Silk

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  He stinks like work and whiskey (she wrinkles her nose), is still wearing his carpenter’s apron, pockets with three-penny nails and roofing tacks and little canvas loops for screwdrivers and hammers. “Quikrete” stamped across the front in pale red. He goes to the sink and washes his hands, scrubs them and scrubs and scrubs with the sliver of Ivory soap, stares out the window, up at the sky.

  “Is it looking stormy, Carl?” her mother asks, setting the chicken on the table, and she goes to the refrigerator for the watermelon pickles. “On the radio, they were calling for thunderstorms again.”

  And her father doesn’t look away from the window above the sink, lathers with the soap again, rinses his hands and dries them on a dish towel.

  “Maybe it’ll cool things off some,” her mother says and sits down, starts spooning butter beans onto Lila’s plate.

  Her father stands at the sink a long time, after she and her mother have begun to eat. Lila puts Green Eggs and Ham on the floor beneath her chair because he doesn’t allow books at the table. And he’s still watching the sky.

  “Come and eat, Carl, before everything gets cold.”

  He looks away from the window and slowly lays the towel across the edge of the sink. His eyes are bright and far away and look kind of scared. Lila stabs a butter bean and watches him while she chews it.

  Her father takes big helpings of everything, moves slow, doesn’t say anything or look at anyone. Takes two pieces of chicken at once, a drumstick and a breast, and doesn’t eat a bite. There’s no wind or thunder and it’s still sunny outside, and she wonders what her father was looking at in the sky.

  He takes a pack of Chesterfields from his apron, lights one and stares at the food, untouched, on his plate. Her mother doesn’t look angry anymore, worried, though, and a little scared, maybe. She wipes fried-chicken grease from her hands.

  “Carl, is something wrong? Did something happen at work?”

  He turns and stares at her, but his eyes are still not really there. And now Lila is scared, too.

  “Carl?”

  “I’m all finished, Momma,” Lila says, although she’s still very hungry.

  Her mother looks at her plate.

  “No you’re not, Lila. You hardly ate a thing.”

  “But I’m full,” and she pushes her chair (scrunk) away from the table.

  “You sit still,” and her mother is questioning her father again. He won’t answer, smokes his cigarette, taps ashes into his hand.

  “Momma, please, I really-”

  “I said sit still, Lila.” Her mother sounds very frightened now.

  “Leave the girl alone, Trisha,” and her father’s voice is smooth, sleepy, whistles out of him the way air leaks out of a balloon. She imagines her father getting smaller and smaller, drawing in, until there’s nothing left but an empty, wrinkled skin balloon draped over the back of the kitchen chair. “She said she was full.”

  She gets out of her seat and retrieves Dr. Seuss.

  “Did someone get hurt on the job, today, Carl? Is that what happened? Oh god, was it Jess?”

  Lila stands beside the table. Mr. Mouser is meowling and clawing at the screen to come in, and she thinks that if it is going to storm, she should let him inside. But she wants to hear. People get hurt a lot on her father’s jobs; sometimes they even get killed.

  Mr. Mouser is climbing the screen door. If she turns around, he’ll be hanging there like a big furry bug.

  “For pity’s sake, Carl, say something. Tell me what’s the matter.”

  And her father rubs his sunburned sandpaper cheeks with both hands, hides his face behind thick fingers, uneven yellowed nails. And she realizes that he’s crying, even though he’s smiling when his hands fall, plop, on his lap. Shiny tears and a gray-black streak of cigarette ash.

  “Lila, go outside and play.” Her mother grabs a napkin and is wiping her father’s face, and her father is smiling even more, showing all his tobacco-stained teeth in a huge Cheshire-cat grin.

  “What’s wrong, Momma?”

  “Right now, Lila.”

  And she’s turning around, hugging the tattered book, and there’s Mr. Mouser, claws and marmalade belly and dappled paw pads, clinging to the screen door, and it seems very, very bright outside.

  “Bad cat,” she scolds, and now her father is sobbing. And he’s laughing, also, and in her stomach something starts to wind itself up tight, like a rubber band. She thinks that maybe she’ll barf up the butter beans. The screen swings open when she pushes it, but Mr. Mouser is still hanging on, looking at her through the tiny wire squares.

  “I can see angels,” her father says.

  She steps into the late afternoon heat. Closes the door carefully, pulls the cat loose one foot at a time.

  “Bad Mouser. Bad, bad cat.”

  Lila sits down on the back steps, Dr. Seuss open to page one on her knees and strokes Mr. Mouser until he forgets about wanting inside and begins to purr in his loud, ragged tomcat voice.

  Spyder swallowed the last bite of her second sandwich and opened her eyes. There was no globe on the kitchen light and the naked bulb jabbed needles at her. Somewhere, there was a globe, full of spare change, mostly nickels and pennies, left in a corner after the first time she blew the light, years and years ago. The globe was old, maybe as old as the house, frosted glass etched with a ring of grape leaves.

  And it should be here to stop the light from hurting my eyes. It should be here to…

  Spyder slammed her fist down hard on the table, hard enough to hurt and snip at the voice in her head. The empty Buffalo Rock bottle jumped, fell to the floor. Rolled away into a dark place.

  Get up, Spydie. Get up and do something easy, something normal.

  /but she smells red, nasty cloying crimson, and gags, thinks that she’s going to puke but/

  She stood up too fast and knocked the chair over.

  “No.”

  /and her voice smells like sour little crab apples and millipedes/

  “I’m not going down tonight, I won’t fucking go down tonight.”

  Spyder gathered up the supper stuff, the plate with the leftover chunk of Spam, the mayonnaise jar (screwed the lid down so tight it’d be a bitch to open next time), the dirty knife. She dropped the knife in the sink, put the Spam and mayo in the fridge. More careful than careful, paying perfect attention to each necessary step. Twist-tied the bread closed, set it on the countertop.

  She fished the the ginger ale bottle out from under the table, ignored the dry scritching beneath the floorboards.

  /ignores the red smell/

  Spyder put the bottle in the trash, counting her footsteps. Got the noisy carton of crickets off the top of the relic Frigidaire and the styrofoam cup of mealy worms from inside. Carried them back to the sink and set the crickets down.

  /but she’s slipping now, for sure, and Dr. Lynxweiler is telling her to relax, ride it out, don’t let it freak you out this once, Spyder, don’t let it take you down/

  There was something in an alley, Spyder, he’d said, and On my way home.

  Spyder pulled the plastic top off the worms, stirred the sawdust inside with her finger to be sure they were still alive.

  /she’s in Alice time, and crimson smells like the sound of starling wings/

  She found a dead worm and washed it down the drain. The others seemed healthy enough, just sluggish from the cold.

  “It’s all right, Spyder,” she said and closed the mealies, picked up the crickets.

  She turned off the light above the table and stood a minute in the darkness, fighting to anchor herself, to nail herself feet and hands and cold spike between her eyes, into this moment, clinging to the sound of the nervous crickets and the growling wind outside.

  This is the first night that they waited in the cellar for the bombs to fall, for the trumpets and hurricane buzz of locust wings.

  Her mother lights the oil lamp and warm orangeness floods the cellar, eclipsing the pale beam of her father’s flashligh
t. The cellar smells like wet earth and mushrooms, sulfur from the match. There are rows of old boxes, cardboard and wooden crates, stacked high along the dirt walls. Sagging shelves crowded with forgotten Ball mason jars and old newspapers. Rusty garden tools. She can see scraggly goblin fingers poking out of the dirt, but knows they’re only roots.

  Her father is crazy drunk, and her mother has finally stopped crying. They sit together, cast their three long shadows, and her father talks about the angels.

  Her mother is crocheting, trying not to hear the things he’s saying over and over again. A sweater out of green yarn from Woolworth’s, and the yarn makes Lila think about the cats, Mr. Mouser and Sister and Little John, all locked outside at the end of the world. She set their supper on the back steps, asked her mother if cats went to Heaven, and her mother too quickly told her yes, they go to Cat Heaven. But at least it’s cool in the cellar, like air conditioning.

  The shotgun across his lap and the big family Bible open to the last few pages. They sit inside a circle of salt, and she watches her mother’s lips, counting stitches with her. Her father reads out loud all the scary parts she’s never heard.

  When her mother says it’s bedtime (How can she tell? There are no clocks down here, and she’s missed television and hasn’t even had her bath), she lies down on one of the army cots. They smell like mildew and dust, the blanket smells like mothballs, and she sneezes. She wipes her nose on the back of her hand, but her mother doesn’t even yell.

  “Like a thief in the night,” her father says, and after she rolls over, he says it again. Her parents throw monster-movie shadows on the walls. She’s never been this afraid, not even in tornado weather, but she doesn’t cry.

  Lila stays awake as long as she can, fights the heaviness dragging at her eyelids. Watches her father when he gets up and paces the red-dirt floor, never once stepping outside his circle. She counts sheep to stay awake.

  And when she loses count, she dreams about blood in the streets and fire and the sky as black as coal.

  3.

  At the end of the long hall, past the toilet and her mother’s old sewing room, a linen closet and the back way into the room that had been her parents’, Spyder’s bedroom was a shrine of glass and wax. A hundred jars easy, fish tanks cracked or too leaky to hold water, and everywhere candles, the only light she permitted here. All the windows were nailed shut and painted blind, two thick coats of Sears’ flat black masking each pane. She’d used a fine-tipped camel’s hair brush to trace the webs, not cartoon spiderwebs or the stylized patterns tattooed on her skin, but painstaking reproductions copied from textbooks and photographs.

  At first, after Florida and the nuthouse, she’d tried sleeping in her mother’s bedroom. It was so much bigger, and it’d seemed a shame to waste, but she could always smell the deathbed stench and her dreams had been even worse than usual. So she had crammed most of her stuff into this narrow space at the very back of the house, the room that had been hers as a child. Had patched the drafty walls with spackling paste and wood putty and used a staple gun to repair the peeling strips of wallpaper. Had tacked up the extra insulation of poster prints by Edvard Munch and H. R. Giger, Dali and Gustav Klimt.

  Spyder lit a cinnamon-scented candle, closed and locked the door behind her. The crickets were making a fuss, and she shook the carton, stared through the wire-mesh window set into the side (“Live Bait, Catch the Big’uns!”). Tiny bodies scrambling over each other, clinging to the sides, fidgeting antennae and hair-trigger legs.

  “What do you little fucks know, huh?” And Spyder thumped the side of the carton, knocking some of the crickets over on their shiny brown backs. “You don’t know shit, do you?”

  She was starting to feel better by scant degrees, the whisper and shimmer at the borders beginning to ebb and fade. She’d double her Klonopin tonight, just to be safe, just to be sure things stayed that way until morning. But her room was almost as good as the meds, so absolutely her, nothing left to guard against. She could breathe here and let the vigilance fray, let the wariness begin to dissolve.

  The candlelight glimmered dully off aquarium glass and old pickle jars. Behind the reflections, there was hungry movement, greedy patience. She no longer knew how many spiders she shared the room with, how many more, carefully pinned and labeled, were housed in the wooden museum cases stacked against the walls and hidden beneath the bed.

  Spyder used the cinnamon candle to light a dozen others, passing the flame from wick to wick until the room was washed in the flickering glow. Then she plopped down on her squeaky mattress, a World War II army-surplus hospital bed draped with an autumn-colored quilt. Her mother had made a lot of quilts, but her Aunt Margaret had most of them.

  Her big Sony boom box sat on the floor, surrounded by neat towers of CD jewel cases. Spyder put on a Danielle Dax album, skipped ahead to her favorite track and turned up the volume far enough that she couldn’t hear the insistent wind over the keyboards and guitars, the banshee vocals.

  In the five-gallon tank on the little table beside the bed, Lurch and Tickler rustled about in their shredded newspaper. She’d bought the pair of Mexican red-legged tarantulas almost five years ago, a present to herself on the first anniversary of Weird Trappings’ opening. Officially, red-legs were an endangered species, but she’d found these two with a local pet shop owner who’d claimed he’d gotten them from a breeder in Mississippi. More likely, through a black market connection in Mobile or New Orleans. Lurch and Tickler were both females; males of the species stopped eating when they reached adulthood and promptly either fucked themselves to death or were eaten by females after mating.

  Spyder opened the tank, let Tickler crawl cautiously into her palm. The chocolate and apricot spider was almost as wide as her hand. She stroked the stiff hairs on its back, then gently pressed her cheek against Tickler’s bristly abdomen.

  “I’m gonna be okay,” she whispered, pretending the tarantula could understand, and Tickler raised her front-most left leg, seeming to caress the bridge of Spyder’s nose.

  Sometimes, she imagined that the others watched, jealous of the affection she lavished on the red-legs, that the thousands of pinpoint black eyes glared at her through their plate-glass walls and longed for more than their suppers. But tonight she didn’t think about them, focused only on the living weight of the tarantula and the glimmering candles. On the singer’s voice and the words and music.

  An hour later, after she’d divided up the last of the crickets and mealies among the five tanks of black widows, after she’d rounded up Lurch and Tickler and traded Danielle Dax for Dead Can Dance, Spyder turned down the quilt and undressed.

  Tomorrow morning, Byron would be waiting for her at the shop, and she’d let him apologize again. And then she’d convince him that there’d been nothing waiting for him in that alley except a street crazy or maybe a stray dog.

  She popped the safety caps off her scripts, dry swallowed two yellow and green Prozac capsules and two baby blue Klonopin. Blew out all but the candle closest to her bed. For a moment, she stood naked in the dim yellow light, admiring her strong body, the full firmness of her breasts, the washboard-flat stomach, and the muscular line of her unshaven legs. The perfect tapestry of pain and ink covering her arms and shoulders.

  Spyder lay down, covered herself with the mismatched sheets and her mother’s patchwork, and watched the tarantulas stalk their dinners until she fell asleep. Toward dawn the dreams found her, and she walked the blood streets under coal-black skies.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Yer Funeral

  1.

  D aria knows that she’s dreaming, almost always knows, and so her dreams are like amusement park rides or tripping or movies of lives she might have led. And she knows that she is not seven, even though the world rushing past outside the Pontiac’s open windows is too fresh, the sunlight and colors of the Mississippi countryside much too brilliant, to have filtered through her twenty-four-year-old eyes. She knows that it’s November a
nd not the week before her eighth birthday at the end of May.

  The warm breeze through the windows smells like new hay and cow shit, a faint, syrupy hint of the honeysuckle tangled in the fences that divide pastureland from the henna ribbon of the unpaved road. Dust spins up off the tires and hangs like orange smoke in the morning air behind them; hard gravel nuggets pop and ping off the underbelly of the Pontiac.

  “I have to go to the bathroom,” she says, and her dad looks at her in the rearview mirror. “Not much farther. You don’t want to go in the ditch, do you?”

  “I can wait,” she says, isn’t sure if she’s telling the truth, not after two strawberry Nehi’s from the styrofoam cooler in the backseat floorboard. She turns away from the window, back to the shoe box of crayola stumps and her big pad of manila drawing paper.

  “Well, it’s your call,” he says from the front.

  The paper is completely covered, crazy loops and swirls, figure eights and broad smears from crayons skinned and rubbed furiously sideways. Psychedelic, her mother would say if she were here, or abstract, she would say, or impressionistic. A rainbow gutted, turned inside out, and she looks at the back of her dad’s head, his hair dirty, almost to his shoulders now. There’s nothing on the radio but country music stations and preaching stations, and she doesn’t know the words to any of these songs.

  “There are some trees up there you could go behind.”

  “I said I can wait,” she says again and picks all the broken pieces of black crayon out of the box, arranging them neatly on the seat beside her. With the largest, she begins working across the page from the upper left corner, burying kaleidoscopic chaos beneath perfect, waxy black.