“We’re going right,” Glass said.
Kid felt distinctly they were going wrong. But distrust of his distinct feelings had become second nature. He walked, waiting, beside them.
“See,” Glass said, surprising Kid from his reverie, maybe twenty minutes later, “This is that place between Brisbain North and Brisbain South. Told you we’re going right.”
Two canyon walls collapsed inward upon one another, obliterating the time between.
“What?” asked Kamp.
“We’re going right,” Glass said. “Up to Mr. Calkins’.”
Lamps on three consecutive corners worked.
They squinted and blinked at one another after blocks of darkness.
“I guess,” Kamp said, jocularly, “it must be pretty hard for anybody to navigate after dark in the city.”
“You learn,” Kid said.
“What?”
What sort of accent do I have? “I said ‘You learn.’”
“Oh.”
Ahead, black was punctured by a streetlamp at least five blocks off, flickering through branches of some otherwise invisible tree.
“You fellows ever have any trouble on the street?”
“Yeah,” Kid said.
“What part of the city,” Kamp asked. “You know, I want to know what neighborhoods to stay out of. Was it over where we were? The colored area, Jackson?”
“Right outside of Calkins’,” Kid said.
“Did you get robbed?”
“No. I was just minding my own business. Then this bunch of guys jumped out and beat shit out of me. They didn’t have anything better to do, I guess.”
“Did you ever find out who it was?”
“Scorpions,” Kid said. (Glass chuckled again.) “But that was before I started running.”
“Scorpions are about the only thing in Bellona you got to worry about,” Glass said. “Unless it’s some nut with a rifle in an upstairs window or on the roof who decides to pick you off.”
“—because he doesn’t have anything better to do,” Kid finished.
Kamp took a breath in the dark. “You say the neighborhood up here, around Roger’s, is really bad?”
“About as bad as anyplace else,” Kid said.
“Well,” Kamp reflected, “I guess it was a pretty good idea to get you guys to come up with me, now.”
He is using his fear to use me, Kid reflected, and said nothing. Ten dollars for the walk? Kid wondered how much this paralleled the genesis of the protection racket in the park commune. He put his fingertips in his pockets, hunched his shoulders, grinned at the night and thought: Is this how a dangerous scorpion walks? He swung his steps a bit wider.
Kamp coughed, and said very little for the next quarter-hour.
…am a marauder in the internal city, tenuous as the dark shaken on itself with a footstep, eyeblink, heartbeat. Intrigued by the way his fear has given me purpose, I swagger down the labyrinth of least resistance. (Where is the sound?) There is a sound like glass and sand, or a finger turning in the channels of the ear. I acknowledge my own death with an electrified tongue, wanting to cry. These breaths I leave here disperse like apparitions of laughter I am too terrified to release.
Which was the conclusion of the reverie he’d begun before: but could not remember its beginning.
“Do you know how far along the wall here the gate is?” Kamp asked.
“The wall makes your voice sound funny in the dark, don’t it?” Glass said.
“Won’t we be able to see some light from the house?” Kamp asked.
Kid asked: “They still got light?”
They walked.
“There,” Kid said. “I see something—” stumbling at the curb edge. “…hey, watch—!” but did not fall. He recovered to Kamp’s nervous laugh. He thinks, Kid thought, something almost jumped out at us. Only my eyes are bandaged in darkness. The rest of my body swerves in light.
“Yes,” Kamp said. “We’re here.”
Between the newels, through the brass bars and shaggy pine, light slid into the crevices of Glass’s face (sweating; Kid was surprised) and dusted Kamp’s that was simply very pale.
I thought I was the only one scared to death, Kid thought. My luck, on my dumb face it doesn’t show.
“José,” Kamp called. “José, it’s Mike Kamp. I’m back for the night. José,” Kamp explained somewhat inanely, “is the man Roger has on the gate.”
K-k-klank: the lock (remotely controlled?) opened and bars swung inches in.
“Well,” Kamp put his hands in his pockets. “I certainly want to thank you guys for—Oh.” His hands came out. “Here you go.” He riffled through his wallet, held it up to his eyes. “Got to see what I have here, now…” He took out two bills.
Glass said, “Thanks,” when he got his.
“Well,” Kamp said again. “Thanks again. Well now. If I don’t see you before, Kid, I’ll see you in three Sundays.” He pushed the gate. “Do you fellows want to come—”
“No,” Kid said, and realized Glass had gotten himself ready to say yes.
“All right.” K-k-klank. “Good night now.”
Glass shifted from one foot to the other. “Night.” Then he said: “Those curbs are too much in all this dark shit. Let’s go down the middle of the street.”
“Sure.”
They stepped off the sidewalk and started back.
You’ll get to see what it looks like inside in a couple of weeks, Kid thought of saying and didn’t. He also thought of asking why Glass was a scorpion, how long he’d been, and what he’d done before.
They did not talk.
Kid constructed the stumps of a dozen conversations, and heard each veer into some mutually embarrassing area, and so abandoned it. Once it occurred to him Glass was probably indulging in the same process: for a while he pondered what Glass might want to know about him: that too became fantasized converse and, like the others, embarrassing. So their silent intercourse moved to another subject.
“All this walking ain’t worth five bucks,” Glass said at the North-South connection.
“Here.” Kid held out his bill, crumpled by the time in his fist (the crisp points had blunted with perspiration). “It probably ain’t worth ten either. But I don’t need it.”
“Thanks,” Glass said. “Hey, thanks, man.”
He was both surprised and amused that the interchange released him from his preoccupation with who Glass was.
They ambled the black street into the city, neither moving to illuminate his projector, in memoriam—Kid realized—to the sun.
How long had they been? Three hours? More? The distance between then and now was packed full of time during which his furious mind had prodded the outsides of a myriad fantasies and (if he were asked he would have said) nothing had happened. Thoughts of madness: Perhaps those moments of miscast reality or lost time were the points (during times when nothing happened) when the prodding broke through. The language that happened on other muscles than the tongue was better for grasping these. Things he could not say wobbled in his mouth, and brought back, vividly in the black, how at age four he had sat in the cellar, putting into his mouth, one after the other, blue, orange, and pink marbles, to see if he could taste the colors.
They passed another lamp.
Glass’s face was dry.
The way anywhere in this city was obviously to drift; Kid drifted, on kinesthetic memory. To try consciously for destination was to come upon street signs illegible through smoke, darkness, or vandalism, wrongly placed, or missing.
When they crossed Jackson, Kid said, “I want to go back to the party.”
“Sure, motherfucker.” Glass grinned. “Why not? You really want to?”
“Just to see what happened.”
Glass sighed.
Across the pavement, at the other end of the block, Kid saw the dim trapezoid. “Light’s still on.”
Of the cluster of three lanterns inside the door, one still burned. Inside, the doors to the hall were closed.
“Don’t sound like nobody’s there.”
“Open the door,” Kid said because Glass was ahead of him.
Glass pushed, stepped in; Kid stepped after.
Only two lanterns were working: a third, in the corner, guttered. The meeting room was empty; the party’s detritus lay in ruin and shadow.
Near the one-winged statue, fallen among the prickly plants, the tip of the barrel on his belly, the butt on the linoleum, the black guard whom they had talked to outside lay on his back and snored. The tracked plaster, overturned chairs, and scattered bottles momentarily brought Kid an image of a drunken shooting, the barrel swinging around the room moments before he’d passed out—but he saw no bullet holes.