Silk - Caitlin R. Kiernan [95]
“No,” she said. “Is it deep?”
“Ass-high to a Watusi Indian chief,” he said and rubbed at those raw eyes.
“What time is it?” Niki asked, and he shrugged, hell-if-I-know-or-care shrug. On the mattress, Daria opened her eyes, grumbled something indecipherable and shut them again, covered her head with the pillow.
Keith yawned loudly, lion yawn, and went to one of the holes punched through the Sheetrock, reached inside and pulled out what looked to Niki like a leather shaving kit. He sat down against the wall, the hole gaping like a toothless mouth above his head, his dirty hair.
“Daria says your folks are from Vietnam,” he said and unzipped the little case. “North or South?”
“Yeah,” Niki answered, and “South. My mother was born in Saigon. My father is from Tayninh.”
“Vi-et-nam,” Keith Barry said, drawing out the word slow, syllable by syllable, his heavy Southern drawl making the name something new. And he took a small baggie of white powder from the case, poured a tiny bit into a tarnished spoon, twist-tied the bag shut again with a rubber band. Mixed a little of his spit with the powder.
“Yeah, my dad was there right at the start of that war,” he said and began to heat the underside of the spoon with a disposable lighter. Niki had never actually watched anyone shoot up before, tried not to stare, tried not to seem rude by looking away.
“He was Army, two tours,” and after the powder had turned to a dark and bubbling liquid, he wrapped a green and yellow bungee cord tight around his bicep, thumped hard at his forearm with one index finger while the heroin cooled. “Took a bullet at Nhatrang during the Tet Offensive.”
“I don’t know where that is,” Niki said, and cringed inside when he took the needle from the case, old-fashioned glass syringe that he had to screw the needle onto.
“Shit. Neither do I. Just one of those places he used to talk about, that’s all it means to me.”
Keith drew the heroin carefully, carefully, every drop in through the needle, tapped the syringe and pushed out the air bubbles. He set the needle against his skin, skin scarred with tracks like a pox, needle aimed away from Niki, toward his heart.
“He used to talk about the war a lot. Had a medal and everything ’cause he got a foot blown off.”
And he pricked the skin, shifted his thumb slightly, easing the pressure on the plunger; Niki clearly saw the dark flow of his blood back into the syringe, the billow darker than crimson in the shadowy apartment before he injected. When the syringe was empty, he slipped the needle out, removed the bungee cord. Closed his eyes and inhaled loudly.
“It doesn’t hurt?” Niki asked him.
Nothing for a moment, and then he exhaled, slowly.
“Babe, it only hurts when the well runs dry,” he smiled, and for just a second looked so much younger, so much more vulnerable, more than a fucked-up junky rushing after his wake-up fix. And she could almost see in him what Daria might see, glimpse of something that Niki had heard in his music the night before, someone he kept safe and out of sight.
“It only hurts when it ain’t there.”
And she thought of the things she’d read, secondhand life, William Burroughs and something about Billie Holiday. And how little any of it meant, how she understood that she’d never understand, unless she let the needle kiss her own skin one day, and another day after that, until the junk became as much a part of her as air or water or the blood in her veins.
“Most of this kit was my dad’s, too,” Keith said, and when he saw the surprise on Niki’s face, he laughed. “No shit. They sent him back short a foot, but he had that fucking medal and a hell of a morphine habit.”
And then neither of them said anything for a while, just the wind outside talking to itself, and Keith stared past her out the window.
“Should we wake them up?” she asked, finally.
“Sure,” he said. “Bunch’a lazy-ass motherfuckers.”
“And then what?” Niki asked, and Keith grinned.
“Bet you never built a snowman, New Orleans girl.”
“No,” she said. “I never did.”
After the