…well, things are getting a little tight in the park." He glanced back out in the hall. "We got some real funny people around. Although it looks a little crowded here too." He decided on his pockets. "You guys getting hungry yet? I probably shouldn't mention it, but John and Milly are quite beholden to you since you quit hitting them up for care packages."
"An oversight," I said.
"Shouldn't have mentioned it."
I turned back under the sink, looked for something to do but couldn't really find anything. So I kept looking.
"You guys seem to have a real thing going here. I'm not happy with what's going on around me where I am. I want to know where I get my transfer, where I can buy a ticket—"
again. I called him every kind of name I could, between fits of laughing. Lady of Spain insisted: "Look, he's got a gun!" nowhere near as drunk as she'd been. "Kid, let's get out of here!" But I kept up. He watched. Once he moved to rest the butt on the sill, the barrol pointing straight up. I think he was grinning. Finally we left.
The city is a map of violences anticipated. The armed dwellers in the Emboriki, the blacks surrounding them, the hiss from a turned tap that has finally stopped trickling, the time it takes a group who go out to come back with bags of canned goods, packaged noodles, beans, rice, speghetti — each is an emblem of inalienable, coming shock. But the clashes that do occur are all petty, disappointing, minor, inconclusive, above all stupid, as though the city prevents any real anxiety's ever resolving. And the result? All humanity here astounds; all charity here is graced.
Lady of Spain and I reached the nest, still laughing, astounded we were alive.
In the back yard, Lanya told me she had taken Denny to the museum—"for a couple of hours. We looked at all the paintings you especially liked — and Denny turned them right side up. So he could see them, of course." "Smug butch," I said. She said: "Who? Me?" And Denny began to laugh as though somehow the joke were really on the two of us, which had us both wondering. Then he said they'd wandered around, he taking her out to a place called Holland Lake. They crawled into bed beside me, and we talked till it grew light, Denny being the only one of us who doesn't realize how much easier that makes liking one another. And when Denny did a lot of talking, it finally put me to sleep — though I wanted to stay awake — and woke a little later, with them asleep too, in the familiar position.
We can survive so much.
And crawling between them (more comfortable, I guess, than the familiar position when all is said and done) went to sleep again till Lady of Spain and Risa, laughing out in the hall, woke us up; I hoped they would come in. But they didn't.
"Oh, man," I said. "I can't talk to you about shit like that now. I'm busy."
"Sure Kid," came out real quick, and he stopped leaning on the doorframe. "Maybe later. I'll just hang around… till you have some time."
D-t handed me the string. "Hey, thanks," I told D-t, "but I don't think I should pack that grease trap." So I didn't, but it was pretty much all right anyway.
Glanced back.
Frank was gone.
So we scrubbed out the grease-streaked bowl, more or less quiet, questioning such idiot work and finding the value — a chance to do something with D-t-disappeared, defined. Well, the sink wasn't dripping.
Something (I heard it) was happening in front of the house. I listened, surprised (looking at D-t look up at me), to somebody get up in the front room, run out of the front door—
"Uh-oh," I said. "Come on." We went into the hall together. D-t got ahead; I pushed by him out the front door; stopped on the forth step.
"Jesus Christ!" Frank shouted. "Hey, watch it—!"
"You want a chain, huh?" Copperhead, crouched, wound the links once more around his fist, pulled back, and swung again. "I'm gonna wrap this one around your fuckin' neck!"
"God damn, man! Look, all I did was…!"
Some in the loose circle glanced up at me; so did Frank, then jumped back as Copperhead swung: "Hey—!"
Copperhead, concentrated as a pool player, raised his fist again.
"ALL RIGHT!" and I walked down the steps. "WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING?" which got everybody's attention except Copperhead's. "COPPERHEAD—! Cut It Out!" thinking: This is going to be the time when I have to tangle with him. Thinking also: It's just not worth it. But he hooked around and I snatched the end of his chain and yanked. He let go and snapped his fingers back. It must have hurt his hand because it sure as hell hurt mine.
I went up to Frank (who looked as scared of me as he was of Copperhead) and said, "What is this, huh? All right, what are you doing in this—"
"I didn't—" He started at some movement behind me.
I didn't turn. "I think you better get out of here." It must have been Copperhead in some feint. "Go on. Go on, now! Get going."
He started to say, "Um…" and I realized how used I was to people doing what I told them when they weren't doing anything else.
"Look," I said, "though you are making it harder and harder for me to remember it, so far, you have been my most accurate critic; therefore you deserve some consideration. I'm giving you that consideration now: Scoot!"
Frank turned, went gingerly between Fireball and Lady of Spain, who broke the circle for him.
I turned to Copperhead: "You must be really down on me, man. Because I'm always coming along to mess up your fun, right?"
"Aw, Kid—" Copperhead rubbed his beard with his wrist—"I was not going to hurt him."
"You were just going to scare him. Sure." I saw the story coming: Frank's annoying manner, too blunt questions, a jibe, a look; and a violence crystallized from the day's boredom.
Copperhead began to tell it to me, insistently. (I tossed him his chain and he caught and put it around his neck without breaking his sentence.) So I motioned him to come on and, half listening, went up the steps with him.
California came back this evening. Must have seen him three/five times before I noticed — we were on the back steps — he'd hung both a gold six-pointed star (Hebrew letters on it) and a black swastika (edged in silver) on his light-shield chain. Jack the Ripper, carrying on about something, started to call California "…a crazy Jew-bastard…" only he saw the star, the bent cross. I could hear the shape the unspoken epithet carved in the silence. Then the Ripper went on about something else. California, since he went away, has changed: his thin hands are tenser; his boney shoulders sit more forward; his blue eyes, between strings of his long hair, are wider and angrier. (How odd symbols are!) I think the change is like what I went through when I got my chain of prisms, mirrors, lenses… The Ripper's sensativity surprised me (he did call California a Jew-bastard five minutes later) but then, the derogatory terms we hurl around here with such seeming freedom are actually counters in a complicated game, and the point was the Ripper's. Penalties for misplay can grow huge — recall the beating Dollar took at Calkins'. The rewards? I suspect, in this landscape, they are just as huge. Am I just being pompous, or is the real and necessary information these epithets generate (making them a real and necessary part of Bellona's own language) the reminder that it is often just when we are most aware of the freedom of the field in which we move that our actions become most culture-bound?