"Gotta what?" Nightmare rubbed his shoulder. "Look, man I wasn't there. I didn't know nothing about it."
"We were someplace else." Dragon Lady turned a white cup in her dark hands, shoulders hunched, sipping watching. "We weren't even anywhere around, you know?" She alone in the room drank; and drank loudly.
Mildred brushed away threads of red hair and looked much older than Dragon Lady. (He remembered once thinking when neither were present that, for all their differences, they were about the same age.) Dragon Lady's lips kept changing thickness.
"This is shit!" Nightmare kneaded his arm. "I mean this is real shit, man! Don't load this shit on me. You want to talk to somebody—" His eyes came up beneath his brows and caught Kid—"talk to him. He was there, I wasn't. It was his thing."
Kid unfolded his arms. "What'd I do?"
"You—" Mildred turned—"killed somebody!"
He felt, after moments, his forehead wrinkle. "Oh, yeah?" What cleared inside was distressingly close to relief. "When?" he asked with the calm and contrapuntal thought: No. No, that's not possible, is it? No.
"Look," John said, and looked between Nightmare and Kid. "Look, we could always talk to you guys, right? I mean you're pretty together, you know? Nightmare, we've always done right by you, hey? And you've done right by us. Kid, you used to eat with us all the time, right? You were almost part of our family. We were gonna put you up the first night you got here, weren't we? But you guys can't go around and murder people. And expect us to just sit around. I mean we have to do something."
"Who'd we kill?" he asked, realizing, they don't mean me! They mean us. The feeling came cold and with loss.
"Wally!" Milly said from the edge of hysteria. "Wally Efrin!"
The name rang absolutely hollow in his mind. Kid searched the company squatting in memory before the communal cinderblock fire over beans and vegetable hash with spam; Wally Efrin? (The short-hair he'd once asked to help him get wood who'd said no because he was too frightened to leave the others? The one who had sat between him and Lanya and talked non-stop of Hawaii? The heavy one with the black hair long enough to sit on who kept asking people whether or not we'd seen his girl friend? One he'd seen but never noticed? One he'd never seen? He remembered Jommy and a half dozen others.)
"Where?" he asked, at her silence. "What'd we kill him for?"
"Oh, for Christ's sake…!" Milly shook her head.
"Yesterday," John said. "Yesterday afternoon. When you were all at that house, with the… sun. Mildred was there—"
"I didn't know about it till after I got home," she said, in the voice one used to make excuses.
"Me neither," Kid said. "So do you want to tell me?"
"No, I don't want to…" Milly exclaimed. "This is really just terrible! This is animal…!"
"You were in charge there, Kid, weren't you?" John asked.
"So everybody tells me."
"Well, it seems that — now I wasn't there, but this is what I've been told…"
Kid nodded.
"…It seems like some of the guys started a fight. And… what? Wally tried to break it up?"
"He may have started the fight," Milly said to the floor, "with them."
"I guess most of the people were upstairs. This was downstairs in the kitchen. He got beat up pretty bad, I guess. Someone hit him a couple of times. In the head. With the bar of a police lock. Then everybody left I guess. Apparently lots of people there didn't even know about it. It was downstairs." John repeated: "In the kitchen. I mean, Mildred didn't know until after she g back and Jommy told her." A movement of John's tanned chin indicated that Jommy was the emaciated boy with a lot of brown hair, and small, pale eyes. (He had remembered Jommy; but he had not recognized him…)
"Everybody left him, because they thought he was just knocked out or something. Or they were scared. Then we went back for him. He was dead."
"Who did it?" Kid shifted his bare foot, which was tingling.
Copperhead stood in the kitchen door, one fist on the jamb.
John looked at Jommy who pointed immediately to the scorpion on the couch, the unshaven, pimpley, white youngster: "Him!" who grunted at the accusation and raised his head a little. He was also the scorpion whom the long-haired youngsters had held, crying, on the balcony as the great circle set.
"You kill somebody yesterday afternoon?" Kid asked.
"No!" He said it thickly and loudly and questioningly, trying the answer for effect.
Nightmare sat, now, at Dragon Lady's feet. Head against the wall, he looked from speaker to speaker, with the smile of an enthusiast at a tennis match.
"You beat anybody up?" Kid asked.
"Beat the fuck out of 'im!" The scorpion's fists bounced on the couch's rim. "Yeah! With a fuckin piece of pipe. But I didn't know what kind of pipe it was!.. or if he was dead!"
"Shit, I sure did!" Glass chuckled. "I knew it when you hit the motherfucker the first time. The second, third… all those other times you were banging on him, man, that was just extra."
"You shut the fuck up!" (It was, Kid remembered, the scorpion for whom he had rescued the bronze lion.) "I didn't kill nobody."
"But you did beat somebody over the head with a piece of pipe yesterday?"
"Look, I didn't…" He stalled on the word, and stood, fists flailing about his shoulders to beat away the barrier to speech, then yelled, "… didn't kill any God-damn body with no—"
"SIT DOWN, GOD DAMN IT…!" Kid bellowed, coming away from the door by three steps. That, he thought in the silence, was pretty theatrical. But he was astonished by its efficacy. Twitching behind his face, he felt an embryonic giggle. Both feet and hands were tingling. Shall I say the next thing, or shall I yell it? (The scorpion was leaning back on the couch, balanced on his fists, his seat not quite on the cushion, an expression not quite on his face.) "DID YOU BEAT ON SOME KID'S HEAD WITH A PIPE…?" He'd made the choice to avoid laughing.
The scorpion sank to the cushion. The expression was terror. "I guess so?" the scorpion asked quietly. "I don't know…?"
Kid shook both hands hard, by the hips, to return the feeling. He heard one of the people beside him creak a floor board and catch breath.
"Look," he said to John. Milly, behind him, seemed more frightened than the scorpion on the couch. Little Jommy had an intent expression of cold interest. "Why don't you people just get the fuck out of here, all right?"
"Um …" John's thumbs had gone beneath the lapels with the rest of his fingers. "You know we haven't had a… trial or anything." He glanced at the scorpion. "Mildred said maybe Wally started it, you know—"
"I didn't see it," Milly reiterated. "Somebody just told—"
Kid breathed in, and was still surprised that it cut the ribbon of her whisper like scissors. "You all get out."
"Now we're not trying to…" John began; Milly, Jommy, and the others had all started for the door. He let go his lapels and followed.
"What'd you do with Wally, huh?" Kid called.
"Huh?" John stopped a moment. "We just left—"
"No," Kid interrupted. "No, don't tell me about it!" He kneaded one fist in the other. Feeling was beginning to return. The gesture sent John pushing against the people in front of him to get out of the room, beating nervously against his leg.
The scorpion on the couch looked very miserable. Clutching his lamp, or on the balcony crying; Kid thought: He's looked miserable every time I've ever noticed him.
"Shit!" Kid said. (Outside, he heard the door close behind the commune deputation.)