“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, Dante’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.”
“We could help,” and Niki felt Spyder’s impatience just fine without having to see her face; swelling, burring, silent disapproval like something solid as the old mill.
“We can handle it just fine. Just tell the guy at the box office you’re on Stiff Kitten’s guest list, and you won’t have to stand in line.”
“Well, if you’re sure…”
“Hey, girl’o, we are three buff motherfuckers,” Daria said and flexed her biceps like Mr. Charles Atlas, her hard, scrawny arms hidden underneath her coat, anyway. “We can handle this shit just fine.”
And so they went to the box office, Claude catching up with them, and a guy with three steel rings through his left eyebrow and a violet goatee checked their IDs against sheets of paper on a clipboard, checked them off one after the other: Niki, Claude, and Spyder last, and he complimented the tattoos on the backs of her hands, the webs disappearing up and inside the cuffs of her leather jacket.
“Yeah. Thanks,” Spyder said. All three got Day-Glo orange bracelets and a stamp on one hand that left behind nothing they could see. Then they bypassed the long line of shivering faces waiting for nine o’clock to come, foggy breathers, passed under the wrought-iron sign into a short passage with an uneven dirt floor; must and the same bare stone walls seemed to go up forever, the ceiling lost somewhere high overhead.
On the right, a rough arch and the sense of vast space beyond, swallowing depth and dark lit only by incandescent lightning and black-light strobes, flashes that revealed empty cages hung, lasers that stabbed crimson shafts through a roiling haze of glycerine smoke. Some of the smoke drifted out into the bright hall, hesitant tendrils out of their element. A huge gargoyle the color of shit squatted on one side of the arch, warty plaster haunches and a spiked leather dog collar around its neck, the collar fastened to a chain bolted to the wall. In there, the DJ already warming up for the night, and the smoke shimmered and the dusty floor ached with the twining, remixed passion of synthesizers and drum machines.
And above the door, of course, another heavy iron sign on its rusted chains, one word burned through the metal, meaning in the emptiness left within the raw edges of acetylene cuts. Inferno, and Claude said, “Hell,” and jabbed a thumb at a smaller archway to their left and another sign, this one a plank of dark wood, wood sculpted like muscle, straining shoulder and gritted teeth, empty eyes and Purgatorio carved there, hung on oily-looking ropes. The heavy wooden doors to Purgatory were closed and padlocked.
“They do special shit in there,” he told Niki. “Fetish night and things like that.”
At the end of the passage there was more wrought iron, a spiral staircase winding up and up and a longhaired boy, blond and Niki thought he looked like a misplaced surfer, California tan in Georgia November.
Claude presented his hand, palm down, and surfer boy ran some sort of scanner across it, neon blue light and ANGEL stamped right there on Claude’s skin. Niki next and the same secret message revealed, and then he reached for Spyder’s hand, but she had backed away, stared, eyes wide and her mouth the slightest bit open, gazing into her tattoos.
“What’s wrong, Spyder?” Niki said, soft voice, calming voice. “Is something wrong?” and surfer boy looked annoyed, sighed loudly. Claude was already halfway up the stairs, noisy clanging shoes; he stopped and waited, looked down at them and whatever was happening.
“I don’t want that on my hand,” she said. Niki looked at Spyder’s face, cheeks too pale, the cruciform scar between her eyes angry pink, and Niki understood, click, like revelation or an impossible math problem that you’ve sweated over and then it just makes sense.
“Are you going up or not, ladies?” surfer boy said and waved his glowing scanner at them like a magic wand. “In or out, one way or another.”
“Just a second,” Niki said and smiled, wanted to kick him instead.
“I’ve got to wash it off,” Spyder said, but Niki took her hand and held it tightly.
“It’s just ink,” she said quietly. “That’s all. We’ll wash it off as soon we get upstairs, I swear. We’ll find a restroom and wash it off.”
And she led Spyder past the cruel, unveiling light and they followed Claude up the winding stairway, around and up and around and up, to the landing above. And the third sign set above the third arch, chisel-scarred marble and Paradiso, like the punch line to a dirty joke.
“Where’s a restroom?” Niki asked, and Claude pointed into the shadows on one side of the landing.
“Right over there,” he said, confusion and worry thickening his voice. “You gonna be all right, Spyder?”
“She’ll be fine,” Niki said, smiling, nodding, trying to sound like she believed it. “You go on in, and we’ll catch up, okay?”
Spyder had begun to dry-scrub the back of her hand hard against her jeans.
“Come on,” Niki said, and Claude watched them step free of the dazzling light spilling out of Heaven and disappear into the gloomy spot where the women’s room was. After a few seconds, he went in without them.
They’d emptied the van, everything lugged clank and crash up the black stairs, black carpet and black walls and two narrow flights up to Heaven’s back door. Each branded with garish orange stickers by the security goon guarding the door, Gabriel or Michael in a mu
scle shirt and nothing on his face but pure and frosty ennui, and the stickers read DANTE’S, “Stiff Kitten” and the date scrawled underneath with a smeary black Sharpie.
Then the goon had grumbled that they had one too many guests on the list, only three allowed for the second band, not four. And so Mort and Keith had told him Theo was their harmonica player. The goon had shaken his head, no dice, and so Theo had begun to dig through her purse.
“It’s in here somewhere, really,” but she’d found nothing but a dented old kazoo, and he’d said what the hell and given her a sticker, anyway, had stamped their four left hands. And then they’d found out the sound man was going to be late, and Theo had broken a nail and spent fifteen minutes bitching about it. Three dressing rooms behind the stage, and only the one for the headliner had a heater.
As typical a load-in as they could have asked for.
Keith was sitting alone in a total loss of an arm chair, sandwiched between his guitar and the wobbly flight case with Mort’s drums inside, and Mort and Theo had gone to find Niki and Spyder and Claude.
He looked sick, and not just junk sick; Daria knew that look well enough. She lit a cigarette and handed it to him.
“Thanks,” he said and held her hand.
“You gonna make it?” and he didn’t answer, drew smoke deep into his lungs and rubbed at his stubbly cheeks.
“Can’t sleep,” he said, and the smoke rushed back out again. “Not a wink in three goddamned nights,” and she looked at the red welt across the bridge of his nose, the angry red of infection, remembered the cuts from that morning at Spyder’s and never any explanation for how they’d gotten there.
“Bad dreams?” and she wanted to look over her shoulder, then, maybe even wanted to take back the words before he could answer her. But Keith looked at her and laughed, took another drag off the cigarette and blew two streams of smoke from his nostrils. Nothing in his gray eyes she could read.
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