Текст книги "Dhalgren"

Автор книги: Samuel R. Delany

Соавторы: Samuel R. Delany
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Текущая страница: 41 (всего у книги 60 страниц)

“Tak!”

“What? Hey, come over here. You seen these?”

Kid sprinted up the aisle between the piled cartons.

Tak kicked back a board cover. Nails squeaked, and the echo rolled among pyramided crates. “This is where you come to get ’em if you need anymore.”

The holders inside the slats reminded Kid of the square cardboards on which eggs were racked.

Some dozen had been removed.

The ones remaining, the size of golf balls and the color of gun metal, were blistered with lenses. The switch-pips all pointed to the left side of the crate. To the right were the metal loops to link them.

Kid picked up his own projector, watched it swing on its chain.

“They don’t have any batteries inside them,” Tak said. “You have to get those from stores in the city.”

Stenciled across the inside of the crate top it said, “SPIDER.”

On the crates piled around, Kid read:

DRAGON

LIZARD

FROG

BIRD OF PARADISE

SCORPION

MANTIS

MANTICORE

GRIFFIN

Kid lifted the corner of the holder. The layer beneath was full. “There must be—” he frowned at Tak—“thousands of them here…?”

“I gotta get some stuff from upstairs,” Tak said. “Come on.”

“Tak.” He looked at the myriad crates labyrinthed around. “There must be thousands of these things here! Millions, maybe!”

Dust filled a slant column from the skylight’s marbled panes.

Tak went to the metal steps against the wall. “There’s a whole lot of weird stuff in here.” He leaned over the banister, grinned at Kid, and started up.

“Hey.” Kid swung around the metal newel and followed him. “What did you come here to get?”

“It’s upstairs.”

The cardboard cartons piled by the wall were water stained. Plumbing rose beside them; the asbestos covering the pipes was mottled too.

“Here you go.”

They walked down the balcony. Kid ran his hand along the rail, looking out across the warehouse.

“This place always reminds me of the last scene in Citizen Kane,” Tak said. “This is what I want.”

Two bolts of…cloth (it was some sort of lamé. Kid couldn’t tell, in this light, whether it was gold or silver) leaned against the wall.

“For the dress?” Kid asked.

“She was talking about it, and I told her I remembered seeing some stuff lying around.” He picked up the bolt and unwrapped it. “I don’t know if this is what she wants. It’s pretty special. Go on and explore, if you want. I’ll give a yell when I’m leaving.”

Kid walked a dozen steps further, glanced back—Tak was still stretching out yards of cloth—then walked on.

The cartons near him—smaller and piled haphazardly—were stenciled with clumsy representations of zodiacal signs. He stepped around them. Another, opened like the box of tags downstairs, had been left in the middle of the plated walkway.

His own steps, even his bare foot, set off a metallic ring. The open top joggled with the shaking of the floor.

Diagonally across the cardboard was stenciled:

RED EYE-CAPS

He did not frown. All the muscles of his face urged him toward the expression. But something else was paralyzed. He squatted, pushed back the top.

They had probably all been stacked neatly together once. But movement had jumbled most of them. He picked up one. It was like a concave disk the size of a quarter, cut from a pingpong ball.

It was red.

He turned it in horny fingers. But it doesn’t explain it, he thought. Then blinked, because his eyes were filled with water. It doesn’t! Gooseflesh settled over his shoulders, his back, his buttocks, like gauze. What could anybody want with…

He blinked again.

The tear fell on the cap’s matte surface. Where it spread, the color deepened to the luster of scarlet glass.

No: That was a double thought, with and without word, and hardly an overlap.

The cap cracked in his fingers.

He dropped it in the box, stood in a motion. He let out all his breath, took in some more, and swallowed in surprise at the echo.

He stepped back.

When do they put them on? When do they take them off? Where do they put them…I would rather think (the thought kaleidoscoped and went lucid) that these have nothing to do, nothing to do with…

Kid stepped back again, turned, hurried up the balcony.

Tak, the lamé folded over his arm, squatted by another box. “I got everything I need. Find anything interesting?”

From where Kid stood, looking down, the visor masked the engineer’s eyes.

The terrible thing, Kid realized, is that I’m too scared to ask!

“Hey, are you all right?” Tak raised his head. The shadow bobbed on the top half of his face. “You’re not going to go into another one of your flip-outs, are you?”

Kid tried to say, I’m all right. All he did was expel another breath.

From the carton Tak removed some square piece of metallic equipment and stood. “Let’s go.” He sighed.

Halfway down the stairs Kid managed to say, “I’m all right.” It hung detached in dusty light, blunted by echoes. Tak gave him a sarcastic glance.

Is this, Kid thought, one of the things that, a minute hence, will slip from the register of memory to take some inaccessible address beside my name? (He closed his mouth, and the roar he had moved through for the last minutes ceased.) More likely it is one of those things that I will never be able to speak of, and never forget.

They were halfway to the door before the first voice proportioned with amusement yawned somewhere and inquired, Never? then giggled, turned over, and went to sleep.

Well not for a hell of a long time.

But he felt a little bit better.

“Did you see those?” Tak nodded down another aisle of crates.

“What?” Kid’s heart still beat very fast. He felt light-headed.

“Come on.” Tak led him along.

The orchids hung on wooden racks pegged over with dowels.

Kid walked to one stand. “This is…the fancy kind.” He looked back. “Like you have, isn’t it?”

“Plain ones are over there.” Tak stepped beside him. “I really thought you’d probably been in here before.”

To Kid’s questioning glance, Tak took down the nearest. Beneath it was lettered:

BRASS ORCHIDS

Kid laughed. It made a weak sound in his throat, but echo lent it body. “Here, let me see that?” Kid took the scrolled contrivance and turned it around and around. “I guess it would be okay if I took this one…wouldn’t it?”

Tak shrugged. “Why not?”

Kid folded his fingers together and pushed them through the wrist band. “I left my other one back at the nest. Might as well have two—one for special occasions.” He made a sudden feint at Tak. “You like that?” He laughed again.

“Come on.” Tak had not moved at all. “Let’s go.”

They were in sight of the door when Kid got another attack of gooseflesh. But this one just made him grin. He looked up at the skylight, hunched his shoulders, and hurried after Tak. I’ll probably never be able to find this place again, he thought. To steal a souvenir (he looked down at the yellow blades about his hand) seemed suddenly the ultimate cunning.

Outside, Tak smoothed the folded material across his arm. “Since this is going to be your girlfriend’s ball gown, I shouldn’t show you how it works. But it’s sort of neat. Just a second.” He took out of his pocket the piece of equipment—a metal box the size of a cigarette pack with three dials, two knobs, and a small light on one corner. “Give me a loan of the battery in your shield.”

“Oh, sure.” Kid fumbled the sphere through the blades. The projector clicked open. “I only got one hand. You take it out.”

“Right.”

Tak opened the back of the box and put the battery in.

“Now watch.”

He turned a knob.

The light on the box’s corner flickered argon-orange.

“Here we go.”

He turned another.

The cloth over Tak’s arm—at first Kid thought Tak was shaking it—turned purple.

“Huh?” Kid said.

The metallic scales from which the cloth was made all seemed to have reversed. Some reversed again, and a blot of scarlet grew in one corner, occluded the purple, till it in turn was swept by glittering green.

“Oh, hey…!” Kid stepped back. “That’s going to be a dress?”

“Pretty, isn’t it?”

The parti-colored flicker, like insect wings, resolved to blue that deepened, and deepened more, to black.

Tak turned off the box. Most of the cloth fell into dull silver. He shook it; and it was all one metallic grey.

“You know how it works?”

“Um-hm.” Tak put the box back in his pocket. “It’s simple, really. Hey, don’t tell Lanya I showed you this. She wanted it to be a surprise.”

“Oh, sure,” Kid said. “Sure.” He looked back at the warehouse. “Hey, Tak, who…?”

“Now that question,” Tak said at his shoulder, “if I knew the answer to, I would have already told you.”

“Oh,” and Kid began to list those to which that could have been an adequate response.

“You want to come up and have a drink?”

Kid said, “Hey, let me see how that stuff works again. That’s what I want to see.”

Tak sighed. “Sure.”

“…gonna kill you, motherfucker!” shrieking like a baby in pain. Kid leaped from the loft, pivoted around the door jamb. Dollar danced in the hall, swinging the plank above his head.

“Hey…!” Copperhead stepped back, his arm before his face.

“—kill you if you don’t leave me alone!”

Copperhead ducked. The plank hit the wall.

Three scorpions (two black, one white) crowded the living room doorway. Two (one man, one woman) stepped in, staring, from the service porch.

Dollar’s head went back.

Kid lunged and grabbed; his hand tangled Dollar’s hair. He grasped the scorpion’s shoulder and spun him back against the wall. Dollar crashed, and clicked his long teeth. The plank corner hit Kid’s shoulder and clattered to the floor, while Dollar opened his mouth again. His lips strung out gummy saliva. Dollar tried to shove forward, gasping; Copperhead was trying to pull Kid away.

Kid jammed his elbow back. “Get off!”

“I’m gonna kill ’im!” Dollar shrieked in Kid’s face. “He won’t leave me alone. I’m gonna kill ’im! He knows I’m gonna kill ’im! I’m gonna kill ’im! I’m gonna kill—”

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

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

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

“You gonna let us take care of him?”

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

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

Copperhead blinked and stepped back.

Dollar’s eyes stopped rolling.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Go on,” Kid said. “Just don’t bother with him.”

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

“I’m gonna kill ’im! He knows I’m gonna—”

Copperhead turned and barreled back.

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

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

“Owe…! Naw…!”

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

No one moved.

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

Behind him there was a scraping and jangling.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Kid…?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kid opened the door.

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

“You’re about eight blocks off Jackson,” Kid said.

June shook her head. “I wasn’t looking for…”

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

“You…you live here?” June asked.

Kid nodded. “What do you want? If you’re not looking for George, who are you looking for?”

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

Kid frowned.

“My big brother, Edward.”

“Oh…” Kid frowned harder. “What makes you think you’ll find him here?”

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

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

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

June looked at it.

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

“Somebody told my mother that they’d…they thought they’d seen somebody who…”

They went into the next room.

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

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

“He isn’t one of them?” Kid asked. “Is he?”

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

“You want to hunt around?”

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

“Come on, I’ll show you around.”

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

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

“You don’t live in the park anymore?” June asked.

“Nope.” He looked out on the porch and into the yard. “He’s not one of those?”

She shook her head without, he thought, looking.

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

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

Kid stepped forward.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What do you want?”

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

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

California turned over on the mattress.

Cathedral looked up from the book.

June’s eyes flicked about the shadowed room, caught once on the poster, dodged it. “I liked your book very…I thought it was nice…the part you wrote about us when…you know.” She said after a moment: “Eddy lives here with you…I mean how long has he…”

Kid shrugged.

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

When she didn’t finish, he said: “Say hello for me.”

“I wouldn’t dare!” After a second, she closed her mouth. “Oh, I couldn’t…”

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

He could walk away and leave her to wait alone.

“Watch it,” Glass said behind him.

Kid turned.

“Got it.” Spitt hefted Dollar’s ankles up under his arms.

“You just put him in there,” Copperhead said. “He’ll be all right.”

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

Dollar’s shoulder hit the door.

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

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

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

“I think he fakin’,” Copperhead told Kid, scratching his head. “I think he just didn’t want to get hit no more, and he’s just fakin’. But he’s fakin’ pretty good.”

“He didn’t run when he saw you coming?” Kid asked.

“Where was he gonna run?” Copperhead held his right fist in his left hand. The freckled knuckles were bleeding. “Put him down on that one.”

Kid looked, but couldn’t see Glass’s hands.

Angel came out of the closet again, looked around, said, “Aw, Jesus Christ…” shook his head, and again went back inside.

By the window, Cathedral, who had closed his book, opened it again.

“They put him on Eddy’s…?” June began.

The couple on the door shifted. The counterpoint of the naked scorpions’ snoring went on without change.

“Excuse me, huh?” With a glare Eddy stepped around Pepper. He walked to his mattress, squatted, and pulled a hank of chains out from under Dollar’s shoulder. He looked up at Kid. “They got him?” He shook his head, picked up the blanket and pulled it up over Dollar’s shoulders.

That, Kid thought, is for her. The room was too hot for blankets.

Putting on his chains, Eddy came back to the door. “What did you come here for?”

“I don’t know…I just don’t know—I just don’t understand how you can…”

Spitt and Glass had gone. Copperhead looked at June, frowned at Kid, and left.

“Come on,” Kid said. “You people want to talk? Let’s go out on the porch, huh? People are sleeping here, right?”

Kid let them go first, and took up Eddy’s rear.

In the hall, the bathroom door was open; Filament—yes, that was the short-haired white woman’s name, he suddenly remembered—was taking her morning crap, jeans around her shins, the Times folded across her knees.

“In there,” Eddy pointed over June’s shoulder.

June turned through the service porch door, and said, “Oh, I’m sor—”

“Huh?” Raven’s stream halted. “There’s somebody using the bathroom,” he explained, bewildered, to June’s bewildered stare; and his urine chattered in the sink again.

“Come on, come on,” Kid herded them in. “He’ll be finished in a minute.”

Raven shook himself, pushed himself back into his pants. “Yeah, I’m finished.”

This has been planned, Kid thought smugly. This couldn’t just be happening.

Raven left—

“I’ll shoo anybody else out,” Kid said.

–then ducked back in the door. “Hey, I meant to run some water in the sink, you know…?”

“Later,” Kid said.

“Okay.” He left again.

June was looking out the window. Eddy was watching her and pulling the hair at the back of his neck. “What did you want, huh?”

June turned.

“I figured,” Eddy said, “you would all get out. I mean I thought Mom and Daddy would take you and Bobby to another…city…”

“You didn’t tell him,” June asked, “about Bobby?”

“I didn’t know he was your brother until three minutes ago,” Kid said. “June pushed Bobby down an elevator shaft and broke his neck, accidentally. He’s dead.” And immediately George’s face filled his mind, obliterating all other reactions.

“Mother’s very sick,” June said. “She really isn’t well at all. And I’m worried about Daddy. He goes out to work every day, you know; in spite of it all. But sometimes now he doesn’t come home for three, or four days…”

“Huh?” Eddy leaned back against the washing machine. “What…?” which was not a reaction to what June was saying at all.

“I’m so worried I don’t…know what to do. I swear…!” Though her sentences were as halting as before, she spoke each fragment more firmly. “Since you’ve gone, it’s all…everything has just fallen apart. Everything, Eddy. Since you went, it’s like…like the plug was pulled out and everything ran out. All of it.”

“Jesus Christ…” Eddy looked at the floor and shook his head. “Bobby…?”

She circles, Kid thought, she circles, magnificently banal, denying guilt or innocence: if only in her single-mindedness, she is heroic!

Biting both lips, June shook her head. “Are you going to come home?”

And, like an afterthought: She is only a seventeen-year-old, over-protected god. (Somewhere, George leered.)

, “Well,” Eddy said, “what for…?” Then he said, “Bobby’s dead? And Dad doesn’t come there anymore?”

“Some,” she said. “Oh, he comes back…”

Eddy looked up. “What would I come back for?”

“Oh, if you got some nice clothes, and a haircut and stuff, and told them you were sorry…”

“Sorry for what! He said he was going to kill me if I came back!”

“But that’s just because—”

“They start it,” Eddie said. “They start it every time I go back there, and I can’t stop it. I don’t know how. That’s why I went away…”

“But if you said you were sorry for the way you acted—”

“Sorry for what? Yeah, I’m sorry that every time I go back there they start needling me until I blow up and then they blow up right back! I’m sorry Momma’s sick, I’m sorry Dad’s all upset. I’m sorry Bobby’s dead.” Eddy frowned, and after a second, he asked, “You killed him…?”

June began to cry, silently, eyes streaming.

“Oh, hey, I’m…look, I didn’t mean…” By his hips his hands closed and opened and closed with the motion Kid recognized as the one that had preceded Copperhead’s fury.

“You could take us away…!” Her crying burst full. What Kid thought she said through it was “…from this horrible place!” But with her sobs she was as difficult to understand as some Jackson black. Finally she clamped her mouth, rubbed her eyes, sniffed. “I just wish someone would…take me away!”

“Why doesn’t Dad go?”

“He doesn’t think Mother will. And…I don’t even think he wants to.”

“You take them.”

“I’m just a girl,” June said. “I can’t do anything. I can’t do anything at all!” She rubbed her forehead on the heels of her hands.

Eddy’s hands turned over on his knees. “They wouldn’t go before?” Eddy said. “I couldn’t make them go!”

June lifted her face from her palms. “What are you doing here?” she demanded, softly. “Oh, Eddy, please come home! What are you doing in a place like this? This is just…here…awful!”

“What?”

“I mean,” she said, “what do you do here?”

“Mm,” Eddy shrugged, “we don’t do too much. We all just live here, the scorpions. You know? We’re all together. Here. That’s all.”

“You don’t,” she began tentatively, “rob people on the street, and beat up people and take their money, and things like that…do you?”

“Naw,” Eddy said, indignant. “Naw, we don’t do things like that. Why do you think we do things like that?”

“That’s what people say,” June said. “Sometimes in the newspaper, it says things like that.”

“The newspaper says a lot of things that aren’t true, you know? You know that. Besides, now the Kid’s a friend of the guy who runs the paper, he’s having a party for the Kid, and we’re all going up there. So the paper will probably do a little better by us, huh?”—this last to Kid.