Dhalgren

Nightmare flailed backward out the screen door, II his forearm/ going/ making a cracked the on the jamb.

Horsing around in the yard with Nightmare, Raven, Filament, and Glass, tripped and scratched my calf on the edge of the steps. Later, Lanya came into the loft and saw me. “Hey,” she said. “You should put something on that. Don’t play with it that way. You’ve practically rubbed it raw. You don’t want it to get infected.”

Everybody poured after them—somebody knocked something off the sink. I heard a garbage bag fall and tear under someone’s boots. Two of the little boys (Woodard and Stevie) were holding hands and butting their shoulders against each other, Rose, the youngest (seven?), and brightest girl was right up there trying to see with everybody else. She went through the door with me.

Dragon [Lady] was snappinged her own bladed fist back and forth as though her arm were a whip. (Her elbow dripped. Nightmare spun away: gravel chattered against the bottom step. Drops splatted the ground.

The sky gleamed dull as zinc.

I looked up at the alley—thinking: You can’t /even/ see the end, when Thirteen came hurrying out of the mist. He stopped twenty feet away, Smokey and Lady of Spain behind collided with him.

Dragon Lady staggered, swayed—I thought she’d tripped.

But she shook her head, hard, gave a tiny cry, turned; and fled down up the street.

Smokey collided with Thirteen. Lady of Spain stepped back.

Nightmare stood, panting, both arms going wide and around, getting back his breath.

Among his chains, the optical one caught light. At first I thought it was lengthening…Broken, it slipped across his stomach and tinkled coiled made a tinkling/ puddle between his foot/ beside his boot / against his boot where the sole had pulled off the upper. Not seeing, he lurched away. The chain slipped half over the curb.

Thirteen caught his arm him, “You’re all right…?” and staggered with him.

Behind me the door creaked; two people had gone back in.

“You come on with me,” Thirteen said, “now you just come on.”

Back in the living room, California was looking at the wall by the door. He’d pulled all his hair in front of his shoulder and was sort of hanging on it. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “Will you look at that. I mean, Jesus Christ. That’s where she splattered when she went through.” He started to touch one of the dime-sized spots, already dried brown dry, but shook his went back to hanging on his hair. “/I mean,/Jesus.”

Raven, Copperhead, and Cathedral came in frowning at the constellations of her blood, but kept on going

“You see the way she went at that motherfucker,” Pepper said somewhere out in the hall. “I thought she was gonna kill him. I wouldn’t blame her, man. I wouldn’t blame her one bit the way that motherfucker done. Did you see the way they were going after each other, man? I never seen anything like that before in my life. I really thought we was gonna have chopped meat for dinner the way he lit into her with those that orchid, man, I really thought…”

I went back [into] the kitchen.

Rose was looking out the screening, a brown fist up beside her face chin. I went up behind her and looked too. The other four children were outside.

Sammy was standing at the place where the curb cracked away into the street. With the toe of his sneaker, he touched the coil of Nightmare’s chain.

Stevie, who was sitting on the steps, stood up.

Sammy started to pick up the chain.

Stevie said, “Don’t you touch that, nigger!”

Marceline laughed, but I don’t think at that.

Sammy looked up and looked embarrassed, went to pick up a board lying out on the street, and played by himself.

I touched Rose on the shoulder and she jumped.

“Don’t you want to play with the other kids outside?”

She just blinked. (Somebody should do something about the black spade confusion of her hair—cut it short, I guess.) Then She went out and sat on the steps as far away from the others as she could get.

Only Stevie and Marceline are really friends. Woodard (who is sort of mustard colored, both his skin and his wooly top) merely hangs around them.

I feel sorry for them all.

Later that evening, I using a piece of pine plank for a writing board, I /went out to/ sitting on the steps /and/ was working on playing in my a poem. I had been there perhaps two hours when I noticed the chain /was/ had been removed gone.

I sat a few minutes more. Then I went inside.

Just after Denny went out this morning, Lanya brought back my notebook—this one. The first thing I did was look inside the front cover. “What about the new poems?” I asked.

“Since they’re all on loose sheets I decided I’d keep them in my desk drawer. If you want them…?”

“No,” I told her. “That8[’?]s probably better. They’d just fall out.”

“Did you see the article /in the Times/ about you and the children?” [s]he asked when we went out into the back yard.

“No,” I said.

So she told me.

It made me feel strange.

Once we went back /up/ into / into the loft/ to get something. She found a piece of paper down tween /between/ the wall and the mattress. “Are you finished with this one?”

I looked at it. “I guess so. It isn’t complete, really. But I’m not interested in it anymore.”

“I’ll just take it back to my place and keep it with the others,” and she put it in her [—?] shirt pocket; then she jumped down, cried out when [she?] landed, “Owwww!”

I thought she’d twisted her ankle.

But it wasn’t serious.

We went into the kitchen; she looked into the coffee pail on the stove and frowned at the mess.

D-t came in with a paper. “Hey, man, that’s something, huh?” He had it folded back to the article.

It was on page three.

“What I want to know,” Lanya said, looking through the living room door at Stevie and Woodard (Tarzan was trying to ride them across the floor like a horsie), “is what you’re going to do with them.”

I was leaning against I was leaning against the refrigerator door with my fingers hooked arounding at the rubber flange that goes around the inside of the door. “It doesn’t even mention George.” I was pullinged. “It makes it sound like I saved them all by myself. It was George’s Goddamn idea. I was just along—”

Rose walked in, banging the screen, and stared at Lanya on her way to the next room. Lanya smiled: Rose didn’t and kept walking. At the doorway she stopped, looked at Tarzan and the boys, sighed, turned around, went back—bang!—onto the front steps.

Sammy was playing in the middle of the street and did not look at her.