Dhalgren

Black Mak watched me, frowning.

White Tom dug in a can of beans (hot on one side and cold on the other?) with his fingers.

Red swallowed.

'Sure I eat pussy!' California shouts and shoves Tarzan backward.

'Hey, man, hey—' D-t moves along with them.

'You God-damn right I eat pussy!' and shoves again.

'Come on, now, man, what you—'

'I'd eat your fucking pussy if you had one!' and Tarzan crashes back into the fence.

'Now come on!' D-t, a hand on either of California's shoulders, moves him away, and Tarzan, abandoned, suddenly starts to—

— but Gladis's laugh turned shriek, letting me hear (remember?) a second crash's echo. Among all the concerned 'What's…' and 'Who's…' and unconcerned laughter (mostly Dollar's, bright and insistent), it got figured out that somebody had hurled a hot can at Gladis, which tipped her shoulder and splattered on the steps.

Red wasn't at the fire any more. And a moment past the rage, I felt that surge of good feeling to rival those acid moments of unbearable friendship when the gates will not shut. Later, I went up behind Dollar and caught him across the back of the head, hard.

'What'd you do that for…?' he whined, lids crimped around eyes gone orange under the fire.

'For throwing that God-damn can.'

His eyes crimped more and his mouth opened on that slate-chip laughter (clear, a little shrill, like a boy's on the short side of puberty) and he said: 'Oh, man, did you see the way she hollered? I bet she was scared enough to drop it right here,' and wheeled away, laughing, while D-t shook his head, watching, and said, gravely, 'Shit, man.'

Tom and Thruppence were arguing about geography which took us from the yard to the kitchen, from the kitchen to the front steps, from the front steps to the yard. Everybody was staggering and bending and belly- clutching with laughter.

Then this altercation with Denny: 'Man, I don't like to go to bed with you when you're drunk,' he explained, three times, sadly, only I knew if Lanya was there, he would have come; he did anyway. Woke up later to find him gone; woke again, even later, lying on my side, with his small hot butt pressed against my belly, the continent of his back, muscular and vertebral, going away in the grey. No hangover when I got up, but my gut was a little loose so that I knew the first coffee or even water I drank would make me shit like hell. I'd gone to sleep in my pants. Getting them back together, I stepped into the hall.

Red came from the bathroom, gave me a funny look, and went out on the service porch while I went on up the hall, trying to figure what had changed about him. Glanced out at him when I passed the door: there was a projector chain hanging around his neck; figured he'd gotten it off the mannequin in the bathroom. I opened the bathroom door: Check.

Shit now? I wondered.

Wandered back to the service porch instead.

'…you mean the one that's gonna have the baby?' Red was asking, which Dollar answered, as I stopped to watch them:

'Fireball, what's the matter with you! Not the pregnant one; the other one!'

'Oh. The other one. Sure.'

(So some time while I'd been asleep, Red had acquired his first chain and a name.)

I leaned against the door frame. 'Fireball?'

Red turned.

A half cup of wine spilled back and forth across the bottom of the gallon jug hooked on Dollar's forefinger. He lifted it to his mouth with both hands, dropped it again, and looked at me with eyes bright, wet, and pink. 'Me and Fireball are gonna go get us some pussy, if she's still puttin' it out, you know? You comin'?'

I said to Red/Fireball: 'Where're your friends, Tom and Mak?'

'They split.'

'We scared 'em off, huh?'

'You know; they're pretty…' He gestured with his hand. It meant finicky/normal/unimaginative — the same hand-joggle one patient in a mental hospital will use to another to describe a third who's particularly out of touch that morning: palm down, fingers wide and waggling. 'They're nice guys, though. They gave me a ride all the way down here. They treated me nice. Then, when the truck broke down, they didn't seem to mind if we hung out together, you know?'

'Come on,' Dollar said. The jug clicked the doorframe as he stepped out.

We went with him up the hall.

I opened the door to the back room and went in first, Dollar and Fireball right behind me. It was very warm. California, squatting in the half-dark, stood up beside us and chuckled: 'God damn! Copperhead and Glass are having themselves a fuckin' contest,' heard himself and decided to change the emphasis: 'A fucking contest, man.' He chuckled again, swaying so close the hair over his shoulder brushed my arm.

Before the lion, rampant on the sill, scorpions slept or sat. Jack the Ripper, wandering around, stepped over sleeping Gladis and one of the non-members who occasionally crashes here.

Gladis and Mike, sleeping: knee to knee, forehead to forehead, his hair, long and light, lay over hers, tight and black, his arm over her brown collar, her arm above her belly. She snored. (Conceit: They curled, facing, like single quote marks enclosing an ellipsis pared to a unit point.)

Lady of Spain — black vest, black jeans, black boots, with black chains a-tangle over tightly folded arms and an intent, midnight frown — leaned against the wall, shoulder to shoulder with Revelation, who was naked, gold hair at his head a matted snarl and, down-sloping from gold-matted groin, what I guess was half a hard-on, deeper pink than the rest of his perpetual blush. He'd tucked his hands between his buttocks and the wall, his expression, though as intense as Lady of Spain's, empty of content.

Risa grunted: Copperhead… moaned? growled? on top of her, his freckled ass bouncing between her darker knees. The sleeping bag they'd started out on (Raven's, opened over the charred mattress) had bunched into a green python under her back. Her elbows came away from his (Copperhead still wore his vest), flapped, and fell, one hand slapping the mattress, the other catching his arm.

Glass sat in the corner, knees up, forearms over them, head back on the wall, taking long, loud breaths.

'Hey?' California put his hand on my shoulder and whispered: 'You gonna get a piece?'

'Let's see how she's doing when he gets off.' But my cock was about half-hard, and I could feel my heart in it for a dozen beats, till I shifted my leg.

'She's really wild,' California said. 'She wants everything you can figure out, man! Right now, most of the ladies except—' he nodded toward Lady of Spain who was saying something to Revelation who didn't seem to hear), then went back to watching—'are out now. But they were all in here working on her a little while ago! Black Widow, baby? Whew…! What a T-V spectacular that was —'

'Hey!' Lady of Spain said from her place on the wall.

Life in the Behavioral Sink, Episode Sixteen Thousand, Six Hundred and Thirty-Seven: Heavy Cathedral, who is getting heavier, squatted last evening with his back to the house, discussing the behavior of overcrowded rats, with a half-dozen of us who stood around, listening — Gladis had just come by cradling a poor, dead mouse that had to be flushed down the toilet. 'Sure,' counters astute, diminutive, and dark Angel, who is drunk, 'the similarities between rats and people are very large. But the differences, I suspect, are on the order of the factor of the differences in body weight between an undernourished mouse and an eight-month pregnant woman!' (Is art and sex replacing sex and death as the concerns of the serious mind? Life here would make me think so.)

'Don't lay any of that shit on us.' Her chin jerked up. 'That wasn't nothing like what