Silk (16 page)

And long-leggity beasties…

Robin slumped back against the bucket seat and willed herself to relax, buying time until the Valium kicked in. She focused on the staggered pattern of bricks in a warehouse wall across the wide parking lot, a hundred rectangular shades between red and brown and black caught in the Civic’s headlights. Bricks laid before her parents had been born, when her grandparents had been children, maybe. The engine was still running, faint and soothing metal purr of fans and pistons, and Sarah McLachlan sighed like gravel and rain from the stereo.

The shadow slipped across the wall, blackened mercury, gangling arms or legs and so sudden that it was gone before she’d even jumped; she sat up straight and stared, unblinking, across the hood, the empty space between the car and the wall and the unbroken shafts of her headlights.

…and long-leggity beasties…

And then the pain between her shoulders, the shearing fire that left her breathless and wanting to puke, and she yanked the Civic out of Park, never taking her eyes off the wall, not daring to glance into the rearview mirror, as the tires squealed and she backed out into the street.

1.

T
he sun down an hour, first long hour of cold, and Keith Barry sat on one end of the old loading platform; no trains on these tracks now, just the rotten boards and brick and concrete crumbling down to grit and dust, the barrel that the bums and junkies kept their stingy little fire inside. He sat with Anthony Jones and his banged-up Honer harmonica, and they’d been playing Tom Waits and Leadbelly for the rambling empty stretch of railyard, the dry, whispering weeds between the ties and broken glass and a stripped pickup burned to a red-brown cicada shell. Keith plucked his pawnshop twelve-string and Anthony Jones’s harp cried like all the ghost whistles of all the trains that would never rumble past this platform again.

“Almighty Christ,” Long Joey muttered, Long Joey who stood in the crunchy gravel ballast and stomped his feet like someone trying to make wine from stones. “Too damn cold for November. We
all
gonna have blue balls by Thanksgiving.”

The last chords of “Gun Street Girl” and then Keith laid the guitar down beside him, although Anthony let a few more notes straggle from the instrument pressed to his dark lips. Keith took a big swallow from the half-empty pint of cheap rye whiskey and handed the bottle to Long Joey.

“Maybe this’ll put a little spark back in them,” and Joey grinned his crackhead smile and accepted the bottle in his shaky hands. “Just don’t drop it, okay? Drop it, and I’ll have to kick your ass.”

Anthony finished his solo and wiped the harmonica on a flannel sleeve. “And then you give it here, L.J.”

Keith had been at the platform since late afternoon, since he’d made his connection, cooked and fixed in the men’s room of the Jack’s Hamburgers on First Avenue. He carried the twelve-string in a case so beat-up that it stayed together only by the sticky grace of a roll or two worth of duct tape and some copper wire he’d strung through the holes where the hinges used to be. He also kept his works in the case, hidden inside a compartment intended for picks and capos; Keith never used a pick, relied instead on his sure and callused fingers. He had enough stuff left for one more fix, tucked safely inside his left boot.

There were twelve or thirteen men on the platform tonight, most of them huddled around the flickering barrel, but he was the only one into junk. Most of them were winos or dirtbag crackheads, street addicts too far down the food chain to even have house fees. They bought their bits of rock from the cruisers who pushed from their cars. Every now and then he caught the caustic stink of someone’s pipe over the smell of piss and booze and burning wood.

Long Joey passed the bottle to Anthony, noticeably emptier for its time in his hands, and then he started stomping his feet again, pulling hard at his earlobes. Long Joey was a puller and sometimes his ears were raw and caked with dried blood. He liked to talk, but never talked about anything but crack and the women he either imagined or lied about having fucked.

“I
told
this bitch L.J. don’t put no jimmie cap on his dick, but she just kept on whining about the big A, so I finally slapped her around until she shut the hell up.”

“And you just took you some pussy, ain’t that right, L.J.?” and Anthony grinned and winked at Keith.

“Goddamn right.
Goddamn
right.”

Anthony passed the bottle back to Keith, just enough left for one more round; the rye felt warm burning down his throat, settling in his belly.

“You still seein’ that pretty little girl with the fire-engine hair?” Anthony asked, and for a second Keith was too busy looking through the neck of the bottle, strange and useless telescope that looked out on nowhere, to answer.

“Yeah,” he said at last. “Yeah, I guess so.”

“You
guess
so? What’s with that, you
guess
so?”

When Anthony Jones talked, he waved the Honer in the cold air like a conductor’s wand.

“You either down with that redheaded lady or you ain’t. There ain’t no in-betweenin’ pussy.”

“Man, I had me some fine white pussy last week….” L.J. started, but Anthony cut him off with a knifeblade glance, stabbed the harmonica at his heart.

“Why don’t you shut the hell up for a little while?”

“You think I’m lyin’? You think I gotta lie ’bout gettin’ white-bitch pussy?”

“I think I’m tired of listening to you talk trash.”

And L.J. looked offended and hurt, pulled hard at his right earlobe and wandered off, mumbling to himself.

“That nigger can’t even get hisself a skeezer these days,” and Anthony laughed and stared off towards the darkened windows of the Eagle Syrup plant. This side of town was a wasteland of empty warehouses and abandoned factories, a prelude to the miles of derelict steel mills further west.

“I just can’t seem to stay out of the shit house with Daria these days.”

Anthony Jones didn’t make any sign he’d heard, still gazing across the tracks and the street at the ridiculous giant honey jar perched atop the roof of the syrup plant.

“That her name?” he asked. “Daria?”

“Yeah, man, that’s her name.”

“She the same girl that’s in that band with you?”

“Yeah. Shit, she
is
the band. She’s gonna dump me and find someone else to play guitar for her. She
ought’a
fuckin’ dump me.”

“Man, you just on yourself tonight, that’s all,” and then he looked quickly at his feet, scuffed shoes from one of the missions, rubbed at his eyes. “You got gold in them fingers.”

Keith held his hands out, stared into his palms like he could read his past or future in the lines etched there.

“She takes a load of shit, man.”

“I hear you,” Anthony said. “I do hear you. Had me a good woman long time ago. Some pretty little babies, too.”

Keith passed the almost empty bottle back to him and picked up his guitar again, ran his fingers once across the strings and started tuning, gently twisting each rusted peg in his magic fingers. And Anthony Jones drained the last of the whiskey before he hurled the useless bottle at the darkness that lay like sleeping dogs between the platform and the syrup plant.

2.

Niki Ky had finally found a place to sit in the back of the van, a plastic milk crate covered over with a warped piece of plywood. The crate was mostly full of cords and cables, rubber black coaxial serpents that stuck out through the checkerboard holes in the sides and bit at her legs every time the van hit a bump or a rut or pothole. At least they hadn’t gone directly down Morris from Daria’s place, hadn’t jounced over all those goddamned cobblestones. The rear of the van was sectioned off with a sagging barrier of chain-link fence, soldered and bolted into place, and there was more junk back there. Niki thought briefly about scooting the crate closer to the wire, close enough that she could hook her fingers through the diamond spaces and hold on.

“There, Mort. Turn right there,” Daria ordered, pointed one insistent finger at a side street. She was sitting on a huge red Sears Craftsman tool chest behind the driver’s side, straddling it, hanging on to the back of Mort’s seat. The tools inside the chest clanked and clattered, and Niki imagined that it was the sound of her bones and teeth and kidneys.

Mort missed the turn, and Daria slammed her fist into the back of his headrest.

“
Goddammit,
Mort! Are you fucking deaf?”

“There’s no left turn there, Dar—”

“Did you see any fuckin’ cops?! Who would’ve given a shit?
Huh?
”

“Why don’t you calm down,” Theo said, and Niki saw the fire jump like lightning in Daria’s eyes.

“Why don’t
you
keep the hell out of this?” she said, almost snarled, and Niki wished again that she had stayed back at the apartment with Claude and his Ella Fitzgerald tapes, his comforting coffee and conversation.

“
Hey,
will the
both
of you just shut the hell up and let me drive?” Mort growled, no patience infinite and Niki could tell he’d had enough.

She had just stepped out of the shower when the phone rang, was still standing naked and dripping in the steam, drying herself with a thin, not-quite-white towel that had once belonged to a Holiday Inn. Someone who’d heard from someone else that Daria’s boyfriend had been in a fight, had gotten himself cut up and might be dead. Dying, at the very least.

A minute or two later, the towel wrapped tightly around her, and “It might just be a false alarm,” she’d said, trying her best to sound hopeful, reassuring, starting to feel awkward and misplaced.

“You don’t know Keith,” Daria had said, pulling her boots on and not bothering with the ratty laces.

“Which makes you a very lucky girl,” Claude said and had turned quickly away, shielding himself from the hot recrimination in Daria’s eyes.

“Put on some clothes if you’re coming,” Daria had said, and Niki thought maybe it would be rude to say no thank you, I’ll stay right here. Rude, or dangerous.

“Okay, look, you can turn left at the next light, on Seventeenth, and circle back around….”

Niki tried to shut out Daria’s frantic commands, shut her eyes and then immediately opened them again, not wanting to make car sickness any more likely than it already was; puking would do absolutely nothing to improve the van’s all but palpable funk, the reek of ancient sweat and cigarette smoke, oil and the sweet and sour hint of rotting food. She hung on to the edges of her plywood raft and rode the wave.

After they’d checked two titty bars and a park full of bums and monuments to dead civil rights leaders, Daria had finally thought to call the hospitals. Niki and Theo sat in the van while Daria and Mort fed precious quarters into a pay phone and argued with emergency room nurses.

“God, I hate that asshole,” Theo said.

Niki, who’d decided she was better off just staying in the floor after having been twice bounced off the milk crate, shifted her stiff and aching butt, rubbed her freezing hands together. Obviously, the van had no heater.

“You mean Daria?” she asked.

“No, not Dar. Keith-fucking-Barry,” Theo answered too quickly, pulled the cheesy flamingo-pink polyester and velvet tux jacket she was wearing tighter around her shoulders. “Dar’s a doll, when she’s not chasing after that fucker’s junky prick.”

“Oh,” Niki said, knowing nothing else to say.

An uncomfortable and silent five minutes later, and Mort and Daria were climbing back inside, driver’s door popping open and banging closed again, the sliding side door complaining viciously on its rusted tracks. Night rushed into the van, soaking Niki in chill air and the colder glare of the streetlights.

“So?”

“‘So’
what,
Theo?” Daria said, reclaiming her seat on the tool chest.

“
So
is he dead or what?”

Mort sighed, pulled off his baseball cap and ran his fingers through his hair.

“No one named Keith Barry has been admitted to any of the ERs tonight,” he said and put his cap back on, the bill turned around backwards so Niki could read the red, white, and blue STP patch stitched on the front. He slapped his big hands together loudly. “And there are no John Does that fit his description. We checked the city morgue, too.”

“This is bullshit,” Theo muttered and lit a cigarette.

“We should check out that house in Ensley,” Daria said, ignoring her. “The one with all the windows painted yellow.”

“Christ, Daria,” Mort hissed and slumped over the steering wheel, already defeated before he’d even begun to object. “I do not want to go wandering around that part of town after dark.”

“I wouldn’t want to go wandering around that part of town in broad fucking daylight, Mort, but what’s your fucking point? I’m not just gonna sit around on my ass and wait for the cops to call.”

“I’ve had enough of this crap,” Theo said and blew a cloud of smoke against the cracked inside of the windshield. “You guys can let me out downtown. And Niki, I’d advise you to come with me.”

Niki felt helpless, lost. None of this had anything to do with her, but she felt caught anyway, stretched suddenly between Daria and Theo like the rope in a particularly nasty tug-of-war match. And of course the advantage went to Daria, Daria who had taken her in and given her a place to sleep, a bath.

“Uh, I guess I’ll just stay with you guys,” she said, speaking to Daria, who frowned and stared down at the bare metal floor between her boots.

“Yeah, well, whatever,” Theo said. “It’s your ass.”

“What’s the deal with this place, anyway?” Niki asked, certain that she didn’t really want to know. “What sort of house is it?”

“A crackhouse,” Mort said and started the van. “It’s just a goddamned crackhouse.”

After they’d left Theo, after she’d asked Niki if she was absolutely sure she didn’t want to come back to her place, Mort drove west and Daria took Theo’s seat; Niki sat on the floor and watched the streetlights become dimmer and farther apart, wider pools of night between them. Downtown surrendering to the first belt of decay, neighborhoods wilted and gone to ugly, cancerous fallow. She didn’t know this city, was becoming increasingly disoriented as the oasis of tall buildings slipped behind them. Daria had stopped talking, had stopped pointing, and now she sat smoking, staring intently out her window at things Niki couldn’t see.