Silk (19 page)

2.

Because she was Spyder, they came to her, to sit near her and breathe in the air she breathed out. They brought her the meager precious offerings of their company, their fragile faces painted like gentle death to hide the real scars and pain. She wasn’t sure what she had to offer them, but accepted that it was something that they needed, something that soothed or at least distracted, and they never seemed to take anything away.

Robin pressed tighter against her and Spyder knew how much she enjoyed the masked envy of the others, these who could come as close as a seat or standing room at her booth on Saturday night, but never any closer.

Walter was sitting on her left, and Byron standing point like a pretty gargoyle, or just keeping his distance, distant now since Thursday evening in the shop. He’d stayed away on Friday, hardly a word to her since he’d called her house afterwards, and she thought that maybe he’d flinched when she kissed his cheek earlier in the evening. She’d said nothing more to him about what he had or had not seen in the alley, knew that he wouldn’t listen to her anyhow.

The terrible grunge that seemed to have been playing most of the night ended abruptly, partway through a song, and even over the rambling voice of the crowd, the silence seemed profound. “Thank god
that’s
over,” said the boy sitting next to Robin, black
Sandman
T-shirt and tonight he was calling himself Tristan. Spyder nodded her head, and the lights were going down lower, pumping new life into the shadows; more darkness to hide within, and at her table she felt nervous bodies relax a fraction. Except for Byron.

You’re losing him,
she thought and shoved the thought quickly back the way it had come.

The stage lights came up and Spyder buried her face in Robin’s jasmine-scented hair, kissed her throat. Tonight, she’d come for more than the usual self-conscious and jealous attentions, had come knowing that Daria Parker and Stiff Kitten were playing, a month or more since she’d seem them last. Daria had not come back to Weird Trappings on Friday as she’d hoped, had hoped for no reason she’d been able to recognize. Except that Daria had been getting into her dreams lately, sometimes looking down on her from high places while Spyder walked the Armageddon streets. More than once, Spyder had looked up and there she’d been, her face pressed against window glass, hair like the blood that filled the gutters and gurgled down storm drains. Silent judgment in her eyes.

“I heard this band really sucks,” Tristan said, risking brave opinion; Robin leaned over and whispered something into his ear. He bit his lower lip then, and shrugged and looked sheepishly away.

“Well, the girl who said that’s a dweeb, anyway,” and then he was quiet. Robin smiled a wicked-mean grin, and Spyder kissed her on the forehead.

The band entered from a door poorly hidden behind the stage, taking their places on the rough platform of plywood and railroad ties: drummer first, skinny stick man whose name she always forgot, and then the towering guitarist, and Daria last of all. She wore her bass like an albatross or something deadly from an old Buck Rogers film. Spyder sipped at her watery gin and lime, the one drink she’d allow herself all night, savoring the pine sap or turpentine bite of the liquor.

The band opened gently with a cover of the Velvet Underground’s “There She Goes Again,” spooky lilt and punched up just a little, but still as much a lie, as much an act of misdirection, as the hushed moments before a tornado. Last verse, and Byron turned and she caught him looking at her, his face more than its usual pinched, and he looked immediately away again.

Yeah, you’re losing him,
and she took a bigger sip from her drink, pretending it wasn’t true, watching Stiff Kitten across the writhing dark of Dr. Jekyll’s. The spotlights stabbed down from the cramped balcony, borrowing definition from the smoke, blue and red, too much like something toward the end of any one of her nightmares.

Only if you
let
him go.

Daria Parker was building a mournful, droning bridge with her strings, segueing into their own “Imperfect.” Spyder knew the titles to a few of the songs because she’d bought their demo tape a few months back, five tracks and a grainy black-and-white photocopied snapshot for the cover, snapshot of a very run-over cat.

Up there, her lips pressed to the microphone, muscle-taut fingers locked in their brutal tarantism, Daria drove her words like nails. And Spyder tried not to think about anything else, nothing but the sneer and tremble of Daria’s lips and words.

‘I always meant, always meant to open up,’ my skin starts to tear, my skin starts to tear, my skin starts to tear…

Down in the pit, bodies slammed together, meat stones pounding themselves for some sympathetic spark, some uglier echo or answer, and from where Spyder sat, the moshers looked more like the condemned souls from a Gustave Doré illustration.

…and what’s inside pours itself out, pours itself out, ink into your arms.

Daria wheeled suddenly away from the mike, yielding to the guitarist, set her back to the crowd, and played now to black building-block stacks of amps. Under the gels, Keith Barry’s red Fender looked bruised, damaged by his hurried, certain hands. He was left-handed and played left-handed, and Spyder always felt like she was watching him through a mirror, reversed. Then Daria was back, managing to sound bitter and innocent in the same conflicting instant. Daria, mike stand pushed forward and teetering on the edge of the stage, head bowed, leaning out over the damned, leaning into herself. Her hair, washed red-violet in the lights, ripe plum tangle and spray of sweat, whipped side to side, her face a blurred snarl.

You see there’s nothing else left for you in there, nothing that you’d want to fuck, nothing you could steal…

Her fingers released the steel strings, drawing sudden silence from the bass, and Keith Barry and the drummer were on their own for the last furious, rushing beats. At the end, after the end, the fading whine of the guitarist’s final, angry chord, alone for the brief and empty space before the applause. And Robin’s hand, like a hungry child’s, at Spyder’s breast.

3.

“It doesn’t snow down here, does it?” Theo asked, hugging herself tightly, stomping her feet loudly on the sidewalk.

“I don’t know,” answered Niki, and Theo nodded her head.

“I keep forgetting you’re not from around here, either.”

Niki looked up at the low sky, the baby-aspirin clouds hanging closer than before the show, pearly and swollen with reflected city light.

“Well,
I
think it’s gonna snow,” Theo said.

They were waiting for Keith, who was supposed to be bringing the van around, had been waiting for almost ten minutes now, for Mort and Daria still inside the club. Shivering caryatids bracketing what Niki supposed you’d call the stage door, standing guard over the amps and cases of sound equipment stacked up beside the curb. This door was wider and the same black as the wall, no handle on the outside so it would be almost invisible when closed.

“I’ve never really seen snow,” Niki said.

In the big parking lot across the street, there were still people lingering around cars, stalling, wringing the last dregs from a Saturday night already gone well over to Sunday morning. Smoking and getting sick drunk on cheap wine and beer. The back edge of the lot ran all the way to the railroad tracks, and Niki noticed a few of the goths there, clustered around an old brown car, Spyder Baxter sitting on the hood, still the center of their attention. And the green-haired girl so close she could pass for a Siamese twin.

“Come
on,
guys…” and the door swung immediately open, as if Theo had commanded it, open sesame, but really just Daria kicking the door wide, trying to brace it open with one shoulder. Niki caught it, held it open while Theo hugged herself and Daria and Mort wrestled the last of the equipment through.

“So, where the hell is he?” and Daria still sounded every bit the queen bitch, but Niki could feel how much of her tension had drained away during the show,
through
the show. Up there, she’d slipped around the diffusion somehow, wrapped herself in soothing rhythm and feedback, electricity and discord sedation. She wore a fresh Band-Aid on her right index finger, and her hair was plastered flat with the dried sweat of two long sets and the beer that someone down front had drenched her with halfway through the last song.

“First guess don’t count, right?” and Theo laughed, only half to herself, then began to whistle the chorus of “Let It Snow.” Niki was amazed; Theo even managed to whistle sarcastically.

“Fuck,” resigned and weary moan from Daria, and she helped Mort roll the cumbersome flight case the last couple of feet to wait with everything else, one wheel missing and so it tipped and wobbled like a drunken monolith. Mort had painted the band’s undead mascot on one side of the scraped and dented black box in his most careful acrylic. The zombie kitten leered hungrily at Niki, broken fangs, one eye rolled back in its rotting skull, the other dangling by gooey optic nerves.

“Shit, it’s
cold
out here,” Mort said, pulling Theo close to cop what little body heat she might have to spare.

“That’s ’cause it’s gonna snow, dumbass,” she said, and Niki let the door slam shut, sealing them all outside.

Mort grumbled something rude and unintelligible through his steaming breath. And then, one thunder-crack backfire, shotgun loud in the brittle air, and Niki jumped, felt her heart lurch and skip inside her chest. The van rumbled around the corner of Dr. Jekyll’s, pulled out of the side lot and bounced down onto the cobblestones, cough and blat of a muffler shot like a coal miner’s lungs. Keith pulled in too close and the right front wheel scrunched against the curb; the wind caught white puffs of the Ford’s exhaust, blew acrid warm and choking gusts into their faces. The van idled, and Keith stepped around the side, unlocked the rear doors and opened them like the wings of a giant albino scarab.

“Okay, boys and girls. Time to feed the shitmobile,” Mort said, mock glee, and Niki stepped back, out of the way, feeling useless and uncertain, feeling outside. They moved like this chore, too, had been choreographed and rehearsed, performed a thousand times, as practiced as their music. They filled the caged-in back of the van while she watched, attentive, just in case someone asked for her help.

When they were done, Keith bummed a cigarette from Mort, bummed a light, spoke around the Camel’s filter, “Did y’all settle up with Bert?”

“Oh yeah. And he said we could have the second week in December if we wanted it. Dar has your split.”

“You mean you got
cash
out of him?”

“Twenty-five each,” Daria said. “Don’t spend it all in one place.”

From across the street, the gravelly, coarse rumble of male laughter, threatening and primal as the warning growl in a bad dog’s throat; Keith turned to see, and Niki followed his gray eyes back to where the goths had gathered around Spyder and the cruddy brown car. Except now there were three big guys, almost everyone else had gone, and Spyder sat alone on the hood, head down as if she were praying or straining under an invisible weight.

“Assholes,” Keith muttered. “Christ, I hate those fuckers,” and Niki heard the threat there, too.

Daria had opened the panel door, crouched inside, almost out of the wind, trying to tease a spark from her lighter. She glanced up at Niki. “What’s he talking about?”

“Some guys’re messin’ with Spyder and the shrikes,” Mort said.

“Skins?” asked Daria, and the lighter flickered, framing her face for a yellow-orange instant before the flame guttered and died again.

“Nah,” Mort answered. “Just some assholes.”

“Well,
you
stay the hell out of it, Keith,” Daria said. “You hear me?”

“Yeah, Dar. I hear you.”

The laughter again, smug and hateful chuckle, and whatever the guy closest to Spyder said was spoken almost loud enough for Niki to hear. Spyder raised her head slowly, and Niki imagined she could clearly see the anger glistening in her eyes. The guy leaned closer, seemed to whisper something in her ear, and then his friends sniggered.

“I fucking
mean
it, man.” Daria gave up on the lighter, exasperated, tossed it out of the van and disposable pink plastic clattered across the pavement. “We don’t need you getting your ass kicked tonight by a pack of bulletheads.”

But Keith was already moving, quick around the driver’s side, the door jerked open, and he pulled a dented aluminum baseball bat from behind the seat, black tape strapped around the handle.

“There he goes,” Theo said, both hands up, helpless, furious gesture, and Niki knew this was something else practiced, something else played over and over, something else she had no part in.

“Stop him, Mort!”

“Oh yeah, right. Fuck you, Dar.
You
stop him.”

“Goddammit,”
and Daria was out of the van and running to catch up with Keith. Niki hadn’t even seen her reach for the tire iron that she held clutched in both hands, close to her chest, as she ran.