Caitlin Kiernan - Silk

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.

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.