Caitlin Kiernan - Silk

“No problem at all,” and Daria sucked a final drag from her cigarette and stabbed it out in a large cut-glass ashtray, oasis of butts and ash in the middle of the card table’s chaos.

Caught there in the last glory of the day, Niki’s skin seemed to radiate its own light, perfect silken complexion, balanced somewhere lustrous between almond and ginger. Daria knew her own skin was as unremarkable as her face, not pale enough for goth, despite her vampire’s hours, but certainly no color to speak of. A few poorly placed freckles scattered beneath her eyes, and she still got zits on the days before her periods. Niki was wearing a ratty Cure T-shirt she’d pulled out of her bubblegum-colored gym bag, frayed sleeves cut off at the shoulders and the collar stretched shapeless, and she still looked exotic.

Daria accepted the coffee Claude held out to her, white mug and the molecular formula for caffeine printed on one side. The handle had broken off a long time ago, and so she held it cradled in both palms, which was really better anyway. The heat was almost painful, soaked quickly into her hands and flowed up her wrists. She closed her eyes and breathed the rich, slightly bitter steam, felt it working its way seductively into her aching sinuses.

“But you weren’t born there,” Claude said, and Daria realized that she’d missed something. It didn’t matter; Claude would entertain Niki Ky, had already moved in on her like a kitten with a fine new toy. Claude would play the proper host while Daria brooded and sipped her scalding coffee.

“No,” Niki said. “I was born in New Orleans.”

“I have friends in the Quarter,” he said, and Daria opened her eyes, stared across the brim of her mug at the giant poster of Billie Holiday hanging above her stereo. Lady Day watching over them like some beautiful, tragic madonna of heroin and the blues. Bee-stung pout in grainy black-and-white, enlarged too many times to retain integrity, resolution, black-and-white flowers in her hair. Eyes that let nothing in and gave nothing away. Claude had brought the poster home with him one night, had carefully mended a tear along the bottom edge with Scotch tape, and she’d never found out where he’d gotten it.

It made her think of nothing now but Keith. Keith and his needles and his strong and certain fingers pulling music from the strings. From her.

“Since June,” Niki said, half-sighed answer to a question Daria hadn’t heard, and then, “But it seems like years, you know?”

This late, Keith had probably already made his connection, would have scored for the day and fixed. Was either laid up in his roachy little apartment or hanging out with the bums and punks and other junkies who used abandoned railroad cars, condemned and empty buildings, as shelter from the cold and cops. She held the mug to her lips, swallowed quick before the coffee had time to cool inside her mouth.

Another hour and Mort’s shift at the machine shop would be over.

Claude laughed, soft boy laugh, almost as comforting as the coffee, and she tried to let it all go for now, plenty of time later, the rest of her life, to worry about Keith Barry and Stiff Kitten and the haunted places in her sleep. Her croissant sat neglected on an apple-green plastic saucer in front of her, pastry dusted with powdered sugar and cocoa, and she didn’t even remember him setting it on the bed.

“Does it bother you if people call you a stripper?”

“Christ, Claude, does it bother you when people call you a faggot?” and it didn’t come out like a joke at all, sharp edges and acid where she thought she’d only intended to slip back into the conversation.

Claude was staring at her, his face gone stony hard and any surprise or hurt guarded safe behind a piercing what-the-hell-crawled-up-your-ass-and-died glare. Good question, good fucking question. Niki had looked away, quick glance down and picked at her own croissant, half-eaten and the gooey brown insides showing.

“No,” she said. “It doesn’t bother me. I am a stripper.”

“I’m sorry,” Daria said, meant it but there was no way to sound enough like she meant it.

“And that’s Mr. Faggot to you,” Claude said sternly, mock-severity that lifted the tension just barely enough that she could slip beneath his barbed-wire gaze, could at least look away.

“I really do need to call about my car,” Niki said. “I have no idea what time the garage closes.”

“Yeah, sure,” and Daria pointed at the clunky old rotary phone sitting on the floor next to one of the stereo speakers. “Help yourself.”

Claude finished the last of his coffee, stood up, and walked back to the sink with his mug and saucer. Niki set her own dishes out of the way before she pushed aside the afghan and the Peanuts sheets and scooted across the floor to the phone. And again, Daria found herself watching her, envying the subtle alliance of movement and unaffected elegance that made the simplest action seem graceful. She tried to imagine Niki Ky on some seedy, barroom stage, rehearsed bump and grind, bogus passion, through a haze of cigarette smoke and colored lights, but there were too many contradictions. All the strippers she’d met in Birmingham had big hair and nails like the talons of predatory birds, silicon tits and makeup caked like spackling paste. Drag queens without the sense of humor.

“The phone book’s right over there,” she said and pointed to a sloppy stack of magazines and comics by the bathroom door, “if you need to look the number up.”

“They gave me a card.” Niki was already digging through the pockets of her army jacket. “If I haven’t lost it.”

Daria sighed, looked at her wristwatch, and swung her legs over the side of the bed, bare feet flat against the chilly hardwood. Off toward the tracks, toward the other end of Morris and work, she heard the whistle of a freight train, a desolate, empty sound, and she sat and listened to Niki arguing with the mechanic, Claude running water to wash dishes. And the steel wheels, razor wheels on steel rails, as the sun went down again.

Daria had been nineteen when she’d fallen over backwards into her first band.

She was living in a Southside firetrap with a guy named Pablo, had worked day jobs flipping burgers and sold blotter acid on the side to keep a roof over their heads, Ramen noodles and Wild Irish Rose in their bellies. Their apartment had been on the topmost floor of a building that might still have been habitable when her grandmothers were her age. Rats as big as puppies, and they’d slept with all the lights on to keep the roaches off the bed. When it rained, the roof was little better than a colander, rainwater seeping through a sagging foot of plaster and rotten lathe, pigeon shit and mold, before it dripped from the ceiling and streamed in murky rivulets down the walls.

Pablo had played bass for a band called Yer Funeral, three punker holdouts with identical Ramones haircuts who covered the Sex Pistols and the Clash and made everything sound like crap. The singer and guitarist, a painfully skinny cokehead named Jonesy McCabe, had lived in Manhattan in the early eighties and claimed to have given the ghost of Sid Vicious a blow job one Halloween. Carlton Hicks on drums, and they’d opened for marginally better bands on the local hardcore circuit, two or three shows a month and the rest of their time spent picking fights with rednecks and skinheads, fucking their girlfriends; counterfeit anarchists scrounging bedlam in the sunset days of Reagan’s America.

Daria had never asked Pablo to teach her to play, had never had any particular interests in music or anything else creative. Sometimes she’d talked about college; she hadn’t dropped out, and her SAT scores had been decent enough, but there was never any money, never would be, and although there were loans, the thought of owing Uncle Sam twenty or thirty thousand for an undergrad degree had finally soured her on the idea. So she worked at McDonald’s and Arby’s and sold her cheap blotter, stamped with dancing rows of rainbow-colored Jerr-bears and so weak that even high school kids who still thought cigarettes were cool had trouble getting a trip off the stuff.