“What do you mean what do I mean?” She spoke clumsily, breaking through three tones of voice. “Where have you been?” Retreating from the clumsiness, her voice was left only with hurt. “Why did you go away? What did you do all this time?”
Little things clawed between his buttocks, mounted rib by rib, perched on his shoulder to nip at his neck so he had to drop his chin. Lines of perspiration suddenly cooled. “You’re kidding with me, aren’t you? Like with the moons?”
She looked puzzled.
“The night when the moons first came out, and later we were talking about them; you pretended that there had just been one, and that I had been seeing things. You’re fooling with me like that now?”
“No!” She shook her head, stopped it in the middle of a shake. “Oh, no…”
His cheeks felt like pincushions.
“Kid, what happened since the last time you saw me?”
“We woke up, when those sons of bitches were standing around us, right?”
She nodded.
“Then you went away, and I…well, I hung around for a little while, and then I went down to the john to wash up. I guess I took an awful long time. I should have hurried…But there was this guy there, Pepper, a scorpion.” The prickling had left his feet: it felt as though he were being poured full of cold water. It rose behind his knees. “Pepper and me, we went down to the camp site, only it had been abandoned.”
“John and Milly didn’t move the commune till the day after I saw you last; they thought it would be safer.”
“Then we went to Teddy’s to look for you. Only it wasn’t open yet. And I had a lot of wine with Bunny—you know the guy who dances there. I gave him a message for you.”
She nodded. “Yes, he gave it to me…the day before yesterday!”
“No,” he said. “Because I gave it to him this morning.” The water reached his loins, poured into his scrotum; his scrotum shriveled. “Then I went out, and ended up at that department store downtown. That’s where I met the other guys, and we broke into the place. There were people living in there. We got out. But they shot one of the guys. We just got him out of there, on the God-damn bus that happened to be coming along!”
“That happened two nights ago, Kid! Some of the scorpions came into the bar and wanted to know if anybody knew where they could get a doctor. Madame Brown went with them, but she came back in about ten minutes. Everybody was talking about it all yesterday.”
“He was bleeding and moaning on the floor of the bus!” The water roared around in Kid’s chest, then filled the column of his neck, fountained inside his head. “I got off the bus, and I came—” He choked, and for a moment thought he would drown.“—came here.” The water reached his eyes (and the work bulb grew knitting needles of light); he brushed it away, before more of it rolled down his face, no longer cold, but hot.
He kept rubbing at his eyes with the other: coffee had slopped over.
He raised his cup and sucked the bitter liquid from his skin.
“O, give that here!” She took his cup from him and put them both down on the sofa arm. “I’m not fooling you!”
His hand, lost with nothing to hold, hung like something torn from among roots and still clumped with earth.
Lanya took it, pressed the knuckles to her mouth. “I’m not kidding you at all. That morning, in the park, when Nightmare woke us up was five days ago. And I haven’t seen you since!”
At her touch, he found himself ponderously calm, and kept trying to determine if the submarine silence that filled him hid anger or relief.
“Look, you said Mr. Newboy was here with the galleys. You can’t set type on a whole book overnight, can you?”
“Oh…”
“When we were all talking about you, last night in the bar, he came looking for you with them then, too.”
“Talking about me?” He wanted to pull his hand away, but felt embarrassed.
“About you and the scorpions. They said you saved somebody’s life.”
“Huh?”
She took his other hand now; the familiar gesture only made him less comfortable.
The hurts among her small features and his own made something ugly between them. He raised his hands and pulled her to him, to squeeze it away. She came up against him with her arms crossed over her belly, and here was a hard thing over one breast—her harmonica. She moved her head against his chest. “Oh, for God’s sakes,” she whispered.
“I’m not fooling you either!” He didn’t sound, he thought, nearly as desperate as he felt. “I saw you this morning. I…I thought I saw you this morning.”
“You’ve been running around with the scorpions all week. Everybody thinks you’re some kind of hero or something.”
“What’d you think?” Her hair brushed his moving chin.
“Shit. That’s what I thought: ‘Shit.’ You want to go off in that direction. Fine. But I don’t feel like getting messed up in anything like that. I really don’t.”
“This afternoon,” he said. “I mean it was by accident I found them. And I didn’t save anybody’s life. That was just…”
“Look at you,” she said, not moving away. “You’re dressing like them; you’re hanging out with them. I mean go on: If that’s what you want, go on. But it’s not my scene. I can’t go there with you.”
“Yeah, but…Hey, look. You: you say you’ve got a house and all. Where are you staying now?”
“Would you mind,” she said softly, “if I didn’t tell you?” but opened her arms and put them around him. “Just for a while?” The harmonica corner cut his chest.
He wondered could she feel the anger inside him, pulsing under her hands. “I,” he said, “saw you this morning.”
She pulled back, all his anger on her face. “Look!” She made fists at her hips. “Either you’re lying to me for some kooky reasons I don’t even want to know about or you’re really crazy, and in either case I shouldn’t have anything to do with you, right? The night before I saw you last, you lost three hours. Now you’ve lost five days. Maybe you really are crazy. I shouldn’t have anything to do with you! That’s rational, isn’t it? I haven’t seen you in five days, and, Christ, am I angry at you!”
“Then why the fuck were you looking for me!” He turned and stalked down the hall, a great bubble about to burst inside his ribs.
At the piano, he realized Harrison must have opened the curtains on the low stage. The backdrop—and there were stands with photographer’s floods—showed a painted moon, some seven feet across, and indications around it of trees.
He turned at the apron, surprised again to find her behind him. “Why did you come?”
“Because this is the first time I’ve known where you were. I didn’t know….” She gasped. “I didn’t know if you were all right. You didn’t come back. I thought maybe you were angry at me for something. You used to always come back. And suddenly, for all that time, instead of you, all I got was what people were saying about you. You and the scorpions, you and the scorpions.” Something spent itself in her eyes. The lids lowered on the shadowed green. “Look, so far we haven’t had one of those ‘I’ll-follow-you-anywhere’ relationships. I still haven’t made up my mind if that’s where I want to go. And I just get a little nervous when I find myself thinking I might. That’s all.”
“A week.” He felt his face twist. “What the hell did I do for…five days? When did I…” He reached for her.
Her face crashed against his, hitting his mouth, but she pushed her tongue against his, and was holding tight to the back of his neck. He kept trying to pull her even closer, leaning against the stage.
He loosed one hand to dig between them, till he could pull the harmonica from her blouse pocket. It rattled on the stage behind them.