Silk - Caitlin R. Kiernan [58]
Long Joey passed the bottle to Anthony, noticeably emptier for its time in his hands, and then he started stomping his feet again, pulling hard at his earlobes. Long Joey was a puller and sometimes his ears were raw and caked with dried blood. He liked to talk, but never talked about anything but crack and the women he either imagined or lied about having fucked.
“I told this bitch L.J. don’t put no jimmie cap on his dick, but she just kept on whining about the big A, so I finally slapped her around until she shut the hell up.”
“And you just took you some pussy, ain’t that right, L.J.?” and Anthony grinned and winked at Keith.
“Goddamn right. Goddamn right.”
Anthony passed the bottle back to Keith, just enough left for one more round; the rye felt warm burning down his throat, settling in his belly.
“You still seein’ that pretty little girl with the fire-engine hair?” Anthony asked, and for a second Keith was too busy looking through the neck of the bottle, strange and useless telescope that looked out on nowhere, to answer.
“Yeah,” he said at last. “Yeah, I guess so.”
“You guess so? What’s with that, you guess so?”
When Anthony Jones talked, he waved the Honer in the cold air like a conductor’s wand.
“You either down with that redheaded lady or you ain’t. There ain’t no in-betweenin’ pussy.”
“Man, I had me some fine white pussy last week….” L.J. started, but Anthony cut him off with a knifeblade glance, stabbed the harmonica at his heart.
“Why don’t you shut the hell up for a little while?”
“You think I’m lyin’? You think I gotta lie ’bout gettin’ white-bitch pussy?”
“I think I’m tired of listening to you talk trash.”
And L.J. looked offended and hurt, pulled hard at his right earlobe and wandered off, mumbling to himself.
“That nigger can’t even get hisself a skeezer these days,” and Anthony laughed and stared off towards the darkened windows of the Eagle Syrup plant. This side of town was a wasteland of empty warehouses and abandoned factories, a prelude to the miles of derelict steel mills further west.
“I just can’t seem to stay out of the shit house with Daria these days.”
Anthony Jones didn’t make any sign he’d heard, still gazing across the tracks and the street at the ridiculous giant honey jar perched atop the roof of the syrup plant.
“That her name?” he asked. “Daria?”
“Yeah, man, that’s her name.”
“She the same girl that’s in that band with you?”
“Yeah. Shit, she is the band. She’s gonna dump me and find someone else to play guitar for her. She ought’a fuckin’ dump me.”
“Man, you just on yourself tonight, that’s all,” and then he looked quickly at his feet, scuffed shoes from one of the missions, rubbed at his eyes. “You got gold in them fingers.”
Keith held his hands out, stared into his palms like he could read his past or future in the lines etched there.
“She takes a load of shit, man.”
“I hear you,” Anthony said. “I do hear you. Had me a good woman long time ago. Some pretty little babies, too.”
Keith passed the almost empty bottle back to him and picked up his guitar again, ran his fingers once across the strings and started tuning, gently twisting each rusted peg in his magic fingers. And Anthony Jones drained the last of the whiskey before he hurled the useless bottle at the darkness that lay like sleeping dogs between the platform and the syrup plant.
2.
Niki Ky had finally found a place to sit in the back of the van, a plastic milk crate covered over with a warped piece of plywood. The crate was mostly full of cords and cables, rubber black coaxial serpents that stuck out through the checkerboard holes in the sides and bit at her legs every time the van hit a bump