“That’s nice,” then realized how flip that sounded and was embarrassed.
“Tak here has been trying to tell me about how to get along in this place,” Jack offered: He had either not taken offense, or just not heard. “Tak’s a lot smarter than I am, you know. It’s pretty funny here, huh?”
He nodded.
“I was gonna go to Canada. But somebody told me about Bellona. Said it was a pretty swinging place, you know? So I thought I’d stop off here. On the way.” Now he looked around the bar. The woman howled again: The purple angora had abandoned her. The howl moved predictably once more toward laughter and she sat, alone, shaking her dark red hair over her drink. “I ain’t ever seen a place quite like this. Have you?” Jack offered the conversation back to him.
“Oh, I bet you ain’t,” Tak intercepted. “Now the Kid here, you know, he’s my age? You probably would have thought he was younger than you are. Jack here is twenty. Now seriously, how old would you say the Kid here is?”
“Uh…oh, I don’t know,” Jack said, and looked confused.
(He wanted to look at the engineer’s shadowed face again, but not yet.)
“Where the hell did you run off to this morning, anyway?”
A dog barked, somewhere in the bar.
About to turn and answer Tak, he looked toward the noise. Claws scrabbled; then, bursting between the legs of the people next to them, the black muzzle and shoulders!
He snatched his arm up from the barking.
At the same time, Lanya arrived: “Hey, come on, girl!”
Others had turned to watch the beast bark up at their table.
“Come on. Quiet down.” Lanya’s hand strayed on the shaking head, played on the black snout. “Be quiet! Quiet, now.” The dog tried to pull its head away. She grabbed its lower jaw and shook it gently. “What you making so much noise about? Shhhhh, you hear me? Shhhh!” The dog turned its brown eyes from the table, to Lanya, back to the table. Bright pricks from the candles slid on the black pupils. It licked her hand. “There now. Be quiet.” In the other was a wad of wet paper towels. She sat down, put them on the table: they trickled on the wood.
Jack’s hands were back in his lap.
Tak pushed up his cap; the shadow uncovered his large, blue eyes. He shook his head, and sucked his teeth in general disapproval.
“Come on, now,” Lanya said once more to the dog.
It waited beside the table, panting.
He reached out toward the dark head. The panting stopped. He passed his fingers over the rough hair, the wiry brows. The dog turned to lick the ham of his thumb. “Yeah,” he said. “You just be quiet.”
“Is Muriel bothering you people?” Purple Angora sucked a sighing breath. “I tell her—” he gestured toward the woman at the bar—“she shouldn’t bring her in here. Muriel is just not that well trained. She gets so excited. But she will bring her in here every night. I hope she hasn’t annoyed you.”
Lanya reached again to rough the dog’s head. “She’s an old dear! She didn’t bother anybody.”
“Well, thank you.” Purple Angora bent to drag Muriel back to the bar by the collar. Once he glanced back, frowned at them—
“See if you can wipe some of that stuff off your face,” Lanya said, wrinkling hers.
“Huh? Oh, yeah.” He picked up a towel and held it to his temple; which stung. Water rolled down.
He rubbed the blood off his cheek. Picked up another towel (the first now purple to the rim) and wiped his face again.
“Hey,” Jack said. “I think you’re…” with a vague gesture.
“Lord—!” Lanya said. “I’ll get some more towels.”
“Huh? Am I bleeding again?”
Tak took him by the chin and turned his face. “You sure are,” and pressed another towel against his head.
“Hey!” He reached across for Lanya’s arm. “Look, let me just go to the men’s room. I’ll fix it up.”
She sat again. “Are you sure…?”
“Yeah. I’ll be back in a little while.” With one hand he held the paper to his face; with the other, he picked up the notebook. (“What happened to him?” Tak was asking Lanya. And Lanya was leaning forward to answer.) He pushed through the people next to them toward where the men’s room ought to be.
Behind him, music began, staticky as an old radio, more like somebody’s wind-up Victrola. He turned in front of the rest-room door.
Neon lights had come on in a cage hung up behind the bar. (The redhead’s face [forty-five? fifty?] was soap yellow in the glare:
(“Muriel! Now, Muriel, be quiet!”
(The fugitive barking stilled, and the Purple Sweater sat up once more.) Through the black curtain stepped a boy in a silver lamé G-string. He began to dance in the cage, shaking his hips, flicking his hands, kicking. His ash-pale hair was flecked with glitter; glitter had fallen down his wet brow. He grinned hugely, open mouthed, lips shaking with the dance, at customers up and down the bar. His eyebrows were pasted over with silver.
The music, he realized through the static, was a medley of Dylan played by something like the Melachrino Strings. The “boy” was anywhere between fifteen and an emaciated thirty-five. Around his neck hung glittering strands of mirrors, prisms, lenses.
He pushed into the bathroom as a big man in an army jacket came out fingering his fly.
He locked the door, put his notebook on the cracked porcelain tank (he’d left the paper on the table), looked at the mirror and said, “Christ…!”
Tap turned full, the cold water only trickled over the tear-shaped stain. He pulled paper towels, rasping, from their container, and let them soak. Minutes later the sink was awash with blood; the battleship linoleum was speckled with it; but his face was clear of gore and leakage.
Sitting on the toilet, pants around his shins, shirt open, he turned up a quarter-sized mirror on his belly and gazed down at a fragment of his face with an eye in it. Water beaded his eyelashes.
He blinked.
His eye opened to see the drop, pink with dilute blood, strike the glass and spread to the gripping callous.
He let go, took the notebook from the toilet tank, turned it back on his thighs, and took out his pen. The coil pressed his skin:
“Murielle”
He doubted the spelling, but wrote on:
“Seen through blood, her clear eyes…” He crossed out “clear” methodically, till it was a navy bar. He frowned, re-read, rewrote “clear,” and wrote on. He stopped long enough to urinate and re-read again. He shook his head, leaned forward. His penis swung against cold porcelain. So he wiggled back on the seat; rewrote the whole line.
Once he looked up: A candle by the painted-over window was guttering.
“Remembering,” he wrote, “by candle what I’d seen by moon…” frowned, and substituted a completely different thought.
“Hey!” Pounding at the door made him look up. “You all right in there, Kidd?”
“Tak?”
“You need some help in there? Lanya sent me to see if you’d fallen in. You all right?”
“I’m okay. I’ll be out in a minute.”
“Oh. Okay. All right.”
He looked back at the page. Suddenly he scribbled across the bottom: “They won’t let me finish this God-damn” stopped, laughed, closed the book, and put the pen back in his pocket.
He leaned forward on his knees and relaxed: The length and splash surprised him. There wasn’t any toilet paper.
So he used a wet towel.
Light glittered on the dancer’s hips, his shaking hair, his sweating face. But people had resumed their conversations.
He pushed through, glancing at the cage.
“Well, you certainly look a lot better,” Lanya said.
Jack said: “Hey, I got you and your girlfriend a beer. One for you too, see, because I didn’t want you to think…well, you know.”
“Oh,” he said. “Sure. Thanks.”
“I mean Tak ain’t let me buy anything all evening. So I thought I’d get you and your girlfriend a beer.”
He nodded and sat. “Thanks.”
“Yeah, thanks,” Lanya said.
“She’s a very nice girl.”
Lanya gave him a small Well-what-can-you-do look across the table and drank.