…and long-leggity beasties…

And then the pain between her shoulders, the shearing fire that left her breathless and wanting to puke, and she yanked the Civic out of Park, never taking her eyes off the wall, not daring to glance into the rearview mirror, as the tires squealed and she backed out into the street.

T he sun down an hour, first long hour of cold, and Keith Barry sat on one end of the old loading platform; no trains on these tracks now, just the rotten boards and brick and concrete crumbling down to grit and dust, the barrel that the bums and junkies kept their stingy little fire inside. He sat with Anthony Jones and his banged-up Honer harmonica, and they’d been playing Tom Waits and Leadbelly for the rambling empty stretch of railyard, the dry, whispering weeds between the ties and broken glass and a stripped pickup burned to a red-brown cicada shell. Keith plucked his pawnshop twelve-string and Anthony Jones’s harp cried like all the ghost whistles of all the trains that would never rumble past this platform again.

“Almighty Christ,” Long Joey muttered, Long Joey who stood in the crunchy gravel ballast and stomped his feet like someone trying to make wine from stones. “Too damn cold for November. We all gonna have blue balls by Thanksgiving.”

The last chords of “Gun Street Girl” and then Keith laid the guitar down beside him, although Anthony let a few more notes straggle from the instrument pressed to his dark lips. Keith took a big swallow from the half-empty pint of cheap rye whiskey and handed the bottle to Long Joey.

“Maybe this’ll put a little spark back in them,” and Joey grinned his crackhead smile and accepted the bottle in his shaky hands. “Just don’t drop it, okay? Drop it, and I’ll have to kick your ass.”

Anthony finished his solo and wiped the harmonica on a flannel sleeve. “And then you give it here, L.J.”

Keith had been at the platform since late afternoon, since he’d made his connection, cooked and fixed in the men’s room of the Jack’s Hamburgers on First Avenue. He carried the twelve-string in a case so beat-up that it stayed together only by the sticky grace of a roll or two worth of duct tape and some copper wire he’d strung through the holes where the hinges used to be. He also kept his works in the case, hidden inside a compartment intended for picks and capos; Keith never used a pick, relied instead on his sure and callused fingers. He had enough stuff left for one more fix, tucked safely inside his left boot.

There were twelve or thirteen men on the platform tonight, most of them huddled around the flickering barrel, but he was the only one into junk. Most of them were winos or dirtbag crackheads, street addicts too far down the food chain to even have house fees. They bought their bits of rock from the cruisers who pushed from their cars. Every now and then he caught the caustic stink of someone’s pipe over the smell of piss and booze and burning wood.

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.

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 or a rut or pothole. At least they hadn’t gone directly down Morris from Daria’s place, hadn’t jounced over all those goddamned cobblestones. The rear of the van was sectioned off with a sagging barrier of chain-link fence, soldered and bolted into place, and there was more junk back there. Niki thought briefly about scooting the crate closer to the wire, close enough that she could hook her fingers through the diamond spaces and hold on.

“There, Mort. Turn right there,” Daria ordered, pointed one insistent finger at a side street. She was sitting on a huge red Sears Craftsman tool chest behind the driver’s side, straddling it, hanging on to the back of Mort’s seat. The tools inside the chest clanked and clattered, and Niki imagined that it was the sound of her bones and teeth and kidneys.

Mort missed the turn, and Daria slammed her fist into the back of his headrest.

“Goddammit, Mort! Are you fucking deaf?”

“There’s no left turn there, Dar-”

“Did you see any fuckin’ cops?! Who would’ve given a shit? Huh?”