Silk - Caitlin R. Kiernan [5]
Tailpipe farts and the gentle rev of engines made in Japan and Germany, the office monkeys calling it a day, reclaiming their cars from the parking garages spaced out along the length of Morris Avenue. Daria closed her eyes, exhaling slow smoke through her nostrils, listening to the bumpity sound of wheels on the polished cobblestone unevenness of the street. Behind her, behind the offices, the sudden air-horn blat and dinosaur-herd rumble of a freight train, hurrying along one or another of the six tracks that divided downtown Birmingham into north and south.
Daria opened her eyes, squinting through the matted tangle of her hair and the soft gray veil of smoke that hung like a shapeless ghost, undisturbed in the chilly twilight air. She kept her hair long, down past her shoulders and cut no particular way, bleached clean of any trace of its natural color and dyed cherry red with Kool-Aid or, when she could afford it, the Manic Panic cream rinse she bought around the corner at Spyder Baxter’s shop.
The men brought more peanuts out to the curb. There would be a white panel truck soon to take them away.
She glanced at her wrist, at the clunky silver dreadnought of a man’s wristwatch she’d found a year or so ago, groundscore, lying in the road and obviously run over but still counting off the seconds on a liquid-crystal display the color of dirty motor oil. She’d worn it continuously ever since, when she slept or showered, every time and everywhere the band played, and it had become a sort of running joke, a bizarre contest of wills, whether Daria would eventually devise a torture that even the watch could not survive or if perhaps it might go on forever.
Beneath its scratched and pitted face, the watch read five fifteen p.m. in squarish numbers and that meant fifteen more minutes before she was late for practice, less than seven hours until her graveyard shift at the coffeehouse began. She pulled a last drag from the cigarette and crushed it out on the sidewalk, thumbed the butt halfway across the street, narrowly missing a Nissan’s tinted windshield.
“Three points,” she said out loud, smoke leaking from between her lips, and stood up, shouldering the knapsack, brushing sidewalk tracks off her jeans. The sun was almost down now, just the slimmest fireball rind silhouetting the city’s brick and steel and glass carapace. Daria hugged herself, shivered as she buttoned the sweater’s only two remaining buttons. When she was done, she slapped her hands together a couple of times to get the blood flowing again, picked up her bass, and crossed the street.
Spyder Baxter’s shop looked like something displaced, something stolen from the streets of New Orleans maybe, and wedged in tight between Steel City Pawn and First Avenue Rent-2-Own. Daria paused before the display window, fly-specked and ages of dust gathered in the corners like little dunes, parabolic drifts against the smeared glass and rusted frame and a handful of dead bugs thrown in for good measure. Weird Trappings’ handpainted sign swayed and squeaked faintly on its uneven chains, approximate Gothic in clumsy black and purple slashes across whitewashed tin.
Something new, or at least something that hadn’t been there yesterday, caught her attention. Or maybe she simply hadn’t noticed the album before, Anthology of Tom Waits, almost hidden in the clutter, the confusion that Spyder let pass for window dressing. Used leather jackets, tie-dyes and Guatemalan trinkets,