John, scratching under the fringed shoulder of his Peruvian vest with one hand and eating a piece of bread with the other, came around the furnace. “You guys want some more?” He gestured with the slice, chewing. “Just go take it. You didn’t get here till we were already halfway through breakfast.” Gold-streaked hair and gold wire frames set off his tenacious tan; his pupils were like circles cut from the overcast.
Kidd said: “We had enough. Really.”
In the basket on which the bald man sat (“I take these from you uncrossed and I give them to you…crossed!” More laughter) a half dozen loaves of bland, saltless bread had been brought over by two scorpions who had taken back two cardboard cartons of canned food, in exchange.
Kidd said: “You’re sure that’s today’s paper?” which was the third time he’d asked John that over the last hour.
“Sure I’m sure.” John picked the paper up off the picnic table. “Tuesday, May 5th—that’s May-day, isn’t it?—1904. Faust brought it by this morning.” He folded it back, began to beat it against his thigh.
“Tell Milly when she gets back thanks again for the clean shirt.” Lanya tucked one side of the rough-dried blue cotton under her belt. “I’ll bring it back later this afternoon.”
“I will. I think Mill’s laundry project—” John mused, beating, munching—“is one of the most successful we’ve investigated. Don’t you?”
Lanya nodded, still tucking.
“Come on,” Kidd said. “Let’s get going. I mean if this is really Tuesday. You’re sure he said Tuesday now?”
“I’m sure,” Lanya said.
(“Nope, you’re still doing it wrong, now watch: I take them from you crossed and I give them to you uncrossed.” His fingers, smudged to the second knuckle and bunched at the base of the charred batons, came forward. Hers, smeared equally, hesitated, went back to fiddle with one another, started to take them again. She said: “I just don’t get it. I don’t get it at all.” Fewer laughed this time.)
“So long,” Kidd said to John, who nodded, his mouth full.
They made their way through the knapsacks.
“That was nice of them to feed us…again,” he said. “They’re not bad kids.”
“They’re nice kids.” She brushed at her clean, wrinkled front. “Wish I had an iron.”
“You really have to get dressed up to go visit Calkins’ place, huh?”
Lanya glanced appraisingly at his new black jeans, his black leather vest. “Well, you’re practically in uniform already. I, unlike you, however, am not at my best when scruffy.”
They made their way toward the park entrance.
“What’s the laundry project?” he asked. “Do they have some place where they pound the clothes with paddles on a rock?”
“I think,” Lanya said, “Milly and Jommy and Wally and What’s-her-name-with-all-the-Indian-silver found a laundromat or something a few days ago. Only the power’s off. Today they’ve gone off to find the nearest three-pronged outlet that works.”
“Then when did the one you have on get done?”
“Milly and I washed a whole bunch by hand in the ladies’ john yesterday, while you were at work.”
“Oh.”
“Recording engineer to laundress,” Lanya mused as they passed through the lion gate, “in less than a year.” She humphed. “If you asked him, I suspect John would tell you that’s progress.”
“The paper says it’s Tuesday.” Kidd moved his thumb absently against the blade of his orchid he’d hooked through a side belt loop; inside it, the chain harness jingled, each step. “He said come up when the paper said it was Tuesday. You don’t think he’s forgotten?”
“If he has, we’ll remind him,” Lanya said. “No, I’m sure he hasn’t forgotten.”
He could press his thumb or his knuckles against the sharp edges and leave only the slightest line, that later, like the other cross-hatches in the surface skin, would fill with dirt; but he could hardly feel it. “Maybe we’ll avoid any run-ins with scorpions today,” he said as they crossed from Brisbain North to Brisbain South. “If we’re lucky.”
“No self-respecting scorpion would be up at this hour of the morning,” Lanya said. “They all sleep till three or four, then carouse till dawn, didn’t you know?”
“Sounds like the life. You been in Calkins’ place before, you keep telling me. It’ll be okay?”
“If I hadn’t been in there before—” she slapped her harmonica on her palm—“I wouldn’t be making this fuss.” Three glistening notes. She frowned, and blew again.
“I think you look pretty good scruffy,” he said.
She played more notes, welding them nearly into melody, till she changed her mind, laughed, or complained, or was silent, before beginning another. They walked, Lanya strewing incomplete tunes.
His notebook flapped his hip. (His other hand was petaled in steel, now.) He swung, in twin protections, from the curb. “I wonder if I’m scared of what he’s going to say.”
Between notes: “Hmm?”
“Mr. Newboy. About my poems. Shit, I’m not going to see him. I want to see where Calkins lives. I don’t care what Mr. Newboy says about what I write.”
“I left three perfectly beautiful dresses there, upstairs in Phil’s closet. I wonder if they’re still there.”
“Probably, if Phil is.”
“Christ, no. Phil hasn’t been in the city for…weeks!”
The air was tingly and industrial. He looked up on a sky here the color of clay, there the color of ivory, lighter over there like tarnished tin.
“Good idea,” Lanya said, “for me to split. I got you.” Slipping her hand between blades, she grasped two of his fingers. Even on her thin wrist, turned, the blades pressed, rubbed, creased her skin—
“Watch out. You’re gonna…”
But she didn’t.
Over the wall hung hanks of ivy.
At the brass gate, she said, “It’s quiet inside.”
“Do you ring?” he asked, “or do you shout?” Then he shouted: “Mr. Newboy!”
She pulled her hand gingerly away. “There used to be a bell, I think…” She fingered the stone around the brass plate.
“Hello…” from inside. Footsteps ground the gravel somewhere behind the pines.
“Hello, sir!” Kidd called, pulling the orchid off, pushing a blade into a belt-loop.
Ernest Newboy walked out of shaggy green. “Yes, it is Tuesday, isn’t it.” He gestured with a rolled paper. “I just found out half an hour ago.” He did something on the inside of the latch plate. The gate clanked, swung in a little. “Glad to see you both.” He pulled it open the rest of the way.
“Isn’t the man who used to be a guard here anymore?” Lanya asked, stepping through. “He had to stay in there all the time.” She pointed to a small, green booth, out of sight of the sidewalk.
“Tony?” Mr. Newboy said. “Oh, he doesn’t go on till sometime late in the afternoon. But practically everybody’s out today. Roger decided to take them on a tour.”
“And you stayed for us?” Kidd asked. “You didn’t have to—”
“No, I just wasn’t up to it. I wouldn’t have gone anyway.”
“Tony…” Lanya mulled, looking at the weathered paint on the gate shed. “I thought his name was something Scandinavian.”
“Then it must be somebody else now,” Mr. Newboy said. He put his hands in his pockets. “Tony’s quite as Italian as you can get. He’s really very nice.”
“So was the other one,” Lanya said. “Things are always changing around here.”