“Come on, come on,” Kid herded them in. “He’ll be finished in a minute.”
Raven shook himself, pushed himself back into his pants. “Yeah, I’m finished.”
This has been planned, Kid thought smugly. This couldn’t just be happening.
Raven left—
“I’ll shoo anybody else out,” Kid said.
—then ducked back in the door. “Hey, I meant to run some water in the sink, you know…?”
“Later,” Kid said.
“Okay.” He left again.
June was looking out the window. Eddy was watching her and pulling the hair at the back of his neck. “What did you want, huh?”
June turned.
“I figured,” Eddy said, “you would all get out. I mean I thought Mom and Daddy would take you and Bobby to another…city…”
“You didn’t tell him,” June asked, “about Bobby?”
“I didn’t know he was your brother until three minutes ago,” Kid said. “June pushed Bobby down an elevator shaft and broke his neck, accidentally. He’s dead.” And immediately George’s face filled his mind, obliterating all other reactions.
“Mother’s very sick,” June said. “She really isn’t well at all. And I’m worried about Daddy. He goes out to work every day, you know; in spite of it all. But sometimes now he doesn’t come home for three, or four days…”
“Huh?” Eddy leaned back against the washing machine. “What…?” which was not a reaction to what June was saying at all.
“I’m so worried I don’t…know what to do. I swear…!” Though her sentences were as halting as before, she spoke each fragment more firmly. “Since you’ve gone, it’s all…everything has just fallen apart. Everything, Eddy. Since you went, it’s like…like the plug was pulled out and everything ran out. All of it.”
“Jesus Christ…” Eddy looked at the floor and shook his head. “Bobby…?”
She circles, Kid thought, she circles, magnificently banal, denying guilt or innocence: if only in her single-mindedness, she is heroic!
Biting both lips, June shook her head. “Are you going to come home?”
And, like an afterthought: She is only a seventeen-year-old, over-protected god. (Somewhere, George leered.)
, “Well,” Eddy said, “what for…?” Then he said, “Bobby’s dead? And Dad doesn’t come there anymore?”
“Some,” she said. “Oh, he comes back…”
Eddy looked up. “What would I come back for?”
“Oh, if you got some nice clothes, and a haircut and stuff, and told them you were sorry…”
“Sorry for what! He said he was going to kill me if I came back!”
“But that’s just because—”
“They start it,” Eddie said. “They start it every time I go back there, and I can’t stop it. I don’t know how. That’s why I went away…”
“But if you said you were sorry for the way you acted—”
“Sorry for what? Yeah, I’m sorry that every time I go back there they start needling me until I blow up and then they blow up right back! I’m sorry Momma’s sick, I’m sorry Dad’s all upset. I’m sorry Bobby’s dead.” Eddy frowned, and after a second, he asked, “You killed him…?”
June began to cry, silently, eyes streaming.
“Oh, hey, I’m…look, I didn’t mean…” By his hips his hands closed and opened and closed with the motion Kid recognized as the one that had preceded Copperhead’s fury.
“You could take us away…!” Her crying burst full. What Kid thought she said through it was “…from this horrible place!” But with her sobs she was as difficult to understand as some Jackson black. Finally she clamped her mouth, rubbed her eyes, sniffed. “I just wish someone would…take me away!”
“Why doesn’t Dad go?”
“He doesn’t think Mother will. And…I don’t even think he wants to.”
“You take them.”
“I’m just a girl,” June said. “I can’t do anything. I can’t do anything at all!” She rubbed her forehead on the heels of her hands.
Eddy’s hands turned over on his knees. “They wouldn’t go before?” Eddy said. “I couldn’t make them go!”
June lifted her face from her palms. “What are you doing here?” she demanded, softly. “Oh, Eddy, please come home! What are you doing in a place like this? This is just…here…awful!”
“What?”
“I mean,” she said, “what do you do here?”
“Mm,” Eddy shrugged, “we don’t do too much. We all just live here, the scorpions. You know? We’re all together. Here. That’s all.”
“You don’t,” she began tentatively, “rob people on the street, and beat up people and take their money, and things like that…do you?”
“Naw,” Eddy said, indignant. “Naw, we don’t do things like that. Why do you think we do things like that?”
“That’s what people say,” June said. “Sometimes in the newspaper, it says things like that.”
“The newspaper says a lot of things that aren’t true, you know? You know that. Besides, now the Kid’s a friend of the guy who runs the paper, he’s having a party for the Kid, and we’re all going up there. So the paper will probably do a little better by us, huh?”—this last to Kid.
Kid, by the door, with folded arms, shrugged.
“What do you do, then?”
“I don’t know,” Eddy said. “We make runs.”
“What’s that?”
“You know…” Eddy looked at Kid. “Kid is the boss here; he takes us out on runs.”
“What do you do on a…run?”
“The guys all get together and we…go some place, check it out; get stuff, stuff we want, stuff we’d like to have.”
“Like food?”
“Not food! You don’t make food runs if you’re a scorpion, unless things have really gotten up tight. You go for other things…”
“Like what?”
“Stuff.”
“And bring it back here?”
“If it’s something we want.”
“You don’t look like you have very much here…?” June said.
“We don’t need much.”
“Then what do you do on these runs?”
“Well, we…” Eddy shrugged.
“We break things,” Kid said. “Mainly. And if there’re people around who don’t like it, we rough them up.”
“Is that what you do?” June asked Eddy.
“Sometimes. Yeah, sometimes we do that. But most of the places we go, there isn’t anybody there. The people you do find, they’re so scared they usually split.” He looked as though he was trying to remember something. “Oh, yeah. We keep things quiet if somebody has a problem and comes to us. That doesn’t happen too much. People are scared of us. So they don’t act up.”
“That’s what other people call our protection business,” Kid explained. “Only we don’t protect anybody.”
“Yeah,” Eddy attested.
“But why…?”
“We’d do something else,” Kid said, “if there was something else to do—”
“—’Cause it’s…”Eddy began. “Look, I’m a scorpion and I like being a scorpion. It’s better than anything else I’ve done. It’s a tough, dangerous world out there, and we gotta survive…you know? People are scared of us, and maybe they shouldn’t be. But it makes it easier. To survive. The reason I’m a scorpion is because when a bunch of us walk down a street, and somebody sees us, they think—” Eddy snapped his fingers—“yeah. We come along and we get the first pick of whatever is there; and if anybody tries to keep it from us, they better watch out. We’re together, you see? For one another. If one scorpion gets in trouble, then the nest comes down and swarms! If something comes at the nest, then you’ll have scorpions from all over. The guys here don’t care who you are, where you come from, or what you do; they’re for you…like a family. When you’re a scorpion, you know you’re part of something that’s important, that means something, that makes people stop, and then think…You know…?”
In the silence, June looked confused.
“Is that why you’re a scorpion?” Kid stood in the doorway and shook his head. “Shit…Hey!”
Her eyes snapped at him—
“You haven’t found George yet?”