Kid nodded.
She folded her arms across the full, faded sweatshirt. “This place is—” she looked around the rubble—“is sort of nice.”
“You come over here to see Denny?”
She looked down at her baggy elbow. “What do you want with him? I mean what are you—” she tightened her arms—“going to do with him? I want him back.”
Jack the Ripper glanced across the fireplace, glanced away. Kid thought: She has learned, when she lived like this, to hold such converse in a space full of people.
“I want him. What do you need him for?”
He thought she was going to cry, but she just coughed.
“He just isn’t that smart. Those poems you wrote? I read them, all of them. When I was in school, we read poetry and stuff and I liked it. I was the smartest person in my class—one of them, anyway. Denny won’t read them because he can’t even say the words. You ever hear him try to read the newspaper? But I read them. The part about me bringing you the whisky when you were in the bathtub washing off the blood, and saying good-bye? I read about that and I understood it. But the stuff in there about him, if he read it, he wouldn’t even get it I bet. What do you want him for, huh? Why don’t you give him back?” She began to look to either side. “I’m sorry.”
“I don’t keep him from seeing you.”
“I know,” she said. “I’m sorry. I’m gonna go.”
She dropped her arms and went around him to go up the stairs.
Lanya, in jeans and blouse, stood in the doorway. The two girls looked at one another. Then the one in the blue sweatshirt sighed. Lanya glanced after her, then looked back at Kid.
Kid frowned.
Jack the Ripper, by the fire now, looked over, his smile between sympathy and complicity, and shook his head.
Kid walked up the steps. “You just get up?”
“Only seconds, I’m sure, after you did. I heard you talking to her when we came out on the porch; so I decided I’d come out and listen. She seems like a nice kid.”
He shrugged. “Denny still asleep?”
“Nope.”
Kid sat on the step below her. They both had to move legs when Devastation came down to wander over to the fire, to stand with his hands in his back pockets.
“He got up with me,” Lanya explained. “We were going to come out and surprise you while you were wandering around looking preoccupied. I told him we couldn’t do it if you were anywhere near a pencil and paper. But then, when we got to the porch, we saw you talking to her.”
“Where’s Denny?”
“He saw her, covered his mouth with both hands—I thought he was going to blurt out something, God knows what—ducked behind me, and ran. I’m not sure if he’s locked himself in the bathroom, or just split. No, the bathroom doesn’t have a lock, does it? She didn’t see him—he made enough noise!” She rested her chin on her fist. “The poor girl. I feel sorry for her.”
“Mean little bastard, isn’t he?”
“You think so?”
“He is to her. He is to you. To me. I can take it.” Kid shrugged. “What are you going to do when he decides one day when you come to see him he doesn’t want to see you?”
“Take it, I suppose.” She sighed. “He really should have talked to her. How old is he?”
“Fifteen. And she’s seventeen.”
“You should tell him to talk to her. If they were really all that close.”
“Shit,” Kid said. “I never argue with people I screw. She seems to think there isn’t anything to say. I don’t blame her for wishing there was.”
“Maybe.” Lanya sounded doubtful. “I sort of took a liking to her, just listening. She lives in the girls’ house? Now that is a strange bunch. I’ve been there a few times.”
“Dykes?”
“No more than here. Do you think she’d be interested in helping with the school?”
“You’re just going to get yourself in trouble.”
Lanya laughed. “It’s so nice to know there’re one or two things about which I am more worldly than you are! I think it’s fine to have an occasional knock-down, drag-out…discussion with people you’re screwing. I never quarrel with the people the people I’m screwing are screwing. Or were screwing. I make a point of being on the best terms possible. Even if you have a knack for it, sometimes it takes a lot of work. But the trouble you avoid—” she turned down her mouth and tapped her knee three times—“is not to be believed!” Then she tugged his hair. “Let’s go look for him.”
But Denny had left the house.
Back in the yard the fire had been completed. Lanya volunteered to go with Priest, Thruppence and Angel to the liquor store. When they came back, Kid had taken the door out of the back room and set it up on some boxes for a table in the yard. Others had begun food.
“Come on. I want to go back up in the loft.”
“Sure.” She squeezed his hand and followed.
When they had lain together, when they had talked quietly a while, when they had begun to make love, he was surprised to find her somewhat listless and distracted; small movements she made silently angered him. Till she said, “Hey, what’s the matter? You seem so far away. Come on back,” which returned the whole thing to the realm of the humorous.
After that it was very good.
After coming, while he lay there and held her, the smell woke him. His waking woke her. He lifted his head at the sound. A third plate, in raised hands, was pushed over the loft edge. Then Denny climbed up, crawled across them, and began to take off his clothes. “We can eat up here,” he whispered, as though they might still be sleeping with opened eyes.
There were lots of frankfurters on the plates.
And vegetable hash.
“Where’d you get off to?”
Denny shrugged. “Just wandering around. Thirteen’s got a place right down the block and across the street. Pretty nice.” He picked up a frank in his fingers and bit. Juice ran down his forearm and dripped from his elbow to his knee.
Kid licked it off. “You’re gonna gimme a hard-on,” Denny said and pushed one of the plates to Lanya. “Here. You wanna eat?”
“Sure.” She rubbed her eyes and pulled out of Kid’s arms. “Where…oh, hey. Thanks!” to the bite of Denny’s he offered from his hand.
Remembering not a moment of grace, but a moment laced with it, I am thrown back on a present where only the intensity of the senses can justify this warmth, the look of shadow on her shoulder, light on his hip, a reflection on the blackened glass, light up from below. That is not as good. What I have fallen from, perfected by memory into something only possible, I do not want to falsify anymore than that. Now there are only the eyes and the hands to fill out.
They drank some of the brandy he’d had her get for Tak. (“You won’t believe my dress, either of you. I know you’ve seen it, Kid. You still won’t believe it.”) She said she was going to go home soon, but fell asleep. Somebody yelling in the kitchen once woke them hours later and they all made love again in the dark.
For the second time, from an urge that crossed experimentation with duty, he sucked Denny off; it took twice as long as before. “Don’t you think you ought to rest?” Lanya finally suggested.
“Yeah,” Denny said. “You rest some.”
So he closed his eyes and racked it up to foibles. Still, it was the best time he remembered. He drifted toward sleep, only sad he remembered so little, and closed his eyes.
When the window had gone indigo, Kid opened them. Lanya was kneeling up. “I’m going now,” she whispered. So they crawled over Denny, to find their clothes. “But I want some coffee,” she mouthed.
“There should be boxes around,” Kid said. “We just don’t have any pot.”
“That’s all right. Come on.”
In the kitchen, Thirteen and Smokey with three black scorpions, Raven, Thruppence, and D-t, up the night, sat talking. Kid was surprised when, from the banter, he realized Lanya knew all their names: Even Thruppence’s. (He’d had to ask that one several times: “Thruppence, man. Thruppence. That’s English for three cents.”) And “D-t,” he found out, stood not for Delirium tremens but Double-time. A bucket was the only thing really clean so Lanya filled it to make boiled coffee.
“You gonna drink that?” D-t asked her.