Silk

by Kiernan, Caitlin R.

  Didn’t it hurt?, just the memory of a question Niki had asked about her tattoos, but so loud and clear that for a moment Spyder thought maybe she was awake, too, and Spyder’s fingers went to the scar between her eyes, as if that’s what Niki had meant, instead. And the dream rolling back over her, weightless feather crush, the part she hadn’t told Niki, and the truth about the tattoos. Never mind the details, all the business she’d volunteered about ink and the sound of the artist’s silver gun, time and money and aftercare. Fact, but nothing true, and she stared unblinking at the storm.

  After she’d come home from Florida, but years before Weird Trappings, before Robin, before Byron and Walter, and the dreams had been so bad she couldn’t sleep at all, not even with the pills; after sundown, she walked the streets and sat alone in all-night diners and empty parks. Talked to herself and bums, the street lunatics, other people too crazy to sleep, and there had been a woman with a rusty red wagon loaded full of rags and Coke cans and newspapers. A madwoman named Mary Ellen, and one night Spyder was sitting alone under a dogwood, crying because she was so tired and too fucking scared to even close her eyes. She’d bought a pack of Remington razor blades at a drugstore and sat beneath the tree, one of the blades out and pressed against her wrist. Felt her pulse through the stainless steel, and just a little more pressure would have been enough, but she was too scared for that, also, and she’d kneaded the scar between her eyes, as if it might be rubbed away like dirt.

  “Hey there, you,” and Mary Ellen was sitting on a bench nearby, watching, and she must have been sitting there all along, but had kept very quiet so Spyder wouldn’t notice. “Fuck off, Ellen,” Spyder muttered, “I don’t want to talk to anyone tonight.” But Mary Ellen hadn’t fucked off, had left her bench and come to sit in the grass with Spyder, dragging the squeaky wagon behind her.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “I won’t try to stop you. I know what that feels like, when you got some bleeding to do and they stop you and sew you up like a hole in a sock,” and she’d shown Spyder her wrists, then, bony bag-lady wrists and the crisscross of scars there.

  “But ain’t nothing wrong with having some company, Lila.”

  “Does it hurt?” Spyder asked her, and Mary Ellen had shrugged and nodded her head. “’Course it hurts. Shit, yeah, it hurts, but only for a little while. It’s not so bad after a little while.” And she’d taken something out of the heap in her wagon, handed it to Spyder: an old pickle jar, kosher dill spears, but half the label torn away.

  “I got you something,” she said.

  “I don’t need a jar,” Spyder said, and Mary Ellen frowned, “No, damn it. Not the jar. Inside the jar.” And Spyder had held the pickle jar up so the closest streetlight shone in through the smudged glass.

  “Found her out back of the Woolworth’s, under a box, under a big motherfucking box, and I didn’t mean to listen. I don’t talk to bugs, but she knew your name,” and there, inside the jar, a huge black widow spider, and Spyder’s mouth suddenly so dry, too dry to speak. “She said you might have forgotten her, Lila, said once upon a time she had a hundred black sisters and they saved a princess from a troll or an evil magician…”

  “Thank you, Mary Ellen,” Spyder said, and Mary Ellen had stopped talking and smiled. Smiled her brown-toothed smile and hugged herself. “Yeah,” she said. “Yeah, that’s cool, Lila. Anytime. I find lost stuff all the time.”

  And Spyder had gone home, left her razor blades under the dogwood tree with Mary Ellen and walked back up the mountain to Cullom Street with her gift; it didn’t matter that she wasn’t crazy enough to hear the voices Mary Ellen heard. She had her own, and the next day she’d taken the bus across town, carried the widow hidden down in her knapsack, safely sealed in a new and smaller jar with some newspaper crumpled inside. She’d shown the tattooist the drawings she’d worked on for hours, colored pencils on the brown back of a grocery bag. “Just like that,” she’d said, pointing, and the money from her savings, and she’d had all the time it would take.

  The salvation ink bleeding beneath her skin, beautiful scar to stand against all the other scars, the one on her face and the scars past counting in her head.

  Outside, the wind gusted and the white flakes buffeted the window of Keith’s apartment. Niki Ky made a soft sound in her sleep, like something a word might leave behind, and Spyder held her and watched the snow until she could stop remembering.

  3.

  In the morning, gray only a few shades lighter than the night, Niki was awakened by the sound of water, the distinctive spatter of boy piss on porcelain. While they’d slept, Spyder had moved closer, had gripped Niki’s right hand so tightly that the fingers had gone stiff and numb. She looked around the room, Daria alone now on the mattress and Mort lying on his side, still snoring. Theo in a cattight ball of strange and mismatched fabrics on the other side of the room, but no sign of Keith. Down the hall, a toilet flushed and then footsteps, and he strode through the doorway, twice as rumpled as the night before. Carnation splotches beneath his hard eyes, rubbing his big hands together.

  “Mornin’,” he said. “You looked out the window yet?”

  Niki glanced at the snow heaped on the sill, perfect cross section of the drift that had grown as high during the night as gravity would allow.

  “No,” she said. “Is it deep?”

  “Ass-high to a Watusi Indian chief,” he said and rubbed at those raw eyes.

  “What time is it?” Niki asked, and he shrugged, hell-if-I-know-or-care shrug. On the mattress, Daria opened her eyes, grumbled something indecipherable and shut them again, covered her head with the pillow.

  Keith yawned loudly, lion yawn, and went to one of the holes punched through the Sheetrock, reached inside and pulled out what looked to Niki like a leather shaving kit. He sat down against the wall, the hole gaping like a toothless mouth above his head, his dirty hair.

  “Daria says your folks are from Vietnam,” he said and unzipped the little case. “North or South?”

  “Yeah,” Niki answered, and “South. My mother was born in Saigon. My father is from Tayninh.”

  “Vi-et-nam,” Keith Barry said, drawing out the word slow, syllable by syllable, his heavy Southern drawl making the name something new. And he took a small baggie of white powder from the case, poured a tiny bit into a tarnished spoon, twist-tied the bag shut again with a rubber band. Mixed a little of his spit with the powder.

  “Yeah, my dad was there right at the start of that war,” he said and began to heat the underside of the spoon with a disposable lighter. Niki had never actually watched anyone shoot up before, tried not to stare, tried not to seem rude by looking away.

  “He was Army, two tours,” and after the powder had turned to a dark and bubbling liquid, he wrapped a green and yellow bungee cord tight around his bicep, thumped hard at his forearm with one index finger while the heroin cooled. “Took a bullet at Nhatrang during the Tet Offensive.”

  “I don’t know where that is,” Niki said, and cringed inside when he took the needle from the case, old-fashioned glass syringe that he had to screw the needle onto.

  “Shit. Neither do I. Just one of those places he used to talk about, that’s all it means to me.”

  Keith drew the heroin carefully, carefully, every drop in through the needle, tapped the syringe and pushed out the air bubbles. He set the needle against his skin, skin scarred with tracks like a pox, needle aimed away from Niki, toward his heart.

  “He used to talk about the war a lot. Had a medal and everything ’cause he got a foot blown off.”

  And he pricked the skin, shifted his thumb slightly, easing the pressure on the plunger; Niki clearly saw the dark flow of his blood back into the syringe, the billow darker than crimson in the shadowy apartment before he injected. When the syringe was empty, he slipped the needle out, removed the bungee cord. Closed his eyes and inhaled loudly.

  “It doesn’t hurt?” Niki asked him.

  Nothing for a moment, and then he exhale
d, slowly.

  “Babe, it only hurts when the well runs dry,” he smiled, and for just a second looked so much younger, so much more vulnerable, more than a fucked-up junky rushing after his wake-up fix. And she could almost see in him what Daria might see, glimpse of something that Niki had heard in his music the night before, someone he kept safe and out of sight.

  “It only hurts when it ain’t there.”

  And she thought of the things she’d read, secondhand life, William Burroughs and something about Billie Holiday. And how little any of it meant, how she understood that she’d never understand, unless she let the needle kiss her own skin one day, and another day after that, until the junk became as much a part of her as air or water or the blood in her veins.

  “Most of this kit was my dad’s, too,” Keith said, and when he saw the surprise on Niki’s face, he laughed. “No shit. They sent him back short a foot, but he had that fucking medal and a hell of a morphine habit.”

  And then neither of them said anything for a while, just the wind outside talking to itself, and Keith stared past her out the window.

  “Should we wake them up?” she asked, finally.

  “Sure,” he said. “Bunch’a lazy-ass motherfuckers.”

  “And then what?” Niki asked, and Keith grinned.

  “Bet you never built a snowman, New Orleans girl.”

  “No,” she said. “I never did.”

  After the icebox of the building, the cold outside wasn’t such a shock, except when the wind gusted, came roaring at them around the corner of a building, up a deserted street, sluiced through garbage-can alleyways. A wind that made Niki think of places she’d never been, Chicago wind, Manhattan wind, wind that flayed without bothering to peel back skin and muscle first, that cut straight through no matter how many layers of clothes.

  There’d been no hope for the van, half-buried by the Dumpster, so they’d all borrowed layers from Keith’s ragpile boxes, set out on foot, and when they passed the smoked-glass window of a shoe-shine and repair shop, Niki thought they looked like the shambling survivors of some Arctic apocalypse, ice not fire, Robert Frost’s second choice. Tube socks for gloves, flannel like the hides of plaid antelope, and Niki had found a second pair of jeans, Levi’s that would have been huge on Keith or Mort, cinched around her waist with an old extension cord the color of a neon-orange warning.

  They built their skinny snowman on the sidewalk outside the Compass Bank on Twentieth Street, just a little taller than Niki and Daria, three uneven tiers and he listed a little to the right. Mort found limestone gravel for the eyes, an old windshield-wiper blade for an industrial Cyrano, snapped sticks off a frozen shrub for twiggy arms.

  “Ugly fucker,” Keith said, and then he’d made the snowman a bifurcated dick with another twig.

  “You are so sick,” Theo said, and so he smacked her in the back of the head with a snowball, as big as a grapefruit. The one she lobbed back at him was only half as big, packed harder; it missed Keith altogether and caught Daria right between the eyes. Keith started laughing so hard that he had to sit down, holding his stomach, sinking up to his waist in the snow.

  “Fuck you, asshole,” and Daria had found some wetter snow in the gutter, muddy snow, and a few seconds later she’d nailed him and Keith was spitting and coughing, but still laughing so hard he couldn’t talk.

  Spyder had sat down beside the bulbous lower tier of the snowman, had pulled out his stick-dick and was busy using it to trace swirling lines in the snow crust. Niki joined her, sat as close as she dared, remembering the awkward kiss the night before, still just as confused, still just as attracted. The designs Spyder drew in the snow reminded Niki of aboriginal rock paintings or sloppy paisley.

  “Are you okay?” she asked, and Spyder looked up too fast, clear she hadn’t even noticed Niki until she’d spoken. The cut over her eye was red, red against her wind-pink face.

  “Um,” she said. “Yeah, but I should go home now.”

  “Do you think Byron will be there, and Robin?”

  “Maybe,” she said, and in the street, Theo and Daria had paired off against Mort and Keith, and they cursed and laughed and shrieked as the snow flew like shot from fairy cannons.

  “Look like fun?” Niki asked Spyder, and Spyder only shrugged; she’d refused any extra clothes, except a pair of socks for her hands, a hole in one so her left pinkie stuck out the side. Her black jacket stood out, contrast like a hole in the day.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “There is something else I’ve always wanted to do,” Niki said. A missile intended for Theo sailed over their heads, then, hit the snowman instead and sprayed them both with crystalline shrapnel. And she stood, found a patch of snow they hadn’t messed up yet with footprints, and lay down.

  “What are you doing?” Spyder asked, turning to see, face scrunched into a James Dean squint.

  “Just watch,” Niki said. “When I was a little girl, I read about kids doing this, in those Little House books or somewhere.”

  And then Niki began to move her arms up and down, legs scissoring open and closed again, displacing snow, plowing it aside. And then she stood, shaking and brushing away the white powder before it could melt and soak through.

  “It’s a snow angel,” she said, proud that it had come out looking just like she remembered the pictures, and Spyder only stared, said nothing, eyes intense like she was trying to solve a puzzle, an optical illusion.

  “See,” Niki prompted, “Those are the wings.”

  Spyder got up and started off down the street without them.

  “Hey, where are you going?”

  “Home,” Spyder called back. “I have to go home now.”

  “Well, wait,” and by then Keith and Daria had noticed, although Mort and Theo were still busy pummeling each other.

  “Where’s she goin’?” Keith asked, and Daria shook her head, asked, “Where’s Spyder going, Niki?”

  “Just come on, guys,” and Niki was already running to catch up, what passed for running in the snow halfway to her knees. The street rose steeply here, last hill before the mountain, and she was out of breath after only three or four lumbering steps.

  “Wait!” she called after Spyder. “I can’t walk that fast,” her voice so loud and small in the cold air and no sign that Spyder had even heard, trudging ahead as if there were no one left on earth but her.

  At the top of the hill, Niki stopped, lungs aching, teeth aching from the cold, legs filled with lactic acid knives, sweatsoaked underneath her clothes and Keith’s. And Spyder still ten or twenty yards ahead, the others still twenty or thirty behind. She looked north, back toward downtown, the frozen city paralyzed, cocooned after the storm. Not a car on the roads, hardly anyone else on the sidewalks. The shouts of other people blocks away and everything too white under the low and racing clouds. The wind up here was worse, tore at her clothes, stung her face and made her ears hurt.

  Hands on her knees and bent double like she was puking, Niki waited on Daria and the rest.

  Two blocks west, they caught up with Spyder, finally, but only because she’d paused to knock snow off the soles of her Docs, slamming one foot and then the other against a telephone pole.

  “You’re gonna have a heart attack,” Niki wheezed, “or a stroke or something if you don’t slow down,” coming up behind Spyder, startling her again although she’d made noise on purpose so she wouldn’t. There were little snotcicles dangling from each of Spyder’s nostrils, her face like a boiled crab from the wind and exertion, and the cut on her forehead had opened again, fresh blood trickling into her eye.

  “This is not a fucking forced march,” Daria said; Mort was actually holding Theo up now.

  Spyder only looked at them uncomprehendingly, blank disregard, went back to kicking the telephone pole, black rubber against creosote pine.

  “Man,” Keith gasped, leaned against convenient chain link, steel division between sidewalk and a smothered church parking lot. “Man, why are we
chasin’ this crazy bitch, anyway?” Another pause, another gasp, and “That’s what I’d like someone to tell me.”

  “I can make it fine from here,” Spyder said, examining the bottom of one boot. The hardpacked snow she’d kicked off lay all around her feet, molded like weird albino waffles.

  Niki ignored her. “Because she could have a concussion for all we know. We at least need to see she gets home all right.”

  “Christ,” Mort panted. “She’s in better shape than I am. Look, she’s not even outta breath! Christ.”

  “How do you know if you’re freezing to death?” Theo whimpered from his side.

  “We can at least get some coffee,” Daria said, “Just one fucking cup of coffee,” and Niki asked, “Where?” then noticed a diner across the street, a Steak and Egg Kitchen squeezed in between an apartment building and a Pizza Hut. The Pizza Hut was dark, but inside the Steak and Egg, the lights were on.

  “Yeah,” Theo wheezed. “Please? I can’t feel my tongue.”

  Niki looked at Spyder, unfathomable urgency burning as cold as frostbite in her eyes, unearthly eyes, and Spyder turned away from her, gazed past and through trees and street signs and houses, at the frosted mountain, half-hidden now in the heavy clouds.

  “This ain’t up for debate,” Daria said. “If you want me along, you’ll wait until after I get some coffee and catch my fucking breath.”

  “Spyder?” And Niki risked one hand on the back of Spyder’s jacket, leather wet with melted snow, leathery skin as impenetrable as the girl wrapped inside.

  “Yeah,” she said and looked back at Niki, and her eyes had changed, the strange silver fire only smoldering ash like dread or regret and nothing much there but exhaustion. “Some coffee would be good.”

  “Thank fuck,” Theo muttered, and they followed Daria across the empty, icy street.