Текст книги "Dhalgren"

Автор книги: Samuel R. Delany

Соавторы: Samuel R. Delany
сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 21 (всего у книги 60 страниц)

“No, you wouldn’t!” Lynn insisted. “You wouldn’t.”

“It’s pretty rough,” Kidd said.

“The way we got together,” Lynn went on to explain, “it’s much better for the children. You see?”

“Yeah, sure!” He’d heard her suddenly helpless tone and he responded to it.

“What’s there around here to write poems about?” That was her husband again. “I mean, nothing ever happens. You sit around, scared to go outside. Or when you do, it’s like walking into a damn swamp.”

“That’s the whole thing,” Lynn acknowledged. “Really. In Bellona, I mean, now. There’s nothing to do.”

From her father’s side, June said: “Kidd writes lovely poems.” Under the candles, shadows bobbled in the cream.

“Oh, yes,” Mrs. Richards affirmed, setting down dishes of jelly before the large woman in corduroy and the blond man in tweeds. “Kidd, you will read something to us, won’t you?”

“Yes,” Mr. Richards said. “I think Kidd should read a poem.”

Kidd sucked his teeth with annoyance. “I don’t have any. Not with me.”

Mrs. Richards beamed: “I have one. Just a moment.” She turned and hurried out.

Kidd’s annoyance grew. He took another spoonful of jello; which he hadn’t wanted. So drank the rest of his coffee. He hadn’t wanted that either.

“Here we are!” Mrs. Richards cried, returning; she slipped the blue-edged paper before him.

“Oh,” Kidd said. “I forgot you had this one.”

“Go on, read it.”

“Better be good,” said blond and tweedy, affably enough. “Otherwise Ronnie will run the other way every time she sees you on the street because she thinks you’re a—”

“I don’t go out on the streets,” Ronnie said. “I want to hear what kind of poems you write. Go on.”

A man who wasn’t Mr. Richards said, “I don’t know very much about poetry.”

“Stand up, Kidd,” Mr. Richards said, waving a creamy spoon. “So we can hear you.”

Kidd stood and said as levelly as possible, “Mr. Richards, I just came to see you about getting my money for the work I did,” and waited for reaction.

Mr. Richards moved his shoulders back and smiled.

Somewhere—outside in the hall?—a door closed.

Mrs. Richards, holding the edge of the table and smiling, nodded: “Go on, Kidd.”

Ronnie said to Mrs. Richards: “He wants his money: He’s a pretty practical poet.” Though she spoke softly, everyone laughed.

He looked down at Mrs. Richards’ copy of his poem, and drew his tongue back from his teeth for the first word.

In the hall, a man screamed, without words or inflection: footsteps, some dull thuds—the scream changed pitch at each of them.

Kidd started reading. He paused at the third line, wanting very much to laugh, but didn’t look up.

Footsteps: running voices arguing—a lot of them.

Kidd kept reading till he reached Mrs. Richards’ omitted comma.

Lynn, beside him, let out a little cry. From the corner of his eye, he saw her husband take her arm. Somebody banged on the wall outside with what sounded like a crowbar. And the screaming cracked to a hysterical, Mexican accent: “Oh, come on, please, come on lemme ’lone. Don’t fool ’round like that—No! C’mon, c’mon—No. Don’ please—”

Kidd read the last lines of his poem and looked up.

The crashes had moved from the wall to the door, and fell with timed, deliberate thuds. Within the crash, as though it were an envelope of sound, he could hear the chain rattle, the hinges jiggle, the lock click.

As he looked around the table, the thought passed with oblique idleness: They look like I probably do when somebody’s eyes go red.

Outside, above the shouting, somebody laughed.

Kidd’s own fear, dogged and luminous and familiar enough to be almost unconscious, was fixed somewhere in the hall. Yet he didn’t want to laugh. He still wanted to giggle.

Out there, someone began to run. Others ran after.

A muscle on the back of Kidd’s thigh tensed to the crashing. He smiled, vaguely, confused. The back of his neck was tickly.

Someone’s chair squeaked.

“Oh, for God’s sake, why don’t they—” and, where rhythm predicted the next crash, only her word fell: “—stop!”

Footsteps lightened, tumbled off down steps, retreated behind banged doors.

Kidd sat down, looked at the guests, some of whom looked at him, some of whom looked at each other; the woman in corduroy was looking at her lap; Mrs. Richards was breathing hard. He wondered if anyone liked his poem.

“They do that around here too, huh?” Sam forced, jocularly.

Then a woman Kidd could not really see at the table’s end spilled coffee.

“Oh, I’ll get a rag!” Mrs. Richards screamed, and fled the room.

Three people tried to say nothing in particular at once.

But when Mrs. Richards returned with a black and white, op-art dish-towel, one voice detached itself, a hesitant baritone: “For God’s sakes, can’t we do something about that? I mean, we’ve got to do something!”

Of several feelings, the only sharp one Kidd felt was annoyance. “Mr. Richards?” he said, still standing, “Mr. Richards? Can I talk to you now?”

Mr. Richards raised his eyebrows, then pushed back his chair. June, beside him, surprisingly concerned, touched her father’s arm,…restrainingly? protectively? Mr. Richards brushed her hand away and came down the table.

Kidd picked up his orchid and went out into the hall.

The woman in corduroy was saying, “When you can think of something to do, will you please let me know what it is. You’ll have my cooperation one hundred per cent. One hundred per cent, believe me.”

At the door Kidd turned. “We should get this five dollars an hour business settled now, don’t you think, Mr. Richards, because it’ll just—”

Mr. Richards’ slight, taught smile broke. “What are you trying to do, huh?” he demanded in a whisper. “What are you trying to do? I mean five dollars an hour, you must be crazy!”

Mrs. Richards, still holding the dishtowel, drifted up behind her husband’s shoulder, blinking, in perfect imitation of Smokey with Thirteen.

“I mean just what are you trying to do?” Mr. Richards went on. “We don’t have any money to give you, and you better understand that.”

“Huh?” because it seemed absurd.

“Five dollars an hour?” Mr. Richards repeated. “You must be crazy!” His voice was insistent, tense and low. “What does somebody like you need that kind of money for, anyway? It doesn’t cost anything to live in this city—no food bills, no rent. Money doesn’t mean anything here anymore. What are you trying to do…? I’ve got a wife. I’ve got a family. MSE hasn’t had a payroll for months. There hasn’t even been anyone in the damn office! I’ve got to hold on to what I have. I can’t spend that kind of money now, with everything like this. I can’t—”

“Well, isn’t that what you told—?” He was angry. “Oh shit. Look, then why don’t you…” Then he reached around to his pocket.

Mr. Richards’ eyes widened as the orchid Kidd held flicked by him.

But Kidd only dug at his pocket. “Then why don’t you keep this too?” Mr. Richards swayed when the moist, green knot bounced off his shirt and fell to the floor, unfolding like paper on fire.

Kidd turned the lock and pulled the door open. The chain stopped it—ratch!—at two inches.

Mrs. Richards, immediately beside him, fumbled with the catch. A step into the hall, he looked back to show them his disgust.

The astonishment Mr. Richards returned him, as Mrs. Richards with varied bitternesses at her eyes, closed the door on it, was unexpected, was satisfying, was severed with the doors’ clash.

He counted the fifteen, paint-chipped dents before he decided (someone was laughing inside again) to go.

In the elevator, he dropped, ruminating. Once he looked up to wrinkle his nose at a faint putrescence. But dropped on. Echoing in the shaft, with the wind, were footsteps from some stairwell, were voices.

There was no one in the lobby.

Satisfied?

His annoyance, at any rate.

But all the vague and loose remains roiled and contended for definition. “Ba-da ba-da ba-da?” he asked. “Ba-da ba-da,” he answered, sitting. It listed like oil on turbulence. At last Ba-da ba-da ba-da? formed around the fragments of a question, but Ba-da ba-da fit no worded answer. He flexed his fingers around the pen point till they ached, then went back to struggling with the recalcitrant quantities of sound overlapping their sense. He reread some dozen alternate lines for the beginning of one section: with the delight of resignation, he decided, with the change of a “This” to a “That,” on his initial version.

A candle on the high windowsill cast the batteryless projector’s swinging shadow across the notebook opened on his naked thigh.

Someone knocked just at the point he discovered he was copying, in quick, cramped letters, the same line for the fourth time (his mind had meandered on). “Are you in there?” Lanya asked.

“Huh?” He looked up at the door’s layered scrawl. “Yeah. I’m coming out now.” He stood and pulled his pants up from around his shins, pulled the flush chain.

“He said you were in there.” She nodded toward the bartender when Kidd opened the door. “Come on.”

“Huh? Where?”

She smiled. “Come on.” She took his hand.

“Hey,” he called, passing the bar. “You wanna keep this for me again?”

The bartender leaned over for the notebook. “In the usual place, kid.” He reached up and stuck it through the cage bars.

She paused at the door to ask, “How did it go with the Richards?”

“I gave him back his fucking five bucks.”

Her confusion suddenly went in laughter. “That’s too much! Tell me what happened.” And she tugged him on into the hallway and out to the street.

“What happened?” she asked again, shrugging her shoulder into his armpit. They walked quickly down the block. When she turned to glance at him, her hair tickled his arm.

“He didn’t want to pay me. They were having a dinner party or something there. So I gave him back what he gave me already, you know?” He rubbed his chest underneath his vestflap. At his hip, the orchid’s harness jingled. “You know their kid, the boy, they just left him…” He shook his head against hers. “Hell, I don’t want to talk about that. Where we going?”

“To the park. To the commune.”

“Why?”

“I’m hungry, for one thing.”

“Just as well I’m not talking.”

She hurried him across the street, into an ocean of smoke and evening. He tried to smell it, but his nostrils were numb or acclimated. The lions gaped in the blur with stony, astonished protest. They neared the foggy pearl of a functioning street light. “This morning,” Lanya said, “after you went away to write, some people said that there had been some new fires at the other end of the park!”

“Smoke’s sure thicker.”

“Down there,” she nodded, “before, I thought I could see it flickering. And it hadn’t even gotten dark yet.”

“There couldn’t be any fires in the park,” he announced suddenly. “The whole thing would just burn up, wouldn’t it? It would either all burn or it wouldn’t.”

“I guess so.”

“Did they send anybody to check? Maybe they should get some people down there to dig one of those things, a breakfront.” Breakfront? and heard the word resonate with images of a charred forest, where years back he had tramped with a canister of water strapped to his shoulders, hand pumping from the brass nozzle into sizzling ash. “Maybe you and John and his people could go.”

She shrugged under his arm. “No, really, I’d rather not go down there…”

From her voice he tried to reconstruct what it told him of her expression, and remembered her sitting on the stone railing with arms full of torn blue silk.

“You’re scared to death!”

Her head turned abruptly in question or affirmation.

“Why?”

She leaned her head forward and surprised him by reiterating, “Come on,” quietly, sharply.

His bare foot went from concrete to grass.

The night billowed and sagged: habit guided them through a maze of mist.

He saw quivering fires.

But they were from the commune’s cinder block furnace. People moved silently, listlessly before flame.

Perched along the picnic table, in a variety of army jackets, paisley shirts, and grubby tank-tops, young people stared through stringy hair. Someone dragged a sleeping bag in front of the fire. Shadow: pale, hairy skin; black leather: Tak stood back from the fire, arms folded, legs wide. The ornate orchid of yellow metal hung from his belt. Three scorpions stood behind him, whispering.

One was the red-headed, freckled black who had pipe-whipped him at Calkins; the other two were darker. But his initial start was followed by no more uneasiness. Somebody swaggered past with a cardboard carton of tin cans, crumpled cellophane wrappers, paper cups. He realized (very surprised) he was very high. Thought swayed through his mind, shattered, sizzled like water in hot ash. It’s the smoke, he thought frantically. Maybe there’s something in this fog and smoke. No…

John walked by the fire’s edge, bald chest glistening between his vest, stopped to talk with Tak; they bent over Tak’s weapon. Then, at John’s wrist:—brass leaves, shells, claws: from the ornamented wrist band the overlong yellow blades of the orchid curved down around John’s fingers. He was making motions from the elbow as if he would have beat his leg were his hand un-armed.

Tak grinned, and John moved away.

Kidd blinked, chill and unsteady. There was Lanya—she had moved from his side—talking with some of the people around the table. Isolate questions pummeled inarticulately. A muscle twitched in his flank, and he was terribly afraid of it. He stepped, brushing shoulders with someone who smelled of wine. The fire put a hot hand against cheek, chest, and arm, leaving the rest of him cool.

Milly shook her hair somewhere in the shadow of a tree: bloody copper shingles rattled her shoulders.

Why were they here? Why did they mill here? His inner skull felt tender and inflamed. Watch them, listen to them, put together actions and conversation snatches: He searched the screen where perception translated to information, waiting for somebody to dance, to eat, to sing. He wished Lanya had told him why they had come. But he was very tired. So he moved around. Someday I’m going to die, he thought irrelevantly: but blood still beat inside his ear.

He stepped backward from the heat, and backward again. (Where was Lanya?) But was too distraught to turn his head. Everything meant, loudly and insistently, much too much: smoke, untwirling over twigs; the small stone under his heel; the hot band from the fire across his lowered forehead; the mumblings around him that rose here, fell there.

Milly stood a few feet in front of him, bare legs working to a music he couldn’t hear. Then John crashed down, crosslegged in the leaves, beside her, fiddling absently with the blades around his hand.

A while ago, he realized, he had thought once again: Please, I don’t want to be sick again, please, but had hardly heard the thought go by, and could only now, disinterestedly, discern the echo.

Something, or—one, was about to emerge into the clearing—he was sure; and was equally sure that, naked and glistening, it would be George! It would be June!

“Isn’t this stupid,” someone Kidd couldn’t see was saying, “when I could be in Hawaii—?”

Tongue tip a pink bud at the corner of his lips, John stared at Milly’s shifting calves. He raised his bladed hand (a reflection crossed his chin), and, with a sharp, downward sweep, cut.

Milly gasped, bit off the gasp, but made no other sound. She did not step, she did not even look.

Astounded, Kidd watched blood, in a torrent wide (the thought struck irrelevantly amidst his terror) as a pencil run down her heel.

IV In Time of Plague

“LOOK, LEAVE ME ALONE…”

“Come on; come—”

“Tak, will you get your fuckin’ hands—”

“I’m not after your tired brown body. I just want to get you to the bar where you can sit down.”

“Look, please I’m…”

“You’re not drunk; you say you’re not stoned or anything, then you damn well better sit down and relax!” Tak’s beefy hand clamped his shoulder. (Kidd took three more unsteady steps.) “You were staggering around there like you were half in some sort of trance. Now come on with me, sit down, have a drink, and get yourself together. You sure you didn’t take anything?”

The ornate orchid at Tak’s belt clashed the simple one at Kidd’s.

“Hey, look! Just come on and leave me alone…Where’s Lanya?”

“She’s more likely to find you at Teddy’s than wandering around out in the dark. You come on.”

In such colloquy they made their hesitant way from park to bar.

Kidd swayed in the doorway, looking at rocking candle flames, while Tak argued with the bartender:

“Hot brandy! Look, just take your coffee-water there, in a glass with a shot of…”

June? Or George?

Paul Fenster looked up from his beer, three people down (Kidd felt something cold but manageable happen in his belly at the recognition), and came over to stand behind Tak; who turned with two steaming glasses.

“Huh…?”

“So. I’ve found somebody here I know.” Fenster was buttoned halfway up the chest in a red, long-sleeve shirt. “I didn’t think I would, and it’s my first night back.”

“Oh.” Tak nodded. “Yeah. How you doing? Hey, I gotta bring a friend a drink. Um…Come on.” Tak lifted the brandy glasses over some woman’s shoulder, stepped around some man. Fenster raised his chin, watching.

Tak came across to Kidd. Fenster came behind.

“Here’s your brandy. This is Paul Fenster, my favorite rebel-who-has-managed-to-misplace-his-cause.”

“That’s what you think.” Fenster saluted with his beer bottle.

“Well, he didn’t misplace it, actually. It went somewhere else when he wasn’t looking. Paul, this is the Kid.” (Kidd wondered if he were projecting Tak’s lack of enthusiasm.) “Come on over and sit down.”

“Hello.” Kidd nodded toward Fenster, who wasn’t looking at him, hadn’t heard him, apparently did not recognize him. Well, he didn’t feel like talking anyway, so could be amused at Fenster’s obliqueness.

“Come on, come on.” Tak headed them toward a booth, glanced apprehensively at Kidd again.

Gesturing with his bottle, Fenster continued: “Oh, there’s a cause all right! Maybe you’ve lost ninety-five per cent of your population, but you’re still the same city you were before—”

“You weren’t here, before.” Tak sat at the outside edge of the seat, so Fenster had to sit across the table. Then Tak slipped over, making room for Kidd, who noted the whole maneuver and wondered if Fenster had.

Kidd sat. Tak’s leg immediately swung against his in warm, if unwanted, reassurance.

“That’s not what I mean,” Fenster said. “Bellona was…what? Maybe thirty percent black? Now, even though you’ve lost so many people, bet it’s closer to sixty. From my estimate, at any rate.”

“All living in harmony, peace, and brotherly love—”

“Bullshit,” Fenster said.

“—with the calm, clear, golden afternoon only occasionally torn by the sobs of some poor white girl dishonored at the hands of a rampaging buck.”

“What are you trying to do, show off for the kid there?” Fenster grinned at Kidd. “I met Tak here the first day I got to Bellona. He’s a really together guy you know? He likes to pretend he’s short on brains. Then he lets you hang yourself.” Fenster still hadn’t recognized him.

Kidd nodded over his steaming glass. The fumes stung; he smiled back and felt ill.

“Oh, I’m the God-damn guardian of the gate. I’ve spoken to more people on their first day in this city than you could shake a stick at.” Tak sat back. “Let me clue you. It’s the people I take time to speak to again on the third, fourth, and fifth day you should watch.”

“Well, you’re still kidding yourself if you think you don’t have a black problem here.”

Tak suddenly sat forward and put his worn leather elbows on the table. “You’re telling me? What I want to know is how you’re going to do anything about it sitting up there on Brisbain Avenue?”

“I’m not at Calkins’ anymore. I’ve moved back to Jackson. Down home again.”

“Have you now? Well, how did your stay work out?”

“Hell—I guess it was nice of him to invite me. I had a good time. He has quite a place up there. We got into a couple of talks. Pretty good, I think. He’s an amazing man. But with that constant weekend bash going, thirty-eight days a month it looks like, I don’t know how he has time to take a leak, much less write half a newspaper every day, and run what’s left of the God-damn town. I outlined a couple of ideas: a switchboard, a daycare center, a house-inspection program. He say he wants to cooperate. I believe him…as much as you can believe anybody, today. Since there’s as little control around here as there is, I wouldn’t be surprised if he gets more done than you’d expect, you know?”

Tak turned his hands up on the table. “Just remember, nobody voted him up there.”

Fenster sat forward too. “I’ve never been that down on dictators. Long as they didn’t dictate me.” He laughed and drank more beer.

Brandy sips dropped in hot knots to Kidd’s stomach and untied. He moved his leg away from Tak’s. “Did you talk to him about that Harrison article?” Kidd asked Fenster.

“George Harrison?”

“Yeah.”

“Hell, that’s just a whole lot of past noise. There’re real problems that have to be dealt with now. Have you ever walked up Jackson Avenue?”

“I’ve crossed it.”

“Well, take a good look around it, talk to the people who live there before you go on to me about any of that George Harrison horseshit.”

“Paul here doesn’t approve of George.” Tak nodded deeply.

“I don’t approve or disapprove.” Fenster clinked his bottle on the wood. “Sadism simply isn’t my bag. And I don’t hold with anybody committing rape on anybody. But if you want to associate with him, that’s your problem, not mine. I think making all that to-do over it is the worst sort of red herring.”

“If you’re back down on Jackson, then you got him for a next-door neighbor; so you’re more or less stuck with associating with him, huh? I just have to be friendly in the bar.” Suddenly Tak slapped the table edge: “You know what the problem is, Paul? George is nicer than you.”

“Huh?”

“No, I mean: I know you both, I like you both. But I like George more.”

“Hell, man, I see those posters Reverend Amy’s giving out. I know what you guys in here like—”

“No,” Tak said. “No, you’re missing the point.”

“Like hell I am—Hey, you know?” Fenster turned to Kidd. “Have you ever read those articles, the ones in the issue about the riot, and the other issue with the interview?”

“Huh? No, but I heard about them.”

“Tak hasn’t read them either.”

“I’ve heard enough about them,” Tak echoed.

“But here’s the point. Everybody’s heard about the articles. But since I’ve been here, I’ve only talked to one person who actually says he read them.”

“Who?” Tak asked.

“George Harrison.” Fenster sat back and looked satisfied.

Kidd tilted his brandy. “I met somebody who read them.”

“Yeah?” Fenster asked. “Who?”

“The girl he screwed. And her family. Only they didn’t recognize her in the pictures.” From something that happened on Fenster’s face without destroying the smile, Kidd decided maybe Fenster wasn’t so bad after all.

“You met her?”

“Yeah.” Kidd drank. “You probably will too. Everybody keeps telling me how small the city is. Hey, Tak, thanks for the drink.” He started to stand.

Tak said, “You sure you’re all right, Kidd?”

“Yeah. I feel better.” He nodded at Fenster, then walked, relieved, to the bar.

When Jack said, “Hey, how you doing?” Kidd started. His relief, the shallowest of things, vanished.

“Hello,” he said. “Fine. How you been?”

“I been fine.” Jack’s shirt was wrinkled, his eyes red, his cheeks unshaven. He looked very happy. “I just been fine. How are you? And your girlfriend?”

“I’m fine,” Kidd repeated, nodding. “She’s fine.”

Jack laughed. “That’s great. Yeah, that’s really great. Say, I want you to meet a friend of mine. This is Frank.” Jack stepped back.

“Hello.” With a high, bald forehead and neck-length hair, Frank had apparently decided to grow a beard perhaps a week ago: I give them to you crossed, I take them uncrossed…yes, that was who it was. Only he had put on a green shirt with milky snaps instead of buttons; and washed his hands.

“This,” Jack explained to Frank, “is the friend of Tak’s I was telling you about who writes the poems. Only I can’t remember his name.”

“Kidd,” Kidd said.

“Yeah, they call him the Kid.” Jack continued his explanation. “Kid, this is Frank. Frank was in the army, and he writes poems too. I was telling him all about you, before. Wasn’t I?”

“Yeah, I’ve seen you around the park.” Frank nodded. “Jack was telling me you were a poet?”

Kidd shrugged. “Yeah. A little.”

“We been drinking,” Jack continued his explanation, “all afternoon.”

“And it’s night now.” Frank grinned.

“This God-damn city. If you wanna stay drunk, it sure is the place to come. You can buy drinks at the God-damn bars and you don’t have to pay no money. Or anything. And anyplace you go, people always got stuff to smoke or to drink. Jesus.” He burped. “I gotta go water the garden. Be back in a minute.” He stepped away and headed for the john.

Kidd felt a wave of disorientation, but the phrases he’d prepared before broke through: “You been looking out for nature boy?”

“He’s sort of looking out for me,” Frank said. “We’re both army deserters. Him, a little more recently. Only I think Jack’s getting homesick.”

Kidd swallowed. “For the army?” And felt better.

Frank nodded. “I’m not. I left about six months ago. Happy I’m here. I’m getting a chance to write again, and it’s a pretty together place.”

“You,” and, at the reiteration, he felt toward Frank sudden, surprising, and total distrust, “write poems?” So he smiled.

Frank smiled back and nodded over his glass: “Well, I’ve been sort of lucky about getting things published, really. The book was just an accident. One of the west coast little magazines puts out good editions of people who contribute. I was lucky enough to get selected.”

“You mean you have a book?”

“No copies in Bellona.” Frank nodded. “Like I said, even that was an accident.”

“You been writing a long time, then.”

“Since I was fifteen or sixteen. I started in high school; and most of what you write back then is crap.”

“How old are you now?”

“Twenty-five.”

“Then you’ve been one for a long time. A poet. I mean it’s your job, your profession.”

Frank laughed. “You can’t make a living at it. I taught for a year at San Francisco State, till I went into the army. I like to think of it as a profession, though.”

Kidd nodded. “You got a lot of poems in magazines and things?”

“Three in the New Yorker about a year ago. Some people think that’s my crowning achievement. Two in Poetry, Chicago, before that. There’re a few others. But those are the ones I’m proud of.”

“Yeah, I used to read that magazine a lot.”

“You did?”

“It’s the one that used to have the little curlicue horse a long time ago? Now it just has funny pictures on it. I read it every month in the library, at school. For years.”

Frank laughed. “Then you’re doing better than I am.”

“I seen the New Yorker” Kidd said. “But I never read it.”

Frank’s expression changed slightly and noncommittally.

“And I’ve never published any poems at all,” Kidd said. “Anyplace. I’ve only been a poet a little while. A couple of weeks. Since I came here. You probably know a lot more about it than I do.”

“About getting things published?”

“That too. I mean about writing them, though. It’s hard.”

“Yes, I guess it can be.”

“It’s about the God-damned hardest thing I’ve ever done.”

Frank laughed and rubbed his young beard. “Sometimes. You’ve…only been writing—poems, for a few weeks? What made you start?”

“I don’t know. What made you?”

“I suppose,” and Frank nodded again, “I had to.”

“Do you—” Kidd paused a moment, considering the theft—“do you find Bellona stimulating, making you produce work?”

“About as much as anyplace else, I guess. Maybe a little less, because you have to spend so much time scuffling, you know? I was working on a few short things. But I lost my notebook a few weeks back.”

“Huh?”

Frank nodded. “Since then I haven’t written anything. I haven’t had time.”

“Hey, you lost your notebook!” Discomfort broached fear. “Christ, that must be…” Then his feelings centered. Kidd leaned over the bar. “Hey, can I get the notebook! Huh? Come on! You want to give me the notebook, please!”

“All right,” the bartender said. “All right, I’ll get it. Simmer down. You guys ready for another—”

“The notebook!” Kidd knocked the counter with his fist.

“All right!” Sucking his teeth, the bartender pulled it from the cage and flopped it on the bar. “Now do you want another drink?”

“Oh. Yeah,” Kidd said. “Sure.”

Besides blood, urine, mulch, and burn marks, there were rings from the bottles he had set haphazardly on the cover. He opened it in the middle. “…This isn’t yours, is it?”

Frank frowned. “You found this?”

“Yeah. It was in the park.”

Geoff Rivers

Arthur Pearson

Kit Darkfeather

Earlton Rudolph

David Wise

Phillip Edwards…

Kidd looked over Frank’s shoulder and read the listed names, till Frank turned the page.

“Hey, what you doin’?” Jack said behind them. “You showing Frank here your poetry writing?”

Kidd turned around. “Just this notebook I found, filled up with somebody’s journal.”

“Frank’s pretty smart.” Jack nodded. “He knows about all sorts of shit. He taught history. In a college. And he cut out on the army too.”

“Lots of us have,” Frank said, not looking up. “The ones with any sense go to Canada. The rest of us end up here.” He turned a page.

“You been having a good time?” Jack put his hand on Kidd’s shoulder. “This is the place to have a good time, you know?”

“Fine time,” Kidd said. “But I haven’t seen you around. Where you been staying?”

“Stayed on a few days with Tak.” Jack’s hand rose and fell. “He kicked me out after a week when I wouldn’t let him suck on my peter no more.”

Across the bar Loufer, his cap low on his ears, still talked earnestly with Fenster.

Jack’s hand fell again. “They got girls in this city! Frank knows this whole house. Full of girls. Real nice girls. We was over there, and…” His grin widened toward ecstasy. “They like Frank a lot.” He screwed up his face. “I think that’s ’cause he’s growin’ a beard and things. Or maybe taught in a college.”

“They liked you okay,” Frank said, still not looking up. “They just didn’t know you.”

“Yeah, I guess they just didn’t know me well enough, yet.”

“Say?” Frank looked up now. “You wrote all this—?”