Dhalgren

  But Kidd was crossing the worn grass, among sleeping bags, rolled or airing; knapsacks and pack-braces scattered the clearing, lay piled around the picnic bench, or leaned beneath the trees.

  She wasn't among the dozen spectators to the Chinese Checker game between the squat, dark-haired man who sat crosslegged behind the board and rocked with his elbows on his knees, and a tall, freckled woman with crew-cut hair, who wore much Southwestern silver under and over her denim shirt; her belt was silver and turquoise. As her long freckled fingers, heavy with blue-stoned rings, moved and moved back over the marbles, Kidd saw her nails were bitten badly as his own.

  A girl who looked at first like nothing but a mop squatted (two threadbare knees poked up either side) to paw through the cardboard carton of colored string- what was left of John's "loom" project.

  Another girl (her hair was the color of a car he recalled, whose owner said he'd just had it painted "Mediterranean Gold") sat on a dented brass drum, lacing a high-topped shoe-the kind with hooks in place of the last dozen eyes. Her pants leg was rolled up above a very red knee. A bearded boy stood beside her, talking and grinning, occasionally pushing his own bushy hair back from an earlobe pierced with a gold cross. His sneaker, on top of the drum, was wedged against her thigh. The drum itself held clay, cracked away from the side and shot with crevices-that was Milly's "pottery" project.

  Milly herself, or Lanya, were not there . ..

  Harmonica notes tangled with the smoky leaves above. He looked up. More music-but not from above. Just far away. And from which-?

  He looked around the clearing again, charged off into the brush . . . which dumped him on another park path, sloping up toward silver notes. He started after them, wondering at how little of the park he'd actually explored.

  The music moved away.

  Notes bent like blues, and slid, chromatically, from mode to austere mode. It was as if her major influences, (he grinned) were late Sonny Terry and early Stockhausen.

  At the top of the rise, he saw them at the bottom: Milly's bare legs below her denim shorts, Lanya's jeans; Milly's heavy red hair shook as she gazed around; Lanya's, scrap bronze, bent to her harp. Shoulder to shoulder, the two girls disappeared around a turn.

  He started to run after them, anticipated dialogue filling his mouth: Hey, I just about got the Richards into their new apartment! All the big stuff is up, so Mrs Richards gave me the rest of the day off. Tomorrow morning, I take up the rugs and we put the furniture .. .

  Two steps, and erupting through it was the sudden and inexplicable urge to-follow, to observe, to overhear! What he wanted to do, he realized, was watch Lanya when she was not watching him.

  The path curved right.

  To the right, he pushed into the brush-making a lot of noise. Well, if they discovered him, he was discovered. He was still curious.

  The music halted; were they talking?

  That path had sloped down; the ground he pushed over sloped up. Was he going to come out on them after all?

  A sharp drop stopped him.

  Beyond rocks and a few trees grown crookedly on the slope, the path lay sixteen feet below. Which meant, he figured, they'd come around the bend right there-and see him.

  They came around the bend-and didn't.

  One hand above, he hooked a slender branch; bare foot flat, sandal on its toe, he waited, a smile ready behind his face to push forward when they noticed him. Would he get some snatch of conversation (possibly even about him) before they looked up and saw?

  ". . . perfectly terrified," Milly said in a tone neither flip nor rhetorical.

  "There isn't anything to be terrified of," Lanya said. "I'd think, with the rumors of rape and violation going around, you'd be fascinated to meet the man himself and get a look."

  "Oh, the rumors are fascinating enough," Milly said, "in a perfectly horrible way-"

  "And the man is rather nice-" Lanya turned her harmonica, examining it as she walked-"despite the rumors. Don't you find reality more fascinating than a flicker of half truths and anxiety-distorted projections?"

  The two young women passed beneath. He imagined his reflection sliding across her harmonica; her eyes starting up-

  "In principle," Milly said. "In practice, when the rumors get to a certain point, I'm willing to let the whole business alone and go off exploring in the opposite direction. Suppose the reality turns out to be worse than the rumors?"

  "Oh, really . . . !" Lanya raised her harmonica, played. "You're going to chicken out, again, aren't you?" She played another snatch.

  "Someday," Milly said, pensively, "I wish you'd play a piece from one end to the other. The snatches are awfully nice."

  (Kidd looked after them.)

  Lanya looked at her harmonica. "I guess that's because I never play for anybody else."

  "You should," Milly said. "I mean, everybody hears it anyway. Sometimes, all those little pieces, pretty as they are, practically give me a headache because they aren't connected to each other."

  "I'll try," Lanya said. "And you should not try to avoid the subject. Are you going to chicken out?"

  "Look," Milly said, "going to meet George Harrison was your idea. I just said it might be interesting to talk to him."

  "But I've already met George," Lanya said. "I've talked to him lots of times, I told you. Going to meet him was your idea; I just said I'd make introductions."

  "Oh, you know everyone," Milly said; her hair shook. And then, ". . ." which was maddeningly beyond ear shot. Lanya's answer was another burst of music, that went on as they disappeared around the next turn; after a few wrong notes, the tune halted.

  Kidd crab-walked down the dirt, stepped from behind the last bush, and looked where the girls had been.

  The mention of George Harrison left a funny feel. A subterranean frown battled the inner smile still behind his face. His cheek twitched, his lips moved to shape vowels from no languages he spoke. Again he was tempted to run after them. But his curiosity had shifted a thumb's width toward anxiety.

  The path, apparently, wound back the other way.

  Perhaps he could cut through again, overtake them once more-? Speculation became resolution. He crossed into the bushes, again climbing; he scrambled over a stretch of rock, pushed forward through leaves. Ten feet away, fifteen-a long note from Lanya's harmonica, a flicker of Milly's bright hair! He crouched, cheek and one palm against bark. His bare boot, over a root, rocked him unsteadily.

  Through dull leaves, he could just make them out.

  There was another musical sound-not her harmonica, but their two laughters.

  ï "Okay," he heard Lanya say, "we'll do it that way- if you want." "Oh, yes," Milly cried. "Let's!"

  "It's silly." Lanya laughed. "But all right. He's there every afternoon, almost. All right, we'll do it that way, but only because you're my . . ."

  They were further away, so he heard less this time -except their laughter, leaving. What, he wondered, were they going to do what way, that involved George Harrison? Were they going to see him now-? Suddenly he was convinced they were. Their interchange, like schoolgirls planning a prank, upset him. What prank, he wondered, "do two women sanely play on a man who'd just molested a girl only a few years younger than themselves? He remembered the obscene poster. He remembered his glimpse of Harrison at the bar.

  He stood again, took three loping steps through the brush, the worried laugh to stop them with, ready in his throat. (Thinking: Hey, what kind of crazy idea have you two nuts gotten into your-)

  A root caught his sandal toe and spun him out on the concrete. He almost fell. Pushing up from one knee, he turned. And was suddenly confused.

  Which way had they come from?

  Which way had they gone?

  He'd only glimpsed them this time. In both directions the path curved the same way . . . His faulty left-right orientation, always worse under strain-the plague of the ambidextrous, a doctor had once explained-gave way completely. Well, he'd come from that side of the road. He
darted into the other, hoping to catch the path again and head them off.

  The growth-of course-was thicker. The slope here was so steep he had to scrabble with hands as well as feet. Thinking: When was the last time I saw sunlight a golden flutter in bright green? The sky, flickering through, was the color of iron. The leaves, each in a caul of ash, were like grey velvet scraps, or dead mice.

  Pebbles rolled underfoot. No, he thought, they can't be going to see George Harrison now! For all he knew, the conversation had changed subject completely between the first turn and the second.

  And where the hell was the third? Trees cleared to high boulders. He skirted one and, leaning on it, vaulted down a small drop, brushed aside brush-

  Across flat rock (a section had been filled with cement to level it) was a building of black stones, rounded and the size of heads, webbed in white mortar. Above the building's several wings rose a square tower with a crenellated balcony of the same black stone. The building was not large; the tower was not quite three stories. The vaulted windows, paned with pebbled glass, deeply recessed, were so thin he would have had trouble climbing out.

  A waist-high wall of stone went along two sides of a large, informal courtyard in front of the building.

  On the corner, wearing black-framed glasses, work-shoe heels wedged in a deep tenon, elbows on the knees of soiled khaki coveralls, and reading the Times, sat George Harrison.

  Kidd squatted.

  Leaves flicked up the image.

  Knuckles mashed in dirt, Kidd leaned forward.

  Leaves tickled his cheek.

  Kidd was afraid; Kidd was fascinated. Whatever caused both left him clammy-handed.

  George took off his glasses, put them in his shirt pocket, slid from the wall and, work shoes wide and fist-heels up, stretched. Khaki creases fanned from flank to shoulder.

  (Squatting, watching; curiosity and alarm resolved, into a sort of self-righteous, silent mumble: Okay, fun is fun, but what sort of prank were they up to?)

  George's face twisted under a metal sky so low the city's fires had scorched and marred it like an aluminum pot-bottom.

  Beyond a break in the wall (which, Kidd realized only from her gait, had steps below it) Lanya-hair, nose, chin, shoulders-emerged. "Hey, George," she said. "You're back here again this afternoon? City life too much for you?"

  Milly (had she chickened out?) was not with her.

  "Hu'?" the aspiration voiced and the vowel voiceless; George turned as she gained the top step. "Y'com' ba' " (back or by, Kidd wasn't sure) "heah too?" The t was nearly a d, and the final vowel was a strangely breathy one from which the lips made no recovery, but hung heavy and open from teeth Kidd could see, even from here, were large, clean, and yellow. How, Kidd wondered, could this mauled and apocopated music be fixed to a page with roman letters and standard marks of elision? He decided: It can't. "You taking an afternoon stroll, yeah?" George laughed and nodded. "I hear you playing before, and I think: She gonna come by" (or was it "back"?) "here maybe say hello."

  "Hello!" Lanya laughed too, and put her harmonica in her own shirt pocket. "I don't always come by," Lanya said. (She, he realized, had mis-heard gonna, with its almost unstopped g and n's loose as I's, as always.) "I saw you here a couple of days ago, but the last time we said hello was in the bar. Why do you come out here in the park every afternoon?"

  "To look at the sky . . ." George shrugged. "To read the paper."

  (Kidd's ankle stung from squatting. He slid his foot over-twigs crackled. But George and Lanya didn't hear.)

  "Last time I was at the bar-" (Kidd listened to the melodious inflection that catapulted the broad bass into the tenor at / and bar: Irony? yes. But italics, he thought, would brutalize it to mere sarcasm.)-"I didn't even get a chance to say hello. You just running out of there with your friends." George looked up at the sky again. "Can't see nothing in all that mess. Can't see nothing at all."

  "George," Lanya said, leaning back against the wall, finger tips in her jean pockets and tennis shoes crossed, "this is the sort of question you lose friends over, but-" Kidd remembered when she'd used the same phrase with him-"I was curious, so I figured I'd just ask. What did happen with you and that girl there was suppose to be all the pictures of in the papers?"

  "You know-" George paused to stick his tongue way down inside his cheek, and turned half around with his hands in his pockets-"the first time somebody asked me that, I was mad as shit! But you ain't gonna lose you no friends 'cause too many other people done asked me now."

  Lanya said quickly: "I was asking because my old man knows her and he's been-"

  George's face took a strange expression.

  "-been telling me something about her . . . That's all." Lanya's face, after a moment, mirrored it as if in attempt to understand it. (Kidd felt his own face twitch.)

  After a few seconds, George said: "Well, I got me an answer."

  "What is it?"

  In the khaki pockets, George's knuckles became a row of rounded points.

  "Well, now I done raped this little white gal, right? I told the papers, right out, that's what I done." He nodded, like a man agreeing with the obvious-then glanced at Lanya, as though considering the new fact she brought. "Now there's rape and there's rape." George's hands came free. "You walking along one night and some guy jump-" George lunged, crouching-"out and grab you-" (Kidd, in the leaves, pulled back.) Lanya blinked-"and pull you into some alley and tie you up and other than that he don't touch you, but he pull his thing out and Wank! Wank! Wank!-"crouching, Har-rison swung his fist up and down at his groin. (Kidd's jaw and buttocks clamped; Lanya, still leaning back on the wall, hands in her pockets, watched George's mime.)-"and Oh it's so good and Wow-wee that's gooood shit and Ohhhh--!" George stood, threw up his head, then let it fall slowly to the side with the end of the exhalation. His head came back up: "if he get one drop- one-" The fist rose with forefinger toward veiled heaven -"one drop on your handbag . . . that is lying there three feet away-" the fist fell-"in this state, that's rape! Even though his pecker ain't touched you . . . just dribbled on your handbag, like I say, see?" George nodded and considered: "And suppose some little girl who is seventeen years, three hundred and sixty-four days and twenty-three hours and fifty-five minutes old, she come up and say, 'Oh, honey, I want it so bad! Give it to me, give it to me, baby! Oh, please!' " George's long head went back again, wobbling side to side. "And she throw herself on the ground and pull down her panties and rubbing herself all up and down-" in a jogging crouch, he dragged his forearms up and down between his legs, pale nails on black fingers clawing toward the ground- "and moaning Oh, baby, do it to me, do it to me, I want it so bad! and you damn fool enough not to wait five minutes before you say-" George stood, punched the air-"Yeah, baby!" Both hands went slowly back to his pockets. "Well, that's rape too-"

  "Wait a minute, George." Lanya said. "If you're walking home at nine o'clock and somebody behind you grabs you by the throat and bangs your head into a wall and hisses he'll knife you if you scream or don't do what he says- No, wait a minute; listen! And you're pissing in your pants in little squirts while he cuts you once on the arm and twice on the leg just so you see he's serious and then tells you to spread your legs and gives you a black eye when you shake your head, because you're so scared you don't think you can, so you bunch up your skirts, while he's got your ear between the blade and his thumb and he keeps twisting and it's bleeding down your neck already and he tries to pull you open with his hand and pokes and prods you with a half-hard dick and slaps you a few times because you're not doing it right- no, don't stop me; we're talking about rape, now-and when he's got it about a half inch in you, he shoots, and while he's panting and it's dripping down your leg, you finally get a chance to run, and when he lunges after you, he trips and drops the knife, shouting he's gonna kill you now, he's gonna kill you, and for the next four days you can't walk right because of what he did inside you with his fingers, and in court-because they do catch him-a lawyer spends six hours
trying to prove that you gave him some come-hither look or your hem was too high or your tits were too big, but they put him away anyway: only next week, they ask you to change schools because you're not a good influence any more . . . Now while you're telling me all this, don't forget, that's also rape!" Lanya's forefinger speared the air; she leaned back once more.

  "Well," George said, "it is. Yes . . . that ever happen to you?"

  "A friend of mine." Lanya put her hands back in her pockets.

  "Here in Bellona?"

  "There aren't any schools in Bellona you can be asked to change. No, it was before. But you men have a strange idea of the way the world works."

  "Now you," George said, "are trying to make me think about something, right?"

  "You think enough to bounce up and down here like a damn monkey and tell me a lot of bullshit. I asked you what happened. Tell me it's none of my business, if you want. But don't give me that."

  "Well just maybe," George said, "you got a funny idea too if you think this is something I didn't think about." He looked at Lanya; a smile lurked behind his face. "You ask me a question, see, and you don't wanna hear my answer? The whole point, see, is rape is one pot with a lot of different kinds of stew in it. Some of them is tastier than others." George narrowed his eyes: "How you like it?"

  "What?" Lanya asked.

  "You like it rough, with fighting and beating and scratching and crying-" George leaned toward her, looking out of one eye, one hand between them, one fingertip Wagging faster and faster-"and moaning No, no, don't do it, please, don't do it, but crawling back for more between trying to get away and a few yesses slipping out every once in a while between the scratching and the biting?"

  "That's the way you like it?"

  "Yeah!" George stood back. His fist closed. (In the dirt, Kidd's opened.) "You know what I tell my women? 'Hit me! Go on, fight me! I'm gonna take it, now. I'm gonna take it, see. And you see if you can keep me from takin' it.' Then we do it-anywhere. In an alley, in a stairway, on a roof, in a bed . . ." George's brows lowered. "That the way you like it?"