Samuel Delany - Dhalgren

"FUCKER…!" she shouted so loud you knew it hurt her throat. "FUCKER…!"

Her right fist came down from her left ear and hammered his face. Like an echo his head cracked back against the trunk.

"Hey! Stop it… Stop…" Then I guess he really tried to break out. He shouted, grabbed her wrist…

She was meat red from the neck up, yanking her fist over, twisting his fingers; then grabbed one fist with the Other and swung it against his neck.

"Jesus…" Jommy said, to me I realized. "She's crazy…" But he stepped back from the look I gave him.

John tried to grab her in some sort of bear hug. He kicked out, and they both went down, him pretty much on top. Everyone stepped back together.

Flailing out, she came up with a handful of grass. Then there was grass in his hair and he yelled again.

His ear was bleeding. But I don't know what she'd done.

"Hey, look!" Milly said, loud and upset. "Why doesn't somebody…" Then it struck her that if somebody was, the somebody was going to have to be her.

She started forward.

I touched her on the shoulder and she looked sharply around.

"Fair fight," I said.

He hit her three times, hard, one after the other: "Stupid. Bitch. Stupid…" but she somehow got him off. And reared back. She came down with both fists on his face, once glancing off his ear and hitting the ground and coming up for another hit, bloody. When she hit him again — he was just trying to cover his face, now — I saw hers was scraped up bad.

About the sixth time she hit him — one knee went into his stomach — I thought maybe I should try and stop her. I thought about Dollar. I thought about Nightmare and Dragon Lady. But I wasn't as scared as I'd been at the beginning, when I'd thought her quivering, shaking rage would explode her.

Denny's mouth was open. He let go my arm.

She stood up, almost falling. "You fucking shit!" she said. It sounded like her jaw clicked between syllables. She kicked him in the head. Twice.

"Hey, come on…" one of the others said, and started toward her. But didn't touch her.

Thinking: Maybe a tennis sneaker isn't that hard.

Sure.

She turned and came, blindly, toward me.

As Denny fell back, she stopped, looked behind her and shouted, "You fucking shit!" and came on. Her face was all puffed on one side.

Two of the guys kneeled beside John. Milly hovered behind them as though she still couldn't make up her mind.

"Oh, wow!" Denny said. "You really creamed the bastard!"

"The fucking shit!" she whispered, wiping at her face and grimacing. "The fucking…" One eye was all teary. She started walking. We walked with her.

"It looks like he got in a couple too," Denny said.

"She's walking," I said.

"Hey, you did better than Glass did with Dollar," Denny said.

"I had—" She took a breath. "I guess I had more reason." She rubbed her shoulder with her palm, fingers strained wide. And left blood on the workshirt sleeve. I don't think she knew she was bleeding yet.

"Hey, Lanya?" Jack said. Frank stood behind his shoulder.

She stopped and looked.

She swallowed and I wondered if she remembered who he was.

I was probably projecting.

"Thanks," Jack said.

She nodded, swallowed once more, and started walking again.

"What's the matter?" Denny asked about twenty yards later. "Your eye hurt?"

She shook her head. "It's just that…" She really sounded upset. "Well, nice girls from Sarah Lawrence don't usually beat the fucking shit out of…" and gasped again.

I put my arm around her shoulder. She fitted like usual. Only she didn't adjust her step to mine. So I adjusted mine to hers. "Did you want me to lend you a hand in there?"

"I would have pulled your balls off!" she said. "I would have … I don't know what I would have…"

I squeezed her shoulder. "Just asking, babes."

She touched her jaw again, gently, realizing it hurt. And left blood there. "The school was my thing. It wasn't yours. You didn't have anything to do with it. You didn't even like Paul… Oh, the fucking shit—!" and stopped walking.

"I helped you with the class a couple of times," Denny said. "Didn't I?" and glanced back at the others.

"Sure," Lanya said, and put her hand on his shoulder. Then she winced and reached down to rub her leg. Not limping, she still favored it.

"I just don't understand why you lit into him," I said.

"Oh, fuck you!" She pulled away from me. "You don't understand a lot of things. About me."

"All right," I said. "I'm sorry."

"So am I," she said, harshly. But when I caught up with her, she put her arm around my shoulder. And adjusted her step.

"Hey," Denny said. "You wanna be by yourself for a while?"

"Yeah," she said. "Yes I do."

She walked with us to the park entrance, so that I figured she was going back with us to the nest. But by the lions she said, "I'll see you later," and just walked off.

"Hey …" I called.

"She wants to be by herself," Denny said.

I still felt funny.

She did come back to the nest, late that night after we'd been in bed (me half drunk) about an hour. Vaguely I heard her talcing off her clothes, then climbing the ladder pole.

She crawled across me, rolled me by the shoulder onto my back, and, a-straddle my chest, glared down, swaying like she was going to rip something out of me with her teeth. I reached between her legs and pushed two fingers through her hair between the granular walls; they wet.

She leaned both hands on my chest, her arms pushing her breasts together and actually growled.

Denny, wedged in the corner, turned over, lifted his head, and said, "Huh…?"

"You too!" she said. "You come here too!"

I've never been balled like that before — puffy eye and sore leg notwithstanding — by any one. (She said she'd spent the afternoon and evening with Madame Brown, just talking. "You ever ball her?" Denny wanted to know.) In the middle of a heavy stretch, Copperhead stuck his head over the edge of the loft and asked, "What are you guys doing up here anyway? You're gonna tear the loft down!"

"Get out of here," Denny said. "You had your chance."

Copperhead grinned and got

Walked around the streets this afternoon with Nightmare, listening to his reminiscences of Dragon Lady: "Man, we used to do some freaky things, all the time, any time, anywhere, right in the middle of the fuckin' street, man, I swear." We ambled; he pointed out doorways, alleys, a pickup truck parked on its axles—"Once with her sitting in the cab and me standing on the fuckin' sidewalk, a hand on either side of the door, and my head just in there, eatin' out all that black pussy — Baby and Adam running around someplace across the street-then I fucked her in the back there, on the burlap. Oh, shit!" — and where, by the park, she had pushed him up against the wall and blown him; where she used to make him walk down the center of the street with his genitals loose from his fly, "with her sitting on the curb and doing things with her mouth, man, before I even got there, so I had a hard-on out to here!" He talks out these celebrations as though they are religious rituals recently banned. Forty minutes of this, before it hit me how lonely not only Nightmare is, but all of us here are: Who can I discuss the mechanics of Lanya and Denny with? I don't even have the consolation of public disapproval. He probably has never talked about any of this before. On the marble steps of the Second City Bank building (he tells me) he made her take off all her clothes—"Just like Baby, man. I mean people can go around in the street stark naked here, and it don't mean nothing." — and urinate, while he stood behind her, one arm over her shoulder, catching her water in his palm. "And once she made me lie on my back, you know, in the center of the pavement—" the incident illustrated with much gesturing and head-shaking as we search his memories out of the dry mist—"naked, man, and she just walked around and around and around me, a big woman!" (He repeats this last a lot, as though her circling defined some terribly necessary boundary on this wild terrain.) "…made me eat her out for half an hour, I swear, right—" he looks around, surprised— "here, man. Right here! It was just getting light, and you couldn't hardly see her…" As my attention drifted from his account, I thought of all the cliches about how to act among violent people, current among the non-violent: Rise to the first challenge or you'll be branded a coward for the rest of your stay; a willingness to fight gains the group's respect; once you beat him, the bully will be your friend. Somebody coming into the nest with these as functioning propositions would get killed! (Thinking: Frank?) Nightmare's shoulders rocked. His fists, wrists bound in leather, bobbed. He recounted hoarsely: "She used to get me drunk and I'd have her suck me off, my ass up against any old, cold, God-damn wall, with my pants down around my fuckin' knees, and her tryin' to get two fingers up my ass — don't remember how she figured out I like that." Suddenly he looked up, frowning. "You think I was right?"