Silk - Caitlin R. Kiernan [33]
The warm breeze through the windows smells like new hay and cow shit, a faint, syrupy hint of the honeysuckle tangled in the fences that divide pastureland from the henna ribbon of the unpaved road. Dust spins up off the tires and hangs like orange smoke in the morning air behind them; hard gravel nuggets pop and ping off the underbelly of the Pontiac.
“I have to go to the bathroom,” she says, and her dad looks at her in the rearview mirror. “Not much farther. You don’t want to go in the ditch, do you?”
“I can wait,” she says, isn’t sure if she’s telling the truth, not after two strawberry Nehi’s from the styrofoam cooler in the backseat floorboard. She turns away from the window, back to the shoe box of crayola stumps and her big pad of manila drawing paper.
“Well, it’s your call,” he says from the front.
The paper is completely covered, crazy loops and swirls, figure eights and broad smears from crayons skinned and rubbed furiously sideways. Psychedelic, her mother would say if she were here, or abstract, she would say, or impressionistic. A rainbow gutted, turned inside out, and she looks at the back of her dad’s head, his hair dirty, almost to his shoulders now. There’s nothing on the radio but country music stations and preaching stations, and she doesn’t know the words to any of these songs.
“There are some trees up there you could go behind.”
“I said I can wait,” she says again and picks all the broken pieces of black crayon out of the box, arranging them neatly on the seat beside her. With the largest, she begins working across the page from the upper left corner, burying kaleidoscopic chaos beneath perfect, waxy black.
“I’m sorry,” her dad says, and she bears down so hard that the crayon breaks again, crumbles into oily bits that she rubs into the paper with her thumb. Both her hands are stained, the sides of her palms, the tips of her fingers, smudged ocher and sky blue and salmon. Her thumb is the indefinite color of a bruise.
“You don’t have to keep saying that,” she says, older, tireder Daria voice speaking over whatever the child might have said, and he’s staring at her from the rearview mirror, watching her through Keith Barry’s pebble-polished eyes.
The crayon smears on her skin melt and run together, mercuric, drip off and splash the black, and now she’ll have to use more black to hide them.
Something huge that coughs diesel smoke and hickory and rolls across the land on sinuous wheels like centipede legs rattles past the Pontiac, blocking out the sun for the instant before it’s gone, and she looks up, looks where it was, the shining stitches in the red, red earth, and “You go first,” Keith whispers, and uses the blade of his big pocketknife to pry away one of the rotten boards, weathered shimmery gray and splintery. The old wood mousesqueaks and pops free, rust-toothed nails flipped up to the cloudless spring sky.
Keith grins like a guilty weasel, folds his knife away, and the yawning dark slit where the board was sucks him inside the shack, the listing shack behind the store and gas station after she pissed, while her father talks nervous with the man who pumped their gas and wiped dead bugs from the windshield with his wet blue rag.
“C’mon,” her father shouts, and she hears glass and grit scrunching beneath his shoes and it sounds as if he’s being chewed alive in there, ground up like a mouthful of raw hamburger. Mort hesitates, and Maybe, she thinks, maybe he’s thinking about being eaten, too.
“Wait the hell up,” Mort says, and then he’s gone, leaving her alone in the sun and the sour stink of gasoline and the tall grass. More chewing footsteps, growing fainter, and she looks back, down Morris past the warehouses to the railroad, past the rusting water pump and the scrap metal heaped behind the gas station. She wants to call them back, call for her dad.
“Jesus Christ, Dar. Come the fuck on if you’re comin’.”
And then she squeezes herself through the