“Your father’s working late, and I’m having dinner with Marjorie and Quentin. Don’t forget to lock up, and set the alarm when you leave.”
Robin’s teeth parted, and her tongue slipped gratefully back inside her mouth.
“Promise?”
“Yes,” Robin said.
“Good girl,” her mother said. “Have fun and drive safe,” like some fucking public service blurb, and Robin turned her back on the mirror. Concentrated on buttoning each sanguine button, on the retreating tattoo of her mother’s footsteps. Her mother played pretend, pretend that Robin was still a child, pretend that her father was held up late over his blueprints and drafting tools instead of his latest whore girlfriend. That her life wasn’t as hellish as everything else in the world, and Robin didn’t really give a shit as long they paid the bills on her charge cards and didn’t bitch about where she spent her nights. Who she spent them with.
Robin sat down on one rumpled corner of the bed and laced her feet tight into tall vinyl boots, icicle heels and toes like fresh slices of midnight. The calm she’d felt only a minute before had dissolved completely, whatever dim sanctuary her room conferred violated by her mother’s voice and brittle delusions, and now all she wanted was to escape. Put all the miles she could between herself and the neat suburban rows of brick and aluminum siding, pretty mortgaged cancers, and follow the interstate over the mountains, to Spyder and the honest desolation of the city.
But she’d wait a few more minutes, give her mother plenty of time to clear out. Robin lay back on the bed, the sheets that smelled like jasmine incense and clove cigarettes and her musty sex, and stared at the walls.
Walls her painstaking alchemy of acrylics and sponge dabbings had transformed into some impossible marble, simple Sheetrock into ebony stone shot through with scarlet quartz veins. Four stark slabs supporting, framing, the tragic tableau overhead, the pillars of the world, and the walls were almost bare: only a giant Siouxsie and the Banshees poster above the headboard and a raccoon skull hanging snout down in the narrow space between her cluttered bookshelf and the new stereo her parents had given her for her last birthday.
“Nineteen,” her mother had said. “Robin’s so mature for just nineteen. Don’t you think so, Bill?” And her father had smiled, his eyes a hundred miles away.
She’d painted the door a single bottomless shade of glistening black, like hot tar or spilled oil, clinging absence of anything like light.
Robin listened, as patient as anything cornered, and when she finally heard the faint growl and clank of the automatic garage door, the softer purr of her mother’s car backing out of the drive, she got up and opened the black door.
2.
This is where it started.
On an April night when thunderstorms had swept out of Mississippi, raking the world with lightning and the promise of tornadoes, and the city’s civil defense sirens had howled shrill apocalypse. And Walter, who said he wanted to be a sailor and only pretended to be queer so nobody would think he was strange, had brought them a tiny bit of opium, black tar in Spyder’s antique hookah, just like Gomez and Morticia. There was almost nothing that Walter could not secure, given time and the cash, no pill or herb or intoxicating powder too exotic that he didn’t seem to have a source, somewhere.
Gawky Walter Ayers, rawboned and hair like a handful of dead mice, so hard in love with Robin that she always got to laughing if she looked at his eyes too long. He bought her company, Spyder’s, Byron’s, with drugs and clumsy, helpless charm.
And that night the storm and Bauhaus turned down low so they could still hear the thunder and the sizzling rain and sirens, and she’d nestled content and almost naked in Spyder’s tattooed arms; waiting for her turn at the water pipe’s brass mouthpiece. Listening to whatever Walter was saying, gathering his words inside her head: the book he was reading on the Holy Grail, having exhausted Jessie Weston and Roger Sherman Loomis, a book by Carl Jung’s wife and the grail as vessel, the sword and the lance, grail as stone. She’d watched their candle-oranged faces: Walter’s too excited; Byron, bored, but watching Spyder to see what she thought before he agreed or disagreed.
“And these angels, the zwivelaere, had wanted to preserve the original God-image,” he said, “the unity, the divine inner opposites that were being torn apart by the war in Heaven.”
“Zwivelaere,” the German had rolled easy and slow from Spyder’s tongue. “What does that mean?” And then she’d taken the mouthpiece from him and filled her cheeks with the faintly sweet, acrid smoke, had leaned down, and Robin parted her lips and accepted the kiss, taking Spyder’s breath and the opium inside her, had closed her eyes and only exhaled when her lungs had finally begun to ache and the distant thrum in her ears, like the empty space between radio stations.
“The doubters,” Walter answered, guarded awe in his voice like this was a secret, dangerous knowledge, and Spyder only nodded her head.
Robin had watched Spyder’s slow eyes, eyes the gentle color of faded denim. Spyder almost never smoked anything but pot, routinely turned down the best acid and ’shrooms, but the opium was a treat too rare to allow her caution to interfere, her fear of the wild things and places in her head. Robin knew it was those parts of Spyder she loved most, the turbulence behind those pacific eyes, the part that Spyder locked away with her tranquilizers and antidepressants.
“The doubters hid the grail stone on the earth,” Walter said, and she wished he would shut up. He rarely actually seemed to understand the books he read, arcane treatises on conspiracy and occult Christian orders; but he rattled on about then endlessly in a desperate attempt to impress her, and so it had become a sort of game: she fed his desperation by suggesting the most difficult texts and watched as he struggled, fixated on the obvious, the superficial skin of myth and history. Everything reduced to Tolkien-simple fantasy, and the magic and deeper mystery lost on him.
She did not particularly dislike Walter, but she didn’t love him the way Spyder did, either. Didn’t see him as some integral part of the circle of her life.
The storm had rattled at the windows, wanting in, and she’d watched the water caught like glistening bugs in the screen wire behind the glass.
There was a longish pause in Walter’s exposition, then, and Byron sighed loudly, got up from his seat on the spring-shot sofa to put a new CD on or a tape, cold molasses motion. And Walter had said, “I can get some buttons next week, if anyone’s interested.”
“Buttons?” Byron said. “What kind of ‘buttons’?”
“Peyote,” and the word had brought Robin drifting back from her contemplation of the raindrops trapped inside the squares of wire, held fast by fate and their own surface tension.
“How much?” she’d asked him, and Walter looked lost for a second and shrugged.
“Randy said to get back to him about the price, but—”
“No, I mean how many buttons can you get?”
“Oh,” and she’d seen his hot embarrassment, inordinate unease over nothing at all.
“Probably as much as we want,” he’d said. “Why?”
“’Cause I did peyote once when I lived down in Mobile, but I only got one button and it didn’t do anything much but make me puke. You gotta eat a lot, like nine or ten buttons at least, if you’re gonna get a good trip off it.”
Byron had stopped fumbling through Spyder’s CDs, clack-clack-clack of jewel cases against one another, and put on My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult’s Sexplosion, skipped ahead to “Sex on Wheelz.” The music drowned the storm, and Robin had to raise her voice to be heard.
“It would be worth it,” she’d said, “if you could get enough.”
“I heard that stuff tastes like shit.” Byron had returned to the sofa and took his turn at the hookah.
“I’ll see what I can do,” and Walter had tried to sound matter-of-fact about it, sure of himself, but she’d heard the crisp uncertainty between his words, knew that the chances of his coming up with that much peyote
were slim to none. Just another test, like Carlos Castenada and Foucault’s Pendulum. Spyder had frowned down at her with sleepy blue eyes full of admonition and lazy passion.
A little while later, the last of the opium gone and she’d followed Spyder to the bedroom, leaving Walter and Byron alone in each other’s company. Down the narrow hallway, past closed doors, into the dusty heart of the big house and the dark where she could hear the storm again.
Not the next week, or the week after, but early in May, Walter had shown up at Weird Trappings very late one afternoon, her and Spyder closing up the shop, planning to spend the whole night watching Dario Argento videos and screwing on the living room floor, and he’d stood on the far side of the counter while Spyder counted out the register. Had shifted, impatient dance, one foot to the other, occasionally looking back over his shoulder as if someone might be following him. Walter had set the book he was reading down on the smudgy glass countertop, a library copy of Charles Fort’s Lo!, Robin’s latest suggestion and his place marked about halfway through with a dirty pigeon feather. The book and a big Piggly Wiggly bag, grocery-brown paper rolled closed at the top.
“I got them,” he’d said, looking over his shoulder again, his eyes bright and proud and nervous.
“You got what, Walter?” Spyder asked, and then she’d lost count of the twenties and cursed him before she started over again.
“I got the peyote,” he’d said, almost whispered, the last word squeezed down to a cautious hiss that had reminded Robin a little of Peter Lorre in Casablanca or Arsenic and Old Lace.
“No shit,” and Robin had reached past Spyder and the cash drawer, had thought for a second that Walter was going to snatch the bag away from her. She’d unrolled the crumpled paper and in the shadows down at the bottom were three or four large Ziploc baggies, each filled with lumpy dark buttons of sun-dried peyote.
“Goddamn it, Walter,” she’d said, and then Spyder, who’d given up trying to count the twenties, had taken the bag away from her and peered skeptically inside.
“Holy fuck,” she’d whispered. “Where’d you get it all?”
Walter had smiled his tense half-smile, the dimpled corners of his mouth still drawn stubbornly down.
“Randy’s got a connection somewhere out in Texas. It’s legal for the Indians to grow it out there for religious purposes, but you have to be a member of this Indian church and have a lot of Indian blood to buy it.”
“The Native American Church,” Robin had said, remembering a book she’d read about the peyote religions, the state-licensed peyoteros who grew their sacred cactus, could legally sell it only to registered members of the NAC.
“A group of Oklahoma peyotists formed the Church in 1918 to protect their ceremonies from the Feds,” and she hadn’t missed the way that’d impressed him, took her full measure of delight from his futile admiration.
“Well, I told you I could get it,” he’d said, and his unaccustomed smile had stretched wider, revealing a rare glimpse of uneven front teeth.
Spyder had continued to stare into the Piggly Wiggly bag, shaking her head slowly, mild, pleased disbelief on her face.
“But what did all this cost?” she asked, and he’d shrugged. “Not so much as you’d think. It’s cheap shit, really. The Indians can get a thousand buttons for about a hundred and fifty bucks. Of course, Randy has to charge me a lot more than that, though. I got fifty buttons in there.”
Spyder had handed the bag to Robin and gone back to counting the crumpled green bills.
“So, you guys want to call Byron and get fucked up tonight?” Walter asked, hopeful, fairly glowing with his little victory.
“No,” Robin replied. “We’re gonna do this right,” and then she’d rolled the bag closed again.
3.
Or this is where it started, where it really started.
The night that Robin met Spyder Baxter. Still months to go before high school graduation, pomp and circumstance and her parents picking colleges for her like arranged marriages. Waiting around the civic center parking lot after the show, the Jim Rose Circus and Nine Inch Nails, as if something worth seeing might happen; one more in the smoky clot of bodies assembled around Tony’s new Honda CRX. Warm Boone’s Farm like soured Kool-Aid from a jug, and an amber bottle of Jack Daniel’s making the rounds, too.
She’d sat in the open hatchback, too drunk to feel the cold night, Tony all over her, his rough hands and whiskey mouth, wanting inside. And she’d taken her turn at the jug and passed it on to someone else, another girl, nameless blonde from another school. The blond girl was almost ready to spew, and Robin had dimly hoped she’d at least go somewhere else to do it.
“There was a drive-by shooting here last week,” someone said, and she’d blinked through the booze, trying to match the slurred voice to a face. “There’s still broken glass all over that side of the street.”
The other faces had oohed and ahhhed their suburban awe, and then Tony had pushed her down, the kittensoft carpet against her skin and his stinking breath and new-car smell slipping up her nose.
“Goddamn,” and that had been Rick Reynolds, or one of the other varsity fucks. “Will you just get a load of that?” Laughter from the girls, then, egging him on, and he’d laughed too, a husky, mean sound, and she’d strained to see over Tony’s shoulder.
“Goddamn faggot freak,” Rick Reynolds said, and she’d seen the slight and pretty boy walking nervously past the group. He’d worn a woman’s coat, big fake fur and leopard print with a high, turned-up collar, had held his head down, ostrich denial, misguided belief that if you don’t look at the dog it won’t bite you.
“Hey fag, you wanna show me some pussy?” and then Tony had pushed her back down, a bruising shove and her T-shirt hiked up, his insistent hands working their way beneath her bra, relentless fingers across her rigid nipples.
“Aw shit, man, I just wanted to see some pussy,” and the girls had laughed louder, caged-bird cackle, loving the show, loving the threat and fear and their time on top.
“Get off me, Tony,” Robin had said, and then his mouth had covered hers, the probing gag of his tongue forestalling any further resistance, the rejections he wouldn’t have to hear, wouldn’t have to pretend he hadn’t heard.
“I think he’s gonna cry,” someone said, not Rick but one of the girls, and the zipper on Robin’s jeans parted as if by its own traitorous accord. Tony’s hand had worked its way across her exposed belly, diamond serpent’s head with five anxious fingers, slipped beneath the elastic band of her panties and tangled in her pubic hair.
“Oh baby, you want it,” he said. “You know that you want it,” and then she’d kneed him in the balls, had brought her leg up hard and fast and felt his nuts and his stiffened penis, still trapped inside his pants, all mashed helpless between her and his body.
“Well, you come back around if you change your mind, fag,” Rick called after the boy, the girls still laughing like hyenas while Tony’s face had turned almost the same bright red as his new car. She’d wriggled out from under him, all the way out of the hatchback and into the cold, zipping up, straightening the rumpled mess he’d made of her clothes. And Tony held onto his crotch with both hands, leaned forward and spat curses at her like blinding venom. The others made a circle around her, just to see what had happened, she’d known that, but it felt like they were there to make sure she didn’t get away.
“You goddamn cunt!” he’d hissed, and she could see the sweat standing out on his forehead, the way he gritted his perfect white teeth together and forced the words through the spaces in between.
“I said no, Tony,” she’d said, breathless, her voice too small and alone.
“Fuck you, cunt! Goddammit! I ought’a fucking hold you down and kick your fucking face in!”
“Christ, man, what’d she do to you?” Rick asked, and she knew he was standing just behind her, would be there if she turned to run.
“The bitch kicked me in the fucking nuts, you dumbfuck!”
“That’s cold, Robin, that’s real cold,” Amy Edwards said, and she’d sat down next to Tony in the hatch, all big-eyed concern and opportunist’s reproach.
“I told him no,” Robin said again, and then he lunged at her, cooing Amy thrown to one side, his sparkling, hateful eyes, dog-snarled lips. His fist had landed once, big blow to her face like concrete and meat and a bag full of marbles.
No man had ever hit her, not even a spanking from her father; Robin staggered backwards, no one to catch her, and tripped, fell flat on her ass, the sharp parking-lot gravel unnoticed, her head too full of the suddenness and the force, the absoluteness of this violence. She’d sat there while the numbness in and around her right eye segued slowly into skin burn and bone ache, bright fire wherever he’d touched her. She was breathing fast and hard, and every time she exhaled there was a sticky, warm spray of blood from her nose, red-berry spatters down the front of her shirt.
“Christ, Tony,” surprise and a whisper of fear in Rick Reynold’s voice. “You busted her nose, man.”
“I ought’a kick her fucking ass.”
She’d tried to scramble out of his reach, scraped palms and the frantic heels of her Hush Puppy loafers slinging grit and dust, but there were legs like prison bars, legs that wouldn’t step aside to let her through, faces that stared down in shock and disgust and something hungry like delight.
“She’s not worth it, man,” Rick stammered, and Robin had hung on those words, terrified, praying silently that Tony would see the obvious truth in them, that she wasn’t worth it, wasn’t worth the energy it would take to realize the bottomless fury in his eyes.
He’d stood over her, a dangerous animal she’d never seen take off its mask, what big teeth you have, what big claws; big man, still holding his balls with one hand.
“Please, Tony,” she whimpered through the blood and snot and stinging salt tears, “I’m sorry. Please…”
“Fuck her, man,” Rick said, creeping, oily desperation. “Let’s just get the hell out of here.”
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