“Oh, yeah…” Kidd looked down at blood, on himself, on the floor. It didn’t run. It looked like jellied paste. “Thanks.” He looked at the thing on the floor too, while wind and the woman’s voice made torrents in the shaft. “I better get…him upstairs.”
Bobby’s shirt had ripped across the back. The flesh that wasn’t torn was purple.
“You could make a sling, or something,” Thirteen offered. “Hey, do we got anymore of that canvass stuff?”
Someone he didn’t recognize said: “We threw it out.”
Kidd sucked his teeth, stooped, got his arms under Bobby’s shoulders, tugged him over. One eye, open, had burst. The face, as though it had been made of clay, was flattened across one quarter.
Thirteen, glancing up the shaft, said: “Dragon Lady, why you want to go hollering up at her about her kid’s dead?”
“Because,” Dragon Lady said, “if I was his mother, I’d want to know!”
“But suppose he was still—”
“Man,” Dragon Lady said, “that ain’t like gettin’ dumped out a two story window. That’s seventeen, eighteen flights!”
Kidd wedged his hand under the knees, stood, unsteadily, stepped back.
“Watch it!” Denny grabbed Kidd’s shoulder. “You don’t want to go down there again, now, do you?”
Kidd said: “Make the elevator go!” In his arms, the body was heavy, not so warm, and dripped less.
“Huh?” from Dragon Lady, who was coiling up the rope. “Oh, yeah!” She swung into the car, did something else to the switches above the buttons.
The door started to close. She stopped it with her forearm. (K-chunk.)
Denny stepped back as Kidd carried Bobby inside.
“Baby, Adam, you go on up with the others,” Dragon Lady said from the back of the car.
But Kidd, turning to face the door as it rolled to, could not tell which of the people standing behind Thirteen and Smokey she addressed: their light shields had been extinguished.
A moment into darkness, he heard Dragon Lady’s hand move among her chains; and the car filled with light. “So you can see what you’re doing,” the dragon said. “Here, I’ll push the floor. Which one? Seventeen?”
“Yeah.” He nodded, stepped aside.
The car rose.
The dragon beside him, he realized, was bigger than the elevator. Since it was light, he would have expected walls and ceiling to cut off that side claw, the top of that head. The effect, however, was that those places in the blue, enameled walls and ceiling seemed transparent, and the claw and the head shone through. The apparition was reflected on four sides.
Standing there, shifting the weight in his arms—Kidd had to shift it several times—he noticed the striations, like a muzzy image on some vertical television screen, raced to the left if he swayed right; if he swayed left, they raced right. Kidd said: “I don’t think you should get out with me.”
The dragon said: “I wasn’t planning to.”
He shifted the weight again, looked down at it, and thought: It smells…it has a specific smell. And there was an annoying piece of paper—he glanced down over the knees; was it a match book?—stuck to his bare foot.
Why, Kidd thought, why am I standing here with this armful of heavy, heavy meat, filthy with blood…? Then something raked inside his face; his throat clamped, his eyes teared. Either fear or grief, it extinguished as quickly as the lust that had momentarily raked inside his loins.
He blinked, again shifted his weight to the sandaled foot. The bare one stuck to the floor.
Beside him the swayings and motions that might tell him Dragon Lady’s thoughts were hidden in light.
He shifted back the other way. His sandal stuck too.
The car slowed; the door opened.
Mrs. Richards’ fist rose to strike her chin. The gesture was a stronger version of June’s.
Mrs. Richards stepped back, and back again.
June caught her mother’s arm.
Mrs. Richards closed her mouth and her eyes and began to shake. High brittle sobs suddenly crackled the silence.
“You better take your mother upstairs,” Kidd said and stepped, after his grotesque shadow, into the hall.
June’s head whipped back and forth between him and her mother, till an edge of shadow swept over his. It was not him she was staring at, but the bright apparition in the closing elevator.
“I’ll put him in the old apartment.”
“Bobby’s…?” June whispered, and smashed back against the wall to avoid him as he passed.
“Yeah, he’s dead.”
Behind him Mrs. Richards’ crying changed pitch.
The other elevator door, against the rolled carpet, went K-chunk, K-chunk, K-chunk…
He shouldered into 17-E. Put the boy in his own…? Kidd walked down the hall, turned into the bare room. One of Bobby’s hands (the one with the chain, all stained) struck and struck his shin. All he had to do was look at what he lugged not to be sad.
He tried not to drop it on the floor, lowered it, almost fell; and dropped it. He pulled at the bent leg; it…bent again, at the wrong place. So he stood up.
Christ, the blood! He shook his head, and peeled his shirt from stomach and shoulders. Starting for the door, he unbuckled his pants and, holding them with one hand—they dropped to his thighs—stepped into the hall.
Mrs. Richards, standing in the middle of the hall, began to shake her head and cry again.
He scowled and pulled his pants up. He’d been heading for the bathroom but, exposed to her astonished grief, he was thrown back to the moment of sexual response at the shaft bottom. Shit, he thought: “Ma’am, why don’t you go upstairs. There’s nothing you can do. Being here won’t make you feel…any better. June…?”
June half hid behind her mother.
“…why don’t you take her upstairs.” Suddenly he didn’t want to be there at all. “Look, I’ve got to go get some—something.” Holding his pants closed, he went past them into the living room, picked up his notebook and, holding it in front of his lap, stalked out the door.
Thirteen said, “I guess she’s taking it pretty rough,” and stepped back to let him in.
“Shit.” Dragon Lady glanced at the ceiling.
The sound of crying, high and stifled, dripped into the room like something molten.
“Why don’t she shut up!” Dragon Lady said.
“Look, man—” Thirteen started.
“I know, I know. Somebody just asked me if I wanted a glass of wine. Well I sure as shit do. Baby? Adam? You bringing that damn wine?”
“You said,” Kidd began, “you had some clothes?”
“Oh yeah. Sure. Come on in.”
Denny, who was resting a glass jug on the crook of his arm, said, “I think he wants to use the bathroom.”
“Yeah, you want to wash up. Tub’s a mess, but you can use it if you want. What’s the matter?”
“Nothing.” But Denny’s last sentence had caused gooseflesh more unpleasant than either grief or terror. “Yeah, I better wash up.”
“Down the hall. It don’t have no fuckin’ windows. I’ll get a lantern.” Thirteen lifted one from a nail in the wall.
Kidd followed him into the john.
In the swaying lantern light, he saw a line of rust along the middle of the tub to the drain. The enamel had flaked here and there from black patches. “We had to put a fucked-up scorpion in here a couple of nights back—name was Pepper—and he’d put something in his arm he shouldn’t have. Put him in the bathtub with his spurs on, and he tried to kick holes in it.” Lantern high in one hand, Thirteen bent and picked up a screw from the tub bottom, looked at it, shrugged. “Use any of those towels you want. We don’t got no washcloths.” He put the lantern down on the back of the toilet.
Kidd put the notebook on the seat-top, turned on the water and picked up the soap: Flakes of rust had dried into it.
With a grey towel (torn) he swabbed the bottom of the tub. There was no stopper, so he rolled it up and plugged the drain, then got in before the water had covered the bottom.
“Do you want something to drink?” a girl called through the door.