The street was in full swing by the time Mickey and Rick arrived to set up their gear. Memory of the day’s ninety-degree temperatures hung like a scent in the sultry air. The heat brought out the crowds but stripped them of the leathers, boots and great coats with which they declared their allegiances all winter. Mickey had shed his customary leather jacket and rolled up the sleeves of his “Death from Above” T-shirt. Rick had even tied back his shoulder-length hair in concession to the heat. And, Mickey thought with a private grin, because with his hair tied back and his round sunglasses on, he looked just enough like U2’s guitarist to get him a second look from the girls passing by.
There wasn’t much room on the corner, but the recessed doorway to one of the used-clothing stores provided a space to duck when the flow of pedestrians got too heavy. The traffic crawled along, windows down and stereos blaring—competition they could do without on a night when they’d brought only two acoustics.
“Holy Roller’s here, right on schedule,” Rick observed as he started to snap open his guitar case. Mickey finished slinging his Ovation over his shoulder and glanced down the street.
“He’s closer tonight.”
“I think the waiters at the Flamingo called the cops the other night. It made it hard for the people to eat on the patio with him ranting about AIDS and the wages of sin all night long. Wonder what the sermon is tonight?”
“I hope it’s the evils of rock and roll. I like that one,” Mickey joked, though he shot the preacher another careful glance. The consensus on the street was that the Holy Roller was harmless—just another lost soul driven crazy by too much religion or too many drugs. He wasn’t a street person—he was too clean for that, a kind of hard-scrubbed cleanliness that suggested that it ranked somewhere on par with godliness. The face was craggy, edged in a shock of muddy brown hair. It was very different from the bland visages and capped smiles of the television preachers. But if his face kept him off the dollar-mill to glory on TV, his voice put all the Falwells and Swaggarts of the world to shame. Or it must have once, Mickey thought, with the musician’s ability to hear the echoes of beauty in it. Now, drink or illness or merely the endless duty of haranguing their oblivious world had taken their toll and when the Holy Roller preached, you heard crows, not angels. Mickey hated to have to sing over that strident rant, though he and Rick both took a wicked delight in playing songs that ran in ironic counterpoint to the preacher’s sermon.
The strum of Rick’s guitar brought him back to the moment and they began to tune their guitars, pausing once in a while to scan the street. When the two instruments sounded almost like one, Rick settled his felt hat farther over his eyes and grinned sideways at Mickey. “Well, pal. Shall we try to make this week’s rent tonight?”
“Why not?” Nothing else to do, Mickey thought with a wry grin, realizing they were in for a long night’s work. “Start with ‘I Knew the Bride’?” Rick nodded, counted in with the bob of his head and they started out the night with a quick pop beat.
An hour later, a small shifting circle had gathered around them. Some people stayed only for a bar or two, some for a whole song if it caught their fancy, and some hung around longer just to catch some free entertainment. Or nearly free. Mickey’s guitar case lay open on the ground, a mute invitation for payment. As usual, they had spiked the pot with a few bills of their own, just to plant the idea of generosity in the audience’s mind.
It seemed to have worked, Mickey thought, doing a quick tally of their take. They might really make a dent in their rent, maybe even before midnight.
When he looked up again, the girl was standing in the front of the circle, watching him. Mickey stared for a moment because he couldn’t help himself. Her hair was startlingly black, a dye job, he realized. Beneath the line of ragged bangs, sunglasses covered her eyes. Trying too hard to be cool, he decided. Or covering up the bruises and lines of too hard a life. Her face was pale, except for her lips, which bloomed red-rose on her snow-white skin. There were faint lines around her lips, and a barely perceptible indent beside her mouth. Mickey wondered if she were chewing the inside of her mouth, keeping the tension inside.
She wore a battered khaki trench coat over a black mini-skirt, dark stockings, and a loose black T-shirt. There was a faded design on the T-shirt but he couldn’t make it out. He could only see the suggestion of a pattern and gothic lettering that shifted as she breathed.
The Holy Roller cried out, almost in anguish, and the girl turned her head suddenly. Blood swung around her neck and Mickey started, staring, until he realized the red gleam was only a stone in her earring. She looked back and he saw the twin pewter winged faces suspended from her ears, red glass dangling from their throats like drops of blood.
She tilted her head a little and he felt the basilisk gaze, the sunglasses settle on him. Uneasily, Mickey dropped his glance, strummed aimlessly on his guitar. “For temptation is everywhere, my children, and we are lost in the wilderness. The wilderness is the devil’s and the devil takes all forms here—many of them pleasing.” The Holy Roller’s rant echoed in his ears suddenly, the shattered voice rolling the last words around like a grape before spitting out the seed of meaning.
When Mickey looked up, the girl was still there, the black-lensed gaze turned to Rick. A sideways glance at his friend revealed the familiar slow grin of interest. Normally, Rick’s salivating over the women who gathered around them amused Mickey. Tonight, he wished the thin trickle of sweat down his back hadn’t turned to ice.
“Come on, man,” he said desperately and nudged Rick with his guitar. “Let’s give the old Holy something to really rail about.” The crowd had gotten restless and if they wanted any more cash that night they’d better start the show again.
“Huh? Oh, yeah,” Rick answered, dazedly, barely looking away from the black-clad, black-eyed girl.
“‘Wild Thing’?” Mickey suggested?
“Yeah.” The affirmative was stronger this time, and when his friend’s gaze returned to the dark-haired girl, Mickey realized he’d picked the wrong song. But they were committed now, the first chords hit and the song begun.
To give Rick credit, he was trying to be subtle. He smiled at all the women in the crowd, and kept the lyrics and the chords straight. But he was singing it for her, his voice drawling and dipping over the chorus, stuttering and sighing over the verses. In the end, even Mickey was drawn into the intensity of the song, his guitar solo sliding achingly up and down the scale, echoing Rick’s voice.
The girl stood there, smiling faintly, swaying just a little to the beat. The wind fanned her hair into a dark halo around her head and the streetlights fired the crimson gems hanging from her ears. For a moment, in the night heat and the thunder of the guitar rhythm, even Mickey wanted her.
Then the song was over, the last words a shout of “Wild Thing!” that the crowd joined. There was applause, and the clatter of money into the guitar case. All of which Mickey heard only distantly.
Because the girl had taken off her sunglasses and smiled at Rick.
You’re not jealous. Staring into his coffee cup, Mickey repeated the words to himself. And he knew that they were true. It wasn’t jealousy that had made him angry when Rick started packing up his guitar, ignoring the crowd that thinned and drifted until only the girl stood there. It wasn’t jealousy that made him insist that Rick meet him at the street-side diner in half an hour. It wasn’t jealousy that kept him sitting here on the stool, staring out onto the street, while his coffee went cold and the blonde at the end of the bar went colder.
It was because the girl’s eyes had flared as red as her earrings, just for a second, and her teeth had looked as sharp as ice beneath her crimson lips. It was because, just for a second, he had been afraid.
The girl’s name was Ardeth. Rick said it over, once or twice, as Mickey stomped away up the street, carrying both guitars. “Ardeth. That’s pretty.” She smiled, lashes ghosting over her eyes for a moment.
“Thanks. You were very good.”
“Thank you. It pays the rent, most of the time. Of course, we really want to get a band together and start playing the clubs. Then again, doesn’t everybody?”
“Yes, doesn’t everybody.” Her voice was remote and a faint frown etched between her pale brows.
“You new around here? I’ve never seen you before.”
“Maybe you just never noticed me before.” Her smile was flirtatious but there was a bitter edge to her voice.
“Oh no, you I’d have noticed,” Rick assured her and she smiled again. Her eyes were, incongruously, a soft hazel. She looked suddenly very fragile. “So, would you like to get a drink?”
“Yes. I would. Come on, I know just the place.” She took his hand.
“Jesus, you’re freezing.”
“You know what they always say—cold hands, warm heart.” She was tugging him along the street and he had to take a few quick steps to catch up to her.
“Do they?”
“Always.” Her voice sounded weary but the smile she gave him was dazzling. “Just around here.” She pulled him around the corner into one of the side streets.
“Is there a bar down here? I never noticed it. . . .” Rick began, then stopped as she turned into an alleyway. “Wait a minute, what’s going on?”
She let go of his hand and turned to look at him. In the faint light from the street, her face was all shadows and angles, alien. “Don’t you want to?” she asked quietly. Rick looked around at the four-storey walls bleeding moisture in the heat, at the long shadow of the dumpster touching the edge of his boots. Someone had sprayed the slogan “Scary World” on the container’s metal side. In the silence, he could hear the faint echo of the Holy Roller’s voice coming down the far end of the alley.
“Don’t I want to what?”
She took a step backward, shrugged. The trench coat fell to the ground. The black T-shirt was emblazoned with a faded sun symbol. Then it was gone too and he had a quick glimpse of her gleaming bare breasts before she disappeared behind the dumpster. “Don’t you want to?” her whisper came to him, half-taunting, half-promising.
Games. All right, if she wanted to play games, Rick thought with sudden anger, and followed her, seizing the cool, bare arms and pulling her against him.
It was easier than he had thought it would be. For all his boasts to Mickey, he didn’t get that many girls, and had never simply fucked a girl in a dark alley after exchanging five sentences. Even now, part of him was afraid, afraid of the diseases you could get, afraid of the possibility of failure, afraid even of the dark. It didn’t help that he could hear the Holy Roller and the echoes of a long-forgotten religious past. “I am the resurrection and the life,” he heard the Holy Roller cry as the girl fumbled with the zipper on his jeans. “Whosoever believeth in me, shall not die, but shall rise again!” He wondered distantly why the girl was laughing, but then he was inside her, and she was wrapping her legs around him as he pushed her back against the wall, and he didn’t care at all.
The triumph, the pleasure was so intense that he barely even noticed when she started to kiss his throat. By the time he felt her teeth, he couldn’t have stopped even if he had wanted to.
The first thing he saw when he came to was a rat the size of a small cat. It stared at him from across the alley, red eyes gleaming. When he moaned and started to sit up, it vanished with a whip of its snakelike tail. Holy fucking Christ, what happened? His head felt as heavy as a lead weight on his shoulders, and when he tried to lift his hand, it moved as slowly as if through water. Dizzily, he tried to remember.
The girl . . . Ardeth . . . he recalled meeting her, remembered fucking her in the darkness, even vaguely remembered the orgasm that buckled his knees and tumbled them both to the littered ground. After that . . . ? After that, there was only darkness.
He opened his mouth to call out to her, to anyone, but only a rasping croak came out. How long had he been here? Mickey must have left . . . Jesus, Mickey’d be furious. He had to get up and find Mickey, tell him what had happened.
Rick pushed himself to his hands and knees and swayed there, breathing deeply. His knees hurt, and his back, and his throat. At the thought of the pain in his throat, a vague memory stirred inside him, but it only confused him and he pushed it away. Clinging to the side of the dumpster, he hauled himself to his feet and started down the alley.
Twice, he had to stop while the world spun around him, but at last he made it to the street and staggered onto the sidewalk. The streetlights flared and unfocused suddenly and he took a step towards the street, struggling to maintain his balance. When his vision cleared and he looked up, he saw a slender figure in a khaki trench coat standing on the other side of the street, farther up towards Queen. Red glittered in her black hair.
“Ardeth,” he croaked, stumbling forward. “Ardeth.” The curb came too suddenly and pitched him out onto the street. She turned her head just as the cab’s brakes squealed. Rick saw her eyes widen, spark red beneath the headlights, and then the impact threw him headlong into the gutter.