“You been having a good time?” Jack put his hand on Kidd’s shoulder. “This is the place to have a good time, you know?”
“Fine time,” Kidd said. “But I haven’t seen you around. Where you been staying?”
“Stayed on a few days with Tak.” Jack’s hand rose and fell. “He kicked me out after a week when I wouldn’t let him suck on my peter no more.”
Across the bar Loufer, his cap low on his ears, still talked earnestly with Fenster.
Jack’s hand fell again. “They got girls in this city! Frank knows this whole house. Full of girls. Real nice girls. We was over there, and…” His grin widened toward ecstasy. “They like Frank a lot.” He screwed up his face. “I think that’s ’cause he’s growin’ a beard and things. Or maybe taught in a college.”
“They liked you okay,” Frank said, still not looking up. “They just didn’t know you.”
“Yeah, I guess they just didn’t know me well enough, yet.”
“Say?” Frank looked up now. “You wrote all this—?”
“Yeah—well, no. I mean most of it was written in there when I found it. That’s why I wanted to know if it was yours.”
“Oh,” Frank said. “No. It’s not mine.”
Kidd turned from under Jack’s hand. “That’s good. Because when you said you had lost your notebook, you know, I just thought…”
“Yeah,” Frank said. “I see.”
“We’re gonna go out and look for some more girls,” Jack said. “You wanna come along?”
“Jack thinks there’s safety in numbers,” Frank said.
“No. No, that’s not it,” Jack protested. “I just thought he might want to come and help us look for some girls. That’s all. Maybe we can go back to that house?”
“Hey, thanks,” Kidd said. “But I got to hang around here for a while.”
“The Kidd here’s got his own old lady,” Jack said in knowing explanation. “I bet he’s waiting on her.”
“Hey, I’m…sorry it’s not your notebook,” Kidd told Frank.
“Yeah,” Frank said. “So am I.”
“We’ll see you around,” Jack said, while Kidd (smiling, nodding) wondered at Frank’s tone.
Absently rubbing the paper (he could feel the pen’s blind impressions), he watched them leave.
Bumping shoulders with them, Ernest Newboy came into the bar. Newboy paused, pulling his suit jacket hem, looked around, saw Fenster, saw Kidd, and came toward Kidd.
Kidd sat up a little straighter.
“Hello, there. How’ve you been for the past few days?”
The small triumph prompted Kidd’s grin. To hide it he looked back at the book. The poem Frank had left showing had been tentatively titled:
LOUFER
In the margin, he had noted alternates: The Red Wolf, The Fire Wolf, The Iron Wolf. “Eh…fine.” Suddenly, and decisively, he took his pen from the vest’s upper button hole, crossed out LOUFER, and wrote above it: WOLF BRINGER. He looked up at Newboy. “I been real fine; and working a lot too.”
“That’s good.” Newboy picked up the gin and tonic; the bartender left. “Actually I was hoping I’d run into you tonight. It has to do with a conversation I had with Roger.”
“Mr. Calkins?”
“We were out having after-dinner brandy in the October gardens and I was telling him about your poems.” Newboy paused a moment for a reaction but got none. “He was very impressed with what I told him.”
“How could he be impressed? He didn’t read them.”
Newboy doffed his gin. “Perhaps what impressed him was my description, as well as the fact that—how shall I say it? Not that they are about the city here—Bellona. Rather, Bellona provides, in the ones I recall best at any rate, the decor which allow the poems to…take place.” The slightest questioning at the end of Newboy’s sentence asked for corroboration.
More to have him continue than to corroborate, Kidd nodded.
“It furnishes the decor, as well as a certain mood or concern. Or am I being too presumptuous?”
“Huh? No, sure.”
“At any rate, Roger brought up the idea: Why not ask the young man if he would like to have them printed?”
“Huh? No, sure.” Though the punctuation was the same, each word had a completely different length, emphasis, and inflection. “I mean, that would be…” A grin split the tensions binding his face. “But he hasn’t seen them!”
“I pointed that out. He said he was deferring to my enthusiasm.”
“You were that enthusiastic? He just wants to put some of them in his newspaper, maybe?”
“Another suggestion I made. No, he wants to print them up in a book, and distribute them in the city. He wants me to get copies of the poems from you, and a title.”
The sound was all breath expelling. Kidd drew his hand back along the counter. His heart pounded loudly, irregularly, and though he didn’t think he was sweating, he felt a drop run the small of his back, pause at the chain— “You must have been pretty enthusiastic—” and roll on.
Newboy turned to his drink. “Since Roger made the suggestion, and I gather you would like to go along with it, let me be perfectly honest: I enjoyed looking over your poems, I enjoyed your reading them to me; they have a sort of language that, from looking at the way you revise, at any rate, you’ve apparently done quite a bit of work to achieve. But I haven’t lived with them by any means long enough to decide whether they are, for want of a simple term, good poems. It’s very possible that if I just picked them up in a book store, and read them over, read them over very carefully too, I might easily not find anything in them at all that interested me.”
Kidd frowned.
“You say you’ve only been writing these for a few weeks?”
Kidd nodded, still frowning.
“That’s quite amazing. How old are you?”
“Twenty-seven.”
“Now there.” Mr. Newboy pulled back. “I would have thought you were much, much younger. I would have assumed you were about nineteen or eighteen and had worked most of your life in the country.”
“No. I’m twenty-seven and I’ve worked all over, city, country, on a ship. What’s that got to do with it?”
“Absolutely nothing.” Newboy laughed and drank. “Nothing at all. I’ve only met you a handful of times, and it would be terribly presumptuous of me to think I knew you, but frankly what I’ve been thinking about is how something like this would be for you. Twenty-seven…?”
“I’d like it.”
“Very good.” Newboy smiled. “And the decision I’ve come to is, simply, that so little poetry is published in the world it would ill behoove me to stand in the way of anyone who wants to publish more. Your being older than I thought actually makes it easier. I don’t feel quite as responsible. You understand, I’m not really connected with the whole business. The idea came from Mr. Calkins. Don’t let this make you think ill of me, but for a while I tried to dissuade him.”
“Because you didn’t think the poems were good enough?”
“Because Roger is not in the business of publishing poetry. Often unintentionally, he ends up in the business of sensationalism. Sensationalism and poetry have nothing to do with one another. But then, your poems are not sensational. And I don’t think he wants to make them so.”
“You know, I was just talking to another poet, I mean somebody who’s been writing a long time, and with a book and everything. He’s got poems in Poetry. And that other magazine…the New Yorker. Maybe Mr. Calkins would like to see some of his stuff too?”
“I don’t think so,” Mr. Newboy said. “And if I have one objection to the whole business, I suppose that’s it. What would you like for the name of your book?”
The muscles in Kidd’s back tightened almost to pain. As he relaxed them, he felt the discomfort in the gut that was emblematic of fear. His mind was sharp and glittery. He was as aware of the two men in leather talking in the corner, the woman in construction boots coming from the men’s room, of Fenster and Loufer still in their booth, of the bartender leaning on the towel against the bar, as he was of Newboy. He pulled the notebook into his lap and looked down at it. After the count of seven he looked up and said, “I want to call it—Brass Orchids.”