Dhalgren

much.'

Copperhead bounded past them, flung his arm: the brick-shard flew across the street, shattered the window; Copperhead, full hair and sparse beard furious, turned back, grinning.

'That one?' Kid asked.

'No!' with an urgency he could not follow. 'At the top of the hill. That one. There.'

'Okay.' Kid wheeled.

The blond girl in the pea jacket was falling back through the loose blacks. She was crying; she looked at the sky, and cried harder. Denny's girl put her arm around her, was talking, was making consoling motions with her head. Once she glanced at the great, burning wheel; her face was webbed with rage.

Kid's hand went up across his cheek. Bristle clawed his palm. 'This way!' He waved and turned again. They passed around him as he turned in the light. 'Hey, Ripper, Denny, Copperhead!' He caught at the jouncing projector, and thumbed at the bottom pip. 'How do you turn this thing on?'

'Huh?' Ripper looked back. 'Oh… to the side. Not in.'

The pip slid.

Of course, he thought, I can't see anything from inside. And wondered what he looked like.

Lanya had stepped away and was looking all over him. Kid beat his knees, and swung about. And Denny had disappeared in his own deformed explosion.

'Hey,' the espresso-hued Ripper called, 'we goin' on!'

Figure passed figure as they milled about the cobbles. Kid looked where Copperhead was laughing; and Copperhead disappeared in his lucent arachnid. The menagerie formed in the terrible light.

Thirteen, whom Kid hadn't seen till now, passed him. 'Come on,' he whispered to Smokey beneath his arm, 'let's get out of here. This ain't gonna be no good—'

'I want to watch!' she insisted. 'I want to watch!'

Kid reached the porch. Some people were running behind him. He'd broken down three doors in his life: so he expected to bruise his shoulder. (The light that was Denny blinked beside him: the boy was climbing the rail.) Kid crashed into the weathered wood. It flew back so easily he went down on one knee and grabbed at the jamb. (About him, the mystic aspects lurched.) At the same time, glass broke and light filled the hallway as Denny's apparition came through the shattered porch window.

'Oh-Jesus …' A girl's black face passed the door opposite.

Then another's: 'It's scorpions…!'

A skinny black boy ran into the room with a stick. He opened his mouth and his eyes wide.

'Jimmy, you come on—!'

The boy (was he twenty? Kid staggered to his feet, a little scared, and not believing he was invisible behind some bright beast) kept on jerking at the stick.

'Jimmy!' she shrieked, 'come out of there! It's the scorpions, for God's—'

Jimmy (Kid was surprised) suddenly closed his mouth, flung away his stick, and ran back through the doorway. Somewhere else in the house footsteps banged down steps.

Denny beat Kid to the doorway and extinguished. He leaned through, then looked back with a puzzled grin (others had already surged into the room, to fling their shadows in the red light across the wall.) 'Hey, you see the way those niggers run?'

Behind Kid somebody overturned a chair.

He frowned, realized no one could see it, stopped frowning, and slid the stud over the bottom of his projector.

'Shit, man,' Denny said. 'Them was some scared, black motherfuckers.' Shaking his head, he went on through the doorway.

'Don't do that! Don't do that! Don't—'

'What the fuck they got in here?'

'Come on, God damn it, don't do that!'

In the maroon light across the wall in front of Kid, an apish shadow grew smaller, and smaller, and smaller, till the hand, only slightly bigger than Kid's, raised.

The hand clapped Kid's shoulder.

'Hey,' Copperhead said. 'They got some place here! Carpet on the floor…' His other hand gestured down; and up: 'And look at all that shit on the ceiling.'

Kid looked.

Women in gauze and men in armor careened through woods, by lakes, and over hills above the molding.

Kid looked down to see Copperhead squinting out the door at the reddened street. 'Well.' He looked back. 'I'm gonna go see what they got in here.' While somebody screamed in another room, Copperhead's hand fell twice again, in perfect amicability. Then he stepped through. Kid walked back through the room, looking for Lanya.

She was standing just inside the door, and angry.

'What's the matter?'

'There were people living here!' she hissed. 'What in the world…' She shook her head.

'I didn't know that,' Kid said. 'You picked the house.'

'And I didn't know what you wanted to do with it!' She spoke with intense softness, as though she did not want the disk beyond the roofs to hear. 'What the hell did you want to do?'

'Anything.' He shrugged. 'Let's go see.'

She sucked her teeth and gave him her hand. He led her back through the room, only half as crowded, now.

Before neon confetti from the humming television in the other room, figures staggered and swayed.

'Here.' Siam thrust out a bottle with his bandaged hand.

'I gotta eat,' Kid said. 'First, I think.' Then he took the bottle anyway and drank three small sips of bad, burning scotch. 'You want some?'

'No thank you,' she said softly, and held his arm with both hands.

As they were walking up the steps to the third floor, Kid said, 'I want—' the sentence resolved like an idea he had been straining to recall which only now gave itself to consciousness—'to write something down.'

He was surprised when she ran up to the top of the staircase, took something off a phone table, and turned with it. 'Here. There's no pen on this. But you've got yours.' He was both surprised and amused at what her urgency acquired in the beams through the cracked door at the hall's end.

He took the phone pad from her, pushed in the door beside them—

Beneath the pea jacket, open around her on the floor, the girl was naked. The edge of the window light, through the blinds, crossed the navy wool, and banded her ribs, like tape. On top of another girl, Copperhead's freckled buttocks tightened, relaxed and rose, dropped and tightened, relaxed and rose, between heavy legs. The girl, Kid suddenly realized, was the one whose name he did not know, who had said good-bye, to whom he had made love.

'Oh,' Lanya said, matter-of-factly.

The girl in the pea jacket opened her eyes, cried out softly, and rolled over to clutch the green khaki at Copperhead's thighs. Copperhead grunted, paused, looked back over his shoulder, said, 'Hey!' and grinned hugely. He beckoned awkwardly. (On the floor, the other girl, breathing heavily, tightened her lips toward an expression that mocked anger.) 'Join the party, motherfucker! You gimme one of yours, I'll give you one of mine.'

'Knock yourself out.' Kid backed from the door, with Lanya's hand in his.

The hall had filled with people. Kid was hit with black elbows and brown shoulders.

'What's going on in there?' Blond Denny pushed between them.

'Stay out of there, cocksucker.' Kid put his arm around the boy's chest, pulled him back.

'Why?'

'Because I'd get jealous as hell.'

Denny frowned, shrugged, 'Okay,' and wormed loose.

Lady of Spain jogged against Kid's shoulder, shook her head and said, almost drunkenly: 'Shit! What a way to go. I guess we're going, ain't we?' She stepped through, pulling her chains behind her which had caught against Lanya's shoulder.