Dhalgren

  "No!" Dollar lurched in Glass' grip. Glass' vinyl vest swung back from the crossed scar poking over his belt, then flapped to again.

  "You say you're sorry." Kid held the back of Dollar's neck with one hand and put the orchid points against the lower right quadrant of his belly; the dirty flesh jerked. Dollar's chains jingled. "Say you're sorry, or I'll take your appendix out, right here, and we'll spread everything you got all over the God-damn ground-"

  "Nooooo!" Dollar whined and twisted. "Please don't kill me!"

  Talk had stopped again.

  "Say you're sorry."

  "I'm sorry!"

  "Okay." Kid let his bladed hand drop and looked at the Ripper. "He's said he's sorry. Okay?"

  "He didn't have to say it." The Ripper looked sullenly around the circle. "I already got my licks in."

  But other guests had begun to talk once more.

  "Okay," Kid said. "Then let's break it up. WILL YOU PLEASE BREAK IT UP GOD-DAMN IT!" He pushed Dollar forward by the head. Glass came with them.

  Nightmare said: "Come on you guys, will you? You heard the Kid. Break it up! Get out of here! Go on!"

  Somebody asked: "What happened?"

  Somebody else: "What did he do?"

  "I didn't see. Did you see what happened? Is it all right now?"

  "No, I just came in. I guess it's all right. . . ?"

  "Hey, Kid?"

  That was Bill.

  "When you got a chance, can I ..." but somebody moved between them.

  Which was just as well.

  Kid held Dollar by one arm. Glass held him by the other. Kid dug a finger into Dollar's armpit. "Didn't I tell you if something went wrong, you come to me?"

  "I didn't get no chance," Dollar said. "I told 'em, I told 'em just like you said, if they messed with me, I was gonna tell the Kid? Just like you said." He looked over his smudged shoulder at Glass. "Were you there? Did you hear me tell 'em?"

  Glass's head-shake showed more frustration than anything else.

  "But I didn't get no chance to, you know? Them colored guys was all over me."

  Frank leaned over the rail and called down. "Hey, Kid, is everything all-?"

  Glass glanced up. Kid didn't

  "I just don't think them guys-" Dollar's voice took on an echo beneath the bridge-"you know?-like me too much. I guess, you know, some people just don't like other people."

  "I don't exactly love you," Kid said.

  "I just wish-" Dollar rolled his head forward and spoke down at his chest-"somebody would tell me what to do."

  "You don't have it too easy, huh?" Glass said, and didn't even bother to glance at Kid.

  "Oh, man!" Dollar said. "Oh, man, I just don't know, sometimes, you know? I'm half sick all the Goddamn time. I can hardly eat the fucking food. Because of my stomach, you know? I can't drink nothin' except wine, or I get sick. I don't get drunk, I just get sick. Unless it's wine. I mean half them God-damn niggers are-" he looked at Glass-"the colored guys . . ." Then he looked at Kid. "Well, that's what they say, I mean-"

  "Say your thing," Glass said.

  ". . . half the God-damn colored guys are drunk already. That's why they jumped me, I bet. They wouldn't of jumped me if they wasn't drunk. They're nice guys; even the girls. I was just kiddin' anyway . . . I wasn't drunk. I didn't drink nothing here except some wine, 'cause I didn't want to get sick at your party. I just wish somebody would tell me what to do."

  They came from beneath the bridge.

  The path bent like a boomerang into the rocks.

  "You know? If somebody would just tell me . . ."

  "Why don't you just keep from bothering people who're gonna beat you up?" Glass said.

  "Now that's what I mean," Dollar said. "Everybody's always tellin' me what not to do. Keep away from this. Get out of that. Don't bother the other. If somebody would just tell me what I should do, I'd work my fuckin' ass off."

  "Right now you would," Glass said, " 'cause somebody just scared the shit out of you."

  "I would," Dollar said. "I really would."

  "You just come on with me," Glass said. "All right?"

  By the edge of a black railing above, among small trees, Copperhead, Spitt, and the girl in maroon Levis waited.

  Dollar blinked at Kid and rubbed at the flaking corner of his mouth with his thumb. He looked sad and scared.

  "We ain't gonna hurt you," Glass said. "We already got our licks in, too. All we gonna do is make sure you don't get in no more trouble here at the Kid's party."

  Kid, doubting, let go of Dollar's arm.

  "I just wish somebody would tell me what I was supposed to do."

  "Go on with them," Kid said.

  Glass and Dollar climbed up the slope among the brush and saplings.

  Kid turned before Dollar reached the top.

  I want, among all these people who are here because of me, one to come up and tap me on the shoulder and ask me if I'm all right, if I feel okay, say come on, let's go get a drink, after that you must need one. And, God-damn it, I don't want to go all hangdog looking for some person who'll oblige. I just want it to happen. Some-tunes the pressure of vision against the retina or sound against the drum exhausts. Where have I lost myself, where have I laid the foundation of this duct? Walking in these gardens, it is as if the nervous surface of the mind registering the passage of tune itself has, by its exercise, been rubbed and inflamed.

  Did I write . . . ?

  Finding the thought was like looking down again at a pattern of tiles he'd been walking over for hours.

  Did I... ?

  The sublimest moment I remember (Kid pondered) was when I sat naked under that tree with the notebook and the pen, putting down one word then another, then another, and listening to the ways they tied, while the sky greyed out of night Oh, please, whatever I lose, don't let me lose that one-

  "Hey, Kid!"

  "Huh?"

  But the Ripper had only called in passing, with a wave, and was walking on.

  Kid nodded hesitantly back. Then he frowned. And for the life of him could not remember what he'd just been thinking.

  Spider, alone in October, sat on the ground, half in darkness, beside the floodlight, swabbing at his belly with a bunched piece of newsprint. It kept flapping, bloody, in front of the glaring glass.

  "Are you all right?" Kid asked.

  "Huh? Oh, yeah." Spider mashed the paper smaller. "You just scratched me, you know. It didn't bleed too much."

  "I'm really sorry," Kid said. "You feel okay? I didn't see you."

  Spider nodded. "I know." He crumpled the paper some more. "I'm a fuckin' mess-" he pulled his boot heels under him and got to his feet-"but it was just a scratch." He held back his vest and brushed himself with the paper, pressed it to himself. "It was only really bleeding bad at one end."

  Kid looked up at the black youngster's lowered face. "You sure it's okay now?"

  "I guess so. Now. Man, you scared me to death, though I was expecting to see my guts come out all over the grass."

  "I'm sorry, man. Lemme see?"

  Spider stared down.

  His stomach looked like someone had smeared the teak flesh with paint. From one end of the cut, red threaded down toward his belt. The left side of his pants lap was black maroon. He blotted his belly again.

  "You're bleeding like a pig!" Kid said.

  "It's just a cut." Spider touched his stained stomach with his fingertips (He bites his nails, too, Kid thought), felt the taut skin over the top of his navel, pulled the waist of his pants out to unstick it. "It don't hurt none."

  "Maybe they have something inside, some bandages or something. Come on-"

  "It's stopping," Spider said. "It's gonna stop soon."

  He turned the stained paper around, examining it.

  Blood is a living tissue, Kid thought, remembering his high school biology teacher's glasses knocked from the edge of the marble lab table, one lens smithereening over the mustard tiles. "Look, come on. Let's go get a drink, then.
After that, you look like you could use it."

  "Yeah." Spider smiled. "Yeah, come on. A drink. I'd like that." He grinned, balled the paper, flung it noisily into the brush. "Uhnnn . . ." he said after three steps. "Maybe I should go inside and wash it or something."

  "I'm sorry, man," Kid said. "I'm really sorry."

  "I know," Spider said. "You didn't do it on purpose."

  When they were halfway across July, Ernestine Throckmorton looked up and said, "Oh! I mean my ... God!"

  In the following confusion, Denny and Lanya (purple, purple blooming blue) found him while Ernestine and several others tried to get Spider to go inside.

  "I wanna . . . drink," Spider said, hesitantly.

  Ernestine asked Spider: "Do you feel all right? Are you okay?"

  "He wants a drink," Kid said.

  Spider looked confused; then the confusion sank in belligerent, silent embarrassment; he let himself be taken away.

  "That could get infected," Everett Forest said for the third tune.

  Madame Brown stood across the crowd, folding and

  turning her hands. The leash swung and sagged and

  jingled.

  Kid kept touching Lanya's shoulder; they stood watching. (The second tune she touched his hand in return, but not the first, third, or fourth.)

  Muriel, panting, pushed to her forepaws; then lowered her muzzle again to the ground.

  Denny, in the crowding, had pushed against Kid several times, settling a hand on his shoulder, arm, or back. Kid contemplated some response-

  "Kid!"

  Kid didn't look around at first.

  "If youVe a few minutes to spare . ". . Kid, do you think I could have you for a few minutes?"

  When he did turn (Lanya and Denny turned too), Bill was smiling at him over the surrounding heads, and holding a box that looked much like the controls to Lanya's dress up near his ear. "Can I have you for a few minutes . . . Kid?"

  This time when Kid touched Lanya and Denny, they came with him. (Thinking: They would have come anyway; both, working within entirely different mechanics, have developed curiosities that would not let them miss it!) "Sure," Kid said. "What you want?"

  "Thank you." Bill grinned, and adjusted the mike clipped to the pocket in his black turtleneck pullover. "This is on now. We might as well leave it going, so you can get used to ignoring it. But let's get out of all this noise. Why don't we go behind- Say, what happened to that tall black kid? He's part of your nest?"

  "I cut him," Kid said.

  Bill tried not to look surprised.

  "It was an accident," Kid said to the mike. He un-snapped the ornate blades from his wrist.

  "You're-" Bill noticed Lanya and Denny but didn't say any thing to them-"very strict with your own, aren't you?"

  Kid decided: I'm being told, not asked, and said nothing.

  "Where we going?" Denny whispered, and looked warily again at Bill's cassette recorder.

  "To hell, if we're invited nicely," Kid said. "Shut up and come on. He's not going to make you say anything. Just me."

  "Let's . . ." Bill looked like he was trying to, politely, think of a way to get rid of Lanya and Denny.

  Lanya looked as though she were about to, politely, excuse herself and take Denny with her.

  "They should come," Kid said. "They're my friends."

  "Of course. I just wanted to ask you a few questions-let's go this way." They passed through another garden. "This is really a little confused, what with Roger's not being here. I guess he's . . . gone for the night. He wanted to get a chance to talk to you, I know that; he told me so. He wanted to find out a few things he thought the readers of the Times might be interested in . . . we were actually going to interview you together. I help Roger with a lot of his newspaper work. Draft a lot of his articles. As you might imagine, he's a busy man."

  "You write his articles?" Lanya asked. "I always wondered where he got the time to do all he does."

  "I don't actually write anything he signs. And . . . I research a lot for him." Bill turned up a small path Kid remembered having walked over twice during the evening but couldn't remember where it led. "Roger wanted to ask you-well, we both did . . . just a few things. I was going to wait for him. But I get the impression that people might start leaving soon. And if Roger didn't get back in time, I know he'd still want me to use the opportunity."

  Before two spotlights, fixed low to trees at opposite corners of the clearing, white wicker furniture cast black coils and curlicues on the grass.

  "Nobody seems to have found their way here yet Why don't we have a seat and get started?"

  Denny sat beside Kid on the edge of the bench, leaning forward on his knees to look over at Bill, who took the paddle-backed lounge. Lanya stood a little ways away, leaning on a tree trunk, once brushing at her autumn-colored skirts to strike in them silver rain,

  "I want to ask you a few questions about your gang -your nest. And then something about your work . . . your poetry. All right?"

  Kid shrugged. He was excited and uncomfortable; but the two states, vivid as feelings, seemed to cancel any physical sign of either.

  He looked at Lanya.

  She had folded her arms and was listening rather like someone who had just passed by and stopped.

  Denny was looking at the control box, wanting to play with it, but also wondering if this were the time.

  Lanya hovered among various blues.

  Bill ran his hand from the mike along the wire to the recorder, turned a knob, and looked up again. "Tell me first, how do you feel having your book published? It's your first book, right?"

  "Yeah. It's my first. I like it, all the commotion. I think it's stupid, but it's . . . fun. There aren't very many mistakes in it ... I mean the ones the people who put the type together made."

  "Well, that's very good. You feel, then, the poems are as you wrote them; that you can take full responsibility for them?"

  "Yeah." Kid wondered why the muffled accusation did not make him more uncomfortable. Possibly because he'd been through it already in silence.

  "I mean," Bill went on, "I remember Ernest Newboy telling us, one evening, about how hard you worked on the galleys. He was very struck by it. Did Mr Newboy help you much with the poems themselves? I mean, would you say he was an influence on your work?"

  "No." He does think, Kid thought, that I'm seventeen! He laughed, and the familiarity of the deception put him even more at ease. He moved back on the lounge and let his knees fall apart. So far it wasn't so bad.

  Something moved at the corner of Kid's eye. Bill looked up too.

  Revelation stood behind them with Milly, who he had not seen since they had surprised her in the bushes.

  Denny went, "Shhhhh," took his finger from his lips and pointed to the recorder.

  "Can you tell me-"

  Kid looked back.

  Bill coughed. "-tell me something about the scorpions, about the way you live, and why you live that way?"

  "What do you want to know?"

  "Do you like it?"

  "Sure."

  "Do you feel that this way of life offers you some protection, or makes it easier for you to survive in Bellona? I guess it's a pretty dangerous and unknown place, now."

  Kid shook his head. "No . . . it isn't that dangerous, for us. And I'm getting to know it pretty well."

  "You all live together, in a sort of commune-nest, as you call it. Tell me, do you know the commune of young people that used to live in the park?"

  Kidd nodded. "Yeah. Sure."

  "Did you get along well with each other?"

  "Pretty much."

  "But they're fairly peaceful; while your group believes in violence, is that right?"

  "Well, violence-" Kid grinned-"that isn't something you believe in. That's something that happens. But I guess it happens more around us than around them."

  "Someone told me that, for a while, you were a member of this other commune; but apparently you preferred the scorpions."
>
  "Yeah." Kid pressed his lips and nodded. ". . . well, no, actually. I was never a member of the other commune. I hung around; they fed me. But they never made me a part of it. The scorpions, now, soon as I got with them, they took me right in, made me a part. That's probably why I like it better. We had a couple of kids hanging around our place who should probably have ended up with the park people; but we fed them too. Then they drifted on. That's what you have to do."

  Bill nodded, his own lips pursed. "There's been talk that some of the things you guys indulge in get pretty rough. People have been killed . . . or so one story goes."

  "People have been hurt," Kid said. "One guy was killed. But he wasn't a scorpion."

  "But the scorpions killed him . . .?" Kid turned up his hands. "What am I supposed to say now?" He grinned again.

  Behind Bill, a dozen others had gathered. Another cough, behind Kid, made him realize another dozen had come up to listen.

  Bill's eyes came back to Kid. "Do you think, objectively, that the way you're living is ... a good way?"

  "I like it." Kid felt his jaw with his wide fingertips and heard five-hour stubble rasp. "But that's subjective. Objectively? It depends on what you think of the way the rest of the world is living."

  "What do you think of it?"

  "Well, look at it," Kid said. Then he coughed, which caused some general laughter, defining the audience he had not looked at yet as thirty, or even forty: scorpions and other guests.

  Nightmare stepped into the clearing, said, "Say, what's everybody-?" then got quiet and went to sit on the grass next to Dragon Lady. .

  "How would you describe life in the nest?"

  "Fucking crowded!"

  "Oh, man!" D-t slapped Tarzan's palm. "He said fucking crowded!"

  "Shut up, you two," Raven said.

  "And with all the crowding, and all the violence, you still manage to work-to write."

  "When I get a chance."

  Lanya laughed at that. She was the palest orange, flaking to palest pink and purple. Denny held the box between his knees; his arms were folded.

  "A lot of people have commented on the, how shall I say, colorfulness of your poems, their vivid descriptive quality. Is there any connection between the violence and that?"

  "Probably. But I don't know what it is."