In the big parking lot across the street, there were still people lingering around cars, stalling, wringing the last dregs from a Saturday night already gone well over to Sunday morning. Smoking and getting sick drunk on cheap wine and beer. The back edge of the lot ran all the way to the railroad tracks, and Niki noticed a few of the goths there, clustered around an old brown car, Spyder Baxter sitting on the hood, still the center of their attention. And the green-haired girl so close she could pass for a Siamese twin.
“Come on, guys…” and the door swung immediately open, as if Theo had commanded it, open sesame, but really just Daria kicking the door wide, trying to brace it open with one shoulder. Niki caught it, held it open while Theo hugged herself and Daria and Mort wrestled the last of the equipment through.
“So, where the hell is he?” and Daria still sounded every bit the queen bitch, but Niki could feel how much of her tension had drained away during the show, through the show. Up there, she’d slipped around the diffusion somehow, wrapped herself in soothing rhythm and feedback, electricity and discord sedation. She wore a fresh Band-Aid on her right index finger, and her hair was plastered flat with the dried sweat of two long sets and the beer that someone down front had drenched her with halfway through the last song.
“First guess don’t count, right?” and Theo laughed, only half to herself, then began to whistle the chorus of “Let It Snow.” Niki was amazed; Theo even managed to whistle sarcastically.
“Fuck,” resigned and weary moan from Daria, and she helped Mort roll the cumbersome flight case the last couple of feet to wait with everything else, one wheel missing and so it tipped and wobbled like a drunken monolith. Mort had painted the band’s undead mascot on one side of the scraped and dented black box in his most careful acrylic. The zombie kitten leered hungrily at Niki, broken fangs, one eye rolled back in its rotting skull, the other dangling by gooey optic nerves.
“Shit, it’s cold out here,” Mort said, pulling Theo close to cop what little body heat she might have to spare.
“That’s ’cause it’s gonna snow, dumbass,” she said, and Niki let the door slam shut, sealing them all outside.
Mort grumbled something rude and unintelligible through his steaming breath. And then, one thunder-crack backfire, shotgun loud in the brittle air, and Niki jumped, felt her heart lurch and skip inside her chest. The van rumbled around the corner of Dr. Jekyll’s, pulled out of the side lot and bounced down onto the cobblestones, cough and blat of a muffler shot like a coal miner’s lungs. Keith pulled in too close and the right front wheel scrunched against the curb; the wind caught white puffs of the Ford’s exhaust, blew acrid warm and choking gusts into their faces. The van idled, and Keith stepped around the side, unlocked the rear doors and opened them like the wings of a giant albino scarab.
“Okay, boys and girls. Time to feed the shitmobile,” Mort said, mock glee, and Niki stepped back, out of the way, feeling useless and uncertain, feeling outside. They moved like this chore, too, had been choreographed and rehearsed, performed a thousand times, as practiced as their music. They filled the caged-in back of the van while she watched, attentive, just in case someone asked for her help.
When they were done, Keith bummed a cigarette from Mort, bummed a light, spoke around the Camel’s filter, “Did y’all settle up with Bert?”
“Oh yeah. And he said we could have the second week in December if we wanted it. Dar has your split.”
“You mean you got cash out of him?”
“Twenty-five each,” Daria said. “Don’t spend it all in one place.”
From across the street, the gravelly, coarse rumble of male laughter, threatening and primal as the warning growl in a bad dog’s throat; Keith turned to see, and Niki followed his gray eyes back to where the goths had gathered around Spyder and the cruddy brown car. Except now there were three big guys, almost everyone else had gone, and Spyder sat alone on the hood, head down as if she were praying or straining under an invisible weight.
“Assholes,” Keith muttered. “Christ, I hate those fuckers,” and Niki heard the threat there, too.
Daria had opened the panel door, crouched inside, almost out of the wind, trying to tease a spark from her lighter. She glanced up at Niki. “What’s he talking about?”
“Some guys’re messin’ with Spyder and the shrikes,” Mort said.
“Skins?” asked Daria, and the lighter flickered, framing her face for a yellow-orange instant before the flame guttered and died again.
“Nah,” Mort answered. “Just some assholes.”
“Well, you stay the hell out of it, Keith,” Daria said. “You hear me?”
“Yeah, Dar. I hear you.”
The laughter again, smug and hateful chuckle, and whatever the guy closest to Spyder said was spoken almost loud enough for Niki to hear. Spyder raised her head slowly, and Niki imagined she could clearly see the anger glistening in her eyes. The guy leaned closer, seemed to whisper something in her ear, and then his friends sniggered.
“I fucking mean it, man.” Daria gave up on the lighter, exasperated, tossed it out of the van and disposable pink plastic clattered across the pavement. “We don’t need you getting your ass kicked tonight by a pack of bulletheads.”
But Keith was already moving, quick around the driver’s side, the door jerked open, and he pulled a dented aluminum baseball bat from behind the seat, black tape strapped around the handle.
“There he goes,” Theo said, both hands up, helpless, furious gesture, and Niki knew this was something else practiced, something else played over and over, something else she had no part in.
“Stop him, Mort!”
“Oh yeah, right. Fuck you, Dar. You stop him.”
“Goddammit,” and Daria was out of the van and running to catch up with Keith. Niki hadn’t even seen her reach for the tire iron that she held clutched in both hands, close to her chest, as she ran.
“Jesus Christ, why don’t we just call the cops?” Theo pleaded, “This one time, Mort, why don’t we please just call the fucking cops?” and she sat down on the curb, kicked at Daria’s dead, discarded lighter.
Yeah, Niki wanted to say. Good idea.
Mort sighed, a loud and vaporous sound, his face helpless as Theo’s, almost as fed up.
“You guys just wait here, okay.”
“No, Mort. It is not okay,” Theo spat back. “Goddamn it. One night you’re gonna get killed playing Mr. Third Musketeer, and it is not fucking okay…” But he had already gone, chasing Keith and Daria through overlapping pools of streetlight.
4.
When the three jocks showed up, Spyder had been thinking about bed and the flower and sweat smell of Robin’s naked body, contentedly enduring the idiot argument between Tristan and a chubby girl named Darlene over whether the Sisters of Mercy were better pre-or post-Vision Thing, with or without Patricia Morrison. Most of the evening’s earlier doubts had faded, dimmed almost to irrelevant mist, and she’d been about to tell them both that they sounded like comic-book fanboys, fussing over which superhero had the lamest sidekick or the biggest dick.
And now these three in matching green and gold UAB baseball jackets, haircuts like a lawn mown too close to the earth and eyes full of piggy stupid trouble.
“See, Tony? Man, I told you there were dykes over here,” the tallest said, blond hair and Nazi-blue eyes.
Tristan and Darlene shut up and stepped out of their way. In the Celica, Byron and Walter paused in their own affairs, Byron up front alone and Walter in the backseat with a boy dressed like a deb from Hell’s cotillion; Spyder could feel their uneasiness seeping sticky cold through the windshield.
“Goddamn,” said the jock named Tony, and Spyder felt Robin shudder then, saw the frightened recognition on her face. “I guess you were right, man.”