Kid walked beside a raging mantis with swaying ruby eyes.
Watching the walkers among the ballooning lights, Kid realized that the group was nearly a fourth smaller than the one which had come up with him. Nightmare’s scorpion, on the corner, threw a half dozen amblers (Baby was the one recognizable) into silhouette.
Listening to their silent progress down, Kid recalled their boisterous journey up. A street lamp pulsed above the corner (they had passed it before. Where?) and Kid saw the couple, hand in hand, beneath it.
“Hey, you two.”
The woman turned, surprised, and raised her free hand: Bracelets clattered to her pale elbow. She blinked interrogatively, then smiled.
The man looked over at Kid. “Hello.” He brushed back long hair, the color of wild rice, from his cheek and smiled too.
“What are you supposed to be doing here?”
“Oh, we…well, we were at…your party.” Over his double-breasted jacket, he wore a large lion’s-head medallion that, in this light, looked like metallic plastic. It hung around his neck on a loop of the optical chain. “We have to get down to Temple, and we just thought we’d walk along with you, for the company.”
“It’s all right, isn’t it?” the woman asked.
“Sure,” Kid said. “You can walk anywhere you fucking well want.”
“Um…thanks,” the man said.
“You want a drink?” Kid looked around in the darkness. “Hey, Ripper, come here!” He took the bottle from the tire-colored hands that jutted from the mantis. “Here, have a drink. We got a long walk.”
“Thanks, no,” the man said. “I don’t drink.”
“I do,” the woman said and reached out a clinking arm.
“Good.” Kid nodded and gave her the bottle. He left them while she was still uncapping it, wondering where, over the last few moments, he had misplaced Lanya and Denny.
He heard their laughter some twenty feet behind him.
He turned to face the dark; and realized how dark it was.
“You scared?” Denny laughed. “There ain’t nothing to be scared of.”
Lanya said: “I’m not scared. Unlike you, I don’t believe in ghosts.”
Kid turned on his lights.
Lanya gave a little shriek and fell into Denny’s arms, both of them blue and helpless with hysterics.
“Are you drunk?” Kid asked.
“No,” she said. “I’m not drunk,” and began to laugh again.
“She smells like she’s drunk,” Denny said.
“How would you—” Still laughing, she straightened up and nearly tripped at the curb.
Which started all three of them off again.
When they were halfway down the next block, Denny asked: “You like your party?”
“Yeah,” Kid said. “I wish I’d gotten a chance to say good night to the old girl with the crab cakes and the blue hair. She was my favorite.”
“Ernestine? She’s priceless!” Lanya said. “Where’s my harmonica?”
Kid pawed in his pocket. Beside the mouth organ and the envelope, there was grit at the bottom. The metal was so warm on his hand it might have been artificially heated.
He gave her the harp.
She played three chords, walking beside him, then started some improvisation in long, platinum notes that took her two, three, four steps ahead.
Denny had turned on his lights (and apparently turned off her dress). Her back was silver, and as she played she trod the joined shadows of herself.
Between two notes, something crackled at Kid’s hip: The envelope. He pushed thick fingertips into his pocket to feel the folded edge.
Copperhead, the girl in maroon jeans tucked tightly under his arm, bobbed into the dim penumbra. “Hey, Kid!” He grinned, broad-nosed, freckle-lipped, and bobbed out.
Kid fantasized a conversation: Copperhead, did Mr. Calkins ever hire you to keep people away from his place? I mean, were you working for him that first day you guys beat me up? No, he didn’t want to know.
Behind Kid, Angel, Glass, and Priest were in altercation.
“No!” Glass interrupted himself at some request from Dollar. “What do you want any for? You just got through tellin’ us how it makes you sick.”
“What I wanna know…”Angel said, thickly. “No, wait, man. Let him have it. Let the dumb white motherfucker get sick if he wants to—Now, what I want to know is, where do all these niggers come from?”
“Louisiana,” Priest said, “Mostly. But there’re a lot of guys here from Chicago. Like you. Illinois, anyway.”
I just don’t like, Kid thought, the idea of not wanting to know anything. He looked around at the luminous dark. “Hey, Copperhead?”
But Copperhead’s arachnid, scales bright as the underside of submerged rose leaves sheened with air, ballooned ahead, drifted away. The legs, rigorous and hirsute, with a faint indigo after-image, deviled Kid’s eyes behind sliding striations.
What he’d expected most from this evening—information about Calkins—the whole over-determined matrix seemed bent on denying him.
A gorgeous bird collapsed near him. Ahead, among a dozen others, a scorpion flickered. Harmonica music was drowned in breaking glass and laughter: someone had dropped the bottle. The bird ignited again; Kid glanced around to see the pavement glisten.
They exhaust my eyes. My ears are on fire. There is nothing left to watch but fire and the night: circle within circle, light within light. Messages arrive in the net where discrete pulses cross. Parametal engines of joy and disaster give them wave and motion. We interpret and defeat their terms by terminus. The night? What of it? It is filled with bestial watchmen, trammeling the extremities and the interstices of the timeless city, portents fallen, constellated deities plummeting in ash and smoke, roaming the apocryphal cities, the cities of speculation and reconstituted disorder, of insemination and incipience, swept round with the dark.
7
Lights doused, scorpions crowded up the nest’s stairs.
He stood on the street, while she laughed sadly: “Hell, then—I might as well have gone back with Madame Brown—”
He said: “I just want to check out that place we saw down the street that was on fire. I’ll be right back—”
Gangling D-t hooked one brown arm around Denny’s neck, rested two brown fingers on Lanya’s silver, and said: “I’ll take care of ’em for you, Kid. Now you don’t worry.”
Denny, looking even sadder, said: “If you go down there, you better be careful…”
And Kid walked for fifteen minutes, turned one corner, turned another, turned another and thought: If the wind changes, I’ll die!
He squinted in the heat.
“The smoke! The smoke will be enough to kill me! How did I…?”
White fire, a-flap with yellow and orange, engulfed the upper stories. Night roared in the street. He heard something huge fall behind one of the facades and edged along the brick, thinking: It could jump the street…
A flicker between the cobbles:
As his bare foot touched one, he saw that water, running between the humped stones, had made all the alley a web of light. He sprinted to the left. Smoke rolled to his right, pulled away from more fire beating up about the high masonry. This was what he had seen between the lions of August…? This is what they had watched from Calkins’ gardens…?
Not this gorge of flame!
It couldn’t be this big:
Cold puffed against his cheek.
More heat, then cold again; his sweaty jaw dried.