“Sure. Bring it to a boil three times, then throw in a glass of cold water. The egg white will make it settle. Then you just pour it off into a pot and keep it hot,” for which purpose Smokey volunteered to clean the kettle.
“You just don’t let the Spider know you used up two of his good eggs to make that mess.”
“Shit,” Raven said, “everybody else use ’em.”
Kid and Lanya drank theirs black while the rest went through a confusion of powdered milk (someone remembered the box under the table), cup rinsing, and sugar.
“Now that’s nice coffee,” Raven (his top-knot, now, undone) admitted, gazing into the cup on the table. “It’s just as clear! I gotta remember me that.” He pouted heavy lips at the steam and shook his head. The hairy beachball swung side to side.
“Yeah,” Thirteen said back over his shoulder. “You gonna remember that, Smokey?” who nodded.
Cathedral and Filament had come in sleepily from the other room. Nine people stood drinking coffee in a space that was crowded with four.
“Now I’m just across the street and down the block,” Thirteen was saying. “On the top floor. Any of you guys come over who want to. Kid’ll tell you, he stayed in my place. I got so many scorpions around, you’d think I was running a nest. But I ain’t. I just like to be friendly, you know?”
“You want to stay,” Kid told Lanya as they left, “you just go back up in the loft. Nobody’s going to bother you.”
She rubbed the back of her neck. “There’re just some things I have to get done before school. Give Little Brother a hug for me.”
Nevertheless, as he walked her home, he was pretty sure what she wanted was another two hours sleep. He asked, “You coming back tonight?”
She squeezed his hand. “Nope. You two can come up and see me if you’ve got time. For a little while.” She squeezed his hand once more.
The gesture became an emblem of her nervous charm.
The paper that day said:
Sunday—July 14th, 1776.
They spent the night at Lanya’s.
The next day:
Sunday—June 16th, 2001.
That afternoon tire-colored Jack the Ripper, crouching before the open icebox whose light had just blown, whose insides were crammed, and whose enamel was streaked and stained, looked up and asked, “Say, when you gonna run?”
“Right now!” Inception, impulse, and decision had all fixed between Kid’s first word and his second. Kid grabbed the doorway, leaned into the next room and shouted, “WE’RE GONNA RUN…!”
D-t, Spider, Angel, Priest crowded in from the hallway.
California shucked quickly from the sleeping bag beside the couch.
Raven and Glass and Lady of Spain came into the kitchen.
Spitt pushed in through the scorpions crowding the doorway.
They swayed and moved their feet and looked uncomfortably serious.
“Come on,” Denny was saying as the others clattered down the front steps. “Hey, you! You gonna come? Get on out here.”
Within the house he had almost been able to imagine a lucid city. Now catatonic windows watched them stalk. Their boots crunched and thudded on the pavement. They hurried with lowered brows, staring out from under, looking left and right on the neutral avenues.
Kid remembered, later, breaking the plate window of the Second City Bank building.
Jack the Ripper danced on broken glass and cackled: “Man, we gonna bust up nigger-town, now!”
They didn’t.
They shuffled and poked at papers and files and adding machines. Copperhead turned over a desk and stood looking at it, breathing hard, a full minute.
They found neither money nor locked boxes; the only things in the money drawers were paperclips, gummed reinforcements, rubber-bands.
Kid climbed back over the brass bars of a teller’s cage (the top was a strip of greasy filth; a lot was on his hands now), dropped to echoing marble, and walked to a group with their backs to him. He shouldered between Tarzan and Thruppence.
Knee on the cushion (he took sharp, shallow breaths), Dollar jabbed an orchid-blade into the leather chair and ripped with caged and quivering fist. More stuffing pushed out. Catching his tongue tip in his teeth, he jabbed and ripped again.
Priest sniffed and took his hand from his pocket.
Filament tried not to clear her throat.
As they walked home, Kid searched his memory of what had occurred on Nightmare’s run to the Emboriky. Among the black group strolling at his side Kid noticed blond Tarzan at their center. Raven, his arm around Tarzan’s shoulder, was saying, “…your sister? Man, you got you a pretty sister. Tarzan, you got about the prettiest sister I ever seen. You gonna have to get me and that sister of yours together! Oooooo—whee!” On Whee! he yanked at the crotch of his jeans with his free hand and nearly tugged Tarzan over.
“Now what you gonna talk about his sister for?” Lady of Spain asked.
“Aw, shit,” Raven shouted over his shoulder, all his hair swaying. “Tarzan and me are friends. That right, Tarzan?” who grinned across the forearm beneath his chin.
“Tarzan,” Glass grunted at Kid, “and the fuckin’ apes!”
“Hey!” Jack the Ripper punched at Glass’ shoulder. “Who’s a fuckin’ ape, nigger?”
But when Kid and Glass looked back, the Ripper let both legs go bandy, wheeled his arms about his shoulders, and began to bound about and grunt. Chains flew around his head. Now and then he paused to scratch his sides with his underhanded flaps.
Copperhead’s laugh was louder and harsher than the others’, rising and dying, as though responding to nuances of the performance no one else could catch.
Raven still draped around Tarzan, they staggered on. Raven’s expression was now haunted and grim. Tarzan, hands hanging from his pockets and elbows swinging, smiled at the pavement over which they lurched, happily centered in so much attention.
The next day was:
Sunday—January 1st, 1979
(Headline:)
HAPPY NEW YEAR!
“You sure you don’t want to come?” Kid asked Pepper. Kid’s face still stung from shaving.
“Naw.” Pepper shuffled nervously before the bathroom door. “Naw, I don’t like stuff like that. All them people I don’t know. You just go on, tell me about it when you come back. I got some wine, from the liquor store.”
“Okay.” Kid took his hand from Pepper’s shoulder.
Copperhead came out of the bathroom. “Hey, you sure we don’t got to dress up?”
“You wear your chains,” Kid said, “your lights, and your vest, and you’re dressed.”
“Okay,” Copperhead said. “If you say so. Man, Nightmare sure looks something out there in them red velvet pants. Like a God-damn spade!”
Kid’s concession to festive dress, besides washing and shaving, had been to hang his brass orchid from a neck chain. As he walked up the hall—a water drop ran his bare ankle—the Ripper stopped him to whisper: “You really gonna let that boy go up there like that?” which was the third time someone had said something about Baby, who had arrived ten minutes ago, naked (as promised) and dirty (as ever), with Nightmare, Dragon Lady, and Adam.
“Sure am.”
“Oh, man, I gotta see this. I was gonna stay home, you know? But I got to go to this one just to watch.”
“He doesn’t have anything you don’t except a foreskin,” Kid said. “Can’t you be cool, huh?”
“Oh, sure!” The Ripper beat down the doubt with his wide, black hand. “Sure.” He laughed and went on.
In the front room, Nightmare turned around and said something to Kid, mauled beyond comprehensibility by laughter. The others laughed too. His thick braid glistened with dressing. To his leather vest, neck chains, chained cycle boots, and garrison belt, the velvet loaned a scarlet panache.
“Nightmare,” Siam (who only wore a small bandage now) was saying, “you’re wearing those pants so low your ass has got cleavage, man!”
“Shit!” Nightmare caressed his great shoulder. “They like to see my muscles!” There was only a trace of the shoulder scar.
Kid glanced down at his own, listening to the laughter.
Dragon Lady, legs crossed, sat on the couch: white Levi’s, white boots, a silver lamé turtleneck, and over it a white Levi jacket, sleeves torn off. Her usual chains (a trip to the hardware store?) had been replaced by silver—or at any rate, stainless steel. Her nails were painted platinum. When she threw her head back to laugh on her big, stained teeth, sweat glistened just below her rough hair. She looked easy, elegant, and terrifying.