Dhalgren

produce work?'

'About as much as anyplace else, I guess. Maybe little less, because you have to spend so much time scuffling, you know? I was working on a few short things. But I lost my notebook a few weeks back.'

'Huh?'

Frank nodded. 'Since then I haven't written anyhing. I haven't had time.'

'Hey, you lost your notebook!' Discomfort broached fear. 'Christ, that must be…' Then his feelings centered. Kidd leaned over the bar. 'Hey, can I get the notebook! Huh? Come on! You want to give me the notebook, please!'

'All right,' the bartender said. 'All right, I'll get it. Simmer down. You guys ready for another—'

'The notebook!' Kidd knocked the counter with his fist.

'All right!' Sucking his teeth, the bartender pulled it from the cage and flopped it on the bar. 'Now do you want another drink?'

'Oh. Yeah,' Kidd said. 'Sure.'

Besides blood, urine, mulch, and burn marks, there were rings from the bottles he had set haphazardly on the cover. He opened it in the middle. '… This isn't yours, is it?'

Frank frowned. 'You found this?'

'Yeah. It was in the park.'

Geoff Rivers     Arthur Pearson

Kit Darkfeather     Earlton Rudolph

David Wise…     Phillip Edwards…

Kidd looked over Frank's shoulder and read the listed names, till Frank turned the page.

'Hey, what you doin'?' Jack said behind them. 'You showing Frank here your poetry writing?'

Kidd turned around. 'Just this notebook I found, filled up with somebody's writing.'

'Frank's pretty smart.' Jack nodded. 'He knows about all sorts of shit. He taught history. In a college. And he cut out on the army too.'

'Lots of us have,' Frank said, not looking up. 'The ones with any sense go to Canada. The rest of us end up here.' He turned a page.

'You been having a good time?' Jack put his hand on Kidd's shoulder. 'This is the place to have a good time, you know?'

'Fine time,' Kidd said. 'But I haven't seen you around. Where you been staying?'

'Stayed on a few days with Tak.' Jack's hand rose and fell. 'He kicked me out after a week when I wouldn't let him suck on my peter no more.'

Across the bar Loufer, his cap low on his ears, still talked earnestly with Fenster.

Jack's hand fell again. 'They got girls in this city! Frank knows this whole house. Full of girls. Real nice girls. We was over there, and…' His grin widened toward ecstasy. 'They like Frank a lot.' He screwed up his face. 'I think that's 'cause he's growin' a beard and things. Or maybe taught in a college.'

'They liked you okay,' Frank said, still not looking up. 'They just didn't know you.'

'Yeah, I guess they just didn't know me well enough, yet.'

'Say?' Frank looked up now. 'You wrote all this—?'

'Yeah — well, no. I mean most of it was written in there when I found it. That's why I wanted to know if it was yours.'

'Oh,' Frank said. 'No. It's not mine.'

Kidd turned from under Jack's hand. 'That's good. Because when you said you had lost your notebook, you know, I just thought…'

'Yeah,' Frank said. 'I see.'

'We're gonna go out and look for some more girls,' Jack said. 'You wanna come along?'

'Jack thinks there's safety in numbers,' Frank said.

'No. No, that's not it,' Jack protested. 'I just thought he might want to come and help us look for some girls. That's all. Maybe we can go back to that house?'

'Hey, thanks,' Kidd said. 'But I got to hang around here for a while.'

'The Kidd here's got his own old lady,' Jack said in knowing explanation. 'I bet he's waiting on her.'

'Hey, I'm… sorry it's not your notebook,' Kidd told Frank.

'Yeah,' Frank said. 'So am I.'

'We see you around,' Jack said, while Kidd (smiling, nodding) wondered at Frank's tone.

Absently rubbing the paper (he could feel the pen's blind impressions), he watched them leave.

Bumping shoulders with them, Ernest Newboy came into the bar. Newboy paused, pulling his suit jacket hem, looked around, saw Fenster, saw Kidd, and came toward Kidd.

Kidd sat up a little straighter.

'Hello, there. How've you been for the past few days?'

The small triumph prompted Kidd's grin. To hide it he looked back at the book. The poem Frank had left showing, had been tentatively titled:

LOUFER

In the margin, he had noted alternates: The Red Wolf, The Fire Wolf, The Iron Wolf. 'Eh… fine.' Suddenly, and decisively, he took his pen from the vest's upper button hole, crossed out LOUFER, and wrote above it: WOLF BRINGER. He looked up at Newboy. 'I been real fine; and working a lot too.'

'That's good.' Newboy picked up the gin and tonic the bartender left. 'Actually I was hoping I'd run into you tonight. It has to do with a conversation I had with Roger.'

'Mr Calkins?'

'We were out having after-dinner brandy in the October gardens and I was telling him about your poems.' Newboy paused a moment for a reaction but got none. 'He was very impressed with what I told him.'

'How could he be impressed? He didn't read them.'

Newboy doffed his gin. 'Perhaps what impressed him was my description, as well as the fact that — how shall I say it? Not that they are about the city here — Bellona. Rather, Bellona provides, in the ones I recall best at any rate, the decor which allow the poems to… take place.' The slightest questioning at the end of Newboy's sentence asked for corroboration.

More to have him continue than to corroborate, Kidd nodded.

'It furnishes the decor, as well as a certain mood or concern. Or am I being too presumptuous?'

'Huh? No, sure.'

'At any rate, Roger brought up the idea: Why not ask the young man if he would like to have them printed?'

'Huh? No, sure.' Though the punctuation was the same, each word had a completely different length, emphasis, and inflection. 'I mean, that would be…' A grin split the tensions binding his face. 'But he hasn't seen them!'

'I pointed that out. He said he was deferring to my enthusiasm.'

'You were that enthusiastic? He just wants to put some of them in his newspaper, maybe?'

'Another suggestion I made. No, he wants to print them up in a book, and distribute them in the city. He wants me to get copies of the poems from you, and a title.'

The sound was all breath expelling. Kidd drew his hand back along the counter. His heart pounded loudly, irregularly, and though he didn't think he was sweating, he felt a drop run the small of his back, pause at the chain—'You must have been pretty enthusiastic—' and roll on.

Newboy turned to his drink. 'Since Roger made the suggestion, and I gather you would like to go along with it, let me be perfectly honest: I enjoyed looking over your poems, I enjoyed your reading them to me; they have a sort of primitive vigor that comes very much from a pruned sort of language that, from looking at the way you