Silk

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “I wouldn’t want to go wandering around that part of town in broad fucking daylight, Mort, but what’s your fucking point? I’m not just gonna sit around on my ass and wait for the cops to call.”

  “I’ve had enough of this crap,” Theo said and blew a cloud of smoke against the cracked inside of the windshield. “You guys can let me out downtown. And Niki, I’d advise you to come with me.”

  Niki felt helpless, lost. None of this had anything to do with her, but she felt caught anyway, stretched suddenly between Daria and Theo like the rope in a particularly nasty tug-of-war match. And of course the advantage went to Daria, Daria who had taken her in and given her a place to sleep, a bath.

  “Uh, I guess I’ll just stay with you guys,” she said, speaking to Daria, who frowned and stared down at the bare metal floor between her boots.

  “Yeah, well, whatever,” Theo said. “It’s your ass.”

  “What’s the deal with this place, anyway?” Niki asked, certain that she didn’t really want to know. “What sort of house is it?”

  “A crackhouse,” Mort said and started the van. “It’s just a goddamned crackhouse.”

  After they’d left Theo, after she’d asked Niki if she was absolutely sure she didn’t want to come back to her place, Mort drove west and Daria took Theo’s seat; Niki sat on the floor and watched the streetlights become dimmer and farther apart, wider pools of night between them. Downtown surrendering to the first belt of decay, neighborhoods wilted and gone to ugly, cancerous fallow. She didn’t know this city, was becoming increasingly disoriented as the oasis of tall buildings slipped behind them. Daria had stopped talking, had stopped pointing, and now she sat smoking, staring intently out her window at things Niki couldn’t see.

  Niki glimpsed the incongruously bright facade of a Burger King over Mort’s shoulder, and then he turned, pulling the Ford Econoline up to the curb.

  “Man, I can’t believe the cops haven’t shut this fucker down,” he said, reaching beneath his seat for something Niki couldn’t quite make out, something black and heavy slipped quickly inside his coat.

  Daria slid the side door open for Niki, and she stepped out onto the sickly brown patch of grass between the street and the sidewalk. The house had once been something grand, Victorian gingerbread and dormer windows, a disintegrating cupola perched on the high gabled roof. And every window hidden behind irregular sheets of plywood, all painted the same neon shade of canary yellow.

  “It certainly isn’t inconspicuous, is it?” Niki said as Daria slammed the sliding door shut behind her.

  “It doesn’t have to be,” she said, stepping past Niki, heading up the walk to the long front porch. “The cops are all too busy hassling hookers and queers. They don’t get out this way very often.” Daria was walking fast, purposeful steps and words more purposeful; Mort had to jog to catch up with her.

  “Might be bad for their health,” she said.

  Up the crumbling stoop, five steps, and now Niki could see the swirling graffiti tangle laid thick across almost every available surface, tags and gang warnings, spray-can pasta, the universal language of urban tribes. She recognized some of the stuff from the Quarter, crude 8-ball placa and dollar signs to show all this territory was controlled by Crips and Disciples.

  Daria hammered on the front door, hard fist against flaking wood; Mort stood just behind her, struggling to look calm and cool, obviously neither, trying to keep an eye on every corner and shadow. The only response from the darkened house was the steady, muffled thump-thump-thump of rap, and Daria pounded the door again, using both fists this time.

  “Hey!” she shouted, howled, hands cupped around her mouth to make a megaphone. “Open the goddamn door, or I’m gonna call the cops!”

  “Come on, Dar,” Mort whispered, urgent, but she’d already started kicking at the door. It shuddered in its frame with every blow from her Doc Martens.

  The scrabbling, clicking sounds of locks turning, chain sliding back, and the door opened an inch or two. The face pressed into the crack was backlit and featureless in the glare of yellow incandescent light, leaking like pus or urine from the house.

  “What the hell do you want, bitch?” the face hissed, voice worn raw and gravelly, female voice, old as someone’s grandmother.

  “I’m looking for somebody,” Daria said, slipping the toe of her boot into the crack between door and jamb.

  “Well, you’re lookin’ in the wrong place,” the woman said, glancing down at Daria’s intruding foot.

  “He’s been here before.”

  “Well he ain’t here now!”

  “Then let me in, and I’ll see for myself.”

  The woman opened the door an inch wider, and Niki caught a glimpse of her burning eyes, eyes like the pit of famine’s stomach, and the long, uneven keloid scar beneath her right eye, proud flesh like melted plastic.

  “Look, white girl. If you keep shootin’ off your mouth and makin’ all this noise, Mr. Wilson’s gonna hear you, and he ain’t as tolerant as me.”

  Mort’s big hand on Daria’s shoulder then, and Niki could see that he was almost ready to drag her from the porch, kicking and screaming and squeezing his balls if that was the only way back to the van.

  “He’s not here, Dar. Let’s go,” he said.

  “She might be lying,” Daria said, as if the woman wasn’t standing there, as if she couldn’t hear.

  “Girl, you think tonight’s a good time to die or you just stupid?”

  Behind the woman, down the half-glimpsed throat of pissy light and wallpaper peeling in long skin strips, someone shouted, “Who the hell is it, Tabs?”

  The woman stared at them, at Daria, with her starvation eyes, and after a moment she yelled back, without turning around, yelled, “Goddamn Jehovah’s-fuckin’ Witnesses!”

  And the other voice, male boom and rumble, “At night? Well, tell ’em to go the fuck away!”

  “You heard the man,” she said. “He won’t say it that nice again.”

  “Now, Dar,” and Mort was hauling her backwards, Niki sidestepping quickly to get out of their way.

  The door slammed shut, and now the house was as dark and sealed away from the rest of the universe as it had been before. Daria pulled free of Mort and almost tumbled ass-first down the steps.

  “What the hell did you think you were doing, Mort?” she demanded, looking back at the closed door.

  “Trying to stop you from getting us all killed.”

  “You’re so full of shit!”

  A red and listing Plymouth crammed full of teenagers, black boys in sunglasses and black knit caps, cruised shark-slow past the van, big white van beached like a lunatic’s whale there against the curb.

  “Can we just please get the hell out of here?” Niki asked, heard the fear and exasperation wrestling between her words, fussing over the tattered rags of her resolve.

  “We’re already on our way,” Mort said and headed for the Ford. Niki, painfully uncertain, waited for Daria, who stood for one moment more, with fists clenched, staring back at the scarred and defiant house.

  3.

  And this is the first time that Keith had seen Daria, had laid eyes on her, this muggy summer weeknight in 1993 back when the junk still felt like gold and Dr. Jekyll’s was still the Cave. Barely six months since he’d had that last and grandest fight with Sarah and she’d driven off alone to find her own gilded peace pressed between rails and spinning steel wheels. Without her voice and her fraying scraps of sanity, the weak but vital gravity of her center, Stiff Kitten had come apart, had disintegrated and left him alone with his needles and veins. He’d still picked up occasional solo sets for the money and beer, and Mort had been there, Mort and his sticks and his foot keeping all the time Keith had left. But he’d refused to play the old songs, covered shit by just about anyone else, especially Tom Waits because he figured he couldn’t do the vocals much harm.

  And then he’d walked into the Cave one night, needing a fix and not a copper penny in
his jeans, no credit, either, hoping that he could wheedle a few drafts out of the skinny albino kid who tended bar on Wednesday nights. And a band had been setting up on the stage, no one he recognized. It had taken him fifteen minutes to sweet-talk one lousy beer, watery Bud in a plastic cup, and then he’d sat, sick and alone in a corner booth, watched past empty tables and wobbly handrails at the steep edge of the pit, across the black moat (dance floor for Techno Tuesdays and mosh-pit hell the rest of the week).

  Her hair had been the dirtiest sort of blond back then, and he’d watched her unpack her bass, had tried to remember the name he’d seen on the marquee as he’d come in, red plastic letters that had meant nothing. Wednesday nights were always dead, and there was no one to watch her, no one but him and the bartender with his pink eyes and cornsilk hair. She’d finished tuning and looked toward him, but he was hidden by shadows and the glare of the lights; she’d shaded her eyes with one hand and, to the geeky boy with his too-new guitar and tie-dyed Sonic Youth T-shirt, had said, “Okay, guys. Standing room only tonight.” The geeky boy had laughed, and Keith scrunched down deeper into the shadows, had felt like a hungry cockroach, sipping his shitty beer and watching someone laying out a feast from his kitchen crack.

  And then the songs had come one right after the other, no introductions or titles or stupid banter between the singer and her guitarist or drummer. Just her words and her aching voice, like stained glass, beautiful and shattered sound fused together with solder, frozen lead seams binding the deepest reds and clearest cobalt blues.

  He’d finished his shitty beer, and for a while there had been only the empty cup, worried between his jonesing fingers. At some point, the albino kid had brought him another, even though he hadn’t asked, but he’d hardly noticed. Had hardly even thought of the pain worming about in every cell of his body, no room for anything but the nameless girl and her nameless band.

  A few people straggled in towards the end, goth queers who sat near him in the back and talked loud enough to hear themselves over the music. He’d leaned over to them in the white space between songs, before the very last, and “Why don’t you guys just listen,” he’d said. A fat girl with so much eyeliner she’d looked like a gluttonous raccoon had sneered at him, and then they’d all started talking again.

  “Stupid fuckers,” he’d grunted, but they’d ignored him, too infatuated with the patter of their own voices to be bothered by the world.

  The last song had been more amazing than all the rest together.

  Afterwards, he’d slipped unnoticed into the sour hall behind the stage that led back to the dressing room, the ten-by-four closet where a thousand bands had sweated and smoked and scribbled cryptic messages to each other on the swimming-pool blue walls. Had brushed at his crazy hair with his hands and tried to rub the cloudiness from his eyes. They’d all been there, packed in tight with their instruments and BO, the singer sitting on the floor, putting Band-Aids the phony color of mannequin flesh on her fingers. He’d still been trying to think of something to say, when she’d looked up and seen him, and her eyes had gone big and her mouth had dropped open a little ways.

  “Hi,” he’d said, one clumsy word.

  “Hi,” she’d said, that voice so much different when she spoke, but still the same voice. “You’re Keith Barry, aren’t you? You used to play with Stiff Kitten.”

  “Uh, yeah…”

  “Wow,” the Sonic Youth boy said, springing up from a rusty folding chair, hand out like a karate chop. “You guys were fucking killer, man.”

  “Uh, yeah, thanks…” and Keith wanted to be somewhere else, out front sipping his charity beer, looking at the empty place where she’d stood on the stage.

  “Whatever happened to that chick that sang for you guys, man? God, she was cool.”

  “A train ran over her,” Keith said, no emotion left in the words, and the boy’s camera grin had drooped and faded away, the offered hand hanging uncertain between them. The girl on the floor frowned up at him, and he’d sat back down on the scabby chair.

  “Can I, uh, can I talk to you?” Keith had asked her then, pointing at the girl with one hand and pulling nervously at the collar of his shirt with the other.

  “Sure,” she’d said, getting up, the final Band-Aid wrapped around her right index finger.

  And then they’d been walking back down the hall, had paused at the steps that led up to the stage, the way back, and she’d leaned against the wall, thumbs hooked into the pockets of her jeans.

  “I’m sorry about Sherman,” she said and looked back the way they’d come. “He isn’t a dork on purpose, not usually.”

  “No problem,” he’d said, and then, “Do you guys have a name?”

  “You got a cigarette?” she asked, and he’d fumbled at his pockets, but had come back with nothing but an empty pack and a few dry crumbs of tobacco.

  “Thanks anyway. Ecstatic Wreck, but that’s just until we think of something better.”

  “That’s a pretty cool name,” and he was trying not to show the jitters, the way his hands shook and the cold sweat, wishing his fucking junk-starved body would let him be for five lousy minutes.

  “I played with some other guys for a while, but they joined the army,” she said. “Tonight was our first show.”

  “Well,” he said. “I just wanted to tell you you’re goddamn good. Better than that.”

  “Thanks,” she said, embarrassed, he could tell. “That means a lot.”

  “You want to maybe get a beer or go for a walk or something?”

  She’d shaken her head, and his stomach had begun to roll again. “Sorry. That’d be cool, but I have plans already.”

  “Maybe another time, then,” he’d said.

  “Definitely.”

  They’d shaken hands, his damp and hers so dry, and she’d started back towards the dressing room. He was up the first two steps, two to go, hoping he’d make the toilet before he puked the beer back up, when he stopped and called after her.

  “Oh, hey, what’s your name?” and she’d said, “Daria Parker,” without even turning around.

  It had been two weeks before Ecstatic Wreck played again, another Wednesday night at the Cave, and this time he’d fixed and worn a cleaner shirt, and he’d dragged Mort along with him. There had been more people, word of mouth and he’d seen some flyers stapled up around town, pink paper and black letters. They’d sat in the same booth, because the best sound was way back there, and this time Mort had bought him cold long-necked bottles of Old Milwaukee.

  The same songs in a different order, and between every one Keith had reached across the table and poked Mort in the shoulder.

  “What did I tell you, man? What the hell did I tell you?” and Mort had nodded his head.

  “I know what you’re thinking, Keith.”

  “What? What the hell am I thinking, then?”

  “Your guitar’s still in hock, man, and don’t tell me it ain’t, ’cause I saw it this morning hanging in the window at Liggotti’s.”

  Keith had taken another hit off his beer and watched the stage while she adjusted the strap on her bass.

  “She’s already got a band,” Mort said. “And they’re too good for you to go bustin’ up.”

  “She’s good,” Keith said. “They’re just there because she wants them there.”

  “Shit, for all I know you’re just horny.”

  “Man, I haven’t been horny in a month of Sundays,” Keith had said, knowing there was so much more truth in that statement than his admission of a junky’s impotence. Daria had played her black Fender like hot midnight, her voice a chorus of hoarse and growling angels, and Keith’s hands had felt empty, lonely for his strings, for the first time since Sarah’s funeral.

  “I’d be a shit,” she’d said, “if I just walked out on them like that.”

  Keith frowned, sighed and slumped back into the booth. Mort was busy shredding a napkin.

  They’d been talking for an hour, talking in tight little circl
es, figure eights, Möbius-strip conversations, and Mort was almost no help at all. Keith knew that he wanted it just as much, wanted to play again, to plug himself into Daria Parker’s wild energy.

  “They’re not the ones you should be worrying about,” he said and lit another cigarette.

  “They’re my friends…”

  “Sure, they’re your friends. But you know that they’re nowhere near as good as you are, right? You’ve admitted that much already.”

  And then Daria Parker had looked at him, had nailed him to that moment and the back of the booth with her green eyes like flawed emeralds, and she’d said, “Yeah, I said that. But I also know that your arm’s got a habit.”

  “Whoopee-shit,” he’d said, feeling the old anger start to rise, not wanting to see its face. “I guess that makes you Sherlock-fucking-Holmes.”

  “That sort of thing doesn’t stay secret in a town like this. All I’m sayin’ is, I want to know if it’s something you got a handle on, or if it’s got you. You’re asking me to ditch some really good guys. I think I have a right to ask.”

  “You some kinda saint?” And Keith knew how close he was to blowing it, blowing it like a cheap hustler, but the words were too close to the surface to push back down. “I had a lot of nasty shit the last few months…”

  “Just answer her, Keith,” and that was only the half of what Mort was saying; the rest was there in his face, coiled like twine and baling wire.

  Keith took a long drag off his Lucky and let the smoke out slowly through his nostrils; the haze made it easier for him to match her cut-glass scrutiny. Blink, fucker, and she’s got your number.

  “Yeah,” he’d said, cool and calm as well water. “It’s under control, okay? I just need to get back to work. It’s not a problem.”

  And she’d nodded, a slow and wary nod, and finished her beer.

  “I’m gonna think about this for a couple of days,” and the beer bottle had thunked back down onto the table in front of her, glass the color of honey from wildflowers and amber beads of sweat.