Too close, sick irony or coincidence, and Niki hoped nothing showed on her face. “You guys were real close?” she asked.
“Yeah, I guess,” and Spyder released Niki’s hand, laid both hers palm-up on the counter, empty offering to no one and nothing in particular. “We hung out at Rush-ton Park when I was still a kid, you know, hanging out on Highland with the hustlers and runaways. It was nice, in the summer.
“Andy didn’t hustle, though. He had money, money his mom had left him when she died. Just enough to keep him going until he started getting sick…” and she paused, looked up at the ceiling, ornate plaster molded and painted a green so deep it was almost black.
“Andy’s mom was great. She knew he was queer and all, that he’d gotten AIDS, but she was still great. She used to cook us these big-ass Sunday dinners, used to let him bring home street kids on cold nights and shit. It’s unfucking believable, Niki, that anyone ever gets parents that cool, you know?”
“Yeah,” Niki said, and how many months now since she’d seen her own mother and father, anyway? She’d called her mother twice from motel rooms, just to let them know she was okay, but never stayed on the line long enough that home could sneak its way through the connection and find her.
“Anyway, he left me a whole bunch of money when he died, enough to start Weird Trappings and keep it going a while…
“I stayed with him, you know, at the end. He went blind finally and toxo got his brain. But he’d made me promise that I wouldn’t let him die alone, and he didn’t.”
Niki swallowed and wanted to hold Spyder, but instead her eyes wandered away, afraid: Daria noisily steaming milk, an old photograph of a trolley car on the wall, finally down to her lap. Anything but beautiful, unfathomable Spyder, simple as a single thread knotted over and over and suddenly too much to grasp, like particle physics or her own mortality. And then Daria was setting their drinks on the bar, Niki’s in a crystal demitasse, pitch black and a perfect skim of créma on top, Spyder’s in a tall glass and the color of a quadroon’s skin.
“Hey, you guys okay?” she asked, and Niki nodded, but Spyder only looked out at the street and wrapped her tattooed hands around the warm glass. “Christ, it’s this fucking depressing-ass music,” and Niki noticed it for the first time, blues she didn’t recognize. Could tell from Daria’s eyes that she knew it had nothing to do with the music, but she changed the CD, anyhow. Exchanged the blues for Joan Jett, and one of the kids in the back stood up and yelled, “All right! Goddamn right!”
“Dork,” Daria muttered under her breath.
“Thanks,” Niki said.
“No problem. Listen, how’d you guys like to come to our show this weekend? We’re part of this big deal at Dante’s Saturday night, in Atlanta. Three or four bands, and someone from Atlantic is supposed to be there, so I’m fucking freaked, you know? It’d be really cool if you guys could come. I’ll put you on the guest list.”
“I don’t know,” Spyder said.
“Maybe you could ride up in the van with us if you wanted,” and Niki couldn’t tell if Daria was just trying to help, give them something do, another excuse to get Spyder out of the house, or if she really wanted them along. Or both, perhaps.
“We’ll think about it and let you know, okay?” Niki said and sipped her Cubano, sweet and scalding. Spyder hadn’t even tried her almond milk, just held onto the glass and stared out the window at the gray street.
“Sure,” Daria said. “Just let me know if you wanna go. Look, I gotta go check on the roaster, but I’ll be right back.”
And when she was gone, Niki took another sip of her coffee, glanced out the window, through THE FIDGETY BEAN painted careful and the letters two feet tall, words running backwards from this side of the glass.
“What you looking at?”
“Nothing,” Spyder said. “I thought I saw someone I knew, that’s all. But it was someone else.”
And then she tasted her milk and left Niki to stare at the street by herself.
He knew that she had seen him, that she had caught him watching her, frozen, too afraid to move, and Byron Langly walked quickly, shoes too loud (like she might hear), clothes too black (like she might see); finally stood out of the wind in one of the alleys that led up to First Avenue and Weird Trappings. His heart beating too fast, breathless, bright fear and adrenaline ache, muscles knotting like a bad dose of ecstasy or acid and now the strych was working on him.
He had not been back to his apartment in days, not since Billy said the cops had been by asking about him and maybe he should lay low for a while, and then Billy had mentioned seeing Spyder at the Steak and Egg, said he’d talked to her the day before, day after the night Byron had left Robin lying in the snow, bleeding and poisoned and helpless against the skitterers. But he had called the ambulance, right? He hadn’t abandoned her. He’d hunted a pay phone through that fucking, blinding storm, and he’d called 911, even though he’d wanted to run straight home, even though his hands and face were numb and he’d kept catching glimpses and skulking hints from the corners of his watering eyes.
“She left in a hurry,” Billy had said. “Like that girl’s ass was on the way to a fire or some shit,” and then they’d both seen the thing creeping toward him across Billy’s yellow and green candy-striped coffee table, eight busy legs and its body like a black pearl.
Billy had run to find the can of Raid he kept under the sink to kill cockroaches, but Byron had smashed it beneath a heavy ashtray, could see the widow’s ruined body pressed between cut glass and painted wood, its life and deadly juices and a little movement left in its legs. So he’d ground the ashtray hard against the table, scratching the lacquered finish, had put all his weight on the damned thing until Billy had grabbed his shoulders. And then he’d sat on the sofa, crying again, holding the ashtray like a shield, cigarette butts and ash spilled all over his lap, parts of the spider stuck to the glass and the rest smeared on the table.
And then he’d left the apartment, and he hadn’t been back. Walking the streets like a bum and lingering outside Weird Trappings, keeping track of the dark inside, living off coffee and cigarettes and junk food from the gas stations and convenience stores, sugar and salt and caffeine. Sleeping in doorways and almost freezing to death, trying not to see himself reflected in the windows he walked past.
Maybe, if he could find Walter, they could figure something out. But Walter hadn’t answered his phone and no one had seen him in days. And everything twisting inside kept telling him to run, get a bus ticket to Atlanta; there were people there he could stay with for a while, people who wouldn’t ask too many questions.
But he couldn’t run, did not know why, if he was too afraid or not scared enough, but he couldn’t. Could only wait.
When his heart had slowed, exhausted beat, and the fear faded to the steady background white noise it’d been for a week, he moved on.
2.
Finally, Niki had talked Spyder into going to the show, but only by agreeing that they’d take the Celica instead of riding along in the van. That way, they could leave when they wanted, which seemed important to Spyder, that she not feel trapped, restrained by Stiff Kitten’s itinerary, by whatever plans Daria and the band might have. That she could leave if and when she wanted to.
“No problem with the car going that far?” and Spyder had said no, that she drove to Atlanta and even as far as Athens sometimes, once all the way to New Orleans, and it had only overheated a couple of times.
So Niki had called Daria, and on Saturday afternoon, almost twilight, they met the band around back of a store that sold baby stuff. Keith and Daria were loading the van, instruments and the big rolling flight cases, amps, Theo sitting in the front seat, filing her nails and listening to a Lemonheads tape.