathedral demanded, catching both door jambs and swinging his bulk into the room. He swung back. The optic strand glittered around his brown neck, creased twice with fat. "What we waiting for?"

Kid grinned, nodded—was astonished at the silence. "Come
on!"

They poured after him, laughing and shouting once more, out the front door and down the steps.

Pepper moved aside quickly.

"Change your mind yet?" Kid asked.

Pepper grinned his ruined grin. "Naw, I just don't feel like it, you know? I don't go for that stuff." His eyes flicked from Kid's.

Kid looked too.

From the bottom of the steps, among the milling scorpions, Tarzan watched; with a look of disgust he shook his head, turned away.

"Hey, don't let Tarzan stop you from coming," Kid said, suddenly angry. "I'll put the horsemen—" he nodded toward Copperhead and company—"on him so fast he won't be able to remember—" he started to say:
His name—
"what he thought it was he didn't like about you."

"Naw," Pepper said. "Naw, that ain't it. I'd just be all … Look, I thought I'd get me some wine, see. And maybe go over and say hello to Bunny. I ain't seen Bunny in a God-damn long time. She crazy, you know? She really a nut. But she's a good guy."

"Okay." Kid grinned back. "You do that."

"Uh…" Pepper said after him, "you have a nice time at the party…"

"Oh, hey…! Hey…! Come on, hey!" somebody shouted as Kid descended among them.

They started up the alley.

"Which way?" Nightmare called over a cluster of black heads in which, like, respectively, a lemon, a cumquat, and a dandelion among plums, were Tarzan's, and Copperhead's and Revelation's.

"Up this way. We have to pick up somebody."

Smoke encysted the corner street lamp in a giant pearl.

"God damn!" Somebody coughed. "How do you guys stand all this!"

(Kid couldn't see her because they had left the doorway's light.)

"You just ain't been here long enough, man! You'll get so you can't breathe without it after a while!"

"Somebody turn on some God-damn lights!" Kid called out, feeling across his chest for his projector. "Come on, huh?"

Dragon Lady's dragon raised, luminous jade, ahead. The mantis and the griffin flared, swaying, with misty penumbras.

An indigo spider flickered, mandibles higher than Kid's head—flickered out once around Copperhead, then gained full brightness like tardy neon.

Glass disappeared inside his newt.

Spitt's beetle glistened up like bottle glass.

Nightmare turned to Kid and grinned. "You got it pretty bright tonight, Kid," and flashed out beneath raised pincers.

The plastic colors opaled in the smoke.

Peacock (that was the Ripper), mantichor, and iguanadon, the spectral menagerie turned up the avenue.

"Are you sure this is where Lanya lives?" Kid asked Denny. The others milled about the stoop.

"Yeah," Denny said. "Yeah! Sure, ring the bell."

Kid did. Moments later, after footsteps (and he heard someone say, "Oh, dear…" behind the peephole), she opened the door and stepped out, all silver, into the smokey light.

"God
damn!"
Raven said appreciatively behind him.

Lanya shaded her eyes, looked about, said, "My God!" and burst out laughing.

Madame Brown, in something blue and tailored, stepped out behind her, looking tentative. The diffused light gave back to her heavy face the lines and over-madeup quality Kid had first seen by candle light. Once more her hair was harsh henna. And her neck, bound and bound around again with the optical beads, looked far too heavily decorated—yet it was the same way she wore them with her daytime browns and beiges.

Muriel barked once, leaped forward, and came up on the end of the leash.

"Oh, why don't you leave her home?" Lanya coaxed. "Look at our escort. We'll be—"

"Kid doesn't mind Muriel coming along; do you Kid? You said Roger had all those grounds. She'll be a perfect dear."

"Naw," Kid said, and discovered, saying it, he did. "Bring her along!"

"She just gets so lonely if I don't take her with me." Madame Brown surveyed the arrayed scorpions.

Muriel tried to run down the porch steps, couldn't and barked again.

"Hush, now!" Madame Brown said. "Hush!"

"Here, I'm giving this to you." Lanya handed Denny the piece of equipment Tak had taken from the warehouse with the cloth. "Put it in your shirt pocket for me?"

The silver fringe on Denny's sleeve shook in curtains of light as he put the control box away.

Lanya took Kid's hand. Her dress was sleeveless, scoop-necked, and reached the ground. She leaned to whisper: "I've got something for you too," and handed him her harmonica. "Put this in your pants pocket for me?"

"Sure."

Feeling the metal on his thigh through the dime-sized tear, Kid stepped down among the others. Lanya, Muriel, and Madame Brown came behind.

As they started, he heard Madame Brown: "Your arm looks a lot better. It hasn't been giving you any trouble?"

"No ma'am," Siam answered. "Not much. Any more. But I thought I was gonna die when you just poured all that iodine in there." He laughed.

They crossed the street.

"That was the only way I could think to keep it from getting infected. You were very, very brave."

"Shit." Siam said. "I hollered like a motherfucker—pardon, ma'am. But you remember how they were holding me down."

"Yes. And I still think you were brave."

"It's nice of you to say so. But if one of them niggers had let go of me, I'd a' probably killed you." He laughed again.

They spread the sidewalk, the street, each beast sailing on a pool of light.

Windows dripped with molten reflections—those with panes.

Perhaps half had their shields lit any one time. A boisterous black in silhouette would turn on a bright hippogryph, a mantichore; some gorgeous parrot or lizard would collapse around an ambling, side-lit figure—Kid tried to recall what
that
one had been, but her apparition, among so many, attracted his attention only by vanishing.

Dragon Lady, lights out, looked skeptically at Lanya, said to Kid, "I thought you said this weren't no dress-up party."

"Then you and I," Lanya told her, "will look that much better!"

Dragon Lady laughed. "You and me? Oh, honey, we sure will!" She dropped back and linked her silver arm in Lanya's bare one. "We gonna strut out fine, honey, and make them sons of bitches suffer!" Which made Lanya laugh. For a block the three of them walked arm in arm in arm.

But at some altercation ahead, Dragon Lady flared in jade and hastened forward to quell it:

Revelation (a frog) had started quarelling with Cathedral (some large bird that could, Kid realized on closer view, have been intended as an American Eagle): The Dragon moved between them, making more noise than both; they quieted.

Behind and to the side, Tarzan fingered, but hesitated to ignite, his parti-colored gila monster.

"That one…?" Madame Brown nodded ahead with a deep frown and theatrical restraint. "Have you noticed, but every time his griphon flickers—" which it just did, revealing stringy yellow hair, knobbly spine, pockmarked buttocks, and grime-rimmed heels—"but doesn't it look just like he doesn't have any clothes on at all?"

"He doesn't." Kid said.

"Is there anything wrong with him?" Madame Brown demanded. "Is he all right?"

Her tone had changed from smutty complicity to puritan distress. Kid recognized each but could not follow the mechanics of transition; he grew fearful of the light-headedness in which his mind bobbed. "No. He just doesn't have any," he explained, wondering if he were losing again his ability to follow logical connections.

Madame Brown said, "Oh…" in a tone at total odds with either previous.

They swarmed across the little park between Brisbains.

"I hope we get a ride back," Lanya said. "This is a long enough walk sober."

"Don't count on it."

"Roger is always talking in the paper about driving people in and out of town. Maybe he could have one of his drivers run us home afterward."

"I've seen his car. It's something from the thirties. Besides, how'd we fit all these people in?"

"You're just too democratic for words." She kissed his cheek. "Do you think I look nice?"

"Didn't I say so?"

"You did not. Nor did you say, 'You really made that dress yourself?' Or any of those things for which I'd prepared such very clever answers."

"Did you really make that dress yourself?" Kid slipped his hand around the tickling material on her waist. "It looks nice."

"Don't press too hard," she said. "I don't want to injure the material. No, no… I'm not driving you away!"

"I think you look nice," Denny said. "I think…" He whispered in her ear.

"Young
man!" Lanya said. "I don't believe I know you—"

"Aw," Denny said, "go suck on my dick…" and started away.

"Hey, I was kidding…" Lanya called, amused puzzlement at Denny in her voice. Her waist tugged in Kid's arm.

Denny turned, his face flickering in the passing lights. As they caught up to him, he grinned. "I wasn't." He put his arm around her too.

They stepped up on the next corner, watching the jogging luminosities, delicate or bulbous, pass beneath charred branches, under lamp posts suspending inverted crowns of broken glass, by houses with columned porches, entrances gaping on blackness, as if the occupants had rushed out to see, then fled back in too distracted a state to close the doors behind.