Part 34 (1/2)
”What if they turn me away? What if they won't pay Malim?”
”Why don't we worry about crossing that particular bridge when it pops up and smacks us in the face?”
”Chance favors the prepared.”
”What the h.e.l.l's that? Were you some sort of f.u.c.king Camp Fire girl or something?”
”I'm just really scared, that's all. And I wish Spyder had left me alone, like I was. I wish she'd left me where I was.
At least there, only a few people didn't want me around.”
”I think I liked you better without the self-pity, Vietnam.”
”That puts you one up on me. I don't think I like me at all.”
” 'My soul is crushed, my spirits sore; I do not like me any more.' ”
”Dorothy Parker,” Niki whispers, half to herself, and smiles, a familiar line or two of poetry almost enough to lift 306 her spirits. ”Daria always hated Dorothy Parker because sometimes the press would get her name wrong and print it 'Dorothy Parker.' Sometimes people writing fan letters even did it. I always told her she ought to be flattered.”
”Who's Daria?” Scarborough asks.
”Never mind,” she says, because she doesn't want to get started trying to explain Daria, what she did and didn't mean, and for all Niki knows, Scarborough Pentecost hates d.y.k.es. ”I'll tell you about Daria some other time.”
”Fair enough.”
Overhead, there's a crackling thunder-and-lightning sort of noise, noise like the sky cracking open, so loud that Niki covers her ears.
”Just what I f.u.c.king need,” Scarborough frowns, glaring up at the place where the sky would be, if all that wood weren't in the way. ”A G.o.dd.a.m.n storm. The only thing worse than being on a boat is being on a boat in a G.o.dd.a.m.n storm. With my luck, it'll be a hurricane. It's that time of year.”
”We used to have big storms in New Orleans,” Niki says, thinking of the rain beating hard against her and Danny's windows in the French Quarter, remembering the night her mother came into her room and talked about fire falling from the sky. ”I've been through a couple of hurricanes. Never on a boat, though.”
”It's all kinds of fun, let me tell you.”
”And you think Spyder's just as bad as the Dragon,”
Niki says, not asking, a statement to change the subject because even her doubts about herself and Spyder are better than imagining the little s.h.i.+p caught at sea in a hurricane.
”That's not what I said. I didn't say that because I don't know that. I just don't know otherwise.”
”But you're trying to make me doubt her.”
”I'm trying to make you think.”
And then the thunder sound again, so loud that Niki can feel it pa.s.sing through the s.h.i.+p, through the wood of her berth, through the fillings in her teeth.
”There are factions,” Scarborough says, looking directly 307.
at her now and speaking deliberately, parceling out his words like he's trying to ignore the thunder and what it means. ”The Weaver isn't the only one who wants to get rid of the Dragon, but she's the only one cracked enough to actually try to f.u.c.king do it.”
”Does that make her crazy, or does that make her brave?”
”You got spirit, Vietnam. I gotta give you that. Look, like I said, it's complicated. We've got this Madame Tirzah b.i.t.c.h and her ghouls over in Auber, right, and we've got the f.u.c.king red witches down in Nesmia and Sarveynor, and then, like we need more troublemakers, we've got Esme and the Weaver. And it's not just that the right hand doesn't know what the left is up to. Most of the time, the right hand's just sitting around hoping and praying the left hand makes a wrong move and winds up on the Dragon's f.u.c.k-you-hard-right-now list, because every one of these bozos thinks they're the ones with the solution, and everyone else can go straight to h.e.l.l.”
”But the Dragon wasn't a problem before Spyder came?”
”I said she changed him. I didn't say he wasn't already a problem. Esme told me that when the Weaver came across, the Dragon took something from her, from inside her head,” and Scarborough thumps himself smartly on the forehead. ”Something that the Weaver believed, and it drove him insane, believing it, too.”
And then the thunder again, and as it rolls away across and through the sea, one of Malim's crew pulls open the trapdoor to the hold and shouts down at them.
”The captain wants you both topside, and he don't mean tomorrow.”
Niki glances upwards, towards the anxious, commanding voice, and there's clean white sunlight streaming in around the vague silhouette of the sailor's head and shoulders, illuminating the rungs of the tall ladder leading down to the floor.
”What the h.e.l.l for?” Scarborough calls back.
308.
”That weren't my business, and I ain't gonna go making it that way,” and then the sailor's gone again, but he's left the trapdoor open, and Niki marvels at the light spilling into the squalid compartment with them.
”Thank goodness,” she says, even though the light hurts her eyes. ”I was beginning to think the night was never going to end.”
Scarborough curses and spits on the floor again.
”Grab your gear,” he tells her. ”I got a feeling, whatever we've been hearing, it's not a storm after all.”
”What else could it be?”
”I'm sorry to tell you this, but, as they say in the movies, you've got a lot to learn, kiddo,” and then he rubs his stubbled cheeks and smoothes back his stringy brown hair with both hands before helping her out of the berth. Niki slips her pack and boots on, no time to bother with the laces, and lets Scarborough lead her up the ladder and into the warm maritime sun.
Daria sits alone on the hood of the rented Honda Accord, s.h.i.+ny new car the color of an eggplant, and watches the old house at the end of Cullom Street. Alex is still talking with the two Birmingham cops, the ones she begged him not to call, the ones he called anyway. They've been through the whole place, top to bottom, and didn't find anything but graffiti on the walls, trash and a few empty crack vials on the floor, a corner in one of the bedrooms that someone had been using as a toilet. Nothing much at all in the bas.e.m.e.nt. No one's lived here for more than two years, they said, after a call to the owner, who said she was thinking about selling the dump and wanted to know if Daria was interested in buying it.
Only if I could burn it to the f.u.c.king ground, she thinks again. Burn it down and sow the ground with salt and holy water. She imagines herself marking the scorched and smoldering ground with a cross of white stones laid end to end, muttering prayers to a G.o.d she has no faith in.
309.
One of the cops, a stocky, short woman with a mullet- and Daria clocked her right off-shakes Alex's hand again and then turns and waves enthusiastically at Daria, who pretends to smile and waves back. She asked for an auto-graph, when they were done with the house, and Daria gave it to her, scribbled on the back of an Alagasco envelope the cop had retrieved from her squad car.
”Just someone with nothing better to do, messing with your head,” the other cop told Alex, even though whoever it was had obviously been trying to f.u.c.k with her head, not Alex's. All four of them standing out on the front porch because Daria wouldn't go inside, before she signed the back of the gas bill and then said good-bye and went to sit on the hood of the Honda.
”But how did she even know I was in the airport?”
Daria asked him, the tall policeman with thick gla.s.ses and the beginnings of a pot belly, and he shrugged and shook his head.
”Who knows. The G.o.dd.a.m.n internet, maybe. Maybe someone hacked the airline's records and-”
”That's f.u.c.king ridiculous-” Daria began, but Alex was there to interrupt, there to say that they hadn't thought of that and shut her up.
She lights another cigarette and watches Alex watching the cops getting back into their car. She exhales, and her smoke hangs a moment in the late autumn air, withering smoke ghost slowly carried away by the cold breeze slipping silently between the tall trees. Daria s.h.i.+vers and pulls her leather jacket tighter, wis.h.i.+ng that she had a coat, and as the police car pulls away from the house, Alex turns and walks towards her, crunching through the carpet of dead leaves.
”They're so full of s.h.i.+t,” she says and taps ash to the ground. ”Do you think she'd still have wanted my auto-graph if she'd known I was f.u.c.king you?”