He loaded springs and headboards into the elevator—the empty shaft, whose door apparently opened at whatever floor the car beside it stopped, hissed blandly by his side.
The ride up in the dark, with only bed springs, the orange number “19” before him, and his own harsh breath, was oddly calming.
“They should have the padding in the elevators when people are moving furniture,” Mrs. Richards, waiting for him in the upper hall, admonished. “Well, there’s no one to get it out for us. There’s nothing we can do.”
In the new apartment (an hour later), he had reassembled the frames and, going from room to room, put the springs on—he was sitting on the last spring, staring at the folded mattress on the floor when Mrs. Richards came in carrying a small night-table against her chest, its legs stuck forward like four horns. “You know, I didn’t believe you were actually going to get them up here?” she exclaimed. “You really have been working like a madman! You should take a rest, I think.”
He said, “Yeah, I’m resting,” and smiled.
She put the table down, and he noticed her distraught expression. For a moment he thought she’d taken offense at his flip answer. But she said: “They were back, just a moment ago. Downstairs. Running in the halls, making that terrible noise!”
Kidd frowned.
“I am so happy to be out of there…” Mrs. Richards shook her head, and for a moment he thought she was going to cry. “I’m so happy! Really, I was practically afraid to take this—” her fingers swayed on the night table’s carved corner—“out of there. And carry it up here. But we’ve done it. We’ve moved! We’ve…done it!”
He looked about the room, at the folded mattress, at the night table, at the dresser out from the wall. And the rugs were still downstairs.
“I guess we have…” He frowned. “Just about.”
A bubble grew at the caldron’s rim, reflecting both their faces, one front, one profile, tiny and distant.
Jommy’s spoon handle, circling the soup, passed: the bubble broke.
Kidd, still panting, asked, “You seen Lanya?”
“Sure.” Jommy’s face was wider ear to ear than from chin to forehead. “She was right over there talking to Milly—hey, before you run off again! Will you two be back for dinner?” He rested the spoon on a black pipe, crusted with burnt grease, sticking from the cinderblocks.
“I guess so. I took off before the lady at my job could get a chance to feed me.”
Soup ran down the granular grey, bubbled and popped. “Good.” Grinning, Jommy went back to stirring. His khaki shirt sleeve, rolled loosely up his thin arm, swung: the shirt was about three sizes too big. “It’ll be ready about time it gets dark. Lanya knows, but I guess I gotta tell you again: Now come and eat, any time you want, you hear? John and Milly won’t mind…”
But Kidd was crossing the worn grass, among sleeping bags, rolled or airing; knapsacks and pack-braces scattered the clearing, lay piled around the picnic bench, or leaned beneath the trees.
She wasn’t among the dozen spectators to the Chinese Checker game between the squat, dark-haired man who sat crosslegged behind the board and rocked with his elbows on his knees, and a tall, freckled woman with crew-cut hair, who wore much Southwestern silver under and over her denim shirt; her belt was silver and turquoise. As her long freckled fingers, heavy with blue-stoned rings, moved and moved back over the marbles, Kidd saw her nails were bitten badly as his own.
A girl who looked at first like nothing but a mop squatted (two threadbare knees poked up either side) to paw through the cardboard carton of colored string—what was left of John’s “loom” project.
Another girl (her hair was the color of a car he recalled, whose owner said he’d just had it painted “Mediterranean Gold”) sat on a dented brass drum, lacing a high-topped shoe—the kind with hooks in place of the last dozen eyes. Her pants leg was rolled up above a very red knee. A bearded boy stood beside her, talking and grinning, occasionally pushing his own bushy hair back from an earlobe pierced with a gold cross. His sneaker, on top of the drum, was wedged against her thigh. The drum itself held clay, cracked away from the side and shot with crevices—that was Milly’s “pottery” project.
Neither Milly herself nor Lanya was there…
Harmonica notes tangled with the smoky leaves above. He looked up. More music—but not from above. Just far away. And from which—?
He looked around the clearing again, charged off into the brush…which dumped him on another park path, sloping up toward silver notes. He started after them, wondering at how little of the park he’d actually explored.
The music moved away.
Notes bent like blues and slid, chromatically, from mode to austere mode. It was as if her major influences (he grinned) were late Sonny Terry and early Stockhausen.
At the top of the rise, he saw them at the bottom: Milly’s bare legs below her denim shorts, Lanya’s jeans; Milly’s heavy red hair shook as she gazed around; Lanya’s, scrap bronze, bent to her harp. Shoulder to shoulder, the two girls disappeared around a turn.
He started to run after them, anticipated dialogue filling his mouth: Hey, I just about got the Richards into their new apartment! All the big stuff is up, so Mrs. Richards gave me the rest of the day off. Tomorrow morning, I take up the rugs and we put the furniture…
Two steps, and erupting through it was the sudden and inexplicable urge to—follow, to observe, to overhear! What he wanted to do, he realized, was watch Lanya when she was not watching him.
The path curved right.
To the right, he pushed into the brush—making a lot of noise. Well, if they discovered him, he was discovered. He was still curious.
The music halted; were they talking?
That path had sloped down; the ground he pushed over sloped up. Was he going to come out on them after all?
A sharp drop stopped him.
Beyond rocks and a few trees grown crookedly on the slope, the path lay sixteen feet below. Which meant, he figured, they’d come around the bend right there—and see him.
They came around the bend—and didn’t.
One hand above, he hooked a slender branch; bare foot flat, sandal on its toe, he waited, a smile ready behind his face to push forward when they noticed him. Would he get some snatch of conversation (possibly even about him) before they looked up and saw?
“…perfectly terrified,” Milly said in a tone neither flip nor rhetorical.
“There isn’t anything to be terrified of,” Lanya said. “I’d think, with the rumors of rape and violation going around, you’d be fascinated to meet the man himself and get a look.”
“Oh, the rumors are fascinating enough,” Milly said, “in a perfectly horrible way—”
“And the man is rather nice—” Lanya turned her harmonica, examining it as she walked—“despite the rumors. Don’t you find reality more fascinating than a flicker of half truths and anxiety-distorted projections?”
The two young women passed beneath. He imagined his reflection sliding across her harmonica; her eyes starting up—
“In principle,” Milly said. “In practice, when the rumors get to a certain point, I’m willing to let the whole business alone and go off exploring in the opposite direction. Suppose the reality turns out to be worse than the rumors?”
“Oh, really…!” Lanya raised her harmonica, played. “You’re going to chicken out, again, aren’t you?” She played another snatch.
“Someday,” Milly said, pensively, “I wish you’d play that piece from one end to the other. The fragments are awfully nice.”
(Kidd looked after them.)
Lanya looked at her harmonica. “I guess that’s because I never play for anybody else.”
“You should,” Milly said. “I mean, everybody hears it anyway. Sometimes, all those little pieces, pretty as they are, practically give me a headache because they aren’t connected to each other.”
“I’ll try,” Lanya said. “And you should not try to avoid the subject. Are you going to chicken out?”
“Look,” Milly said, “going to meet George Harrison was your idea. I just said it might be interesting to talk to him.”