Silk (9 page)

“What’s wrong, Momma?”

“Right
now,
Lila.”

And she’s turning around, hugging the tattered book, and there’s Mr. Mouser, claws and marmalade belly and dappled paw pads, clinging to the screen door, and it seems very, very bright outside.

“Bad cat,” she scolds, and now her father is sobbing. And he’s laughing, also, and in her stomach something starts to wind itself up tight, like a rubber band. She thinks that maybe she’ll barf up the butter beans. The screen swings open when she pushes it, but Mr. Mouser is still hanging on, looking at her through the tiny wire squares.

“I can see angels,” her father says.

She steps into the late afternoon heat. Closes the door carefully, pulls the cat loose one foot at a time.

“
Bad
Mouser. Bad,
bad
cat.”

Lila sits down on the back steps, Dr. Seuss open to page one on her knees and strokes Mr. Mouser until he forgets about wanting inside and begins to purr in his loud, ragged tomcat voice.

Spyder swallowed the last bite of her second sandwich and opened her eyes. There was no globe on the kitchen light and the naked bulb jabbed needles at her. Somewhere, there
was
a globe, full of spare change, mostly nickels and pennies, left in a corner after the first time she blew the light, years and years ago. The globe was old, maybe as old as the house, frosted glass etched with a ring of grape leaves.

And it should be here to stop the light from hurting my eyes. It should be here to…

Spyder slammed her fist down hard on the table, hard enough to hurt and snip at the voice in her head. The empty Buffalo Rock bottle jumped, fell to the floor. Rolled away into a dark place.

Get up, Spydie. Get up and do something easy, something normal.

/but she smells red, nasty cloying crimson, and gags, thinks that she’s going to puke but/

She stood up too fast and knocked the chair over.

“No.”

/and her voice smells like sour little crab apples and millipedes/

“I’m not going down tonight, I
won’t
fucking go down tonight.”

Spyder gathered up the supper stuff, the plate with the leftover chunk of Spam, the mayonnaise jar (screwed the lid down so tight it’d be a bitch to open next time), the dirty knife. She dropped the knife in the sink, put the Spam and mayo in the fridge. More careful than careful, paying perfect attention to each necessary step. Twist-tied the bread closed, set it on the countertop.

She fished the the ginger ale bottle out from under the table, ignored the dry scritching beneath the floorboards.

/ignores the red smell/

Spyder put the bottle in the trash, counting her footsteps. Got the noisy carton of crickets off the top of the relic Frigidaire and the styrofoam cup of mealy worms from inside. Carried them back to the sink and set the crickets down.

/but she’s slipping now, for sure, and Dr. Lynxweiler is telling her to relax, ride it out, don’t let it freak you out this once, Spyder, don’t let it take you down/

There was something in an alley, Spyder,
he’d said, and
On my way home.

Spyder pulled the plastic top off the worms, stirred the sawdust inside with her finger to be sure they were still alive.

/she’s in Alice time, and crimson smells like the sound of starling wings/

She found a dead worm and washed it down the drain. The others seemed healthy enough, just sluggish from the cold.

“It’s all right, Spyder,” she said and closed the mealies, picked up the crickets.

She turned off the light above the table and stood a minute in the darkness, fighting to anchor herself, to nail herself feet and hands and cold spike between her eyes, into
this
moment, clinging to the sound of the nervous crickets and the growling wind outside.

This is the first night that they waited in the cellar for the bombs to fall, for the trumpets and hurricane buzz of locust wings.

Her mother lights the oil lamp and warm orangeness floods the cellar, eclipsing the pale beam of her father’s flashlight. The cellar smells like wet earth and mushrooms, sulfur from the match. There are rows of old boxes, cardboard and wooden crates, stacked high along the dirt walls. Sagging shelves crowded with forgotten Ball mason jars and old newspapers. Rusty garden tools. She can see scraggly goblin fingers poking out of the dirt, but knows they’re only roots.

Her father is crazy drunk, and her mother has finally stopped crying. They sit together, cast their three long shadows, and her father talks about the angels.

Her mother is crocheting, trying not to hear the things he’s saying over and over again. A sweater out of green yarn from Woolworth’s, and the yarn makes Lila think about the cats, Mr. Mouser and Sister and Little John, all locked outside at the end of the world. She set their supper on the back steps, asked her mother if cats went to Heaven, and her mother too quickly told her yes, they go to Cat Heaven. But at least it’s cool in the cellar, like air conditioning.

The shotgun across his lap and the big family Bible open to the last few pages. They sit inside a circle of salt, and she watches her mother’s lips, counting stitches with her. Her father reads out loud all the scary parts she’s never heard.

When her mother says it’s bedtime (How can she tell? There are no clocks down here, and she’s missed television and hasn’t even had her bath), she lies down on one of the army cots. They smell like mildew and dust, the blanket smells like mothballs, and she sneezes. She wipes her nose on the back of her hand, but her mother doesn’t even yell.

“Like a thief in the night,” her father says, and after she rolls over, he says it again. Her parents throw monster-movie shadows on the walls. She’s never been this afraid, not even in tornado weather, but she doesn’t cry.

Lila stays awake as long as she can, fights the heaviness dragging at her eyelids. Watches her father when he gets up and paces the red-dirt floor, never once stepping outside his circle. She counts sheep to stay awake.

And when she loses count, she dreams about blood in the streets and fire and the sky as black as coal.

3.

At the end of the long hall, past the toilet and her mother’s old sewing room, a linen closet and the back way into the room that had been her parents’, Spyder’s bedroom was a shrine of glass and wax. A hundred jars easy, fish tanks cracked or too leaky to hold water, and everywhere candles, the only light she permitted here. All the windows were nailed shut and painted blind, two thick coats of Sears’ flat black masking each pane. She’d used a fine-tipped camel’s hair brush to trace the webs, not cartoon spiderwebs or the stylized patterns tattooed on her skin, but painstaking reproductions copied from textbooks and photographs.

At first, after Florida and the nuthouse, she’d tried sleeping in her mother’s bedroom. It was so much bigger, and it’d seemed a shame to waste, but she could always smell the deathbed stench and her dreams had been even worse than usual. So she had crammed most of her stuff into this narrow space at the very back of the house, the room that had been hers as a child. Had patched the drafty walls with spackling paste and wood putty and used a staple gun to repair the peeling strips of wallpaper. Had tacked up the extra insulation of poster prints by Edvard Munch and H. R. Giger, Dali and Gustav Klimt.

Spyder lit a cinnamon-scented candle, closed and locked the door behind her. The crickets were making a fuss, and she shook the carton, stared through the wire-mesh window set into the side (“Live Bait, Catch the Big’uns!”). Tiny bodies scrambling over each other, clinging to the sides, fidgeting antennae and hair-trigger legs.

“What do you little fucks know, huh?” And Spyder thumped the side of the carton, knocking some of the crickets over on their shiny brown backs. “You don’t know shit, do you?”

She was starting to feel better by scant degrees, the whisper and shimmer at the borders beginning to ebb and fade. She’d double her Klonopin tonight, just to be safe, just to be sure things stayed that way until morning. But her room was almost as good as the meds, so absolutely
her
, nothing left to guard against. She could breathe here and let the vigilance fray, let the wariness begin to dissolve.

The candlelight glimmered dully off aquarium glass and old pickle jars. Behind the reflections, there was hungry movement, greedy patience. She no longer knew how many spiders she shared the room with, how many more, carefully pinned and labeled, were housed in the wooden museum cases stacked against the walls and hidden beneath the bed.

Spyder used the cinnamon candle to light a dozen others, passing the flame from wick to wick until the room was washed in the flickering glow. Then she plopped down on her squeaky mattress, a World War II army-surplus hospital bed draped with an autumn-colored quilt. Her mother had made a lot of quilts, but her Aunt Margaret had most of them.

Her big Sony boom box sat on the floor, surrounded by neat towers of CD jewel cases. Spyder put on a Danielle Dax album, skipped ahead to her favorite track and turned up the volume far enough that she couldn’t hear the insistent wind over the keyboards and guitars, the banshee vocals.

In the five-gallon tank on the little table beside the bed, Lurch and Tickler rustled about in their shredded newspaper. She’d bought the pair of Mexican red-legged tarantulas almost five years ago, a present to herself on the first anniversary of Weird Trappings’ opening. Officially, red-legs were an endangered species, but she’d found these two with a local pet shop owner who’d claimed he’d gotten them from a breeder in Mississippi. More likely, through a black market connection in Mobile or New Orleans. Lurch and Tickler were both females; males of the species stopped eating when they reached adulthood and promptly either fucked themselves to death or were eaten by females after mating.

Spyder opened the tank, let Tickler crawl cautiously into her palm. The chocolate and apricot spider was almost as wide as her hand. She stroked the stiff hairs on its back, then gently pressed her cheek against Tickler’s bristly abdomen.

“I’m gonna be okay,” she whispered, pretending the tarantula could understand, and Tickler raised her front-most left leg, seeming to caress the bridge of Spyder’s nose.

Sometimes, she imagined that the others watched, jealous of the affection she lavished on the red-legs, that the thousands of pinpoint black eyes glared at her through their plate-glass walls and longed for more than their suppers. But tonight she didn’t think about them, focused only on the living weight of the tarantula and the glimmering candles. On the singer’s voice and the words and music.

An hour later, after she’d divided up the last of the crickets and mealies among the five tanks of black widows, after she’d rounded up Lurch and Tickler and traded Danielle Dax for Dead Can Dance, Spyder turned down the quilt and undressed.

Tomorrow morning, Byron would be waiting for her at the shop, and she’d let him apologize again. And then she’d convince him that there’d been nothing waiting for him in that alley except a street crazy or maybe a stray dog.

She popped the safety caps off her scripts, dry swallowed two yellow and green Prozac capsules and two baby blue Klonopin. Blew out all but the candle closest to her bed. For a moment, she stood naked in the dim yellow light, admiring her strong body, the full firmness of her breasts, the washboard-flat stomach, and the muscular line of her unshaven legs. The perfect tapestry of pain and ink covering her arms and shoulders.

Spyder lay down, covered herself with the mismatched sheets and her mother’s patchwork, and watched the tarantulas stalk their dinners until she fell asleep. Toward dawn the dreams found her, and she walked the blood streets under coal-black skies.

1.

D
aria knows that she’s dreaming, almost always knows, and so her dreams are like amusement park rides or tripping or movies of lives she might have led. And she knows that she is not seven, even though the world rushing past outside the Pontiac’s open windows is too fresh, the sunlight and colors of the Mississippi countryside much too brilliant, to have filtered through her twenty-four-year-old eyes. She knows that it’s November and not the week before her eighth birthday at the end of May.

The warm breeze through the windows smells like new hay and cow shit, a faint, syrupy hint of the honeysuckle tangled in the fences that divide pastureland from the henna ribbon of the unpaved road. Dust spins up off the tires and hangs like orange smoke in the morning air behind them; hard gravel nuggets pop and ping off the underbelly of the Pontiac.

“I have to go to the bathroom,” she says, and her dad looks at her in the rearview mirror. “Not much farther. You don’t want to go in the ditch, do you?”

“I can wait,” she says, isn’t sure if she’s telling the truth, not after two strawberry Nehi’s from the styrofoam cooler in the backseat floorboard. She turns away from the window, back to the shoe box of crayola stumps and her big pad of manila drawing paper.

“Well, it’s your call,” he says from the front.

The paper is completely covered, crazy loops and swirls, figure eights and broad smears from crayons skinned and rubbed furiously sideways. Psychedelic, her mother would say if she were here, or abstract, she would say, or impressionistic. A rainbow gutted, turned inside out, and she looks at the back of her dad’s head, his hair dirty, almost to his shoulders now. There’s nothing on the radio but country music stations and preaching stations, and she doesn’t know the words to any of these songs.

“There are some trees up there you could go behind.”

“I said I can wait,” she says again and picks all the broken pieces of black crayon out of the box, arranging them neatly on the seat beside her. With the largest, she begins working across the page from the upper left corner, burying kaleidoscopic chaos beneath perfect, waxy black.

“I’m sorry,” her dad says, and she bears down so hard that the crayon breaks again, crumbles into oily bits that she rubs into the paper with her thumb. Both her hands are stained, the sides of her palms, the tips of her fingers, smudged ocher and sky blue and salmon. Her thumb is the indefinite color of a bruise.

“You don’t have to keep saying that,” she says, older, tireder Daria voice speaking over whatever the child might have said, and he’s staring at her from the rearview mirror, watching her through Keith Barry’s pebble-polished eyes.

The crayon smears on her skin melt and run together, mercuric, drip off and splash the black, and now she’ll have to use more black to hide them.

Something huge that coughs diesel smoke and hickory and rolls across the land on sinuous wheels like centipede legs rattles past the Pontiac, blocking out the sun for the instant before it’s gone, and she looks up, looks where it was, the shining stitches in the red, red earth, and “You go first,” Keith whispers, and uses the blade of his big pocketknife to pry away one of the rotten boards, weathered shimmery gray and splintery. The old wood mousesqueaks and pops free, rust-toothed nails flipped up to the cloudless spring sky.

Keith grins like a guilty weasel, folds his knife away, and the yawning dark slit where the board was sucks him inside the shack, the listing shack behind the store and gas station after she pissed, while her father talks nervous with the man who pumped their gas and wiped dead bugs from the windshield with his wet blue rag.

“C’mon,” her father shouts, and she hears glass and grit scrunching beneath his shoes and it sounds as if he’s being chewed alive in there, ground up like a mouthful of raw hamburger. Mort hesitates, and
Maybe,
she thinks,
maybe he’s thinking about being eaten, too.

“Wait the hell up,” Mort says, and then he’s gone, leaving her alone in the sun and the sour stink of gasoline and the tall grass. More chewing footsteps, growing fainter, and she looks back, down Morris past the warehouses to the railroad, past the rusting water pump and the scrap metal heaped behind the gas station. She wants to call them back, call for her dad.

“Jesus Christ, Dar. Come the fuck on if you’re comin’.”

And then she squeezes herself through the gap in the wall, pushes between fear and the dry-rot pine, out of the hot morning and into the cool, dustsmelly gloom. And the darkness
does
swallow her, takes her inside the whispery solitude of its velvet guts, the shack, the empty warehouse, makes it seem like there might never have been anything else. Except that the way back, the space of a single slat, blazes like the door to Heaven.

“Mort?” she whispers loud, the way she speaks at the library or a funeral parlor, and “Keith?”

Drifting back, then, from nowhere, from everywhere at once, “Over
here,
Dar.
Over here,
” and it might be Keith or Mort or anyone else. The darkness plays ventriloquist, throwing voices, bending sound, stealing words for its own.

“
Where?
I can’t see you.”

A long silence and finally something taunting like laughter or summer thunder way off, and the voice shouts back, “Over
here
!”

Daria takes one uncertain step forward, crunching the gritty, invisible debris scattered across the floor beneath the rubber soles of her boots. Her eyes are beginning to adjust, slowest fade to fuzzy twilight, and she swallows, her throat dry, dry mouth, and tastes the stale dustbunny air. She remembers the big cooler sweating sweet condensation diamonds inside the Pontiac, the bottles of Coke and Nehi floating in its little arctic sea. And forces herself another step, two, three, moving haltingly now across a gray concrete plain littered with darker patches and the faint glint of broken glass. Streaky sunlight bleeds down through the roof, sieved through shadow, and by the time the dark finishes with it, it’s nothing more than the pale ghost of the morning.

“Hey, Dar! Look at this!”

“
What?
What is it?”

Up ahead of her, something falls over, startlingly loud, weighty metal crash and glass tinkle, and the sudden feathery rustle of wings high overhead.

“Holy
fuck,
Keith! Will you watch what the hell you’re doing?”

And that laughter again, and the rustling, just swallows or pigeons, or bats.

“God, Dar, sometimes you can be such a goddamn pussy,” Keith says, and now she knows the laughter is his, mean laugh, the way you laugh at sissies and fat kids and Carol Yancy when the school nurse found cooties in her hair.

Stop!
she screams.
Stop it!
but just screaming inside her head, the words just loud thoughts trapped inside her the way this darkness is contained inside the warehouse walls, within the walls of the shack that had seemed so much smaller from the outside.

Something touches her cheek, a tickling wisp of her hair or a cobweb, and she slaps at it.

“Lay off,” Mort says, and then there are footsteps moving toward her.

“I can’t see you…” but her voice trails off when the wispy thing brushes her face again. It isn’t her hair. Some of it clings stubbornly to her fingers.

“Stay where you are,” Mort says, Mort or her father. “Stand still, and I’ll find you.”

Hurry up,
and she wishes that much had come out loud enough for someone to hear, but she’s too busy swiping at the sticky wisps to try again.

“I can’t see her, Keith. I can’t see her anywhere.”

Hurry.

“Dumb pussy bitch,” Keith says. “Fuck her, Mort.”

Stand still. Stand still and wait for him to find you. You’re freaking yourself out, that’s all.

It’s just a fucking dream.

The footsteps seem to pass her by, dissolving back into the murk, each one a little farther away than the last.

And then the scurry of tiny legs, delicate across her upper lip, the bridge of her nose. And she gasps, loud drowning noise, and sucks some of the clinging stuff into her mouth, her nostrils.

“Daria?!”
and her dad sounds frightened, almost as much as she is. “Daria, where
are
you?”

She slaps at her face so hard it draws down violet stars, and there are others, all at once, moving rapidly up and down her arms, her bare legs, impatient as minute fingers drumming busily to themselves. One wriggles its way past the collar of her T-shirt, skitters along her spine, another over an eyelid. A hundred, a thousand legs dancing softly, crazily, and the webs like a living curtain all around her.

And finally she can scream, opens her mouth so wide and the sound tears itself out of her, sonic Velcro rip, leaving her throat raw and her ears ringing. When she tries to run, her feet tangle and she lands hard, the breath driven from surprised lungs in a loud whoosh, cutting off the second scream halfway through.

They are all over her then. Everywhere.

Strong hands on her shoulders, and she can smell Mort, his omnipresent reek of pot smoke and sweat, before her father drags her out through the hole in the wall, back into the day, the blinding sun and the sky like a china plate. And then he sees the spiders, long-legged, yellow-brown hurrying things, and he screams, too.

2.

Daria woke up, jerked violent from sleep, and lay very still, wrapped in dingy white sheets faintly damp from sweat and the steam hissing from the radiator across the room. An amber swatch of sunlight on the wall above her bed told her it was late, the last dregs of the afternoon, before she checked her wristwatch. She sat up slowly and leaned back against the plaster wall where a headboard should’ve been, wiped salty moisture from her face with both hands and stared at her unsteady palms and waited for the white noise, the dreamshock, to pass, sluggish decompression bleeding her back into the world.

Niki Ky was still asleep on the floor beside the bed, curled into the old wool afghan and the Peanuts sheets washed so many times that Linus’ blue blanket had gone gray. She only added to the disorientation, something else inexplicable, and Daria let her eyes wander the apartment, taking in safe familiarity, cataloging ratty furniture and the posters thumbtacked to the walls.

She’d never made a habit of bringing home strays; there were far too many of them on the streets, too many ways of charity going sour, no good deed unpunished, after all, and she was having trouble remembering what had been any different about Niki Ky.

Daria reached for her cigarettes, the half-empty pack lying on the foldout card table she used for a nightstand. Her lighter was nowhere in sight, lost in the clutter of spare change and gum wrappers, snatches of song lyrics scribbled on fast-food napkins and scraps of notebook paper, weeks of accumulated pocket trash. She finally settled for a book of matches, one left behind the black cardboard cover stamped with the Fidgety Bean’s gold logo, and when she struck it, the air smelled instantly of brimstone. She inhaled deeply; the Marlboro tasted good and helped to clear her head a little.

Clear away the cobwebs and…

She rubbed at the tender spot between her eyebrows, rough one-thumb excuse for a massage. Her sinuses ached, dull pressure and just enough pain to notice, as if the memories were a cancer swelling there behind her eyes. And if she rubbed hard enough, she might effect a remission.

Across the room, something bumped hard against the front door and she jumped, adrenaline jolt upright, a half-instant later recognized the probing scritch of a key.

“Motherfuck,” she muttered, pushed sweatstiff crimson bangs from her face and pulled another hit off the cigarette.

The dead bolt clicked and the door opened and Claude shut it softly behind him, his cat-careful movement, so determined not to wake her that he hadn’t noticed she was already awake.

“It’s okay,” she said. “I’m up,” smoky cloud of words, and he smiled, held out a white deli bag for her to see.

“Then you can have breakfast with me,” he said. “I got chocolate croissants…” and then he noticed Niki on the floor, only the spiky black top of her head and one leg showing from under her wad of covers.

“Well, she’s definitely an improvement over Keith, but you shouldn’t have made her sleep on the floor.”

Daria transferred the cigarette to her lips and gave him the finger with both hands.

Niki mumbled something in her sleep and pulled the afghan completely over her head; both legs stuck out now, patient corpse feet waiting for their yellow toe tag. Claude just smiled that much wider and turned to the cramped kitchenette, one wall crammed with its gas stove and ancient Frigidaire, cracked and pitted Formica and rust-stained sink. He set the croissants on the countertop and opened the fridge door, took out the big Ball mason jar of coffee beans.

“She just needed a place to crash, that’s all,” Daria said around the Marlboro’s filter. “And you’re a pervert.”