“Yeah.” He nodded, surprised.
The bottle clacked the scarred counter board. “Come on, come on! Put it away, kid.”
“Oh.” Wonderingly, he returned the money to his pocket. “Thanks.”
Under a haystack mustache, the bartender sucked his teeth. “What do you think this place is, anyway?” He shook his head, and walked off.
His hand had wandered to his shirt pocket to click the pen. He frowned down, paused above some internal turning: he opened the notebook, held his pen in the air, plunged.
Had he ever done this before? he wondered. With pen to paper and the actual process occurring, it was as though he had never done anything else. But pause, even moments, and it was as if not only had he never done it, but there was no way to be sure that he ever would again.
His mind dove for a vision of perfected anger while his hand crabbed and crossed and rearranged the vision’s spillage. Her eyes struck a dozen words: he chose one in the most relevant tension to the one before. Her despair struck a dozen more; he grubbed among them, teeth clamped against what cleared. And cleared. So gazed at the cage again till the fearful distractions fell, then turned to her. An obtuse time later, he raised his hand, swallowed, and withdrew.
He jabbed the pen back in his pocket. His hand dropped, dead and ugly on the paper. His tongue worked in the back of his mouth while he waited for energy with which to copy. Sounds resolved from the noise. He blinked, and saw the pyramided bottles against the velvet backing. Between his fingers he watched the curling inkline peeled off from meaning. He reached for the beer, drank a long time, put down the bottle, and let his hand drop on the paper again. But his hand was wet…
He took a breath, turned to look left.
“Eh…hello, there,” from his right.
He turned right.
“I thought it might be you when I was on the other side of the bar.” Blue serge; narrow lapels; hair the color of white pepper. “I really am glad to see you again, to know you’re all right. I can’t tell you how upset that whole experience left me. Though that must be a bit presumptuous: You were the one who was hurt. It’s been a long time since I’ve had to move through such suspicion, such restraint.” The face was that of a thin, aged child, momentarily sedate. “I’d like to buy. you a drink, but I was told that they don’t sell the drink here. Bartender?”
Walking his fists on the wood, the bartender came, like some blond gorilla.
“Can you put together a tequila sunrise?”
“Make my life easy and have a beer.”
“Gin and tonic?”
The bartender nodded deeply.
“And another for my friend here.”
The gorilla responded, forefinger to forehead.
“Hey, I’m sort of surprised,” Kidd volunteered into the feeling of loss between them, “to see you in here, Mr. Newboy.”
“Are you?” Newboy sighed. “I’m out on my own, tonight. I’ve a whole list of places people have told me I must see while I’m in town. It’s a bit strange. I gather you know who I…?”
“From the Times.”
“Yes.” Newboy nodded. “I’ve never been on the front page of a newspaper before. I’ve had just enough of that till now to be rather protective of my anonymity. Well, Mr. Calkins thought he was doing something nice; his motives were the best.”
“Bellona’s a very hard place to get lost in.” What Kidd took for slight nervousness, he reacted to with warmth. “I’m glad I read you were here.”
Newboy raised his peppered brows.
“I’ve read some of your poem now, see?”
“And you wouldn’t have if you hadn’t read about me?”
“I didn’t buy the book. A lady had it.”
“Which book?”
“Pilgrimage.”
Now Newboy lowered them. “You haven’t read it carefully, several times, all the way through?”
He shook his head, felt his lips shake, so closed his mouth.
“Good.” Newboy smiled. “Then you don’t know me any better than I know you. For a moment I thought you had an advantage.”
“I only browsed in it.” He added: “In the bathroom.”
Newboy laughed out loud, and drank. “Tell me about yourself. Are you a student? Or do you write?”
“Yes. I mean I write. I’m…a poet. Too.” That was an interesting thing to say, he decided. It felt quite good. He wondered what Newboy’s reaction would be.
“Very good.” Whatever Newboy’s reaction, surprise was not part of it. “Do you find Bellona stimulating, making you produce lots of work?”
He nodded. “But I’ve never published anything.”
“Did I ask if you had?”
Kidd looked for severity; what he saw was a gentle smile.
“Or are you interested in getting published?”
“Yeah.” He turned half around on his stool. “How do you get poems published?”
“If I could really answer that, I would probably write a lot more poems than I do.”
“But you don’t have any problems now, about getting things in magazines and things?”
“Just about everything I write now—” Newboy folded his glass in both hands—“I can be sure will be published. It makes me very careful of what I actually put down. How careful are you?”
The first beer bottle was empty. “I don’t know.” He drank from the second. “I haven’t been a poet very long,” he confessed, smiling. “Only a couple of days. Why’d you come here?”
“What?” There was a little surprise there; but not much.
“I bet you know lots of writers, famous ones. And people in the government too. Why did you come here?”
“Oh, Bellona has developed…an underground reputation, you call it? One never reads about it, but one hears. There are some cities one must be just dying to visit.” In a theatrical whisper: “I hope this isn’t one of them.” While he laughed, his eyes asked forgiveness.
Kidd forgave and laughed.
“I really don’t know. It was a spur of the moment thing,” Newboy went on. “I don’t know how I did it. I certainly wasn’t expecting to meet anyone like Roger. That headline was a bit of a surprise. But Bellona is full of surprises.”
“You’re going to write about it here?”
Newboy turned his drink. “No. I don’t think so.” He smiled again. “You’re all safe.”
“You do know a lot of famous people though, I bet. Even when you read introductions and flyleaves and book reviews, you begin to figure out that everybody knows everybody. You get this picture of all these people sitting around together and getting mad, or friendly, probably screwing each other—”
“Literary intrigues? Oh, you’re right: It’s quite complicated, harrowing, insidious, vicious; and thoroughly fascinating. The only pastime I prefer to writing is gossip.”
He frowned. “Somebody else was talking to me about gossip. Everybody around here sort of goes for it.” Lanya was still not in the bar. He looked again at Newboy. “She knows your friend Mr. Calkins.”
“It is a small city. I wish Paul Fenster had felt a little less—up tight?” He gestured toward the notebook. “I’d enjoy seeing some of your poems.”
“Huh?”
“I enjoy reading poems, especially by people I’ve met. Let me tell you right away, I won’t even presume to say anything about whether I think they’re good or bad. But you’re pleasant, in an angular way. I’d like to see what you wrote.”
“Oh. I don’t have very many. I’ve just been writing them down for…well, like I say, not long.”
“Then it won’t take me very long to read them—if you wouldn’t mind showing them to me, sometime when you felt like it?”
“Oh. Sure. But you would have to tell me if they’re good.”
“I doubt if I could.”
“Sure you could. I mean I’d listen to what you said. That would be good for me.”
“May I tell you a story?”
Kidd cocked his head, and found his own eager distrust interesting.