Текст книги "Dhalgren"

Автор книги: Samuel R. Delany

Соавторы: Samuel R. Delany
сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 39 (всего у книги 60 страниц)

The woman’s eyes narrowed at the light that was Denny, came to Kid’s and widened. She blinked again. “You got juice and cookies…”

“What?”

“This is the school?” Her voice was still breathy. “You got the juice and the cookies for the children? Oh, I’m sorry!” Her knuckle rose to dent her double chin, a gesture recalling June. “I thought I could get some from here, you know? I live in Cumberland Park? And the store where I go all the time ain’t got none no more. I go in there every day and I get some every day, but I go in there yesterday and there just ain’t nothing. Nothing at all. Oh, God…from the children! I’m so sorry!”

“Then,” Lanya said, “why don’t you go to another store?”

“Oh, I’m sorry! I really am…”

“You got juice and cookies?” Denny asked. “Whyn’t you give her some?”

“Because this is…” Lanya’s lips worried the teeth behind them. “You wait here.” She walked from the circle of Denny’s illumination; Kid heard a door.

The woman transferred her bag to the other hand. “Taking from the children. That’s just so awful!” Her voice was weak and low as some man’s.

Lanya stepped back into the light. In one arm were two number ten cans of grapefruit juice. In the other were two boxes of Tollhouse cookies, glistening in cellophane. “You take these. But don’t come back here. Don’t break in here and try and take stuff out. Find another store. There’s one four blocks up from here that still has things in it. And there’s another one a block and a half down, right by the burned-out dry cleaners.”

The woman, her tongue tip pink between her lips, blinking, opened her bag.

The cans and boxes went chattering in.

Lanya walked to the front door and held it open.

The woman glanced at Kid, at Denny’s light, quite distressed, and stepped unsteadily forward. At the door she hesitated, suddenly turned to Lanya: “You teach little children dressed like that, half naked with your breasts all hanging out like that? Why, that’s terrible! It’s a disgrace to God!” Then she fled, coat hem swinging above her splayed heels.

“Get that!” Denny (lights doused) ran forward. “You want us to take back our God-damn juice and—!”

“Denny!” Lanya blocked him at the door.

“I mean will you get that shit!” He turned in her restraining arms, shaking his head. “Why’d you give her the damn stuff?”

“Oh, come on. Let’s go!”

“I mean, God damn, she didn’t even say whether or not she liked your music!”

Lanya held on to Denny’s shoulder. “Well, maybe if she was hungry she didn’t really care about the music. Hiding back there for a couple of hours—”

“Then what’s she care that much about your tits for?” Denny shrugged her hand away. “She could’ve come out. We wouldn’t’ve done nothing. Shit!”

“Well, I’m not going to let it bother me,” she said. “So don’t let it bother you.”

Kid thought: How did she get in here in the first place? Then thought: What was I just thinking…It was something I wanted to ask. “Yeah, let’s go, huh?” He laughed, and thought: What was the thought that just slid off the tables of my mind?

Kid followed them outside. And thought: She is bothered.

“Close the door, will you?” Lanya said.

“By the way,” Kid began, “How did she…?”

Denny glanced back at him.

Lanya didn’t.

“You know?” Kid caught up to her. “I wonder if there’re really any children ever in there? I mean I’m having a harder and harder time believing in anything I don’t—”

“Huh?” Lanya looked up.

Deep in thought, she hadn’t heard.

He grinned at her and rubbed the back of her neck. “‘Diffraction,’” he said. “I like it.”

“Mmmm.” She leaned her head back and shook it. Hair brushed his hand and wrist.

“What are you going to do with it?” he asked.

She shrugged: “I don’t know. What are you going to do with your poems?”

He shrugged. “Maybe write…some more.”

She slipped her shoulder under his arm. “Maybe I’ll compose some more…maybe.” Suddenly she said: “A disgrace to God?—really!”

Denny, who walked along the curb, picking at his chest, glanced back. And grinned.

What she’s thinking, Kid thought, is seldom what it looks like she’s thinking. Sometimes (as he walked, he catalogued incidents) he’d found her thoughts far simpler than her complicated expression of them. Other times (this catalogue was longer) more complex.

Denny, holding his chains with both hands and walking with his head down, to examine what was beside his feet, was easier, nastier, duller and (the attraction beyond the body) predictable.

Lanya lifted her harmonica (when, Kid tried to remember, had she snatched it up from the table inside? But that was lost too, with the others) toward her mouth. Her hair pulled from his forearm as she stepped ahead of him; his arm slid down the vest, fell.

She bent over the silver organ. Then she lowered it. Then turned it in her hands. Then she raised it. Then she lowered it again.

2

At the head of the stairs, Kid bent to scratch Muriel, who licked furiously at the ham of his thumb.

Madame Brown came into the hall and said, “Now I didn’t even know you’d gone outside! I could have sworn I’d heard you back in Lanya’s room just now. Would you like wine, or coffee?”

“Could I have both?” Denny asked.

“Certainly.”

“Just wine for me,” Lanya said. “That’s probably what you want, too, right?”

“Yeah,” Kid said. “Thanks.”

They followed Madame Brown into the kitchen.

“You want to come to my party?” Kid asked. “Up at Mr. Calkins’.”

“The one he’s giving for your book, that everybody’s been talking about?” Madame Brown smiled. Her necklace glittered.

“Huh? Yeah. I guess that’s it.”

“I’d be delighted.”

Lanya, legs crossed, raised the front feet of her chair. “He hasn’t invited me, yet.” Above her, in the grey window, an asparagus fern turned on a string.

“Oh, you know you two are invited.” Kid sat on the kitchen stool.

“You got a party? Up at Calkins’?” Denny, hands in his pockets, leaned on the stove. He moved to let Madame Brown get the enameled coffee pot.

She said: “That should be quite something.”

“He said bring about twenty or thirty friends. I’m going to bring the whole nest up.”

“Marvelous!” Lanya clapped her hands. “I’m sure that’s what he wants.”

“Yeah? You think so?”

Madame Brown, dubious, set out glasses and picked the gallon jug up from the floor. “Well, it will be interesting.” She twisted at the cap, her face lining with effort. “It’s in three Sundays, isn’t it?” The cap seemed stuck. “Mary will never forgive me if I go. She’s invited me for dinner. But I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

“Here. I’ll do it.” Kid opened the bottle and poured out yellow wine. “You got lots of patients here?”

Madame Brown, seated in what looked like a lawn chair, observed her glass. “A few. Would you like to come and have a session with me some afternoon?”

Kid looked up. And thought: I’m embarrassed. Why?

“Lanya’s told me about some of the things you were feeling, and how upset you’d been. And about your memory problems. If you’d like to talk about them with someone, I’d be very happy to.”

“Now?”

Lanya rocked in her chair.

Denny, sitting at the table now, looked back and forth between his wine glass and coffee cup.

“Goodness, no. Perhaps some afternoon next week. That would be best for me. I’m terminating sessions with two patients, and if we want to work out something further, it would be a little easier to make arrangements.”

“Oh,” Kid said. “Yeah. You give therapy to people now?”

“Yes, I have been for quite a while now.”

Lanya said, “I told Madame Brown you’d been in therapy before.”

“You told her I’d been in a mental hospital?”

“You mentioned that to me once yourself,” Madame Brown said.

Kid drank some wine. “Yeah. I’d like to come and talk to you. Thanks. That’s nice of you.”

“You think he’s crazy?” Denny asked. He’d only drunk from the coffee. “He acts pretty funny sometimes. But I don’t think he’s crazy. Not like Dollar.” He looked over his cup at Madame Brown and explained: “Dollar’s killed somebody already. Beat his head in with a pipe. Now Dollar’s a real nut. You wanna talk to him?”

“You shut up, huh?” Kid said.

Madame Brown said: “I’m afraid I don’t have facilities for handling…real nuts. ‘Crazy’ and ‘nuts’ are terms doctors don’t use—or shouldn’t. But, no, I don’t think Kid’s crazy at all.”

Denny’s head had gone to the side and his tongue into his cheek, listening for patronization. His mouth changed shape over the cup. He’d apparently found it.

“I don’t want to start any long-term thing,” Kid said, “where I come back and back—yeah, I know that’s how it works. But I just don’t want to get into that.”

“Whether or not you needed something long term would more or less depend on what we found out in the first sessions, wouldn’t it? So we’ll do first things first.”

“Okay…” Kid felt wary.

“You know—” Lanya’s chair legs came down—“that whole thing about Dollar killing Wally has really got me upset.”

“What is this,” Madame Brown asked, “about someone killing somebody?”

So they told her.

“Now he sounds nuts.” Madame Brown nodded.

“Oh, he ain’t that nuts,” Denny answered.

Madame Brown sighed: “Well, I suppose that afternoon did provide some extenuating circumstances.” But she sounded more worried than convinced.

The bell rang.

“Well, my break is over.” Madame Brown left the room.

As soon as she’d gone, Denny said: “Did you know that while you were asleep last night, the guys had two girls in the back they were shagging? Man, them niggers really went to town! I used to watch a lot, but I never took no turn before. One of them, the little white one, she was freaky, man! Really. Freaky. Glass said I could take a turn, if I wanted.” He revolved the cup to align the handle with a crack between the table boards. “So I did. To come, though, I had to pretend—” Denny glanced at Kid—“stuff with you.”

“You been busy, huh?” Kid hadn’t known; he was surprised.

Denny looked at Lanya. “I pretended about you too.”

“I don’t know whether I should be flattered or not.” She rocked her chair again. “I’ve always pictured myself as a pretty worldly young lady, but you guys have a way of making me feel like I just got out of a convent. Not—” she let the chair legs down—“that I’m trying to keep up…well, maybe I am, just a little.” She stood, stepped around the table corner, and put a hand on either side of Denny’s face, which rotated between her palms, mouth opened. She dropped her mouth on his. He held the edge of the table and strained his neck to kiss her. Finally, he let go with one hand and put it around her waist. “Hey—” he pulled his face away from hers—“that’s nice,” giggled, and kissed her again.

Kid’s laughter made them look.

“What would you do,” Kid said, “if I brought the whole nest around and had them all lined up, taking turns?”

Leaning against Denny’s shoulder, Lanya frowned. “I wouldn’t put it past you, you bastard…Naw, that’s not true. You wouldn’t.” She glanced down and sat on Denny’s knee. Denny immediately settled one hand over her breast and frowned at her. “Gang bangs, chains, leather—it isn’t my scene.”

“I’ve got a hard-on,” Denny said.

“You’ve had a hard-on ever since I met you,” Lanya told him. “Look, you two: two guys making it together turns me on. That’s all. Most of my friends have always been gay. That’s what I dig.”

“I know a lot of guys who dig dikes,” Denny said.

Lanya bit his ear.

“Owww…!”

“Anyway,” she said, “that’s the turn-on for me. Not getting gang-shagged.”

“Glib.” Kid rocked his stool legs now. “But logical.”

“I think you look cute in my vest,” Denny said. “You think I look cute without it?”

“As a bug, babes,” Lanya told him.

“Hey,” Denny said. “Are you mad at me?”

“No,” she said. “Just a little confused.” She looked at Kid. “I can never figure out if you’re the person I keep thinking you are.”

Kid stood up, walked over, and stopped with his hands on Lanya’s shoulders, his legs astraddle Denny’s knee. “If I talk about you screwing Denny or me, it’s for real. If I talk about you screwing anybody else, I’m joking. See? And you can do or talk about whatever you want.”

“And I think you misunderstand me entirely—” she nodded with a look both wary and wry—“sometimes.”

He kissed her (face turning between his palms) and had to bend his legs. She turned her head gently back and forth, rubbing his tongue with hers, and meshed her fingers behind his neck, pulling him down, harder. Finally he had to settle his weight on Denny’s thigh. Denny took Kid’s shoulder with one hand. The knuckles of the other moved against Kid’s breast, fondling hers. Kid’s hands slid between Lanya’s back and Denny’s belly.

“Both of you,” Denny said, “weigh more than I do. Either me or the chair is gonna go, one.”

Lanya laughed into Kid’s mouth.

“Let’s go back into your room and ball.” Kid said.

He had actually thought one or the other of them would protest.

Geoff Rivers

Arthur Pearson

Kit Darkfeather

Earl Rudolph

David Wise

Phillip Edwards

Michael Roberts

Virginia Colson

Jerry Shank

Hank Kaiser

Frank Yoshikami

Gary Disch

Harold Redwing

Alvin Fischer

Madeleine Terry

Susan Morgan

Priscilla Meyer

William Dhalgren

George Newman

Peter Weldon

Ann Harrison

Linda Evers

Thomas Sask

Preston Smith

At her desk, he read the list for the sixth time. The sky beyond the bay window, dense and low, darkened toward evening. Roberts or Rudolph, Rivers or Evers: Fantasize a persona for any. Which, he pondered, would I pick myself? Some permutation…Gary Morgan, Terry Rivers, Thomas Weldon? None was his. Was one perhaps nearer than the other? No…if they are all real people, he reflected, then each is just as important. Hey, Kamp, isn’t this what that democracy’s about that put you up on…a moon? (But I don’t want one. I need one about as much as I need a handful of dollars.) Lips tight, he picked up the papers: Three sheets from the phone pad, two pieces of newsprint, the back, blank pages of a paperback, some sheets of Lanya’s paper—all he had written since Brass Orchids. I promised not to write anymore; Newboy promised I would. Kid smiled, putting one paper behind the other. He slipped Brass Orchids from beneath the notebook, opened it, closed it, opened it again. Holding it on his palm too long made his stomach ache. Such a strange, marvelous, and marvelously inadequate object! He was still unable to read it through. He still tried. And tried again, and tried till his throat was constricted, his forearms wet, and his heart hammered down where he’d always thought his liver was. Neither dislike nor discomfort with the work explained that. Rather the book itself was lodged in some equation where it did not belong, setting off hyperradicals and differentials through all the chambers of his consciousness. He looked over at the notebook, read what was on the page behind the list:

Lingual synthesis: Wittgenstein, Lévi-Strauss, Chomsky—I suspect it is what they were getting at: Attempts to reduce vast fields of Philosophy, Anthropology, and Linguistics to sets of parameters that not so much define as mirror the way in which philosophical, anthropological, and linguistic information respectively fit into, upon, and around the mind itself. Those particularly parametric works (the Tractatus, La Geste d’Asdiwal, Syntactic Structures—though all three men have written much longer works, work of this type must be very short; none of these is above 30 thousand words) do not discuss fields of study; they drop careful, crystalline catalysts, which on any logical mind (as opposed to trained minds familiar with galleries of evidence and evaluations) perforce generate complicated and logical discussions of the subject using whatever evidence is at hand, limited only by the desire or ability to retain interest in the dialogue propagating in the inner ear.

In an age glutted with information, this “storage method” is, necessarily, popular. But these primitive

was the end of the page. He did not turn to the next. Wittgenstein, Lévi-Strauss, Chomsky: He mulled their sounds. A year, a year and a half ago, he had read everything he could find by one.

He had never heard of the other two.

“Lingual synthesis…” That was nice on the tongue. “…particularly parametric works…” He picked up Brass Orchids, balanced it on blunt fingers. “…careful, crystalline catalysts…” He nodded. A particularly parametric work of careful, crystalline catalysts in lingual synthesis. That, at any rate, was the type of object it ought to be. Well, it was short.

One of them turned in the bed.

One of them turned again.

He looked across the room:

The tent of a knee. An arm over an arm.

The chair back was cool against his. Caning prickled the bottom of one thigh. The plants leaned from their pots.

He pinched the bright chain across his belly.

Dark ones coiled the clothing on the floor.

Suppose, he thought, she wants me to stay and him to go. Well, I get rid of the bastard. Suppose she wants me to go? I get rid of all the bastards.

But she won’t. She likes privacy too much. Why else would she go along with this? Along? Something in me would like to have it that she is doing this for me. But all joy in it comes from those moments when it is obviously as real as her music and personally otherwise.

I am restless.

She turns restlessly.

His arm, limp, moves with her moving shoulder.

Lanya blinked, raised her head. Kid watched her eyes close and her head lay down. He was smiling. He turned Brass Orchids in his hands, turned the loose pages, as though he might heft, through some quality other than weight, the difference.

The notebook was open again at the list. Puzzling, he read the names once more (it was almost too dark), this time right to left, bottom to top:

Preston Smith

Thomas Sask

Linda Evers

Ann Harrison

Peter Weldon

George Newman

William Dhalgren

Priscilla Meyer

Susan Morgan…

Madeleine Terry…

3

“Why’d she kick us out?”

“She didn’t kick us out. She had things to do. She’ll be down to see us. Don’t worry.”

“I ain’t worrying.” Denny balanced along the curb edge. “Shit, I could have stayed up there for the rest of my life and been happy. You on one end and her on the other.”

“How’d you manage to eat?”

“Present company excepted—” Denny tugged at his vest—“I’d just send out for it. You sure she wasn’t mad at us?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay…you really think she’s gonna come down and visit the nest?”

“If she doesn’t, we’ll go up and see her. She’ll come.”

“She’s a nice person!” Denny emphasized each stress with a beat of his chin. “And I really like that song. ‘Diffraction,’ huh?”

Kid nodded.

“I hope she comes down. I mean I know she likes you, ’cause you wrote a book and everything, and you know her a long time. But I’m just a fuck-up. She ain’t got no reason to like me.”

“She does anyway.”

Denny frowned. “Sure acts like it, don’t she?”

The street light above them pulsed…at half strength; then died. The sky sheeted over with one more film of darkness. The only other light to come on was two blocks away; it pulsed, pulsed, pulsed again.

Someone moved into it and shouted, “Hey! Hey, Kid! Denny!” Others trooped into the wavering circle.

“What the hell are they doing here?”

Denny shrugged.

In the middle of the next block, Dollar, lugging the brass lion on its broken base, pushed between Copperhead and Jack the Ripper. “Hey, we gotta move, you know? We’re movin’ again!” Dollar was grinning.

Copperhead was not. “The fuckin’ house burnt up on us! How you like that? The fuckin’ house burnt up!” A knapsack, one green with his fatigues, swung about his shins. He hefted the strap to the other hand.

“Jesus,” Denny said. “All my shit…?”

“What happened?”

“Nothin’,” Copperhead shrugged. “You know…it just, well….”

“The whole damn block,” Siam said. “About an hour ago. Shit, it was something!”

Kid felt his heart thump once (like it always did when he found out somebody he knew had died); in the hollow remains, he thought: That isn’t so much a reaction as it is a fear of what the reaction might be. The house burnt down? The…house burnt down? But that seems so easy. The house…

He asked: “Was Nightmare there?”

“Fuck,” Copperhead said. “Fuck. He and the Lady was off somewhere. Thirteen was gone somewhere too. Fuck.”

Glass chuckled. “I could smell Thirteen’s stash burning right up. Sure wished I knew where he kept it, and I would have got it out for him. But when it was burning—” he swung a pillowcase down from his shoulder into his arms—“you sure could smell it. You know I been in seven God-damn fires. Seven times I had my house burn out from under me. Lost my mother in a God-damn fire.”

“In Bellona?” Siam asked.

Glass looked at Siam, realization in his face that he had been misunderstood. “No…” He hugged up the pillowcase. “I ain’t been in no fire in Bellona, except this one.”

“Where are we going to move?”

Denny said, “You want to go back to Lanya’s and see if she’ll put us—”

“Not on your fucking life,” Kid said.

“I mean,” Denny questioned, “you said she wasn’t mad at us none.”

“You got some place for us to move?” Copperhead asked.

“Nope,” Kid said. “Come on. We’ll find one.”

“Now we don’t want no place that’s gonna burn up again before we get in it,” Copperhead said. “Do we?”

Scorpions mumbled outside the circle of the lamp. Some carried mattresses, some cartons, some shovels and tools.

“Come on down this street,” and the cavalcade practically filled the alley. Trees had been planted and ringed with ornamental fences. But each trunk was charred to a black fork with twisted tines. “That wooden house must have gone up like a matchbook.”

“Naw,” Copperhead told him. “And nobody got hurt. Nobody didn’t really lose nothing they didn’t want to lose. We all got out in time.”

“I got the lion!”

Kid turned on Dollar’s pocked and stubbled grin.

“Man, I wouldn’t’ve left my lion behind for nothing. It’s the only fuckin’ thing I own. You got that for me, Kid, remember? You got that for me and I wouldn’t leave behind nothing like that for anything in the world, you know?”

“Denny…?”

Behind Dollar, she pushed her way forward. Her arms were full, her hair was tangled, and one heavy cheek was smudged.

“Denny, I got your stuff out!”

Her eyes, sweeping among them, caught Kid’s and swept away.

“Denny? I think I got it all…”

“Oh, wow!” Denny said. “Oh, hey, you did? Wow, that’s great!”

“Here: I got your shirts.” She caught up with them. “And—” she glanced up blankly at Kid; the heavy breasts in her blue sweatshirt pressed out against bags and packages. Her small, full fingers had left the brown paper sweaty so that it bellied between them—“and the posters down from your wall. And the picture books. I didn’t bring the blankets…I didn’t bring the blankets because I thought it wouldn’t be too hard to get some more blankets—”

“You got my radio?”

“Of course I got your radio. I think I got everything—there wasn’t very much—except the blankets.”

“I don’t care about the God-damn blankets,” Denny said. “You okay? I mean the house was burning down, and you were back up in there getting my stuff?” He took a paper bag from her—

“Oh, watch out…!”

–pulled Brass Orchids from his back pocket and dropped it inside.

“What’s that?”

“Nothin’. What you so curious about? Oh, hey! You got my game in there.”

“Un-huh. Denny?”

“Why don’t you let me carry the rest of those?”

“That’s all right. Denny?”

“What?”

“I don’t think me and my friend—”

She glanced back.

Kid did too.

The blond girl in the pea jacket was just behind them.

“—are going to stay with you guys anymore. I just wanted to bring you your stuff.”

“Hey,” Denny said. “Why not?”

“I don’t know.” She adjusted the other bags. “We just want to go somewhere else. We don’t want to be members. And we know some nice people who have a house where we thought we could stay. It’s just girls there.”

“Just girls?” Denny said. “You ain’t gonna have no fun there.”

“Boys can visit and stuff like that. Boys just don’t live there. I just don’t think I want to live with you guys anymore. I mean after the fire—” once more she glanced at Kid—“and everything. You know.”

“Jesus,” Denny said. “Jesus Christ. Well, I mean, I guess so, if you don’t want to anymore.”

“You can come visit me, too. If you want.”

“Shit,” Denny said. “God damn.”

“I just think it would be better. I mean if I live someplace else. It’s a very nice place. They’re very nice girls.”

Denny was looking into the bag.

She said: “I’m pretty sure I got everything. What are you looking for? If it’s not in there, it’s probably in here.”

“I’m not looking for anything.”

“Oh.”

The mask of Kid’s face tingled. Suddenly he turned to Copperhead. “You ever been in any of these houses?”

“No.”

“Let’s try that one.”

“Sure.”

Kid turned to the others. “Hey! Hold up there, will you?” He walked up the unpainted steps. Halfway, he glanced back:

She shifted paper bags in her arms, biting at her lip while trying to get them comfortable. Denny looked at her, then at Kid, then back at her. The others shuffled and talked.

In his hand, the knob’s squared and toothy shaft slid out another inch—

Kid pushed the door in.

The loose ceiling fixture—

He ran his eyes over the hall, waiting for sounds of occupancy.

The crayoning on the dirty wall—

He had the oddest feeling. “Anybody home?”

“Well, if they are,” Copperhead said, “they can damn well get ready to move the fuck out. ’Cause we come to pay a long visit, right?” Others laughed. Copperhead called up: “Does it look okay?”

“Yeah. It looks pretty…”

“Should we come on up?”

“Yeah, come on.”

At the end of the hall the bathroom door was open. Footsteps behind him passed around him; and somebody carrying the chained mannequin pushed by.

The house came alive with scorpions.

With a feeling of suspended confusion, he wandered through the front room into the kitchen.

Copperhead was looking in the cabinets above the sink. “Whole lot of canned stuff. That’s pretty good. Too bad they left all their garbage though.” A bag had broken under the table. The table was piled with garbage. The sink and the counter were heaped with dishes.

Kid decided he didn’t like it here.

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

He turned abruptly into the living room.

The blond girl in the pea jacket sat on the couch, fists between her knees, watching two scorpions lay out a mattress on the floor. She looked at Kid, hunched her shoulders, and looked back at the scorpions. She seemed very tired.

“Hey, man,” Dollar said behind his shoulder, “this is a really fine place.” Clutching his lion, he shouldered open a door across the hall. Several guys were inside, straightening out mattresses and sleeping bags. Dollar pushed his way among them to set the lion in the window. He turned, silhouetted before the torn window shade. The brass beast peered by his hip from the sill. “Hey, man. You shouldn’t have brought that old burned-up mattress with us. It’s gonna smell up the whole fuckin’ place.” On the ticking was a charred halo around a crater two feet across of ashes and burned cotton.

“It’s the only one I had,” the scorpion (another white guy named California) said, and yanked it across the floor. He dropped the corner to overlap another.

Newspaper and magazine pictures had been at one time pasted over the wall; then some of them ripped off.

A black scorpion Kid didn’t know stood up and grinned. “This sure beats the place we were staying, hey, Kid?” Squinting, he looked around. “Yeah, this is pretty nice.”

I prefer, Kid thought, the red eyes, Goddamn it!

Across the hall, the door to the service porch was open. He started in, and stopped, one hand on the jamb. There was neither glass nor screening in the windows. Siam sat on a crate. “Hey…” He pulled the newspaper into his lap and looked at Kid with growing confusion. “I was…was reading the paper.” Siam offered a smile, thought better, and took it back. “Just reading the paper.” He stood; the paper fell on the floor. The boards had once been painted maroon. “Is there something you want me to do…? I was gonna help out with the moving, but my hand…” He gestured with his bandaged arm. At the place where the bandage wrapped his hand, the flesh was scaling. “I guess I can help set up some stuff,” Siam said, looking at his grimy fingers. “If you want…?”

“Naw,” Kid said. “Naw, that’s all right.”

The verdigrised spigot on the wall splashed on the muddy drain.

Something clanked and ground behind him.

Kid turned.

The Ripper and Devastation wheeled the Harley up the hall:

“I don’t see why you wanted to bring this piece of junk along. You can’t get no gas for it, and you say the motor’s all shot anyway.”

“Well, it’s a good bike, if I could get it fixed.”

“You want to put it in the bathroom like last time?”

“Shit, these cocksuckers get drunk and don’t aim at all. And you know one of ’em’s gonna piss on it just to see it rust.”

“Aw, come on, motherfucker—”

“No, man! Hey, Denny, can I put it in there?”

“I guess so.” Denny stood by a doorway, both arms full of paper bags.

Kid walked up to him, took his shoulder. “She go?”

Lips pursed, Denny nodded, looking from one bag to the other.

Inside, someone leaned the shovels against the wall beside an ironing board.

They backed up the Harley to wheel it in.

“Hey, is this gonna be your room, Kid?”

Kid said, “Probably.”

“It ain’t gonna take up too much space. Later I can maybe find someplace for it, you know?”

“If it’s in the Kid’s room, nobody’s gonna bother it.”

“That’s okay.”

Kid squeezed Denny’s shoulder. They stepped inside.

“Hey,” Denny said. “It’s got a loft!”

Kid’s spine chilled. He stood very still. “Denny?”

“What?”

“Did the place where we came from have a loft?”

Denny looked puzzled. “Sure it did. But it wasn’t as nice as this one.”

“It wasn’t?”

“This one’s a lot bigger,” Denny said. “And it’s got a mattress on it.”

“What was the place like we were living before?”

“Huh?”

“Describe it to me. I can’t remember it. I can’t…remember anything about it.”

“What do you mean?”

“What color were the walls painted?”

“White weren’t they?”

Frowning, Kid nodded. The walls about them were green.

“You really don’t remember where we lived before?”

Kid shook his head.

“We had,” Denny began, prompting, “a bunch of spades across the street from us? It was down about eight or nine streets from here. And over a little.”

“How did it compare to here?”