Silk (40 page)

“Spyder Baxter’s a fucking froot-loop,” Daria said and now she was staring back down the alley, trying to see what he saw, what he was afraid of.

“No. I don’t mean about her being crazy. I mean, she’s not
right
.”

“Walter, will you please just tell me what the hell you’re talking about and stop with the damn tap dancing?”

And back in the shadows, then, a garbage can had fallen over, bang, and the sound of metal and rolling glass on asphalt, before something dark and fast had streaked across the alley. Walter almost dropped the bag, and she’d taken it from him.

“What the hell’s wrong with you? It was just a cat, or a dog, for Christ’s sake….”

“Spyder’s not right,” he said again, like maybe she’d understand if he repeated it enough times, “and if you care about your friend, you’ll keep her away from that house. Robin knew, and she tried to tell us, and now she’s dead. And Byron believed her, and no one knows
where
the hell he is.”

“I think I’m way too drunk for this shit,” she’d said. and started walking again. Walter hadn’t moved.

“I’ll wait a day or two,” he’d said as she’d walked away. “Just a day or two, and then I’ve gotta leave. If you want to talk, I’ll be around.”

“Yeah, sure, whatever,” she’d muttered, not caring if he heard, just wanting to be back in her apartment, just wanting another drink.

And the last thing, before she’d stepped out of the alley and into the cold-comfort glare of streetlights: “I’m not crazy,” he’d said. “I swear to God, Daria. I’m not crazy.”

5.

She’d found Claude in her bed, making time with his boy, and she’d made them move it to the sofa. Had found a cleanish glass in the kitchen and screwed the top off a big bottle of Jim Beam, filled the glass to the brim and set the bottle of bourbon next to the bed.

“Maybe you’ve had enough,” Claude had said, careful, and a glare had been all it took to shut him up. He’d taken his boy and they’d left the apartment, left her alone. Her face, her hands felt fevery, wind-chapped, and her side hurt from Spyder’s boot. A miracle she didn’t have broken ribs; wondered if maybe she was bleeding somewhere inside, and Daria took a long, burning drink of the Jim Beam and went to the bathroom to piss. Just beer piss, safe yellow. She’d finished the bourbon, filled the glass again, and had lain down, head on her own pillow, soft and slightly funky, stared at Claude’s big poster of Billie Holiday through the syrup-colored liquor. The sadness, the fight with Spyder, the weirdness in the alley with Walter, everything running together like candle wax, waxen weight pulling down, and in a few minutes she was asleep.

“I don’t hate her,” her father says, “I love your mother,” and she looks up from her crayons, her color swirl under black wax and the lines she’s begun to scratch into it with her nails. Outside the sky is low and she can smell ozone and the rain rushing across the Mississippi prairies toward them, can see the electric lizard-tongue flicks of lightning on the horizon. The car bleeds red dust behind them, and she tells him that she knows that, that she never thought he hated them. Scratches at the rising welts on her arms and hands, and he puts his arm around her, pulls her close to him and the steering wheel: her crayons are in the backseat now, and she feels cold and sick at her stomach. The storm talks in thunder, and the orange speedometer needle strains toward ninety.

“I’m gonna get you to a doctor, Daria, and you’re gonna be fine. So don’t be afraid, okay? You’re gonna be fine. I swear I’d never let anything happen to you.”

The world rumbles under the thunder, and the car bumps and lurches along the dirt road.

“I should have listened to your Mammaw,” he says, and she tries not to think about what happened back at the gas station, the old shed and the biting spiders all over her, in her clothes and hair, and the look on her father’s face almost as bad as all those legs on her skin.

“I was scared, Daria, I didn’t know what to do.”

Crack, sky cracking open like a rotten egg and blue yolk fire arcing over them. Blistered sky boiling, and she closes her eyes; the blanket that the man at the gas station gave her father to wrap her in itches and she wants to kick it off, but he’s bundled her too tight.

“I just couldn’t let her hurt you again.”

She shivers and listens to the thunder. And something else, a wail like the storm has learned to howl, opens her eyes and she looks over dashboard faded plastic and the stitches in the earth laid out before them, bisecting the dirt-red road, iron spikes and steel rails and pinewood ties to close some monstrous wound up tight, and the train, crawling the tracks like a jointed metal copperhead, train so long, boxcar after boxcar, that she can’t even see the end. Can see the candy-striped gate arm coming down in front of them ahead, red crossing light flashing its useless warning.

Her father presses his foot down hard on the accelerator, and now he’s praying, praying loud, please God, please God, if we get stuck behind that thing she’ll die. And the train bigger than God, the God that hides behind His storm up above and sticks at the land with hatpin fire.

“Daddy…?” she says, but he’s still praying, and the cyclops eye of the train through the gloom, engine jaws and spinning silver-wheel teeth. And she thinks that it has started to rain, because
something’s
hitting the windshield, ocher drops that the wind sweeps away. Dry, yellow-brown drops before the shark snout of the Pontiac hits the gate arm and the wood snaps loud, flips up and smacks the windshield, spiderwebs safety glass as they fly over the railroad tracks, careening, jarring flight, and the train is everything on her right, her father everything on the left of her, the storm the world above, and they smash through the gate arm on the other side as the train roars past behind them.

The car fishtails, spins to a stop in the dust, and her father’s crying, slumped over the wheel and crying the way her mother had cried when he’d taken her away. And the broken windshield beneath the rain, rain with tiny furred bodies and a billion busy legs.

And another night, Thursday night, Daria sat with her back against the wall, bug spray in one hand and a cigarette in the other, hours since she’d awakened in the early afternoon pale sun coming through her window, head throbbing from the bull-bitch of all hangovers and the nightmare memories that still hadn’t faded; waiting alone for Claude to come back from the Bean, Claude who’d listened to everything she said, who’d fed her aspirin and coffee and cold glasses of tap water. Who’d helped her to the toilet when she had to puke again but hadn’t thought she could walk that far, and who should have been back half an hour ago.
Before
it got dark.

She took a deep drag off the Marlboro, exhaled, and jumped when she thought she saw something move, half glimpse from the corner of her left eye. Something big leaning over the foot of the bed, but of course there was nothing there now, nothing but tangled sheets and her blanket, gray powder smears from where she’d hurled the ashtray at Claude.

“Fuck,” she said, tried to laugh and take another drag, but the cigarette had burned down to the filter so she stubbed it out on the bottom of the Hot Shot can, flicked the butt away. “Fuck me.”

Can’t even tell the difference between a goddamn bad dream and what’s real. Crazy as Spyder fuckin’ Baxter, now.

She’d told Claude about her mother and father, talked for hours, through the pain and dread, about that day with the spiders and the train and everything that had led up to it. Her father’s secrets, not other women but other men, and her mother taking it out on her. So her dad had put her in his Pontiac and they’d driven, heading nowhere, just driving, and her not even eight years old. How she’d wound up in a Bolivar County, Mississippi hospital with twelve brown recluse bites, and she’d shown him the ugly scars on her legs to prove it, the worst of the scars that she never showed anyone. Puckered-flesh proof that it had all happened, touch and go for a while, and afterwards, the divorce and the years before she ever saw her father again.

Claude had listened, kind and so good at listening, but he can’t walk a block down the street and back in forty-five goddamn minutes. And she hadn’t told him about the other dreams, the dreams since that day on Cullom Street, not just the familiar race with the train, the threadbare echoes of her father and that one awful day, but the new dreams of fire and things from the sky, entrail rain and the silent, writhing angels, greased stakes up their asses while the streets filled with blood and the long-legged shadows that might be crabs or tarantulas big as fucking Volkswagens, under a sun the color of a nosebleed.

She reached for another cigarette but the pack was empty, and she wasn’t about to get up and look for more. Thunder, right overhead, and the windowpane shuddered.

And the lights flickered.

“
Christ,
Claude…”

She hadn’t told him that she knew that Keith had been having the dreams too, or about her talk with dowdy, frightened Walter the goddamned shrike on her way home. Hadn’t brought up the marks on Niki’s hands or the weeping marks on Keith’s face and ankles. Connect the dots, Dar, draw your fucking paranoid’s connections.

A tickle on her cheek, then, and Daria brushed at her face, brushed back hair and stared at the thing that had fallen into her lap, eight legs drawn up tight like a closed umbrella, spider fetal, and she almost screamed, thumped it away from her. Touched her face again, and there were others waiting there, running from her, and she
did
scream, then, screamed louder when she saw how the walls were moving, crappy old wallpaper seeping their thumbnail bodies, the floor alive and clumps swelling from the ceiling, hanging there until their own weight and gravity’s pull had its way and they began to fall around her. The spider clumps made almost no sound when they hit the floor.

Daria beat at her face, her chest, the scream continuous now, waiting for their jaws, the hypo sting, waiting to drown beneath them. She remembered the can of Hot Shot and sprayed herself, the bed, stinking pesticide mist everywhere, wet mist falling with the recluse shower.

“I’m not done with you….” whispered next to her ear. “I’m not done with you, bitch,” and she screamed for Claude, for Mort, screamed for Keith. They were inside her clothes, touching her everywhere, at every orifice, and soon they would be inside
her
. So many legs moving together they made a sound like burning leaves. Daria bashed herself against the wall, spidervelvet-papered wall, head thump against the Sheetrock, and through the pain she saw her silver Zippo lying where she’d left it on the table by the bed.

Just like Pablo had taught her years ago, cans of hair spray or whatever and a lighter, just for fuckin’ kicks, just to see the noisy rush of fire, Daria aimed the can of Hot Shot at the foot of the bed, thumb on the striker wheel and
fwoomp,
bright splash of flame, gout of flame and spiders crisping, curling to charred specks, charred lumps of specks. The blanket caught, the sheets, and she aimed the flamethrower at the wall.

The can spat up a last dribble of fire and was empty, but it didn’t matter, because the flames were crawling away on their own, devouring a thousand fleeing bodies every second as they spread.

And then Mort, reaching through the smoke, strong boy arms, his hands, dragging her off the burning bed, bump, bump, bump across the floor like Pooh, and she let him, let him drag her all the way across the apartment and out into the hall, too busy beating at the spiders still clinging to her to stop him, the spiders carpeting the floor. He left her lying on the landing, grabbed the fire extinguisher off the wall and rushed back inside. Muffled sound like a giant espresso machine steaming milk, steaming a whole goddamn cow, and he was right back, coughing, his eyes watering and black smoke all around them.

“Get them off me,”
she sobbed, begged.
“Please, Mort, get them off me,”
and he squatted down next to her, into the cleaner air beneath the smoke.

“Get
what
off of you, Daria? Tell me what the hell you’re talking about,” but she was raking at her face, now, raking at the spiders trying to burrow their way into her skin to escape the fire. And he slapped her, slapped her so hard her ears rang like Sunday morning bells, and she fell over; Mort picked her up again, held her hands in his fists and talked slowly.

“You got the fuckin’ DTs or something, Dar. That’s all. There’s nothing here to hurt you. Whatever you think you’re seeing, it ain’t real, okay? I absolutely fuckin’ swear it ain’t real.”

“No, let me go,”
fighting him, coughing and trying to pull her hands free before the spiders were in too deep to pull out again, like they’d gotten inside Keith.
“Can’t you see them?”

“Don’t make me hit you again, Dar. Please god don’t make me have to hit you again.” And he pushed her hands, her straining arms, down to her sides and held them there until she stopped struggling. Until she was only crying, sobbing, and she could hear thunder and the wail of sirens, end of the world wail.

“We gotta get outta here, Dar. You need a doctor, and I couldn’t get the fire out in there.”

Mort picked her up, carried her down the stairs and out into the freezing clean night air, the water rain that peppered her skin like liquid ice, bringing her back. Back to herself and Morris Avenue, the buildings washed in scarlet waves of fire-engine light, blue and white cop-car light.