"I think getting your ass full of buckshot is pretty stupid for any reason."
"Fine!" Bunny pointed an admonishing finger. "You just stick to that idea and keep momma happy. One honorable man!" Bunny's hand returned to the cup. "Yea, even for the want of one honorable man. Or woman— I'm not prejudiced. That's really what Bellona needs." Bunny regarded Kid. "You look like a sensitive sort. Haven't you ever thought that? Lord knows, we have everything else. Wouldn't it be nice to know that somewhere around there was one good and upright individual — one would do, for contrast."
"Well, we've got Calkins," Kid said. "He's a pillar of the community."
Bunny grimaced. "Darling, he owns that den of iniquity in there where I display my pale and supple body every evening. Teddy just runs it. No, Mr C won't pass, I'm afraid."
"You got that church person," Pepper offered.
"Reverend Amy?" Bunny grimaced again. "No, dear, she's sweet, in her own strange way. But that's absolutely not what I mean. That's the wrong feeling entirely."
"Not that church," Pepper countered. "The other one, over on the other side of the city."
"You mean the monastery?" Bunny was pensive as Pepper nodded. "I really don't know that much about it. Which speaks well for it, I'm sure."
"Yeah, someone mentioned that to me once," Kid said, and remembered it was Lanya.
"It would be nice to think that, somewhere inside its walls, a truly good person walked and pondered. Can you imagine it? Within the city limits? Perhaps the abbot or the mother superior or whatever they call it? Meanwhile the scorpions play down at the Emboriky."
"Maybe if you went to the monastery, somebody'd shoot at you too."
"How sad," Bunny looked at the jug again. "How probable. That wouldn't make me happy at all."
"Where is this place?" Kid asked; with the memory occurred the fantasy that Lanya, with her curiosity about it, might have gone there.
"I don't actually know," Bunny said. "Like everything else in town, you just hear about it until it bumps into you. You have to put yourself at the mercy of the geography, and hope that down-hills and up-hills, working propitiously with how much you feel like fighting and how much you feel like accepting, manage to get you there. You'll find it eventually. As we are all so tired of hearing, this is a terribly small city."
"I heard it's on the other side of town," Pepper said. "Only I don't even know which side of town this is."
Kid laughed and stood up. "Well, I'm gonna go." He drained the wine, and tongued the bitter aftertaste. Wine first thing in the morning, he pondered. Well, he'd done worse. 'Thanks for breakfast."
"You're going to go? But honey, I have enough in here for brunch, lunch, high tea, and dinner!"
"Come on," Pepper said. "Take another glass. Bunny don't mind the company."
"Sorry." Kid moved his jar from Bunny's reach. "Thanks." He smiled. "I'll come back another time."
"I'll only let you go if you promise me." Bunny suddenly reached for Kid's chest. "No, no, don't jump. Mother's not going to rape you." Bunny put a finger beneath the chain that crossed Kid's belly. "We have something in common, you and I." With the other hand, Bunny lifted the white silk to show the optical chain around a slim, veined neck. "Nightmare and I. Madame Brown and Nightmare. You and Madame Brown. I wonder if I betray it by mentioning it." Bunny laughed.
Kid, unsure why, felt his cheeks heat and the rest of his body cool. I can't have absorbed the custom of reticence so completely in so little time, he thought. And still wanted anxiously and urgently to leave.
Bunny was saying, "I'll tell your girl friend what you said if I see her. You know even if you did have one of those… ahem, smiles I find just too irresistible, I'd still deliver your message. Because then, you see, I'd want you to like me, and to come back. Doing something you wanted me to do would be one way to get that. Just because I'm not a good person—" Bunny winked—"you mustn't think I'm a bad one."
"Yeah. Sure. Thanks." Kid tugged away from Bunny's finger. "I'll see you."
"Good-bye!" Pepper called from the counter where he'd gone for more wine.
Now the street sign said RUBY and PEARL. The ladder and the lady in greens were gone.
He pondered and compared directions, dismissed the park, looked where the mist was thickest (down "Pearl"), and walked. Lanya? remembered his calling, an echo in the dim, an after image on the ear. Here? In this city? He smiled, and thought about holding her. He sorted his dubious recollections, wondering where he was going. It's only, he thought, when we're stripped of purpose that we know who we are.
His missing name was a sudden ache and, suddenly, he wanted it, wanted it with the same urge that had made him finally accept the one Tak had given. Without it he could search, survive, make word convections in somebody else's notebook, commit fanciful murder, strive for someone else's survival. With it, just walking, just being might be easier. A name, he thought, is what other people call you. And that's exactly where it's important and where it's not. The Kid? He thought: I'm going to be thirty in a mouthful of winter and sun. How unimportant then that I can't remember it. How important what my not being able to remember it means. Maybe I'm somebody famous? No, I do remember too well what I've done. I wish I felt cut off, alone, an isolate society of one, like everybody else. Alienation? That isn't what it's about. I'm too used to being liked.
Damn! He wished he had his notebook; but before the feeling, as he listened, no word rose to begin the complex fixing. Fingering the blades at his waist, hearing, not feeling, an edge rasp his calloused thumb, he turned another corner.
Car motors were so unfamiliar that he was frightened, until he actually saw the bus. It hauled itself around the corner and into the whitewashed stop-markings. Clap-clap, the doors. He looked at the balding driver squinting out the windshield as if for traffic.
Why not, he thought, and climbed the worn rubber steps.
"You got a transfer?"
"Hey, I'm sorry. If you need fare or something—" He stepped back.
But the driver motioned him on. "This is a transfer point. I thought you had a transfer, maybe. Come on." Clap-clap: the bus rocked forward.
An old man slept in the back seat, hat down, collar up.
A woman in the front sat with her hands crossed on the top of her pocketbook. A younger woman with a large natural stared out the window. A boy with a smaller one sat nervously just behind the back door, toeing one sneaker with the other.
A couple — he with knees wide, sunk in the seat with his arms folded, his face set belligerently, she with legs together, her face registering something between fear and boredom — were making a point of not looking at him.
Simultaneously he realized that there was no seat from which he could watch everybody, and that he was the only non-black on the bus. He decided to give up the old man and took the next to the last seat.
Where am I — but wouldn't think: going? He looked over the bars on the seat backs to the blunt nose and lips, the sharp chin, profiled below the billowy ball.
He watched the buildings she watched go headlong in goalless motion.
She blinked.
He was only nervous at the turnings, and had to quell the absurd impulse to go ask the driver where the bus was headed. The headlong, with its implication of easy return, was safe. The bus turned again, and he tried to enjoy being lost: but they were going parallel to their first route.