Dhalgren

“I don’t keep him from seeing you.”

“I know,” she said. “I’m sorry. I’m go

She dropped her arms and went around him to go up the stairs.

Lanya, in jeans and blouse, stood in the doorway. The two girls looked at one another. Then the one in the blue sweatshirt sighed. Lanya glanced after her, then looked back at Kid.

Kid frowned.

Jack the Ripper, by the fire now, looked over, his smile between sympathy and complicity, and shook his head.

Kid walked up the steps. “You just get up?”

“Only seconds, I’m sure, after you did. I heard you talking to her when we came out on the porch; so I decided I’d come out and listen. She seems like a nice kid.”

He shrugged. “De

“Nope.”

Kid sat on the step below her. They both had to move legs when Devastation came down to wander over to the fire, to stand with his hands in his back pockets.

“He got up with me,” Lanya explained. “We were going to come out and surprise you while you were wandering around looking preoccupied. I told him we couldn’t do it if you were anywhere near a pencil and paper. But then, when we got to the porch, we saw you talking to her.”

“Where’s De

“He saw her, covered his mouth with both hands—I thought he was going to blurt out something, God knows what—ducked behind me, and ran. I’m not sure if he’s locked himself in the bathroom, or just split. No, the bathroom doesn’t have a lock, does it? She didn’t see him—he made enough noise!” She rested her chin on her fist. “The poor girl. I feel sorry for her.”

“Mean little bastard, isn’t he?”

“You think so?”

“He is to her. He is to you. To me. I can take it.” Kid shrugged. “What are you going to do when he decides one day when you come to see him he doesn’t want to see you?”

“Take it, I suppose.” She sighed. “He really should have talked to her. How old is he?”

“Fifteen. And she’s seventeen.”

“You should tell him to talk to her. If they were really all that close.”

“Shit,” Kid said. “I never argue with people I screw. She seems to think there isn’t anything to say. I don’t blame her for wishing there was.”

“Maybe.” Lanya sounded doubtful. “I sort of took a liking to her, just listening. She lives in the girls’ house? Now that is a strange bunch. I’ve been there a few times.”

“Dykes?”

“No more than here. Do you think she’d be interested in helping with the school?”

“You’re just going to get yourself in trouble.”

Lanya laughed. “It’s so nice to know there’re one or two things about which I am more worldly than you are! I think it’s fine to have an occasional knock-down, drag-out…discussion with people you’re screwing. I never quarrel with the people the people I’m screwing are screwing. Or were screwing. I make a point of being on the best terms possible. Even if you have a knack for it, sometimes it takes a lot of work. But the trouble you avoid—” she turned down her mouth and tapped her knee three times—“is not to be believed!” Then she tugged his hair. “Let’s go look for him.”

But De

Back in the yard the fire had been completed. Lanya volunteered to go with Priest, Thruppence and Angel to the liquor store. When they came back, Kid had taken the door out of the back room and set it up on some boxes for a table in the yard. Others had begun food.

“Come on. I want to go back up in the loft.”

“Sure.” She squeezed his hand and followed.

When they had lain together, when they had talked quietly a while, when they had begun to make love, he was surprised to find her somewhat listless and distracted; small movements she made silently angered him. Till she said, “Hey, what’s the matter? You seem so far away. Come on back,” which returned the whole thing to the realm of the humorous.

After that it was very good.

After coming, while he lay there and held her, the smell woke him. His waking woke her. He lifted his head at the sound. A third plate, in raised hands, was pushed over the loft edge. Then De

There were lots of frankfurters on the plates.

And vegetable hash.

“Where’d you get off to?”

De

Kid licked it off. “You’re go

“Sure.” She rubbed her eyes and pulled out of Kid’s arms. “Where…oh, hey. Thanks!” to the bite of De

Remembering not a moment of grace, but a moment laced with it, I am thrown back on a present where only the intensity of the senses can justify this warmth, the look of shadow on her shoulder, light on his hip, a reflection on the blackened glass, light up from below. That is not as good. What I have fallen from, perfected by memory into something only possible, I do not want to falsify anymore than that. Now there are only the eyes and the hands to fill out.

They drank some of the brandy he’d had her get for Tak. (“You won’t believe my dress, either of you. I know you’ve seen it, Kid. You still won’t believe it.”) She said she was going to go home soon, but fell asleep. Somebody yelling in the kitchen once woke them hours later and they all made love again in the dark.

For the second time, from an urge that crossed experimentation with duty, he sucked De

“Yeah,” De

So he closed his eyes and racked it up to foibles. Still, it was the best time he remembered. He drifted toward sleep, only sad he remembered so little, and closed his eyes.

When the window had gone indigo, Kid opened them. Lanya was kneeling up. “I’m going now,” she whispered. So they crawled over De

“There should be boxes around,” Kid said. “We just don’t have any pot.”

“That’s all right. Come on.”

In the kitchen, Thirteen and Smokey with three black scorpions, Raven, Thruppence, and D-t, up the night, sat talking. Kid was surprised when, from the banter, he realized Lanya knew all their names: Even Thruppence’s. (He’d had to ask that one several times: “Thruppence, man. Thruppence. That’s English for three cents.”) And “D-t,” he found out, stood not for Delirium tremens but Double-time. A bucket was the only thing really clean so Lanya filled it to make boiled coffee.

“You go

“Sure. Bring it to a boil three times, then throw in a glass of cold water. The egg white will make it settle. Then you just pour it off into a pot and keep it hot,” for which purpose Smokey volunteered to clean the kettle.

“You just don’t let the Spider know you used up two of his good eggs to make that mess.”

“Shit,” Raven said, “everybody else use ’em.”

Kid and Lanya drank theirs black while the rest went through a confusion of powdered milk (someone remembered the box under the table), cup rinsing, and sugar.

“Now that’s nice coffee,” Raven (his top-knot, now, undone) admitted, gazing into the cup on the table. “It’s just as clear! I gotta remember me that.” He pouted heavy lips at the steam and shook his head. The hairy beachball swung side to side.

“Yeah,” Thirteen said back over his shoulder. “You go

Cathedral and Filament had come in sleepily from the other room. Nine people stood drinking coffee in a space that was crowded with four.