“Hello.” Kid heard faint organ music.
“Y’s’pos’d’ be i’ ’eah?” Harrison looked from behind the paper.
The natural rhythm of English speech; no, Kid thought, it is impossible.
“You sure you supposed to be in here?” George repeated.
“Reverend Taylor brought me down.” (It would be stupid, he decided, even to try.)
“’Cause if you ain’t suppose to be in here, she gonna get mad.” Harrison smiled, a mottled ivory crescent between his lips’ uneven pigment. “Seen you in the bar.”
“That’s right.” Kid grinned. “And you’re in those posters all over town.”
“You seen them?” Harrison put down the paper. “You know, them fellows what make them is a little—” he joggled his hand—“you know?”
Kid nodded.
“They good though. They good guys.” He shook his head, then pointed at the ceiling. “She don’t want no scorpion around here. You sure you’re supposed to be in here. Don’t matter to me, she said okay.”
“I was hungry,” Kid said. “She said I could get something to eat.”
“Oh.” Harrison turned on the couch. His green jumpsuit was open to the waist, over a banlon shirt with a raveled collar. “You come for the service?”
“No.”
“Ain’t no scorpion come to the damn service anyway. What you fellows dress up all that shit for?” Harrison laughed, but shook a finger. “It’s cool, it’s cool.”
Kid looked at the large, lined knuckles and thought of cracks in black earth. “What kind of service is it?”
“I just come because she say I should please come, so, you know, I come here sometimes.” Harrison shook his head. “From Jackson, that’s where—” and something Kid couldn’t follow—“see?”
Though he didn’t, Kid nodded. Then he became curious and asked, “What did you say?”
“In Jackson. You know what Jackson is?”
“Yeah, sure.”
But Harrison was laughing again.
He, Kid reflected, is becoming a god, to see what emerged from his tone of thought. Kid’s inner eye was alive with visions of June.
But George stood, dropping his paper. White leaves opened and fell, one on the couch, several on the floor. “You the one they call the Kid. Yeah?”
Kid was terrified, and felt stupid for not knowing why.
“They talk about you. I heard about you. I heard what they said.” The finger shook again. “You the one that don’t know who he is. I heard them.”
“Nobody around here got anything to do except talk,” Kid said. “You know that? You know what I mean about that?”
The black hand went down against the coverall. The green wrinkled. “So you don’t like it here?”
“Yeah,” Kid said. “I like it…don’t you?”
Harrison nodded, his cheek filled with his tongue. “You ever come over in the Jackson?” The tongue flicked the lips.
“I’ve walked through.”
“You know any black people live over there?”
“No. Well, Paul Fenster…”
“Oh, yeah.”
“But I don’t know where he lives.”
“You come over there and see me sometime, huh?”
“Huh?” Kid was not sure he had caught any of the last words bundled in that voice with a nap longer than velvet.
“I say ‘You come pay a visit on me.’”
“Oh. Yeah. Thanks.” Kid was bewildered. Searching that, he found two questions about things that rhymed which flooding embarrassment blocked. So he narrowed his eyes instead.
“Kid—” she called from the stairs behind him. Then, in a completely different voice: “George—hi there, babes!”
Kid turned. “Hey—!”
George called over him, “Hey there—” and then with a narrowing expression: “Say this ain’t your old man, is it? The guy I been hearing all that talk about over in the bar—well, say! Now the last time I seen your old lady, you know I tell her to bring you down and pay a visit to me, you hear?”
Lanya came down the steps; George walked toward them.
“Now see,” Lanya said, “I haven’t seen you since the park.”
“If I got to invite you twice, I guess I got to invite you twice,” George said, starting up. “Got to go see me the Reverend now, though. One of you drag the other on down, now.” George nodded toward Kid.
“Um…thanks,” Kid said, nodded back.
“See you around,” George said.
“Sure,” said Lanya.
They passed.
George’s response was a falsetto, “Ooooooooo,” which broke and became trundling laughter. Laughter rolled beneath the ceiling like smoke. George mounted into it.
At the bottom of the stairs Lanya said, “Where’ve you been?” and blinked four or five times more than he thought she would have, in silence.
“I…I couldn’t find you this morning. I looked for you. I couldn’t find you. At the commune, or down at the bar. What happened? Where did everybody go?”
Her eyes questioned. Her lips moved on one another, did not open.
“You want some coffee?” he asked out of discomfort, turned and went into the kitchen. “I’ll go get you some coffee. It’s all ready, inside.”
At the urn, he picked up a cup, pulled the lever. “Did you see Tak too? How’d you know I was here?” Amber bubbles burst at the rim; black liquid steamed. “Here you—” he turned and was surprised that she was right behind him.
“Thank you.” She took the cup. Steam flushed before her lowered eyes. “I saw Tak.” She sipped. “He said you might be here. And that Mr. Newboy was looking for you.”
“He just left. He had my book. The galleys, for the poems. The type’s all set.”
She nodded. “Tell me what you’ve been doing.”
“It was a pretty funny day.” He poured coffee for himself, deciding as he did he had already had too much. “Really funny. After you went off, I looked for you. And I couldn’t find you anywhere. I stopped in the john to wash up. When I got down to the camp site, I couldn’t find you. And everybody’d run off.” He put his hand on her shoulder; she smiled faintly. “I got in with some scorpions this afternoon…this evening. That was pretty strange. A guy got shot. We were on the bus, and he was bleeding. And I kept on thinking, what are they going to do with him? Where are they going to take him? There isn’t any doctor around. We even had his arm in a tourniquet. I couldn’t take it. So I just got off the bus. And came here. Because I was hungry. I hadn’t had anything to eat all day except a God-damn pint of wine for breakfast.”
“You ate here?” She looked by both his shoulders. “That’s good.”
“What did you do?”
She was wearing a white blouse, clean but unironed, that he had not seen before. As she walked beneath the bulb, he saw her jeans were new enough to show the crease. “You pick up some clothes this afternoon?” He followed her into the bare auditorium.
“Yesterday. I found them in a closet of the place where I’m staying now.”
“You have been busy, huh? You found a house an’ all?”
“About three days ago.”
“Jesus,” Kid said, “when did you get time to do that? I didn’t think I let you alone long enough to go to the damn bathroom, much less find a house—”
“Kid…” She turned on the word to lean against the sofa arm. In the hall, shrill echoes returned. “Kid,” much more softly, “I haven’t seen you in five days!”
“Huh?” The heel on the floor and the heel in his boot prickled. Prickling rose up his legs, spread about his thighs. “What do you mean?”