'I was just thinking, I really was, about asking you to autograph this for me.' He held up the copy and snorted rough laughter. 'I really was.'
Kid decided not to examine the shape this thought made, but caught the mica edge: It's not not having: It's having no memory of having. 'I don't like that sort of shit anyway…' he said, awed at his lie, and looked at Tak's face, all shadowed and flared with backlight. He searched the black oval for movement. It's there anyway, he thought; he said: 'Here. Gimme,' and got the pen from the vest's buttonhole.
'What are you going to do?' Tak handed it over.
Kid opened it on the counter by the register, and wrote: 'This copy of my book is for my friend, Tak Loufer.' He frowned a moment, then added, 'All best.' The page looked yellow. And he couldn't read what he'd written at all, which made him realize how dim the light was. 'Here.' He handed it back. 'Let's go, huh?'
'Yeah.' Tak glanced down stairs and sucked his teeth. 'You know?' They walked to the door. 'When you took it from me, I thought you were going to tear it up.'
Kid laughed. Perhaps, he thought, I should have. And thinking it, decided what he had put was best. 'You know—' as they stepped into the night, Kid felt his fingers dampen on the cover: fingerprints? — 'people talk about sexual inadequacy? That doesn't have anything to do with whether you can get a hard-on or not. A guy goes out looking for his girl friend and doesn't even know where she lives, and doesn't seem to have bothered to find out… You said Madame Brown might know?'
'I think so,' Tak said. 'Hey, you're always talking about your girl friend. Right now, do you have a boy friend?'
Kid figured they had reached the corner. On the next step he felt the ball of his bare foot hung over the curb. 'Yeah, I guess I do.' They stepped down.
'Oh,' Tak said. 'Somebody told me you're supposed to be making it with some kid in the scorpions.'
'I could get to hate this city—'
'Ah, ah, ah!' Tak's voice aped reproval. 'Rumor is the messenger of the gods. I'm sort of curious to find out what you wrote in my book.'
At which Kid started to balk, found his own balking funny, and smiled. 'Yeah.'
'And of course, the poems too. Well…'
Kid heard Tak's footsteps stop.
'…I go this way. Sure I can't convince you…?'
'No.' He added: 'But thanks. I'll see you.' Kid walked forward thinking, That's nuts. How does anybody know where anything is in this, and thought that thought seven or eight times through, till, without breaking stride, he realized: I cannot see a thing and I am alone. He pictured great maps of darkness torn down before more. After today, he thought idly, there is no more reason for the sun to rise. Insanity? To live in any state other than terror! He held the books tightly. Are these poems mine? Or will I discover that they are improper descriptions by someone else of things I might have once been near: the map erased, aliases substituted for each location?
Someone, then others, were laughing. Kid walked, registering first the full wildness of it, the spreading edges; but only at the working street lamp at the far corner, realizing it was humor's raddle and play.
Two black men, in the trapezoid of light from a doorway, were talking. One was drinking a can of beer or Coke. From across the street, a third figure (Kid could see the dark arms were bare from here, that the vest was shiny) ambled up.
The street lamp pulsed and died, pulsed and died. Black letters on a yellow field announced, and announced, and announced:
JACKSON AVENUE
Kid walked toward them, curious.
'She run up here…' the tall one explained, then laughed once more. 'Pretty little blond-headed thing, all scared to death; you know, she stopped first, like she gonna turn around and run away, with her han' up in front of her mouth. Then she a'ks me—' The man lowered his head and raised his voice: ' 'Is George Harrison in there? You know, George Harrison, the big colored man?' ' The raconteur threw up his head and laughed again. 'Man, if I had 'em like George had 'em…' In his fist was a rifle barrel (butt on the ground) that swung with his laughter.
'What you tell her?' the heavier one asked, and drank again.
' 'Sure he's inside,' I told her. 'He better be inside. I just come out of there and I sure as hell seen him inside. So if he ain't inside, then I just don't know where else he might be.' ' The rifle leaned and recovered. 'She run. She just turned around and run off down the block. Run just like that!'
The third was a black scorpion with the black vinyl vest, his orchid on a neck chain. It's like, Kid thought, meeting friends the afternoon the TV had been covering the assassination of another politician, the suicide of another superstar; and for a moment you are complicit strangers celebrating by articulate obliteration some national, neutral catastrophe.
Remembering the noon's light, Kid squinted in the dark. And wished he were holding anything else: notebook or flower or shard of glass. Awkwardly, he reached back to shove the books under his belt.
The three turned to look.
Kid's skin moistened with embarrassment.
'…She just run off,' the black man with the gun finally repeated, and his face relaxed like a musician's at a completed cadence.
The one with the beer can, looking left and right, said, 'You scorpions. So you come down here a little, huh?'
'This is the Kid,' the black scorpion explained. 'I'm Glass.'
His name, Kid thought (he remembered Spider helping with Siam's arm on the rocking bus floor…): It isn't any easier to think of them once their names surface. They might as well be me. Surfaced with it was a delight at his own lack. But that joy still seemed as dull and expected as a banally Oedipal dream he'd had the first night he'd been assigned a psychiatrist at the hospital.
'You the Kid?' The man hooked the can's bottom on the top of his belt buckle. 'You fellows gonna come down here and give
'Yeah, they all shootin' up black people now, you come on down to Jackson.'
Far inside, other blacks were talking and laughing.
'What happened?' Kid asked.
Glass stepped over closer to Kid. (Kid thought: I feel more comfortable. He probably does too.) The others moved to accomodate the shift.
'Someone been shooting up down here?' Glass asked. 'That was this afternoon?'
'Sure was.' The barrel went into the other hand. 'Like a sniper, you know? Ain't that something. I mean, this afternoon, with that thing hanging up there.'
'What happened?'
'Somebody climbed up on the roof of the Second City Bank building down on the corner, and started shooting people with a gun. Just like that.'
'Did he kill anybody?' Kid asked.
The man with the can pursed his lips to a prune.
The man with the gun said: 'About seven.'
'Shit!' Kid said.
'Like he got four people together, you know — bip, bip, bip, bip. The woman wasn't dead yet, but she couldn't move very far. A little later some people came out to help them, 'cause they thought he'd gone. But he stood up again and picked off three of them. Then he run.'
'It was a white boy, too.' The other gestured with his can. 'And he gonna come all the way down here to shoot niggers.'
'The woman died, hey… when?' Glass asked.
'A little later. She didn't say nothing about the guy did the shooting though. Some others saw. That's how they know he was white.' He grinned, finished the can, tossed it. 'You scorpions gonna—' it clunked and bounced —'gonna come down to Jackson and give us some protection? Keep them crazy white motherfuckers from shooting
