“Yes we can,” Lanya said. “Here, see…”
A minute later, heads together, arms locked around one another’s backs, Kid said, “This is comfortable.”
“I think,” Denny said, moving his head down between their chins, “I smell more than either of you.”
“Mmm…” Lanya nodded.
“Didn’t you say something about wanting to go out?” Kid asked.
She nodded again. “Mmmm? Let’s go.”
First cold air under his left arm, then his right. Her fingers on his chest were the last to leave him.
He looked at the desk and wondered whether he should take the notebook.
“You sure keep it hot in here,” Denny said.
“Oh, would you turn that off for me?”
“How?”
“Never mind. I’ll do it.”
Kid looked up: Lanya squatted before the heater, grunting and twisting at something inside.
“There.” She stood. “Let’s go.”
“You ain’t gonna put no shirt on or nothing?” Denny asked.
The sides of the heater, cooling, clanged.
“Be a doll and let me wear your vest?”
“Sure,” Denny shrugged out of his. “But it won’t cover your tits.”
“If I wanted them covered, I’d put on a shirt.” She took the vest from him. “There’s some advantages to living in this city.”
“You’re a funny lady.”
“You’re a funny boy.”
Denny bit on his lip a moment, then nodded deeply. “I guess I sure as fuck am.”
“What are you grinning about?” Lanya asked Kid.
“Nothing,” and ended up grinning harder. “You gonna take up chains too and be a member…”
She considered a moment, sucking her underlip. “Nope.” One nipple was just visible inside the leather lapel. The other was covered. “Just curious.” And picked up her harmonica from the floor by the bed.
They play me into violent postures. Adrift in the violent city, I do not know what stickum tacks words and tongue. Hold them there, cradled on the muscular floor. Nothing will happen. What is the simplest way to say to someone like Kamp or Denny or Lanya that all their days have rendered ludicrous their judgments on the night? I can write at it. Why loose it on the half-day? Holding it in the mouth distills an anger, dribbling bitter, back of the throat, a substance for the hand. This is not what I am thinking. This is merely (he thought) what thinking feels like.
They were quiet through the living room. At the head of the steps Denny began giggling. Lanya hurried them down. They reached the porch, hysterical.
“What’s so funny?” she asked three times; three times her face recovered from the contortions of mirth.
Kid thought: There’s a moment in her laughter when she’s very ugly. He watched for it, saw it pass again, and found himself laughing the harder. She took his hand, and he was very glad she did. The stridence smoothed in his own voice.
Denny’s leveled, too, from some relief Kid did not understand.
“Where’s your school?” Kid asked.
“Huh?”
“Denny told me you were teaching in a school. And Madame Brown said something about classes.”
“You told me about the school,” Denny said.
“It’s right down there. That’s where we’re going now.”
“Fine.”
She bit both lips and nodded; then slid her arm up to link Kid’s elbow, held out her other hand to Denny…who pretended not to see and tight-roped along the curb. So she dropped Kid’s hand too.
The green jacket was new. The shirt between the brass zippers looked old. He came from the corner, unsteadily, head slightly down. His varying steps took him indiscriminately left or right. Twenty-five? Thirty? His black hair was almost shoulder length. In the bony face there was nothing like eyes. He…staggered closer. Tiny lids were pursed at the back of fleshed-over sockets otherwise smooth as the insides of teacups. One leaked a thread of mucus down his nose. He came on, missing the lamppost by a lucky detour. On twine around his neck hung a cardboard sign, lettered in ballpoint:
“Please help me. I am deaf and dumb.”
Denny stepped closer to Lanya and took her arm. The blind-mute passed. “Wow—” Denny started, softly. Then breath stopped.
The heavy blond Mexican in the collarless blanket-shirt hurried from a doorway. The irregular tap of the blind-mute’s cowboy boots stopped when the Mexican seized his shoulder; his head came way up and swung in the air like sniffing as the Mexican took the blind-mute’s hand. He pressed in his fist against the mute’s palm, and pressed again, and pressed again, making different shapes. The blindmute nodded. Then they hurried to the corner, holding one another’s arm.
“Shit…” Denny said, wonderingly and lingeringly. He looked at Lanya. “We seen him before, you know? The big spic. He pushed Kid, you know? Just came to him in the street and pushed him.”
“Why?” Lanya asked. She reached across to hold the right lapel of Denny’s vest with her left hand.
“Don’t tell me everything in this fucking city happens for a reason,” Kid said. “I don’t know.”
“Well,” Lanya said, “usually, in Bellona, everything happens for…” Then she sucked her teeth. “Deaf and blind? That’s heavy. I was in San Francisco once. You know the welfare office on Mission Street?”
“Yeah,” Kid said, “I tried to get on welfare out there, but they wouldn’t let me.”
She raised an eyebrow. “I was walking by it once…reading the signs on the Page Glass Company…? When I looked down, I saw a dumpy woman in a flowered house dress leading this old man who was tapping a cane. But when she got to the steps, she stooped down to feel around. And she was saying, ‘Now I know…I know where it is.’ Three more steps, and I realized she was blind, too. I watched them till she finally got them through the door. It was fascinating, and a little horrifying. But when I went on, I began to think: What a marvelous image for most of human history, not to mention current politics. Practically every relationship I know has something in it of—and then of course it struck me, and I began to laugh right there on the street. But the point is, it really hadn’t occurred to me all the time I’d watched them. And all I could do was think how lucky I was that I had decided not to be an artist, or a writer or a poet. Because how could you use a perfectly real experience like that in a work of art today, you know?”
“I don’t get it,” Denny said. “What do you mean?” (Without Denny’s vest, Kid noticed one of the five chains Denny wore was copper. His back and shoulders, here and there pricked with pink, looked white as stone.)
“It’s just that…” Lanya frowned. “Well, look, Denny—you’ve heard the expression…”
He hadn’t.
When they’d tried to explain for a block and a half, Kid realized that Denny was now between them once more (“But why can’t you use something anyway that somebody already said?” Denny demanded once more. “I mean if you say where you got it from, maybe…”), but Kid could not remember switching positions: gruffly he switched back.
“That’s the school.” Lanya squeezed Kid’s arm. “It doesn’t look like one, I know. But I guess that’s the point.”
“It looks like a drug store,” Denny said. “I wouldn’t want to put a school in no place that looked like a drug store. I mean not around here.”
“It was a clothing store,” Lanya said.
“Oh.” Denny’s tongue made a hillock on his cheek. “It sure looks like a drug store.”
“I hope not.” Lanya actually sounded worried.
“I don’t think it should look like any sort of store at all,” Kid said. “I mean if you don’t want people busting in.”
“That was the idea,” Lanya said. “I didn’t think it looked like a store at all. At least since we took the sign off. Just a house with a large front window. There isn’t any writing on it.”