Silk

by Kiernan, Caitlin R.

  “Jeez, man, you were supposed to tell her how it is.” Keith’s words came out slurred, fuzzy with the junk slogging through his veins. “Look, Dar, it’s only for Mondays and Sundays, okay? It’s not a big deal—”

  “Fuck you,” Daria spat back, cutting him off. “Just shut the fuck up, okay?” and she was on her feet now, the free end of the cable dangling threateningly from her hand like a weird bullwhip.

  “Me and Mort are out busting our asses trying to hold down jobs to pay for this place and get a few decent shows together, and what are you doing, Keith? Huh? Why don’t you just tell me what exactly the fuck it is you think you’re doing?”

  Keith rubbed at his chin, shook his head slowly.

  “Mortie, man, will you please talk to her.”

  “No, Keith, this time I want to hear a goddamn answer from you!” and she took a sudden, vicious step in his direction, snapping the tangled cable tight. Her bass fell over, clatter and clong to the floor, and she winced at the noise, but kept her green eyes steady on Keith.

  “Hey, Dar. I was just tryin’ to help some guys out, okay? They need a place, and I was just tryin’ to help some guys out.”

  “Bullshit! That’s a load, and you know it’s a load, Keith,” and she turned away, picked up her bass from where it had fallen and began checking it over for damage.

  “You don’t even give a shit about us, Keith, about your own music.” Her cheeks felt hot past flushed, angry-burn, blistered inside out by her rage, and she spoke with her back to him as she carefully tested volume and tone control knobs, each brass tuning peg.

  “You expect us to believe that you’re out there posing as some kind of rock-and-roll angel of mercy, that you care whether or not—” but then she found a fresh scratch an inch or so above the output jack, hairline violation of the smooth ebony resin, and ran a callused index finger softly over it.

  “Tell me how we’re supposed to get ready for a show when you’ve rented this place out from under us. We’ve got Dr. Jekyll’s this Saturday night, and then the big show at Dante’s. Or did Dante’s just kinda slip your mind?”

  “Just forget it, okay, Daria,” Keith mumbled, still holding on to his guitar case, holding it like James Cagney. “Just forget the whole fucking thing. I’ll call Jack and Soda and tell them the deal’s off.”

  Daria hooked the bass over one shoulder, closed her eyes, and spoke slowly, choosing her words more carefully now. The rage had almost passed, and she felt shaky and a little ill, the dimmest threat of nausea squiggling around in her belly like tadpoles.

  “You do that, Keith,” she said. “And listen, I swear to god, if you ever pull anything like this again, I don’t care how bad you need money for a fix, you’re out on your ass. Do you understand?”

  “Hey, whatever you say, Dar. You’re the boss lady.”

  And then Daria marched away to the skanky little toilet at one end of the room, trailing the black cable out behind her. She shut the bathroom door hard, but the cable—half in, half out—got caught in the way, and the door swung slowly open again.

  Keith set his guitar down, ran one hand through his spiky mud-brown buzz cut.

  “So, Mortimer. I guess you think I’m one mondo asshole too.”

  “I think you went way too far this time, man, that’s all. I’ve always known you were an asshole.”

  “Yeah. Thanks, man.”

  “Hey, that’s what I’m here for,” and Mort lightly smacked the edge of a cymbal with two fingers.

  Theo pushed the magazines aside and climbed over the arm of the La-Z-Boy, wide corduroy gash and bulging tufts of white stuffing, chair hernia. Neither Mort nor Keith said anything to her as she got up and followed Daria and her black rubber excuse for bread crumbs to the john.

  Theo stepped inside the bathroom, little more than a shit closet really, and pushed the door quietly shut behind her. Daria’s bass cable was wound loosely around her left hand like a ropy bandage; she slipped it off and laid it on the edge of the sink, feeling awkward, knowing she was absolutely no good at this, wise-ass Theodora Babyock, never any good at consolation or the sympathetic shoulder to cry on bit. Just like now, worrying more about her inability to be the good mother goddess, dispensing tenderness and understanding like Easter jelly beans, than Daria’s need for comfort.

  “Hey, are you gonna be okay?” she asked, and god, that was lame enough all right, Daria sitting there on the edge of the crapper, arms tight around her bass, face buried in her hands and everything hidden beneath her blood-red hair. She wasn’t crying; Theo had never seen Daria cry, and she had a feeling no one else had, either. She was just sitting there, breathing too hard and too fast, a dry and graceless sound stranded somewhere useless, the stillborn expression of something she knew Daria would never even admit to feeling.

  “I am so goddamned sick of this,” she said, the words squeezed out like toothpaste between her clenched teeth, and her voice only made Theo feel that much more ineffectual.

  “He’s just gonna keep jerking us around like this, and pretty soon I’m gonna be too tired to even care anymore. Christ, I hardly give a rat’s ass now,” the last word hissed, and she kicked the wall, drove the toe of her Doc Marten into the bare Sheetrock.

  “Then maybe it’s time to cut him loose, babe,” and there it was, out quick before she could back down, before she lost her nerve.

  Daria looked up through the red straggle, slash-mouthed lips pulled tight and those eyes, red-rimmed but tearless, their twin fires banked for now, but the last green coals still dancing around her pupils, and Theo looked away.

  “We’re nobody without Keith. Do you honestly think people are gonna pay to hear Mort, or to listen to another froggy-voiced chick with a bass? Even when he’s so high he can’t find his dick to take a piss, he plays like…” but she trailed off, and her face disappeared back inside the shaggy veil of her hair.

  “You can’t save him,” Theo said flatly, and she heard the tone of her voice slipping, no longer straining to sound supportive, pretty sure she was at least as fed up with Keith Barry as anyone could be.

  “And if you guys think you can, he’ll wind up dragging you and Mort down in flames with him.”

  And then neither of them said anything else for a moment. Through the closed door, they could hear Keith tuning, rambling discord, stray chords segueing cruelly into a snatch of something that might have been funked-up B. B. King or Muddy Waters. And then the riff collapsed in a sudden, tooth-jarring twang and feedback whine, and Keith, cursing the broken string.

  “What an asshole,” Daria muttered, releasing a stingy, strangled sound that might have been meant for a laugh, and Theo flinched, afraid for a moment that Daria might cry after all. Instead, she leaned back against the toilet tank and sighed loudly, inverted V of dark water and ruststreaky porcelain showing between her denim thighs.

  “It wasn’t supposed to be like this, Theo,” she said, soft as a whisper. “I mean, I never thought it was gonna be the fucking Partridge Family, you know, but I also never figured it was gonna be like this.”

  There was a hesitant, soft rap at the door, just once, as if whoever it was had thought better of it at the last minute, and then Mort, sounding cautious and impatient at the same time, said, “Daria? We’re ready whenever you are.”

  “C’mon, girl,” Theo said. “Nothing else is gonna make you feel any better.” And she knew at least that much wasn’t bullshit, had been through this scene enough times, scenes enough like it, to know that the only way back up for Daria was work, her music or just the coffeehouse thing she’d taken to keep the bills paid. Work that absorbed her and left absolutely no room for distraction, no room for anything but itself, and always ended in merciful exhaustion.

  Daria fingered the new scratch on her bass, freshest scar, so many dings and scrapes there already that one more couldn’t possibly matter, and Theo thought about all the stickers on the instrument’s case, glossy Band-Aids hiding a hundred scuffs.

  “Yeah, Mo
rtie,” Daria said. “I’m coming,” and Theo felt unexpected relief, the knot in her stomach beginning to loosen a little. Daria stood, flushed the toilet for no reason Theo could see, turned on the tap and splashed her face with cold water.

  “I’m right behind you,” she said, drying off with the front of her T-shirt, and Theo opened the bathroom door.

  2.

  As McJobs came and went, Daria had certainly done a whole lot worse than the Fidgety Bean. Whenever the crowd of yuppie poseurs, the wannabes and could’vebeens, began to eat away at her fragile resolve not to get canned, all she had to do was remind herself of the months she’d put in at the Zippy Mart, two armed robberies in as many weeks, and that last time, the slick and shiny barrel of the .38 or .45 or whatever so close to her face. Or the fast-food nightmares, scalding showers after every shift, scrubbing with sickeningly perfumed soaps and shampoos until her skin was raw and her hair worse than usual, still stinking like deep-fried dog turds.

  There were no drug tests or polygraphs at the Bean, no security cameras. And at least Claire and Russell, the two aging Deadheads who owned the Morris Avenue coffeehouse, allowed her to dress like a human, the less threadbare of her own clothes instead of some middle-management fuck’s idea of dress-up, somebody’s poster child for corporate identity.

  Tonight, Friday morning already, the Bean was quiet; there’d be a little rush toward dawn, when the clubs along Twenty-first Street emptied out and the rave crowd, sweatsticky and half of them sizzling on ecstasy, wandered in. But so far, things had been calm, lots of Nina Simone and Alison Moyet sighing through the stereo and a handful of night owls sipping at their pale lattés, hardback books or laptop computers open on the tables in front of them. One conversation toward the back, a black woman and two men with gray beards and pipes, smoke like burning cherries and occasional laughter. And Russell, stomping someone’s ass at chess across the bar.

  Daria finished setting out the careful rows of freshly washed mugs and glasses on top of the big silver Lavazza espresso machine, squat mugs the color of old cream and the crystal demitasse like cups from a child’s tea party. The Lavazza was sleek and utterly modern, efficient Italian engineering, none of those antique Willy Wonka contraptions at the Bean. She’d heard enough gripes and horror stories from baristas who’d worked with those funky old brass octopuses to be thankful that Claire had insisted on function over flash. Daria never had any trouble with the Lavazza, except once or twice when someone else had forgotten to turn the thing back on after cleaning it and she’d had to stand around waiting for the boiler to build up steam, watching the pressure gauge’s slow creep into the red as orders backed up and people began to grumble and complain.

  “Hey, Daria,” Bunky shouted at her from the register. “Make this guy a double with lemon.” Bunky Tolbert was the worst sort of slacker, scab-kneed board weasel, late more often than not, and Daria couldn’t believe Russell hadn’t fired his ass, that he’d actually hired him in the first place.

  The “guy” was tall and lanky, expensive suit that hung off his shoulders like scarecrow rags, and she thought immediately of Keith, of the shitty, spiritless excuse for a rehearsal and the way that he’d finally just packed up his guitar, not a word, and left her and Mort and Theo in Baby Heaven.

  Daria nodded, removed the filter and banged it upside-down over the dump bin until the old grounds fell out as a nearly solid disc, miniature hockey puck of spent espresso. She rinsed the filter clean beneath the scalding jet on the far right side of the machine and scooped a cup’s worth of the fine black powder from the can on the countertop. The espresso flowed from the scooper like liquid midnight, dry fluid so perfectly dark, so smooth, it seemed to steal the dim coffeehouse light, to breathe it alive and exhale velvet caffeine fumes.

  Daria added a second scoop and packed it down with the plastic tamper, slid the filter back into the machine and punched the “double” button above the brewer. She glanced at the register, and the scarecrow was counting out the dollar-fifty for his drink in quarters and dimes and nickels, a handful of change spilled on the bar and his long fingers pushing coin after coin across the wood to Bunky. He didn’t really look anything like Keith, too healthy despite his thinness, much too alive. Sometimes she thought the only part of Keith that had survived the junk was his eyes, his strange granite eyes trapped in there alone, and that everything else was just clumsy puppet tricks with string and shadow.

  The espresso drained from the brewer’s jets, twin golden streams, smooth as blood from an open vein; Daria caught the steaming coffee in a demitasse, waiting for the machine to finish. In the glass, the liquid was as black as the powder had been, black as pitch, and the layer of nut-brown créma thick and firm enough to support sugar crystals. She took a strip of lemon peel from a plastic container and rubbed it around the rim, then passed the glass to Bunky and the scarecrow carried it away.

  Daria looked up at the huge Royal Crown Cola clock, vintage plastic glowing like a full moon above the fridge, and the shelves crowded with their heavy glass jars of freshly roasted beans. Half her shift gone already, and she hadn’t so much as stopped for a cigarette, driving herself, finding things to do when there were no orders to keep her busy. No doubt Bunky would think she was just brown-nosing Russell, trying to make him look bad in front of the boss. But the night was catching up with her, Mr. Jack Baggysuit having somehow managed to unravel all her defenses, the rough mantra of movement and distraction that kept the crap in her head and the ache in her muscles from taking hold and dragging her down.

  “I’m taking a cig break,” she said, stepping past Bunky, handing him the soppy rag she’d been using to wipe down the bar.

  “Oh. Yeah, sure,” Bunky said, sounding sullen and supremely put upon.

  “Try not to hurt yourself for five minutes.”

  As she walked away, Bunky mumbled, muttered something she didn’t quite catch, but enough meaning conveyed in the sound of his voice that the words didn’t much matter anyway. Russell looked up from the chessboard, one white plastic bishop in his hand, flashed her a grandfatherly scowl, his everybody play nice or else face, bushy white Gandalf eyebrows knotting like epileptic caterpillars.

  Daria shrugged, dredged up half an apologetic smile that she hoped would pass for sincere. Tonight, it was the best she had and was going to have to do.

  She fed two dollars and fifty cents into the cigarette machine, too much to pay, but it was her own fault for not having picked up a pack on the way over after practice. A booth she liked near the back was still empty, back where the two men who looked like professors and the black woman sat talking in their shroud of pipe smoke. Daria slid into the cool Naugahyde, fake leather the unlikely color of eggplant, and tapped the fresh red Marlboro box hard against the palm of her hand before peeling away the cellophane wrapping.

  “Mmhmmm,” the woman said. “In the Sumerian and Babylonian fragments. The Semitic tribes were still worshipping their rocks and trees.”

  Daria had purposefully sat down with her back to the discussion, had always hated listening in on other people’s conversations, even by accident.

  “Watch her, Henry,” one of the men warned the other, his voice low and full of mock admonition. “Let her go and change the subject now and she’ll have you arguing patriarchal conspiracy theories ’til dawn.”

  She lit her cigarette and thought about moving back up to the bar, decided instead to concentrate on the music, the big Sony speaker rigged up almost directly over her booth, and not the voices behind her. But the Alison Moyet disc she’d put on was ending, the last song over, and she could see Bunky making straight for the little stereo sandwiched in between the soft-drink cooler and the coffee grinder. Bunky had recently developed a fondness for an old Johnny Cash album that bordered on the fanatic and stuck it in every chance he got.

  “I mistrust that word,” the woman said.

  “Which word, Miriam?” one of the men asked. “Which word don’t you trust?”

  “D
emon,” the woman replied.

  Daria shut her eyes, holding the first deep drag off the Marlboro like a drowning man’s last, useless breath of air, wishing the smoke was something stronger than tobacco. Overhead, Johnny Cash began to sing, rumbling voice, broken glass and gravel and the time when she was seven, almost eight, and her father had driven her all the way to Memphis just to see Graceland.

  She opened her eyes and exhaled, forced the smoke out through her nostrils.

  “God, Bunky, we have gotta talk,” and she reached to stub out her cigarette, would finish it later, somewhere free of the song and the argument she’d tried not to overhear. But her hand froze halfway to the ashtray, possum-on-her-grave shudder, and she felt suddenly light-headed, not dizzy, but light, pulled loose, and the pale hairs on the backs of her arms prickled with goose bumps.

  How long had it been since she’d thought about that trip, or anything else from that awful year?

  You’re just wasted, girl’o, that’s all.

  Too much Keith and too much Stiff Kitten, the better part of the night spent pretending that she wasn’t pissed beyond words, pretending that what Theo had said wasn’t the truth. Too much of that weary-ass Little Miss Martyr routine. And any way you sliced it, definitely way too much Bunky Tolbert.

  Christ, you haven’t even eaten anything tonight, have you? Just cigarettes and coffee and great big greasy dollops of denial.

  The smoke curling up from the fingertips of her right hand made a gauzy question mark in front of her face. And her hands were still shaking, dry wino jitters; the sense of dislocation had faded to the dullest gray unease.

  And is that all it is, Dar? Malnutrition and caffeine, nerves and nicotine? Are you absolutely sure that’s all it is?

  Daria finished the cigarette while Johnny Cash sang about Folsom Prison, while the three behind her began to talk about the time, how late it’d gotten and how early they each had to be up in the morning. Slowly, the shakiness passed, and she promised herself she’d grab one of the muffins or poppy seed bagels in the pastry case before she went back to work.