Without looking up, she opened her mouth and I slipped the cig between her lips. She drew in a lungful and slowly let it drift out her nostrils. “Thanks.”
I didn’t want to disrupt her, but I had to ask. “What did you mean when you said ‘ever since’?”
“Oh, I guess I should tell you, shouldn’t I?” It sounded more like a statement than a question. “I usually wait until afterwards, but what the hell.” She looked up into my eyes, searching, as if she could see right through me.
“Like I said, I used to be an artist. Not a tattoo artist, but a painter, you know? I was pretty damned famous, as far as artists go. ‘Joan Arkhamson’ was a freaking brand name. I used to make a helluva lot of money. Got more than ten thousand for just one piece once.”
I raised an eyebrow in disbelief.
“Oh, I don’t expect you to believe me. You probably never heard of me before, but I swear, everything I’m tellin’ ya is true.”
“I believe you, Joan.” I noticed that the needle no longer tickled, and I looked down at her work—the outline of a woman’s figure could be seen, dotted by beads of blood and ink. She was right: this tattoo was going to be a classic. I could tell already, just by the outline. It was like nothing I’d ever seen before.
“Anyway, that didn’t last very long.” A stack of ash dropped from her cigarette. “Not because of me, though ‘Cause of them.” She paused again and blinked cigarette smoke out of her eyes. “Could you take this?”
I grabbed the butt out of her mouth and threw it to the curb. “Who?”
She ignored me. “Now I’m freelancin’. Not that I don’t like it. Actually, I love it. But I work better with oils.”
“What happened?”
“Oh, didn’t tell ya, did I?” She giggled. “Guess I’m doin’ it to myself now.”
I had no idea what she meant.
“You see, I got a little loose with my work. Started doin’ stuff I wanted to do. Nudes, and stuff like that. It sold, too. Then I really let loose and started drawing things the way I saw ‘em, abstracts of politicians and celebrities. Some of it was sick, sure, but only if the subject itself was sick.” She sighed. “I was paintin’ reality, man, reality. Guess they couldn’t deal with reality, though. They put an end to it real quick.”
“Hey!”
She looked up at me, startled. “Huh?”
“Who the hell are you talking about?”
She avoided my eyes and went back to etching. “To tell you the truth, I really don’t know. Some anti-porn group, or maybe some extremists from the Moral Majority, or…hell, I don’t know. Some crazies. I wouldn’t doubt if it was the government itself! But whoever they were, they really got me. Well…” she giggled again. “They haven’t caught me yet.”
Getting impatient, I looked down at the tattoo. She was almost done. The woman’s legs melted together into a webwork, kind of like a mermaid…maybe a snake. She had finished the outline and was now shading in the scales that tapered into a coil where the woman’s feet would be.
“That explains the set up ya got here.” I nodded at the cycle. It was a beauty. A Harley, with chrome out the butt. It had mirrors on the handlebars that jutted out farther than most bikes and twisted at odd angles, as if she spent more time looking at herself than the road behind her when she cruised. On the side of the tank in big red letters, were the words “Freedom Rider.”
“Yeah. You like it?”
“It’s different. Kinda sorry looking. But I trust ya.”
“It’s all I got, but at least it’s something. Used to be paint and brush; now it’s motorcycle and needle. At least I’m still expressing myself…if I can’t draw, I’m worthless, ya know?” She sighed.
“So tell me more about ‘them,’” I said, getting interested.
“Oh, well…maybe I should wait till I’m done here.”
“C’mon!”
“Okay,” she licked her lips. “I started getting threats in the mail, over the phone, everywhere. I caught a guy following me once, too. But he didn’t do anything to me. He was just always like, there, you know?”
“Mmm.”
“Anyway, one night I had an exhibit in Cincinnati. They, whoever they are, broke into the museum and trashed my best pieces. They spray painted ‘Bitch’ on the walls, and ‘Die, Commie,’ and all sorts of stuff worse than my fucking art! Anyway, I was history after that. The media played on it, and…didn’t you read about me in the papers? Well, probably not. You don’t look like the paper-readin’ sort.” She winked at me. “Anyway, I couldn’t get an exhibit anywhere after that. And then lotsa people were followin’ me then…not just the crazies, either. Everybody.”
“Must’ve been hell.”
“Oh yeah, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as what finally happened. They shot up my house with machine guns and shit! I’m lucky to be alive!”
“Uh-huh.” I rolled my eyes.
“Anyway, my boyfriend got killed. So that was it. I got the hell out of there. No one knows where I am, not even my mother. I’ve just been riding the streets, sleeping in the woods and stuff, carrying on my art. They’ll never be able to stop it, not if I have anything to do with it.”
“Rock and roll will never die,” I said, mimicking her pride.
“One guy got killed.”
“What?!” She threw me off with that one.
“She frowned, concentrating on her work. “They must be following me now, too.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Well you might if you aren’t careful. What I mean is, they killed a guy I tattooed. They actually censored my living art! Those bastards don’t know when to stop. They must be everywhere. I mean, how did they find that guy? I never signed my stuff back then. At least I don’t think so.”
“Wait. You mean they actually killed a guy who had one of your tattoos? An innocent man?”
“Yeah.” She grinned. “That’s why I said that you’re getting more than your money’s worth with this. Do you know how rare this is?”
“I know now.” I reached into my pants and caressed my gun.
“Well I’m about done. Think this is my best one yet.” She finally lifted the needle away from my arm. “What do ya think?” She smiled and cocked her head.
I looked down at it. Perfection. It was her best one yet. A helluva lot better than the one on the guy I shot the week before. It was priceless. But it wasn’t complete. “It’s great,” I said, smiling. “But since I’m already a marked man, can you sign it for me?”
She chuckled. “Of course! It’d be my pleasure. Just don’t go showin’ this around…you might find yourself dead.”
The needle hummed back to life, and she quickly dotted my arm. While she did so, I pulled out my pistol and pressed it against her temple.
What happened next was really strange. She knew I was going to kill her, but she just went right on signing her name, her face wrinkled in a grimace of determination. It was the greatest act of strength I’d ever seen. “Thanks, Joan,” was all I could say.
She nodded. I pulled the trigger and she fell to the curb. Hopping off the stool and stepping over her body, I limped over to my gar. Inside, I checked the buzzing ink on my skin. It was beautiful. Another “Joan Arkhamson classic,” just like she said. The figure of the sumptuous woman was enticing, tapering off into a coiled snake. She had added a tiny rattle at the end of the coil and the woman was holding a pitchfork, or a trident, something like that. I’d seen her paintings before and this was better than any of them. The Agency paid well, but this tattoo was worth more than the million they gave me to kill her. Lots more. I might be a hit man, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have taste.
Then I noticed her signature. There was something really wrong with it…it read, “Joan Arkhahahaha.” What could she have been thinking whe
n I put the gun to her head? Perhaps she wasn’t as strong as I thought. I cursed at not letting Joan finish the job properly before I shot her.
As I drove away, I got tired. Exhausted. My arms turned limp and useless and my foot slipped off the gas pedal. Just before the car went out of control and rammed into an oncoming truck, I realized Joan’s last thoughts were about poison. So were mine.
* * *
“So that’s the story, Nurse,” I said, rolling my eyes toward the beautiful blonde towering over my paralyzed body. She nodded, smiling. “You believe me, don’t you?”
“Of course,” she said, caressing the tattoo on my lifeless arm. “The evidence is right here. I’d recognize Joan Arkhamson’s work anywhere!”
“So, if you believe me, then you gotta understand why you have to kill me. Joan was right about one thing: those Agency bastards are everywhere. I can only imagine all the horrible ways they’ll torture me when they find me here with this tattoo! It’ll be worse than death. Please have mercy.”
She looked down at me with wet eyes. “Well…”
“’I used to be an artist’ was the first thing Joan said to me and she was right. I used to be one, too. A death artist. But now I’m worthless. Please.” A tear rolled down my cheek. “Kill me. Grant me a last wish…to die as I have lived.”
“Now, now,” she replied, wrapping her fingers around the IV needle in my arm. “I’m sorry, Sir, but that would be impossible.”
She twisted and dug the needle deep into my flesh. I screamed.
“That would be letting you express yourself, now wouldn’t it? We at the Agency don’t like to see our money wasted. I am here to make sure that we get every dollar’s worth of the million you were given. The million you gave that bitch artist…”
She reached for a scalpel from a nearby table. I closed my eyes and pictured the tattoo on my arm, the beautiful snake woman, coiled and smiling. It made me feel warm and strong. “You still are an artist, Joan,” I said aloud, allowing the beauty of her work to push the twisted visions of the horrors to come out of my mind.
I mused that the snake woman just might join me to the grave. And as the old cliché, “you can’t take it with you,” came to mind, I laughed a lot like Joan Arkhamson.
BALD TIRES
Let me start at the beginning, okay? That way maybe we both can get a better picture of exactly what happened. I’m not even sure I do know what happened, or if I can believe it. But there’s no denying the facts, I suppose, so we might as well try to at least understand how we got here. I’ll tell you my story, and then you can tell me yours, okay? Here goes….
It all started with Shorty, a regular client at my shop, who I’d just finished a tattoo on and had been giving me funny looks the whole time. “Call me weird,” he said as he was counting out some cash, “but every time I get a tattoo from you, I feel like a little part of me disappears.”
I pocketed his payment. “Well this two-hundred bucks of yours is history, that’s for sure. But that art ain’t going anywhere anytime soon, man.”
Shorty stuffed his black leather wallet into the back pocket of his jeans, squinting oddly at me. His eyes were bloodshot; two big welts of exhaustion in the middle of his face. He obviously hadn’t been getting any sleep. For a guy his age—about seventy, I guess—that wasn’t a good sign. And considering that the last time I’d seen Shorty was in a fist fight against two brawlers young enough to be his grandkids (a bloody battle which he’d easily won), I was worried about the old guy. Something had changed about him. His face had taken on the look of a snail, shriveled up inside of its shell. He had transformed from gearhead to geezer. Or maybe he just had a hangover. I know I did, and that it was making me see the world crooked all day. Maybe it was all in my mind. Anyway, the tattoo I had just put on his shoulder blade had exhausted us both, that was for sure.
“No, no,” he said, waving his head like an old horse. “You don’t understand. It’s not the money. Money’s just dead paper. What I’m giving up is alive. It’s like I’m scooping a little piece of myself out from the inside and wearing it on the outside, sharing my inner secrets with the rest of the world. And every time someone takes a gander at my ink, they rip that part right out of me. With just their eyes. The eyes, man…the eyes are bandits.”
He wasn’t making much sense. But from the massive tattoos that covered the majority of Shorty’s skin, he sure seemed to have a lot to give. I’d created a lot of those tats, too. I was especially proud of the ink on his forearms and neck, the spider and the double-headed dogs—those were the most visible, and got the most exposure. None of them were freestyles or custom jobs—Shorty made damned sure I’d ink what he wanted me to, dot by tiny dot—but they were still mine, in a way, because I had been the one to take needle to flesh, and I was the one who could make Shorty’s imagination reality. And I’d poured my heart into every single tattoo, as if it was my own skin I was staining.
“Know what I mean?” Shorty continued, looking at me strangely, eyebrow raised like I had all the answers or something.
“What? That after all these years of carrying all that ink—those fantastic pieces you’ve got all over your body—you’re having second thoughts about your tats? That’s silly, man. You must’ve taken one too many hits off that bottle I gave you earlier.”
“I finished it,” Shorty corrected with a smirk. “But I’m stone cold sober, and I tell you, I’m losing something each time I get tattooed. Damned if I know exactly what it is, but I can feel it. As if the ink itself was soaking me up from the inside-out, like a biscuit in a puddle of gravy. I’m almost empty inside. Completely dried up.” His face turned all wrinkly as he scowled and stared at the ceiling. “I’ve replaced myself with other people’s pictures, and traded my own blood for ink so much there’s not much me left inside of me anymore.”
“What’s gotten into you? You might be a bit up there in years, but in a way you’re the youngest guy I know. And now you’re talking like you’ve got one foot in the grave, or something…” I lit a cigarette and inhaled the smoke, shaking my head from side to side, as if to shame him like a child. “Get real, man. Tattoos add to who you are—they don’t take anything away from you.” I chuckled and grinned. “Except your paycheck.”
“I didn’t think so, either, until I started putting two and two together, and I think I might be more right than you realize. Last time I came in here, you did this one…” Shorty lifted his shirt up from his waist, revealing the lizard I’d done two weeks ago. It was thick green, like a living alligator snapping its jaws at his belly button. Its forked tongue was just that—a razor-edged piece of crazy silverware that leapt out from between massive fangs, poking toward an older, faded tattoo of a Vargas-styled pin-up girl in frilly lingerie on his ribcage. It looked like the girlie was flirting with a death lizard—teasing it, if you know what I mean.
“Yeah, I remember that one,” I replied, putting out my cigarette. One of my best. I’d put what seemed like years of work into the slimy design.
“Notice how green that lizard is nowadays? How much larger it’s gotten since you’ve done it?”
It was larger and greener. But that had natural explanations: “Listen, Shorty. I know where you’re heading with all this. There’s no way that that tattoo is growing all on its own. The skin naturally expands with time. You should know this more than anyone. Blood clots cling to ink sometimes if it’s a rough job, and that makes the tattoo a bit darker than it’s supposed to be. Hell, just blushing can cause a tat to take on a different tone. Maybe you got a bruise underneath it, or…”
“That’s all bullshit, and you know it, boy.” Shorty—who was called such because he was actually one gargantuan ballbreaker, standing at six-foot-six—strolled over to my stool where I usually sit to ink in clients, and I did the same, sitting down at my desk and lighting another smoke, shaken by his snarl. “Som
ething’s happening to my body, Johnny. It’s changing. Maybe I’m just getting old, and maybe not. Hell, okay, I am old, but I tell ya: these tattoos are stealing what little soul I’ve got left. It’s like I got a bunch of bloodsucking leeches latched all over me and I can’t get rid of ‘em!”
I couldn’t stand watching him. He was getting senile right there in front of me. I felt sorry for the old guy, till I got another idea, one that might change his mind: “If you think these tattoos are ‘stealing you’ or whatever, then why the hell did you come in here this morning to get another one?”
“To test my theory, that’s why. While I still got enough of myself left to see things clearly.”
I groaned at his pat answer. Shorty reached for my ink gun on a nearby table, and toyed with its tip. “I know this all sounds crazy to you, but hear me out, okay?” He paused for emphasis, waving the needle at me like a handgun. I nodded, resolved to humor him. He fingered the needle’s sharp tip as he spoke: “I stopped at the gas station this morning to fill up the tires on my chopper. Did you know that they’re chargin’ money for air these days? Air is fucking free! Anyway, I was gonna top off my tires as usual, and when I started to put nozzle to valve I heard that funny sound you always hear. You know, that ‘PFFFT’ sound?”
I snorted a laugh in affirmation.
“Anyway, I remember thinking, ‘Gee, there goes a penny’s worth of air,’ till I realized that it wasn’t the air from the hose that made the sound but the air from inside the tire, old air that snuck out before I could force new air inside.”
Duh, I thought. “So? That’s how it works, Shorty. You give up a little and you get a lot in return. Just like in real life, if you’re lucky.”
“But that’s my point, exactly,” he smiled back at me, poking his fingertip with the tattoo needle.
“Say what?”
“It’s just like life. Every time you take this needle to my skin, you’re not only shooting ink inside, you’re letting a little bit of my insides out, just like that stupid air nozzle. And considering how many times this little inker of yours goes in and out of my skin to leave a drop of ink, that’s a helluva lot of me that’s just pfffft right the fuck out!” He set the ink gun back on the table, like a lawyer displaying incriminating evidence.
Grave Markings: 20th Anniversary Edition Page 41