I prefer, Kid thought, the red eyes, Goddamn it!
Across the hall, the door to the service porch was open. He started in, and stopped, one hand on the jamb. There was neither glass nor screening in the windows. Siam sat on a crate. “Hey…” He pulled the newspaper into his lap and looked at Kid with growing confusion. “I was…was reading the paper.” Siam offered a smile, thought better, and took it back. “Just reading the paper.” He stood; the paper fell on the floor. The boards had once been painted maroon. “Is there something you want me to do…? I was gonna help out with the moving, but my hand…” He gestured with his bandaged arm. At the place where the bandage wrapped his hand, the flesh was scaling. “I guess I can help set up some stuff,” Siam said, looking at his grimy fingers. “If you want…?”
“Naw,” Kid said. “Naw, that’s all right.”
The verdigrised spigot on the wall splashed on the muddy drain.
Something clanked and ground behind him.
Kid turned.
The Ripper and Devastation wheeled the Harley up the halclass="underline"
“I don’t see why you wanted to bring this piece of junk along. You can’t get no gas for it, and you say the motor’s all shot anyway.”
“Well, it’s a good bike, if I could get it fixed.”
“You want to put it in the bathroom like last time?”
“Shit, these cocksuckers get drunk and don’t aim at all. And you know one of ’em’s gonna piss on it just to see it rust.”
“Aw, come on, motherfucker—”
“No, man! Hey, Denny, can I put it in there?”
“I guess so.” Denny stood by a doorway, both arms full of paper bags.
Kid walked up to him, took his shoulder. “She go?”
Lips pursed, Denny nodded, looking from one bag to the other.
Inside, someone leaned the shovels against the wall beside an ironing board.
They backed up the Harley to wheel it in.
“Hey, is this gonna be your room, Kid?”
Kid said, “Probably.”
“It ain’t gonna take up too much space. Later I can maybe find someplace for it, you know?”
“If it’s in the Kid’s room, nobody’s gonna bother it.”
“That’s okay.”
Kid squeezed Denny’s shoulder. They stepped inside.
“Hey,” Denny said. “It’s got a loft!”
Kid’s spine chilled. He stood very still. “Denny?”
“What?”
“Did the place where we came from have a loft?”
Denny looked puzzled. “Sure it did. But it wasn’t as nice as this one.”
“It wasn’t?”
“This one’s a lot bigger,” Denny said. “And it’s got a mattress on it.”
“What was the place like we were living before?”
“Huh?”
“Describe it to me. I can’t remember it. I can’t…remember anything about it.”
“What do you mean?”
“What color were the walls painted?”
“White weren’t they?”
Frowning, Kid nodded. The walls about them were green.
“You really don’t remember where we lived before?”
Kid shook his head.
“We had,” Denny began, prompting, “a bunch of spades across the street from us? It was down about eight or nine streets from here. And over a little.”
“How did it compare to here?”
“What…do you mean?” Denny asked again.
“How is this place different?”
“Shit,” Denny said. “This place is about twice as big! Don’t you remember how cracked the walls and everything were? This place is in pretty good condition.” After a moment, Denny asked: “Is this gonna be your place?”
“I guess so,” Kid said.
“Can I put some of my shit up there? These cocksuckers will walk off with anything you just leave around.”
“Sure. Go ahead.”
Denny flung up one of the bags, then the other. “I sure wish this one had a ladder. You’re supposed to really climb up and down this thing?” The supporting beam had triangular notches cut into the side. Denny climbed up two, and looked back. “Hey, it ain’t that hard…you really don’t remember where we were before?”
“I guess…no.”
“Wow,” Denny said and pulled himself up onto the mattress. “You lived there an awful fucking long time.” He looked at Kid again, frowned, responding to something Kid could feel moving in his face but could not identify. “…maybe not that long,” Denny recanted, dubiously. He disappeared.
More people moved in the hall behind him.
“Hey, Kid,” somebody said, but was gone when he looked.
He went to the post and climbed up after Denny. In the corner, he sat back and watched the boy thumbtack Koth the Dark Angel next to the day-glo Scorpio. Now Denny emptied the other bags between his knees. “I guess,” he said after a moment, “she really got it all. That was pretty nice of her, huh?”
Kid nodded.
Denny crawled over the mattress, hesitated, then put his head in Kid’s lap. Kid rubbed Denny’s neck, looked down, surprised. Denny took two deep breaths.
He’s gonna cry…? Kid wondered.
“You all right?” Denny asked in a perfectly controlled voice.
“Yeah,” Kid said. “What about you?”
“I’m fine,” Denny said, listlessly. After a while, he said, “I’m gonna go down and check things out, huh?”
“Okay.”
He sat alone, listening to the sounds of the house. Once he picked up Denny’s radio and turned it on. There was not even static. No battery?
He turned the glass dice, watching reflected ghosts of his face. He turned up a mirror on his chain; comparison of the two images told him nothing. But he looked back and forth.
Someone banged on the boards beneath him.
“Hey, you up there? Kid?”
He opened his eyes; the dice rolled from his lap as he crawled to loft’s edge.
Black eyes, broken tooth, hair with a braid undone: Between huge shoulders, the smooth and the scarred, Nightmare grinned. “Hey, you got yourself a real nice nest set up for you here, huh?”
“How you doin’, man!” Kid swung his legs over, dropped to the floor. His body tingled, heels, chin, knuckles and knees.
Nightmare took a stiff step back, another to the side, and bobbed his head. “Yeah, you really got yourself set up. Really nice.” He looked into the hall, nodded at someone who hailed him. “Stealin’ all my folk away from me?” He glanced back, brows high and forehead furrowed. “You’re welcome to the scroungy motherfuckers! The niggers are okay. But the white ones, man. Shit…!”
Dollar said, “Hey, Nightmare—”
Shoulders raised; head lowered, Nightmare spat on the floor.
Dollar swallowed, and disappeared at a gesture of Nightmare’s fist.
Nightmare turned, annoyance and concern weighting the ends of his eyebrows, the corners of his mouth. “Fuckin’ psycho! You gotta treat these bastards like horse turds, man! Like fuckin’ monkey puke! They all like you now. But you’re gonna have go show ’em soon.” He turned his boot on the gobbet. “And watch out for the ladies, they are particularly bad.”
“Nightmare,” Kid said, “Most of the time, I can’t even tell which ones the ladies are!”
“Got a point there.” Nightmare nodded. “Altogether, how many you got here?”
“Don’t know.”
“I never did neither.” In the hall, Nightmare squinted at the ceiling. “Yeah, this is going to be interesting.”
Kid followed him.
“Somebody told me you fool around with boys, huh?” Nightmare nodded again, considering. “I was in reform school for years. Yeah, I know about that shit.” He leaned out on the service porch (where two blacks manhandled a chipped washing machine), and pulled back, still nodding. “So you got Copperhead, Glass, and Spitt all here in the nest with you. That’s pretty cool, I guess. I wouldn’t have the balls for that. I tell you that now.”