Dhalgren (27 page)

"You're here!" Lanya seized his arm. "You look so bright and shiny and polished. I didn't recognize you!"

He pulled her against his shoulder. "This is Ernest Newboy," glad of the interruption. "This is my friend Lanya."

She looked surprised. "Kidd told me you helped him up at Mr Calkins'." She and Newboy shook hands across Kidd's chest.

"I'm staying there. But I was let out for the evening."

"I was there for days but I don't think I ever got a night off."

Newboy laughed. "There is that to it, yes. And where do you stay now?"

"We live in the park. You mustn't look astonished. Lots of people do. It's practically as posh an address as Roger's, today."

"Really? Do the two of you live there together?"

"We live in a little part all by ourselves. We visit people. When we're hungry. Nobody's come to visit us yet. But it's better that way."

Newboy laughed again.

Kidd watched the poet smile at her banter.

"I wouldn't trust myself to hunt you out of your hidden spot. But you must certainly come and see me, some day during the afternoon." Then to Kidd: "And you can bring your poems."

"Sure." Kidd watched Lanya be delightedly silent. "When?"

"The next time Roger decides it's Tuesday, why don't you both come around? I promise you won't have the same problem again."

He nodded vigorously. "All right."

Mr Newboy smiled hugely. "Then I'll expect you." He nodded, still smiling, turned, and walked away.

"Close your mouth." Lanya squinted about. "Oh, I guess it's okay. I don't see any flies." Then she squeezed his hand.

In the cage, neon flickered. Music rasped from a speaker.

"Oh, quick, let's go!"

He came with her, once glanced back: the back of Newboy's blue serge was wedged on both sides with leather, but he could not tell if the poet was talking or just standing.

"What have you been doing all day?" he asked on the cool street.

She shrugged closer. "Hanging out with Milly. I ate a lot of breakfast. Jommy is cooking this week so I really had more than I wanted. In the morning I advised John on a work project. Kibitzed on somebody's Chinese Checker game. After lunch I took off and played my harmonica. Then I came back for dinner. Jommy is a love, but dull. How was your job?"

"Strange." He pulled her close. (She brushed his big knuckles with her small ones, pensive, bending, removed.) "Yeah, they're weird. Hey, Newboy asked us up there, huh?" She rubbed her head against his shoulder and could have been laughing.

Her arm moved under his hand. "Do you want this back now?"

"Oh. Yeah. Thanks," and took the orchid, stopping to fix the longest blade in his belt loop. Then they walked again.

He did not demand a name. What does this confidence mean? Long in her ease and reticence, released from an effort to demand and pursue, there is an illusion of center. Already, presounded, I am armed with portents of a disaster in the consciousness, the failure to suspect, to inspect. Is she free here, or concerned with a complex intimacy dense to me? Or I excuse myself from her, lacking appellation. Some mesh, flush, terminal turned here through the larynx's trumpet. The articulate fear slips, while we try to measure, but come away with only the perpetual angle of distortion, the frequency of an amazed defraction.

In the half—or rather four-fifths dark, the lions looked wet. He brushed his right knuckles against the stone flank in passing: It was exactly as warm as Lanya's wrist, brushing his knuckles on the left.

How does she find her way? he wondered, but thirty steps on realized he had anticipated the last dark turn himself.

Distant firelight filigreed through near leaves. Lanya pushed them aside and said, "Hi!"

A shirtless man, holding a shovel, stood knee deep in a… half-dug grave?

Another man in a denim shirt, unbuttoned, stood on the lip. A young woman in a scrape, her chin balanced on both fists, sat on a log, watching.

"Are you still at this?" Lanya asked. "You were
this
far along when I was here this morning."

"I wish you'd let me dig," the young woman said.

"Sure," the bare-chested man with the shovel said. He shook blond hair from his shoulders. "Just as soon as we get it going."

The woman dropped her fists between her patched knees. Her hair was very long. In the distant light it was hard to see where its color was between bronze and black.

"I wonder where John gets the ideas for these projects," the man in the denim shirt on the lip said. "I was just as happy running off to squat in the bushes."

The guy with the shovel made a face. "I guess he's worried about pollution. I mean,
look
at all this!" The shovel blade swung.

But other than the dozen people standing or sitting over near the flaming cinderblocks, Kidd could see nothing outside the bubble of night the flames defined.

"Can you actually see what you're doing there?" Lanya asked.

"Enough to dig a God-damn latrine!" The shovel chunked into earth again.

"You know," the one on the lip said, "I could be in Hawaii right now. I really could. I had a chance to go, but I decided I'd come here instead. Isn't that too fucking much?"

As though she'd heard this too many times, the woman on the log sighed, palmed her knees, stood up, and walked off.

"Well, I really could." He frowned after her, then back at the pile of dirt. "Did your old lady really want to dig?"

"Naw." Another shovelful landed. "I don't think so."

Slap-slap, slap-slap, slap-slap went a rolled
Times
against a thigh. John walked up, cutting out more light.

Chunk-shush, chunk-shush
went the shovel.

"They're digging it awfully close to where everybody stays," Kidd said to Lanya, "for a latrine."

"Don't tell me," Lanya said. "Tell them."

"I've been wondering about that too," John said, and stilled his paper. "You think we're digging it too close, huh?"

"Shit," the one who wanted to be in Hawaii said and glared at Kidd.

"Look," Kidd said, "you do it your way," then walked off.

And immediately tripped over the foot of somebody's sleeping bag. Recovering himself, he just missed another's head. Millimeters beyond the circle of darkness were chifferobes, bureaus, easy-chairs, daybeds, waiting to be moved from here, to there, to someplace else… He blinked in the fireplace's heat and put his hands in his back pockets. Standing just behind three others, he watched the curly-headed boy (Jommy?) wrestle a barrel—"Isn't this great, man? Oh, wow! Look at this. When we found this, I just didn't believe it—It's flour. Real flour. And it's still good. Oh, hey thanks, Kidd. Yeah, push it this… yeah, this way."—around the end of the picnic table.

"Here?" Kidd asked, and grunted. The barrel weighed two hundred pounds at least.

"Yeah."

Others stepped back a little more.

Both grunting now, Kidd and Jommy got it in place.

"You know," Jommy said, standing back, smiling, and wiping his forehead, "if you're hungry around here, man, you should ask for something to eat."

Kidd tried to figure out what that referred to when Milly and Lanya walked up. "It's awfully nice to see you here again and helping out," Milly said, passing between Kidd and the fire. The hot places just above his eyes cooled in her shadow. She passed on.

Lanya was laughing.

"Why'd we come here?" he asked.

"I just wanted to talk to Milly for a moment. All done." She took his hand. They started walking through the blanket rolls and sleeping bags. "We'll go sleep back at my spot, where we were last night."

"Yeah," he said. "Your blankets still there?"

"If nobody moved them."

"Hawaii," somebody said ten feet off. "I don't know why I don't take off for there right now."

Lanya said: "John asked me if you wanted to take charge of the new commune latrine work project."

"Jesus—!"

"He thinks you have leadership qualities—"

"And a feeling for the job," he finished. "I've got enough work to do." Blinking away after-images of firelight, he saw that the blond-haired guy with no shirt now, stood on the lip, shoveling dirt back in the hole.

He moved with her into dark.

Once more he wondered how she found her way. Yet once more, in the dark, he stopped first when he realized they had arrived.

"What are you doing?"

"I hung the blanket up over a limb. I'm pulling it down."

"You can see?"

"No." Leaves roared. Falling, the blanket brushed his face. They spread it together. "Pull down on your left… no, your right corner."

Grass and twigs gave under him as he lurched to the center on his knees. They collided, warm. "You know the Richards?" Artichokes…

He frowned.

She lay down with him, opened her fist on his stomach.
"Um?"

"They're stark raving twits."

"Really?"

"Well, they're stark. They're pretty twitty too. They haven't started raving, but that's just a matter of time. Why do I have this job, anyway?"

She shrugged against him. "I thought, when you took it, you were one of those people who has to have one."

He humphed. "Tak took one look at me and decided I'd never worked in my life. I
don't
need the money, do I?"

She put her hand between his legs. He let his legs fall open and put his own hand on top, thick fingers pressing between her thin ones. "I haven't needed any yet." She squeezed.

He grunted. "You wouldn't. I mean, people like you. You get invitations places, right?" He looked up. "He's a systems engineer, she's a… housewife, I guess. She reads poetry. And she cooks with wine. People like that, you know, it's funny. But I can't imagine them screwing. I guess they have to, though. They've got kids."

She pulled her hand away, and leaned up on his chest. "And people like us." Her voice puffed against his chin. "Screwing is the easiest thing to imagine us doing, right? But you
can't
think of us with kids, can you?" She giggled, and put her mouth on his, put her tongue in his mouth. Then she stiffened and squeaked,
"Owww."

He laughed. "Let me take this thing off before I stab somebody!" He raised his hips and pulled his orchid from the belt loops, pulled his belt out.

They held each other, in long lines of heat and cool. Once, on his back, naked, under her, while his face rubbed her neck, and he clutched her rocking buttocks, he opened his eyes: light came through the jungle of their hair. She halted, raising. He bent back his head.

Beyond the trees, striated monsters swayed.

The scorpions passed, luminous, on the path below.

More trees cut out their lights, and more, and more.

He looked up at her and saw, across the top of her breasts, the imprint of his chain, before darkness. Then, like a two-petaled flower, opened too early at false, fugitive dawn, they closed, giggling, and the giggling became long, heavy breaths as she began to move again. After she came, he pulled the corner of the blanket over them.

"You know, he tried to cheat me out of my money."

"Mmm."
She snuggled.

"Mr Richards. He told Madame Brown he'd pay me five dollars an hour. Then he just gave me five for the whole afternoon. You know?" He turned.

When he pushed against her leg she said, "For God's sakes, you're still all hard…" and sucked her teeth.

"He did. Of course they fed me. Maybe he'll settle up tomorrow."

But she took his hand and moved it down him; again meshed, their fingers closed on him and she made him rub, and left him rubbing. She put her head down on his hip, and licked and nipped his knuckles, the shriveled scrotal flesh. He beat, till her hair on his thighs was nearly lost in some vegetative horror, then grunted, "Okay…" His fist hit her face three times, before he let her take him. She slid her arms behind his hip, put her legs around his, while he panted and let go of her hair.

Anxiety lost outlines beneath glittering fatigue. Once he did something like wake to her back against his stomach. He reached beneath her arm to hold her breast, the nipple a button on his palm. She took his thumb as gently, he realized, as she possibly could, in case he slept.

So he slept.

There was grey light after a while. On his back, he watched leaves appear in it. Suddenly he sat, in one motion, to his knees. He said:

"I want to be a poet. I want to be a great, famous, wonderful poet."

As he looked toward the hem of darkness beneath grey streakings, something caught in his stomach. His arms began to shake; he was nauseated; and his head throbbed; and throbbed; and throbbed. He opened his mouth and breathed roughly through it. He shook his head, felt his face shaking, and dragged his breath back in. "Wow," he said. The pain receded, and let him smile. "I don't think they…
make
poets as great as I want to be!" That only came out as a hoarse whisper. Finally he rose, naked, to a squat and looked back at her.

He thought she would have slept through: her head was propped on her hand. She watched him.

He whispered. "Go back to sleep."

She pulled the blanket across her arm and put her head down.

He turned for his shirt, took the pen. He opened the notebook to what he had written at the bar. Cross-legged on the blanket's edge, he readied to recopy. The paper was blued with halfdawn. While he contemplated the first word, distractions of book jackets, printed praise, receptions by people who ranged from Richards to Newboys—The twig under his ankle brought him back. He shook his head again, shifted his ankle, again bent to recast fair copy. His eyes dropped in a well of
Time
magazine covers, ("Poet Refuses Pulitzer Prize"), the audience's faces as he stood on Minor Latham's stage where he had consented to give a rare reading. He hauled himself back before the fantasies' intensity hit pain. Then he laughed, because he had still not re-copied a word. He sat a while more, unable to write for thinking, amused at his lack of control, but bored with its obvious lesson.

Self-laughter did not stop the fantasies.

But neither could the fantasies stop self-laughter.