“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.”
“Yeah, whatever you say.” And then, to her, “But baby, you better know that your life is over. The goddamn niggers won’t even want you after I’m done talking.”
He drew his foot back, and she’d flinched, bracing herself for the hard rubber toe of his sneaker, but he’d struck the ground instead, and bits of the parking lot rained down in her hair, pelting her arms and face.
And lucky Amy Edwards had climbed into the candy-apple CRX in her place, and the ring of drunken teenagers had broken up and wandered away to other cars and other bottles, leaving her to the night and its consequences.
Twenty, thirty minutes later, and she was still sitting there, shivering and shielding her swelling nose with blood-smeared hands, trying to stop crying, when someone behind her had asked, “Are you gonna be okay?”
She’d turned around, and the pretty boy in the leopard coat had been there, and a girl with skin like milk and whiter dreadlocks haloed in the sodium-arc glare. The girl wasn’t wearing a coat, just a Hanes tank top, and her bare arms were covered with silver-blue webs, spiderwebs like casting nets from the backs of her broad hands to her shoulders.
“Do you need us to take you to the hospital?” the girl with the tattoos asked, the white girl, that beautiful ala-baster gorgon. And then another boy, not so pretty, something broken and wary in his lean face, had knelt beside her and wrapped a leather jacket around her.
“I think he broke her nose, Spyder,” the boy told the white gorgon, and she’d knelt, too, made Robin move her hands and frowned. There was a small and perfect cruciform scar between the gorgon’s eyes, softest rose against the snow, and it had almost seemed to glow when she leaned close to look at Robin’s nose.
“Yeah, I guess you do,” the gorgon said, and then they’d helped her stand and followed the pretty boy, haughty swish and fake fur, across the empty parking lot.
4.
Where the highway cut deep into Red Mountain, the weathered gash down through its Paleozoic bones, shale and chert and iron-ore ligaments, Robin switched her headlights on. The sun was gone, burned down to a molten sliver, orange-red streak in the western sky as she crested the mountain and started down into the wide valley below. The city twinkled and glittered in the fresh night, the uneven cluster of electric light and the garish ribbons of I-65 and I-20.
She’d been concentrating on nothing but the cherry-red taillights of the eighteen-wheeler in front of her, ignoring the oily flow of images that had begun to play behind her eyes, the memories past vivid that ate into her cool, her queen-bitch deceit, like nail polish remover through Styrofoam. She felt dim relief to see the city, to know that Spyder and Byron were so close now.
“Don’t let it freak you out,” Spyder would say, “they’re only flashbacks. They can’t hurt you.” But Robin knew better, knew that Spyder knew even better than her.
Outside, it was getting colder, but she had the window down, anyway; she hated to drive alone now, especially after dark, paced the Civic to keep up with the speeding patches of traffic. The heater was blowing full tilt, but her lips and ears and the tips of her fingers were still painfully cold, and her breath fogged like cigarette smoke. She leaned over and punched the eject button on the Civic’s CD player and it whirred and spat out the PJ Harvey disc she’d been listening to for the past twenty minutes. She’d begun to imagine, to suspect, that Polly Jean’s jangling voice was mocking her own jangling nerves, and she searched through the loose CDs in the passenger seat for anything calmer, found Sarah McLachlan’s Fumbling Towards Ecstasy and loaded it into the empty tray.
In the last four or five straining seconds before the disc cued to the first track and the music began again, Robin clearly heard the quick, dry scritch across backseat vinyl, the weighty thump of something heavy falling to the floorboard directly behind her. But she did not jump or cry out, did not turn to see, but pressed the black toe of her boot to the accelerator and passed the truck, stayed even with its cab all the way to her exit.
5.
Three days spent piecing together the ceremony, a blurred chain of days revisiting volumes on peyote religion and the general use of hallucinogens in shamanism; library tomb dust and Robin curled into a corner of Spyder’s old sofa, the books scattered around her like fallen megaliths. Spyder had not dared to interrupt when her parents called, again and again, looking for her, or even to remind her that she’d forgotten to eat.
But the books contained only the smallest portion of what she was looking for, disappointing syntheses of the contaminations of Christian missions and older aboriginal ritual. The Ghost Dance, the Kiowa Half Moon Ceremony, and the Cross Fire Ceremony; revelations of the Creator’s Road, the narrow way, old men’s visions of the life of Christ and figures in the sky: celestial landmarks for the Spiritual Forces, the Moon, the Sun, Fire. Her head filling up and up until her temples ached with contradictory instructions and still, the keen awareness that none of these could be their ceremony, the dawning certainty that she had to find it inside herself. Make it new, not so different from what the Sioux and Caddo and Comanche had done, but a synthesis of her own instead of bits and odd pieces cribbed from obscure ethnographies.
Through all this, Walter had hovered at the dim edges of her awareness, as if, found guilty of some crime, he was merely awaiting sentence, the ugly consequences of his indiscretion. Sometimes he sat across the room from her, alone and watching, and sometimes he paced anxiously through Spyder’s house, impatient, barely comprehending her obsession and insistence on detail, on any ritual at all, for that matter. If he spoke, either Spyder or Byron was usually there to tell him to shut up, leave her alone, go home now, Walter.