Dhalgren

D-t, Spider, Angel, Priest crowded in from the hallway.

California shucked quickly from the sleeping bag beside the couch.

Raven and Glass and Lady of Spain came into the kitchen.

Spitt pushed in through the scorpions crowding the doorway.

They swayed and moved their feet and looked uncomfortably serious.

'Come on,' Denny was saying as the others clattered down the front steps. 'Hey, you! You gonna come? Get on out here.'

Within the house they had almost been able to imagine a lucid city. Now catatonic windows watched them stalk. Their boots crunched and thudded on the pavement. They hurried with lowered brows, staring out from under, looking left and right on the neutral avenues.

Kid remembered, later, breaking the plate window of the Second City Bank building.

Jack the Ripper danced on broken glass and cackled: 'Man, we gonna bust up nigger-town, now!'

They didn't.

They shuffled and poked in papers and files and adding machines. Copperhead turned over a desk and stood looking at it, breathing hard, a full minute.

They found neither money nor locked boxes; the only things in the money drawers were paperclips, gummed reinforcements, rubberbands.

Kid climbed back over the brass bars of a teller's cage (the top was a strip of greasy filth; a lot was on his hands now,) dropped to echoing marble, and walked to a group with their backs to him. He shouldered between Tarzan and Thruppence.

Knee on the cushion (he took sharp, shallow breaths), Dollar jabbed an orchid-blade into the leather chair and ripped with caged and quivering fist. More stuffing pushed out. Catching his tongue tip in his teeth, he jabbed and ripped again.

Priest sniffed and took his hands from his pocket.

Filament tried not to clear her throat.

As they walked home, Kid searched his memory of what had occurred on Nightmare's run to the Emboriky. Among the black group strolling at his side Kid noticed blond Tarzan at their center. Raven, his arm around Tarzan's shoulder, was saying, '…your sister? Man, you got you a pretty sister. Tarzan, you got about the prettiest sister I ever seen. You gonna have to get me and that sister of yours together! Oooooo-whee!' On Whee! he yanked at the crotch of his jeans with his free hand and nearly tugged Tarzan over.

'Now what you gonna talk about his sister for?' Lady of Spain asked.

'Aw, shit,' Raven shouted over his shoulder, all his hair swaying. 'Tarzan and me are friends. That right, Tarzan?' who grinned across the forearm beneath his chin.

'Tarzan,' Glass grunted at Kid, 'and the fuckin' apes!'

'Hey!' Jack the Ripper punched at Glass' shoulder. 'Who's a fuckin' ape, nigger?'

But when Kid and Glass looked back, the Ripper let both legs go bandy, wheeled his arms about his shoulders, and began to bound about and grunt. Chains flew around his head. Now and then he paused to scratch his sides with underhanded flaps.

Copperhead's laugh was louder and harsher than the other's, rising and dying, as though responding to nuances of the performance no one else could catch.

Raven still draped around Tarzan, they staggered on. Raven's expression was now haunted and grim. Tarzan, hands hanging from his pockets and elbows swinging, smiled at the pavement over which they lurched, happily centered in so much attention.

The next day was:

Sunday — January 1st, 1979

(Headline:)

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

'You sure you don't want to come?' Kid asked Pepper. Kid's face still stung from shaving.

'Naw.' Pepper shuffled nervously before the bathroom door. 'Naw, I don't like stuff like that. All them people I don't know. You just go on, tell me about it when you come back. I got some wine, from the liquor store.'

'Okay,' Kid took his hand from Pepper's shoulder.

Copperhead came out of the bathroom. 'Hey, you sure we don't got to dress up?'

'You wear your chains,' Kid said, 'your lights, and your vest, and you're dressed.'

'Okay,' Copperhead said. 'If you say so. Man, Nightmare sure looks something out there in them red velvet pants. Like a God-damn spade!'

Kid's concession to festive dress, beside washing and shaving, had been to hang his brass orchid from a neck chain. As he walked up the hall-a water drop ran his bare ankle — the Ripper stopped him to whisper: 'You really gonna let that boy go up there like that?' which was the third time someone had said something about Baby, who had arrived ten minutes ago, naked as promised (and dirty as ever), with Nightmare, Dragon Lady, and Adam.

'Sure am.'

'Oh, man, I gotta see this. I was gonna stay home, you know? But I got to go to this one just to watch.'

'He doesn't have anything you don't except a foreskin,' Kid said. 'Can't you be cool, huh?'

'Oh, sure!' The Ripper beat down the doubt with his wide, black hand, 'Sure.' He laughed and went on.

In the front room, Nightmare turned around and said something to Kid, mauled beyond comprehensibility by laughter. The others laughed too. His thick braid glistened with dressing. To his leather vest, neck chains, chained cycle boots, and garrison, the velvet loaned a scarlet panache.

'Nightmare,' Siam (who only wore a small bandage now) was saying, 'you're wearing those pants so low your ass has got cleavage, man!'

'Shit!' Nightmare caressed his great shoulder, 'they like to see my muscles!' There was only a trace of the shoulder scar.

Kid glanced down at his own, listening to the laughter.

Dragon Lady, legs crossed, sat on the couch: White levi's, white boots, a silver lame turtleneck, and over it a white levi jacket, sleeves torn off. Her usual chains (a trip to the hardware store?) had been replaced by silver — or at any rate, stainless steel. Her nails were painted platinum. When she threw her head back to laugh, on her big, stained teeth, sweat glistened just below her rough hair. She looked easy, elegant, and terrifying.

Adam, brown and glum looking, sat on the couch arm in his baggy pants and sneakers.

Baby sat on the floor in front of him, one dirty foot on top of the other, arms wrapped around his knobbly knees, a grubby hand on each grubby elbow, smiling like a happy, blond rat.

'Hey! Hey, come on! Now listen to this!' Blonder than Tarzan (who stood, oddly sullen, by the kitchen door), blond as Bunny, Revelation, perched on the back of the chair, turned over the Times and pulled aside his chains. He wore twice as many as anyone else, all brass and copper: '…'late in the afternoon yesterday, stalked through the streets of Jackson, terrorizing residents.' How you like that? So you guys were out terrorizing the spades yesterday? Huh?' His skin was the luminous pink some pale flesh becomes either in great cold or great heat. '…'committing acts of vandalism, the damage for which there is no way to assess, the rowdy band of black and white youths, necks hung with the chains that we have come to associate with the scorpions'—'

'We didn't terrorize nobody!' Denny (black shirt, silver fringe, beneath his vests and chains) sat with his back against the wall. 'There wasn't nobody on the God-damn street!'

'That's cause they were all terrorized,' Revelation explained. 'Don't you see?'

'…'breaking into the Second City Bank'—?'

'Shit,' Thruppence said (who had borrowed one of Denny's shirts) 'we didn't do nothing yesterday.'

'We robbed a fuckin' bank!' Filament (who had commandeered another) countered. 'What do you mean we didn't do nothing? We robbed a whole God-damn bank!' She clasped her hands before her chin and looked delighted.

'A fuckin' bank?' Nightmare said. 'Man, you're into some heavy stuff.'