Caitlin Kiernan - Silk

Anthony finished his solo and wiped the harmonica on a flannel sleeve. “And then you give it here, L.J.”

Keith had been at the platform since late afternoon, since he’d made his connection, cooked and fixed in the men’s room of the Jack’s Hamburgers on First Avenue. He carried the twelve-string in a case so beat-up that it stayed together only by the sticky grace of a roll or two worth of duct tape and some copper wire he’d strung through the holes where the hinges used to be. He also kept his works in the case, hidden inside a compartment intended for picks and capos; Keith never used a pick, relied instead on his sure and callused fingers. He had enough stuff left for one more fix, tucked safely inside his left boot.

There were twelve or thirteen men on the platform tonight, most of them huddled around the flickering barrel, but he was the only one into junk. Most of them were winos or dirtbag crackheads, street addicts too far down the food chain to even have house fees. They bought their bits of rock from the cruisers who pushed from their cars. Every now and then he caught the caustic stink of someone’s pipe over the smell of piss and booze and burning wood.

Long Joey passed the bottle to Anthony, noticeably emptier for its time in his hands, and then he started stomping his feet again, pulling hard at his earlobes. Long Joey was a puller and sometimes his ears were raw and caked with dried blood. He liked to talk, but never talked about anything but crack and the women he either imagined or lied about having fucked.

“I told this bitch L.J. don’t put no jimmie cap on his dick, but she just kept on whining about the big A, so I finally slapped her around until she shut the hell up.”

“And you just took you some pussy, ain’t that right, L.J.?” and Anthony grinned and winked at Keith.

“Goddamn right. Goddamn right.”

Anthony passed the bottle back to Keith, just enough left for one more round; the rye felt warm burning down his throat, settling in his belly.

“You still seein’ that pretty little girl with the fire-engine hair?” Anthony asked, and for a second Keith was too busy looking through the neck of the bottle, strange and useless telescope that looked out on nowhere, to answer.

“Yeah,” he said at last. “Yeah, I guess so.”

“You guess so? What’s with that, you guess so?”

When Anthony Jones talked, he waved the Honer in the cold air like a conductor’s wand.

“You either down with that redheaded lady or you ain’t. There ain’t no in-betweenin’ pussy.”

“Man, I had me some fine white pussy last week…” L.J. started, but Anthony cut him off with a knifeblade glance, stabbed the harmonica at his heart.

“Why don’t you shut the hell up for a little while?”

“You think I’m lyin’? You think I gotta lie ’bout gettin’ white-bitch pussy?”

“I think I’m tired of listening to you talk trash.”

And L.J. looked offended and hurt, pulled hard at his right earlobe and wandered off, mumbling to himself.

“That nigger can’t even get hisself a skeezer these days,” and Anthony laughed and stared off towards the darkened windows of the Eagle Syrup plant. This side of town was a wasteland of empty warehouses and abandoned factories, a prelude to the miles of derelict steel mills further west.

“I just can’t seem to stay out of the shit house with Daria these days.”

Anthony Jones didn’t make any sign he’d heard, still gazing across the tracks and the street at the ridiculous giant honey jar perched atop the roof of the syrup plant.

“That her name?” he asked. “Daria?”

“Yeah, man, that’s her name.”

“She the same girl that’s in that band with you?”

“Yeah. Shit, she is the band. She’s gonna dump me and find someone else to play guitar for her. She ought’a fuckin’ dump me.”

“Man, you just on yourself tonight, that’s all,” and then he looked quickly at his feet, scuffed shoes from one of the missions, rubbed at his eyes. “You got gold in them fingers.”

Keith held his hands out, stared into his palms like he could read his past or future in the lines etched there.

“She takes a load of shit, man.”

“I hear you,” Anthony said. “I do hear you. Had me a good woman long time ago. Some pretty little babies, too.”

Keith passed the almost empty bottle back to him and picked up his guitar again, ran his fingers once across the strings and started tuning, gently twisting each rusted peg in his magic fingers. And Anthony Jones drained the last of the whiskey before he hurled the useless bottle at the darkness that lay like sleeping dogs between the platform and the syrup plant.

Niki Ky had finally found a place to sit in the back of the van, a plastic milk crate covered over with a warped piece of plywood. The crate was mostly full of cords and cables, rubber black coaxial serpents that stuck out through the checkerboard holes in the sides and bit at her legs every time the van hit a bump or a rut or pothole. At least they hadn’t gone directly down Morris from Daria’s place, hadn’t jounced over all those goddamned cobblestones. The rear of the van was sectioned off with a sagging barrier of chain-link fence, soldered and bolted into place, and there was more junk back there. Niki thought briefly about scooting the crate closer to the wire, close enough that she could hook her fingers through the diamond spaces and hold on.

“There, Mort. Turn right there,” Daria ordered, pointed one insistent finger at a side street. She was sitting on a huge red Sears Craftsman tool chest behind the driver’s side, straddling it, hanging on to the back of Mort’s seat. The tools inside the chest clanked and clattered, and Niki imagined that it was the sound of her bones and teeth and kidneys.

Mort missed the turn, and Daria slammed her fist into the back of his headrest.

“Goddammit, Mort! Are you fucking deaf?”

“There’s no left turn there, Dar-”

“Did you see any fuckin’ cops?! Who would’ve given a shit? Huh?”

“Why don’t you calm down,” Theo said, and Niki saw the fire jump like lightning in Daria’s eyes.

“Why don’t you keep the hell out of this?” she said, almost snarled, and Niki wished again that she had stayed back at the apartment with Claude and his Ella Fitzgerald tapes, his comforting coffee and conversation.

“Hey, will the both of you just shut the hell up and let me drive?” Mort growled, no patience infinite and Niki could tell he’d had enough.

She had just stepped out of the shower when the phone rang, was still standing naked and dripping in the steam, drying herself with a thin, not-quite-white towel that had once belonged to a Holiday Inn. Someone who’d heard from someone else that Daria’s boyfriend had been in a fight, had gotten himself cut up and might be dead. Dying, at the very least.

A minute or two later, the towel wrapped tightly around her, and “It might just be a false alarm,” she’d said, trying her best to sound hopeful, reassuring, starting to feel awkward and misplaced.

“You don’t know Keith,” Daria had said, pulling her boots on and not bothering with the ratty laces.

“Which makes you a very lucky girl,” Claude said and had turned quickly away, shielding himself from the hot recrimination in Daria’s eyes.

“Put on some clothes if you’re coming,” Daria had said, and Niki thought maybe it would be rude to say no thank you, I’ll stay right here. Rude, or dangerous.

“Okay, look, you can turn left at the next light, on Seventeenth, and circle back around…”

Niki tried to shut out Daria’s frantic commands, shut her eyes and then immediately opened them again, not wanting to make car sickness any more likely than it already was; puking would do absolutely nothing to improve the van’s all but palpable funk, the reek of ancient sweat and cigarette smoke, oil and the sweet and sour hint of rotting food. She hung on to the edges of her plywood raft and rode the wave.