Silk

“The doubters,” Walter answered, guarded awe in his voice like this was a secret, dangerous knowledge, and Spyder only nodded her head.

Robin had watched Spyder’s slow eyes, eyes the gentle color of faded denim. Spyder almost never smoked anything but pot, routinely turned down the best acid and ’shrooms, but the opium was a treat too rare to allow her caution to interfere, her fear of the wild things and places in her head. Robin knew it was those parts of Spyder she loved most, the turbulence behind those pacific eyes, the part that Spyder locked away with her tranquilizers and antidepressants.

“The doubters hid the grail stone on the earth,” Walter said, and she wished he would shut up. He rarely actually seemed to understand the books he read, arcane treatises on conspiracy and occult Christian orders; but he rattled on about then endlessly in a desperate attempt to impress her, and so it had become a sort of game: she fed his desperation by suggesting the most difficult texts and watched as he struggled, fixated on the obvious, the superficial skin of myth and history. Everything reduced to Tolkien-simple fantasy, and the magic and deeper mystery lost on him.

She did not particularly dislike Walter, but she didn’t love him the way Spyder did, either. Didn’t see him as some integral part of the circle of her life.

The storm had rattled at the windows, wanting in, and she’d watched the water caught like glistening bugs in the screen wire behind the glass.

There was a longish pause in Walter’s exposition, then, and Byron sighed loudly, got up from his seat on the spring-shot sofa to put a new CD on or a tape, cold molasses motion. And Walter had said, “I can get some buttons next week, if anyone’s interested.”

“Buttons?” Byron said. “What kind of ‘buttons’?”

“Peyote,” and the word had brought Robin drifting back from her contemplation of the raindrops trapped inside the squares of wire, held fast by fate and their own surface tension.

“How much?” she’d asked him, and Walter looked lost for a second and shrugged.

“Randy said to get back to him about the price, but-”

“No, I mean how many buttons can you get?”

“Oh,” and she’d seen his hot embarrassment, inordinate unease over nothing at all.

“Probably as much as we want,” he’d said. “Why?”

“’Cause I did peyote once when I lived down in Mobile, but I only got one button and it didn’t do anything much but make me puke. You gotta eat a lot, like nine or ten buttons at least, if you’re go

Byron had stopped fumbling through Spyder’s CDs, clack-clack-clack of jewel cases against one another, and put on My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult’s Sexplosion, skipped ahead to “Sex on Wheelz.” The music drowned the storm, and Robin had to raise her voice to be heard.

“It would be worth it,” she’d said, “if you could get enough.”

“I heard that stuff tastes like shit.” Byron had returned to the sofa and took his turn at the hookah.

“I’ll see what I can do,” and Walter had tried to sound matter-of-fact about it, sure of himself, but she’d heard the crisp uncertainty between his words, knew that the chances of his coming up with that much peyote were slim to none. Just another test, like Carlos Castenada and Foucault’s Pendulum. Spyder had frowned down at her with sleepy blue eyes full of admonition and lazy passion.

A little while later, the last of the opium gone and she’d followed Spyder to the bedroom, leaving Walter and Byron alone in each other’s company. Down the narrow hallway, past closed doors, into the dusty heart of the big house and the dark where she could hear the storm again.

Not the next week, or the week after, but early in May, Walter had shown up at Weird Trappings very late one afternoon, her and Spyder closing up the shop, pla

“I got them,” he’d said, looking over his shoulder again, his eyes bright and proud and nervous.

“You got what, Walter?” Spyder asked, and then she’d lost count of the twenties and cursed him before she started over again.

“I got the peyote,” he’d said, almost whispered, the last word squeezed down to a cautious hiss that had reminded Robin a little of Peter Lorre in Casablanca or Arsenic and Old Lace.

“No shit,” and Robin had reached past Spyder and the cash drawer, had thought for a second that Walter was going to snatch the bag away from her. She’d unrolled the crumpled paper and in the shadows down at the bottom were three or four large Ziploc baggies, each filled with lumpy dark buttons of sun-dried peyote.

“Goddamn it, Walter,” she’d said, and then Spyder, who’d given up trying to count the twenties, had taken the bag away from her and peered skeptically inside.

“Holy fuck,” she’d whispered. “Where’d you get it all?”

Walter had smiled his tense half-smile, the dimpled corners of his mouth still drawn stubbornly down.

“Randy’s got a co

“The Native American Church,” Robin had said, remembering a book she’d read about the peyote religions, the state-licensed peyoteros who grew their sacred cactus, could legally sell it only to registered members of the NAC.

“A group of Oklahoma peyotists formed the Church in 1918 to protect their ceremonies from the Feds,” and she hadn’t missed the way that’d impressed him, took her full measure of delight from his futile admiration.

“Well, I told you I could get it,” he’d said, and his unaccustomed smile had stretched wider, revealing a rare glimpse of uneven front teeth.

Spyder had continued to stare into the Piggly Wiggly bag, shaking her head slowly, mild, pleased disbelief on her face.

“But what did all this cost?” she asked, and he’d shrugged. “Not so much as you’d think. It’s cheap shit, really. The Indians can get a thousand buttons for about a hundred and fifty bucks. Of course, Randy has to charge me a lot more than that, though. I got fifty buttons in there.”

Spyder had handed the bag to Robin and gone back to counting the crumpled green bills.

“So, you guys want to call Byron and get fucked up tonight?” Walter asked, hopeful, fairly glowing with his little victory.

“No,” Robin replied. “We’re go