Dhalgren

“Well,” Lanya said, “it still sounds a little strange. Okay, it’s not my thing. But what do you think, say, about the guy I was telling you about, who did that to my friend?”

“I think,” George said, “I know a little bit more about him than you do. And I think if he’d maybe come talked to somebody like me first, we could have maybe worked somethin’ out where he didn’t have to go and get himself and some little girl in trouble. About him or the girl, I don’t think nothing; I don’t know them. But I think what you told me about is very,” and George dropped his chin, “very, very sad.”

Lanya took a breath. “I’m just still wondering about the girl. I mean the one you were with…Do you even know her name?”

“Well, after I was finished, we did not exactly introduce ourselves.” Suddenly George scowled. “Look, you try and understand this. I don’t give a shit about the bitch! I really don’t. And suppose I did? Suppose, afterward, I’d done said, ‘Oh, hey baby, that was so fine, let’s you and me get married and live all happily ever after so we can just take care of one another every night!’ What she go

“About,” Lanya said, “what you just did.” She pressed her lips, considering. Then she said, “She’s looking for you, George. I saw her once, come up to ask my old man after you. She wants to find you again.”

George’s laugh launched high as Madame Brown’s and, with his rocking head, tumbled down into its easy bass. “Yeah…! Yeah, she looking for me! She just circling and circling around me, getting in closer and closer—” George’s forefinger circled on the air, spiraled in—“just circling and circling, closer and closer, like the moon around the sun!”

Something (though Kidd was not sure what it was) struck Lanya as fu

“Well,” George said, “maybe it usually don’t, but this is Bellona, and you ain’t got no way to tell what’s go

“On the head,” Lanya said. “You should be guessing in a fair.”

“Well, I’m old enough to be your daddy—”

“You’re old enough to be June’s daddy too.” Lanya said. “Do you have any children?”

“I got five of them I know about,” George said, “and one of them off a white woman, too, young lady. Green-eyed, mustard-headed—” George screwed his face—“ugly little motherfucker! Well, maybe he ain’t so ugly. And I got one of them as old now as her momma was when I first stuck it to her, too.” George cocked his head the other way. “And that ain’t nowhere near as old as the little girl we was talking about. None of the five of them is here in Bellona. But I tell you, if I was to see that oldest girl of mine, standing on the corner, looking at me like that little white girl was looking—I don’t care if she my kin or not, I’d do the same fuckin’ thing. Now you believe it!”

“George,” Lanya said, “you are incorrigible!”

“Well, sometimes you look pretty fu

“Yes,” Lanya said, “I’d noticed. George, people are scared of women doing anything to get what they want, sex or anything else. Christ, you men are presumptuous bastards. If I was telling you how blacks really are the way you’re telling me about women, you’d organize a sit-in!”

“Well,” George said, “I just didn’t know if you went to the movies that much so’s you’d know.”

After a moment, Lanya asked: “What do you think’s go

George’s eyebrows, darker crescents on an iron-black face (the tarnished light erased all browns and reds), rose. “Well, she go

“I think,” Lanya said, “you’ve got your images mixed again.” She came away from the wall and ambled a few steps across the stone. “You’re doing just what the movies are doing—making it into something terrible and frightening.”

“That’s the problem—like I say: You see I like it like the movies. But when we get together again, we just go

“Not quite.” Lanya gri

“Same as before, I guess. Blam! and excuse me, ma’am, and then be on my way. And then it starts all over…” Once more that oblique expression came to George’s face. “You say your old man…is she all right? I mean is she okay and all? I don’t want no thin’ to happen to her ’fore we meet up again.”

“Yeah,” Lanya said. “She…I guess so.”

George nodded. “Yeah…somebody told me back in the bar you done got yourself a new boyfriend. That’s nice.”

Where, Kidd wondered, was Milly?

“Things get around.” Lanya smiled, and Kidd had an image of her suddenly snatching her harmonica to fling up some fusillade of notes to hide her embarrassment. Only she didn’t look embarrassed. (He remembered wanting to overhear Lanya and Milly discussing him; the prospect of a discussion of him with George left him vaguely uncomfortable.) Fingers hooked over her pocket rim, Lanya was toying with her harmonica. “Yeah. I don’t know if I’d say I got him; how about getting?”

“Well, you sure get yourself some wi

“What did you think of Phil, George?” The subject, almost as uncomfortably, had changed.

“I thought he was crazy!” George said. “I thought he was a stuckup, up-tight, tight-assed asshole—Smart? Oh, he was smart as a whip. But I’m still glad to see you shut of him.” George paused; his brows wrinkled. “Though I guess maybe you ain’t…?”

“I don’t know.” Lanya’s lowered eyes suddenly rose. “But that’s easier to say if you got a new one, isn’t it?”

“Well—” George’s laugh came out surprising and immense—“I guess it is. Say, when you go

“Well, thanks,” Lanya said. “Maybe we’ll come down…if we don’t see you in the bar, first.”

“Gotta check your new old man out,” George said. “First, see, I thought maybe you’d get involved with one of them faggot fellas up at Teddy’s. God damn, sometimes I think there ain’t nobody in the city no more ain’t a faggot but me.”