Grave Markings: 20th Anniversary Edition

by Arnzen, Michael A.

  Roberts nodded. “I know. Is it okay if I smoke?”

  “Sure, as long as you share.” Corky went back to work, rubbing the skin more gently this time.

  Roberts tapped out two cigarettes, placed one in his mouth and lit it with a shaky hand. He passed the other one to Corky.

  “What’s this? Oh, sure.” He snatched it from his fingers. “I just thought when you said smoke, you meant smoke.”

  Roberts guffawed. It sounded fake. Sweat had begun to bead on his forehead and drip down into his ears. He was afraid to move, as if any motion might disturb the artist. Again, he compared it to getting a haircut.

  Corky finished his prep work. He turned, beginning to prepare his needles. Roy did not want to see them. “Let’s see if I got this right. You, uh, want a little typewriter tattooed on your shoulder blade?”

  He thought he heard Corky stifling a laugh.

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “Just what do you do?”

  “I’m a reporter.”

  “Ahh…I see.”

  A few quick hums rocked the air. They sounded like the bursts that emit from a dentist’s drill.

  “And I bet you’re looking for a story, aren’t you?”

  “Well, not really. I just…”

  The sound of something unscrewing. Ink bottles?

  “Here.” Corky shoved a bottle of bourbon between Roberts’ legs. “A little anesthesia for ya.”

  Roberts took a big swallow. He felt much, much better.

  And then Corky took needle to skin.

  IV.

  It wasn’t as painful as he expected. At first it stung, sure, but after drinking half the bottle of bourbon, it felt itchy more than anything else. Distracting, like a mosquito buzzing around on his back.

  Corky nursed a beer as he worked. An hour had passed and Corky had finished most of the framework of the two-inch rectangle that would soon develop into a full-color typewriter. They were silent most of the time, Roberts still too nervous to talk, though the bourbon had loosened his lips a bit.

  Corky clicked off the electric needle and set it on a nearby workbench. He sipped his beer slowly, pondering Roberts’ back. Then he uncapped a tube of lotion, and rubbed it into the skin. “There you go, you let that set a moment.” He rubbed, greasing the shoulder blade. “Man, you got baby flesh, you know that? You get raw, real easy.”

  “Great.” Roberts rolled his eyes. It figured. He was beginning to regret the whole affair. Here he was, getting a tattoo from a very experienced man, but no magical knowledge had come to him. No wise tales. Nothing for his time and money but a scabby back. It was silly, he realized, to expect some sudden click of mystic understanding just from sitting here getting permanently marked. A childish grasp at straws.

  And why a typewriter? He’d come here on impulse, not really knowing what kind of tattoo to get, but the word “typewriter” had spilled out of his lips before he could stop it when Corky asked him what he wanted. Roberts wasn’t too sure he wanted a goddamned typewriter on his back for the rest of his life—hell, he hated his job…why stitch a part of it into his skin? For inspiration? He didn’t know. But it was too late, much too late, to go back now.

  The room was silent as the lotion soaked coolly into his flesh. Corky took another beer out from a tiny refrigerator behind his ancient oak wood desk.

  Corky looked him in the eye. “Reason I asked if you were looking for a story was ‘cause of the way you look. Something about you says that you’re looking for something other than a tattoo. I figured it had something to do with the cops that were snooping around here the other day.”

  “Cops?” His back began to sting. He wanted to rub it, but kept his hand gripped around the neck of the bourbon bottle, as if choking it.

  “Yeah, they were in here last week, asking all sorts of dumb questions, showing me pictures, all kinds of weird things. They were doing it to the other shops in town, too. Pissed a lot of brothers off. Some bro must have fucked up real bad to cause that kind of pigfest.”

  Pigfest. Obviously, Corky didn’t care for the police. Roberts reminded himself not to mention that one of his good friends was a cop.

  “I had no idea,” Roberts lied.

  Corky smirked, nodding.

  “Actually, I’m just curious about tattoos, like I told you before. I want to know what it feels like, to understand it all. One of my friends,” he said, thinking of Schoenmacher, “he has a tattoo, too. Swears by it. I thought I’d give it a whirl, myself.”

  Corky smiled, his beard audibly crackling. “I’ve only known you about an hour or so, but I think I know what’s up.” He swallowed his beer in big gulps. “You just don’t know nothing about images, do you?”

  “Huh?”

  “Images. You’re what they’d call a ‘semantogenic cripple.’”

  “A what?” The words escaped him—who was this guy?

  “I could tell when you walked in the door. By your eyes. The way you looked at the pictures on my walls, in my flashbook…hell, you couldn’t stop gawking at my tats from the second you stepped into the shop. You act like you never even seen art before.”

  That wasn’t true. He’d just never seen real tattoos before, up close and on living flesh. But he wasn’t about to admit that to Corky. “Whoa, hold on! What’s a—what did you say…? Samantha-genitalia?”

  Corky bent forward, laughing at Roberts’ blunder. “Samantha-genitalia? Hell, I gotta remember that one. Sounds like a woman I used to know…”

  “C’mon, man, what did you say?”

  He shook his head from side-to-side. “Never mind. What I mean—in layman’s terms—is that you’re a man of words, not pictures.”

  It was true. Roberts paled.

  “You think things, but you don’t see things. And I bet you’re embarrassed about it, too. Heck, I bet you just want that tattoo to cover up this part of yourself.”

  Roberts was pegged. Not for being an investigative journalist in pursuit of background material, not for electing himself as Lockerman’s pseudo deputy…but for being himself, a man hung up on words. Corky met him, and knew him instantly. Roberts was amazed.

  “Ever see a foreign film, my man?”

  “A few.”

  “Tell me the truth, now. Do you ever look at the movie, or do you keep your eyes glued to the subtitles, like reading a book or something?”

  Roberts didn’t answer, he just felt his head nodding in reply. Am I that readable?

  Corky silently sipped on his beer. Got another.

  “How do you know all these things?”

  Corky cracked the beer, siphoning off the foam with pursed lips. A few beads of Pilsner shined yellow in his beard. “Hell, I was a college boy once, just like you.”

  Roberts wasn’t a college boy, but he kept his mouth shut—because he was learning nevertheless.

  Corky continued. “English major, Art minor. Nowadays I wish it was the other way around, but oh well. They damn near had me trained, like you, to see the world in terms of words. Ugh.”

  “What do you mean?” Roberts asked. “Don’t we think in words, don’t we communicate in words? Aren’t we using words right now?”

  “Geez, were you on the debate team, or what?” Corky laughed, looking over Roberts’ raw shoulder blade, checking it. “Not exactly. Words are words—symbols. Images are sights, man. Reality. If you can see something, it’s really there; if you just read about it it’s not…it’s all in your head. ‘A picture is worth a thousand words,’ ever heard of that before? Well, I say a thousand words ain’t worth shit—it’s the picture itself that counts. Get it?”

  Roberts let the words sink in.

  “Well, you’ll see. That’s what tats are all about, man. Images. The reality inside. Art. Something that words can’t make sense
out of.”

  Roberts sucked on the bourbon, trying to figure Corky’s philosophy out. It made sense, but whenever Roberts tried to push words out of his mind, it didn’t happen. His interior journalist continued to try to describe the world around him—the pictures on the wall, the oak desk, the gray-haired biker with a flair for philosophy. Words. Thoughts were words.

  He tried to break it down. Sentences. Questions. The Five W’s. Words. Letters.

  The madman’s initials, a signature on a twisted image…the psycho’s reality.

  Corky broke his concentration: “I think you’re ready for more ink. More bourbon, too.” He got another bottle out from a desk drawer—it clinked loudly against glass and Roberts knew that Corky had enough liquor stockpiled for his customers to open a bar. He took a swig off of it before replacing the near-empty bottle between Roberts’ legs. Corky finished the shot’s worth in the first bottle and set it on the workbench.

  He inked up the needle with color—a silver to shade in the metallic black he had imagined the typewriter to be. It might be a stupid subject for a tattoo, he thought, but that was no reason not to make it rock and roll. No sense doing the thing if ain’t worthwhile. Gotta make it worth the time and energy.

  Roberts couldn’t see Corky while he began to work on his back, and he thought it was probably better that he didn’t watch. His stomach was feeling queasy enough as it was.

  Corky said into his ear, “Tell ya what. I got a story about another samantha-genitalia—I mean semantogenic cripple—like yourself, who came in here a while back. This’ll just give you a better idea of what the hell I’m talking about. You just sit back and sip on that there bottle while I tell it to you.”

  Eerie, Roberts thought. It was beginning to sound a bit like his dream. A bit too much like his dream. “You aren’t gonna rip my face off, are you?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Never mind.” He blushed again.

  “Whatever…now you just relax and listen. But be forewarned: I love to tell stories. My English degree gets a hold of me sometimes and I can’t stop it. But this here’s a true story, so I like telling it. If I get too long-winded, just tell me to shut the fuck up, and I’ll do so. Okay?”

  Roberts leaned back, giving in. The room was spinning a bit, but he felt good. He promised himself to concentrate on the images and not the words, if that was possible at all.

  “Okay, here goes.” The inker hummed to life, and Corky began his tale.

  V.

  “This homeless biker walked his rusty ol’ Harley up to my doorstep, leaned it up against the brick wall outside, and trotted into my tattoo shop like he owned the place. He always showed up on Thursday afternoons, when business was deader than Ted Bundy. I never could tell if Thursdays sucked because that’s just the way Thursdays were, or if people avoided the place like the plague because that’s when he was there, all scraggly and stinking like a urinal.

  “I know, I should have kicked the piss-stained fucker out the door the first day he walked in. But I’d taken to the poor beggar, and I pitied his poverty-stricken life. The only thing that made his life worth living was his dilapidated frame of a scooter, and I had to give him credit for that.

  “He called himself One-Eyed Jack, and I figured that was because he wore a black patch on his eye…whether it was for show or not, I couldn’t tell, but because of the grime on it, the patch looked legit. His clothes were in tatters: the beer-stained long underwear shirt he wore was frayed at the bottom, where his lint-filled belly button peeked out over ratty and stringy denim jeans. He didn’t have any tats of his own, and looked naked to me without them. If he didn’t drag his broken-down bike along with him everywhere he went, you wouldn’t have known he was once a biker…you’d just think he was some weird-looking bum with a silly patch on his right eye.

  “Anyway, he came in that Thursday and plopped his ass down in the seat where my patrons either sit to read mags when I’m busy or to bullshit when I’m not. For two months going, Jack always came in to shoot the shit, since he couldn’t afford my rates, meager as they were.

  “He said, ‘Hey, Corky, how’s biz?’ He always asked the same thing when he came inside, and I always ignored it. His voice grumbled like tires spinning in gravel when he spoke, and there was something buried inside the sound that said I’m hungry, though he was too proud to actually say the words.

  “He picked up one of my art books, and started flipping through the laminated pages. From the way he oohed and ahhed you’d think he was my Number One Fan. I guess he really was, though I had my regulars who paid good money for my work. But he seemed to really appreciate my skill. Maybe that was why I took such a liking to him, when no one else in their right mind would.

  “After a half hour of going through his routine, he tossed the book down on the coffee table and looked me square in the eye. ‘I got a proposition for ya, Corky. Wanna hear it?’

  “’What?’ My reply was flat, though I was a bit thrown off by the way the hungry sound of his voice changed from wheels rumbling in gravel to new tires gracing a smooth blacktop. He sounded sure of himself, like the asshole salesmen I sometimes get at the shop.

  “’If you’ll break down and give me a tattoo, I’ll give you my Harley,’ he said.

  “His bike was shit, but I couldn’t believe he was offering his most prized possession to me. Still, I said, ‘No,’ folding my heavily inked forearms across my chest for emphasis…and to rub it in a bit.

  “’I’ll work for you then. I can sweep up the place, and I know a little bit about…’

  “’No,’ I repeated.

  “’Aw, c’mon Corky. You know I’m good for it.’

  “’Nope,’ I said again. Did he really think I’d waste my precious time and colors on him?

  “’Wait, wait,’ he said, lifting his cheeks to dig into the back pocket of his jeans. ‘Before you make a decision, I got somethin’ I want you to check out.’ He dug harder into his back pocket, looking like he was scratching hemorrhoids. After a while he withdrew a crumpled piece of paper, unfolded it, and handed it to me, smiling his gap-toothed pirate’s grin at me.

  “I looked at the paper. It was a glossy page ripped out of a magazine, with a slick close-up photo of some Yuppie-looking faggot on one side. The Yuppie—probably one of those male fashion models—smiled up from the page at me, turning my stomach. I flipped the paper over, looking for something significant. I asked him, ‘What the hell is this?’

  “’The guy, Corky, look at the guy.’

  “So I stared at the faggot gawking up from the page.

  “’What about him? You go for queers?’

  “’I want his eye.’

  “’What?’

  “I looked up at One-Eyed Jack. He had a pistol pointed at my face. It looked loaded, and he cocked it for emphasis. ‘I want his eye, Corky. And I want it today.’

  “Fucking Thursdays.”

  Corky clicked off the inker, and began refilling it with a different color—camouflage green, to give the typewriter some tint. “You sleeping, Roy?”

  “No, just listening. Good story. You do the guy’s voice well, like an impersonator or something. So did you give him the eye, or not?”

  “Hold your horses, and just listen up. You’ll see soon enough.” Corky took a big chug off of the bourbon bottle that Roberts had been clutching. The inker hummed back to life, and Corky continued the tale….

  “Anyway, since he’d been hanging around my shop so much, he knew where I kept my .44, and helped himself to it. Next he drew the blinds and locked the door.

  “Then, when the room was nice and shadowy, he ripped off his patch and tossed it on the floor, revealing his disfigured face. The entire right side of his face was smooth and pale, as if both his eyeball and eyebrow had been erased clean off. Unlike the other side of his f
ace, there was no sunken-in socket…it was just a flat surface of white virgin flesh.

  “’What are you starin’ at?’ he asked, wiggling the gun at me.

  “’Nothin’, Jack,’ I said. ‘Nothing at all.’

  “He got pissed at that. ‘Hey, don’t get cocky with me, man. I gave you a chance at doin’ this the easy way. I thought you were different, Corky. But you’re not—you’re as stingy as the rest of the bastards that spit on me when they walk by the homeless hangout every day.’

  “I didn’t say anything. He was obviously teetering on the edge, and I wasn’t gonna be the one to push him over it. Not with a gun in each of his shaking hands.

  “His one good eye rolled around in its socket as he considered his options. Then he sighed. ‘Now,’ he said, waltzing over to my barber’s chair and falling into it. ‘I want you to give me an eye, just like the ones that guy in that picture has.’ He used the tip of my .44 as a pointer, tapping it against the ugly side of his face: ‘I want you to ink it in, right here.’ I hoped the gun would go off while he had it near his temple, but nothing happened.

  “There was nothing I could do, except to humor him and do what he said. Being twice his size, I really felt like an asshole following his orders, but I knew he was crazed enough to shoot. So I prepped my needles for the job.

  “With hummer in hand, I sat down on my stool and tried to decide where to begin. The spot he wanted me to ink looked like it would pop like a boil if I touched it. It wasn’t leathery like real skin—it was smooth and alien. I admit I was a little too spooked to go near it.

  “I felt the barrel nudge into my ribs. ‘And you better do a good job, too. I’ve seen your other stuff—and it really is good art—but I want your best. It has to look real.’ He poked harder with the pistol. ‘Get it?’

  “I nodded. He wasn’t making my job any easier.