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Between gnarled knuckles and gnawed nails he looked at the smooth undersides of fingers thi
The combination was terrifying.
“Hey,” somebody said, “what you staring at?” grabbed the top of the mirror from the back, and yanked it down. It swiveled between its posts. The lower rim struck Kid’s shins.
Kid reeled.
“You pickin’ your pimples?” Copperhead gri
Astonished and angry, Kid lunged forward and brought his free fist down against the mirror’s near edge. The far rim tore from Copperhead’s loose fingers, scraped his chest, cracked his chin. The mirror drifted down again.
Roaring and clutching his jaw, Copperhead danced between the clothing racks. “Now what the fuck did you…Arggg! Oh, my fuckin’ tongue, I think I bit…Ahhhh!…” The third time he looked up, he just blinked.
Kid gulped air.
A triangle of glass slipped from the frame, broke again on the rug. Beyond shatter lines he saw himself, barefoot and beardless, gasping and rubbing the chains on his chest. At his hip the orchid flickered. Some feet behind, De
Kid turned in quarter-light.
“I got some…” De
“Huh?”
“’Cause you lost your shoe.” De
Kid said: “You pickin’ your pimples now?” Then he laughed. Started, it raced at hysteria. He was frightened.
A laugh, he thought, is a lot of clotted barkings. He laughed and leaned against a table covered with shirts, and motioned De
“You only wear the right one, huh?” De
Kid picked up two, three—they were all right ones. He laughed harder, and De
“What are you guys making all the God-damn noise for?” Nightmare called across the aisle. “Will you cut the God-damn hollering?”
Kid choked back both his laughter and his fear, picked out a moccasin boot of soft, rough-out black.
De
De
Kid laughed again. De
“I guess we scared them all upstairs,” one girl said to Nightmare.
“You bastards over here are making enough noise to scare anybody,” Nightmare said.
“Hey,” Kid said, “if I broke any of your teeth, I’m sorry. But don’t fuck with me anymore, hear?”
Copperhead mumbled and rubbed his scantily bearded jaw.
“All this shit going down, and the two of you got into it?” Nightmare rubbed his shoulder.
“Nightmare,” De
“Yeah?”
A heavy scorpion behind Nightmare said: “Somebody was shootin’ down here too.”
“You goin’ around savin’ peoples’ lives?” Nightmare said. “You got guts in you after all. Told you he was a good kid.”
Kid flexed his toes. The boot gave like canvas. Fear kept lancing, looking for focus, found one: He felt vastly embarrassed. A bee-bee gun, he thought, from some scared woman I ate di
De
Nightmare pushed Copperhead’s head to the side to examine it. “I wouldn’t mess with the Kid if I was you. First time I saw him, I didn’t like him either. But I said: If I ain’t go
Copperhead pulled away from Nightmare’s inspection.
“There was something about him,” Nightmare went on. “You nasty, Copperhead, but you dumb. I’m tellin’ you this ’cause I’m smarter than you and I thought you’d like to know how to act. The Kid’s smarter than you too.”
Behind teeth clamped and filled with tongue, Kid thought: Does he want him to kill me, huh?
“He just grabbed the gun,” De
“I’m go
“You carry it,” Nightmare said. “I ain’t go
“There’s still people up there with guns?” Copperhead took his hand from his jaw to gesture at the dark mezzanine.
“Kid scared ’em away,” the black called D-t said.
Nightmare turned and bellowed so loud his knees and elbows bent: “All right, motherfuckers! Here we are! You wa
The unshaved, pimpled scorpion hefted the lion up on his belly, turned his chin away to avoid the shade, and followed.
“You up there, you better get us now! Come on, you mangy motherfuckers, you chicken-shit assholes! You ain’t go
This, Kid thought walking between a tall, thin black (named Spider) and the heavy one (called Cathedral: Kid slowed to let Copperhead get a step ahead of them so he could see him), is insane. Laughter: only a fragment blurted. Two of the others looked at him. Gri
“You up there, you better shoot!” Nightmare bawled at the mezzanine railing. “You don’t, you some real scroungy cocksuckers!” He unscrewed his face and said to Priest, who walked next to him:
“I heard you over on the other side, hollering. What were you doing?”
“There was somebody in there. I don’t think he had a gun. I chased him up the—”
“You better do it now, you son of a bitch!” Nightmare turned back to the guy beside him. “Yeah?…Do it, you do it, cocksucker, if you’re go
“—chased him up the stairs.”
Lady of Spain had kicked in the board bottom of a display case. Copperhead looked up, with consternation and surprise, and put his boot through the glass case in front of him, first the top shelf, then the bottom, then once on the other end; glass and watches scattered the rug. Gasping, he loped to the next. Crash! and crash! and crash-crash-crash! All their eyes, Kid noted (trying to recall what it meant), are red glass.
Another thin black frowned toward Kid, his lids narrowing over blank crimson balls. He looked about De
“You real chicken-shit up there, you know!”
CRASH-CRASH!
“You ain’t worth shit, Goddamn it!”
CRASH!
“Eat my shit…!” Nightmare looked around and smiled. “Up your ass!…Fuck you!”
Lady of Spain pushed a whole case over; it smashed into the one behind it. She gri