Grave Markings: 20th Anniversary Edition

by Arnzen, Michael A.

  A clunk of glass on wood alerted him to the fact that Chet had set the drinks down in front of him. He picked up the shot glass, flexed his heavily tattooed arms, and slammed the tequila down in one gulp, saving the beer for later.

  The blonde from the restroom sat down next to him, obstructing his view of the redhead. She sized him up before turning to Chet. “How about bringing two more of what he’s having?”

  Coolie handed Chet a five dollar bill without looking, and then took a pull off his beer. The blonde beside him smiled.

  “I love a man who knows the proper way of drinking ta-keel-ya,” she said, laconically licking her painted lips as she slurred her words.

  Coolie baited the verbal hook. “Really, babe? And how’s that?”

  She brought his wrist to her lips. “Lick,” she explained, darting her pink tongue out and over his hairy skin. Then she grabbed a salt shaker. “Shake,” she continued, pouring crystals onto his flesh with a slow, masturbatory flick of her arm.

  Coolie withdrew his hand and placed it on his lap. Smiling at her, he said, “Then what?”

  She leaned forward a bit, looking up into his eyes with her own dilated and glassy pupils. Then she bent forward and hungrily smacked up the salt from the back of his wrist, sucking it dry. Coolie watched the back of her head, the shimmer of her blonde hair, the up-and-down bob of her neck over his lap. Then she sat up, reached for the tequila shot on the bar, and raised it in a lazy-handed toast, giving him a wink. “Swallow.” She quickly downed the liquor, the tiny knob on her throat twitching as she gulped.

  Coolie pressed down on the hardness in his lap before lifting his own shot glass. “I’ll drink to that,” he said, rolling his eyes. He slurped the booze down, and then slammed the glass on the table. “After all, snake bites are pretty hard to do.”

  The blonde chuckled. “Hard is right, baby.”

  Coolie looked over at Chet and the redhead, grunting at them. “Two more, eh?”

  Chet took his time about it.

  Waiting for the booze, the woman slowly rolled her eyes up and down, looking Coolie over from boots to chin.

  “You don’t have to undress me with your eyes, babe. I can take care of all that for ya…”

  The woman smirked as if disappointed with her choice in men. Then her eyes bulged and she leaned intensely forward, looking at his arm. “Wow, nice art!”

  “Huh?”

  She prodded his arm with a finger and Coolie flinched from the pain. “Watch it! That’s fresh work.” He covered the tender area with a palm. “Are you telling me you actually like this tat?”

  “Well, if you’d let me look at it…”

  Coolie let go of his own arm and grabbed the shot glass that Chet had set in front of them. He couldn’t believe it. The tattoo was actually working.

  “Salut,” he said to his reflection in the bar mirror, congratulating himself on his thievery the previous night. That Kilpatrick fucker was one crazy bastard, but he sure did know how to draw.

  The woman clinked his glass with her own, toasting along with him, as if reading his mind. They downed the drinks.

  By the time Coolie and the blonde—whose name, he discovered, was Cheri—finished their fifth drink together, Cheri had found a permanent spot for her hand atop his pulsating lap, and Coolie had an arm wrapped around her supple waist, where he could occasionally rub his fingers across her unrestrained and plump left breast. Coolie charmed her with dirty jokes, and tonguey French kisses were exchanged as frequently as the innuendo-laden words between them. The bikers at the end of the bar—no longer gripping arms—silently watched the two with jealous and horny eyes as they nursed their beers. The brunettes in the booth had left. The headbanded stranger still sat in the front booth, wearing sunglasses in the dark and shady bar, ignored by patron and barkeep alike.

  When Coolie and Cheri paid up, took a shot for the road, and lumbered out of the bar arm-in-arm, the tall man in the headband stood up, put some money on the table, and followed from a purposeful distance.

  II.

  Kilpatrick’s ass was sweating, the vinyl seat of the bar’s booth hot and sticky beneath him as he watched Coolie getting stroked by some blonde barfly. The whole scene disgusted him: Coolie using booze and stolen artwork (my art) to seduce his pickup, like a prostitute giving a sneak peak at some flesh.

  He tried not to watch. If he paid too much attention to them, his cover might get blown.

  He returned to hanging his head, closing his eyes, thinking the whole plan through, reminding himself how he’d always hated Coolie.

  Coolie had been the only semi-regular client at Kilpatrick’s makeshift parlor, and one of the few who knew about the place by word-of-mouth. He’d always show up when Kilpatrick was in the middle of inking himself, more often than not, and Coolie always demanded instant gratification. He’d always get a quick one-color piece of flash sewn into his flesh; Kilpatrick knew that Coolie was the farthest thing from being an art appreciator. Coolie was more like a pill-popper when it came to getting inked: he saw a new tattoo as a cure-all for his problems, a way to get laid or to convince himself that he was somebody. And to Kilpatrick’s financial benefit, it never worked. Each tat was just another piece of stained skin, a postmarked letter that never delivered.

  So when Coolie walked in two days ago and asked for a “realistic” tattoo, Kilpatrick tried to teach him what art was all about. Coolie didn’t really deserve such a gift, but he had, after all, been his only steady income. He gave him a freestyle montage of wondrous ink, a grand masterpiece…and then Coolie stole it from him with the edge of a blade.

  His ear still tingled from the nick Coolie had given him with his knife before running away with a fistful of cash. He wondered if this was how Van Gogh felt, when he, too, was robbed of something he loved.

  In a way, Kilpatrick thought, they all have robbed me. Everyone I’ve ever inked has stolen my work, using it for their own petty desires.

  No more.

  Kilpatrick would no longer lock himself in his garage to ink the flesh of the uncaring. He would no longer remain hidden in private, his self-expression chained and shackled. It was time to go public, to show the world his magnificent creations, to purge those damned unimaginable flash pictures from his mind…and Coolie would be the first to see….

  Coolie laughed loudly from the bar. Kilpatrick opened his eyes and saw the pathetic art thief clowning around with the blonde woman. Kilpatrick wiped his palms on his jeans, and felt them soak wet through the denim. He looked down, and saw that his palms had been bleeding from clenching his fists and digging his nails into the inside of his hands. He wished he could walk over to Coolie and rearrange his ugly, cocky face, to make him bleed. But that wasn’t the way to go public—that was the way to end up behind bars.

  His nerves were on fire, but he kept calm as he waited for Coolie and his woman to leave. When they did, he adjusted his headband, gave them a little head start, and then pursued them from a distance.

  He drove a rented Ford, and followed Coolie’s Harley throughout the streets of Colorado Springs, keeping his eyes on the blonde’s streaming hair and tear-shaped butt from the distance of about a block away, making sure Coolie wouldn’t finger him in his rearview mirrors. Nevada Avenue had just the right amount of traffic to provide excellent cover. Union almost had too much traffic, but Kilpatrick never lost sight of Coolie’s hog, which swaggered from his drunken steering and hand-off-the-bars caressing of his pickup’s thighs.

  Soon Coolie turned into a street Kilpatrick had never seen, Eisenhower Street, a newly paved road lined with fresh painted apartment complexes. Apartments for soldiers out of Fort Carson, most likely. Soldiers were Kilpatrick’s favorite clients, since they seemed to appreciate his artwork the most—and were more proud of their tats than some folks, since inked skin was about the only way they could exp
ress their unique identities in a uniformed world.

  You could take away the clothes and wrap them up in society, but you couldn’t take their skin away from them.

  Kilpatrick’s biggest thrill, though, was knowing that his artwork would be seen across the country, sometimes across the world, carried across the States and overseas on the arms and chests of young, ballsy men with shaved heads.

  Coolie and his woman swaggered into an apartment.

  Kilpatrick waited.

  III.

  All Coolie had in his sparsely furnished apartment was bourbon, but Cheri Carvers didn’t mind. They played “Strip-By-Sip” in the living room, a drinking game that Coolie had fashioned on the spur of the moment. Strip-By-Sip consisted of taking a huge swig of the bottle, paying for it by taking off an article of clothing, and then passing the bottle on to the next person. With only two players, both the bottle and the game ended quickly.

  But the pleasure didn’t. Coolie sat on the brown pillow cushions of his couch, buck-naked and fully erect, watching Cheri sitting Indian style on the floor, the empty bottle between her legs. The black label obstructed the full view of her privates, but Coolie filled in the blanks, knowing she was wet and ready for him. Her large breasts rested lazily on her chest, nipples hard and pointing in opposite directions like bullhorns.

  “So what do we do now?” Cheri asked, pulling the side of the cold glass bottle snug between her legs. “A little spin the bottle?”

  Coolie slapped his hairy thighs and dizzily stood. He walked over to her, his member swinging side-to-side with each step. He reached down and stroked the side of her blonde head, running his fingers through her baby-fine hair. “Wanna drink from my bottle, darling?”

  She moved her head forward and took him into her hot mouth. Before he arched his back in ecstasy, he noticed that she had turned the neck-end of the bottle toward her groin.

  “Caught you with your pants down, didn’t I?”

  Coolie’s eyes shot open as he turned his head toward the voice. He saw the silhouette of a man standing in his door frame. Something long and crooked was in one of his hands, something rectangular in the other. Crazy as it was, he appeared to be holding a crowbar and a briefcase.

  Cheri was impervious to the noise and continued to slurp on Coolie’s shriveling pride. A wet smacking sound emanated from between her legs. Coolie looked down at Cheri and couldn’t help but chuckle at the whole crazy scene. His cheeks flushed with embarrassment as he laughed, and Cheri suddenly stopped, looking up at him. “What’s so funny? Aren’t I doing it right?”

  Coolie had a joke at the ready, but he never got the chance to say it. The last thing he heard was a sigh from the dark man’s throat, before the bright flash of white light exploded within his eye sockets.

  IV.

  Coolie awoke to a jarring series of jagged, staccato shrieks. Turning his head to one side, he saw Cheri, naked and curled up in a ball in the corner of his paneled living room. Her eyes were wide open and wet with tears, her cheeks bright red in contrast to the rest of her pale, cheesy flesh. She was frightened—frightened to death.

  “Whatsamatter?” Mouthing the words hurt. His mouth was dry and chalky, but the pain came from somewhere else. His lips? He didn’t know, but trying to think about it made his head throb. No, his entire body throbbed and pulsated like a giant heartbeat.

  This, he thought, has to be the worst fucking hangover I’ve ever had.

  “Wha…” He couldn’t speak. Too much pain—as if opening his mouth caused his lips to split at the corners and run up to his ears. He was about to ask Cheri what had happened the night before, how much he’d drank and what he’d said and did, when suddenly his brain kicked out the answer:

  Someone attacked us.

  He spoke in a grimace of pain that burned his entire face: “Did that motherfucker rape you?”

  Her body convulsed and she yelped as if Coolie’s voice had reached out and slapped her.

  Coolie propped himself up on his elbows and dizzily tried to stand up. As his head moved forward, the throbbing pain there felt like nuclear bombs exploding one by one inside his skull. His chest burned. His arms boiled, as if dipped in flaming oil. He stood, steadied his balance, and stepped forward.

  A sharp pain in the soles of his feet, like stepping on spikes, caused him to fall back down. More stabbing pain, the carpet a bed of nails.

  He screamed. “I can’t be this hungover!”

  And then he saw his body. He was naked, but his flesh was unfamiliar, foreign. His arms, legs, and chest seemed to have been bruised into an oily blur of black and blue. At first he thought he had taken the worst beating of his life from the man who had broken into his apartment, but as the unreal color that covered his flesh began to form and take shape in his mind, he realized that it was much worse than any beating he could possibly imagine.

  Ivory ribs stretched insanely across his chest, open and sharp as the mouth of a shark…the bones encased a giant chrome engine that sparked and shivered in time with his hammering heartbeat…the horrid engine itself transmuted into a twisted, metallic heart, with wet and gleaming pistons stemming out from the unreal organ, gleaming black tubes and hoses feeding other impossible components of steel and blood which trailed across his torso, around his groin, up toward his neck…his arms and legs were ugly and wet muscles wrapped tightly around a chassis of iron bone, lined with striations of black metal and chrome steel, a mapwork of thick red wires and blue veins which pulsed and throbbed and shivered with coursing blood…

  “HOLY SHIT!” He stood, and tumbled toward the bathroom as if running on hot coals.

  Cheri screamed, covering her head with her arms.

  Coolie flicked on the bathroom light. In the mirror he faced an unreal creature—himself—a mechanical beast, with impossible innards exposed. His face was denuded skull, with red muscles and wiry pink arteries spiderwebbing around his eyes like an electrical system. His heart pumped furiously in his chest, and the engine on his chest roared, pistons pumping. His flesh crawled and tingled with life, and everything moved….

  He grabbed his forearm, which was slick and leathery like the skin of a newly-shed snake. Beneath his grip his flesh burned in pain, but it was flesh—flesh—and that meant that he was still real, still there, somewhere inside the thing that he had become.

  He heard the hurried sound of Cheri putting on her clothes, opening the front door, slamming it, and clambering down the stairs of the building, her voice a gibbering siren.

  Coolie squinted and looked down at his arm. Lightly tapping the veined, metallic muscle, it crackled beneath his fingertips, like dried paint.

  Seeing hope, he quickly reached behind the shower curtain and turned the faucet to HOT. Steam slowly filled the room, and Coolie stepped into the shower.

  The scalding water raked across his flesh, and Coolie screamed as he ran a small bar of soap over his body. The soap burned like steel wool as the scabby layer of skin came off from the abrasion. He crinkled his eyes and looked down toward the drain, which was swirling with flecks of color as he agonizingly scrubbed as fast as he could.

  The pain soon became too much to bear and he dove out of the shower, tackling the curtain and bringing it down to the hard tiles with him as he hit the bathroom floor in an explosion of pain. His body convulsed as the shower rained down beside him like a storm of acid.

  He sucked in a lungful of steaming air and held it. Slowly he opened his eyes and removed the plastic curtain from his body.

  The paint—the horrible combination of physical and mechanical guts—was still there, the engine churning full speed, the insane organs pumping and working as his body shook and convulsed in a puddle on the bathroom floor.

  No, not paint…ink. Under the skin. Tattooed into his flesh. Permanently.

  The engine gave a final shake and t
hen stalled. Coolie passed out.

  V.

  There was no pain. Two fifths of Jack, a few Valiums and a bottle of aspirin made sure of that. Sitting up on the couch, Coolie reached forward and picked the wire brush up from the coffee table. Beginning with his right kneecap—which was a patterned disk of steel, like a polished hubcap—he pressed the hard surface of the brush against his colored flesh. The needlelike tips punctured the skin, bringing warm blood to the surface.

  The warmth felt good, dribbling down his leg.

  Smiling, he watched in awe as the brush slowly worked away the inked skin. The flesh turned to multicolored pulp as he ground the tightly-corded tips of wire into his leg, polishing it till a smooth white knob of bone protruded from the center of his leg.

  Coolie leaned back and crossed his arms, looking at what he had done.

  Nothing. No change in the patterns that coalesced on his leg—a slight shift in its mechanics, but no more, no less. He was the same, inside and out. He could not modify or customize his machine. He could strip it for parts, sure, but why junk a running model?

  He felt his engine sputter, and watched as if from a distance as his metallic chest wheezed and choked. He felt sleepy—his idle was running low.

  Coolie stood, limped over to his kitchen, and opened a door that led into a small garage where he kept his bike. The garage was hazy and gray—no color. Even his own motor was now a blur of black, blue, and silver. It took all his effort to swing a leg over the leather seat of his Harley.

  He lifted his right leg, and then kick-started the motorcycle. His knee popped out from his skin, which now felt like a pair of leather chaps draped down his shin.

  After three tries, the Harley roared to life. The sound was reassuring, the vibrations between his legs waking him up. Coolie leaned forward on the handlebars, revving the engine before crawling off the bike and walking over to a cardboard box in the corner of the garage.