In the morning we all got up together.
I noticed Lanya noticing me being quiet. She noticed my noticing and laughed.
After coffee we all walked to the school. Denny asked to stick around for the class. Now I noticed her wondering if two days in a row was a good idea. But she said, “Sure,” and I left them and went back to the house, stopping once to wonder if I should go back to the nest instead.
Madame Brown and I had lunch again.
“How are you enjoying your visit?”
“Still thinking a lot,” I told her. “But I also think all this thinking is about to knock me out.”
“Your poetry?”
“Haven’t written a word. I guess it’s just hard for me to write around here.”
“Lanya said you weren't writing too much
at your place, either. She said she thought
there were too many people around.”
“I don’t think that’s the reason.”
We talked some more.
Then I came to a decision: “I’m going back to the nest. Tell Lanya and Denny when they get back, will you?”
“All right.” She looked at me dubiously over a soup spoon puddled with Cross & Blackwell vichyssoise. “Don’t you want to wait and tell them yourself when they get back?”
I poured another glass of wine. “No.”
When the next patient rang, I took my notebook and wandered (for five, funny minutes, midway, I thought I was lost) back to the nest.
Tarzan and the apes, all over the steps, were pretty glad to see me. Priest, California, and Cathedral did a great back-slapping routine down the hall. Glass nodded, friendly but overtly non-committal. And I had a clear thought: If I left, Glass, not Copperhead, would become leader.
I climbed up into the loft, told Devastation’s friend Mike to move his ass the hell over.
“Oh, yeah, Kid. Sure, I’m sorry. I’ll get down—”
“You can stay,” I said. “Just move over.” Then I stretched out with my notebook under my shoulder and fell asleep, splat!
Woke up logy but clutching for my pen. Took some blue paper to the back steps, put the pine plank across my knees and wrote and wrote and wrote.
Went back into the kitchen for some water.
Lanya and Denny were there.
“Hi.”
“Oh, hi.”
Went back to the porch and wrote some more. Finally it was
as loud as I could: “Lanya! Denny!” If they answered, I couldn’t hear; and I was hoarse from shouting. The street sign chattered in its holder—the wind had grown that strong.
I took another half dozen steps, my bare foot on the curb, my boot in the gutter. Dust fits hit my face. My shadow staggered around me on the pavement, sharpening, blurring, tripling.
People were coming down the street, while the darkness flared behind them.
That slow, crazy lightning rolled under the sky.
The group milled toward me; some dodged forward.
One front figure supported another, who seemed hurt. I got it in my head it was the commune: John and Mildred leading, and something had happened to John. A brightening among the clouds—
They were thirty feet nearer than I’d thought:
George looking around at the sky, big lips a wet cave around his teeth’s glimmer, his pupils under-ringed with white, and glare flaking on his wet, veined temples, supporting Reverend Taylor; she leaned forward (crying? laughing? cringing from the light? searching the ground?), her hair rough as shale, her knuckles and the backs of her nails darker than the skin between.
The freckled, brick-haired Negress, among darker faces, walked behind them; with the blind-mute; and the blond Mexican.
Someone was shouting, among others shouting: “You hear them planes? You hear all them planes?” (It couldn’t have been planes.) “Them planes are awfully low! They gonna crash! You hear—” at which point the building face across the street cracked, all up and down, and bellied out so slow I wondered how. Cornices, coping stones, window frames, glass and brick hurled across the street.
They screamed—I could hear it over the explosion because some were right around me—and ran against the near wall, taking me with them and I crashed into the people in front of me, wind knocked out of me by the people behind, screaming; someone reached over my shoulder for support, right by my ear, and nearly tore it off. More people (or something?) hit the people behind me, hard.
Coughing and scrambling, I turned to push someone from behind me. Across the street, girders, scabby with brick and plaster, tessellated luminous dust. I staggered from the wall among the staggering crowd and stumbled into a big woman on her hands and knees, shaking her head.
I tried to pull her up, but she got back down on her knees again.
What she was trying to do, I realized, was roll a pile of number ten tomato-juice and pineapple-juice cans and crumpled cookie packages back into her overturned shopping bag. Her black coat spread around her over crumbs of brick.
One can rolled against my foot. It was empty.
She began to go down, even further, laying her cheek on the pavement, reaching among the jangling cans. I bent to pull her once more. Then someone, yanking her from the other side, shouted, “Come on!” (Cŭm ōhn! the vowels, long and short, braying: the m soft as an n; the n loose as an r.) I looked up without letting go.
It was George.
She came up between us, screaming: “Ahhhhhhhhhh—Annnnnn! Don’t touch me! Ahhhhhhhhh—don’t touch me, nigger!” She staggered and reeled in our grip. I didn’t see her look at either of us. “Ahhhhh—I saw what you done!—that poor little white girl what couldn’t do no thin’ against you! We saw it! We all saw it! She come lookin’ for you, askin’ all a-round, askin’ everybody where you are all the time, and now you take her, take her like that, just take her like you done! And see what’s happened! Now, see! Oh, God, oh help me, don’t touch me, oh, God!”
“Aw, come on!” George shouted again as once more she started to collapse. He pulled again; she came loose from my grip. The coat stung my hands. As I dodged away, she was still shrieking:
“Them white people gonna get you, nigger! Them white men gonna kill us all ’cause of what you done today to that poor little white girl! You done smashed up the store windows, broke all the streetlights, climbed up and pulled the hands down from the clock! You been rapin’ and lootin’ and all them things! Oh, God, there’s gonna be shootin’ and burnin’ and blood shed all over! They gonna shoot up everything in Jackson. Oh, God, oh, God, don’t touch me!”
“Will you shut up, woman, and pick up your damn junk,” George said.
Which, when I looked back, seconds later, was what she was doing.
George, ten feet off, squatted to haul up a slab of rubble that rained plaster from both sides, while another woman tugged at a figure struggling beneath. A handful of gravel hit my shoulder from somewhere and I ducked forward.
Ahead of me, turning and turning in the silvered wreckage, Reverend Amy squinted up, fists moving above her ears, till her fingers jerked wide; the up-tilted face was scored with what I thought rage; but it swung again and I saw that the expression struggling with her features was nearer ecstasy.
I climbed over fallen brick. The orchid rolled and bounced on my belly.
The blind-mute was sitting on the curb near the hydrant. The blond Mexican and the brick-haired Negress squatted on either side. She held his hand, pressing her fist, the fingers rearranged and rearranged, at each contact, against his palm.