“You’re not going to hurt anyone,” she said once. “You’re not going to hurt me. I know that. You’re not.”
The hysteria with which she made love to him on that dark stage was first furious, then funny (wondering if someone was going to walk in, and excited by the idea); he lay on his back while she bucked above him, clutching his shoulders, wondering should he feel this way. But the sound she was making that he’d thought was crying cleared to laughter. Her buttocks filled his hands, and he dug between them.
She reared too high, and lost him to the annealing chill. While she reached for him, he rolled her to her side. Legs in the clutch of denim, he crawled down to the sweaty corner of her blouse and pushed his tongue through her salty hair. She lifted a knee to let it fall wide. After she came (he had worked his pants free of one foot) he straddled her, pushed his penis into her again, lowered his belly to her belly, his chest to her chest, his wet face against the crumpled shoulder of her blouse, and began long final strokes, while her arms tightened on his back.
Coming burned his loins (he remembered the spilled coffee) and left him exhausted and still burning (he remembered how it felt after masturbating when all you started off with was a piss-on); exhaustion won. Lakes of sweat cooled around his body. She nodded in the crook of his shoulder, where he knew his arm would numb soon, but didn’t feel like doing anything about it. He slid his hand down his own chest, till his fingers caught in the transverse chain, beneath angular shapes.
Time’s voices in agon? Who wants to hear hunchbacks and spastics haggle? Even if there are no others in concert. We should not be lying here, cooling, half naked, half asleep. A good reason to do it. I am still angry at her. I am still angry. Would she have it I choose scorpions all for negative reasons? Have they been a surround? No: it is better to accept the inevitable with energy. Well then, if I have not chosen up till now, now I choose. That is freedom. Having chosen, I am free. Somewhere in my memory is a moon that gives odd light. It is safe here—
He woke: which was suddenly arriving in that space between the boards and the touch of eyelid against eyelid, the weight of his loose fist on his pelvis and the boards pressing his backside.
She’s gone, he thought, with her harmonica to sit on the couch and play. He listened to the music from the other end of the hall.
But you can’t make that discord on a harmonica.
He opened his eyes and rolled to his side (the batteryless projector clacked onto the floor at the end of the rattling chain) and frowned.
The sound was much further away than he’d thought; and was organ music.
She’s gone…?
Kid stood to pull his pants around his leg.
The harmonica was not on the backdrop curving down over the floor.
He pushed his other foot into his pants, sweaty in blotches. He picked up his vest, his orchid, and walked down the steps at the stage edge. Booted foot and bare left their alternating prints in the dust.
Also, his notebook was not in front of the couch.
At the room’s center, he stopped to swallow something filling his throat. The sound with it was almost a sob.
Upstairs the organ played on. And there were voices, mumbling and growing and diminishing. It was silly to think she was upstairs. He put the orchid in his belt and shrugged up his vest as he climbed the steps.
A dozen black men and women milled from the chapel into the vestibule, from the vestibule into the street. Two women walking together glanced at him curiously. A man in a narrow-brimmed hat smiled at him and vanished. Others looked less friendly. The voices turned and blurred like smoke, or prickled with laughter that melted with the next dozen ambling by the closed office.
“Lovely service, don’t you think…”
“She ain’t gonna talk about all that stuff next time too, is she, ’cause I…”
“Didn’t you think it was a lovely service…”
He stepped among them to leave. Somebody kicked his bare heel twice, but he racked it up to accident and didn’t look. Outside, the evening was purple grey; smoke blunted the facades across the street.
Only a few white people passed through the trapezoid of light across the sidewalk. One, a woman with a flowered scarf tied around her head, followed an older man talking earnestly with a black companion; and a heavy guy, blond, in a shirt with no collar that looked as if it were made of army blanket planted himself before the door, while brown and darker faces passed around him. Now a gaunt girl, with freckles on her tan cheeks and brick-red hair, reached him. The two whispered together, walked into the darkness.
Kid waited by the door, watching the worshippers, listening to the tape. People strolled away. Some voices lingered, till the owners followed their shadows into the night. The dwindling crowd made him feel lost. Maybe he should duck back in to tell Reverend Taylor he was leaving.
Studs bright in scuffed leather, shadows slipping across his shaggy blond stomach, cap pushed back off the yellow brush, Tak Loufer stepped out, looked at Kid with a single highlight in one shadowed eye, and said, “Hey, you still around here? I sent two people over looking for you. But I thought you’d be gone by now.”
5
“What are you here for?”
Tak held up a paper roll. “Completing my poster collection. You been keeping yourself away from us awhile? We were worried about you.”
“Shit!” fell from the residue of anger. “You wanted to suck on my dick some, maybe? Come on. It’s all slicked up for you with pussy juice. You like that, right?”
“Nigger pussy?”
“Huh?”
“Were you screwing a colored girl? And with the clap?”
“What are you talking about?”
“If it wasn’t black meat and a little runny, I’m not interested. Since I had you last time, boy, I’ve gone on to levels of perversion you haven’t even thought about. What’s the matter with you, anyway? You out of it again? Why don’t you come up and tell me about it while I get drunk.”
“Aw, shit…” Not wanting to, Kid put his hands in his pocket and his head down in the night’s chalky stench; they walked together to the curb.
“Your girlfriend find you?”
Kid grunted.
“Did you have a fight or something? The last few times I spoke to her, I got the impression she was sort of getting ready for one.”
“Maybe we did,” Kid said. “I don’t know.”
“Ah, one of those?”
“She said you saw me get off a bus?”
“Yeah. Earlier this evening. I was down at the corner. I was going to call you, but you turned first, down toward here.”
“Oh.”
A light moved in a window.
Fire, Kid thought. The flickering made him uneasy. He tried to imagine the whole block, the church and the buildings around it, conflagrated.
“I think somebody lives there,” Tak said. “It’s just candles.” They stepped off the curb.
“Where are we?” Kid asked when they stepped up again. “I mean, Tak…what is this place? What happened here? How did it get like this?”
“A good question,” Tak answered over tapping boot heels. “A very good one. For a while, I thought it was international spies—I mean, maybe the whole city here was just an experiment, a sort of test-out plan to destroy the entire country. Maybe the world.”
“You think it’s something like that?”
“No. But it’s comforting to consider all this the result of something organized. On the other hand, it could just be another ecological catastrophe. Maybe somebody filled in our swamp by mistake.”