Silk - Caitlin R. Kiernan [7]
Daria pushed open the gates to Baby Heaven, and there was warmer air and real light on the other side, the steamy hiss of radiators and rows of fluorescents suspended from the high ceiling, a couple of shadeless old floor lamps like tiny suns on gooseneck stalks.
And Mort, sitting behind his drums in the middle of the mostly empty room, framed in amps and completely absorbed in the business of rolling a more than respectable joint from the Ziploc baggie of pot balanced on his knee. He looked up, saw Daria and smiled his wide, perfect smile, flashed broad teeth stained dingy with tobacco and neglect.
“Daria,” he said, the way a chintzy magician might say “Presto-chango!” or “Abracadabra!,” and made a grand show of tipping his ratty baseball cap in her direction.
Theo, Mort’s girlfriend, latest true love of his life, was camped out in the permanently reclined La-Z-Boy chair halfway across the room, smoking and prowling through a stack of Duplex Planet and old Rolling Stone magazines. Theo had come down from Nashville late in the spring. She dressed like Buddy Holly with a stumbling hangover and claimed that she was an artist, although Daria had yet to actually see anything she’d painted or drawn or photographed. She wore her hair piled high in an oily pompadour, dyed so painfully black it sometimes seemed almost blue.
Daria closed the door behind her, shutting out the shadows and the clammy stairwell chill.
“He’s not here yet, is he,” she said, no room for question marks in her voice; Mort shrugged his bony shoulders in reply and went back to rolling his smoke. She watched as he sealed the paper with a single expert lick, twisted the ends tight between thumb and forefinger, and tucked the bomber in snug behind his left ear.
“I am so surprised,” and she set her bass on the dusty hardwood floor, sat herself down next to it and flipped up the slightly rust-scabbed latches on the big case. The inside was lined with nappy wine-colored velvet, a burgundy cradle for the black Fender Precision she’d rescued years ago from a local hockshop. From her knapsack, she pulled the shoulder strap she’d cut from an old belt, midnight leather and studs like robot teeth, and fastened it to the instrument, slipped her head through. She removed a snaky coil of cable and plugged the quarter-inch jack into the bass.
“Mort, you are going to tell her, aren’t you?” Theo asked, looking up from the jumble of pages in her lap. Daria froze, faint prickle of dread stroking the back of her neck, the deepest part of her gut.
“Yeah, I’m gonna tell her. Christ,” but instead, he leaned forward and began to fiddle nervously with a wing nut on the snare’s tripod stand.
“Tell me what, Mort?”
“I was gonna tell you that Keith’s pulled another fucking boner on us.”
The prickling inside her swelled, ballooned into raw and gnawing alarm. Keith Barry was Stiff Kitten’s guitarist, had in fact been the one who’d approached Daria the year before, shortly after the band’s original vocalist got wasted on vodka and speed and tried to play limbo with her Camaro and a moving freight train. The wreck was local legend, the sort of thing that was destined to be savored for generations, and although it had felt a little strange at first, being the replacement part for a dead girl, she’d jumped at the chance.
Of course she’d known that Keith Barry was a junky, that he’d been shooting smack since high school, but no idea that she would wind up falling for him ass over tits. Just that he could do things with his guitar that left her speechless, could pull sounds from the strings that left her crying like a goddamned old woman, like the child she spent so much time trying to forget she’d ever been.
“Will you please just tell me what you’re talking about, Mort?”
“Keith told me this morning that he’s sublet this place to some guys in another band.” Mort had stopped fussing with the wing nut, sat very still now and stared up at the ceiling, past the ceiling to some invisible point beyond.
And the