“Dan misses the cat. He misses you, too.”
She scowled. Looked at Roberts. Then she turned away, grabbing a paper cup with coffee in it, and took a sip. “Did he tell you about us?”
Roberts chuckled. “I’ll say. He hasn’t stopped talking about you since the day he took over my living room. He’s head over heels for you, Judy.”
She sipped again, silently. “I wish he wouldn’t have done that.” Sip. “I’ve only gone out with him twice. He thinks he owns me or something.” Her eyes rolled up to face him. “He does not own me, ya know. Nobody does.”
Roberts shrugged his shoulders.
“Nobody,” she continued. “Not Dan, not Rick, not Buckman, not this station…nobody.”
Roberts was beginning to feel a little uncomfortable. Probably because he felt exactly the same way as Judy did…and she was more sure of it than he was.
Judy snapped her lips shut, and Roberts could tell by the way she flexed her jaws that she was grinding her teeth.
“I’m sorry, Roy. I’m just beginning to wish I would have stayed in the newspapers. You don’t know what it’s like having to put on airs for the camera. It’s terrible, feeling all those eyes all over you, watching your every move, hanging on to your every word. It’s scary.” She reached over to a side table, pulled out a postmarked envelope from a pile. “Here, look at this…”
Roberts opened the envelope and withdrew a sheet of folded yellow legal pad. It stank like bleach. In scrawled pencil, the two short sentences read: “Judy, I’m in love with you. I think you and me should fuck.”
“That came in today’s mail. I must have shredded three tons of the stuff since I came here. I don’t know where they come from—fans, perverts, convicts, whatever—but they all usually say about the same thing. I call it Fuck-Me Mail. And since that’s all males want to do, I think it’s a pretty good term for it, don’t you?”
“Yeah,” Roberts said sarcastically. “I guess. But this sort of thing is a bit beyond sexual attraction, Judy, it’s…”
“Well, I’ve gotten used to it,” she continued, ignoring him. “But what I haven’t gotten used to is people like Dan. Guys who probably have good intentions, but who scare the hell out of me once they get close. See, Dan and I shared an…uh, intimate moment once, and I gave him a second chance. Which I shouldn’t have done. Because he took advantage of it, like I owed him something. I’ll never go through with that again.”
Roberts paled. He knew he shouldn’t let her go on about her personal sex life, especially about Schoenmacher. Still, he said, “You don’t honestly believe that Dan would write letters like this one, do you?” He set the note on her glass top desk. She looked down at it, and then tossed it back in the pile to be shredded.
“No, probably not. But I can’t help thinking that he is just like the people who write those letters. I look into his eyes and I wonder if he’s like that, what’s hiding inside there…oh, you never know what’s going on inside a person’s head. It scares the hell out of me.” She sipped from the coffee cup—a dodge, because Roberts had noticed that it was empty. “He might as well have date raped me last time…”
“You really shouldn’t be telling me all this, Judy. You should tell Dan to his face. Maybe give him a chance, maybe he could prove to you that he’s not like that, not at all…”
“No.” She acted like she finished the coffee, crushed the cup into a crumpled mass, and then tossed it into the trash. “Could you please tell him for me? I can’t face him. Not again. I can work with him on the set as long as he quits looking at me like he does…but, not otherwise. Tell him. I’m serious, Roy. And so help me, if he even looks at me weird when he gets back to work, I’ll scream sexual harassment. Or I’ll quit this job. Either way, you let him know.”
“Are you sure you mean all this, Judy? Dan’s really a nice guy…”
She glared at him. Then she picked up some papers, shuffling them as if on camera.
“Okay,” Roberts said, getting the hint. “I’ll tell him. But you should know that you’re still breaking his heart.”
He got to the door, opened it, and turned. “At least think about giving him another chance. Remember, if you want to just call him, you can reach him at my place.”
She didn’t respond.
He shut the door. “Someone’s feeling bitchy today.”
On his way back to his desk, he considered purposely writing a few typos on the copy that was bound for the teleprompter. Dan had, no doubt, made a few mistakes on their date. Couldn’t she budge a little? Couldn’t she understand what it was like to make a damned mistake? For his friend, he’d force-feed her a few mistakes of her own.
II.
He had one of the interns cover for him, so he could take off early. He had done most of the day’s work on his own—the college student only had a short news story to double check for mistakes. Roberts didn’t feel guilty about it at all as he walked out of the boring brick building and got into his car.
He followed the speed limit—which was a change for him, actually, but his past few dreams had warned him about going too fast, about going to Corky’s Tattoos at all—and he avoided heavy traffic. When he arrived, the eyes on the sign were flat, boring. Nothing at all like they had been the first time he noticed them—his fear had given them life, but now he knew that there were worse things to be frightened of, more terribly real horrors than two hand-painted eyeballs. He grabbed the stack of magazines from his passenger seat, and carried them with him into the place like a delivery man.
“Hey, it’s the typewriter man.”
Roberts looked around the shop. Corky was finishing up work on a bald obese man—Jocko?—who had tears dribbling down his shiny cheeks. The guy looked like a big, fat baby. Roberts had to swallow a laugh as he looked at the guy, before setting the magazines down on the table.
“Go ahead and grab a beer outta the fridge, buddy. I’ll be done in a second.”
Roberts obeyed. Corky’s voice sounded falsely friendly for some reason. Did the big baby make him uncomfortable?
Roberts cracked open an ice-cold can of beer and chugged it down. It was smooth. He remembered his nightmare of himself as a tattoo artist. But he didn’t smash the can against his forehead this time. The shop had been cleaned up since his last visit, and the change was good, because it relaxed Roberts’ nerves. The dream, he now realized, was dumb.
He sat at the table, flipping through new magazines, issues he hadn’t stolen from Corky’s home.
After about twenty minutes, the fat man paid a huge fee, and walked out the door, looking tough and mean. Roberts was extremely glad that he had held down his laughter.
Roberts continued to fake reading one of the magazines as Corky sat down behind his desk and popped open a beer can of his own. “You ready for me to finish up your back?”
“In a minute,” Roberts said. “But first I have a question for you, Mr. Corcorrhan.”
Corky sat up, almost dumping his beer. “What the hell did you say?”
“Listen, J.R.”—Roberts exaggerated the inflection of his voice, eating up Corky’s shocked expression—“Where the hell did you get the idea for that story, ‘Burn Out’?”
Corky was openmouthed. “Well, I’ll be damned. How in blazes did you find out?”
Roberts opened to the page of the story, and then left it open-faced on the magazine-strewn table. He felt a little silly, a little like Sherlock Holmes when he said, “Elementary, my dear Corky. You used quite a few of the same phrases in your story as you do in everyday speech. I saw the byline, and made the connection.”
“No shit! Damned if you wouldn’t make a good private dick. ‘Course, you already got the dick part of it covered, but…” Corky laughed nervously at his own joke. “Anyway, congratulations. I’ve been pegged!”
Roberts felt reli
eved for some reason. Corky had admitted his identity. And he really hadn’t covered it up at all, just by going by his handle. Roberts knew that he’d been making Corky into something he wasn’t, just as he had done in his dream.
Corky grabbed two more beers, and handed one to Roberts. “Here’s your prize.”
They slurped. “Why didn’t you tell me you wrote stories?”
“Aw, they’re just ideas I had. They’re all based on real life stuff—things I hear about through the grapevine, the stories people tell me when they’ve had too much to drink, things like that.”
Roberts looked at him slyly. “Corky a writer. For a guy who doesn’t like words very much, you sure do a good job with them.”
Corky chuckled—was he blushing?—as he shrugged his shoulders. “I had to do something with that waste of toilet paper called a college degree in English, didn’t I? Anyway, I just do it for fun once in a while. No big deal. I’m no Hemingway or nothing.”
Roberts just looked at him, waiting for more.
“Remember when I said a picture is worth a million words? Well, a million words is worth a picture, too. It works both ways, sometimes. Drawing and writing are two different ways of reaching the same goal: an image. You can draw with words, just like you can sketch with a needle. It all depends on what it is exactly that you’re trying to accomplish. But both draw pictures in the mind.”
“And that story you told me about One-Eyed Jack…was that for real, or what?”
“Hey, I told you that was a true story, didn’t I?”
Roberts nodded, not quite believing him.
“Oh, fuck you. It’s true, and I don’t give a damn whether you believe me or not. I’ll probably write it up someday and send it to one of them magazines, sooner or later. What the hell.”
Roberts still stared at him, smiling.
“Oh, shut up, typewriter man. See, that’s one difference between you and me. You write facts. I write fiction…sometimes. It’s art. Just like tattooing. A tattoo can tell a story, and a story can draw a tattoo, in a way. They both show things, things about the artist and the wearer, or reader, or whatever. You get me?”
“Sure, it’s logical.” Roberts pulled on his beer. “But just don’t go lecturing me anymore about my being a word man, okay?”
“Well I can’t help it if you are what you are.”
Roberts stood up and walked over to the barber’s chair. He fell down into it, and took off his shirt. “Okay, J.R., how about finishing up that stain on my back that you call a piece of art?”
Corky stood up, pointing at him with a long finger. “Don’t you start thinking you can call me ‘J.R.’ or none such shit as that. You call me ‘Corky,’ because as far as either one of us is concerned, that’s really my name.”
Roberts could tell he wasn’t really upset, but he did mean what he said. “You bet, Corky. Just giving you a hard time, man.”
Silently, Corky checked over Roberts’ tattoo. It looked clean enough to work on, and so he began to rub in the alcohol for preparation.
“I see you followed my advice and used that zinc oxide. Good man. I’ll try and finish you up by the end of business today. How’s that sound?”
“Excellent. I’m dying to see it complete.”
Corky inked up a fresh needle, and clicked it on. The familiar hum of the ink gun was reassuring, relaxing. Roberts knew that everything was going to be all right.
Corky began to shade the outline he had started. With bright, light blue color, he crosshatched lines to fill in the cheek of a nondescript face. “You see the guy who was in here when you showed up?”
“Yeah,” Roberts chuckled. “Cryin’ like a baby. And you thought I was bad…”
“He’s the fourth guy I’ve tattooed in the past two days. I tell ya, that interview we did sure was good for business. I’ve got some appointments, too, lined up for next week. Maybe I can buy a new carb for my scooter.”
“Glad it helped. I’m in good with my boss, too. I mean, shit, I hate the guy, but it’s always good to have the man on your side, know what I mean?”
“Hell, no. I’m my own boss.”
“Must be nice. That’s the only way to go.”
Corky concentrated on Roberts’ back. Getting the mouth right, that was the difficult part. He changed inkers, and began working with bright green. Tracing down his back slowly, he drew long, jagged fangs behind the purple lips. When he was done, the mouth looked back at him, flashing a maniacal grin. The mouth was smiling, and inside of it, gripped between the jaws, was a large, bloated eyeball. The orb ogled the typewriter, which was the centerpiece of Roberts’ shoulder blade.
“Hey, Corky. I almost forgot all about the convention this weekend. Me and my buddies at KOPT have decided to throw a free tattoo expo at the gym down at Central High School. We’re gonna have free beer and hot dogs, and I was hoping you could talk to some of your tattoo artist friends, and get them to show up.”
Corky’s tongue peeked out of his mouth as he worked. “So you want to have a bunch of us artists set up shop down at the gym? We’ll still charge for the tats, you know. But hell, if the beer’s free, I bet I can get some bros to show up. When?”
“Sunday.”
“Hmm…sounds good, since it’s the weekend. I’ll see what I can do. What’s the deal? KOPT need another story, or what?”
Roberts explained the plan, how it was a plot to capture the Tattoo Killer in the act.
“Hey, that’s a damned good idea. As long as it doesn’t turn into another pigfest, you can count me in. Hold steady, now. I gotta put on the finishing touches.”
Corky inked in bright red hair that sprouted out from beneath a gray hat. He colored insane red veins in the creature’s eyes—stalks that shot wetly out from the face as if in surprise, or horror. The eyeball inside the mouth would be the sane one, the centered one. He added dots of red into the tail of his creation, giving it a shiny crimson glint. The tall gray hat cocked sideways on the thing’s head looked ominous, like a gun barrel, as it shot sparks from its lid.
Roberts could feel that the tattoo was almost complete; it felt warm, whole. He couldn’t wait to look at it. His entire right shoulder blade throbbed with excitement, like one big raw scab. He finished off the beer that had warmed between his legs.
Corky leaned back in his new chair and it squeaked. He looked at his freestyle creation, and smiled. Then he held up a thumb in mock imitation of a painter, and said, “It’s complete. The best damned work I’ve done to date.”
Roberts stood up, feeling nervous. Like a kid opening up his report card. He walked over to the mirror above the aluminum sink. He tried looking over his shoulder, but couldn’t see anything but a blur of color.
Corky was suddenly standing next to him, mirror in hand. “Here you go, typewriter man. Check it out.”
Roberts was astonished.
It was the best tattoo he had ever seen…in Corky’s flash pictures, in the biker magazines, in his dreams. The best.
The typewriter was still there, of course, shining black and smiling its mouthful of keys. But above it was a shocking creature of some sort—cute, in a menacing way. It had a big toothy smile of ink-dripping fangs that chomped on an eyeball. The beast was sweating profusely, but enjoying itself…getting off on its own fear. It had determination as it worked—and yes, it was working on something…many things at once.
The tailed monster’s body shrunk down, like a caricature, though it wasn’t quite that either. It was wearing a fashionable suit, with bulging muscles stressing at the seams. Borderline Incredible Hulk. Its strength was reflected more in the way it did what it did, than in the picture-perfect veined muscles that flexed everywhere on its body…muscles like those on a sword-and-sorcery book cover, but better, more realistic. These muscles stood out, not because of their size ac
tually, but because of their amount; Roberts counted seven barbaric arms around the creature, like spokes on a hub. One was pouring a bottle of booze down into the creature’s mouth, another was forcing a sharp pencil into the thing’s temple. A hairy arm protruding from its stomach reached down between its legs, at once both guarding and groping. Two clawed arms that shot out from the back of its head were akimbo over its shoulders, like bat wings, but its own sharp needlepoint fingers were massaging the shoulders of the little devilish beast.
The final two arms, protruding naturally from the shoulders, the only biceps which were position where they were supposed to be, were typing. Typing. Hunched over the original tattoo, Corky’s freestyle creation was typing fast and furious on the typewriter, pounding the symbolic keys with fingertips shaped as mini fists. Other keys, new keys, were spraying off the face of the typewriter like teeth from a punched face. A sheet of paper now curled out from the typewriter…no, not paper, skin. Red letters on skin.
On top of the grinning beast, cocked slightly to one side, was the tall gray hat with a black band, blowing its lid, shooting multicolored brains. Sticking out from the black band was a white card that said PRESS on it. Beneath that was a button, though Roberts immediately understood the double meaning: the tattooed alter ego was a journalist.
He was speechless.
“Like it?” Corky asked shyly, though he was obviously proud of his work.
Roberts twisted the hand mirror at different angles, discovering new nuances in the tattoo. “Like it? I love it! It’s perfect, man! I had no idea you could…you were putting so much meaning into it!”
Grave Markings: 20th Anniversary Edition Page 26