“To the park. To the commune.”
“Why?”
“I’m hungry, for one thing.”
“Just as well I’m not talking.”
She hurried him across the street, into an ocean of smoke and evening. He tried to smell it, but his nostrils were numb or acclimated. The lions gaped in the blur with stony, astonished protest. They neared the foggy pearl of a functioning street light. “This morning,” Lanya said, “after you went away to write, some people said that there had been some new fires at the other end of the park!”
“Smoke’s sure thicker.”
“Down there,” she nodded, “before, I thought I could see it flickering. And it hadn’t even gotten dark yet.”
“There couldn’t be any fires in the park,” he announced suddenly. “The whole thing would just burn up, wouldn’t it? It would either all burn or it wouldn’t.”
“I guess so.”
“Did they send anybody to check? Maybe they should get some people down there to dig one of those things, a breakfront.” Breakfront? and heard the word resonate with images of a charred forest, where years back he had tramped with a canister of water strapped to his shoulders, hand pumping from the brass nozzle into sizzling ash. “Maybe you and John and his people could go.”
She shrugged under his arm. “No, really, I’d rather not go down there…”
From her voice he tried to reconstruct what it told him of her expression, and remembered her sitting on the stone railing with arms full of torn blue silk.
“You’re scared to death!”
Her head turned abruptly in question or affirmation.
“Why?”
She leaned her head forward and surprised him by reiterating, “Come on,” quietly, sharply.
His bare foot went from concrete to grass.
The night billowed and sagged: habit guided them through a maze of mist.
He saw quivering fires.
But they were from the commune’s cinder block furnace. People moved silently, listlessly before flame.
Perched along the picnic table, in a variety of army jackets, paisley shirts, and grubby tank-tops, young people stared through stringy hair. Someone dragged a sleeping bag in front of the fire. Shadow: pale, hairy skin; black leather: Tak stood back from the fire, arms folded, legs wide. The ornate orchid of yellow metal hung from his belt. Three scorpions stood behind him, whispering.
One was the red-headed, freckled black who had pipe-whipped him at Calkins; the other two were darker. But his initial start was followed by no more uneasiness. Somebody swaggered past with a cardboard carton of tin cans, crumpled cellophane wrappers, paper cups. He realized (very surprised) he was very high. Thought swayed through his mind, shattered, sizzled like water in hot ash. It’s the smoke, he thought frantically. Maybe there’s something in this fog and smoke. No…
John walked by the fire’s edge, bald chest glistening between his vest, stopped to talk with Tak; they bent over Tak’s weapon. Then, at John’s wrist:—brass leaves, shells, claws: from the ornamented wrist band the overlong yellow blades of the orchid curved down around John’s fingers. He was making motions from the elbow as if he would have beat his leg were his hand un-armed.
Tak grinned, and John moved away.
Kidd blinked, chill and unsteady. There was Lanya—she had moved from his side—talking with some of the people around the table. Isolate questions pummeled inarticulately. A muscle twitched in his flank, and he was terribly afraid of it. He stepped, brushing shoulders with someone who smelled of wine. The fire put a hot hand against cheek, chest, and arm, leaving the rest of him cool.
Milly shook her hair somewhere in the shadow of a tree: bloody copper shingles rattled her shoulders.
Why were they here? Why did they mill here? His inner skull felt tender and inflamed. Watch them, listen to them, put together actions and conversation snatches: He searched the screen where perception translated to information, waiting for somebody to dance, to eat, to sing. He wished Lanya had told him why they had come. But he was very tired. So he moved around. Someday I’m going to die, he thought irrelevantly: but blood still beat inside his ear.
He stepped backward from the heat, and backward again. (Where was Lanya?) But was too distraught to turn his head. Everything meant, loudly and insistently, much too much: smoke, untwirling over twigs; the small stone under his heel; the hot band from the fire across his lowered forehead; the mumblings around him that rose here, fell there.
Milly stood a few feet in front of him, bare legs working to a music he couldn’t hear. Then John crashed down, crosslegged in the leaves, beside her, fiddling absently with the blades around his hand.
A while ago, he realized, he had thought once again: Please, I don’t want to be sick again, please, but had hardly heard the thought go by, and could only now, disinterestedly, discern the echo.
Something, or—one, was about to emerge into the clearing—he was sure; and was equally sure that, naked and glistening, it would be George! It would be June!
“Isn’t this stupid,” someone Kidd couldn’t see was saying, “when I could be in Hawaii—?”
Tongue tip a pink bud at the corner of his lips, John stared at Milly’s shifting calves. He raised his bladed hand (a reflection crossed his chin), and, with a sharp, downward sweep, cut.
Milly gasped, bit off the gasp, but made no other sound. She did not step, she did not even look.
Astounded, Kidd watched blood, in a torrent wide (the thought struck irrelevantly amidst his terror) as a pencil run down her heel.
IV In Time of Plague
“LOOK, LEAVE ME ALONE…”
“Come on; come—”
“Tak, will you get your fuckin’ hands—”
“I’m not after your tired brown body. I just want to get you to the bar where you can sit down.”
“Look, please I’m…”
“You’re not drunk; you say you’re not stoned or anything, then you damn well better sit down and relax!” Tak’s beefy hand clamped his shoulder. (Kidd took three more unsteady steps.) “You were staggering around there like you were half in some sort of trance. Now come on with me, sit down, have a drink, and get yourself together. You sure you didn’t take anything?”
The ornate orchid at Tak’s belt clashed the simple one at Kidd’s.
“Hey, look! Just come on and leave me alone…Where’s Lanya?”
“She’s more likely to find you at Teddy’s than wandering around out in the dark. You come on.”
In such colloquy they made their hesitant way from park to bar.
Kidd swayed in the doorway, looking at rocking candle flames, while Tak argued with the bartender:
“Hot brandy! Look, just take your coffee-water there, in a glass with a shot of…”
June? Or George?
Paul Fenster looked up from his beer, three people down (Kidd felt something cold but manageable happen in his belly at the recognition), and came over to stand behind Tak; who turned with two steaming glasses.
“Huh…?”
“So. I’ve found somebody here I know.” Fenster was buttoned halfway up the chest in a red, long-sleeve shirt. “I didn’t think I would, and it’s my first night back.”
“Oh.” Tak nodded. “Yeah. How you doing? Hey, I gotta bring a friend a drink. Um…Come on.” Tak lifted the brandy glasses over some woman’s shoulder, stepped around some man. Fenster raised his chin, watching.
Tak came across to Kidd. Fenster came behind.
“Here’s your brandy. This is Paul Fenster, my favorite rebel-who-has-managed-to-misplace-his-cause.”