“I seen drug stores like that.” Denny nodded in self-corroboration. “People around here are always busting into drug stores and doctors’ offices ’cause they think they can find shit. And they find some, too.”
Lanya jiggled the handle. “I thought it looked like a coffee shop.” The door swung in.
Turning inside, Kid saw curtains in front of the window. Light prickled the weave. “I didn’t notice those from the outside.”
“That’s because the window’s so dirty it really doesn’t matter.”
“It sure is dark,” Denny muttered. “You got electricity here, don’t you?”
“There’re lanterns,” Lanya said. “But I don’t think we’d better use them now.”
“Put your lights on,” Kid told Denny. Denny’s hand rattled in chains.
Lanya’s hand leapt to shadow her face. “…that surprised me!” She laughed.
Shadows from the chairs swung on the linoleum as what had been Denny moved toward a blackboard stand. “It sure looks like a school inside.”
“Actually started out just as a day-care center. You have no idea how many children there are in Bellona! We don’t either. They don’t all come here.”
“You take care of them while their parents go to work?” Kid asked.
“I really don’t know what their—” she glanced at him, closed her lips, moved them across her teeth—“what their parents do. But the kids are better having each other to play with some place where it’s safe. And we can teach things here. Things like reading; and arithmetic. Paul Fenster got the thing started. Most of the kids in my section, in all the sections really, are black. But we’ve got three white children who’re holed up with their parents over in the Emboriky department store.”
“Shit,” Denny said. “You take those bastards?”
“Somebody has to.”
“I don’t think I’d fall in love with any of them.”
“Yes, you would. They’re all cute as the devil.” She picked up a lantern that had dropped from its nail and hung it back. “When Paul suggested that I take over a section, at first I really wondered. I’m not a social crusader. But you wouldn’t believe how good these kids are. And quiet? With a bunch of seven, eight, and nine year olds, it’s a little unnerving just how quiet they can be. They do practically anything I say.”
“They’re all probably scared to death.”
Lanya made a face. “I’m afraid, really, that’s what it is.”
“Of you?” Denny’s great light bobbed.
“No.” Lanya frowned. “Just scared. It was my idea to try actually teaching something…just to pass the time. It works out a lot better than letting them run loose—mainly because they don’t run.” She blinked. “They just sat around and fidgeted and looked unhappy.” She turned to the table. “Well, anyway, here—”
The aluminum face of a four-spool tape recorder, interrupted with a quorum of dials, twin rows of knobs, tabs, and multiple ranks of jack-sockets, gleamed above coiled wire, on which lay three stand-mikes and several earphones.
“…since you’re here—” Lanya sat one rod-mike upright—“you might as well help. I was going to try something out that I’ve been working on—Denny, if you’re going to keep that thing on, please be still! It’s distracting!”
“Okay.” A chair rasped back. Denny’s light, quivering, lowered about it; and consumed it. “Okay. What do we do?”
“You can start off by keeping quiet.” She pressed a switch; two spools spun. “Then it gets more complicated. This is a great machine. It’s two free and reversible four-track recorders on one chassis, with built in cell-sink.” She pressed another tab; the spools slowed. She blew a run on the harmonica toward the mike, pressed the off button. Another finger went down on a black tab. The spools halted, reversed; another finger went down.
The spools slowed, stopped.
Another finger.
They reversed.
From under the table—Kid’s eyes jerked down to the metallic-shot speaker cloth—the harmonica, twice as loud and with echo, rang like a mellophone.
Lanya turned a knob. “Level’s a little high. But that’s the effect I want for the third track.”
The tape ran back (more tabs: chud-chuk), reversed. Lanya blew another run, and replayed it.
“Gee,” Denny said. “On the tape, it sounds just like you playing.”
No, Kid thought. It sounds entirely different. He said: “It sounds pretty good.” But different.
Lanya said: “It’s about okay.” She turned one knob a lot, and another only a little. “That should do it.” She pressed another tab. “Here goes nothing. Be quiet now. I’m recording.”
Denny’s chair leg squeaked on the floor.
Lanya scowled back over her shoulder and positioned herself at the mike. Without lifting her sneaker heel, she began swinging her knee to keep time. Her shoulders rounded from the armholes of Denny’s vest. She blew a long, bending note. And another. A third seemed to slide from between them, bent back, hung in the half-dark room—light glowed in three of the dials; red hairlines shook—and turned over, became another note, did something to Kid’s eyebrows so they wrinkled. And Denny had turned off his shield.
She played.
Kid listened, and remembered crouching in dim leaves, leaves tickling his jaw, while she walked beyond him, making bright music. Then something in the playing brought him to the here and now of the room, the plastic reels winding, the tension-arm bouncing inside its tape loop, the needles swinging, three (of the four) signal lights glowing like cigarettes. The music was more intense than memory; emotional fragments, without referent scenes, resolved through the brittle, slow notes. She moved her mouth and her forehead; her two forefingers rose vertical over the silver (her nails were slightly dirty; the music was wholly beautiful), then clamped. Silver slid between her lips. She played, played more, played some phrase she’d played before, then turned the tune to its final cadences, taking it to some unexpected key, and held and harped on the resolving chord sequence; a little trill of notes kept falling into it, every two beats; and falling; and falling.
She dropped the harp, clutching it in both hands, against her bare breasts, and grinned.
After maybe ten seconds, Denny applauded. He stuck out his legs from the chair, bounced his heels, and laughed. “That’s pretty good! Wow! That’s pretty nice!”
Kid smiled, pulled his bare toes back on top of his boot, pushed his shoulders forward; in his lap his hands knotted. “Yeah…”
Lanya grinned at them both, stopped the tapes. “I’m not finished yet. You guys have to help on the next part.” She plugged in one earphone set, tossed it to Denny: “Don’t drop—”
He almost did.
She started to toss another set to Kid; but he got up and took it. Tangled cords swung to the floor. “I’m going to lay in another track on top of it. Remember that little part just before the end? Well, this time you have to clap there, five times, each time a little louder. And sort of shout or hoot or something on the last clap.” She played the section over.
Denny started to beat his hands together.
“Just five times,” she said. “Then shout. I’ll bring you in. Let’s try it.” They did. Denny hooted like a choo-choo train, which broke Kid up laughing.
“Come on,” Lanya said. “You guys don’t have to overdo it!”
They tried again.
“That’s it. Put your earphones on, and we’ll lay it in.”
The rubber rims clasped Kid’s ears and damped the room’s silence down a level.