Текст книги "Dhalgren"

Автор книги: Samuel R. Delany

Соавторы: Samuel R. Delany
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Текущая страница: 30 (всего у книги 60 страниц)

Kid rubbed his neck, and Denny laughed against her, reached up to brush his hair from her face. She was panting too.

“Hey?” Kid brushed her cheek with his knuckle. Her wide eyes locked his. “You make it this time?” With his other hand, he pushed his cock down against her thigh. “I can go again.”

She flashed an uncertain smile. “I’m okay.”

“Shit!” Kid let his head drop with a bark of laughter. “I’m tired, that’s what I am.” He closed his eyes, and a breath later heard them making movements. His own groin, still engorged, was numbing. I bet I’m going to wake up with cramps under my balls, he thought, and didn’t care. Denny touched his shoulder, tugged a little. So he rolled back against them. Denny made another breathy sound, and hugged Kid tightly, suddenly pushed his face against Kid’s neck. “Hey…!” He caught the boy, who was giggling all panty like a puppy (like her, he remembered, when she had first fallen against him). He moved his hand down the hard flank till his knuckles touched her softer one. “Go to sleep or something.” Denny took his face away, and Kid worked his arm beneath her neck (her hair was much crisper than the boy’s, and the back of her neck was moist and hot; his own, moist and cooling) and felt comfortable enough to let himself drift. Drifting, he realized how loud Denny’s breath was and listened for hers. It was slower and farther away. Then, after a time that might have been sleep, it was faster. He reached for her, only brushed her, and thought: A strangeness, hey, and beautiful. His lips, drying, had adhered to one another. They tore apart with the breath and the mumbled word: beautiful. Released, he fell away into sleep.

He woke in annoyance that turned immediately to pleasure. Somebody was blowing him. He grinned on the darkness of his lids, reached down through three levels of thought. Lanya? No, this other girl. His hand glanced from bone under soft hair to hit the hard, tight shoulder. Denny grunted.

“What you doing?” Kid asked. He rolled his head left, then right on the creased blanket, then again with his eyes open. The girl was gone.

Denny said, “You were asleep all the time with a God-damn hard-on. I was just—” Kid locked his fingers in Denny’s hair and pulled his head down.

“That’s what you started doing and you ain’t finished me yet.”

Denny dropped his mouth again.

Kid moved one fist out on the blanket beside his face, hoping it was still warm from her. One fantasy memory of Denny’s face between her legs and his penis thrust between them…he moved from fantasy and lay, with his mouth open, his head back, each muscle loosening; Denny held Kid’s balls while he sucked; and that felt good. Kid held the boy’s sides with his legs. And came. It was something like hot oil poured in cotton (cotton into flame; flame, out beneath water. Water and ashes and ashes washed through him). “Come on up here.”

Denny lay down on Kid’s chest.

Kid rubbed his back, dry and papery as before. He wanted to say thanks, but decided it would be silly, so he squeezed Denny’s shoulder instead.

“Your come tastes different from mine,” Denny said.

“Yeah?” Kid closed his eyes.

“It’s more, you know, liquid. And there’s more of it.”

“I’m bigger than you.”

“And it’s more bitter.”

“You know,” Kid said, “you’re a pretty funny little guy. Where’d your girlfriend go?”

“She got—”

Somebody came into the room, moved something below them, turned.

Kid looked down across the blanket as a nondescript top-of-a-head left through the doorway.

“—got up a little while ago and went out.” Denny’s fist uncurled on Kid’s shoulder.

“Oh. You two do this a lot?”

“Huh?”

“Drag people into bed all the time?”

“Not like this.”

“Like how?”

“I don’t know. It’s her idea, most of the time. She’s my best friend here.”

Kid nodded, his chin tapping the top of Denny’s head. “Is she a scorpion too?”

“Naw. She’s not a member. Not like Filament. Or Lady of Spain. She just likes to hang around with them.” He shifted. “I mean us. I bring guys around for her sometimes. As long as she lets me watch. A couple of times I messed around with the guys, just a little. But not like…well, what we did.”

“You like messing around with her too?”

Denny shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess so. But I never done that before. I mean get inside.”

Kid laughed.

“Sometimes she’d tell me I should, but I never did. It just embarrassed me, you know? I couldn’t keep it hard, I mean before.”

“Oh.” Kid tried not to smile, even though Denny could not see it.

“I can get guys for her two or three times a week, sometimes. She says she don’t wanna be one guy’s girlfriend.”

“She likes two at a time? I can dig it.”

“Maybe.” Denny moved a little. “We do anything together, any old crazy thing, you know? If I told her to do something real crazy, like go up in an old building where there might be people hiding with guns, she’d do it. We found all sorts of junk. In old buildings. There’s lots of stuff around.”

Kid crossed his arms over Denny’s back; the warm mouth brushed his chest.

“I like to watch her make it with guys,” Denny said. “When I blew you, were you thinking about her?”

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you? No, I wasn’t. I mean only a little at first.”

“I don’t care what you were thinking about,” Denny said. “You think you know an awful lot about what I like, huh?”

Now Kid shrugged. “I think I like you. How’s that?” Relaxing from the shrug, he began to laugh. “You want to suck it, sit on it, that’s fine by me. Now you’re going to turn around and run off and look all scared and wide-eyed at me every time we see each other from now on, huh? But I want to make love to you, sometime. Just you.”

“Like I was a girl?”

Kid sighed. “Yeah. If you want to put it that way.”

“I’d like that.”

“I know you would.” He cuffed the back of Denny’s head with his hand.

“When you jerk off, do you do that like what I did?”

“Huh?”

“You know. Eat it.”

“Oh. No. I’ve tasted my own a couple of times. Hell, I guess I ate it once or twice, just to see.”

“I do it all the time,” Denny said, with resolve. “How did you know I did?”

“I’ve just known other people who did that too, and…well. I don’t know.”

“Oh.”

“Is she going to come back?” Kid asked.

Denny shrugged.

“Oh,” Kid said again and thought he’d been saying that a lot. So he closed his eyes.

He listened for people moving around the house, thinking it must be growing late in the morning. Something—Denny’s elbow—hit the side of his head, and he realized he was waking up after drifting off again. He opened his eyes and pushed himself to sitting position. Denny lay curled away from him. Kid breathed deeply; his head was heavy with the detritus of pleasure. He rubbed his shoulder and it tingled, paused at the chain that crossed the hair on his chest. It still held: from a very long time ago, a waking and a sleeping and a waking, he recalled the blond Mexican who had surprised him in the street. Kid frowned, and began to reach around for his clothes.

He had to go to the bathroom, for one thing. His head ached slightly, and his mouth tasted like unflavored gelatin, solid around tongue and teeth. He looked for his pants, stopped, put his hand on Denny’s buttock. A face, he thought, hatcheted on the obstetric line. Cheeks, he thought, sucked in with astonishment. If you hang around, I’m going to tear it up. Denny rubbed his nose and was probably awake but not moving.

Kid pulled on his pants, dragged his vest and his boot over the edge of the platform. The people in the sleeping bags were still there. Bending to put on his vest, he found his flanks sore; he leaned on the jamb to put on his boot, and for the first time in a while wished he had a second. (A vision of his own hands crumbling dirt between them, the dirt falling on water.) He stepped into the hallway.

The tan shade and the warmth in Denny’s loft had intimated a false summer.

The sky beyond a dirty window pane high on the hall wall was stormy. The bathroom door opened: not Thirteen’s girlfriend, but Thirteen himself. His long hair was bushy from sleep. “Hey I didn’t know you was around here.” Thirteen nodded heavily, his voice roughened by fatigue. “Ain’t seen you in a couple of days.” Kid went into the bathroom and, while he urinated, busied himself not thinking about when the last time he had actually seen Thirteen was. He ground his fist against his sore side and reflected: it probably isn’t possible to really fuck yourself to death. Punching his tongue into bitter corners of his mouth, he squinted out the window. Stormy?

Incredible suspensions in the dry air, and he moved between them, dribbling and/or blowing out all holes. He waited for some bright precipitate. His water splashed and silenced. He massaged his limp genitals, not with desire, but rather to press some feeling back. His knuckles got wet, and he looked down wondering if it were urine or final mucus. Pleasure can be an appalling business, he thought and buttoned his pants.

In the hallway, he stood sucking his salty fingers until he realized what he was tasting, wondered why he was doing it, and remembered Denny. He grinned: A psychologist had once called him a maddening combination of lability and willfulness.

Then she walked into the hall without seeing him, and opened the front door. He took his fingers from his mouth, recognized her curly hair, tried to envision her full shoulders beneath the blue sweatshirt she now wore.

She went down the steps.

Curious, he walked to the door. If she turns around, he thought, her eyes will be red, hey?

She stopped by the car, prying beneath the bent rim with one finger, looking absently down the block; looked back at him.

The little chill was all anticipation.

She blinked surprised brown eyes at him, from a face that could have been angry.

“Hey,” he said, and smiled at her from the top of the steps, which became more and more difficult to do before her blank blinking, except in confusion. In confusion, smiling, he walked down. “I missed you when you cut out.” There are some storms, he thought beneath the mangled sky, it’s easier to walk into.

“Sure,” she said as he came down the steps. “I bet you did.” Her fingers kept moving on the broken glass.

“If you keep that up, you’re going to cut your—”

“There’s something funny about you,” she said with a look of distaste. “That was funny, or queer, or something.”

“Look,” he said, “you’re not going to call me names,” and realized he did not know what hers was. That brought him crashing through his embryo anger till he was much closer to her than he’d wanted to be: his fingers against his leg were trying to take the same position as hers. His face pulled to mimic hers.

“When he was…was with me, that was all between you and him. I might as well not have been there!”

“When I was with you, that was all between you and him. I might as well have been beating my meat,” and felt, saying it, the comparison was unfair. “He says you’re his best friend. What is it? He thinks he’s doing it for you, you think you’re doing it for him?” His face, straining after hers, registered a sudden sadness inside him so intensely it took him instant after instant to see her expression had changed.

“I used to be the smartest person in my class!” she said, suddenly.

He wondered why his eyes were burning till he saw tears in hers.

“I used…to be the smartest person in my class!” She dropped her head.

He dropped his, whispered, “Hey…” and put his hand (too gently, he thought) on the back of her neck, touched his forehead to hers.

“Why don’t you go away?” she said with sad, exhausted anger.

“Okay.” He squeezed, snorted the faint laughter of withdrawal, and went back up the steps (his palm cold; her neck had been warm). Halfway up the hall, though, he was frowning.

When he climbed back into the loft, Denny (between Kid’s fists) turned over and blinked and grunted.

“Hey, your girlfriend’s outside all upset.”

“Oh, shit!” Denny said and sat up. He ground the heels of his palms against his eyes, then started for the edge of the loft.

Kid grabbed his unchained ankle.

Denny looked back.

“You guys go through this much trauma every time you screw?”

“It’s my fault,” Denny said.

“Sure,” Kid nodded. “Come on back here, will you?”

“I better go. I guess I been doing too much talking about you. I guess I ain’t talked to her about nothing else for a pretty long time.”

“Which reminds me,” Kid said. “You’re making a lot more out of that lady in the department store with the bee-bee gun than it’s really worth, you know?”

Denny grinned. “I been talking about you a hell of a lot longer than that,” and went over the side.

Kid lay back, grunted, “Fuck…” and rolled over, wishing there was someone else there. Maybe, he thought, very tired, he’ll bring her back. Denny, he figured, would return. Should he have actually touched her? (He recognized the beginnings of a welter of paranoid speculation; recognized as well that sleep lay on the other side of it.) Touched her in the street? If they were lovers, he would be able to find out in a day, a week, a month if it was the proper thing to do. Hell, should he have told Denny about it at all? He was being used: he didn’t like it. That’s not the sort of shit you lay on somebody you just dragged into bed. Lovers? He decided he didn’t like her at all. (She, among silent others, had once said, “Good-bye.”) On the other hand, he shouldn’t go prying around in emotional closets like that. (He turned over again, wishing Lanya had not disappeared.) Silly, stupid kids! Why did Denny drag her in in the first place? Righteous indignation, he finally decided, was easier. For the first time in a long while he was aware of the chain around him. Careful, he mulled, that it doesn’t come apart—not sure why he should be afraid it might.

2

He woke alone.

Kid sat up, with his eyes closed, for half a minute. The air in the loft was heavy and dry. Would the pulsing at the back of his head become a headache? People moved in other rooms. The bathroom door closed three times. Grinding his knees on the blanket, he turned for his clothes.

Denny’s were gone.

In another room a black woman laughed.

His pants were still on. He shrugged up his vest and, with neither buttoned, climbed down. One of the sleeping bags was still occupied. Two others were shed in quilted rings.

He leaned on the wall to pull up his boot. He wished again he had the other, but felt habit dissolve the wish. He went into the hall wondering if he’d encounter Denny or the girl first.

From the door ahead, light slapped across the hall and made him squint.

“Hey, Dragon Lady!”

Kid looked in.

Nightmare, squatting on one of the mattresses, kneaded his thick, scarred shoulder. “Hey, Dragon Lady, you been down!”

The gorgeous beast dazzled about the shabby room.

Nightmare let himself thud backward against the wall. A figure under a blanket moved away. Nightmare laughed and rocked and jangled.

“Down and back! Oh, hey, man. And back!” Dragon Lady turned, killed her lights. And laughed. Kid watched her stained teeth gape.

A dozen people slept around the room. Nightmare and Dragon Lady talked on raucously:

“I brought you coffee!” She breathed heavily, breasts stretching her vest’s rawhide laces. “Adam and Baby are out there now putting it together. Found a whole fucking warehouse full!” Her face was long and dark as bittersweet chocolate. “Brought you back a whole carton.”

“Instant?”

“No.” She made a fist. “No!”—insistent as an economics teacher. “The real thing. My boys are making it in the kitchen.”

Nightmare rocked and hugged his shoulders. “Hey, we’re gonna do up a little caffeine here! That’s really good. Oh, Yeah!”

Copperhead suddenly, knees wide, swung up to sit. Head low between his shoulders, he shook his hair. Freckled hands crossed on his darker genitals, he blinked at the room. His lids were puffy so that you just saw two slashes of gold; which turned toward Kid. Copperhead frowned, cocked his head; his mouth hung open, his lips, marked with a line Kid knew was dried blood (because his own gums bled when he slept), sagged from even, yellow teeth. The girl in the pea jacket moaned and tried to wedge between the cushion and the couch-back.

Nightmare swung his hand at Kid. “That’s him.”

“Sure looks like him.” Dragon Lady’s heavy lips pursed.

Nightmare’s thin ones grinned.

“What you wearin’ that thing around the house for?” Copperhead asked.

Kid looked down at the orchid—on his hand. “It makes shaking my dick after I take a leak a real adventure.” He took a breath, tried not to search out the memory; searched and found a blank.

“Not to mention zipping up your fly,” Copperhead said. “It’s open.” He turned to pull his pants out from under the blond girl, who squeaked and tried to roll into the upholstery again.

“That’s him?” Dragon Lady asked, mocking.

Kid nodded. “It’s me.” He leaned back on the door jamb and dropped to a squat. “It’s going to stay open for a while, too, I guess. I don’t feel like castrating myself.”

“He’s really funny.” Nightmare pushed the end of his braid back over his shoulder. “He’s a good kid. He doesn’t make a lot of noise. But when he does something, it usually turns out pretty good.”

That’s a good image to live up to, Kid decided; and decided not to say very much more. When had he put on the orchid…? When…? Copperhead looked unpleasant, yanked again: “Will you get off my fuckin’ clothes? I wanna get dressed!”

“Hey, will you guys bring in that coffee!” Dragon Lady hollered.

Somebody half hidden by the couch raised her head from the crook of her arm, and dropped it. It was not Denny’s girl.

“They been talking a lot about you,” Dragon Lady said. She frowned at Copperhead. “He ain’t been saying nothing nice.” She laughed.

“I ain’t been saying nothing.” Copperhead fumbled at the snap on his fatigues. One of the thigh pouches was torn. There were holes in both knees. “I don’t got nothing to say about the Kid.”

Nightmare hunkered a little. “Kid, what you got to say about Copperhead?”

Kid shook his head. They want us to fall out and fight right here, he thought.

Nightmare’s laugh started wide, then pulled into gruff, belligerent, good nature.

Somebody else raised his head from a pile of blankets, blinked sleepily, then grinned—“Hey!”—and stood, clumsily, scratching first at the sweaty hair across his forehead, then at the belly of his undershirt. His other arm was bandaged to the shoulder. “Hey, it’s the Kid! You come on back here for a while?”

“How you doing, Siam?” Kid hazarded. The brown, agonized face rocking back and forth on the bus floor had been…different? No, not that different…

“Fine!” Siam ducked his head, grinning hugely. “I’m okay. I’m fine!” His good hand touched the bandage; the finger bounced down dirty cloth (Nightmare still kneaded the multiple-headed bulge of a shoulder that spoke of weightlifting sessions). Siam glanced at the others, got an uneasy look, grinned through the uneasiness, and squatted too, aping Kid.

Dragon Lady called, “I want some God-damned coffee!”

“They ain’t got very many cups.” The guy had two in each hand and three in his arms. His hair was a jangle of scrap gold; chest, chin and buttocks were all blebs and pustules, his toenails and fingernails filthy, and he was naked. “I don’t think they got enough for everybody.” He looked around.

“Give one to Nightmare, Baby.” Dragon Lady took one for herself.

Denny walked in. He sat next to Kid, quietly, and leaned on his crossed legs: the knee of his jeans brushed the shin of Kid’s.

Nightmare took a cup and motioned Baby to give one to Denny. “And give the Kid one—”

“—As long as there’s one for me.” Copperhead got on his second boot and stamped twice. He looked at Kid.

“I guess Adam and me can share one.” Baby frowned at the cups clutched to his chest.

Kid took his cup and thought: If there weren’t enough, I suppose we would have to fight.

Copperhead got one. So did Siam.

“Adam!” Dragon Lady called. “Baby done passed out the glasses. What you doin’ with the brew?”

Adam came in, brown face veiled by steam. Steam rolled down over the chains on his chest. He had lots of thick, dark hair. “Here you go.” He poured for Dragon Lady, and went on to Nightmare. His pants were too big, bunched under, or just sagging from the chain he used for a belt.

Kid held his cup with both hands, feeling its heat.

In the middle of the room, Baby was examining the last cup to see if a crack went all the way through.

“A whole warehouse,” Dragon Lady reiterated. “You can go down and get it yourself when you run out of what we brought you.”

“Shit.” Adam squinted through the steam. “We got ’em a whole carton.” He rubbed his chest; chains growled.

“I don’t make no food runs.” Nightmare blew steam down over his hands. “You know I don’t make no fuckin’ food runs.”

“We got so many free loaders,” Copperhead said at the coffee cup he held on his right knee, “you just may have to.” Head still low, he looked at Kid again. “We get more of ’em every day.”

“You got some in there for you?” Dragon Lady finished saying to Adam, who checked the fuming pot and nodded. Then she looked at Copperhead and hooted: “You really down on the Kid, hey? Why you so down on him?”

“’Cause Copperhead’s big and dumb,” Nightmare said. “Now I like Copperhead. He’s big, dumb, and mean. The Kid’s small and smart. But I bet he’s just as mean as Copperhead.”

“When I got shot,” Siam said, “the Kid pulled me onto the bus. Kid ain’t mean—”

“Aw, fuck you!” Nightmare bellowed, and rolled sharply to his knees.

Siam spilled coffee over his hand.

Nightmare didn’t.

Siam put his cup down, shook his fingers, sucked at his knuckles.

Nightmare guffawed, sipped and guffawed again.

Copperhead blinked, rubbed his beard against his freckled wrist, and retreated even farther between his shoulders.

Kid gripped his cup; his palm was uncomfortably hot. “Hey, Copperhead?” He flexed his nubs on burning porcelain. “Hey, Copperhead, why you think they’re so anxious to get us after each other?”

The redhead glowered from the couch.

“I’m half Indian,” Kid said. “And you’re about…what? Half nigger?” He glanced at Dragon Lady, who looked back and forth between them, black eyes a glint in her dark face, as though she were holding a snicker. Nightmare, his skin, for all his muscles, translucent white, peered over his cup, and actually looked surprised.

“So I guess they just figure it’ll be easy, huh?”

Copperhead’s glower turned to puzzlement. Then suddenly it broke out in a laugh.

“Yeah,” Copperhead said. “Yeah, only—” He pointed a thumb at Nightmare, at Dragon Lady. “Easy, sure. Only half an Indian’s a half-breed or something, right? Half a nigger, anywhere around this part of the world, is still just plain old nigger.” This laugh was a bark that threw back his head. But the building anger was loosed in contempt about the room.

Dragon Lady’s laugh got drowned in coffee, which chattered loudly below her lowered eyes.

“Copperhead and me—” Kid jutted his arm forward for balance and rocked to standing—“we’re on the same side, aren’t we?” He stepped over someone asleep. “We better be, with you bastards around.”

“Man, he got your number, white boy,” Dragon Lady said to Nightmare, chuckling.

“Aw, shut up,” Nightmare said.

“He got both your numbers,” Copperhead said, “Jesus Christ—” He began to dig his hand under the girl on the couch, pulled out his vest.

Kid was about to look at Denny; but Denny’s girl stepped into the far doorway.

She looked very surprised.

Kid walked across the room. He saw Copperhead shrugging into his vest, watched him. So did Dragon Lady and Nightmare, each with differing smiles.

“You want some coffee?” Kid asked.

The girl took the cup he thrust and looked even more surprised. He pushed past through the door.

The sink and counter were heaped with dishes. The table was piled with garbage. A garbage bag underneath had broken.

Outside the screen door, the sky heaved and twisted like a thing chained.

Kid stopped on the littered linoleum and raised his hands to his face—

He’d forgotten the blades.

He pressed the heel of his other hand against one eye. Clean metal and dirty flesh—he brought his armed hand closer, till metal tickled his cheek.

Beyond metal and skin and screening, and wooden roofs across the street, the sky ran and blistered and dribbled on itself.

I will play, he thought, this game another hour. One more hour. Then I will go do something else. I’m tired. That’s not complicated. I’m just tired.

He ground one eye, till light spots superimposed blades, hand and sky.

They were laughing in the other room.

What do I want here?

The boy? he thought to see it fall. I still like him, don’t I? He bores me already (thinking: All that guarantees is that he still likes me).

Lanya, Kid thought angrily, has gone away. Why. Because I’m impossible. And realized, astonished, what he wanted was her.

Double laughter separated into a boy’s and a girl’s. When they stepped around him, hand in hand, she looked quickly away. Denny didn’t.

Kid felt his expression change, not sure to what. But it made Denny stop.

“Get out of here,” Denny said to the girl.

She looked between them, puzzled and—eager? Then she fled back into the living room.

After a second, Kid said, “Your girlfriend doesn’t like me very much.”

Denny’s shoulders made some small, sharp motions. “You been pretty nice to her.”

“Like hell.” Maybe, Kid thought, I should tell him to go away, like he told her. “Come here.”

Denny walked over.

Kid reached in his pocket for Tak’s battery. “Put this in for me?”

Denny’s face made motions small and strange as his shruggings. I make up rituals, Kid thought. They try to comprehend them; and forced the memory of Lanya’s green eyes shut.

Denny fingered up the projector. (The chain tickled Kid’s chest.) Biting his lower lip, Denny unsnapped the sphere. He pushed the battery between the clips with his thumb.

Kid moved both caged and free fingers on the blades, and let his hand swing against Denny’s pants. “You got a hard-on.”

“I know.” Denny sucked in his lips and thumbed the projector case closed. It clicked. “Okay.” Without looking up, he turned for the door.

Kid put his thumb between his own legs and hooked his genitals forward against his pants. “Hey, turn around.”

Denny turned.

“And smile.”

Denny laughed, and then tried to stop the laughter. Shaking his head, he said, “You’re real crazy.” Then he went out.

“Jesus Christ!” Thirteen pushed in around the boy. “Hey, it’s the Kid!” He turned and repeated to Smokey, like an after-image at his shoulder: “It’s the Kid. Hey, Kid, they told me you were around here but I thought you split already. How you doing?”

Kid nodded. The door closed behind them. There isn’t room in this kitchen for all these people, Kid thought.

“Glad to see you!” Thirteen nodded back. “Before you cut out. I mean…” He held the strap of his tank top from his shoulder. “…you cutting out?”

“I don’t know.”

“I mean, you stay as long as you want. That’s fine with me. They got all those God-damn freaks in here, I’m really glad to have somebody like you, you know?”

“Thanks,” Kid said and wondered what Thirteen wanted.

“Um…” Thirteen said, obviously uncomfortable. “Um…somebody told me you been fuckin’ around with the kids, huh?”

“Huh?”

“I mean, somebody heard you guys going at it in the loft. You know?” Thirteen grinned; and still looked uncomfortable. “I mean, how old are they, fifteen? Sixteen? I mean, I just sort of feel responsible for them, because they’re not that old, you know?”

“I wasn’t fucking with them. They were fucking with me.”

“Yeah,” Thirteen said and nodded. “They’re too much, huh? I mean, I don’t care what you do, man. It’s not a moral thing.” Suddenly he reached behind him and drew Smokey up under his arm. “I mean, Smokey here is, what are you, honey? Eighteen? And I mean, seventeen, eighteen, there ain’t that much difference. I just don’t want to see anybody hurt them, that’s all.”

“I’m not out to hurt anybody.”

“Yeah, man. Sure.” Thirteen nodded deeply “I didn’t think you were. It’s just that, well…some people have, that’s all. Come on inside, hey, and smoke some dope with me, hey? I mean, if you feel like it.”

Kid let his caged hand fall to the side.

“I mean, maybe later, then, if you want to.” Thirteen grinned again.

“It’s good you…don’t want anybody to get hurt.”

Thirteen hesitated. “Thanks.” Then he pulled Smokey a little closer, and they walked around Kid into the other room, while somebody outside the door said:

“Hello…?”

She and her shadow on the screening were out of register.

“Kid? That is you…?”

The door opened—she and his memory of her were, too.

She watched him with small things happening at her mouth that could have been preparation for either laughter or recrimination; and other small things happening in her green eyes.

“Oh, hey—!” he said anyway, because something was warming in his chest. It rose to heat his face, left him grinning and squinting. “Hey, I’m glad you…” His arms went out. She and his memory of her (the screen door clacked) came together between them. Her cheek butted against his, her laughter roared happily at his ear. “Oh, hey, I’m glad you came!” His arms had whipped across her back—one slightly out (and quivering for wanting to close) for the orchid.

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 anymore 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.