Текст книги "Dhalgren"

Автор книги: Samuel R. Delany

Соавторы: Samuel R. Delany
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Текущая страница: 56 (всего у книги 60 страниц)

Woke up this morning in the dark loft. Heard a handful of cars before I rolled to the window and pulled back the shade. Sunlight opened like a fan across the blanket. I climbed down the ladder, pole, dressed, and went outside. The air was chill enough to see breath. The sky, lake blue, was fluffed with clouds to the south; the north was clear as water. I walked to the end of the block. The pavement was dark near the edge from pre-dawn rain. I stepped over a puddle. At the bus stop—was it eight o’clock yet?—stood a man in a quilted jacket carrying a black enamel lunch box; two women with fur collars; a man in a grey hat with a paper under his arm; one woman in red shoes with big, boxy heels. Across the street stood a longhaired kid in an army jacket, thumb out for the uphill traffic. He grinned at me, trying for my attention. I thought it was because I’d left one boot off, but he wanted me to look at something in the sky without attracting the other people at the stop. I looked up between the trolley wires. White clouds hung behind the downtown buildings, windows like a broken honey comb running with brass dawn-light. Perhaps twenty-five degrees of an arc, air-brushed on the sky, were the pink, the green, the purple of a rainbow. I looked back at the kid on the corner, but a seventy-five Buick came glistening to a stop for him and he was getting oh God oh Jesus, please oh please I can’t I please don’t let it

“Is he dead?”

Her head shook in a way that meant she didn’t know. Her hands twisted silver cloth at her hips: scarlet bled down from one; yellow snaked across her belly from the other. “In the burning,” she said very quickly. “In the fire…all your poems, the new ones; they burned…!” Her lips kept touching and parting, sorting more words, none of which fit. “Everything, all of them…I couldn’t…”

“Unnn…” Something went right into my stomach without using gut or throat for entrance.

I said, “Unnn…”

She let go her skirt.

“That’s…good I guess,” was all I could say. “I didn’t like them. So it’s good they’re…gone.”

“You should have kept them in your notebook! I was wrong! You should…” She shook her head. “Oh, I’m so sorry!”

I started to cough.

“Look,” she said, “I know half of them by heart anyway. You could reconstruct—”

“No,” I said.

“—and Everett Forest made that…”

“No. It’s good they’re gone.”

This morning Filament brought around a woman who I first thought was Italian and who became Black Widow this evening. Overheard her in a discussion in the back yard just now—one of the few here that has even veered near any politics outside the city: “It’s not that men and women are identical; it’s just that they are so near identical in all but the political abuses and privileges that are lavished on the one and visited on the other that to talk of ‘innate’ differences as significant, even to childbirth, is to hold up the color of the hair, the strength of a limb, a predilection for history over mathematics or vice versa, as a pre-determining factor in who shall be treated how, with no appeal; while to ignore those abuses and privileges is to ignore oppression, exploitation, even genocide, even while these are shaping conscience, consciousness, and rage.” I was impressed. But I have heard similar from Nightmare, Dragon Lady, Madame Brown, Tak, D-t, Bunny, even Tarzan. Is Bellona, then, that unbelievable field where awarenesses of such an order are the only real strength? That they can occur here is what makes possible the idea of leaving for another city.

“Kid,” she said, “what about Paul…? Up on the Second City Bank building. Were you…? Oh, please try to remember!” Then she started as though she’d seen something (behind me? above me? were my lights still on? I don’t remember!), and turned. And ran, blazing gold a moment before shadow took her and I ran after, into the brush, feet crashing in leaves and ash. Her bright hem whipped back till she became some darker color. (Thinking: Who is in control of her? Who, less than fifty yards off, is following through the undergrowth, twisting the knobs, pushing the switches that change her from scarlet to ultramarine?) My bare foot passed from concrete to grass. The night billowed and sagged. Did habit guide us through the maze of mists? I saw the quivering fires.

The brass dish, big across as a car tire, had been dragged twenty feet over the ashy grass. I felt very high. Thought swayed through my mind, shattered, sizzled like water on coals. Something in the smoke—? I raised my arm.

Brass leaves, shells, claws—from the ornamented wrist band, over-long blades curved up around my hand. In the dish, small blue flames hung quivering over the red. Firelight dripped down the blades.

I took another step, flexing just the scarred fingertips.

Something tickled my shoulder.

I whirled, crouching. The leaf rolled down my vest, fluttered against the chains, brushed the worn place at my knee, spun on the ground. Gasping, I looked up the leaning trunk. Above, shadow coiled in the bole of some major branch, struck away by lightning.

The air was still. But suddenly dead leaves I could not see thundered above, loud as jets. Holding my mouth wide as I could, I leaned forward. The side of my foot pressed a root. Thigh, belly, chest, cheek lay up against the bark. I breathed deep for the woody smell and pushed my body into the trunk. With my bladed hand I stroked the bark till I felt the trunk move. Sweat rolled under my vest. Chains bit my belly; glass bits pressed about me; bark gnawed my cheek. Above, in the roaring, I heard a crack; not the sound wood makes broken against the grain, but when it splits longways. And there was a smell, stronger than the smoke: vegetative, spicy, and fetid.

Another crack: but that was gun or backfire, louder than leaves and across the park. I pushed back from the trunk, blinking away the water in my eyes. Something fell, rocked on the grass among the roots; and something else—shards of bark, twelve or twenty inches across. Bark split in front of me, sagging out a few inches. What was behind it, I could see by the light from the dish, was red; and moist; and moved. Something crashed down through the branches, but caught in them. I heard more wood split, and something like a moan. “Lanya!” I shouted loud as I could. “Lanya!” Leaves swelled to a roar again.

I took another step back—a sudden pain along my calf. I whirled, staggering. My bare heel had scraped the high, raised rim of hot metal. I danced away from spilled coals; rocking, the edge had scraped halfway to my knee. There were more gunshots. I began to run.

Very far ahead was a working nightlight. (Thinking: There’s going to be a riot! With Fenster shot, the blacks are going to be out all over Jackson and there’s going to be a debacle from Cumberland Park too…) I tried to remember which way the park exit was.

About a third of the nest says “must of,” distinct and clear. They think it, too. They aren’t saying “must’ve,” or must a’,” either. I notice it specifically in D-t, Filament, Raven, Spider, Angel, Cathedral, Devastation, Priest. So: they are going through a different word to word process than the rest of us (Tarzan, for instance, who says “must’a’”)—I don’t think we feel any verb in that at all, while the people who say “must of” do feel something prepositional, or at least genitive. A word hits my ears and inside my head a sensory recall forms—a memory of an object, dim and out of focus, the recollection of a sound, a smell, or even a kinesthetic expectation. The recalls are unclear—there is always margin for correction. As word arrives after word, the recalls join and correct each other, grow brighter, clearer, become precise: a…huge…pink…mouse! What do I mean when I say a word means something? Probably the neuro/chemical process by which one word sounded against the ear generates one inner recall. Human speech has so little variance to it, so little creativity: I sit on the steps and scan an hour’s conversation around me (my own included) and find once two words in new juxtaposition. Every couple of days such a juxtaposition will evoke something particularly apt about what the speaker (usually Lady of Spain or D-t; seldom me) is talking about. But when it happens, everyone notices:

“Yeah, yeah! That’s right!” and laughter.

“I like that!” and someone grins.

“Yeah, that’s pretty good.”

In college I would scan and find one such language node in ten hours of speech, sometimes in two or three days. Though, there, people were much more ready to approve the hackneyed, the cliché, the inept and imprecise.

Is that why I write here?

Is that why I don’t write here much?

In the middle of this, Lanya says: “Guess who I had dinner with last night?”

Me: “Who?”

She: “Madame Brown took me to the Richards’.”

Me: “Have a good time?” I admit, I am surprised.

She: “It was…educational. Like your party. I think they’re people I’d rather see on my territory than on theirs. Madame Brown feels the opposite. Which probably means I won’t see much of them.”

Me: “What did you think of June?”

She: “I liked her. She was the only one I could really talk to…the hallway down stairs still stinks; weird going past it in the elevator and knowing what it was. I told her all about the House. She was fascinated. A few times Arthur and Mary overheard us and were scandalized. But not many.” She rubs the lion’s back (where bright metal scars the brown patina), looks out the window. “I think she’s going to find George, soon. When she does, we all better watch out.”

Me: “Why? What’ll happen?”

She smiled: “Who knows? The sky may crack, and giant lightning run the noon’s black nylon; and the oddest portents yet infect the ceiling of the skull.” She was mocking with misquotation what I’d given her to read that morning. Her turning it into something inflated like that made me uncomfortable.

She realized it and laid three fingers on my arm. But her touch was light as a leaf; I quivered. “You’d prefer to be hit than tickled, wouldn’t you.” She firmed her grip.

“Yeah,” I said. “Usually.”

She watched me, green eyes dark as gun metal in the crowded room. Almost everyone was asleep. We went into the front.

The sky reaches in through screen doors and un-curtained windows and wipes color off the couches, tables, pictures, posters we’ve hung.

Outside the streets are quiet as disaster areas after evacuation, more claustrophobic than inside, rank as our den is with heat and sleepy shiftings.

People think of us as energetic, active, violent. At any time, though, a third of us are asleep and half have not been out of the nest for two, three, four days (it is seldom noisy here; as seldom silent); we nestle in the wordweb that spins, phatically, on and on, sifting our meaning and meanings, insights and emotions, thin as what drifts the gritty sky.

In all the trees around the leaves were loud as jets.

I thought of turning on my lights, but I didn’t. Instead, I got off the path—stumbled, nearly twisted my ankle, the one I’d scraped. I climbed up some rocks where I couldn’t see a thing; so I figured no one could see me. I sat there, wedged between stones, eyes half closed, trying to be still.

I wondered if they were waiting for me. If I did get out of the park, it would be my luck to stumble out the Cumberland exit, where the burning was heaviest. I ran my hand around the orchid’s wristband.

Light through the leaves startled me. I kneeled forward, sure it was going to be bright shields.

It was a bunch of people with flashlights. When they passed—I pressed myself back against the rock, and one light swept right over me, for a moment directly in my eyes beyond the branches—it was pretty easy to see that they were mostly white; and they had rifles. Two of them were very angry. Then one among them turned back and shouted: “Muriel!” (It could have been a woman calling.) The dog barked, barked again, and rushed through a wandering beam.

I closed my mouth.

And my eyes.

For a long time. A very long time. Perhaps I even fell asleep. When I opened them, my neck was stiff; so was one leg.

The sky was hazy with dawn. It was very quiet.

I got up, arms and knees sore as hell, climbed over the rocks and kept on down the other side till I came out of the trees at the edge of the clearing.

The cinderblocks on the near side of the fireplace had been pushed in.

Smoke dribbled into the air. Ashes greyed the grass.

There was no one there.

I walked to the furnace, between cans and package wrappers. On the bench was an overturned garbage carton. With my boot-toe, I scraped at some cinders. Half a dozen coals turned up as eyes which blinked, simplified, and clapped up.

“Lanya?”

They squatted to the furnace, simulatable in every break on those fenestrated, rusty fill-ins. Only for a distance in civet furrow, here hid awfully just a million savants at the pot. An open egret hung around a perch—still she could stay here any night. The honey worts and wolfling braces amazingly lined askew in weevils or along a posthole should report.

“Lanya!”

An apple to discover? Still they should have saved around what or fixed her. Except in the underpinned white shell, here are some scabs in purple; every beach but effluvia. And they had bought us up to mix here so few concepts with the lazy drinks, had sat sober or reinstated our personal fixated intensity. Soon they cauterized what you, constancy and exegesis, were found very loose around him that we had each, without Denny explaining, fished to fascinate them, beautifully or lazily. They should have allowed her less than an alligator has an eyelid never pulled her from a quiver; terror still felt less alive.

“Lanya?”

I turned to fixative among the walkings.

Beyond the leaves, the figure moved so that I still couldn’t

The blue envelope, barred along its edge with red and navy, is held to the bottom of the above page with yellow, bubbled Scotch tape. There are two, canceled, eight-cent stamps in the upper, right-hand corner. The postmark is illegible. The Bellona address reads:

     Mrs. Arthur Richards

     The Labry Apartments (#17-E)

     400, 36th Street

     Bellona, U.S.A.

The return address, written in the same hand (both in green ink):

     Ms. Julia Harrington

     7 Lilac Vista

     Los Angeles 6, California

The letter itself has either been removed or lost.

When I came up the stairs, her office door was closed. So I wandered from the study to the kitchen into Lanya’s room and back. Finally I sat on the edge of the desk in the hall, tilted the Newboy volumes from between the statuettes, piled them beside me, and began to flip pages.

Which was funny: After five minutes I still hadn’t read one whole poem, or one complete paragraph from the essays or stories. My eyes could only focus before or behind the page. That part of the brain, directly behind the eye, that refracts the jewelry of words into image, idea, or information, wouldn’t work. (I even wondered a while how much of that was because I’d heard him speak.) The books had generated ghosts of themselves, and I couldn’t read the words for their after-images. I kept picking up different volumes, hefting them, closed, on my palm, putting them down, then hefting my emptied palm again, feeling for the ghost’s weight. My stomach began to hurt because I was concentrating so widely. I put them all back—first I ordered them by the dates on the copyright pages—and walked for a while (remember the fourth day on speed?), returning to the desk, pulling the books out again, leaving—really finding I’d wandered away just as I’d turn around to go back.

What it is around these objects that vibrates so much the objects themselves vanish? A field, cast by the name of a man, who, without my ever having read a complete work of his, the hidden machinery of my consciousness at some point decided was an artist. How comical, sad, exhausting. Why am I a victim of this magic? But for all I recognize out of me, I wonder furiously who would hold Brass Orchids on their hand, hefting for noumenal weight?

“Kid?” Madame Brown’s body and face were sliced by the door. “You’re here. Good.”

“Hello.” I closed The Charterhouse of Ballarat. “You ready for me to come in now?”

She opened the door the rest of the way; I got off the desk.

“Yes, let’s begin. I hope I didn’t keep you waiting…?”

“That’s okay.” I walked into the room.

Coming in to the dull green walls, dark wood up to the waist, a day bed with a green corduroy spread, three big leather chairs, a tall bookshelf, dark green drapes, I had to readjust my spatial model of the house: It was the biggest room on the floor and I’d never been in it.

On the wall was a swing-out display rack, like in poster shops. I walked over, started to open it, glanced at Madame Brown—

“Go ahead.”

–and turned the first leaf, expecting George:

The raddled earth hung above tilted, lunar shale. On the next, a bulky astronaut stared out his half-silvered faceplate. All the pictures—I went through some dozen—were of the moon, or Mars, or the familiar faces of astronauts, necks ringed with helmet clamps—two of a younger, closer-cropped Kamp—or their polished angular equipment (the foil-wrapped module foot under which Kamp’s moon mouse had fled), plastic flags, or pale, cirrus clouds, hind lit by exhaust-light as the rocket rose above its stanchions.

Let Kamp smirk out on our session? No, I turned to a chalky scape, backed by an earth with clouds like a negative thumb-print. Or a saucepan of soured milk a moment before it boils; and went to a chair.

“Comfortable there?” Madame Brown closed the door. “You can lie down on the couch if it’s easier for you to talk that way.”

“No. I’d rather see you.”

She smiled. “Good. And I’d rather see you.” She sat in one of the other chairs at a slight angle to me, a hand on the arm, a hand in her lap. “How do you feel about talking to me?”

“A little nervous,” I said. “I don’t know why: I’ve talked to enough shrinks before. I was thinking, though, it’s all right here because there aren’t any mental hospitals left, so you can’t put me away.”

“Do you feel that the other doctors you talked to—perhaps the doctors you saw before you went into the hospital the first time—put you away?” She said that pretty openly, not with any sarcastic quotes around put you away.

But suddenly I was angry: “You don’t know very much about crazy people, do you?”

“What do you want to tell me about them?”

“Look—I’m very suggestive. Labile…like they say. I incorporate things into my…reality model very quickly. Maybe too quickly. Which is what makes me crazy. But when you tell us we’re sick, or treat us like we’re sick, it becomes part of…me. Then I am.” And I wanted to cry, at once, surprisingly, and a lot.

“What’s the matter?”

I wanted to say: I hate you.

“I don’t…don’t think you think at all!” Then I cried. It really did surprise me. I couldn’t move my hands. But I lowered my head to stop what hurt in the back of my neck. Water trickled the side of my nose. Thinking: Christ, that was fast! and sniffing when the silence got on my nerves.

“Did you like the hospital where you were?”

“Like it…?” I raised my head. “You’re the one who said to me…” Another tear rolled. I felt cold. “…no, you said about learning to love the people at hand? Well there were a lot of very hurt people there, who it was very hard to learn to love, very expensive—emotionally. But I guess I did.”

“Why are you crying?”

“Because I don’t believe in magic.” I sniffed again; this time something salty the size of a clam slid back out of my nasal cavity and I swallowed it. “You’re a magic person, sitting there. You’re sitting there because you think you can help me.”

“Do you need help?”

I was angry again. But it was deep and bubbled down below things. “I don’t know. I really don’t know. But that doesn’t have anything to do with the fact that that’s what you believe.”

“You’re angry at me.”

I took a deep breath. “Not…really.” The bubbles, one after the other, broke. I absorbed the fumes that raged.

My stomach was very tight.

“It’s all right if you are. You may have good reason.”

“Why should…?” and stopped because I could think of about ten. I said: “You’re smug. You’re not sympathetic. You think you understand. And you don’t…”

“I don’t understand yet; and I don’t know whether I’ll be able to. As of now, you haven’t given me any reason to be sympathetic. If I’m smug, well…I’d rather I weren’t, but I can feel some reserve in myself about getting too close to you just yet; which may be what smugness is.”

“I don’t think you can understand.” I lugged both hands together in my lap and pushed them against one another. They felt numb. So did my feet.

“What do you feel like now?”

“Like not much of anything.”

“Does it make you want to cry again?”

I took another breath. “No. I don’t…” I put my head back. “I think I lost it, whatever was coming out…”

“Are you a very emotional person? Do you cry often?”

“That’s the first crying I’ve done in…three years, maybe four…a long time.”

She raised her eyebrow. After a moment, she said: “Then you’re probably under a great deal of pressure. What kind of pressure are you under?”

“I think I’m going crazy. And I don’t want to. I don’t like it. I like life, I like living. I like what’s going on around me, all of it to watch, and most of it to do. There’re all sorts of people and situations around I really enjoy. And I’m at a place where I don’t have to worry about all sorts of others I don’t. I don’t want to go nuts again. Not now.”

After a moment she smiled: “I’ve occasionally given therapy to some rather successful business executives; lots of money, happy families, some even without ulcers—who’ve said practically the same thing in the same way. We do know each other outside the office, and I must admit, from what I’ve observed myself, and from what Lanya’s told me, I find it a little ironic; I mean that you express it in such similar words.”

“I said you wouldn’t understand. I said I was afraid—and I am angry—that I don’t think you can.”

“Tell me the symptoms of your going crazy.”

“I forget things. I don’t know who I am…I haven’t been able to remember my name for months. I wake up, sometimes, terrified, everything in a blood-colored fog, which begins to clear while my heart beats so loud it hurts my chest. I’ve lost days, days and days out of my life. I see things, sometimes, like people with their eyes…” And I felt my back snarl with fear. Sweat rolled down the underside of one arm. “People with…” I closed my mouth, so astonished I couldn’t say it that I couldn’t say it. I backtracked in my mind, looking for something I could loop with words. “Can I…?” I had to back up further; I was looking at the multiple loops of optic chain she wore around her neck. “Can I tell you about a…dream?”

“Please go right ahead.”

“I dreamed that…well, I was in a woods, on the side of a mountain. The moon was shining—one moon. And this woman, a nice looking woman, a few years older than me, she came walking up over the rocks and through the leaves. She was naked. And we balled, right there in the leaves. Like that. When we were finished, she got up and ran off through the bush—”

“—you completed making love in the dream?”

“Yes. After we came, she got up and ran off through the woods to this cave, and told me to go inside it.”

“And you obeyed her?”

“Yes. I remember that very clearly. I remember I stepped on some leaves once, in some water; I jumped over a crack in the cave floor. In a niche in one wall of the cave there was a brass thing, big around as my two arms, filled with glowing coals and little flames. I climbed this rock edge, and I found…” I touched the chain across my chest. “I dreamed I found these there.” I hooked the chain with my thumb and watched Madame Brown. “I mean it must have been a dream; because of what happened later.” She looked more intense; a fourth line crossed her forehead. “I put them on. But when I came out, she was gone. I looked for her in the woods, until I came to a moonlit road—just before, I remember, I stepped in a mud puddle. I was still trying to figure out where she’d gone when I saw her, there, in a meadow, on the other side of the road. So I started toward her, across the grass. And she turned into a tree. For some reason, in the dream, that terrified me. So I ran away, back down the road. Until I got to a highway. The rest of it is a little vague. I remember for part of it I was riding in a truck with this man with a sort of scarred-up face. Like bad pock-marks or acne. And this funny conversation about…Or maybe it wasn’t really a conversation. One or the other of us just mentioned something in some connection that I don’t remember…”

“That’s all?” Her fingertips came together.

“That’s all,” I said, while her hands parted, touched her knees. “But it was so…strange!”

“What made it particularly strange?”

“Well, everything happened so…clearly. And when this woman changed, I was so scared. I mean I was incredibly frightened. I ran away, I mean…”

Madame Brown crossed her legs.

Across her calf, glazed with nylon, a scratch curved down to her ankle.

She asked: “What is it?”

I tried to open my mouth, felt my face twitch.

She waited a long time.

I tried a couple more times.

My fingers were knotted together. Separating them was hard as prying lip from lip.

But I tried.

And sank backward in myself as if my eye-sockets were caves and the balls were rocketing toward the back of my skull, in rebound from the effort.

“Tell me about Lanya.”

“Denny—” the cave wasn’t where I lived, though—“and me, we like her a lot.”

She mmmed. “Tell me about Denny.”

“Lanya and me like him…a lot.”

My hands came apart. I was able to move again on the chair. I looked at her leg. But it was only terror. I took a couple of breaths, smiled.

“What are you feeling?”

“Scared.”

“That I disapprove of the relation between the three of you?”

“Huh?” That surprised me. “Why should I think you disapprove? Lanya’s never said anything about you not liking it. A couple of times she’s said it confused you, but like a joke. God damn, you don’t disapprove of the Richards, why should you disapprove of us?”

“Well, for one thing, the Richards are a normal, healthy family. They aren’t coming to me for help; and they don’t think they’re going crazy.”

“More power to me!” She’d catapulted me into a completely different part of my head and I’d dropped hard. I got myself together to see where I was—it had been a jolt. But this anger was very easy to make words: “You disapprove of people who come to you for help?”

“Now, that’s not what I—”

“Jesus Christ! Hey, what do you—” I leaned forward—“what do you think of the Kid? Sometimes I get the impression that’s all anybody around here ever does—though I’m sure I’m just flattering myself. Tell me.”

She joined fingertips, raised eyebrows; suddenly she asked: “What do you think of the Richards, Kid?”

“I don’t know…” Then I said: “She’s frightening. I mean she spends all that energy keeping up a delusional system that just won’t hold. But that’s sort of heroic, too. Him? He’s despicable. He paid for all the props; the system is set up to his specifications, and all to his profit.” Then I asked: “Do they even know you’re black?”

“Yes. Of course they do.”

“I’m surprised.”

“I suspect a lot of things would surprise you, even about the Richards.”

“Do they know you’re gay?”

Madame Brown moved in the chair and Mmmed again, negatively. “Let me see,” she said after a moment: “Black, lesbian, I’m also very middle class. And Mary and Arthur are my friends. But I wish sometimes I didn’t think you were so right. It would make my life much easier. But then, I’ve never particularly wanted an easy life, really.” She sighed. “I do find this in myself, Kid: When I occasionally get exasperated with Arthur or Mary, especially when they’re going on about you, I wonder to myself—quite honestly—what they would say if I told them some of the things you’ve actually done—just for the upset it would cause. At that point, I tell myself it’s because I ‘approve’ of you and don’t ‘approve’ of them.”

Lanya surprises me once more: The whole nest out in the yard, she asks, “Hey, how come Kid is the head scorpion in this nest? I mean Nightmare was before, and then Kid. I would have thought you’d have a black running things.”

“Yeah,” Tarzan says. “Me too.” While everybody else looks like they’d never thought anything of the kind. But I have; so I waited.

Finally Glass laughs: “Well, of course Nightmare was sharing it with Dragon Lady. But I think more or less everybody has got it in their head that after one of these runs or other, the shit is gonna come down. Hard. When it does, you gonna see some niggers fade in the night like nobody’s business. But the chief scorpion, maybe, ain’t gonna be able to fade quite so fast. So that if this dumb-ass white motherfucker—” Glass put his arm around my shoulder and gave me a big grin. “—wants to stick around here and play superman, ain’t no nigger with any sense gonna stand in his way. I mean the guy in charge is the one who gets zapped. At least, that’s the way it works anyplace else…” Glass squints up at the sky.

Copperhead seemed to think it was funnier than anybody else.

Fireball said: “He’s white? I didn’t know that. He’s darker than I am!”

“Man,” Glass said, “the Kid is an Indian.”

“Now I didn’t know he was white,” Fireball repeated. “He’s crazy as a nigger.”

Tarzan gave me a smile that dribbled strychnine.

“An’ he sure likes his little blond brothers and sisters.” Fireball (whose spade accent, more than any one else’s, comes on and off for the occasion) pointed to Lanya and Denny. (Denny laughed.) “The Kid is really something else, man. Really something.” (Lanya was pensive.)

If you want to upset them, you could tell them some things about June, about Bobby and…what’s his name? Eddie.”

“Of course, you side with the youngsters—”

“No,” I said. “I’m nearly thirty years old. And I wouldn’t swear to which side of it I’m on, from what some people tell me. I’m not taking sides; I’m just pointing out some upsetting areas in their life that are a little closer to home.”