He looked at her with eyes as dull as pebbles. Then he
“No, I daren’t risk it. I have to be as keyed up as I can.”
She stared at him for a long moment. Before she could say anything else, however, he had read her mind.
“You think I’m going to burn myself out, don’t you?”
She gave a nod. A very slight nod, as though limiting the gesture could soften the truth behind it.
“Yes: Yes, I think so too,” Danty muttered. “But not doing what I feel I have to do-that would be worse.” A faint smile followed the words. “But thank you anyhow. If there wasn’t someone I could talk to, someone, who cares about me, I’d have gone insane long ago.”
He rose, stretching. “Although it’s arguable, I guess,” he added, “that I already am crazy. Poor Magdal”
“What?”
“‘Poor Magdal’ I said. Landed with one case for which you can’t see any hopeful outcome!”
She pondered that, then shook her head. “No, that’s not true. You may burn yourself out, that’s a fact. But it would be a very special kind of burning. Goodbye, Danty.”
. vu .
“What ch’waiting for” Potatohead muttered, staring at the addle cock blonde with the bare chowbag. He nudged Josh Tatum.
“Poke me one more,” Josh said, “I cut out yo’ Idaho eyes. She walking this way? She climbing walls? Shee-it.”
Josh wasn’t a reb and if you’d called him one he’d have carved you for it. They were tight on guns in Cowville but knives, everybody had knives. He was slick from neck to heel in plastic blacker than his skin, and shinier, and his scalp fuzzed an eighty-eight force-grown natural. Same with other, Shark Bance. -Potatohead was shaved and ashamed. But something wrong with the follicles.
“Lakonia,” Shark said under his breath.
“Where the shit else? 1 know her.”
“What?”
“Name? Name? Piss her name. Peg it, peg it! Chow bare, zip-crotch shorts-eyes, use yo’ eyes!”
“Pegged,” Potatohead said. “Po’ li’1 rich, due fo’ kindah- F a surprise.” He grabbed Shark’s hand and kissed it.
“Kill it! Wannah-a see that? She grunt pigl Spread an’ y bar-a walk. Makun quick!” ‘
“Inta scrap yard?” Shark inquired.
“Scrap yard, yea.”
In spite of her resolution Lora felt nervous as she `
approached the young blacks. There was something so
statue-like about them: all three tall, all three dead-faced,.
all three in that strange tight muscle-hugging plastic ….
She liked to feel a boy’s skin before she let him unzip–,,
the crotch of her shorts, which was why she preferred
the beach, or in winter the dansoteks where it was always
too hot for heavy clothing.
But this was the thing she had set her mind to, so she
kept on going.
The nearest of them, with the shaven head, stepped into ~a her path. She smiled sunnily at him and said, “Hil”
He looked at her with eyes as dull as pebbles. Then he :y
reached out and touched, not her bare arm, but the fabric of her playtop. Meantime the one .beside him, marginally the biggest, examined her critically from top to toe.
“In there,” he said after a couple of heartbeats, and jerked his head towards the scrap yard.
She was taken aback. This wasn’t what she’d expected. There should be-well, a bit of chat. Banter. Joking. Some sort of preliminaries)
But they had fallen in around her like military police escorting a deserter, and were forcing her towards the scrap yard gate. There was a gatekeeper’s hut. There was no one in it.
Huge clanging noises, and a sulphur stink. Horrified, she found herself shut in by walls of ruined cars rusty bathtubs, mounds of cans crushed into polychrome lumps, while underfoot she walked on painful glass.
“I-” she began to say, ,and they rounded a corner among the piles of metal and were out of sight of anyone.
“Value her,” the tallest black said, and the bald one confronted her and took her wrist. He inspected her watch.
“Saw, Josh?” the third said. “No purse!”
“Saw,” the tallest said. “Zip up, Shark. Well, Potatohead?”
“Piss and shit! Japanese! Worth around eight-fifty!”
“Foreign, um? Ah-hunhl Anna clothes?”