Kidd strained to see: the vaguest suggestion of light up in the distance—was it some upper, open door? “Mrs. Richards!” His shout vaulted about the shaft. “You get back from that door!”
Oh, Bobby! Kidd, is he all right? Oh, please, let him be all right.
Mom, come back, will you?
Then lights around him moved forward, harshening the brick, the painted steel. On the shaft wall shadows of heads swung; some grew, some faded; new shadows grew.
“You see anything?” Dragon Lady asked, crowding his shoulder. “Here.” Her arm came up, hooked his. “Lean on out further if you want.”
He glanced back at her.
She said, her head to the side: “I ain’t gonna let you fall, motherfucker!”
So he hooked up his arm. “Got me?”
“Yeah.”
Their elbows made a hot, comfortable lock.
He leaned forward, swaying into the dark. She let him slowly out.
The other lights had filled the door, flushing the shaft with doubled shadows.
“You see anything in there?” which was not Dragon Lady’s voice but Denny’s.
The junk down there: On darkness like velvet, cigarette packages, chewing-gum papers, cigarettes and cigarette butts, match books, envelopes and, there to one side, heaped up…the glitter in it identified the wrist. “Yeah, I can see him…I think.”
Can you see where he is? Bobby? Bobby, Kidd, can you see him? Oh, my God, he fell all that way! Oh, he must be hurt, so badly! I can’t hear him. Is he unconscious? Oh, can’t you see where he is yet?
Momma, please come back from there!
Behind him, Dragon Lady said with soft brutality: “Christ, I wish that bitch would shut the fuck up!”
“Look, man,” Thirteen said, behind them, “that’s her kid down there!”
“Don’t ‘man’ me, Thirteen,” Dragon Lady said; and Kidd felt her grip—well, not loosen so much as shift, about an inch; his shoulder tensed. “I still wish she’d keep quiet!”
“I brought the crowbar,” somebody said. “And a screwdriver. Do you need a crowbar or a screwdriver?”
“After that fall,” Dragon Lady said, “there can’t be too much left of him. He gotta be dead.”
“Shit, Dragon Lady,” Thirteen said, “his Momma’s right up there!”
“I said: He’s gotta be dead! You heard me?”
Mom, come on!
Can you see him down there? I can’t see anything. I can’t hear anything. Oh, Bobby, Bobby! Can you hear your mommy? Please, Bobby!
The grip suddenly sagged; for a moment Kidd thought he was falling—Dragon Lady, still holding, had leaned in behind him. Her voice roared about his ears. “YOUR SON IS DEAD, LADY!” And Kidd was pulled away. “Come on, let’s get you back.”
Thirteen, with an unhappy expression, shook his head.
Denny, up front now, gripped a length of wound clothes line. “You want to get him up? You take the rope. We’ll hold you while you go down.”
Kidd took hold of the double end, ducked his head through, and hooked his arms over. (Griffin and Mantis flanked the door.) Thirteen, Denny, and Dragon Lady were handing out the other end among them.
“You just hold on,” Kidd said. “I’ll climb down.” He got onto his knees at the sill, holding the edge (one rough hand lost in griffin light), dropped one leg down, then the other. The shaft at his back was cool. He could not tell if the wind came from above or below. He went over the edge, had to keep away from the wall first with his knee, then with his foot.
“You all right?” Denny asked, legs wide, fists close.
Kidd grunted, pulling on the ropes, taut around his back (pushing something glass into his back) and taut under his arms: “Yeah.” The slanted bar of the door mechanism slid under his bare foot. His sandal toe scraped metal.
Swaying at either side of the door, the apparitions loomed, luminous.
Once he called: “You can lower it a little faster than that. I’m okay.”
“Sorry,” which was Thirteen, catching his breath; and the rope.
His shin scraped the basement door-sill. His bare foot hit something and slipped, in either grease or blood.
He turned, while the rope sagged around him, and looked at the—he had to be dead.
The shaft was momentarily silent, except for wind.
Finally Dragon Lady called down: “You still okay…?”
“Yeah.” Kidd took a breath. “I’ll tie the rope around him. You can haul him up.” He slipped the rope from under his arms, pulled it over his head, but left it around one shoulder; he stepped forward on the oozy filth, stooped, and tugged a leg from where it had wedged between two blackened bumper plates.
“…is he alive?” Thirteen called.
Kidd took another breath. “Naw.” He pulled at the arm, got a grip around the chest, which was all soft against him. His own shirt front soaked immediately. Blood dribbled along his forearm. Standing, he dragged the body back a step. A foot caught, pulled free; the leg fell back against his thigh—his thigh wet, warm, to the knee. Dragging it, limp, reaching for the rope, he thought: Is this what turns on blood and blade freaks? He thought of Tak, he thought of George, hunted in himself for any idle sexuality: he found it, disconcertingly, a small warmth above the loins that, as he bared his teeth and the rope slid through his sticky hand, went out. “Let me have another couple of feet!” Well, he had found it before in auto wrecks, in blue plush, in roots, in wet wood with the bark just stripped.
Rope dropped over his shoulder; the voices eighteen floors up came again:
Oh, Mom—
Is he all right? Kidd, have you found him yet? Bobby? Bobby, can you hear me at all?
Oh, Mom, you heard—
Bobby, are you all right?
He got the rope around the chest, got a clumsy knot done—like trying to do it with your hands in glue—that maybe would hold. Bobby sagged against Kidd’s knees, heavy enough to make his bare foot slide backward. “Okay!” He tugged the rope.
He could see it run across the sill above him, go taut, and slow. The weight lifted from against him. A sneaker dragged across his foot, thumped against the door, and swung away again, and raised, dripping on his cheek. He smeared at his face with the heel of his hand and stepped back.
“Jesus Christ…!” from a girl at the doorway silenced everything but the wind and the reverberating voice:
Bobby, Bobby, please, can you hear me at all?
Another boy said: “Hey, wow…!”
Then, Denny’s nervous laugh: “Oh, man, that’s a mess…!”
Dragon Lady said, “All right, I’m untying him here—you get that rope down to the kid.”
Standing on the bottom of the shaft, his bare heel wedged against one caked girder that crossed the bumper plates, Kidd stared up. For a moment he thought the elevator car descended at him. But it was a trick of light from the flanking beasts, both of whom swayed and flickered at the edge of sight.
The rope fell at him. He grabbed it with one hand, then the other. Someone pulled it; it rasped his coated palms. “Hey…!” It went slack again.
Dragon Lady leaned in, the rope wrapped around one fist. “You got it now?”
“Yeah.” Once more he shrugged it over his head, under his arms. “Got it.”
They tugged him up.
When his head reached the sill, Denny and somebody else were on their knees, catching him around under the armpits. The sill scraped his chin, his chest.
Smokey simply put her hand over her mouth and stepped back behind Thirteen.
Kidd crawled over, got to his feet, moved a few steps forward. The others fell back.
“God damn!” Dragon Lady shook her head, eyes wide, and rolled the rope against her thigh. “God…!”
Denny, with a funny smile, stepped back, black-lined nails moving over his chest. “Wow, you really…” He shook back pale hair, seemed to be considering several things to say. “You look just as bad as…” He glanced at the floor.
“Uh…” Thirteen said, “we got some clothes up at the place. You wanna look through them for something? To change into, well, that’s…all right.”