The scorpion bounced a little and blinked.
"Aw, shit!" Kid turned and walked out of the room.
Three steps down the hall, Kid heard a noise behind him, and turned.
Nightmare swung around the door jamb, an incongruous grin on his face. "Man, you're too fuckin much!" Nightmare pranced, jingling, in the hall, slapped the wall. "Really! You're too much."
Right behind him, Copperhead came out and asked, "Hey, what you want to do with Dollar in there?" He thumbed back in the room.
So that's his name, Kid thought (Dollar?), while asking, "Huh?"
"You want me to rough him up a little for you?" Copperhead asked. "Yeah, I'll do it. I don't mind doing shit like that. I mean if he. goes around hitting people over the head, he's gonna get us in trouble, you know? You want me to work him over?"
Kid made a disgusted face. "No! You don't have to do anything like—"
"If you want me to," Copperhead announced over Nightmare's shoulder, "I'll kill the little white bastard. Or I could just work him over to scare him, you know…"
"No," Kid repeated. "No, I don't want you to do that."
"Maybe later…?" Copperhead said. "When you thought about it?"
"Well, not now," Kid said. "Just leave him alone now."
Nightmare laughed as Copperhead went back into the room. "What were you trying to do, huh? Man, you are too much!"
"Just find out if he did it. That's all."
Nightmare held his laughter in his mouth; it bellied his cheeks till he swallowed it. "Did you find out?"
From inside, there was a sudden crack and a cry. Voices silenced around the sound of loud sipping:
"Now the Kid told me I'm supposed to wait till later to work you over, cocksucker. But don't give me any shit, you hear? You go around breaking people's heads, I think I'm gonna have some fun breaking yours. Now get out of here."
"I… guess so," Kid said.
"I mean," Nightmare shook his open palms in front of Kid's hips, "I was just wondering if you found out. I wasn't there. You was, right? So you should know if he done it or not." He backed away, grinning.
"Hey!"
"What?"
"Come here. I want to talk to you."
Nightmare's arm folded low on his stomach, then raised up his broad chest so that the chains looped across his forearms. "Sure." He tilted his head, warily. "What you want to talk about?"
"I just want to know what — hey, you come on with me."
"Sure," Nightmare said; then his tongue went into the side of his jaw, licking for something among back teeth.
They went up the hall and onto the service porch. Nightmare, arms still folded, stood in the doorway squinting. Dulling smoke hung only yards beyond the screening. Kid asked: "What are you trying to do, huh?"
"What do you mean?" Nightmare's forearms slid across one another to tighten toward a knot.
"I mean you. And Dragon Lady and all. How come I suddenly get to be the boss about everything?"
"You do it pretty well."
"But I want to know why."
"Well." Nightmare looked at the floor and let himself fall against the jamb. "It's gotta be somebody, right?" Boards around them creaked.
"But what about you?"
"What about me?" The boards creaked again, though Nightmare hadn't moved. "What you want to know about me?"
"Just why, that's all. You want a new boss — why not one of the spades, or something. I mean what's with you?"
Nightmare rolled his wet, red underlip back into his mouth, and nodded. His left eye, Kid noticed again, had the slightest cast.
The water puddling in the sink shook beneath the crusty faucet.
"I thought it would be sort of interesting to see what would happen if one of you brainy, crazed types was running things for a while. All the brainy niggers in Bellona had sense enough to get out. We don't got too much to choose from so we might as well make it interesting, right? I ain't gonna stay in this fucking fog hole the rest of my life. It's a real gas being Nightmare, you know? But I'm gonna get back to St. Louis, get me a little foreign car, do some work in the gym, and put two or three ladies back to work for me, and I'm gonna be Larry H. Jonas all over again. And I hope I don't ever hear about no Nightmare no more. If somebody shouts it out on Sixth Street, I'm gonna walk down Olive. I've done too many things here I'd just as soon leave here." He stood up. "You strip off the Nightmare, and I got me a name. I know people. In St. Louis." His hand slid up to his shoulder, big fingers working. "So I figured I'd leave you here. Besides, Denny likes you. That little cocksucker's got a head on his shoulders. Not like some of these dumb nuts. You don't look like you mind." Among the links sagging on his chest, bright beads caught more light than there was to catch, winking and dying and winking.
"Hey, that scar on your shoulder?" Kid asked. "You and Dragon Lady getting on pretty good?"
"Like a bitch. Sometimes." Nightmare's face twisted a moment about his broken tooth. "And then sometimes—" he frowned—"well, you know." After the faucet dripped three more times, he turned to leave, but paused to look over his shoulder. "You want to talk about anything else?"
"No." Kid said. "That's all."
Nightmare left.
Across the hall was a room Kid had never been in. He opened the door.
Dollar, silhouetted before the torn window shade, turned. The lion peered by his hip from the sill. The taste of burning at the back of Kid's throat flooded forward, into an amazing stench: on one of the overlapping mattresses was a charred halo around a crater two feet across of ashes and burned cotton. Newspaper and magazine pictures had been pasted over one wall; many had been ripped off again.
One of the three blacks sitting on the floor glanced at him. The little blond girl shrugged her pea jacket back up her shoulders and pulled it across her breasts.
"What are you… I mean, hey, man…?" Dollar stepped up unsteadily. "Kid, look, you're supposed to be an all-right guy, huh? You don't gotta hurt me. Please? Man, I ain't never done nothing like that before in my life, you know?… You want me to…?" He took another step. "Hey… what are you trying to do? Huh?" His hand strayed in the chains around his neck, twisted in them.
"Whatever it is," Kid said, "it looks like I'm doing it." All the muscles in his face felt tight: he went back into the hall.
Noise was coming from the front room. Nightmare's laughter rose. Dragon Lady's cut across it.
As if they'd suddenly heated, Kid pawed beneath the back of his vest and, from his belt, pulled loose the books. Both were creased. The face of one was rubbed and dirty. So was the back of the other.
"Hey, come on, come on, sweetheart!" Nightmare hollered. "What are you trying to do to me, huh? What are you trying to…" and exploded in laughter.
"I just asked," Dragon Lady announced with hysterical deliberation, "if you wanted some more God-damned coffee…" The last syllable became a shriek, tumbling in counterpoint to Nightmare's laugh, till both splashed into the cistern of mirth.
Kid took refuge in the bathroom.
Pants about his knees, he sat. A fugitive bubble in the gut cramped his abdomen; the cramp faded. He broke wind and knew he was empty.
He turned the books over, flipped through one, then the other. He wanted to read one poem, at least, through. A minute later, he realized he'd actually been deliberating not which poem, but in which book to read it. Was the discomfort in his belly a ghost of the gas? No.
A book in either hand, he joggled them. Time had been spent writing these. The time was mornings with his forehead wrinkled and the grass obligingly silent beyond the blanket's edge; was evenings at the bar with candlelight scoring bottles with their different contents at different heights like pistons in an engine; was a broken curb on either side while he sat with the ballpoint burning his middle finger. Writing, he had not thought to retrieve any of it. But the prospect of publication had somehow convinced him magic was in process that would return to him, in tacto (not memorium), some of what the city had squandered. The conviction was now identified by its fraudulence, before the inadequate objects. But as it died, kicking in his gut, spastic and stuttering, he knew it had been as real and unquestioned as any surround: air to a bird, water to a fish, earth to a worm.