Silk - Caitlin R. Kiernan [12]
“I’m taking a cig break,” she said, stepping past Bunky, handing him the soppy rag she’d been using to wipe down the bar.
“Oh. Yeah, sure,” Bunky said, sounding sullen and supremely put upon.
“Try not to hurt yourself for five minutes.”
As she walked away, Bunky mumbled, muttered something she didn’t quite catch, but enough meaning conveyed in the sound of his voice that the words didn’t much matter anyway. Russell looked up from the chessboard, one white plastic bishop in his hand, flashed her a grandfatherly scowl, his everybody play nice or else face, bushy white Gandalf eyebrows knotting like epileptic caterpillars.
Daria shrugged, dredged up half an apologetic smile that she hoped would pass for sincere. Tonight, it was the best she had and was going to have to do.
She fed two dollars and fifty cents into the cigarette machine, too much to pay, but it was her own fault for not having picked up a pack on the way over after practice. A booth she liked near the back was still empty, back where the two men who looked like professors and the black woman sat talking in their shroud of pipe smoke. Daria slid into the cool Naugahyde, fake leather the unlikely color of eggplant, and tapped the fresh red Marlboro box hard against the palm of her hand before peeling away the cellophane wrapping.
“Mmhmmm,” the woman said. “In the Sumerian and Babylonian fragments. The Semitic tribes were still worshipping their rocks and trees.”
Daria had purposefully sat down with her back to the discussion, had always hated listening in on other people’s conversations, even by accident.
“Watch her, Henry,” one of the men warned the other, his voice low and full of mock admonition. “Let her go and change the subject now and she’ll have you arguing patriarchal conspiracy theories ’til dawn.”
She lit her cigarette and thought about moving back up to the bar, decided instead to concentrate on the music, the big Sony speaker rigged up almost directly over her booth, and not the voices behind her. But the Alison Moyet disc she’d put on was ending, the last song over, and she could see Bunky making straight for the little stereo sandwiched in between the soft-drink cooler and the coffee grinder. Bunky had recently developed a fondness for an old Johnny Cash album that bordered on the fanatic and stuck it in every chance he got.
“I mistrust that word,” the woman said.
“Which word, Miriam?” one of the men asked. “Which word don’t you trust?”
“Demon,” the woman replied.
Daria shut her eyes, holding the first deep drag off the Marlboro like a drowning man’s last, useless breath of air, wishing the smoke was something stronger than tobacco. Overhead, Johnny Cash began to sing, rumbling voice, broken glass and gravel and the time when she was seven, almost eight, and her father had driven her all the way to Memphis just to see Graceland.
She opened her eyes and exhaled, forced the smoke out through her nostrils.
“God, Bunky, we have gotta talk,” and she reached to stub out her cigarette, would finish it later, somewhere free of the song and the argument she’d tried not to overhear. But her hand froze halfway to the ashtray, possum-on-her-grave shudder, and she felt suddenly light-headed, not dizzy, but light, pulled loose, and the pale hairs on the backs of her arms prickled with goose bumps.
How long had it been since she’d thought about that trip, or anything else from that awful year?
You’re just wasted, girl’o, that’s all.
Too much Keith and too much Stiff Kitten,