The last ball bearing glinted in Spyder’s hand, dull reflection of the sun through the window, and there was a slow ripping sound. Spyder grabbed something off the floor, a moment before Niki saw it was a roll of duct tape, used her teeth to tear off a strip and she was reaching for the rift opening beneath the bowling ball when the bedspread tore all the way open, dropping everything out the bottomside. The bowling ball fell three or four inches, thud and barely missed crushing Spyder’s fingers. Niki felt the vibration where she stood watching as the ball bearings spilled out and rolled away in every direction.
“Fuck,” Spyder whispered, and then she sat silently beneath the ruined bedspread and stared at the hole, the last ball bearing forgotten in her fingers.
One of the silver balls rolled into the living room and bumped to a stop against Niki’s foot. She bent down and picked it up, not caring now if Spyder saw her or not, knowing whatever was happening had happened. One word, printed around the circumference of the bearing, one word that didn’t mean anything to Niki, but she thought maybe she was starting to understand the whole thing, the dot-to-dot secret, the marks Spyder had drawn for her, and she wondered what was written on that last one, the one Spyder still held. And then she realized that Spyder was crying, very softly, and went to her.
2.
Monday, another lazy short day that the winter-brilliant sun, warm and washed-out honey, made lazier, took its own sweet time getting up over the top of the mountain. Filtered down through the trees and all those TV towers, into the house, first the windows on the east side where Spyder and Niki were still sleeping sometime after noon. Spyder woke first, her arms around Niki, holding her close, and the sun hung itself on the wall over them, big yellow-orange splotch like a saint’s nimbus or halo, and Spyder watched it closely, suspiciously. Niki was snoring, not a loud ragged boy snore but the sort of sound a cat makes if its sleep is uneasy, and Spyder held her tighter.
She could feel the world still slipping away around her, not the jolts that had come at first; a slow, steady creep now that didn’t ever stop, or slow down, or get any faster, no matter how hard she held on. No matter that she’d sealed up the room. No matter that she watched the trapdoor to the basement to be sure it stayed closed. Spyder looked away from the sun spot on the wall, buried her face in the clean smell of Niki’s hair. Robin’s hair had always smelled of ammonia and hair dye, and Niki’s hair just smelled clean, like hair and baby shampoo.
“Wake up,” she whispered, too quiet to actually wake Niki, pressed her lips against an earlobe, gently tested the steel rings there with her teeth.
“Wake up, Niki,” a little louder this time, just a little, and Niki mumbled something through her sleep and curled into a smaller fetus. Spyder kissed a spot on her cheek, next to her ear, felt the downy hairs there brush her own rough lips.
And that sensation again, less and less time between them every day, dizzy naked feeling, like she was falling and there was absolutely nothing anywhere beneath her, or above, like she’d fall forever. Spyder squeezed Niki, held on, waiting it out, the sensation, the sudden, hollow certainty, perception her doctors would have called delusion, or just panic attacks, and then tell her to take more pills to make it stop. And she wanted it to stop, but she wanted it to stop because it was over, because she’d found a way back, a way to put everything back right again, didn’t just want to take pills that made it harder to feel, harder to trust what she felt and saw and heard, and knew.
And then it was gone again and there was only Niki in her arms and the sun on the wall, the itch beneath her skin that she couldn’t ever reach.
“Niki,” she said. “Wake up, please,” and this time Niki rolled over and stared up at Spyder. Sleepy dumb grin, and she rubbed at her eyes.
“Hi there,” she said and nuzzled against Spyder’s T-shirt, nuzzled in between Spyder’s breasts. “What time is it?”
“I don’t know,” Spyder said. “Not too late, I don’t think. Are you hungry?”
“Mhmmm,” and Niki kissed her, slipped her tongue quick between Spyder’s teeth, and she was still surprised, even though Niki had kissed her so many times, and it still made her think about Robin and feel guilty.
“I meant for food,” she said, and Niki kissed her again, put her hands underneath Spyder’s shirt, small cold hands against Spyder’s chest, waking up her nipples, making them hard. “Coffee,” Niki said, and Spyder frowned.
“I don’t drink coffee.”
“Never mind then,” and now her head was under the shirt, making Mr. Fiend’s face bulge way out like he was pulling himself free of the cloth and silkscreen ink. Niki’s mouth, warm and wet around her left nipple, teasing tongue, tooth play, and Spyder kissed the top of her head through the shirt.
Niki sucked her nipple harder, wrapped both arms around firm muscle and the little bit of fat on Spyder’s belly. Spyder let her own hands wander down Niki’s back, no shirt in the way, just a bra strap before the small of her back, skin like satin, so much softer than Robin, no hard edges, no bones showing through.
And instead of the bottomless feeling, Spyder felt something else, something almost like the way she’d once felt with them all here around her, like things might be all right, if she could be sane a little while, careful, and then Niki’s fingers were inside her boxers, tangling themselves in her thick pubic hair, her sex cupped in Niki’s hand like fruit. Aching tingle when Niki’s middle finger brushed her labia, velvet probe, and then slipped inside. Spyder shivered and there was simply no way to hold Niki close enough, to take her in and bind that sense of security, of oneness and belonging, so it wouldn’t bleed away, wouldn’t desert her, leave her dangling between the nowheres above and below and within when it was over, soon, when Niki pulled her hand away, pulled her head from under the shirt and went to make coffee. Everything was always already over before it began.
Niki laughed beneath the bulgy shirt and switched to Spyder’s right nipple.
“Niki,” Spyder said, “you’re not gonna leave, when you get tired of the sex, or…” and then she didn’t say anything more, wished she’d kept her mouth shut. Niki’s tongue had stopped, and she pulled her head out, didn’t take her hand away from Spyder’s crotch, though. Her hair stuck out all over, static and bedhair, her dark, deep eyes, not hurt or pissed, wide and a little sleepy and no deceit in there that Spyder could see.
“I wasn’t planning on it,” she said and pretended to frown.
And Spyder looked back up at the sun on the wall, an inch or two lower, maybe, like the hand of a clock, sand in glass, nothing left behind as it passed. Except a cooling place if she put her fingers to the wall above it.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I know you’re not thinking about going anywhere. Everyone always acts like it’s gonna be forever, but nobody ever thinks about forever. We were gonna be together forever, Niki. I mean, me and Robin and Byron and Walter, like a family. Like a tribe…”
“I’m okay, Spyder,” Niki said, and the way she said it, Spyder could almost believe she knew what she was talking about. “We’re gonna be okay, too.”
“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 b
ut 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.”
Silk Page 29
