Denny gave a confidential whisper. 'A frog.'
With the woman, Kid thought all of a sudden, did that really happen?
People were screaming again. Below, Nightmare cried, 'Hey, man, look at that!' and his excited laugh.
They went into a stairwell: it was pitch-black. Three steps down Kid said, 'Wait up—'
Half a flight down, Denny asked, 'What happened?'
'My sandal strap broke. I lost my sandal.' Listening to Denny's breathing, Kid felt around with his feet, on the step above, on the one below.
Denny suddenly stopped panting and said, 'Hey, thank you.'
'I can't find it,' Kid said. 'Thanks for what?'
'I guess you saved my life.'
'Huh?'
'That woman. She would have shot me if she got a chance.'
'Oh.' Kid's toes stubbed the wall. 'It wasn't anything. She would have shot me too.' He thought: a bee-bee gun? Fifteen-year-old Denny was very young all of a sudden. 'Damn thing's got to be around here somewhere.'
'Lemme make a light,' Denny said and made one.
Kid moved to see if his sandal was under his shadow. 'Maybe it fell over…' He glanced across the bannister. 'Look, never mind… put that out, will you.' The luminous amoeboid collapsed. The stairwell filled up with darkness, to his eyes, and over. 'Can you hear anything?'
The pulsing blot on the black said, tentatively, 'No.'
'Come on then.' Kid started down.
'Okay,' was whispered in front of him.
— shot me if she got a chance: would she have if she recognized me? Or would I have wrested the rifle if I hadn't recognized her? (He collided softly with Denny's shoulder.) He thinks I saved his life. What — because he saw light — are they doing out there? Shoulders bumping, they walked into the silent first floor.
Denny stepped between racks of twilit tweed and corduroy.
Kid glanced at the figure standing just beyond the doorway beside him (which was, of course, a dressing mirror, in a wooden stand, slightly tilted so that the reflected floor sloped) and — in a gym locker-room, that opened onto the field, someone had once thrown snow at his naked back.
Looking, he re-experienced (and remembered) the moment from that Vermont winter. Then forgot it, looking at the reflection, trying to recall, now that he had stared for a third, a fourth, a fifth second what had struck him first. He raised his hand (the reflected hand raised), turned his head a little (the head turned a little) took a breath (the reflection breathed); he touched his vest (the reflection touched its khaki shirt) then suddenly raised his hand to knuckle his chin (the reflection's knuckle dug into its full, black beard) and blinked (its eyes blinked behind black plastic glass frames).
The pants, he thought, the pants are the same! There was a white thread snaking across the black denim of his thigh. He (and the reflection) picked it warily away, suddenly arching his naked toes on the carpet (the tips of the black engineer boots flexed), then once more raised his hand toward the glass. He opened his fingers (reflected fingers opened), the string dropped (the string dropped).
Between gnarled knuckles and gnawed nails he looked at the smooth undersides of fingers thinner than his own. (He's taller than I am, Kid thought inanely, taller and stockier.) He reversed his hand, to look at his own palm: the yellowed callous was lined and lined again, deep enough for scars. Between his fingers he saw the backs of fingers with only the slightest hair, only the faintest scar above the middle knuckle and a darkening at the left of the first joint. The reflection's nails, though without moons save the thumbs, were long as his adolescent dreams, and only slightly dirty. He glanced down at the other hand. Where his was caged in blades, the reflection held — his notebook? But the correspondence (he recalled the church clock with its broken hands) was too banal for relief. Wanting to cry, he gazed full at the face, which, mirroring him twitch to twitch, for all its beard and glasses (and a small brass ring in one ear!) gazed back, with confusion, desperation, and sadness.
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 grinned across the glass, flat now like a table.
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, Denny, holding something in his arms, watched.
Kid turned in quarter-light.
'I got some…' Denny looked at Copperhead, who rubbed and glowered. 'Over there, they got shoes and boots and things. I brought you—' he hefted the armful—'these.'
'Huh?'
' 'Cause you lost your shoe.' Denny looked at Copperhead again.
Kid said: 'You pickin'
A laugh, he thought, is a lot of clotted barkings. He laughed and leaned against a table covered with shirts, and motioned Denny to come.
'You only wear the right one, huh?' Denny dumped the shoes — boots mostly — on the table.
Kid picked up two, three — they were all right ones. He laughed harder, and Denny grinned.
'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.
Denny watched gravely while Kid, holding the edge in one hand — waving his orchid for balance — pushed in his foot.
Denny said, 'That's the one I liked too.'
Kid laughed again. Denny, higher, sharper, laughed too.
'I guess we scared them all upstairs,' one girl said to Nightmare.
'You bastards over here 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 any more, hear?'
Copperhead mumbled and rubbed his scantly bearded jaw.
'All this shit going down, and the two of you got into it?' Nightmare rubbed his shoulder.
'Nightmare,' Denny said, 'the Kid saved my life. Upstairs, up on the balcony. Somebody came at us with a gun, shot at us as close as you are to me. The Kid just grabbed the barrel and pulled it away.'
'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 dinner with, read a poem to! He put his booted foot on the floor.
Denny looked hugely happy.
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 gonna kill him, I ain't gonna mess with him. That'd be best.'
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
