“They got the door locked.” Someone jiggled the handle.
“Here you go…” Nightmare said, grabbing for the lion.
“Hey, no—”
Glass exploded over the pavement. The grey street was momentarily obscured by myriad bright prisms. “Come on!”
Kid stepped gingerly across the shards, remembering: On broken glass, go flatfooted.
The white, unshaven scorpion stood (among others moving) looking at his lamp. The marble base was in two pieces, the shade crushed. Finally he stooped, caught up the injured object—a marble chip fell but the cracked base stayed amazingly together—and shuffled on, kicking glass.
“Come on…” Denny tugged Kid’s arm.
Kid started walking again.
“A God-damn bus!” which hove around the corner. “How do you like that!”
Some stood in the street now, waving their arms.
The bus pulled to the curb. Nightmare at their head, they crowded between the folding doors. Shoulders collided. Through them, Kid saw the bald, black driver’s worried face.
“You gonna take us home!” the thin black was saying, while the others tried to push past. “Now that’s convenient, brother! You gonna take us—!”
“AHHHH—!” shrill and directly into Kid’s ear.
Kid flinched and turned (A gun crack? There!) and grabbed the black scorpion opening and closing his mouth and falling. Hooking the post by the front seat with the elbow of his bladed arm, Kid swung the wounded youth inside. As he fell, the unshaven guy (and some others), no longer holding his lion, clambered over them—“Watch it—!” Crouched at the top of the bus steps, Kid saw the crushed lamp shade leaning against the sill. He grabbed the socket stalk, wrenched the whole thing up into the bus and as the doors closed he heard ping-CRACK! The bus was moving: ping-CRACK!
He stood—everyone else was crouched in seats or between them.
Even the driver was hunkering over his wheel.
Outside, Kid saw the figure in a third story window of the sandstone wall (right beside the gold i in Emboriky)—sighting along the rifle, eye to the finder.
The broken marble cut at his shin, joggling. Thirty pounds? As he pulled the lion up onto his forearm (so not to blunt his orchid which stuck from underneath) the bus lurched. “Here.” The stubbled face turned up from the seat and blinked. “Here.”
The scorpion wrapped his arms around it—the shade came completely off and joggled around the post—dropped his face, then raised it, at the gasping.
Kid turned, holding the back of the seat.
Denny stopped at the feet of the wounded scorpion.
A woman in a grey hat, jammed against the window next to Nightmare, said, “Oh dear! Oh, he’s terribly hurt—” then put both hands flat against the pane when Kid looked at her, and began to cry. Then she stopped, faced forward again with her eyes closed.
From a rear seat: “Say…”
No one said.
“…what happened to you guys?”
No one answered.
Kid took off his orchid and poked a prong around for his belt loop till he saw (remembering) it had broken. So he hung it from his chain and squatted.
“Annnnnnnn—waa! They got my…arm. I…Annnn!”
Denny looked up: his very blue eyes were bloodshot.
“Annnnnn—ah. Awww?…Oh, hey. Awwwee…!”
Warm blood touched Kid’s toes and spread.
“You want to make a tourniquet or something…” Denny suggested.
“Awwwwwwww—Ahhh…”
“Yeah.”
“Here!” The colored girl in the front seat leaned forward holding a scarf, and almost dropped it when Kid reached. The scorpion panted like a woman in childbirth while Kid tightened the looped cloth on the handle of a knife one of the others gave him. “You gotta loosen it,” he told Spider who was helping. “Every five minutes or so. So he doesn’t get gangrene or something.” Then he sat back on his heels, jogging with the bus. The driver looked back, then turned a corner.
Nightmare, forearms across his knees, was watching them with interest. “You really into this hero bit. Tourniquet, huh? That’s pretty good. Yeah, I like that.”
Kid stood, about to look disgusted: pain shot up his calves from the minutes spent crouched. So he didn’t look anything, walked to Denny’s seat, and sat.
Across the aisle, the old man with his head in his coat collar, who had been on the bus when it had been going in the other direction, pretended to sleep.
“You okay?” Denny asked. “You look…”
Kid turned to the boy (two others, a scorpion and a passenger, were just turning away): Denny rubbed beneath his nose, blinked his blue—
The memory of crimson eyes in the Emboriky’s lobby made Kid open his mouth: The eyes that watched now, intently and compassionately, became as horrible as the discovered significance of what he had forgotten. Surprise blotted another memory—he felt it fade from his mind, struggled to keep it, failed—of something passed in a looking glass. What could he have seen in a mirror? Himself? Nothing else? I’m mad, he thought: like echo, This is insane, he had said there. Stripped of context—what had happened in the department store?—he shook before what it could have signified. Why did I say, This is insane! Something shook in him. His head waggled.
“Kid…?” which Kid was desperately aware was not his name.
Denny’s hand had been on his forearm. He knew because now it moved away. Released, he tried to remember having been held, fixed by the warmth that was fading, had faded. Denny rubbed his upper lip again.
Breathing heavily, Kid sat back in the jogging seat.
Outside, movie marquees passed in cryptic cavalcade.
4
Under high, electric notes, low, wet ones burbled and troughed and erupted. A metallic chord; another metallic chord. Between them: tape-hiss.
Kid cleared his throat; it became a cough.
“Yes?” Reverend Taylor held her pencil by both ends. “Can I help you?”
“I’m hungry,” Kid said. “Um…” He pulled his hands from the half-door’s sill. “Some…somebody told me you used to have a free supper here?”
“Oh, we discontinued that some time back—” Behind her, like revolving eyes, the spools turned.
Kid took a breath. “Yeah, I know…”
“Did you fall…or hurt yourself?”
“Huh? No, I…no.”
“You’re just hungry?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Really, we’re not providing that service any longer, you see. It was far too…” Now she let her eyes drop, sucked her teeth, and considered: “Well, perhaps coffee? And…” She looked up. “Maybe there’s something…and you can sit down for a little while.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Wheels and swivel roared and squeaked through the music as she pushed away her chair. “Come with me.” She stepped to the door, fluttering black robes.
He stepped back while she came through, followed her across the vestibule—”Now, you understand I’m not establishing a tradition. Just this once: I am not opening up the Evening Aid Program again. This is for you tonight. Not for your friends tomorrow”—and down a stairway.
“Yes, ma’am.”
At the bottom, Reverend Taylor turned on a caged work light hung on a nail. A high windowsill, level with the street outside, went from blue to black. The heavy cord curved up the steps. “Let’s see what we have.”