“Huh?”
“I can get you a picture of him, if you want, not like they had in the newspaper.”
“No. I don’t want a picture of him. What kind of picture?”
“Big full-color poster. Buck naked.”
“No!” She dropped her head. “You are playing with me. I wish you wouldn’t. It’s just awful.”
“Hey, I just…” He looked from sandwich to bottle. He wasn’t hungry, but had eaten in complicity. Now he wished he hadn’t. He said: “If you play by yourself, you’re just going to lose. If I play with you, maybe you’ll…have a chance.”
Her hair swung; she looked up, with a confusion he paid her the compliment of assuming feigned.
“Tomorrow I’ll get you the—”
“You were supposed to wait for me,” Bobby said from the doorway. “Mom said we were supposed to come up here together…Gosh, you almost got this room clean.”
June made shoulder motions which Bobby did not exactly ignore; neither did he respond. Instead, he said, “You got that stuff around your neck. Like this.” He held up his bright wristlet.
“Yeah.” He grinned. “Bet you won’t tell me where you got yours.”
Bobby looked more surprised than he’d expected. “I told Mom and Daddy that I just found them.”
June said, petulantly, “You shouldn’t wear them.”
Bobby put his hands behind his back and humphed, as though this were an exchange from a frequent argument.
“Why shouldn’t he?”
Bobby said, “She thinks terrible things happen if you wear them. She’s scared. She took hers off.”
June glared at him.
“You know what I think?” Bobby said. “I think even worse things happen to people who wear them for a while and then take them off!”
“I didn’t take it off.”
“You did!”
“I didn’t!”
“You did!”
“It wasn’t mine! And you shouldn’t have said you found it. I bet really bad things happen to people who steal them.”
“I didn’t steal it!”
“You did!”
“I didn’t!”
“You did!”
“Oh…!” In sibling frustration she flung her hands out to end the antiphon.
He took another bite of pulpy bread; swallowed it with warm Coke: bad idea. He put both down.
“I’m going back,” Bobby said. “You better come too. We’re supposed to be together.” And marched out the door.
She waited. He watched.
Her hand moved in the side folds of her skirt, started to come up. Then she raised her head.
“Maybe you better—”
“Oh, he’s going to go exploring.” Contempt?
“Why do you want to find…George?”
She blinked. A word lost itself in breath. “I…I have to. I want to!” Her hands tried to raise, each one, in turn, holding the other down. “Do you know him?”
“I’ve seen him.”
For all her light-eyed ash-blondness, her expression was incredibly intense. “You just…live out there?”
“Yeah.” He examined her face. “So far I haven’t needed a…” Intense, but it told him little. “…I haven’t been here anywhere near as long as you have.” He forced his shoulders down; they’d hunched to fend something he had not even consciously acknowledged an attack. “I hope you find him.” It wasn’t an attack; it was just that intensity. “But you’ve got a lot of competition.”
“What…?” Her reaction to his realizing it was to suddenly lose all of it. “What do you want?” She sounded exhausted, looked as if she would repeat it with no voice at all. “Why…did you come here?”
“To clean up…I don’t know why. To play, maybe. Why don’t you let me clean up? You better go back downstairs.” He picked up another paper and folded it, growling and flapping, to manageable size.
“Oh…” And suddenly she seemed just a very young girl again. “You’re just…” She shrugged; and left.
He finished the paper, put the revealed junk in the kitchen, up-righted more furniture, and thought about this family.
They filled his mind while he finally shouldered into the packed room; he reached innumerable decisions about them which he lost to scraping chair legs, collapsing bridge tables, drawers that would not fit in their chiffoniers. One thought, however, remained surfaced for the time it took to move five pieces into the swept front room: Trying to stay sane under that sort of madness drives us nuts. He contemplated writing it in his notebook. But none of the words (and he had taken out his pen) weighed enough to pull his hand to the paper. The thought vanished in the gritting hinges of the writing board to a rolltop desk. Who had stuffed all this junk in here? (Drive? Pressure? Effort?…but was exerting too much of it maneuvering a daybed, on its end, around a bureau.) With slick underarms and gritty neck, he toiled, contemplating hours and wages. But it was difficult to judge slipping time while shuffling and arranging so much hollow dialogue.
When he went out on the balcony, the sky was the color of dark stone. His nasal cavity stung. He thought he saw movement down in the grounds. But when he took the rail, to look over, it was only smoke. And his forearms were sore. He went inside. He ate the rest of the sandwich. He drank the Coke, now flat as well as warm.
Work till sunset in a city where you never see the sun? He laughed. Fuck them if they expected him to get all this stuff to the basement! He ambled, panting, through dressers, easy chairs, day beds, and buffets. The thought occurred to put it in another apartment on the same floor. His next thought was: Why not?
He turned, gigantic, in the belly-high furniture forest. There was no one else, for practical purposes, in the building. Who would know? Who would care? His bladder suddenly warmed; he started down the hall.
At the end of an alcove, a hint of tile over the doorsill identified the bathroom. Inside, he flipped a light switch: lights stayed off. But, as he turned, his shin bumped the toilet ring.
It was pitch dark but he thought, what the hell.
The particular sound of his water, reiterated by sudden, hot wetness against his foot, told him he’d missed. He varied his aim without the rattle of water on water to sing success. Stop his stream? The memory of the yellow burst of pain at the base of his penis…He’d mop later. And let it run.
He lurched from the darkness and said, “Shit!”
His wet foot left its spreading print on the notebook, where it lay outside the door. Had it crept after him for soiling? No; he remembered (black and white; no color…like some dreams) carrying it with the intention of writing something down. When the lights hadn’t worked, he had dropped it there.
3
“IT’S ME, KIDD.”
“Oh, hey, just a second.”
The chain fell. The door opened.
Behind her, candles flickered on the phone table. The light from the living room tossed unsteady shadows on the rug. A doorway up the hall let out wavering orange. “Come on in.”
He followed June to the living room.
“Well.” Mr. Richards peered above the Times, folded small. “You worked on a good bit past sundown I’d say. How’s it going?”
“Fine. There was a whole lot of broken glass in the back room. A vanity turned over.”
“You got the furniture out?” Mrs. Richards called from the kitchen.