Dhalgren

Christ, she been whining up there a fuckin' hour!' She looked at the ceiling and bellowed: 'I mean, go out and take a walk, lady!'

'Dragon Lady…' Denny's interruption seemed to take in none of the scorpion's rage.

'We dragged the cocksucker up there for her! She keep it up, I'm gonna go up there and beat the shit out of her, if you don't quiet her down!'

Anger and the cold air: his erection, anyway, was gone: 'The walls are thin.' He rubbed himself with the bunched towel.

'Dragon Lady?'

'What do you want?'

'The… Kid was asking about the run.'

Kidd sensed the hesitant disobedience was some acquiescence to previous commitment. But he could not be sure whether the newly implied capital was respectful or mocking.

'Yeah?' Dragon Lady's anger was quickly exhausted.

'Look, lemme out of here and see what I can do upstairs,' Kidd said. 'We'll talk about it some other time.' He wished Mrs Richards would quiet too.

'Oh, yeah. Sure. Try and shut her up, huh?' Dragon Lady backed out again.

'You don't want the vest?' Denny still pawed in the heap.

The crying suddenly rose in pitch. Outside, Dragon Lady said, 'God damn!'

'Yeah, I want the fucking vest.' Kidd stepped from the tub, reached down, and drained the whisky. Twin warmths of agreement and alcohol turned through him.

Denny, still sitting, was bent almost double, as he sorted the clothing. His belt loops tugged his jeans below his buttocks' crevice.

Kidd sucked his teeth again and toweled his groin. 'What's she here for, anyway?'

'Dragon Lady?' Denny glanced up, unbending.

'Yeah.'

'You remember when you were here last time, Nightmare was collecting us for the run?' Denny shrugged and fell back to sorting. 'Well, she's bringing us back, I guess.'

'Oh.'

The door opened again. The girl stood there, with a plastic cup this time. 'Oh,' she said. 'I didn't know you were…' That was to Denny who didn't look up. So she said to Kidd, 'Denny told me I should bring you another glass after fifteen minutes. Did you finish the first one?'

'You don't give a fuck whether he finished it or not,' Denny said, still bent over. 'Just give it to him.'

'I'm finished.'

She blinked rapidly, while they exchanged mug for cup. Then, without glancing at Denny, she left. Kidd drank some more, then put the cup on the tub edge. 'Thanks.'

Denny still didn't say anything, almost as though embarrassed.

In black jeans and leather vest, Kidd went into the front room.

'Oh, man!' Dragon Lady was saying. 'This is just too much—'

The crying was louder here.

'Dragon Lady,' Smokey said, rugging at the tassels of her macrame belt, 'why do you shout things up there like that? It… it isn't necessary!'

'Well,' Dragon Lady said, thumb hooked around hers, 'if I was making that big a fool of myself, after about an hour, I don't know as how I wouldn't appreciate somebody telling me to cut it out — like they meant it!'

Which Smokey seemed to think was funny; Thirteen's reaction, though, was silent, hand-throwing frustration. He moved, almost protectively, between the two women; Smokey didn't seem to mind.

'Look,' Thirteen said, with settling gestures of the palms, 'if your neighbor, I mean your own neighbor is going through that, you're just obliged, obliged, see, to put up with—'

Dragon Lady threw her glass. It missed Thirteen. Smokey ducked too. 'Hey, watch…' Thirteen shouted. Pieces of glass rocked on the floor. Wine licked down the wall. Smokey just blinked and looked like she didn't know whether to be amused or angry.

But Dragon Lady launched into doubled-over laughter. 'Oh, Thirteen… Thirteen, you are so—' Chains swung, flung back around her neck as she stood. 'You are so chicken shit!' She laughed again.

Maybe, Kidd thought, scorpions just yelled loud, laughed a lot, and threw things.

'Baby!' Dragon Lady shouted. 'Adam! We gonna get out of here, soon…'

'Good-bye,' Kidd said, at the door, and went. The girl in the blue sweatshirt who had brought him the whiskey was the only one who said 'good-bye'. Somehow, though, he was sure it was time to leave. In the hall, it occurred to him he hadn't even noticed if the sick girl were still in her bunk or not.

5

He carried the nest tables into nineteen-A.

Mrs Richards stood in the middle of the room.

'Um,' he said, 'I thought I'd bring these, uh, up with me. Since I was coming. You said you wanted them by the…' then went and put them by the balcony door.

'Your clothes,' she said. 'I was going to give you some of my… son's clothes.'

'Oh. I got these…' They were all black, too.

Her hands gripped one another beneath her breasts. She nodded.

'Is June all right?'

She kept nodding.

'I tbought I heard you downstairs, but when I went in, you'd already gone up.'

The nodding continued till suddenly she averted her face.

'I'll go bring the rest of the stuff up, ma'am.'

He returned with rugs over each shoulder, and dumped them. Mrs Richards was out of the room. On his next trip (he'd considered Bobby's toys, but decided he'd better leave those down there) she passed through and did not look at him. Three more trips and everything (toys too: he took them to Bobby's room and put them in the closet right away) was up.

He sat on the easy chair and opened his notebook. A rusty line still ringed the gnawed lozenges of his nails. He took his pen (clipped to a buttonhole in the vest now) and turned pages. He was surprised how few empty ones were left. He turned to the last and realized pages had been torn out. Their remains feathered inside the coil. The cover was very loose. Half a dozen of the holes in the cardboard had pulled free. He turned back to the furthest- front free page and clicked his pen point.

Then, slowly, he lost himself in words:

Both legs were broken. His pulped skull and jellied hip…

He paused; he re-wrote:

Both legs broken, pulp-eyed, jelly-hipped…

Only somewhere in there his tongue balked on unwanted stress. He frowned for a way to remove a syllable that would give the line back its violence. When he found it, he realized he had to give up the ed's and re-order three words; what was left was a declarative sentence that meant something else entirely and made his back crawl under the leather vest, because, he recognized irrelevantly, it was far more horrifying than what he had intended to describe. The first conception had only approached the bearable