Dhalgren

window. 'I mean on page one.'

Kid, sitting on the stoop, leaned down to scratch his foot. 'What—?' He turned back to the front of the tabloid. 'Where is Cumberland Park, anyway?'

'Lower Cumberland Park?' Faust craned his ropy neck and, beneath his corduroy jacket, scratched his undershirt. 'That's down at the other end of Jackson. That's where they got some really bad niggers. It's where the great god Harrison lives.'

'Oh,' Kid said. 'Where I was last night. It says here something about nobody living there any more.'

Faust hefted the bundle on his hip. 'Then all I know is that I leave a God-damn lot of papers in front of a God-damn lot of doors, and they ain't there the next day when I come back. Damn, splashing around in all that water in the street yesterday morning!' He squinted back at the window. 'It was better this morning though. Hey, I see you again tomorrow. That your book the office is full up with?'

'I don't know,' Kid said. 'Is it?'

Faust frowned. 'You should come up to the office sometime and take a look where they print the paper and things. Come up with me, some day. I'll show it all to you. Your book went in the day before yesterday—' Faust snapped his fingers. 'And I put cartons of it in the bookstores last night. Soon as it… well, you know, got dark.'

Kid grunted and opened the Times again, to look at something not Faust.

'Get your morning paper!' The old man loped down the block, hollering into the smoke: 'Right here, get your morning paper!'

What he'd opened to was another quarter-page advertisement for Brass Orchids. He left it on the stoop, and walked toward the corner, when a sound he'd been dimly aware of broke over the sky: Roaring. And nestled in the roar, the whine a jet makes three blocks from the airport. Kid looked as the sound gathered above him. Nothing was visible; he looked down the block. Faust, a figurine off in a milky aquarium, had stopped too. The sound rolled away, lowering.

Faust moved on to disappear.

Kid turned the corner.

It's different inside the nest, he thought, trying to figure what should be the same:

The crayoning on the dirty wall—

The loose ceiling fixture—

In his hand, the knobs squared and toothy shaft rasped out another inch—

A black face came from the middle room, looked back inside; shook his head, and went down to the bathroom. Among voices, Nightmare's laugh, and:

'Okay. I mean, okay.' That was Dragon Lady. 'You said your thing, now what you want us to do?'

While someone else in the hubbub, shouted, 'Hey, hey, hey come on now. Hey!'

'I mean now… yeah!' Nightmare's voice separated. 'What do you want?'

Kid went to the door.

Across the room, Siam and Glass noticed him with small, different nods. Kid leaned on the jam. The people in the center, their backs to him, were not scorpions.

'I mean—' Nightmare, circling, bent to hit his knees—'what do you want?'

'Look.' John turned to follow him, holding the lapels of his Peruvian vest. 'Look, this is very serious!' His blue work shirt was rolled up his forearms; the sleeves were stained, dirty, and frayed at one elbow. His thumbnails, the only ones visible, were very clean. 'I mean you guys have got to…' He gestured.

Milly stepped out of the way of his arm.

'Gotta what?' Nightmare rubbed his shoulder. 'Look, man I wasn't there. I didn't know nothing about it.'

'We were someplace else.' Dragon Lady turned a white cup in her dark hands, shoulders hunched, sipping watching. 'We weren't even anywhere around, you know?' She alone in the room drank; and drank loudly.

Mildred brushed away threads of red hair and looked much older than Dragon Lady. (He remembered once thinking when neither were present that, for all their differences, they were about the same age.) Dragon Lady's lips kept changing thickness.

'This is shit!' Nightmare kneaded his arm. 'I mean this is real shit, man! Don't load this shit on me. You want to talk to somebody—' His eyes came up beneath his brows and caught Kid—'talk to him. He was there, I wasn't. It was his thing.'

Kid unfolded his arms. 'What'd I do?'

'You—' Mildred turned—'killed somebody!'

He felt, after moments, his forehead wrinkle. 'Oh, yeah?' What cleared inside was distressingly close to relief. 'When?' he asked with the calm and contrapuntal thought: No. No, that's not possible, is it? No.

'Look,' John said, and looked between Nightmare and Kid. 'Look, we could always talk to you guys, right? I mean you're pretty together, you know? Nightmare, we've always done right by you, hey? And you've done right by us. Kid, you used to eat with us all the time, right? You were almost part of our family. We were gonna put you up the first night you got here, weren't we? But you guys can't go around and murder people. And expect us to just sit around. I mean we have to do something.'

'Who'd we kill?' he asked, realizing, they don't mean me! They mean us. The feeling came cold and with loss.

'Wally!' Milly said from the edge of hysteria. 'Wally Efrin!'

The name rang absolutely hollow in his mind. Kid searched the company squatting in memory before the communal cinderblock fire over beans and vegetable hash with spam; Wally Efrin? (The short-hair he'd once asked to help him get wood who'd said no because he was too frightened to leave the others? The one who had sat between him and Lanya and talked non-stop of Hawaii? The heavy one with the black hair long enough to sit on who kept asking people whether or not we'd seen his girl friend? One he'd seen but never noticed? One he'd never seen? He remembered Jommy and a half dozen others.)

'Where?' he asked, at her silence. 'What'd we kill him for?'

'Oh, for Christ's sake…!' Milly shook her head.

'Yesterday,' John said. 'Yesterday afternoon. When you were all at that house, with the… sun. Mildred was there—'

'I didn't know about it till after I got home,' she said, in the voice one used to make excuses.

'Me neither,' Kid said. 'So do you want to tell me?'

'No, I don't want to…' Milly exclaimed. 'This is really just terrible! This is animal…!'

'You were in charge there, Kid, weren't you?' John asked.

'So everybody tells me.'

'Well, it seems that — now I wasn't there, but this is what I've been told…'

Kid nodded.

'…It seems like some of the guys started a fight. And… what? Wally tried to break it up?'

'He may have started the fight,' Milly said to the floor, 'with them.'

'I guess most of the people were upstairs. This was downstairs in the kitchen. He got beat up pretty bad, I guess. Someone hit him a couple of times. In the head. With the bar of a police lock. Then everybody left I guess. Apparently lots of people there didn't even know about it. It was downstairs.' John repeated: 'In the kitchen. I mean, Mildred didn't know until after she g back and Jommy told her.' A movement of John's tanned chin indicated that Jommy was the emaciated boy with a lot of brown hair, and small, pale eyes. (He had remembered Jommy; but he had not recognized him…)

'Everybody left him, because they thought he was just knocked out or something. Or they were scared. Then we went back for him. He was dead.'

'Who did it?' Kid shifted his bare foot, which was tingling.

Copperhead stood in the kitchen door, one fist on the jamb.

John looked at Jommy who pointed immediately to the scorpion on the couch, the unshaven, pimpley, white youngster: 'Him!' who grunted at the accusation and raised his head a little. He was also the scorpion whom the long-haired youngsters had held, crying, on the balcony as the great circle set.

'You kill somebody yesterday afternoon?' Kid asked.

'No!' He said it thickly and loudly and questioningly, trying the answer for effect.