You go down, and down, thinking there’s not a bottom, and Keith looked past the ghetto ruin at the shining new towers, clean light up there, windwhistling Heaven up there and ragpile wino Hell down here, down and down, and this time she wasn’t gonna be there to haul him back to himself, back to Purgatory. One more alley, and it was a dead end, Dumpsters and the crap that had tumbled out of them, shitclogged cul-de-sac in the city’s guts. Keith followed the alley all the way back, kicked a stiff, daysdead pigeon out of his way and sat down in the trash.
Absolutely untogether, Mr. Barry, and just an hour before he’d been somewhere else, someone else, a mile away and the burn and eager need of all those bodies stretched out before him like a banquet, and Daria there beside him. Now, just the knowledge that things might have gone differently.
If we hadn’t followed Spyder home, and he knew that was true, that it wasn’t the H this time. Rushing to the door and that damn old lady, whatever he’d touched, whatever had touched him. Something bad left lying around, and his big feet had tangled in it. Too cold to shiver anymore, Keith closed his eyes and tried to think about nothing but the night before, sleeping over at Daria’s place and her in his arms, radiator warmth and their hard bodies straining against the things held between them, sex and the musky safe smell of her. And afterwards, sleepless, he’d read from a book about Vietnam and thought about Niki Ky while Daria slept, had spent more time listening to the smooth chest rise and fall of her breathing than following the pages.
The lines on her face, the wrinkled place between her eyebrows betraying her nightmares, and he’d put an arm around her, as if he could drive them off, or at least keep her company down there.
He had enough junk left for one more fix, and two Dilaudid he’d scored a week ago and been holding back. Without opening his eyes, he fished a prescription bottle from one pocket and dry-swallowed the Dilaudids, tossed the empty plastic bottle away. And smelled something, damp dried stench, jasmine and roadkill, dusty basement air and the cold-rot smell of something left too long in a refrigerator. Wind swept down the alley, wind that went straight through his clothes, and he was shivering again; wind and the puke smell of all that fucking garbage, and he tucked his face down inside his jacket, a little warm air in there and just his own rank, familiar sweatstink.
Something bad that cut if you weren’t careful where you stepped, as mindless, pointless and mean as barbed wire wrapped around his ankles and trailing after him. And what he hadn’t said to Daria, bright dream of the hole torn in a spider’s web, and whatever had escaped dying anyway, writhing in grass, silk-tangled wings and never mind that the fucking spider hadn’t even wanted it in the first place.
“Please,” she said, voice so close, voice that seemed to spring and then roll back on itself, reverb, and he opened his eyes, nothing but the empty alley leading back to the empty street. A prickling rash of chill bumps on the back of his neck, kid fear, and he yelled at the nothing, fuck off, go the fuck away, I don’t have any more goddamn money. But he watched the shadows of the Dumpsters, the space between the high brick walls. And she said, “Please, wake me up…”
“Fuck off, I said,” and a panel truck rumbled noisily past the other end of the alley and was gone.
Keith unzipped his jacket, bleeding all his warmth away into the night, felt for the comforting bulge of his kit, tucked safely into an inside pocket, his rosary, trinity of spoon and powder and syringe.
“It’s a dream,” the girl said, same voice, same papery wasp-nest voice, and there was a knife in that pocket, too, just a little pocketknife, but he took it out and held it clasped in the sweating palm of his hand.
Something scuttled from one shadow to another, too dark for him to see, just the impression of mass and movement, and he tried to open the knife, but his fingers were sweaty, too, and it was hard to get a grip on the blade.
“It’s just a dream,” and the knife popped open, dull and tiny blade he used for cutting his nails, for splicing cable. The scuttling sound again, closer, “…wake me up.”
He wanted to stand, to leave the voice and the rancid smell, what all this meant or didn’t mean, and she said, “Please…” before one leg like a giant’s beetle-shelled finger reached slowly out of the dark, jointed leg and hairs more like quills, and another, then, testing the paler darkness that surrounded him. Keith wanted to close his eyes, but he watched as she came, all that was left of her and what there was now, instead. Enough of her face in there that he knew, the way he knew the pain in that one green eye, swollen and helpless contrast to the others, her new eyes, bulging, all-seeing pools of pitch and the stingy hours before dawn. The eye and the voice and the tufts of green hair.
Her lips there between the furred vise jaws, the needle-hooked fangs, lips cracked, and this was worse than anything from the dreams, worse than the thing hanging, dripping, from the rafters of Heaven.
“I want to go home,” it said, she said, too-pink lips, raw, and clumsy mandibles, and now the air was full of drifting threads, gossamer falling around him, settling everywhere like spun sugar or glass, cotton candy or angel-hair. The world growing too bright and thin around him, before the flash. The strands burned his skin, and the ground sizzled and smoked where they landed.
“It’s worse,” she said, “over here,” perfect, beautiful sadness and inched backwards into the shadows, leaving something glistening wet and sludgy behind. Keith Barry shut his eyes, as the sparkling silk rained down like Christmas, and he tried to find the memory of Daria’s face through the acid filling his veins and hold it as the world dissolved around him.
3.
From Birmingham to Nashville, Nashville to Louisville and on to Indianapolis, buses and interchangeable bus stations, and Walter had no idea where he was going, hardly why. Less money left every day and no direction, no solution but this movement that solved nothing, and nothing inside but dread and terror pushing him farther and farther from that spot on the earth where Spyder’s house sat festering in his head. Sometime Sunday morning, and he waited for the connection to Chicago, only half-awake in the molded blue plastic chair and his ass hurting, watching the faces around him, the eyes with their own simpler worries. Worries in the real world, solid world, not the insane things, what he didn’t believe and could no longer deny.
At the Greyhound counter, a greasy-looking woman in a Pennzoil windbreaker was arguing with the clerk, something he couldn’t hear, but something to watch anyway, her lips moving and the sneer on her face, white-trash contempt, the annoyed disinterest in the clerk’s eyes, and sleep moved silently up behind him…
…and it’s always the same, always Walter lost in those hours or minutes or days before Spyder comes down from the brilliant, burning hills to take him home, to lead him back to the World. And always that sudden sense of aloneness, severed cord, broken chain, knowing that Robin and Byron are free, that they’ve slipped away, escaped, and he’s still cowering in the sulfur rubble on the edge of the pit. He wants to be happy, to cheer, because they’re gone, like Dorothy to the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodsman and the Cowardly Lion, they got away, they got away; Preacher Man, the Dragon, knows at once, and He roars so loud the world rumbles and the pit rips wider, devours more of this place that is no place at all. The powderglass ground beneath his feet tilts and is turning, accelerating counterclockwise spiral down and down and the pit yawns and belches, grinds its granite teeth.
And the Dragon fills up the roiling floor-joist sky, spreads His scrawny hard sermon arms wide, his dragon wings, and the book is a blazing red sun bleeding out his voice. Ugly black things cling to His hands and face, biting things and Walter is on hands and bloody knees now, clambering for any hold, crawling as the earth shivers and goes powdery. And he remembers his wings, his beautiful charcoal wings, mockingbird boy, and that’s why Preacher Man hates him, isn’t it, and he tries to stand, spreads them wide, but the raining fire has scorched them raw, ragged feather scorch, and the Dragon laughs and laughs and laughs.
; “Come back with me,” Spyder says, her hands around his wrists, but Preacher Man looming over her shoulder. “It’s gonna be all right now, Walter,” but the world turns, water down a drain, down that mouth, and the earth tremoring so he can’t even stand up.
“Help,” he says, every time, and every time she smiles, soft and secret Spyder smile, nods and puts her arms around him so that Preacher Man howls and claws the sagging sky belly until it bleeds; the sour rain sticks to them like pine sap, turning the powdered ground to tar. “He won’t let me leave, Spyder. He knows what I’ve seen, what I know.…”
And she turns and stares up and into His face, like there’s nothing to fear in those eyes, nothing that can pick her apart, strew her flesh to the winds and singe the bones, and she says, “He’s not part of this,” and “You can’t have him.” And the tattoos on her arms writhe electric blue loaded-gun threat, and now Preacher Man, who is also the Dragon, is not laughing. Now He takes a step backwards, puts the pit between them, His protector, and His face is a rictus of rage and pain, and He is fury.
“Lila,” He says, “what you’ve done to me, you’ll burn in Hell forever.” Voice of thunder and mountains splitting to spill molten bile. “What you’ve done to me, you’ll burn until the end of Time.”
And the blue fire flows from her, crackling static cage that He won’t touch, and she’s pulling Walter from the muck, hauling him across the shattered plains, days and days across the foothills with the Dragon howling her damnation, her sentence, but Spyder doesn’t look at Him again, ignores His promises. Drags Walter over the pus-seething caleche and stones that shriek like dying rabbits, stands between him and the rubbing-alcohol wind that whips up dust phantoms and throws burning tumbleweeds.
“Close your eyes, Walter,” she says again and again, and at the end he does, because the long-legged things are so close, and he knows the climb’s too steep, that he’s too tired and she’s too exhausted, and the jaws of the skitterers drip the shearing sound of harvest…
…and he jerked awake, hard like hitting a wall, and the fat dude sitting across from him was staring. Walter wiped cold, oily sweat from his face, and the fat dude whispered, “Hey, buddy, if you need a fix, and you sure as hell look like you need a fix…” Walter shook his head, stumbled to his feet, and the basement hell was still more real than the predawn fluorescent glare of the bus station. He made it to the men’s restroom, to a sink before he puked, sprayed half-digested McDonald’s and coffee, heaved again and again until his insides cramped and ached, but his head was starting to clear and at least there was no one else in there to see.
He ran cold water in the next sink over, cold water in clean porcelain and splashed his face. Shivered and the roll of his stomach, braced himself, but it passed and he splashed more of the gurgling water across his face. Looked up into the mirror and the long, bristling legs were draped limply over the door and sides of the stall just behind him. Every detail clear in the hateful light, and something was dripping onto the filthy tile underneath. The air smelled like cleanser and vomit and rot. Walter whirled around, so fast and him still dizzy so he almost fell, but there was nothing there. Four silver stalls and no one and nothing in any of them.
“Christ!” he screamed, slammed the doors open one after the other, commodes and toilet-paper dispensers and bus-station shitter graffiti.
And the door opened and the fat man was staring at the sinkful of barfed-up cheeseburger and fries, shaking his head, “It’s good shit, man, and you are hurtin’. I ain’t no goddamn DEA man,” but Walter pushed past him and out the door, across the terminal to the Greyhound counter where the clerk glanced up at him from his receipts and claim slips. “Are you all right, Mister?” he said, reaching for the phone. “I can call you a doctor, if you need a doctor.”
Walter shook his head, trying to see through tears, the schedule behind the man’s head, and he dug his ticket out of his jacket pocket, laid it on the counter. “No,” he said. “I just want to exchange this. Can I do that? Can I exchange this ticket for one to Birmingham?”
“It’s cool with me, man,” the clerk said and took the old ticket to Chicago away.
4.
And the white-haired old woman who had always lived just across a kudzu patch, downhill and next door to Spyder, next door to Lila and her parents, to Spyder’s grandparents before that: the old woman who’d lived there nearly sixty years, in the rambling big house her husband built in 1934, before he went away to Europe to be killed by the Nazis and buried in France: the old woman who’d spent her life alone, because she could never refill that empty place in her heart or soul, alone and watching the world fall apart around her: who had always kept her eyes open.
She woke up in the hospital-quiet hour before sunrise, same time she’d awakened every morning for decades, never mind the pills, the medication they gave her to keep her calm and make her sleep. She woke and the moment of disorientation stretched, fog in her head after the dream, and this was not her bedroom, not her things around her. The strange ceiling and tubes leading from her arm and nose up to IV bottles and bags, wires to the glow of the machine that told her that her heart hadn’t stopped, not yet, that made soft green peaks and valleys of her old pulse. In seventy-seven years, how many times does a heart beat? and she remembered where she was and remembered the squeezing pain in her chest and sighed, closed her papery-thin eyelids for a moment. But it was all still there when she opened them again, the hospital room and her memories.
“For the love of Pete, what were you doing in the backyard that time of night?” her niece had asked, middle-aged woman who tried to look younger. “What were you doing out in the cold in your gown and slippers with that old shotgun in the first place?” Had asked her that question again and again, and always the old woman told her that she’d heard the possums or raccoons in her garbage again, or maybe it was dogs, she’d said. Shameful, people letting their dogs run loose and getting into the trash, strewing it all over, and it’s shameful, and her niece kept making that puppy-sad face which meant she was thinking about nursing homes again.
Why were you out there? and for an answer she stared at the dark curtains, the dark places in the corners of the hospital room. Knew she wouldn’t tell the truth, not about the shadows at her bedroom window or the sounds that had come out of the phone when she’d tried to call the police.
“It’s a wonder you’re not dead,” her niece had said and Yes, she’d answered, you get this old and it’s always a wonder you’re not dead.
“That’s not what I meant and you know it.”
She’d been dreaming about sitting with Trisha Baxter after her husband had died, sitting in the warm May sunshine outside Trisha’s house, drinking Coca-Cola and talking about nothing in particular, just feeling the bubbles on her tongue, the sun on her face, watching Lila playing in the dirt with a toy-soldier army.
And when Trisha had gone in to check something on the stove, the old woman noticed the web sparkling in the sun, beads of dew like honeysuckle nectar on every strand, and the huge yellow and black garden spider hanging headdown in the center. Wrapping something in silk, spinning the little insect body around and around, hiding it away and only bumps and ridges so she knew it was a grasshopper in there; when she’d turned around again, Lila was watching her, watching her watch the spider, and there’d been blood in the shape of a cross on her forehead.
And Lila had smiled and held one finger to her little-girl lips.
The old woman licked her dry lips and thought about buzzing for the nurse to bring her a paper cup of ice water.
“I don’t want you keeping that old shotgun in the house anymore,” her niece had said, and she hadn’t argued, because she knew she wouldn’t be going back to Cullom Street, because the eyes that had watched her from the kudzu had only laughed at the gun, anyway, laughed at her, bony old woman. Laughed harder when she’d tried to aim at the winterbare tangle of vines, her shaking hands and their eyes she could only see because they were blacker
than the dark, because they were places where there was nothing else.
The old woman closed her eyes, listened to her tired heart, and waited for the sun to rise.
5.
Niki and Spyder went home by themselves, Niki driving and Spyder talking for a while and then dozing off. Spyder had put on a Doors tape, had seemed in better spirits than on the trip up, as if the mess back at Dante’s had cheered her up. It had left Niki confused, embarrassed and feeling useless again, eager to get out of the way before things got any worse. Claude had gone home with some friends he’d met at the club, said he’d get a ride back to Birmingham later, and Niki hadn’t seen Daria again after they’d left the stage, had only talked to Theo. Theo like a human teakettle, so pissed she gritted her teeth and spoke through clenched jaws. Niki knew that Keith had taken off, and Theo said it was all his fault, because he was a junky, that Daria had finally kicked him out of the band and it was about goddamn time.
Niki blinked, nodded, too sleepy, reminding herself to get off at the next exit for coffee, lousy convenience-store coffee, but maybe it would keep her awake until they got home. Jim Morrison singing “Riders on the Storm,” and that song always gave her the creeps so she reached over and popped the tape out of the deck. Looked back at the road, the broken yellow-line tease, and she rubbed her eyes. Spyder stirred in her sleep, dream mumbled, and Niki thought about waking her up, making her talk.
Let her sleep. God, she hardly ever just falls asleep without the pills, and Niki’s eyelids fluttered, snapped open and fluttered halfmast again.
And something was in the road, then, something big and dark that seemed to be moving slowly ahead of them, just inches ahead of the Celica’s headlights; something too big to be real, but she snapped awake, full awake in a second and swearing, cut the steering wheel sharp to miss it, and the tires crunched breakdown lane gravel as the car rushed past and over the spot where the thing would have been, if it had been anything but her exhausted eyes, anything but her weary, sleep-hungry mind.
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