Silk

by Kiernan, Caitlin R.

“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.”

  Nothing to be afraid of, though. Rats maybe, possums or raccoons. Stray cats. Nothing that won’t get out of your way if you just make a little racket.

  “Spyder? I’m coming to look for you, okay?” and that sounded stupid, stupid as she felt wading around in dead kudzu at seven thirty in the morning.

  “It’s okay,” but Niki almost screamed, actually opened her mouth to scream before she saw Spyder huddled in the shelter of some fallen logs; narrow pocket in the vines like a child’s tepee of quilts and blankets.

  “I’m right here.”

  No coat, short sleeves and bare feet, and Niki thought she could see the white glitter of frost on Spyder’s tattooed arms. “You’ve got to be freezing to death,” she said and took another step and went in up to her waist this time.

  “You can’t get across that way. There’s a ditch there.”

  “Great. Fucking wonderful,” and Niki tried to plow her way through anyway, stopped when the vines were level with her chest and began to trace her way back out again, wishing she could quit thinking about everything that might be lurking in the kudzu, watching the half of her body she couldn’t see, beady mean eyes that didn’t mind the always-dark down there, red eyes, sharp white teeth.

  “So where the hell do I get across?” and when Spyder didn�
��t answer, Niki looked over her shoulder, caught Spyder staring up into the branches overhead, and she followed, like eyes could be a pointing finger, up, through the snarl and strangle, the draping leafless kudzu, up and there, maybe seven or eight feet off the ground, what Spyder was seeing. Niki rubbed at her eyes, rubbed them like a cartoon character to be sure it was real, those dangling arms and legs, limp and somehow stiff at the same time, sunken black sockets where his eyes had been open wide, and his mouth was open even wider than that.

  “Oh,” and she felt like someone had punched her in the gut, had knocked the breath out of her. “Oh god, Spyder.”

  “How are we ever gonna get him down?” Spyder said, said the words so quietly that Niki almost didn’t catch them. “I’ve been sitting here trying to figure that out, Niki, how to get him down.”

  Niki struggled, fought her way out of the kudzu and vomited in the frozen grass, puked coffee and mostly digested supper, and the mess steamed in the morning shadows.

  “Fuck,” she said, over and over, and there was no way to stop seeing that face, the most frightened face she’d ever seen, no way to pretend it wasn’t a dead face, no way not to see Danny Boudreaux up there. No way to get back to the moment before she’d turned around and looked.

  No way except straight ahead.

  “Spyder,” but then she had to stop, wait until the nausea passed, and then, “I’m gonna go back to the house and call some help, okay?”

  “No, Niki. You can’t do that,” a little louder now, a little urgent, “No one’s ever gonna understand, not after Robin. I don’t want to go to jail.”

  “Go to jail? Spyder, you didn’t do that!”

  Spyder didn’t reply, just gazed up at the dead boy in the tree like she was waiting for him to do something besides just hang there.

  “I have to call the police, Spyder. He’s dead.”

  “Then calling the cops won’t make him any less dead, will it? You can come across down there,” and she pointed to a spot a few yards away. It didn’t look any different from the place Niki had tried to cross; she wiped her mouth, then spat again.

  “He’s dead, Spyder. He’s fucking dead.”

  “Yeah. I thought he’d just left town. I thought maybe he’d gone to Atlanta.”

  “Okay, well, then that’s all you have to tell the police when they ask.”

  “We’re not calling the cops, Niki,” so final there was no way to argue, not now, anyway; nothing to do but go to the place she’d pointed, go to Spyder and get her inside before she froze to death or caught pneumonia. The wind rattled through the trees, a dry, hungry rattle, and she realized the dogs were still barking.

  Her feet only disappeared a little past the ankles this time, and the ground creaked beneath her shoes, tired wood creak, glimpses of weathered planks through the growth, and Niki realized she was walking on some sort of bridge, probably rotten, and she tried not to think about that, either. Tried to think about nothing but getting Spyder in out of the cold.

  “Watch out,” Spyder said. “There’s a stump hole there,” and then Niki was standing next to her, standing directly under the body in the tree.

  “Maybe if we just pull on the vines…”

  “I think we should go inside now, Spyder. At least warm you up a little bit. Get your boots and coat.”

  “…together. I tried it, but maybe if we were both pulling, the vines would come loose.”

  “We shouldn’t do that,” and she caught a hint of something bad on the air, a ripe, meaty smell, and she told herself that it was too cold for the body to be rotting up there, but she knew that was total horseshit.

  “You wouldn’t say that, if he’d been your friend. I can’t leave him there.”

  “If he was my friend, Spyder…” and whatever she was about to say, whatever was true and wanted to be said, no need for Spyder to hear it, and instead, “If he was my friend, I’d call the police.”

  Spyder stood, her feet raw, chapped pink, the palms of her hands the same color, the same painful shade across her forehead, under her eyes, around her mouth. But not a hint of frostbite gray, as far as Niki could tell; that was something, at least, something to hang on to. One way this could be worse.

  Spyder grabbed on to one of the vines and pulled; Niki heard the limbs creak, the same grating sound the old boards over the ditch had made, same straining sound that might have been the last thing Danny heard after he stepped off the chair in his kitchen. “Help me, Niki,” and “Spyder,” she said, “Please,” but Spyder only pulled that much harder, frowned and chewed her lower lip.

  “If I could just reach his feet,” she said.

  The soles of the boy’s shoes, swaying now because of all the yanking Spyder was doing on the vines, a bit of gravel wedged between the treads, a yellow-green wad of hardened gum. The vine felt utterly alien in Niki’s hands, dried tendons from an alien corpse, the corpse of something big as the mountain, old as the world. She pulled and way up high there were popping sounds, rip-pings, and Spyder jerked so hard Niki could see where the skin on her fingers was cracking open and beginning to bleed.

  “And what are we supposed to do with him if we ever do get him down?”

  Spyder put all her weight on the vine, lifted herself off the ground a couple of inches. There was a loud crack then and bits of oak bark fell from the sky and peppered their heads.

  “We put him inside, where no one’ll see.”

  Niki followed her example, cringed when the body sank a little closer to them.

  “What then? I mean, you don’t think you can keep him in there very long, do you? It’s a corpse, Spyder. Sooner or later…”

  “He’ll have to be buried,” Spyder said, and Niki didn’t say anything else. Didn’t want to hear any more of this. She tugged until her arms ached, white clouds of breath from the exertion, the cold making her sinuses hurt. And then the vines just let go, sudden slack in her hands and the body tumbled towards them, almost landed on top of her; he lay slumped against the trunk of the tree, head lolled forward now, one arm across his lap, legs splayed like the Scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz, and now she recognized him, the boy she’d watched across the smoky cave of Dr. Jekyll’s. He’d been so wary that night, so pretty; the flesh around his eye sockets was tattered, torn and shredded by the careless beaks of hungry birds, but the face still looked wary. Scared and wary and sad.

  “I can’t do this,” she said, and Spyder only shrugged.

  “Then go back to the house. I can carry him in alone.”

  She almost did, almost left Spyder to do this crazy, awful thing herself, almost left her to deal with that face, the hollows where his eyes had been. Spyder squatted beside him, brushed black hair from his face.

  “No,” Niki said. “I can’t let you do this by yourself. Let’s do it, now, before someone sees us up here.”

  “Oh, Byron,” Spyder whispered. “I’m so sorry.”

  When she was ready, they carried the dead boy across the plank bridge and down to the house.

  Spyder laid him on the kitchen table, asked Niki to get a washcloth from the bathroom, please, something to clean his hands and face with, to scrub away the dirt, the gore on his gray cheeks. His legs hung off the end, deadweight pendulums, but Spyder carefully arranged his arms at his sides so they wouldn’t flop over the edge. Niki obediently brought her a washcloth, glad for something so simple to do, for those few moments filled with the imperfect illusion of sanity; Spyder soaked the cloth with warm water from the kitchen sink, wrung it out and started to clean his face.

  “We have to call the police now,” and Niki was standing right by the phone, only had to lift the receiver and dial 911, but Spyder shook her head and wiped at a rust-colored stain on the side of his nose.

  “No police, Niki. Didn’t I already say no police?”

  Niki looked at the phone, sick of the flat, helpless feeling, sick of walking on eggshells for Spyder, crazy Spyder, and this was going too far, humoring her this time. This was where she h
ad to do something.

  “I’m not asking your permission,” she said as she reached for the telephone, “I’m just telling you what I have to do. You’re not thinking straight right now.”

  And for an answer, Spyder set the washcloth down and picked up the big carving knife still lying on the counter where she’d sliced the onion the night before, stepped past Niki and made a loop of the bandaged phone cord, slipped the knife inside, electrical tape pulled tight around the blade.

  “Put it down,” she said, no malice in her voice, nothing but promise, and Niki understood the rest, put it down or there won’t be a goddamned telephone to discuss, and the knife aimed straight at her heart.

  “Spyder,” and the cord pulled tighter, then, only a little more pressure and the blade would cut them off from the world again.

  “When do I ever ‘think straight,’ huh? I’m taking my meds, and aren’t they supposed to make me ‘think straight’?”

  “That’s not what I meant, and you know it,” but she hung the phone up, stepped back, more distance between her and the knife, and Spyder glanced down at it. “Jesus, Niki, is that what you think? That I would ever hurt you?”

  “Sometimes I don’t know what to think anymore.”

  “If that’s what you think of me, you don’t understand any of this. If that’s what you think, you should just get the hell out of here now,” words pushed out hard and fast, indifferent cold melting away, and she dropped the cord, hurled the knife at the sink, and plates, dirty glasses and coffee cups shattered there.

  “Everything got messed up, Niki. You weren’t here so I don’t expect you to know what I’m talking about. I tried to make it right again, but I couldn’t. This is all I can do for him. It’s the last thing left, and I have to do it.”

  “How am I supposed to understand when you won’t tell me anything, Spyder? Am I just supposed to stand around and watch you mess your life up worse? Screw mine up with it? I do know that none of this is your fault.”

  “You don’t know,” Spyder said, like a sentence handed down, final judgment, you don’t know, and she picked up the washcloth again, went to the sink, steaming water over glass and china shards, the window over the sink fogged opaque, and then she went back to Byron.