Kickback and Other Stories

by Peter Sellers

  I went inside to get him a beer.

  “Been busy?” I asked.

  “Just trying to get by.”

  “So what are you going to do when Deirdre sells her house?”

  “We’re going to take the money and go somewhere warm where I don’t have to work so hard.”

  “Is that what Deirdre wants?”

  He just stared at me.

  Bernard was on the verge of passing out, and there was nobody else home yet, which was good. I helped him up the stairs, and he collapsed on the bed. It was stuffy in the bedroom.

  “Hot,” Bernard said.

  “Do you want the a/c?”

  I’m pretty sure he said yes, so I took an extension cord and plugged the machine into my newly functioning outlet, turned the setting to high, and went to a nearby bar to wait. The nearest fire station was only a few blocks away. I was on my third beer when I heard the sirens.

  The house was typical of Toronto homes of that period, solidly made of double brick. There was smoke and water damage to the house, but the fire was contained to the master bedroom, which was gutted. They found Bernard on the floor beside the bed, horribly burned. The official verdict was that he died of smoke inhalation.

  The Fire Marshall worked it out pretty quickly. Speaker wire is not nearly substantial enough for the power draw of a window air conditioning unit. The power it uses melts the wire before the draw can blow the fuse. Fire often ensues, as it did in this case. Bernard really should have had an electrician install those outlets for him, they said.

  “I had no idea he was actually making them live,” Deirdre said. She was crying, which I hadn’t expected.

  “I guess he wanted to surprise you,” I said.

  It was a surprise for her all right. And a bit of one for me. I hadn’t known for sure that things would work out the way they did. But I’d been hoping.

  Tattoo

  (Originally published in the Osprey Summer Mystery Series)

  I LOVED CARRIE FROM THE MOMENT I FIRST saw her shoulder. She wanted a small rose, done in black and white and shades of grey, just above her shoulder blade. She slipped down the collar of her shirt to show me. I touched the place that seemed most appropriate.

  “Here?” My voice was thick.

  “That feels perfect,” she said.

  I let my touch linger, as if to fix the spot firmly in my mind. But my eyes were closed. If Carrie had been able to see behind her, she would not have been fooled.

  I have encountered every possible kind of skin, every pigmentation, every texture. None in my memory had looked or felt quite the way that Carrie’s did, with a softness and warmth that flowed into my fingertips.

  I traced the rose pattern onto her back. “If this hurts at all,” I said, “I’ll stop right away.”

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “I can take it.”

  Everything I know about art I taught myself. After doodling my way through high school, I enrolled in Fine Arts at Laurentian. Pursuing a woman who wanted to be an actress, I made the mistake of enrolling in Theatre Arts. I learned quickly that this was not for me. There was too much collaboration with too many people. I needed something more intimate and solitary. I left Laurentian after a year and moved to Toronto. I took courses at OCAD, but there was too much emphasis on the abstract, the conceptual, and the formless. No one seemed to care about drawing. After five months, I left there, too.

  A week later, walking past a tattoo parlour on Yonge Street, the flash in the window drew me inside. My work and my attitude impressed the owner and he took me on as an apprentice. Two years later, I’d taught myself all I could and I was tired of the place. I went home.

  I love Sudbury and I knew that, through my art, I could help make the city a place of lasting, ever-changing beauty. With my portfolio, it was easy to find a job at a shop on Regent Street. I’d been there for two years, enjoying the work and feeling good, until Carrie walked in.

  Carrie had not been tattooed before. Many young women who are about to get their first tattoo come in with friends. They are often nervous, sometimes giggly, and their determination often wavers. Carrie was not like that at all. She entered the shop alone and confident. She knew exactly what she wanted and she was resolute. She had come to me because she had seen my flash and she knew that I was the only one to work on her. As soon as I saw her shoulder, I knew she was right.

  “Do you ever make mistakes?” she asked.

  “We all do,” I said, “but not often.”

  “What do you do then?” She didn’t sound concerned, just curious.

  “There are tricks we have, if it’s a small problem. Ways to cover up.” She didn’t ask what they were.

  Over the next eighteen months, I worked with Carrie eleven times. Some of the tattoos were small: the rose, her zodiac sign, a heart cracked almost in two. Others were larger, often demanding more than one sitting. There was a kitten with bright green eyes, an apple with a worm emerging, a phoenix rising from a gout of flame.

  Every time she came back, I asked her the same question. “How did they like it?” Her answer, too, was always the same. “My mom thinks it’s beautiful,” she’d say. “But he hates it.”

  The first time I saw Carrie bruised I didn’t think anything of it. Often, people come in with bruises. If the bruise is on the spot the customer wants tattooed, I send them away until the bruise was gone. Tattooing bruised skin hurts more and takes longer to heal.

  Carrie had bruises on her upper arm where she wanted me to put an elegant swan’s head, outlined in black with bright red eyes. “What happened?” I asked.

  She did not reply. “I can’t work there,” I said.

  In the end, she decided brightly coloured snake, wrapping itself around her calf.

  When Carrie came back next time, she brought a piece of fabric that an aunt had sent her from Tanzania. “I want this,” she said, pointing to a stylized creature unlike any I had seen before. As I took needles from the autoclave, washed my hands and put on the ambulance driver gloves we all use, I asked what the reaction had been to the snake.

  “My mom thinks it’s beautiful,” she said. “But he hates it.”

  Oil paintings take decades to dry. As a result, they are always works in progress, changing in subtle ways every day. Similarly with tattoos. Each design evolves as the skin ages and the body changes. Tattoos are never settled or still before they cease to exist entirely. This thought had always appealed to me. It was the perfect conjoining of canvas and image. Like all art, tattoos must have meaning in order to succeed. They must form themselves effortlessly onto the skin, as if they had always intended to live there. This was the case with Carrie’s choices. There was perfect unanimity between her and the designs that became part of her.

  Carrie continued to visit me regularly, month after month. Her skin was bruised more often than not. Sometimes her arms were marked. Other times it was her stomach or her lower back. True, everybody gets bruised now and then. People really do walk into doors, bump into piece of furniture, or miss a step and fall. But you have to be hopelessly clumsy to have it happen all the time. Carrie moved with grace, and was not the kind to stumble. It was clear that something was wrong.

  The truth came to me as I sat waiting for her one spring afternoon. On days when Carrie had an appointment, this was my routine. I would sit by the window, watching for her, careful not to book another client in the hour before she arrived. I would keep my mind focussed on the design we were going to create together, and I would watch for her.

  On the day of the butterfly, she walked towards me happily. Her smile was evident from a block away. Then he came up, running to catch her, grabbing her arm, and halting her roughly. Her smile vanished. Words were exchanged. I could not hear them but their faces contorted in anger and passersby turned, either towards or away.

  As though projected before me on the glass, everything became clear. He hated the tattoos. He hated having her come to see me, hated the beauty that spread across her
skin. He resented me for the tenderness I showed her, and for the closeness we had established, the intimacy that had grown between us.

  “Who was that?” I asked, after she had shaken him off and come into the shop.

  “That’s Leo,” she said.

  “Are you all right?” Her arm was not bruised, but the flesh where he had grabbed her was an angry red.

  “I’m fine.”

  That day, we began the butterfly emerging from its imprisoning cocoon.

  “I want to get a tattoo,” Leo said.

  My impulse was to turn him down. Over the years, I had refused many potential clients. I refused kids who were underage. I refused women who came in saying they didn’t want to get tattooed, but their boyfriends insisted. I refused people who were being tattooed because they’d lost a bet, people with heart conditions or epilepsy, and women who were pregnant. I refused to do gang tattoos, racist messages, or violent threats. And I refused to tattoo anyone who was drunk or high. They tended to be difficult, uncooperative, occasionally violent, and posed needless health risks. Also, they had been known to come back sometimes and blame the tattooist for the ink.

  If I could turn people down for all those reasons, it would be easy to turn down Leo, who seemed to disapprove of my work and who left his own, unwanted marks on Carrie’s body. I wondered, but did not ask, if he disliked what I did so deeply, why he was in my studio?

  He handed me a photograph of Carrie’s face. “I want this,” he said. “On my back. Big. My whole back.” How could I refuse that?

  “It’ll take a long time,” I said. The longest session I’d ever heard about had lasted more than 24 hours. I couldn’t do that. My longest was eight hours, with breaks every hour or so. I’d been cramping badly by the end. “I figure three sessions. About eighteen or twenty hours total.”

  I could have done it faster, but I wanted to take my time to get Carrie’s face just right. Besides, the longer it took, the more it would hurt him.

  He looked concerned. I didn’t want to scare him off and lose the opportunity. “Portraits are like that,” I said. “If you want me to get her just right, it takes time. Especially at the size you want.”

  “Can you start now?” he asked.

  “No. We need to book three full days. The first session, I do the outline, capture the shape of the face. The second time, I fill it in. The third time, I put on the finishing touches.”

  We booked the first session for the following week. “Why come to me?” I asked.

  “Carrie says you’re good. Me, I wouldn’t know.”

  It was the night before we were to start that I thought about justice. I was cleaning up from the day’s work, something I’m scrupulous about, when it occurred to me. The tattooing machines and the needles were ideal instruments of vengeance.

  It would take research, but I was about to spend hours working on Leo’s skin, piercing his flesh thousands of times. Suppose in each drop of ink there was a minute trace of some virulent toxin? I had no idea what would work -- anthrax, perhaps, or something else I could get the recipe for on the Internet -- but I knew that I had a unique opportunity to settle the score. The autoclave and the ultrasonic cleaner would eliminate all trace of poison. It could be a perfect crime.

  “This is going to hurt,” I said.

  “Just get to it,” he replied.

  To his credit, Leo didn’t whine. Occasionally he gave a muted groan, but he never asked me how much longer it would take. He never said that he felt faint or woozy. He never asked me to stop.

  He didn’t flinch even though I was as harsh and clumsy as a rookie. There had been no time to prepare any poison for this first session. I was annoyed that the idea had come to me so late. In my anger, I jabbed and dug at Leo’s back, forcing my hand to be rough.

  I have worked on all kinds of skin and Leo’s was not the best. It was dry and rough, reinforcing how perfect Carrie’s skin was. On that basis alone, I could have told her that she and Leo were woefully mismatched.

  I set Carrie’s photograph on an easel beside my stool, but I didn’t look at it. There was no need. Every line, every subtle contour of Carrie’s face, was etched in my memory.

  At the end of the day, my wrist was sore but the work had gone well. And as the form of Carrie’s face took shape so did a new understanding.

  After Leo had gone, I closed the shop and went down the street to Empire Espresso for a coffee. I was torn by my desire for revenge and the knowledge that this was the most important tattoo I had ever done. It had to be perfect. If I killed Leo before it was completed, I would let him off too easily. His death would destroy a masterpiece, and that destruction would be an insult to Carrie. There had to be another way. He could not be allowed to think that his crime had gone unpunished.

  I have done many tattoos that stand out in my memory. One young woman, who wanted serenity, gave me the freedom to create whatever I chose. I rewarded her with a magical koi pond complete with fish, water lily, and lotus. On another client I created a glorious peacock with vivid tail feathers spread. And once I inked a lyrical geisha, standing on a reef amid rolling waves and swirling wind, playing a reed flute.

  Pleased as I was with all of those, and a hundred others, no commission had ever meant as much to me as this portrait. It could be a reflection of the depth of my feelings. I thought about the contours of Carrie’s face, the slight crookedness of her eyes, the imperfect mouth, the slender nose, and I knew there was a better way,

  The second session went well, as I drew Carrie’s beauty out of the distasteful canvas of Leo’s back. After we were done, Leo asked to see what had been accomplished.

  “No,” I said. “With this kind of work, you can never see it properly. Not even in a mirror. When it’s all done I’ll take a picture of it and email you a jpeg.”

  Leo was not happy, but I did not back down. There was no way of stopping him from looking as soon as he left the shop, of course, but I had to try and establish a rule.

  Before we started the final sitting, my stomach was tight. The prospect of being so close to achieving my revenge made it hard to focus. I forced myself to breathe slowly and deeply. I reminded myself that I was doing the right thing, and that I was doing it for Carrie, to make everything better for her.

  As usual, Leo said nothing while I worked. The longer the session lasted, the more often my wrist cramped and my back demanded to be stretched. I tried to work through it, resenting the fact that I was the one who caused the work to stop. It fuelled my anger and, each time the cramp eased and I was ready to continue, I dug in more vigorously and with greater passion. The intensity of the work was grueling and I found myself weeping as I worked.

  When, towards dusk, the tattoo was done, I knew that I had created my masterpiece, the kind of work that shocks, that challenges, that provokes.

  “Get me a mirror,” Leo said. “Let me see it.”

  “I told you, you can’t see it properly that way. I’ll email you a photo.” With a tissue, I gently dabbed at Carrie’s face.

  He looked around for a mirror, but I had removed them before the session began. He craned his neck trying vainly to see something of what I had done.

  “I want to see it now.” His anger was building. I could understand his frustration. After the hours of stillness and the pain, he wanted his reward. It would come soon enough.

  “No. Don’t worry,” I said. “I got it right.” I picked up my phone. “Turn around and hold still.”

  He stood up then and, for a moment, I thought he was going to hit me. Then he turned his back and I took a few quick shots.

  “I’ll email it to you,” I said.

  He put on his shirt, paid without a word, and left. Ten minutes later, Carrie came in.

  “Is he here?” she asked.

  “Just left.”

  “That’s too bad. I wanted to see it right away. How’s it look?”

  “It’s bang on.” I was very proud of what I’d been able to do for her.

&nb
sp; “Has he seen it?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Yeah, he told me you wouldn’t show him before either. That made him mad. He liked what he could see of it when he got home before, though.”

  “He’ll see it soon enough,” I said, thinking how angry he’d be then.

  “He can’t wait to show it to my mom and to him.”

  I was confused. “Him?”

  “My stepfather. He hates my tats.”

  My stomach clenched. “Your stepfather?”

  She nodded. “Yeah, and he doesn’t hesitate to show it.”

  “What about Leo?”

  “He loves them even more than mom. That’s why he got one. To show my stepfather that he loves my tattoos and that he loves me. I can’t wait to see how beautiful you made me.”

  After Carrie had gone, I thought about her face gouged onto Leo’s back. Her eyes blackened and swelling shut. Her lip split. Her cheek screaming with a violent bruise. A trickle of blood from her nose. I felt as if I had smashed my fist repeatedly into her flesh, creating wounds that would never heal.

  I sat on my stool, waiting for Leo to come back.

  (This story is dedicated to Martin Bourgeois without whose help it could not have been written.)

  Closing Doors

  (Originally published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, March/April 2019)

  Winner of the 2020 Crime Writers of Canada Arthur Ellis Award for Best Short Story

  KENT FELT LIKE CRYING. THE NEIGHBOURS were making too much noise again. He could not understand how anyone could slam kitchen cupboard doors so loudly and so often. He imagined them standing on the other side of the adjoining kitchen wall, opening the cupboards and snapping them shut, again and again, just to annoy him. The previous neighbours had been thoughtful and considerate, but when this new couple moved in, more than a year before, the distressing banging had begun immediately. The shouting had begun then, too.

  Kent had known, since he was very young, that being quiet was the highest virtue. Making noise meant one of two things. Either you were pathetic and desperate for attention, or you were selfish and rude.