“I got them,” he’d said, looking over his shoulder again, his eyes bright and proud and nervous.
“You got what, Walter?” Spyder asked, and then she’d lost count of the twenties and cursed him before she started over again.
“I got the peyote,” he’d said, almost whispered, the last word squeezed down to a cautious hiss that had reminded Robin a little of Peter Lorre in Casablanca or Arsenic and Old Lace.
“No shit,” and Robin had reached past Spyder and the cash drawer, had thought for a second that Walter was going to snatch the bag away from her. She’d unrolled the crumpled paper and in the shadows down at the bottom were three or four large Ziploc baggies, each filled with lumpy dark buttons of sun-dried peyote.
“Goddamn it, Walter,” she’d said, and then Spyder, who’d given up trying to count the twenties, had taken the bag away from her and peered skeptically inside.
“Holy fuck,” she’d whispered. “Where’d you get it all?”
Walter had smiled his tense half-smile, the dimpled corners of his mouth still drawn stubbornly down.
“Randy’s got a connection somewhere out in Texas. It’s legal for the Indians to grow it out there for religious purposes, but you have to be a member of this Indian church and have a lot of Indian blood to buy it.”
“The Native American Church,” Robin had said, remembering a book she’d read about the peyote religions, the state-licensed peyoteros who grew their sacred cactus, could legally sell it only to registered members of the NAC.
“A group of Oklahoma peyotists formed the Church in 1918 to protect their ceremonies from the Feds,” and she hadn’t missed the way that’d impressed him, took her full measure of delight from his futile admiration.
“Well, I told you I could get it,” he’d said, and his unaccustomed smile had stretched wider, revealing a rare glimpse of uneven front teeth.
Spyder had continued to stare into the Piggly Wiggly bag, shaking her head slowly, mild, pleased disbelief on her face.
“But what did all this cost?” she asked, and he’d shrugged. “Not so much as you’d think. It’s cheap shit, really. The Indians can get a thousand buttons for about a hundred and fifty bucks. Of course, Randy has to charge me a lot more than that, though. I got fifty buttons in there.”
Spyder had handed the bag to Robin and gone back to counting the crumpled green bills.
“So, you guys want to call Byron and get fucked up tonight?” Walter asked, hopeful, fairly glowing with his little victory.
“No,” Robin replied. “We’re gonna do this right,” and then she’d rolled the bag closed again.
3.
Or this is where it started, where it really started.
The night that Robin met Spyder Baxter. Still months to go before high school graduation, pomp and circumstance and her parents picking colleges for her like arranged marriages. Waiting around the civic center parking lot after the show, the Jim Rose Circus and Nine Inch Nails, as if something worth seeing might happen; one more in the smoky clot of bodies assembled around Tony’s new Honda CRX. Warm Boone’s Farm like soured Kool-Aid from a jug, and an amber bottle of Jack Daniel’s making the rounds, too.
She’d sat in the open hatchback, too drunk to feel the cold night, Tony all over her, his rough hands and whiskey mouth, wanting inside. And she’d taken her turn at the jug and passed it on to someone else, another girl, nameless blonde from another school. The blond girl was almost ready to spew, and Robin had dimly hoped she’d at least go somewhere else to do it.
“There was a drive-by shooting here last week,” someone said, and she’d blinked through the booze, trying to match the slurred voice to a face. “There’s still broken glass all over that side of the street.”
The other faces had oohed and ahhhed their suburban awe, and then Tony had pushed her down, the kittensoft carpet against her skin and his stinking breath and new-car smell slipping up her nose.
“Goddamn,” and that had been Rick Reynolds, or one of the other varsity fucks. “Will you just get a load of that?” Laughter from the girls, then, egging him on, and he’d laughed too, a husky, mean sound, and she’d strained to see over Tony’s shoulder.
“Goddamn faggot freak,” Rick Reynolds said, and she’d seen the slight and pretty boy walking nervously past the group. He’d worn a woman’s coat, big fake fur and leopard print with a high, turned-up collar, had held his head down, ostrich denial, misguided belief that if you don’t look at the dog it won’t bite you.
“Hey fag, you wanna show me some pussy?” and then Tony had pushed her back down, a bruising shove and her T-shirt hiked up, his insistent hands working their way beneath her bra, relentless fingers across her rigid nipples.
“Aw shit, man, I just wanted to see some pussy,” and the girls had laughed louder, caged-bird cackle, loving the show, loving the threat and fear and their time on top.
“Get off me, Tony,” Robin had said, and then his mouth had covered hers, the probing gag of his tongue forestalling any further resistance, the rejections he wouldn’t have to hear, wouldn’t have to pretend he hadn’t heard.
“I think he’s gonna cry,” someone said, not Rick but one of the girls, and the zipper on Robin’s jeans parted as if by its own traitorous accord. Tony’s hand had worked its way across her exposed belly, diamond serpent’s head with five anxious fingers, slipped beneath the elastic band of her panties and tangled in her pubic hair.
“Oh baby, you want it,” he said. “You know that you want it,” and then she’d kneed him in the balls, had brought her leg up hard and fast and felt his nuts and his stiffened penis, still trapped inside his pants, all mashed helpless between her and his body.
“Well, you come back around if you change your mind, fag,” Rick called after the boy, the girls still laughing like hyenas while Tony’s face had turned almost the same bright red as his new car. She’d wriggled out from under him, all the way out of the hatchback and into the cold, zipping up, straightening the rumpled mess he’d made of her clothes. And Tony held onto his crotch with both hands, leaned forward and spat curses at her like blinding venom. The others made a circle around her, just to see what had happened, she’d known that, but it felt like they were there to make sure she didn’t get away.
“You goddamn cunt!” he’d hissed, and she could see the sweat standing out on his forehead, the way he gritted his perfect white teeth together and forced the words through the spaces in between.
“I said no, Tony,” she’d said, breathless, her voice too small and alone.
“Fuck you, cunt! Goddammit! I ought’a fucking hold you down and kick your fucking face in!”
“Christ, man, what’d she do to you?” Rick asked, and she knew he was standing just behind her, would be there if she turned to run.
“The bitch kicked me in the fucking nuts, you dumbfuck!”
“That’s cold, Robin, that’s real cold,” Amy Edwards said, and she’d sat down next to Tony in the hatch, all big-eyed concern and opportunist’s reproach.
“I told him no,” Robin said again, and then he lunged at her, cooing Amy thrown to one side, his sparkling, hateful eyes, dog-snarled lips. His fist had landed once, big blow to her face like concrete and meat and a bag full of marbles.
No man had ever hit her, not even a spanking from her father; Robin staggered backwards, no one to catch her, and tripped, fell flat on her ass, the sharp parking-lot gravel unnoticed, her head too full of the suddenness and the force, the absoluteness of this violence. She’d sat there while the numbness in and around her right eye segued slowly into skin burn and bone ache, bright fire wherever he’d touched her. She was breathing fast and hard, and every time she exhaled there was a sticky, warm spray of blood from her nose, red-berry spatters down the front of her shirt.
“Christ, Tony,” surprise and a whisper of fear in Rick Reynold’s voice. “You busted her nose, man.”
“I ought’a kick her fucking ass.”
She’d tried to scramble o
ut of his reach, scraped palms and the frantic heels of her Hush Puppy loafers slinging grit and dust, but there were legs like prison bars, legs that wouldn’t step aside to let her through, faces that stared down in shock and disgust and something hungry like delight.
“She’s not worth it, man,” Rick stammered, and Robin had hung on those words, terrified, praying silently that Tony would see the obvious truth in them, that she wasn’t worth it, wasn’t worth the energy it would take to realize the bottomless fury in his eyes.
He’d stood over her, a dangerous animal she’d never seen take off its mask, what big teeth you have, what big claws; big man, still holding his balls with one hand.
“Please, Tony,” she whimpered through the blood and snot and stinging salt tears, “I’m sorry. Please…”
“Fuck her, man,” Rick said, creeping, oily desperation. “Let’s just get the hell out of here.”
“Yeah, whatever you say.” And then, to her, “But baby, you better know that your life is over. The goddamn niggers won’t even want you after I’m done talking.”
He drew his foot back, and she’d flinched, bracing herself for the hard rubber toe of his sneaker, but he’d struck the ground instead, and bits of the parking lot rained down in her hair, pelting her arms and face.
And lucky Amy Edwards had climbed into the candy-apple CRX in her place, and the ring of drunken teenagers had broken up and wandered away to other cars and other bottles, leaving her to the night and its consequences.
Twenty, thirty minutes later, and she was still sitting there, shivering and shielding her swelling nose with blood-smeared hands, trying to stop crying, when someone behind her had asked, “Are you gonna be okay?”
She’d turned around, and the pretty boy in the leopard coat had been there, and a girl with skin like milk and whiter dreadlocks haloed in the sodium-arc glare. The girl wasn’t wearing a coat, just a Hanes tank top, and her bare arms were covered with silver-blue webs, spiderwebs like casting nets from the backs of her broad hands to her shoulders.
“Do you need us to take you to the hospital?” the girl with the tattoos asked, the white girl, that beautiful ala-baster gorgon. And then another boy, not so pretty, something broken and wary in his lean face, had knelt beside her and wrapped a leather jacket around her.
“I think he broke her nose, Spyder,” the boy told the white gorgon, and she’d knelt, too, made Robin move her hands and frowned. There was a small and perfect cruciform scar between the gorgon’s eyes, softest rose against the snow, and it had almost seemed to glow when she leaned close to look at Robin’s nose.
“Yeah, I guess you do,” the gorgon said, and then they’d helped her stand and followed the pretty boy, haughty swish and fake fur, across the empty parking lot.
4.
Where the highway cut deep into Red Mountain, the weathered gash down through its Paleozoic bones, shale and chert and iron-ore ligaments, Robin switched her headlights on. The sun was gone, burned down to a molten sliver, orange-red streak in the western sky as she crested the mountain and started down into the wide valley below. The city twinkled and glittered in the fresh night, the uneven cluster of electric light and the garish ribbons of I-65 and I-20.
She’d been concentrating on nothing but the cherry-red taillights of the eighteen-wheeler in front of her, ignoring the oily flow of images that had begun to play behind her eyes, the memories past vivid that ate into her cool, her queen-bitch deceit, like nail polish remover through Styrofoam. She felt dim relief to see the city, to know that Spyder and Byron were so close now.
“Don’t let it freak you out,” Spyder would say, “they’re only flashbacks. They can’t hurt you.” But Robin knew better, knew that Spyder knew even better than her.
Outside, it was getting colder, but she had the window down, anyway; she hated to drive alone now, especially after dark, paced the Civic to keep up with the speeding patches of traffic. The heater was blowing full tilt, but her lips and ears and the tips of her fingers were still painfully cold, and her breath fogged like cigarette smoke. She leaned over and punched the eject button on the Civic’s CD player and it whirred and spat out the PJ Harvey disc she’d been listening to for the past twenty minutes. She’d begun to imagine, to suspect, that Polly Jean’s jangling voice was mocking her own jangling nerves, and she searched through the loose CDs in the passenger seat for anything calmer, found Sarah McLachlan’s Fumbling Towards Ecstasy and loaded it into the empty tray.
In the last four or five straining seconds before the disc cued to the first track and the music began again, Robin clearly heard the quick, dry scritch across backseat vinyl, the weighty thump of something heavy falling to the floorboard directly behind her. But she did not jump or cry out, did not turn to see, but pressed the black toe of her boot to the accelerator and passed the truck, stayed even with its cab all the way to her exit.
5.
Three days spent piecing together the ceremony, a blurred chain of days revisiting volumes on peyote religion and the general use of hallucinogens in shamanism; library tomb dust and Robin curled into a corner of Spyder’s old sofa, the books scattered around her like fallen megaliths. Spyder had not dared to interrupt when her parents called, again and again, looking for her, or even to remind her that she’d forgotten to eat.
But the books contained only the smallest portion of what she was looking for, disappointing syntheses of the contaminations of Christian missions and older aboriginal ritual. The Ghost Dance, the Kiowa Half Moon Ceremony, and the Cross Fire Ceremony; revelations of the Creator’s Road, the narrow way, old men’s visions of the life of Christ and figures in the sky: celestial landmarks for the Spiritual Forces, the Moon, the Sun, Fire. Her head filling up and up until her temples ached with contradictory instructions and still, the keen awareness that none of these could be their ceremony, the dawning certainty that she had to find it inside herself. Make it new, not so different from what the Sioux and Caddo and Comanche had done, but a synthesis of her own instead of bits and odd pieces cribbed from obscure ethnographies.
Through all this, Walter had hovered at the dim edges of her awareness, as if, found guilty of some crime, he was merely awaiting sentence, the ugly consequences of his indiscretion. Sometimes he sat across the room from her, alone and watching, and sometimes he paced anxiously through Spyder’s house, impatient, barely comprehending her obsession and insistence on detail, on any ritual at all, for that matter. If he spoke, either Spyder or Byron was usually there to tell him to shut up, leave her alone, go home now, Walter.
And she’d known that they were all, even Spyder, just a little bit afraid of what she was setting in motion, of what she would soon ask them to do. These three, who had taken her in and shown her how to fill in the emptiness, had midwifed her rebirth from that suburban zombie hell; had shown her what they knew of darkness and light and the graying shades in between, of the power to be gained by living through death without first having to die. Grave robbers and self-styled ghouls, cemetery children, daemon lovers, eaters of every opium and lotus, and now they were afraid, these three beyond fear or dread, and it gave Robin the slimmest satisfaction, that she could be so powerful, and that she could, at last, give something back.
Four days after Walter had brought the grocery bag of peyote buttons to Weird Trappings, she’d finally called them all together, had given Byron a list of things they’d need and her Visa card, Spyder’s car keys. And then she’d asked Spyder to find her something to eat, had soaked in a tub of hot, soapy water, rose-scented bath salts, while Spyder scrambled eggs and fried slices of baloney, brewed strong black coffee in her noisy old percolator.
And Walter and Spyder had watched while she ate, Robin stray-cat ravenous after days of Cheetos and candy bars, and his eyes had seemed to follow every forkful from the plate to her mouth. But she was past being annoyed by Walter’s gnawing adoration, too exhausted to object or care. When she’d finished, Spyder had rubbed her neck and shoulders, strong hands kneading awa
y the kinks and knots, and they’d talked about other things until Byron had come back: a shipment of animal skulls that had come into the shop that morning, a documentary Walter had seen on cable about the Knights Templar.
It had been dark an hour when Byron finally returned, found them in the living room listening to Bach, and he’d sent Walter back out to the car for the bags while he’d bitched about a cashier at the supermarket who had looked at the credit card and wanted to know if he was Robin Elizabeth Ingalls.
“Did you get everything on the list?” she’d asked, and he’d rolled his eyes.
“I’m not totally fucking incompetent.”
“If I’d thought that you were, Byron, I’d have gone myself.”
Revived by her bath and the food, by Spyder’s gentle ministrations, she’d finally felt the first twinges of excitement, adrenaline promises and a tightness deep in her belly. When Walter came back in with the bags, she had him set them down on the floor, and she prowled through them, one by one, checking their contents against the list in her head. And yes, Byron had found everything she’d asked for, the spices and salt, the paints and olive oil and two dozen white candles.
“Okay, Walter, if you’d please take this all down to the basement now…” But then Spyder’s eyes had gone wide, lightning swift passage of dread across her face before she’d turned suddenly away, and Robin had known that look, that special silver panic that rode piggyback on her madness, that flashed itself like a warning display. She’d glanced at Byron and known that he’d seen it, too. Spyder walked away from them, stood by a window and stared out at the dark between them and the house next door.
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