Dhalgren (76 page)

"A little blond seventeen-year-old white girl." The sweat, Kid realized, was not just under the books. The shoulders of his vest slid on it. The backs of his knees and the skin under his jaw were wet. "She was outside, asking… asking for you: 'Is George Harrison in there? Is George inside?' "

George's nose and cheeks like sanded teak, his heavy lips wrinkled as hemlock bark, the planes around his off-ivory teeth and eyes, moved into an expression fixed loosely among irony, amusement, and contempt: It was the expression on Tak's first poster. "Lots of little white girls come around here looking for me."

"Her name rhymes with moon, and she—" Kid's right fist clamped, fingertips and knuckles scraping his jeans—"she killed her brother for you: George? She had your poster, all big and black and naked and he saw it, her little brother. He saw it and was teasing her—you know how little brothers are, George? He was teasing her and he was gonna tell on her, you see? He was gonna tell her mother, tell her father: only she was afraid if he did, they'd know—know that it wasn't just a picture; know that she'd found you once; know that she was trying to find you again! See, they'd already threatened to kill her older brother. Already. And he'd run away. So she pushed him, her little brother, down the elevator shaft—sixteen, seventeen, eighteen stories down…! I don't quite… remember!" Kid shook his head. Something that was not pain pulsed in it, pulsed in it again. "Oh, Christ, there was… blood! I had blood all over me. I had to pull him up out of the basement, by the armful! And carry him back upstairs. After he was dead. But… it was for
you!
That's why she… that's why she did it! That's why I…" What pulsed became pain. "She told me herself. She told me that she was afraid he was going to tell. And that she…" Kid stepped away, stepped again, because the first step was unsteady and he had to catch himself on the second. He looked back.

George watched, as if from a long hall whose walls moved with indifferent faces, black and brown.

His eyes will explode like blooming poppies, Kid thought. His teeth will erupt like diamonds spat by the mouthful. His tongue will snake the yards between us, nearly touch my mouth before it becomes pink smoke. Steam in two columns will hiss down from his nostrils…

George stared with—and recognizing it, Kid suddenly turned away and lurched away—the indulgence reserved for the mad.

Is this, Kid thought (saying, "Hey, I'm sorry, man…" and patting someone's shoulder he'd just bumped), one of those moments that, momentarily, will slip out of mind to join my purpose, age, and name? He made it between those two; then somebody, laughing, steadied his arm and handed him on. He came up against the thin metal bars with his cheek and both hands, clutched them, leaned back, looked up:

Someone was coming down the spiral stairway. The fat, bald man (whose skin looked now more like oiled wrapping-paper) in the bib-overalls, descended, by Kid, stepped from ringing, black, triangular steps that circled the central pole, up, around, and up through the open square in the balcony floor—

When Kid looked down again, the man was working sideways through the people wandering about the center of the room.

"You all right?"

"Yeah, I…" Kid looked around.

"Good." Glass, with a bobbing walk, almost slow motion, came toward him. "I was just wondering. You know…?"

"I'm all right…" But he was cold; the sweat was drying on his neck, his forearms, his ankles. "Yeah."

Glass ran his thumb along his belt. Vinyl flapped back from the appendectomy scar in his dark, matte skin, swung over it again.

Multiple Caucasian laughter fell down through the spiral railing.

Glass and Kid looked up together, looked down together.

A lantern high on the wall brushed soft highlights on Glass's arms, slapped harsh ones on his vest, and slipped a line of light along an orchid petal against his chained and chain-lapped chest so bright Kid squinted.

"You wanna go see?" Glass said.

"Sounds like the kids from the park." Kid pressed his lips, glanced up again; suddenly he swung around the rail, started up the steps, one hand on the gritty pole, one trailing on the banister. Glass, behind him, kept bumping Kid's fist with his fist on the rail. The toe of his boot caught Kid's bare heel one step before the top.

From the shadowed kiosk at the head of the aisle, Kid looked down the balcony's raked seats. He heard Glass breathing inches behind his ear.

They sat—six, no seven of them—just back from the balcony rail: The blond woman in the third row, leaning forward to see between the shoulders of the two men in front, was Lynn, the woman he had sat next to at the Richards, the woman from whom he had wrested the gun in the Emboriky.

A tall, curly-haired man sat beside her, his hands locked around the barrel of a gun. He leaned forward, the barrel tip higher than his head; he looked almost asleep.

Another man was still laughing.

Another was saying, "Where is that damn woman's dog? Hey—" He half rose, looked over the empty seats: "Muriel! Muriel—"

"Oh, for God's sakes, Mark, sit down!" Lynn, in her green dress, said.

Another man, in a worn suede jacket, said: "I want to know where that damn
woman
is. She was supposed to be back by…" The last of his sentence was lost in laughter and applause from below, that must have had something to do with the Reverend; but Kid could not see her from here.

And one man had cuffed the man next to him. The other woman, in an off-the-shoulder peasant blouse, was trying to separate them, laughing.

A seat away, scuffed shoes on the back of the seat ahead, knees jackknifed in shiny slacks, and a rifle across his chair arms like a guard bar on the seat of a carnival ride, sat Jack. While the others joked and laughed, Kid could see his hollow, unshaven cheek pulse with swallowing as he balanced his chin on his joined fists and brooded down on the milling blacks.

"Ain't some of those guys look awfully familiar?" Glass whispered, too loudly, it seemed, near Kid's ear. But none of them turned.

Kid glanced back—"The department store…"—and saw Glass nod before he looked away.

Widely scattered in the dark balcony (there were only two lanterns that someone had set up about twenty yards down the balcony rail; all the other light came from below), perhaps a dozen people lounged in the ply-backed seats. The bolts in the wrought metal braces holding the seat, in front of Kid's knee, to the dusty floor were half out—

"What's she saying? Can you hear what the preacher lady's saying down there?"

"On, come on! You can't hear anything up here except noise! I want to go downstairs and wander around the party!"

"You want to go down there, with all of them? Go on, then!"

"That guy down there looks all right… Who is he, anyway?"

"The white guy over there?"

"That's who I was
pointing
at, wasn't I?"

"Man—" The curly-haired one dragged the barrel back against his chest. "We could really just pick them off from up here. Just like—" He suddenly raised his rifle to his eye. "Pow!" he said, then glanced over and laughed. "Just like that, right? Wish I knew which one was George Harrison." He sighted down the gun again. "Pow…" he whispered.

"Cut it out," the man who was Mark said. "We just snuck in here to see what was going on."

The curly-headed man leaned forward and called, "Hey, Reb? Don't you think we could stir up a little excitement down there with a few well-aimed ones—just for target practice, mind you? What you think of that idea, Reb?"

Jack said, soberly and not looking over:
"All
you folks got some strange ideas. Everybody I met since I come here got strange ideas."
Not
soberly, came to Kid as a second thought: Jack's voice had the slurred gravity of a very grave drunk.

"Why do you two want to bring guns to a place like this for anyway?" Mark said.

"They
had guns," the curly-headed man said, putting his rifle butt back on the floor. "You see the way them niggers tried to kick us out, because we had guns? Now that's not right. They had guns, we had guns—all men are created equal. Didn't you know that?—Hey, get your hand off!"

"I just wanted to see it," the woman in the peasant blouse said. "Besides, I'm a better shot than you, anyway."

"Yeah?" the man said. "Sure you are." He hung his curly head back against the barrel.

"Well, I
am!"

"Which one is Harrison?" one of the other men said. "You know, they all
do
look alike." He laughed. "At least from up here."

Jack put one shoe down. Other than that—elbows on the chair arms across his rifle, chin on his fists, and one shiny knee angling wide—he did not move.

"What
is
that woman shouting about down there? Jesus…"

Kid looked at Glass, who had stepped up beside him now. Glass, frowning, glanced back at the small group, with a small, disgusted head shake.

Kid gestured down the spiral steps with his chin, turned, and started.

The hall of milling men and women revolved and received him.

"Too
much!"
Glass said at the bottom, stopping Kid with a warm hand on the shoulder. "I mean, Christ, man…"

"Let's find George." Kid took a breath. "We'll tell him they're up there and see what he wants to do."

"They probably ain't really gonna
do
nothing…" Glass said, warily.

"Then we find George, tell him there's a bunch of white people up in the balcony, two of them with guns, who
probably
ain't gonna do anything." Kid wondered which way to go, saw an opening in the crowd, and loped into it.

Behind him, Glass suggested on the run: "Maybe George already knows they're there?"

"Fine," Kid said, back over his shoulder. "Then he can tell us that too."

Three tubs near the wall held the four- and five-foot cactuses—the sort Kid had always heard sent roots thirty and forty feet down into the desert for water.

On the nearest, among browned and crisscrossed needles, hung what looked like a pink tissue. Two steps nearer, and Kid saw it was the rag of a flower, wide as his hand, limp on the succulent's flesh.

Before the furthest, George joked among a loud and jocular group. One woman with arms like brown sacks, wrinkled at elbows, wrists, and knuckles, waved a bottle, offering it here and there, with kisses and explosive shrieks.

Kid glanced at the balcony. No, they were not visible from where he stood.

Kid edged forward into the group. An arm pressed his arm, a hand steadied against his back to steady someone unsteady: He was sweating again. "George—! Hey, George?" He wondered why, and for answer found all the memories of ten minutes ago's encounter: the compulsive tale of June, his own terror, returning now. "George, I got to—" He took the bottle passed him, drank, passed it on. "George, I got to see you for a minute, man!" Am I afraid of him? Kid wondered. If that's all it is, then all I know to do is not be afraid of the fear. "George…!"

Harrison had the bottle now. His arm rose, his laughter fell—"Hey now, how you doing, Kid? This here is the Kid. The Kid wants to speak to me for a second—" then the arm fell around Kid's shoulder—"so I'll be with you in a second." The dark head lowered next to Kid's with an anticipatory swig, fixing attention.

"Look," Kid said. "Outside, there was some guy talking about some people getting killed in the street by snipers from the roof this afternoon? Well, up in the balcony, you got about half a dozen white guys-two of them with guns. They're sitting there joking about picking people off. And they're particularly interested in which one is you. Now they probably aren't gonna pull anything, but I thought you ought to—"

"Shit!" George hissed. He raised his eyes, but not his head. "They got three women and a dog with them—?"

"Two…" Kid began. "No, three and a dog."

"God-damn thick-headed niggers!" George's breath lurched in sharply. "I
told
them not to let them crazy people in here with no guns! What the hell they think I put them out there for… unless they done snuck in some other way—"

"That's what they were saying," Kid said. "They must of snuck in. And—"

George started to stand.

Kid caught his shoulder and pulled him back down, his mind gone bright with recognition of what was inside of it: "—and George! What I told you—" the sweat started to dry, and as his back cooled under his vest, he knew why it had come—"about June, killing her brother…?"

George's eyes, the corners blood-heavy, the pupils fading almost evenly into the stained-ivory whites, came close to Kid's.

"…it wasn't true. I mean, she
did
it. But you see, I don't know whether she did it
because
of you or not. After he was killed, that's when she told me he was going to tell, about the poster of you I gave her.
She
said it was an accident. She said he was going to tell, and then, just by accident… So I don't
know.
You see…?"

"You real worried about that, ain't you?" George straightened. His arm still hung on Kid's shoulder, the glass bottle moving, as George breathed, against Kid's chains. "Well that's why she looking for me, not you. 'Cause I don't care about that one way or the other. You so busy blamin' or forgivin', you gonna drive her crazy. Me, see, I don't care if she innocent as a little white bunny rabbit in a brand new hutch, or if she done killed her brother, her mother, her daddy, and the President of the United States, cut up the bodies, and danced naked in the blood. What's it to me? What's it to her—? Another white man out of the way, that's all. She might worry about it a bit more than I do, but not much. And, finally, it's just gonna make both our lives easier—maybe even yours. When she come to me, I do her just the same, both ways. You say she looking? Well, I'm here, man, I'm still here. Hey—!" which was called out across the crowd. George waved the bottle high. "We all getting tired out, now. I think we got to all think about going home."

The blades clicked on Kid's chest, turned. Kid said: "You want us to go up and get 'em down for you, George? We'll take them out of the balcony."