Dhalgren (62 page)

He prodded the folds of his consciousness for sadness: the crystal had deliquesced to chalky powder.

…she look like? he thought, and was too tired to panic. Her name, what was that?

Lanya: and he saw her short hair, her green eyes, and she was not there.

One of the street signs was marred with filth and scratchings; the other was an empty frame. He turned into the alley because of the beats; for seconds he could not figure what had happened—a row of tree trunks on the narrow sidewalk, each in a metal fence, had burned to charred spikes. Wonderingly, Kid started down the street, not wide enough for two cars.

Denny sat on the fender of a lopsided auto, a-straddle the smashed headlight, drumming two fingers on the bent rim. Kid walked toward him, wondering when to speak…

"Hey, how're you!" Denny's surprise became delight. "What you doin' here?" He banged with all his knuckles once and stopped. "What you doin' huh?"

"Just taking a walk. Trying to get my cock sucked. Or something. Only nobody's out."

"Huh?" Denny looked puzzled, and then—to Kid's surprise—embarrassed. He flipped one finger three times on the chrome, then looked up again with his lips tight. "The downtown end of the park has got queers all over it, all day and all night. You know the part with the paths?"

"No."

"Well it does." Denny flipped his finger once more. "If you been walking around all night, you couldn't've been looking very hard."

"I was at this guy's house," Kid explained. "I thought he was gonna do me, but somebody else came over and he kicked me out. What are you doing out this hour of the morning?"

Denny nodded toward one of the unpainted buildings. "I'm staying in there now." Behind dirty window glass, the brass lion leered, pinioned on his brass stalk. The shade was gone. The socket held a broken bulb neck.

On the other side of the street, a white curtain moved in a window almost as dirty. Two black faces pressed together, looked till Kid stared directly. The curtain dropped.

"You want to get your cock sucked? Come on." Denny, with three fingers tucked under the rim, was looking straight down. "I'll blow you."

"Huh?"

When Denny neither moved nor said anything else, Kid started to laugh. "Hey…"He stepped on the sidewalk, hit his thighs in imitation of Denny's drumming, then stepped back into the street. "Are you being funny…?"

Denny looked up. "No."

"Now suppose I took you up on that…" Kid said, trying to make it a joke; it wasn't. So he said: "You want to…?" Things that made the obscure obvious by overturning overturned.

"Yeah." Denny scratched his chest among rattling chains. "Go on, take it out. Right here, motherfucker." He shook his head. "I'll do you right here. You want me to show you I mean it? Right here?"

Kid glanced at the window curtain. "Sure, but those spades, they're staring out the damned window."

Denny let out his held breath. "I just told
you;
you think I give a fuck if
they
know?"

What he'd began as banter was suddenly uncomfortable, because though all the actions were predictable, the feelings were not. "Hey, you know maybe you just better let the whole thing…"

Denny leaned his head and glanced to the side with a concentrated expression—the look, Kid thought, of someone in a game of go trying to decide if a long-contemplated move, now made, was, after all, right.

"We'd have to find someplace," Kid said. "A doorway, or inside or something. I don't want to do it right here." Fifteen? Kid thought. He's out of his head; this kid is a fucking nut.

Denny got down from the headlight and slid most of his fingers in his back pockets. "You come on with me."

Kid caught up to him on the unpainted steps. "Is this Nightmare's place?" He put his hand on Denny's small, warm shoulder.

Denny looked back. "Used to be." His vest, showing rough-out leather, then scuffed tanning, swung against his ribs. "Just about anybody stays there now. Even Thirteen's been crashing there. The way he goes on, you'd think he was gonna make it his new place."

Kid frowned. "What… happened to his old one?"

Denny frowned back. "Well, everybody's moved around since…" He nodded. "The kids in the commune, they all went to the other side of the park. Dragon Lady moved her bunch up this side of Cumberland. And Thirteen couldn't stay in that damn apartment no more… but you was there." Denny's frown questioned Kid's.

"Why…?" Kid asked, because there was no answer he could supply.

"The smell," Denny said, "for one thing," and went up the steps.

Kid followed. "Oh, yeah. That…" which made sense; but not the whole shifting and rearrangement during the robbed duration. The whole tape of reality which he had been following had somehow overturned. It still continued; he still followed. But during some moment when he had blinked, days had elapsed and everything right had shifted left: Everything left was now right. "Hey, the last time you saw me, how long was I with—?"

"Shhh,"
Denny said. "Everybody's asleep." He pushed open the door. "It ain't even six o'clock in the morning, I bet."

And Kid suddenly did not want an answer. He asked instead in a softer voice: "Then what are you doing up?"

"I get up real early some times." Denny grinned back over his shoulder as Kid followed him down the hall. "Sometimes I sleep all day, too. You can do that here… but then I'm up all night."

By the hall baseboard, tight, black hair shocked from the end of a sleeping bag. Beyond a doorway, on a couch, a naked man with red hair all over his tan, freckled back—it was Copperhead—slept with a very blond girl wedged between himself and the couch back. Over his bare ankle, Kid could see her sandal, the neatly rolled cuff of her jeans. Her arm, pale from the sleeve of a navy pea-jacket, moved up the torn upholstery, then fell. Someone in another room stopped snoring, cleared his throat, coughed, was silent.

Denny glanced around. "You wanna do it in the bathroom?"

"No." Kid struck Denny's shoulder with his hand's heel. "I don't want to do it in the bathroom!" While Denny blinked, curious, the bathroom door at the end of the hall opened and Smokey walked out, sleepy, in nothing but jeans, her fly hanging open. With neither shielding nor greeting, she passed.

Leaning against the water tank, Kid saw the splotched dummy looped in chain—before the door swung to.

"I'm in here."

Which is where the Harley had been moved.

"How come you get a room all by yourself…?" Kid asked, realizing with the last word that three of the bundles among the shovels (why shovels?), pipes, lumber, and canvas, were people in sleeping bags.

Someone had built a loft.

Three steps up the ladder, Denny looked back over his shoulder. "You come up."

Denny's boots went over the edge. Kid climbed. The planks (they gave some with his hands and knees) were strewn with blankets. The size of a double bed, the platform was without pillow or mattress. "I keep all my shit up here," Denny explained, pushing himself back among wrinkled cloth. By his left hand was an army compass, a green shirt (with gold trim) fresh pressed and wrapped in plastic, a dagger whose handle was a ball-in-claw, and a gaming case on whose outside were long, alternately black and black-outlined triangles for backgammon.

Kid crawled forward through army drab and a weave of paler green rippled through with an electric-blanket cord. In the window that rose above the platform, a mottled shade let tan light on the tangle. He pulled his feet under him to sit and realized his arm was shaking. "How come you don't have half a dozen people sleeping up here with you?"

"I tell 'em to get the fuck out." Denny's hands lay knotted in his lap.

A zodiacal poster hung on the wall: Scorpio. And another of Koth, the Dark Angel. "It's sort of nice up here," Kid whispered. His throat was tight. I'm scared of him, he realized. And I like him. "Get the rest of your clothes off."

"Why?"

Kid let out a breath. "Nothing." He thumbed open the top button and tugged down his zipper. "Go on." He pulled his penis and testicles free of the closing V of brass teeth and let his shoulders relax against the plywood wall.

The ceiling would not let Denny stand. With hunkered back and crouched knees, the boy walked across the bedding, his arms swinging like a skinny blond ape. And fell. Kid flexed his knee under Denny's hand. Denny's hair swung forward, brushed Kid's belly.

His mouth is cold! Kid thought, and pulled his hand away a little sharply. Then he realized that it was only that the boy's lips were wet. Heat covered his thickening penis. He bent his knees and clamped them on Denny's thin flanks. He pushed his hand down his stomach, through moving hair. Saliva in his wiry groin was already cool. "That's good. Make it wet." His fingers butted the base. He pushed back Denny's hair, suddenly bending (and failing) to see the flattened cheeks, the distended mouth. The hair fell back. He cupped the back of Denny's neck. An image of the corpse in the shaft made him let his breath; he wished it hadn't. An equally surprising urge to smack the bobbing head away. Kid grunted,
"Unn…"
and then again,
"Unn…"
and had to close his eyes at the sensation. He pressed his palm against the warm ear. The head moved up and his penis was cold.

"Is it okay?" Denny asked.

"Yeah…"

Heat fell down it like a loose ring. His scrotal sack loosened between his thighs, then shriveled when spit ran down his leg, inside his pants. The moving head shook Kid's arm to the shoulder. He reached for Denny's shoulders. Denny tightened his fingers on Kid's thigh, let go, let himself be pulled up to lay with his chest on Kid's, a clutch of chain and crushed vest between them.

Denny's face was hard and amazed. "What you want?" All the small muscles of chin, cheek, and jaw were visible.

Kid rubbed Denny's back. "I want you to take the rest of your fucking clothes off." Denny's skin was hot and dusty dry.

With his other hand, Kid reached between them to move his cock, caught between creased denim.

Denny jerked back to his knees, took a breath, and began to unzip his pants. Kid thought: he doesn't want me to touch his dick. Something like anger gathered in his stomach.

Denny said softly and hoarsely, "You don't have to take yours off." He worked his jeans back beneath his knees, stopped to pull handfuls of chain from his neck.

Kid scratched his belly. Denny stopped all motion, his eyes caught Kid's groin. Something happened in Kid's throat and to his mouth that it was easy to think was fear, was easier to think desire.

Kid's cock, hardening, rolled up his thigh.

Denny's throat released the little air he tried to hold.

"Take your pants off…" Kid checked anger against desire. Checking only spilled the anger into his voice. "Go on…" Desire remained, a heavy heat under his stomach.

Denny sat back to pull off his boots. On the right, the outer half of the heel was worn to the leather. He pulled the left off more quickly. Loops of chain fell around his ankle. The knob of bone divided three strands from four: a dog's choke collar, wrapped several times. Denny leaned back to pull his pants off.

Kid looked at Denny's hands, Denny's feet, Denny's groin. His own back, against the wall, was slightly stiff. Denny, changing the texture of his movements, now began to fold his jeans, not looking at Kid. To relieve his shoulders, Kid sat forward. Then he reached out and pulled the jeans out of Denny's hands and tossed them in the corner with the boots and blankets. Denny's expression, as his eyes sought something other than Kid's, moved from confusion to belligerence.

Kid smiled, and the smile became the soft laughter for a house full of sleepers. "Come on."

Denny pushed himself forward. Then he said hoarsely: "That's pretty funny I should freak out now, ain't it?" The dry, hot skin brushed Kid's, pressed Kid's, a hand between their shoulders: heel hard, four light pressures and the length of thumb. Kid looked down at where the black-lined nails touched him. He reached around Denny's shoulders to cover the boy's fingers with his own.
Child's?
he thought. And then, with concern: Why has this child brought me here? He tightened both arms across Denny's back: Denny was shivering. "Hey…" Kid rubbed the boney stalk of Denny's spine down to where the flesh thickened and became soft. Then up. Then down. "Hey, cut that out. What's the matter?"

Denny still shook. "Nothing."

I'm afraid. And I want to stop this. Shit, no! "Come on, then. You try to relax." Kid worked further from the wall across the piled blankets. Holding Denny on top, he made a rocking motion. Denny turned his face away so that the side of Kid's face was all a-brush with yellow.

"If we just lay around like—"

One of the people under the loft turned over. And Denny stopped breathing for the count of three; then went on:

"—like this, we ain't never gonna do nothing."

Go on and do what you want then, was anger. With the sentence in his mouth unsaid, Kid realized: I'm twelve years older than him. He said, "Get down there and suck it," which, at the scrambling over his chest and stomach and the welling heat in his groin, he knew
was
lust. He reached for the hair and hunched shoulders between his legs. With his leg, he rolled Denny over on his side, pushing and pushing. Denny held Kid's thighs. Their congress was intense and diligent, till Denny, not holding him, was hammering near Kid's hip. "Okay…" Kid panted, and let the boy go. A quarter toward orgasm Kid hunkered down to press his hard groin on a hip, a thigh, something.

"Hey…" Breathing hard, Denny lay on his back. He raised his hand, glistening knuckles, strung with grey mucous. "I guess I came." He grinned. "What am I gonna do with this stuff?"

"Eat it," Kid said. "That what you usually do?"

"Yeah." Denny looked back up at the ceiling and put his fore knuckle in his mouth, turned his hand to lick the heel.

Kid put his arm, moist with effort, across Denny's thin, hard chest, still dry, and rubbed on the bony hip. Denny took his two middle fingers out of his mouth. "You didn't come yet?"

"Nope."

"Go… go on and do what you want."