Silk (35 page)

“I want to tell you some things,” and now Niki’s hand did move away, left Spyder empty and damp between the legs, but she kept talking. “Not yet, but maybe tomorrow. Maybe soon. They’re not good things, but maybe if we both know them…” and then she was too afraid to say any more, and so she just stared at the sun on the wall, slipping down, like the world was slipping down. Falling, like the world was falling.

“Anytime,” Niki said. “Anytime you’re ready, I’ll listen. And I’ll still be here when you’re done.”

“We shouldn’t make promises,” Spyder said. “It’s bad luck, I think.”

The second time Spyder woke up, the sun was down, twilight tuned down almost to night, and she could smell Red Diamond coffee and something cooking. She reached for Niki, but found she was alone in the bed, and the spot on the sheets where Niki had lain curled next to her was cold. Like nothing could be left behind but body heat and the vaguest impression of arms and legs and heads in pillows. Spyder crawled out of bed and pulled on a pair of old Levi’s, one of the buttonholes on the fly busted so her plaid boxers showed underneath.

She found Niki sitting cross-legged on the kitchen floor, some of Spyder’s tools scattered around her. “Hey, sleeping beauty,” Niki said, and Spyder poked her in the ribs with a big toe. Niki slapped her foot and went back to what she was doing, stripping black rubber insulation from copper telephone wire with a pair of needle-nosed pliers, straightening the strands of wire again.

“I’m pretty sure I can fix this,” she said.

Spyder didn’t comment, went to the stove and lifted the lid on one of the pots.

“I found a bag of pinto beans in the cabinet, and a can of turnip greens,” Niki said, then began twisting the severed ends of the phone line back together. “Too bad we don’t have stuff to make corn bread.”

“Do you know what you’re doing?” and Spyder tasted the pintos, added black pepper to the pot; Niki had already begun covering the spliced wire with electrical tape.

“I think so,” she said. “I mean, it may not be the clearest connection in the world, but I think it’ll at least work again.”

“I wasn’t talking about the phone,” Spyder said. “You have to put salt in these, you know?”

Niki stopped and looked at her.

“And some onion wouldn’t have hurt, either. I thought people from New Orleans knew how to cook beans?”

“Yeah, Spyder. Whenever I wasn’t too busy listening to the blues or chasing alligators down the street, I was cooking beans.”

Spyder opened the refrigerator, began digging around behind six-packs of Buffalo Rock and Diet Coke cans, foil-covered leftovers, for the onion she remembered having seen a day or so before, found a little cardboard carton of mealie worms instead; she took it out and set it on the table. “I thought I threw these out,” and she shook the carton,
shsssk-shsssk
rattle of sawdust and grubs. “I bet they’re all dead by now, anyway,” and she put them back in the fridge.

“Christ, Spyder. Please don’t put dead worms in the refrigerator.”

“I’ll throw them away later,” trying not to think about what the unused, uneaten mealies really meant, what they’d followed from and signified; she found the onion, white onion almost as big as her fist, hiding behind an old carton of buttermilk.

Niki stood up and dusted off her butt, lifted the receiver and held it against her ear. “Wow,” she said, proud voice. “I did it. I fixed the phone.” Spyder shut the fridge and clapped for her, smiled when Niki curtsied.

The receiver back in its cradle and immediately the black telephone rang. “Jesus,” Niki said. “That’s some good fucking timing, huh?” She started to answer it, but “No,” Spyder said. “No, Niki, don’t.”

“Why? I just fixed it. That’s probably someone that’s been trying to call us for days.”

“I don’t care. Just let it ring.”

Niki stared at the phone, strident box of noise on the wall; Spyder carried her onion over to the sink, ran cold water over the papery skin before she began to peel it. After the eleventh ring, the phone was silent.

“Are you gonna answer it next time?” Niki asked, sounding confused, disappointed, and Spyder shrugged, tossed the empty onion skin at the garbage. “Probably,” she said, opened a drawer next to the sink and rummaged through the jumble of utensils and silverware inside until she found the knife she was looking for.

She sliced the onion on the counter, not bothering to get down the cutting board, not caring if she scratched the wood. So many scratches there already. Most of them there since she’d been a child, and she’d never understood why her mother had always been so careful not to add any more.

“I was just trying to help,” Niki said behind her. “You should’ve said something, if you didn’t want me to fix the phone.”

And then it rang again, third slice through the onion, and Spyder almost cut her hand.

“Do you want me to answer it?” Niki asked.

Spyder finished slicing the onion, three more slices, three more rings, rinsed the knife under the tap. She carried a double handful of onion to the stove and added it to the boiling pot of beans. And then she answered the phone, because she knew it was useless not to, just like she’d known precisely when the bedspread was going to tear, which ball bearing she’d be left holding, just like that.

“You don’t have to,” Niki said, but Spyder only stared at her, put the receiver to her own ear, spoke slowly into the mouthpiece. “Hello?” and nothing at first from the other end except traffic sounds, pay phone sounds that made her think of Byron, and she almost hung up.

“Spyder?” Niki whispered, and right after, in her ear, the familiar boy voice, “Spyder? Is that you?”

She pretended not to recognize him, watched the pots on the stovetop, the steam rising from the pintos. “Yeah, it’s me.”

“I know you probably don’t want to hear from me,” he said, Walter’s nervous voice and he was at least half-wrong. Part of her wanted to hear him very badly, wanted to cry and smile and tell him how much she missed him, how she missed them all. Wanted to tell him none of it mattered anymore, not enough to justify the loneliness.

“So why are you calling me,” she said, and there was nothing through the line for a moment except the sound of him breathing, the backdrop of street noise.

“I left, Spyder. I got almost all the way to Chicago and came back,” he said. “I’ve been riding goddamned buses for days, and I have to know what’s happening, Spyder. I think it’s not gonna stop it from happening, or even stop me from going crazy, but I have to know, anyway. I have to know if all that shit Robin and Byron made up still means anything.”

Niki took her other hand, held it tightly, silently mouthed two words that might have been
I’m sorry
.

“Nothing’s happening,” Spyder said. “Nothing at all. Don’t call me again, Walter.”

“Please, Spyder. Please don’t hang up on me. Christ, I’m fucking
seeing
things, and I can’t sleep anymore….”

“I’ve got to go. There’s something on the stove.”

“I’m scared shitless,” he said.

“I’m sorry,” and she hung up, shook her hand free of Niki’s and went to the back door, out into the night, down the back steps, and the screen banged shut behind her. Past the place where the kudzu came down from the mountain and swallowed the edge of the yard. No shoes and the leafsoft ground damp underfoot, rocks and sticks painful sharp, but she kept walking, climbing the hill, until the dark had wrapped itself all the way around her.

3.

The next morning, Tuesday, Niki sat alone on the back stoop of Spyder’s house. No sleep all night, though she’d tried for a little while, had eaten supper by herself and then climbed into their thrift-store bed, pulled the covers around her, left the light in the foyer burning and the bedroom door open so she wouldn’t be in the dark room alone. But there’d been too much emptiness, inside and out, too much worry over Spyder and the memories waiting for her, and finally she’d started imagining that she was hearing noises under the floor, scritchy rat sounds and if she listened hard enough, the incessant mumble of voices, no single speaker, but the softest curtain of indecipherable words and phrases, crowd mutter, and after a while she’d gotten up again, drunk coffee in the kitchen until dawn.

Now she stared at the gray tangle of the mountainside and cursed herself again, for not going after Spyder right away. For fixing the telephone in the first place. For not being perfect, not even close. She tried to concentrate, watching for any sign of movement, any evidence that Spyder was on her way back. She didn’t like those trees, so close together and all those bare limbs that seemed to strain her way, crooked fingers restless in the cold wind, or the vines strung between them, drooping down to the ground, a sea of vines that she guessed was a smothering green sea of kudzu in the summer.

Spyder had told her it wasn’t a good idea to go wandering around up there alone, especially at night or if you didn’t know the woods already. Because there were a lot of old mine shafts and sinkholes that no one had marked or sealed up, deep pits left from the days when the mountain had been tunneled out for its iron-ore bones.

“But they’re really pretty neat, if you’re careful,” she’d said. “I’ll show you one sometime. They’re full of bats, and I’ll show you where to catch the biggest salamanders.”

Niki wondered if Spyder was hiding in one of those old shafts now, or if maybe she’d stumbled into one of them in the night, if she’d been too upset to watch where she was walking and had fallen, had broken her leg or hit her head and couldn’t get back.

“Christ, this is crazy,” standing up, buttoning her army jacket, stomping her feet to warm up a little, to get the blood flowing again. And then she walked to the edge of the yard, crunching over the frosted ground, stood ankle deep in kudzu vines and called into the trees, “Spyder? Spyder, can you hear me?” Somewhere down the hill a dog began to bark, and then another one, farther away.

“Spyder!”

She looked back at the house, wanting to be inside, safe in its comfortable warmth and disorder, safe in bed with Spyder, then turned back to the trees, the vines like a slumping wall before the copperhead mat of leaves began farther in. Took another step, and this time her leg sunk in up to the knee and she almost lost her balance; off to her left, something rustled beneath the vines. “Jesus, Spyder, there’s no telling what’s living under all this shit.”

Nothing to be afraid of, though. Rats maybe, possums or raccoons. Stray cats. Nothing that won’t get out of your way if you just make a little racket.

“Spyder? I’m coming to look for you, okay?” and that sounded stupid, stupid as she felt wading around in dead kudzu at seven thirty in the morning.

“It’s okay,” but Niki almost screamed, actually opened her mouth to scream before she saw Spyder huddled in the shelter of some fallen logs; narrow pocket in the vines like a child’s tepee of quilts and blankets.

“I’m right here.”

No coat, short sleeves and bare feet, and Niki thought she could see the white glitter of frost on Spyder’s tattooed arms. “You’ve got to be freezing to death,” she said and took another step and went in up to her waist this time.

“You can’t get across that way. There’s a ditch there.”

“Great. Fucking wonderful,” and Niki tried to plow her way through anyway, stopped when the vines were level with her chest and began to trace her way back out again, wishing she could quit thinking about everything that might be lurking in the kudzu, watching the half of her body she couldn’t see, beady mean eyes that didn’t mind the always-dark down there, red eyes, sharp white teeth.

“So where the hell
do
I get across?” and when Spyder didn’t answer, Niki looked over her shoulder, caught Spyder staring up into the branches overhead, and she followed, like eyes could be a pointing finger, up, through the snarl and strangle, the draping leafless kudzu, up and there, maybe seven or eight feet off the ground, what Spyder was seeing. Niki rubbed at her eyes, rubbed them like a cartoon character to be sure it was real, those dangling arms and legs, limp and somehow stiff at the same time, sunken black sockets where his eyes had been open wide, and his mouth was open even wider than that.

“Oh,” and she felt like someone had punched her in the gut, had knocked the breath out of her. “Oh god, Spyder.”

“How are we ever gonna get him down?” Spyder said, said the words so quietly that Niki almost didn’t catch them. “I’ve been sitting here trying to figure that out, Niki, how to get him down.”

Niki struggled, fought her way out of the kudzu and vomited in the frozen grass, puked coffee and mostly digested supper, and the mess steamed in the morning shadows.

“Fuck,” she said, over and over, and there was no way to stop seeing that face, the most frightened face she’d ever seen, no way to pretend it wasn’t a dead face, no way not to see Danny Boudreaux up there. No way to get back to the moment before she’d turned around and looked.

No way except straight ahead.

“Spyder,” but then she had to stop, wait until the nausea passed, and then, “I’m gonna go back to the house and call some help, okay?”

“No, Niki. You can’t do that,” a little louder now, a little urgent, “No one’s ever gonna understand, not after Robin. I don’t want to go to jail.”