The salvation ink bleeding beneath her skin, beautiful scar to stand against all the other scars, the one on her face and the scars past counting in her head.
Outside, the wind gusted and the white flakes buffeted the window of Keith’s apartment. Niki Ky made a soft sound in her sleep, like something a word might leave behind, and Spyder held her and watched the snow until she could stop remembering.
3.
In the morning, gray only a few shades lighter than the night, Niki was awakened by the sound of water, the distinctive spatter of boy piss on porcelain. While they’d slept, Spyder had moved closer, had gripped Niki’s right hand so tightly that the fingers had gone stiff and numb. She looked around the room, Daria alone now on the mattress and Mort lying on his side, still snoring. Theo in a cattight ball of strange and mismatched fabrics on the other side of the room, but no sign of Keith. Down the hall, a toilet flushed and then footsteps, and he strode through the doorway, twice as rumpled as the night before. Carnation splotches beneath his hard eyes, rubbing his big hands together.
“Mornin’,” he said. “You looked out the window yet?”
Niki glanced at the snow heaped on the sill, perfect cross section of the drift that had grown as high during the night as gravity would allow.
“No,” she said. “Is it deep?”
“Ass-high to a Watusi Indian chief,” he said and rubbed at those raw eyes.
“What time is it?” Niki asked, and he shrugged, hell-if-I-know-or-care shrug. On the mattress, Daria opened her eyes, grumbled something indecipherable and shut them again, covered her head with the pillow.
Keith yawned loudly, lion yawn, and went to one of the holes punched through the Sheetrock, reached inside and pulled out what looked to Niki like a leather shaving kit. He sat down against the wall, the hole gaping like a toothless mouth above his head, his dirty hair.
“Daria says your folks are from Vietnam,” he said and unzipped the little case. “North or South?”
“Yeah,” Niki answered, and “South. My mother was born in Saigon. My father is from Tayninh.”
“Vi-et-nam,” Keith Barry said, drawing out the word slow, syllable by syllable, his heavy Southern drawl making the name something new. And he took a small baggie of white powder from the case, poured a tiny bit into a tarnished spoon, twist-tied the bag shut again with a rubber band. Mixed a little of his spit with the powder.
“Yeah, my dad was there right at the start of that war,” he said and began to heat the underside of the spoon with a disposable lighter. Niki had never actually watched anyone shoot up before, tried not to stare, tried not to seem rude by looking away.
“He was Army, two tours,” and after the powder had turned to a dark and bubbling liquid, he wrapped a green and yellow bungee cord tight around his bicep, thumped hard at his forearm with one index finger while the heroin cooled. “Took a bullet at Nhatrang during the Tet Offensive.”
“I don’t know where that is,” Niki said, and cringed inside when he took the needle from the case, old-fashioned glass syringe that he had to screw the needle onto.
“Shit. Neither do I. Just one of those places he used to talk about, that’s all it means to me.”
Keith drew the heroin carefully, carefully, every drop in through the needle, tapped the syringe and pushed out the air bubbles. He set the needle against his skin, skin scarred with tracks like a pox, needle aimed away from Niki, toward his heart.
“He used to talk about the war a lot. Had a medal and everything ’cause he got a foot blown off.”
And he pricked the skin, shifted his thumb slightly, easing the pressure on the plunger; Niki clearly saw the dark flow of his blood back into the syringe, the billow darker than crimson in the shadowy apartment before he injected. When the syringe was empty, he slipped the needle out, removed the bungee cord. Closed his eyes and inhaled loudly.
“It doesn’t hurt?” Niki asked him.
Nothing for a moment, and then he exhaled, slowly.
“Babe, it only hurts when the well runs dry,” he smiled, and for just a second looked so much younger, so much more vulnerable, more than a fucked-up junky rushing after his wake-up fix. And she could almost see in him what Daria might see, glimpse of something that Niki had heard in his music the night before, someone he kept safe and out of sight.
“It only hurts when it ain’t there.”
And she thought of the things she’d read, secondhand life, William Burroughs and something about Billie Holiday. And how little any of it meant, how she understood that she’d never understand, unless she let the needle kiss her own skin one day, and another day after that, until the junk became as much a part of her as air or water or the blood in her veins.
“Most of this kit was my dad’s, too,” Keith said, and when he saw the surprise on Niki’s face, he laughed. “No shit. They sent him back short a foot, but he had that fucking medal and a hell of a morphine habit.”
And then neither of them said anything for a while, just the wind outside talking to itself, and Keith stared past her out the window.
“Should we wake them up?” she asked, finally.
“Sure,” he said. “Bunch’a lazy-ass motherfuckers.”
“And then what?” Niki asked, and Keith grinned.
“Bet you never built a snowman, New Orleans girl.”
“No,” she said. “I never did.”
After the icebox of the building, the cold outside wasn’t such a shock, except when the wind gusted, came roaring at them around the corner of a building, up a deserted street, sluiced through garbage-can alleyways. A wind that made Niki think of places she’d never been, Chicago wind, Manhattan wind, wind that flayed without bothering to peel back skin and muscle first, that cut straight through no matter how many layers of clothes.
There’d been no hope for the van, half-buried by the Dumpster, so they’d all borrowed layers from Keith’s ragpile boxes, set out on foot, and when they passed the smoked-glass window of a shoe-shine and repair shop, Niki thought they looked like the shambling survivors of some Arctic apocalypse, ice not fire, Robert Frost’s second choice. Tube socks for gloves, flannel like the hides of plaid antelope, and Niki had found a second pair of jeans, Levi’s that would have been huge on Keith or Mort, cinched around her waist with an old extension cord the color of a neon-orange warning.
They built their skinny snowman on the sidewalk outside the Compass Bank on Twentieth Street, just a little taller than Niki and Daria, three uneven tiers and he listed a little to the right. Mort found limestone gravel for the eyes, an old windshield-wiper blade for an industrial Cyrano, snapped sticks off a frozen shrub for twiggy arms.
“Ugly fucker,” Keith said, and then he’d made the snowman a bifurcated dick with another twig.
“You are so sick,” Theo said, and so he smacked her in the back of the head with a snowball, as big as a grapefruit. The one she lobbed back at him was only half as big, packed harder; it missed Keith altogether and caught Daria right between the eyes. Keith started laughing so hard that he had to sit down, holding his stomach, sinking up to his waist in the snow.
“Fuck you, asshole,” and Daria had found some wetter snow in the gutter, muddy snow, and a few seconds later she’d nailed him and Keith was spitting and coughing, but still laughing so hard he couldn’t talk.
Spyder had sat down beside the bulbous lower tier of the snowman, had pulled out his stick-dick and was busy using it to trace swirling lines in the snow crust. Niki joined her, sat as close as she dared, remembering the awkward kiss the night before, still just as confused, still just as attracted. The designs Spyder drew in the snow reminded Niki of aboriginal rock paintings or sloppy paisley.