Silk

by Kiernan, Caitlin R.

  And then Spyder had Niki drive her downtown, and she made a sign from poster board and a squeaky purple Magic Marker, taped it to the window of Weird Trappings—“Closed Until Further Notice”—had shown Niki around the shop, picking out a few things to take back to Cullom Street with her.

  It was Niki’s idea to go to the Fidgety Bean afterwards, wanting to keep Spyder out a little longer, wanting to see Daria and be out herself. Spyder shrugged and nodded yes.

  “I don’t drink coffee,” she said.

  “Not ever?” Niki asked, incredulous, and suddenly she was thinking about Danny for the first time in days, Danny whose love of coffee had bordered on the religious. She pushed his ghost away, reached out and held Spyder’s warm hand as they squeezed down an incredibly narrow alley to Morris.

  “It always makes my stomach hurt. Makes me nauseous, sometimes. Big-time handicap for a member of the caffeine generation, I guess.”

  And then the alley opened, released them to the cobblestone street, and they were under the dreary sky again. Three doors down to the Bean, and Niki changed the subject, talked about going thrifting for a bed, tomorrow perhaps, and maybe a new lamp, too.

  Early afternoon and the coffeehouse was almost empty, nobody but a rumpled wad of slackers in the back smoking and talking too loud. Niki sat down at the bar before she saw Daria, bleary-eyed and a big coffee stain down the front of her little red apron. She smiled, a genuine glad-to-see-you smile, and put down the tray of glasses she’d been carrying. Spyder took the stool next to Niki and stared out through her dreads.

  “Hi there, stranger,” Daria said and hugged Niki across the bar and a cautious “How you doin’, Spyder?”

  “Okay,” Spyder said, and turned her attention to a jar of chocolate biscotti. “I want one of those,” she said.

  “Sure,” and Daria reached beneath the counter for metal tongs, the lid off the jar and then a big piece of the biscotti on a napkin sitting in front of Spyder. “You gonna want some coffee with that, right?”

  “I never drink coffee,” Spyder said again.

  “Makes her barf,” Niki added.

  “How about some hot chocolate or tea?” But Spyder shook her head, and then she took a loud, crunchy bite.

  “Christ, Spyder,” Daria said. “You’re gonna break a tooth or something.”

  Spyder smiled, and there were cocoa-colored crumbs on her lips.

  “And you want a Cubano, right?” she asked Niki, who was examining the long list of exotic coffee drinks chalked up behind Daria, neon chalk rainbow on dusty slate.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Sure, and I want you to make Spyder an almond milk.”

  When Spyder started to protest, Daria held one finger to her lips, shhhhh, “I promise, it won’t make you barf. Just steamed milk and a shot of almond syrup. Unless you’d rather have hazelnut or caramel, or vanilla.” And Daria pointed to a row of tall bottles behind her, lurid shades of Torani syrups, and Spyder looked at Niki.

  “Almond’s fine,” she said, mumbling around her second noisy mouthful of biscotti.

  “Coming right up, ladies,” Daria said and turned her back, went to work with coffee grounds and sugar, almond syrup and the shiny silver Lavazza machine.

  “So,” and Niki wasn’t looking at Spyder, speaking to her but watching the kids at the back table. “How’d you get the shop going, anyway?”

  Spyder wiped her mouth with the napkin, picked up stray crumbs from the polished countertop, each one pressed down until it stuck to her fingertip and then transferred them to her tongue.

  “A friend helped me,” she said.

  “But didn’t you have to get a loan from a bank or something?”

  “No,” Spyder said. “I tried, to start with, but nobody’s gonna give me a loan, Niki. I had a friend.”

  And Niki was looking at her now, a soft smile on her Asian lips, and now she was holding Spyder’s hand again.

  “A friend who loaned you the money?”

  “No, a friend that died and gave me the money,” she said, and Niki’s smile faded a little.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “That your friend died, I mean.”

  “Yeah. He could look just like Siouxsie Sioux, except you never called him a drag queen. You had to call him a ‘performance artist’ or a ‘female illusionist’ or he’d get pissed off at you. Andy hated to be called a drag queen.”

  Too close, sick irony or coincidence, and Niki hoped nothing showed on her face. “You guys were real close?” she asked.

  “Yeah, I guess,” and Spyder released Niki’s hand, laid both hers palm-up on the counter, empty offering to no one and nothing in particular. “We hung out at Rush-ton Park when I was still a kid, you know, hanging out on Highland with the hustlers and runaways. It was nice, in the summer.

  “Andy didn’t hustle, though. He had money, money his mom had left him when she died. Just enough to keep him going until he started getting sick…” and she paused, looked up at the ceiling, ornate plaster molded and painted a green so deep it was almost black.

  “Andy’s mom was great. She knew he was queer and all, that he’d gotten AIDS, but she was still great. She used to cook us these big-ass Sunday dinners, used to let him bring home street kids on cold nights and shit. It’s unfucking believable, Niki, that anyone ever gets parents that cool, you know?”

  “Yeah,” Niki said, and how many months now since she’d seen her own mother and father, anyway? She’d called her mother twice from motel rooms, just to let them know she was okay, but never stayed on the line long enough that home could sneak its way through the connection and find her.

  “Anyway, he left me a whole bunch of money when he died, enough to start Weird Trappings and keep it going a while….

  “I stayed with him, you know, at the end. He went blind finally and toxo got his brain. But he’d made me promise that I wouldn’t let him die alone, and he didn’t.”

  Niki swallowed and wanted to hold Spyder, but instead her eyes wandered away, afraid: Daria noisily steaming milk, an old photograph of a trolley car on the wall, finally down to her lap. Anything but beautiful, unfathomable Spyder, simple as a single thread knotted over and over and suddenly too much to grasp, like particle physics or her own mortality. And then Daria was setting their drinks on the bar, Niki’s in a crystal demitasse, pitch black and a perfect skim of créma on top, Spyder’s in a tall glass and the color of a quadroon’s skin.

  “Hey, you guys okay?” she asked, and Niki nodded, but Spyder only looked out at the street and wrapped her tattooed hands around the warm glass. “Christ, it’s this fucking depressing-ass music,” and Niki noticed it for the first time, blues she didn’t recognize. Could tell from Daria’s eyes that she knew it had nothing to do with the music, but she changed the CD, anyhow. Exchanged the blues for Joan Jett, and one of the kids in the back stood up and yelled, “All right! Goddamn right!”

  “Dork,” Daria muttered under her breath.

  “Thanks,” Niki said.

  “No problem. Listen, how’d you guys like to come to our show this weekend? We’re part of this big deal at Dante’s Saturday night, in Atlanta. Three or four bands, and someone from Atlantic is supposed to be there, so I’m fucking freaked, you know? It’d be really cool if you guys could come. I’ll put you on the guest list.”

  “I don’t know,” Spyder said.

  “Maybe you could ride up in the van with us if you wanted,” and Niki couldn’t tell if Daria was just trying to help, give them something do, another excuse to get Spyder out of the house, or if she really wanted them along. Or both, perhaps.

  “We’ll think about it and let you know, okay?” Niki said and sipped her Cubano, sweet and scalding. Spyder hadn’t even tried her almond milk, just held onto the glass and stared out the window at the gray street.

  “Sure,” Daria said. “Just let me know if you wanna go. Look, I gotta go check on the roaster, but I’ll be right back.”

  And when she was gone, Niki took another sip of her
coffee, glanced out the window, through THE FIDGETY BEAN painted careful and the letters two feet tall, words running backwards from this side of the glass.

  “What you looking at?”

  “Nothing,” Spyder said. “I thought I saw someone I knew, that’s all. But it was someone else.”

  And then she tasted her milk and left Niki to stare at the street by herself.

  He knew that she had seen him, that she had caught him watching her, frozen, too afraid to move, and Byron Langly walked quickly, shoes too loud (like she might hear), clothes too black (like she might see); finally stood out of the wind in one of the alleys that led up to First Avenue and Weird Trappings. His heart beating too fast, breathless, bright fear and adrenaline ache, muscles knotting like a bad dose of ecstasy or acid and now the strych was working on him.

  He had not been back to his apartment in days, not since Billy said the cops had been by asking about him and maybe he should lay low for a while, and then Billy had mentioned seeing Spyder at the Steak and Egg, said he’d talked to her the day before, day after the night Byron had left Robin lying in the snow, bleeding and poisoned and helpless against the skitterers. But he had called the ambulance, right? He hadn’t abandoned her. He’d hunted a pay phone through that fucking, blinding storm, and he’d called 911, even though he’d wanted to run straight home, even though his hands and face were numb and he’d kept catching glimpses and skulking hints from the corners of his watering eyes.

  “She left in a hurry,” Billy had said. “Like that girl’s ass was on the way to a fire or some shit,” and then they’d both seen the thing creeping toward him across Billy’s yellow and green candy-striped coffee table, eight busy legs and its body like a black pearl.

  Billy had run to find the can of Raid he kept under the sink to kill cockroaches, but Byron had smashed it beneath a heavy ashtray, could see the widow’s ruined body pressed between cut glass and painted wood, its life and deadly juices and a little movement left in its legs. So he’d ground the ashtray hard against the table, scratching the lacquered finish, had put all his weight on the damned thing until Billy had grabbed his shoulders. And then he’d sat on the sofa, crying again, holding the ashtray like a shield, cigarette butts and ash spilled all over his lap, parts of the spider stuck to the glass and the rest smeared on the table.

  And then he’d left the apartment, and he hadn’t been back. Walking the streets like a bum and lingering outside Weird Trappings, keeping track of the dark inside, living off coffee and cigarettes and junk food from the gas stations and convenience stores, sugar and salt and caffeine. Sleeping in doorways and almost freezing to death, trying not to see himself reflected in the windows he walked past.

  Maybe, if he could find Walter, they could figure something out. But Walter hadn’t answered his phone and no one had seen him in days. And everything twisting inside kept telling him to run, get a bus ticket to Atlanta; there were people there he could stay with for a while, people who wouldn’t ask too many questions.

  But he couldn’t run, did not know why, if he was too afraid or not scared enough, but he couldn’t. Could only wait.

  When his heart had slowed, exhausted beat, and the fear faded to the steady background white noise it’d been for a week, he moved on.

  2.

  Finally, Niki had talked Spyder into going to the show, but only by agreeing that they’d take the Celica instead of riding along in the van. That way, they could leave when they wanted, which seemed important to Spyder, that she not feel trapped, restrained by Stiff Kitten’s itinerary, by whatever plans Daria and the band might have. That she could leave if and when she wanted to.

  “No problem with the car going that far?” and Spyder had said no, that she drove to Atlanta and even as far as Athens sometimes, once all the way to New Orleans, and it had only overheated a couple of times.

  So Niki had called Daria, and on Saturday afternoon, almost twilight, they met the band around back of a store that sold baby stuff. Keith and Daria were loading the van, instruments and the big rolling flight cases, amps, Theo sitting in the front seat, filing her nails and listening to a Lemonheads tape.

  “You’re gonna run down the battery again,” Mort said, and she rolled her eyes and turned the volume up.

  Jobless Claude was there too, watching them lug their crap out of the practice space upstairs, Baby Heaven he called it, smoking Camels and complaining about Theo’s taste in music.

  When they were done, Keith locked the rear doors. Mort had been tinkering with something under the hood, and he cursed once when he bumped his head.

  “Are you finished fucking around up there?” Daria shouted, and he grunted some sort of affirmation, slammed the hood closed and the whole van shuddered.

  “If we don’t throw a rod this trip, it’s gonna be a goddamn miracle, Dar.”

  Daria ignored him, dire oracle of grease and socket wrenches, turned instead to Spyder and Niki. “Hey, do you guys mind if Claude rides up with you? It’d make a lot more room in the shitmobile.”

  And Niki didn’t think to ask Spyder. “Sure,” she said. “That’s cool,” and Spyder only shrugged.

  “I don’t eat much,” Claude said and laughed, clean laugh that made Niki feel more at ease than she’d felt in days, in weeks, maybe.

  “Well, look. You guys just follow, but if we get separated, you’ve got the directions I gave you, right? Dante’s isn’t hard to find.”

  “I know where it is,” Spyder said. “I’ve been there,” not helpful or reassuring, more like someone had said, Spyder, honey, you couldn’t find your way around Atlanta with a road map, a compass, and an Indian guide, and Niki began to wonder just how bad an idea this had been.

  “We’ll be fine,” she said, and Daria hugged her, nodded, and then they were all piling into the van, Mort sliding the side door shut, and the last one in.

  “And turn off that crap,” Niki plainly heard, Daria speaking loud over Evan Dando and “Mrs. Robinson.”

  A few minutes later, Claude stuffed into the backseat and talking excitedly about the time he’d seen the Sugarcubes at Dante’s, and Spyder ignoring him, slipping a Joy Division tape into the deck. Niki started the car, driving because Spyder wasn’t supposed to on the Mellaril, and they followed the white van through the city toward the interstate.

  Absolutely no danger of losing the van, of not keeping up, even in Spyder’s grumbling Toyota. Niki followed close behind the Ford, maybe too close, but Spyder’s silence was making her nervous. When she could read the stickers plastered all over the back doors of the van, entirely covering its bumper, she would back off. Catching whiffs of the Econoline’s dark exhaust through the window Spyder kept cracked despite the cold outside, burning oil up there for sure; she wondered if Mort was right and they’d all end up stranded somewhere, middle of nowhere, between Birmingham and Atlanta.

  On their way out of town, she’d noticed the spot where the Vega had broken down, and how long ago had that been now, almost three weeks? Better part of a month, then, and how could it have possibly been that long? And at the same time, the feeling that it must have been much longer, must have been months since that night.

  “Why’d you get those tattoos?” Claude asked Spyder, asked like a ghost from the dark backseat. “It must have hurt.”

  “I don’t feel like talking,” Spyder said. “I’m getting a headache.” She turned up the stereo, and Claude was silent for a while.

  And the miles rolled by, distance marked off in reflective yellow paint and the changing of cassette tapes.

  They crossed the state line, welcome to Georgia and a peach on the sign that made Niki think of a big pink butt, and she was getting too close to the van again, could read “Picasso Trigger Sodomized My Honor Student” and “Five-Eight,” “WHPK Chicago” and “My Other Car Is A Penis.” She relaxed, lifted her foot off the accelerator a little and backed off.

  And the miles rolled by.

  A long time ago, turn of the century or before, Dan
te’s had been a grain mill, a place for grinding kernels of wheat and corn and barley into flour. Rough-hewn chunks of native stone, glinting mica schist, and huge pine beams. And after that, it had sat empty for years, decades, until someone had opened the club, had taken advantage of the mill’s layout, three main levels, for its theme. In the shadow of skyscrapers, shadows of a New South of steel and glass, it sprawled like a Civil War fortress, framed in asphalt and train tracks and tendrils of strangling kudzu. Divina Commedia in wrought iron hung above the doorway and loops of razor wire strung around, past the booth where IDs were checked or tickets for shows were taken, where different colored plastic bands were fastened tightly around wrists to prove whether or not you were old enough to buy booze.

  Mort pulled the van into the circular drive out front, gravel pinging under the tires and red mud hardened to clay-red crust, while Niki parked the Celica in a pay lot across the street. Two dollars to the kid at the gate, and she paid it herself, locked the doors and they walked together across streetlit blacktop, the parking lot already half full, kids hanging around or heading for Dante’s to get in the line forming outside the ticket booth. Mostly punkers and goths, club kids, a few suburban casuals. Niki and Spyder reached the van and Keith was already opening the Econoline’s rear end. Claude had stopped to talk to someone that he knew. A couple of equally battered vans parked close by, one old Winnebago that looked like a prop from a Mad Max film; the other bands, four on the bill in all.

  They were all listed on the fluorescent white marquee hung high on one wall, black plastic letters from top to bottom, order of appearance reversed, of course. The headliner was a funk-punk-industrial fusion band Niki had heard on the radio once or twice, Shard, thought they might have a video out. Then Stiff Kitten, second string so third to play. The two bottom, then, TranSister, a local riot grrrl group, and last of all, something called Seven Deadlies.

  “Why don’t you guys go on in,” Daria said. “There’s no sense in you standing out here freezing while we load in.”