Grave Markings: 20th Anniversary Edition

by Arnzen, Michael A.

  He slumped down to the oily, concrete floor, and clutched the box like a child opening a toy box. Inside he found what he needed—a pair of snakes with copper clamps on each end. Copperheads. He handled them in his arms, trying not to let them bite him as they coiled around his elbows.

  Dragging them with him, Coolie crawled over to his Harley and clamped the fangs of each snake over the battery posts on the underbelly of his bike—his brother machine.

  And then he gave himself a jumpstart.

  FLASH

  The flash of a bulb, bursting light. The flash of an image from the hellish gallery in the core of his mind, exposing like the film that slicks its way out from the bottom of the instant camera in his hands.

  He blinks to shut out the horrendous developing image, and darkness slowly engulfs light. The image is captured in the shutter, transformed from fleshy eyelid to a negative etched in wet paper.

  Memory’s dark portrait is gone, enveloped in blackness. Gone, but still there—OUT THERE—somewhere in the world of light.

  Somewhere else.

  Mark stands still, shaking in the cold musty air of his father’s garage. Arthur Kilpatrick, a mechanic by trade who barely made enough money to support his wife and kid, is wrenching a hot, revving engine on a large chopper. Mark knows he should be in school today, but he’s not, because Dad told him that school was for sissies, and he needed a real man to help him around the shop this afternoon…and what did he need school for anyway? The only decent thing Mark could be was a mechanic, just like him, and you didn’t need no stupid diploma to tell ya how to turn a wrench, now did ya?

  Slap.

  “Did ya?”

  “Did I what, Dad?” Tears, blurry. Looking up to see Arthur towering over him, stout and sweaty, wiping black grease down his brown, polyester jumpsuit like a butcher wipes pigs blood down his apron, because wearing it makes it okay. “I told you to find me a decent tire iron at the junkyard. Did you do it, or not?”

  Mark rubs his eyes, smearing the black grease from his father’s hot handprint on his cheeks into his tears, his eyes. It burns, but Mark knows not to look away from Dad. Looking away makes it worse, because he slaps you so silly that the only way you can look is up—up at him, from the floor. And don’t close your eyes. Ever. Never look away. Don’t even blink, or else out comes the screwdrivers—or worse: Momma.

  Nowhere to look but at the smeared jumpsuit. “I forgot.”

  “You what?” Arthur searches for a tool. The ratchet will do. Ratchet and socket. Ratchet in the eye socket.

  The blood wells and the left eye clamps shut in the rising blood muffin that bulges out from his left cheek, but he can still see through the slit, and he will not stop looking….

  Father’s face contorts and fattens, red as a fire truck. “You and your damned fantasy world…boy, can’t you keep your mind on one damned thing at a time? I wanted a tire iron. A simple fucking tire iron. And what did you bring me back, huh? Nothing. Nothing at all.”

  “I did bring back parts, Dad. Parts for my project for art class. Wanna see?”

  “PARTS? What parts? You ain’t gonna have any parts left once I get through with you, you no good bastard…”

  Dad swings.

  Then Momma, picking him up from behind, pinching his armpits between her hard-nailed fingers. Hugging him against her large, rubbery chest as if he were still a baby. He’s not; he’s seven, and it’s embarrassing him, but at least Dad’s big hairy hand missed his face. Momma’s nipples are sharp as hard screws in his back, and her voice screeches at Dad, telling him to go back to work. Her breath stinks like bad meat, but her perfume is worse, the scent of dead flowers filling his mouth, burning his lungs. Like inhaling a funeral.

  Then she’s kissing his ear, tonguing it, telling him that it’s all okay. “Don’t be afraid of the big bad wolf, Markie-Warkie. He’ll huff and he’ll puff, but he won’t blow the house down.”

  “Don’t baby the little bastard, Alura,” Arthur says, unbuckling his belt. “He’s gonna learn how to be a man, and a man needs to know respect.” He slips the leather belt out from the loops on his jumpsuit like a slick snake.

  “He’ll always be my baby, Arthur. So you can put that belt away this very minute!”

  Mark’s eyes throb in pain, and the garage strobes in a blur of black and chrome, and then he’s fainting, he’s fainting, he’s fainting just like those silly people in the cartoons….

  This little piggy went to market. This little piggy stayed home. This little piggy had roast beef. This little piggy had none.

  He’s whistling the tune, not singing it, but he can hear the words echoing in his mind as he strolls into the living room with his art project in a wrinkled brown grocery sack tucked warmly under his arm.

  Arthur is sitting in his chair—the chair Mark can’t sit in, unless he never wants to be able to sit down again for the rest of his life—watching sports on a dusty gray black-and-white television, and drinking a beer. An eight track tape deck is pushing the heavy beat of Led Zeppelin’s “Trampled Under Foot” through its ash-colored speakers, drowning out the sportscaster’s rant on the television.

  Mark noisily takes the contents out of the brown bag, and sets the object on Dad’s aluminum TV tray. “Look, Dad. It’s my art project. The teacher gave me an A plus!”

  Arthur moves his eyes without turning his head, and looks at the object. It is a statue of sorts, a phallic lump formed of rusty nuts and bolts and twisted scraps of metal, held together with white glue…junk art spawned in the junkyard. “It’s a hunk of junk.”

  Mark blushes, his smooth features taking on a pink gleam, a glow that only emphasizes his purplish black eye. “It’s art, Dad. Art. And I’m the artist…”

  Dad grabs the sculpture and tosses it across the living room. The metal bursts against a yellow wall, pocking the plaster, and sending little pieces of the creation splintering in different directions.

  “NO, DAD, NO!”

  Arthur chuckles and pulls on his beer as Mark rushes to the hole in the wall, picking up the spoiled parts of his sculpture.

  “If I told you once, I told you a million times, son. You ain’t gonna be no high-nosin’, queer boy ar-teest. Think you’re too good to be a mechanic? Think you’re too smart? Smarter than your old man?”

  Mark answers with an uncontrollable sniffle, looking down at the floor. His eyeballs throb as he bends forward, feeling as if they are being tapped out from behind with a small, cold hammer.

  And then Arthur is on him, pulling him back by a handful of baby-fine brown hair, and dragging him out to the garage for punishment.

  He forgot about the one basic rule.

  Never look away.

  Gravel skins his shins as he thrashes his arms out at his father’s iron grip on his hair. In the garage, Arthur releases his son, taking a clump of brown strands with him. Mark struggles on the floor, wrestling with the pain as Arthur straddles his cycle, kick starts it, and revs the engine so loud that the corkboard tools on the garage wall rattle like brittle skulls. Mark crawls toward the door, but it’s too late: Arthur tackles him, and pushes him toward the roaring beast of the motorcycle, exhaust clouding into his nose, his lungs.

  Grabbing him by the arm, Arthur presses his son’s palm against the hot, oil-steaming engine on the torso of the bike, its hot heavy metal branding his tiny hand with its logo and serial number.

  And this time Mark Kilpatrick doesn’t even realize that he is passing out….

  This little piggy went to market. This little piggy stayed home. This little piggy had roast beef. This little piggy had none.

  CHAPTER TWO

  I.

  Cheyenne Mountain was still capped with powdered snow, despite the sunny blue skies that surrounded its towering eminence over Colorado Springs. The huge mountain was home for mor
e than just wild cougars and sparkling streams and the green-yellow aspen trees that canopied its rocky surface. It also housed field sites in its natural camouflage for the soldiers from nearby Fort Carson. It concealed covert practice ranges for the National Guard and hidden airstrips for the Air Force. And deep within its rocky shell—hollowed out in the very heart of the mountain—was the command center for NORAD, the country’s major defense intelligence center in case of nuclear war. Cheyenne Mountain’s snowy peak was tipped with clusters of radar dishes and several sharp antennae towers that spiked the sky from the crested nipple like needles tattooing the sky blue.

  Most of the antennae were for military purposes, but a few were relays for the local network television affiliates, who spread their signals far across Southern Colorado’s front range. In some cases, these stations provided the only entertainment and news for both distant small towns without cable and lone mountain ranches without satellite dishes of their own. For these distant places, the television stations were a godsend, a beacon of hope.

  KOPT Channel 12 was one of them, with its studio building not far from Cheyenne Mountain’s base. It was a small studio as far as most stations go: a twelve car parking lot surrounded the brick, six-room building with tiny shoebox-sized windows wrapped shoulder level around its square perimeter. Next to its boring architecture was a blacktop heliport, with the rarely used KOPT KOPTER’s lazy propeller wings drooping down around the shiny-new helicopter like the wings of a dead bug.

  Feeling trapped within the brick structure, city news editor Roy Roberts gazed out of the tiny, nicotine-stained window nearest his sloppy desk, wishing he were home. The news desk was slow today—as usual, nothing seemed to be happening locally—and Roberts knew he’d have to come up with something quick if nothing came over the wire. No news was good news, but it also meant that Roberts would have to come up with some local interest feature, like interviewing an elementary schoolteacher, or a piece on the new gambling legislation, or even a trite story on how the city was celebrating National Egg Sandwich Day or something equally bland. Creativity was not his forte, and deep inside he knew he was a news breaker rather than a news maker.

  Roberts picked up the handset of his filthy yellow telephone, and decided to use his ace in the hole: his neighbor and friend at the police station, John Lockerman. John always could clue him in on some local dirty laundry—a gang fight here or a car wreck there—that smacked of newsworthy copy. But he knew that John was sick of doling out free gossip, and that this time it was gonna cost him.

  The on-hold Muzak crackled. “This is Sergeant Lockerman.”

  Roberts sat up at his desk. His butt was sore. “Hey, John. This is Roy.”

  “Oh shit,” Lockerman’s deep voice sighed. “Figures. I suppose you’re hard up for material again, aren’t you?”

  Roberts’ cheeks crinkled. “Yup. City’s dead today and Buckman’s been brow-beating me for a story. We air in two hours and I’ve been sitting here picking my nose all day for inspiration. Got anything?”

  Lockerman chuckled like a con man. “In fact I do, Roy, but this time it’s gonna cost you big time. You still owe me a free barbecued dinner from the last tidbit I gave ya, my man.”

  “Okay, okay. I’ll up the ante to two T-bones instead of ground round and hot dogs.”

  “I want beer, too. Bottled import.”

  “All right already!” Roberts laughed, echoing the voice of his friend, the deal complete. “But that’s all. Now, c’mon, whatcha got for me?’”

  “You’re gonna shit your pants.”

  “Don’t you have people to serve and protect? Hurry up, would ya?” Roberts glanced at his watch: three-thirty. Two hours left to get the story ready to air—if it was any good. Lockerman sometimes blew red herrings up like cheap balloons. Roberts grabbed a pen. “Okay? Now, shoot.”

  “All right, get this.” Lockerman coughed over the phone, warming up his storytelling voice. “This hysterical woman, name of Cheri Carvers, calls the station about two hours ago, telling some lame story about how a crazy robot was chasing her. Says she woke up this morning in some stranger’s apartment with this outer space monster grunting at her, trying to rip off her clothes. Then she starts wheezing over the phone, wailing like a baby. I get crazies like this all the time. So I asked her what crime had been committed, and she just gave us an address and hung up.”

  “That’s it? That’s the story?” Roberts rolled his eyes and sighed. “You ain’t even getting a bun with your hamburger for this one…”

  “No, that isn’t it. Not at all.” Lockerman’s voice turned more dramatic. “We checked the address she gave us, it being procedure and all, and we found her robot all right. But he wasn’t chasin’ after nobody.”

  A pause.

  “And?”

  “And the guy was dead. Fried to a crisp. The man was hooked up to a motorcycle with a pair of jumper cables clamped to his tits. It musta been enough juice to jumpstart a tank. There was blood all over the place, too. His knee was all mangled up. Man, the smell…”

  “I don’t get it. What happened…did this Carvers woman try to shock the guy to death, and then turn chicken, or what? What’s all this robot bullshit?”

  “His skin, Roy. A bit bubbly, but you couldn’t miss it. A giant tattoo of blood and metal all over his buck-naked body. I mean a major tattoo. He had this big old gory engine drawn on his chest, with rotors and pistons and everything all over his body. Sick stuff. I can’t describe it, man, you’ll just have to see it for yourself. Looks like something out of Alien—sick as hell, but realistic as all get-out. Here’s the address, if you want to check out the crime scene…”

  Roy quickly scribbled it down on a yellow steno pad, and grinned. “You got color pictures?”

  “Sure, the coroner took some. There’s one here in the file, too. Gives me the shivers just thinking about it. You won’t believe your eyes when you see it.”

  Roy was already off the phone, swinging out of his seat and throwing on a brown suede blazer. A familiar buzz swarmed in his gut—the thrill of actually doing something to get an original story on the news, and the hesitation and reticence involved with exploiting a fellow human being’s strife and pain in order to do it.

  But it was his job. And damn if that buzz in his gut didn’t feel good. He knew he had to hurry if he was going to get this on the evening’s news, but pictures or not, it was gonna make one hell of a story.

  II.

  Kilpatrick had color pictures, too. Two Polaroid snapshots of his work, which he put up in the bedroom-turned-workshop of his new apartment. The color prints were tacked neatly on a clean wall, like trophies.

  Or like an art gallery.

  Right there in front him, neatly pinned up and arranged side by side were two photographs of Coolie—no, not Coolie, but what Coolie had become, what he had created from the worthless flesh of the thankless bastard.

  Coolie’s mechanical tattoos and more…the image in his mind, the horrid flash, the tumorous memory excised and purged from his mind. The visions removed from his hellish mental gallery and transplanted on living, breathing tissue. Trapped permanently in paper and on skin. Gone.

  Kilpatrick crossed his arms and took in the sight of the photographs. Beautiful. A moving masterpiece. His best work ever.

  One photo curled a bit and raised from the wall, creating shadow. He plucked a pushpin from a brimming bowl full of colored thumbtacks on his dressertop, and flattened down the glossy image. Poking it felt good, vaguely reminiscent of the tattooing itself.

  He leaned back and examined it. “Perfect.”

  The job had gone even smoother than Kilpatrick had anticipated. The girl passed out when she saw him, and so he only had to knock out Coolie. One quick slam of the blunted and padded end of his homemade jimmy bar against the back of the skull did the trick.

 
Then he had set to work in a frenzy, quickly tattooing Coolie’s naked form from head to toe with his homemade tattoo needle made especially for the purpose. The event—the actual creation of the tattoo—was a total blur; he couldn’t remember actually doing the job, and doing it so quickly, so perfectly…like a furious fuck on speed, a vacuous rampage of the flesh that led to blinding orgasmic joy…and then he was finished. Dizzy and spent. He took the photographs, and his mind flashed on him—literally. His skull burned, as if someone had turned a blazing spotlight on inside of his head and charred one of the disgusting pictures in his mental gallery right off those clammy tattooed walls….

  It didn’t make sense, but he thought he understood what was happening, how he was picking the scabbed portraits of memory from his mind. Somehow, when he took the first photograph of Coolie, the burst of light from the flashbulb entered his skull—perhaps the tattooed escape hatch he had painted there hadn’t sphinctered all the way shut behind him, allowing the light entrance—and the burst of illumination triggered the portrait to life. The flash picture had transformed from still life to animation, sending him back to when he was seven years old, his father moving his palms toward the steaming motorcycle engine….

  But now it was gone. He could only vaguely remember it at all, and couldn’t be sure if it was real or imagination. It didn’t matter. It no longer stained his brain.

  Kilpatrick had long ago accepted the fact that some art is created by accident. And in this case, he was willing to let the light itself take control. It was as if the tattoos themselves had inked their way into Coolie’s skin. As if they were alive, following his order to go public on their own accord, his minions escaping from his own private hell by working their way inside out.