Silk - Caitlin R. Kiernan [110]
Jobless Claude was there too, watching them lug their crap out of the practice space upstairs, Baby Heaven he called it, smoking Camels and complaining about Theo’s taste in music.
When they were done, Keith locked the rear doors. Mort had been tinkering with something under the hood, and he cursed once when he bumped his head.
“Are you finished fucking around up there?” Daria shouted, and he grunted some sort of affirmation, slammed the hood closed and the whole van shuddered.
“If we don’t throw a rod this trip, it’s gonna be a goddamn miracle, Dar.”
Daria ignored him, dire oracle of grease and socket wrenches, turned instead to Spyder and Niki. “Hey, do you guys mind if Claude rides up with you? It’d make a lot more room in the shitmobile.”
And Niki didn’t think to ask Spyder. “Sure,” she said. “That’s cool,” and Spyder only shrugged.
“I don’t eat much,” Claude said and laughed, clean laugh that made Niki feel more at ease than she’d felt in days, in weeks, maybe.
“Well, look. You guys just follow, but if we get separated, you’ve got the directions I gave you, right? Dante’s isn’t hard to find.”
“I know where it is,” Spyder said. “I’ve been there,” not helpful or reassuring, more like someone had said, Spyder, honey, you couldn’t find your way around Atlanta with a road map, a compass, and an Indian guide, and Niki began to wonder just how bad an idea this had been.
“We’ll be fine,” she said, and Daria hugged her, nodded, and then they were all piling into the van, Mort sliding the side door shut, and the last one in.
“And turn off that crap,” Niki plainly heard, Daria speaking loud over Evan Dando and “Mrs. Robinson.”
A few minutes later, Claude stuffed into the backseat and talking excitedly about the time he’d seen the Sugarcubes at Dante’s, and Spyder ignoring him, slipping a Joy Division tape into the deck. Niki started the car, driving because Spyder wasn’t supposed to on the Mellaril, and they followed the white van through the city toward the interstate.
Absolutely no danger of losing the van, of not keeping up, even in Spyder’s grumbling Toyota. Niki followed close behind the Ford, maybe too close, but Spyder’s silence was making her nervous. When she could read the stickers plastered all over the back doors of the van, entirely covering its bumper, she would back off. Catching whiffs of the Econoline’s dark exhaust through the window Spyder kept cracked despite the cold outside, burning oil up there for sure; she wondered if Mort was right and they’d all end up stranded somewhere, middle of nowhere, between Birmingham and Atlanta.
On their way out of town, she’d noticed the spot where the Vega had broken down, and how long ago had that been now, almost three weeks? Better part of a month, then, and how could it have possibly been that long? And at the same time, the feeling that it must have been much longer, must have been months since that night.
“Why’d you get those tattoos?” Claude asked Spyder, asked like a ghost from the dark backseat. “It must have hurt.”
“I don’t feel like talking,” Spyder said. “I’m getting a headache.” She turned up the stereo, and Claude was silent for a while.
And the miles rolled by, distance marked off in reflective yellow paint and the changing of cassette tapes.
They crossed the state line, welcome to Georgia and a peach on the sign that made Niki think of a big pink butt, and she was getting too close to the van again, could read “Picasso Trigger Sodomized My Honor Student” and “Five-Eight,” “WHPK Chicago” and “My Other Car Is A Penis.” She relaxed, lifted her foot off the accelerator a little and backed off.
And the miles rolled by.
A long time ago, turn of the century or before, Dante’s had been a grain mill, a place for grinding kernels of wheat and corn and barley into flour. Rough-hewn chunks of native stone, glinting mica schist, and huge pine beams. And after that, it had sat empty for years, decades, until someone had opened the club, had taken advantage of the mill’s layout, three main levels,