trying to do…? I've got a wife. I've got a family. MSE hasn't had a payroll for months. There hasn't even been anyone in the damn office! I've got to hold on to what I have. I can't spend that kind of money now, with everything like this. I can't—'
'Well, isn't that what you told—?' He was angry. 'Oh shit. Look, then why don't you…' Then he reached around to his pocket.
Mr Richards' eyes widened as the orchid Kidd held flicked by him.
But Kidd only dug at his pocket. 'Then why don't you keep this too?' Mr Richards swayed when the moist, green knot, bounced off his shirt and fell to the floor, unfolding like paper on fire.
Kidd turned the lock and pulled the door open. The chain stopped it—
Mrs Richards, immediately beside him, fumbled with the catch. A step into the hall, he looked back to show them his disgust.
The astonishment Mr Richards returned him, as Mrs Richards with varied bitternesses at her eyes, closed the door on it, was unexpected, was satisfying, was severed with the door's clash.
He counted the fifteen, paint-chipped dents before he decided (someone was laughing inside again) to go.
In the elevator, he dropped, ruminating. Once he looked up to wrinkle his nose at a faint putrescence. But dropped on. Echoing in the shaft, with the wind, were footsteps from some stairwell, were voices.
There was no one in the lobby.
Satisfied?
His annoyance, at any rate.
But all the vague and loose remains roiled and contended for definition. 'Ba-da ba-da ba-da?' he asked. 'Ba- da ba-da,' he answered, sitting. It listed like oil on turbulence. At last Ba-da ba-da ba-da? formed around the fragments of a question, but Ba-da ba-da fit no worded answer. He flexed his fingers on the pen point till they ached, then went back to struggling with the recalcitrant quantities of sound overlapping their sense. He reread some dozen alternate lines for the beginning of one section: with the delight of resignation, he decided, with the change of a 'This' to a 'That', on his initial version.
A candle on the high windowsill cast the batteryless projector's swinging shadow across the notebook opened on his naked thigh.
Someone knocked just at the point he discovered he was copying, in quick, cramped letter, the same line for the fourth time (his mind had meandered on). 'Are you in there?' Lanya asked.
'Huh?' He looked up at the door's layered scrawl. 'Yeah. I'm coming out now.' He stood and pulled his pants up from around his shins, pulled the flush chain.
'He said you were in there.' She nodded toward the bartender when Kidd opened the door. 'Come on.'
'Huh? Where?'
She smiled. 'Come on.' She took his hand.
'Hey,' he called, passing the bar. 'You wanna keep this for me again?'
The bartender leaned over for the notebook. 'In the usual place, kid.' He reached up and stuck it through the cage bars.
She paused at the door to ask, 'How did it go with the Richards?'
'I gave him back his fucking five bucks.'
Her confusion suddenly went in laughter. 'That's too much! Tell me what happened.' And she tugged him on into the hallway and out to the street.
'What happened?' she asked again, shrugging her shoulder into his armpit. They walked quickly down the block. When she turned to glance at him, her hair tickled his arm.
'He didn't want to pay me. They were having a dinner party or something there. So I gave him back what he gave me already, you know?' He rubbed his chest underneath his vestflap. At his hip, the orchid's harness jingled. 'You know their kid, the little boy, they just left him…' He shook his head against hers. 'Hell, I don't want to talk about that. Where we going?'
'To the park. To the commune.'
'Why?'
'I'm hungry, for one thing.'
'Just as well I'm not talking.'
She hurried him across the street, into an ocean of smoke and evening. He tried to smell it, but his nostrils were numb or acclimated. The lions gaped in the blur with stony, astonished protest. They neared the foggy pearl of a functioning street light. 'This morning,' Lanya said, 'after you went away to write, some people said that there had been some new fires at the other end of the park!'
'Smoke's sure thicker.'
'Down there,' she nodded, 'before, I thought I could see it flickering. And it hadn't even gotten dark yet.'
'There couldn't be any fires in the park,' he announced suddenly. 'The whole thing would just burn up, wouldn't it? It would either all burn or it wouldn't.'
'I guess so.'
'Did they send anybody to check? Maybe they should get some people down there to dig one of those things, a breakfront.' Breakfront? and heard the word resonate with images of a charred forest, where years back he had tramped with a cannister of water strapped to his shoulders, hand pumping from the brass nozzle into sizzling ash. 'Maybe you and John and his people could go.'
She shrugged under his arm. 'No, really, I'd rather not go down there…'
From her voice he tried to reconstruct what it told him of her expression, and remembered her sitting on the stone railing with arms full of torn blue silk.
'You're scared to death!'
Her head turned abruptly in question or affirmation.
'Why?'
She leaned her head forward and surprised him by reiterating, 'Come on,' quietly, sharply.
His bare foot went from concrete to grass.
The night billowed and sagged: habit guided them through a maze of mist.
He saw quivering fires.
But they were from the commune's cinderblock furnace. People moved silently, listlessly before flame.
Perched along the picnic table, in a variety of army jackets, paisley shirts, and grubby tank-tops, young people stared through stringy hair. Someone dragged a sleeping bag in front of the fire. Shadow: pale, hairy skin; black leather: Tak stood back from the fire, arms folded, legs wide. The ornate orchid of yellow metal hung from his belt. Three scorpions stood behind him, whispering.
One was the red-headed, freckled black who had pipe-whipped him at Calkins; the other two were darker. But his initial start was followed by no more uneasiness. Somebody swaggered past with a cardboard carton of tin cans, crumpled cellophane wrappers, paper cups. He realized (very surprised) he was very high. Thought swayed through his mind, shattered, sizzled like water in hot ash. It's the smoke, he thought frantically. Maybe there's something in this fog and smoke. No…
John walked by the fire's edge, bald chest glistening between his vest, stopped to talk with Tak; they bent over Tak's weapon. Then, at John's wrist — brass leaves, shells, claws: from the ornamented wrist band the overlong yellow blades of the orchid curved down around John's fingers. He was making motions from the elbow as if he would have beat his leg were his hand un-armed.
Tak grinned and John moved away.
Kidd blinked, chill and unsteady. There was Lanya — she had moved from his side — talking with some of the people around the table. Isolate questions pummeled inarticulately. A muscle twitched in his flank, and he was terribly afraid of it. He stepped, brushing shoulders with someone who smelled of wine. The fire put a hot hand against cheek, chest, and arm, leaving the rest of him cool.
Milly shook her hair somewhere in the shadow of a tree: bloody copper shingles rattled her shoulders.
Why were they here? Why did they mill here? His inner skull felt tender and inflamed. Watch them, listen to
