We bought Cokes at a corner grocery and lounged under the L tracks in the hot, sooty breeze. Soon the bottles were warm, the Coke too sweet. I thought of Vera’s curfew and how far we were drifting from our car. Vera didn’t seem worried, though, and CJ was good on logistics. And the sun was high; the day still stretched before us. He hailed a cab and asked the driver where the real action was—Grant Park, Lincoln Park, the Amphitheatre? We sank into the air-conditioned backseat.
We were let off on a narrow street of row houses, whose first floors were little shops selling fudge and popcorn, hookahs and rolling papers, adult books. The street was jammed with people and things. Soap bubbles swelled out of a pipe in front of a store called Bizarre Bazaar. Peddlers wound up their tiny metal animals to dance on the sidewalk. Metal snakes hissed and writhed at our feet; an elephant raised and lowered its metal trunk. People’s voices fought the occasional grinding roar of the L.
A tourist trap, CJ said. Middle-aged couples gaped at the booty in the shop windows; children hopped along the sidewalk holding round, flat rainbow-colored suckers the size of their faces. CJ started gabbing with a guy selling Mickey Mouse wristwatches; he bought one for me, and I put it on. “I’ll wear it always,” I said, then amended my statement. “Well, for the next week or so!” I loved the watch and the tiny pretty shops, the pervasive smell of popcorn. Little kids in sunsuits stared at teenagers in ragged tie-dye sprawled on stoops in large laughing groups, and I stared too. A boy in a doorway with hair to his shoulders asked me for a quarter, and I emptied my pockets for him. Beside him, a girl said, “Spare grass? Spare acid?” I apologized for not being provisioned, and she smiled forgiveness. I was thrilled at how readily people talked to us. In another doorway two guys were sharing a joint. One of them passed it to me and wouldn’t take it back. “Blessings,” he said. I gave it to CJ, who blew them a kiss. Saint and Vera, though, seemed not to feel the collective warmth, walking apart in their separate daydreams.
At one of the kiosks in Bizarre Bazaar, CJ bought a hash pipe and rolling papers. A few stores down was a tattoo parlor called Marc of Cane—Marcus and Jillian Cane, proprietors. Signs proclaimed a friendly environment, free consultation, sterile needles, walk-ins welcome. CJ entered and we followed our captain. There were posters in the waiting area of Albert Einstein, Jimi Hendrix, Day-Glo elves and devils. There were large Mylar-wrapped sheets of designs of varying complexity: a tiny rose, a heart, a swastika, a snake emerging from a skull. Five to five hundred dollars. “My treat,” said CJ. “Price is no object.”
He waltzed through as if he knew the place. In an interior room reclining chairs were aligned in front of a long mirror. There was no door or curtain; a man in plaid Bermuda shorts lay with his arm strapped to a board while a woman with stark-white hair down her back injected him with ink. From under the lids of his closed eyes, soundless tears ran down his cheeks. It looked like a demon’s beauty parlor.
By this time I was ready to leave. In 1968, tattoos were for sailors and Hells Angels. Nor was there any part of my body I wanted to decorate or otherwise call attention to. Saint, though, was checking out the designs; Vera too, seriously. On the man’s arm a lizard was emerging, black and green, elegant in an ugly way. I hoped consensus would turn against the idea for us, but it did not. The only conflict was over which tattoo we would get. We had to agree, since the image would represent our bond with one another. Vera argued for a bird, Saint a yin yang sign, CJ either Scrooge McDuck or a severed hand with the bone protruding. Think small, I said. Then someone brought up my logo, the symbol of our four-way unity. I redrew it, extending the foot of the R into a bird in flight. My vision of our immortality. I was on board.
Marcus said he could do it. A sign declared the minimum tattoo age to be twenty-one, but Marcus found no discrepancy between our faces and our fake IDs. It would take at least thirty minutes per client, a couple of hours in all, but less if no one else came in and the proprietors worked simultaneously.
Now it seemed we had refound our purpose. The solution to the problem of life lies in the disappearance of the problem—who had said that? Alan Watts? Wittgenstein? It didn’t matter. Vera and I had curfews. Should we call for permission to come home late, permission that might not be granted? I called and Elise accepted the charges. When our parents came home she’d say I’d be back by one or so. Drive safely, she said, and the problem was gone. Vera chose not to call, knowing permission would never be granted, but her eyes were shining. She was flying under the radar; no one even knew where she was. She would either sneak in or bear whatever consequences ensued. I hugged her, and we embraced as well the prospect of pain, shared and for a greater good. And who could harm us? Our souls were eternal. And in nine days, freed of our souls, our bodies on the lakeshore would bear the same eternal image.
So in the brief, glowing present moment, on the island of Here and Now, the tattooing commenced. CJ and Saint had theirs etched on their biceps, where they could be concealed if necessary inside short sleeves. Mine was on the outside of my calf, hidden under my skirt. I didn’t cry and was impressed with myself. “It doesn’t hurt that much! Really.” The last to go, Vera wanted hers on her breastbone. She pulled her tube top down a notch and pointed to the shallow dip between her breasts. Jillian tried to dissuade her. Over the bone it could be bad. “Do it where there’s some flesh,” she said, “not that you have a lot of flesh.” A tattooed beanstalk ran up Jillian’s arm to her fleshy shoulder. She suggested the top or back of the thigh, but Vera was adamant. She had a high pain threshold. “Don’t worry about me,” she said, and lay back on the chair, chest bared.
Her procedure took longer than any of ours, and Jillian spent as much time wiping off the blood as inserting the dye, but under the needle Vera lay still, dry-eyed.
It was getting dark when we left the tattoo parlor, but the street was rocking. The smell of popcorn was replaced by muskier odors, conjuring images of evil and pleasure hidden under the daytime tourist veneer. Authentic or not, we didn’t care now. It was Halloween, Mardi Gras, an event, not a place. It was Brigadoon, a town that exists for a single day every hundred years. We bought fudge and lemonade, then, still hungry, went to a restaurant and ordered slabs of barbecued ribs. Saint and Vera began to talk, though not exactly to each other. CJ took the check, as he had been doing all day. He put an arm around me, the other around Vera. “Call me Sugar Daddy.”
“You’re not my sugar daddy,” Saint said, more belligerent than seemed called for, but CJ rose to the occasion.
“I pay your tab, I own you.”
“We’ll see about that.”
CJ plunked his elbow down on the table and dared Saint to arm-wrestle him. After an awkward pause, Saint agreed. Biceps swelling under their bandages, they clasped hands. CJ’s arm, so much narrower and shorter than Saint’s, was upright far beyond expectations; the table beside us cheered him on, the obvious underdog. Saint won, of course, but CJ looked radiant, as if something had been achieved. The constriction between them was easing now. There were no rules in this city, or different rules. Tattoos burning on our skin under sterile gauze, we breathed the beckoning, arousing, lawless air. It glowed inside us. “We’re buddies,” said CJ. “Brothers in arms.”
“Oh yeah?”
I nodded encouragement. At least Saint was looking at CJ. It loosened a knot in my chest.
“Anything can happen,” CJ said, and I seconded him. Anything could happen. It was that kind of world.
I felt almost sure then that we would all have lives beyond the Pledge. I could picture CJ at Harvard, then law school, and Saint in Asian studies somewhere planning a semester abroad in Japan. Vera, who had an ear for languages, would study French while she taught ballet to little kids, or performed—why not?—while I graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and had my first show. The idea pleased me, and I stashed it in an out-of-the-way place in my brain.
By now most of the suburbanites had gone home, but the street traffic remained dens
e. The narrow, adjoined buildings were black against the sky, which had a purple cast. Purple haze, violet sky. Hendrix, Dylan—they knew this place. Across the street two men walked together, not touching but as if their bodies were connected, the way couples walked. CJ watched them. Then Vera took my hand and we started skipping like little girls.
It was time for us to head home now, but CJ had copped some hash and he wanted to try out his new pipe. Then we’d get a cab.
We started arguing safety concerns. Vera pointed out a car in a no-parking zone with the telltale plates of a plainclothes cop. Pigs were everywhere. CJ was herding us toward an alley where we could get high, and I was worrying about getting Vera home even if she didn’t care, not to mention the fact that any guy in jeans could be a policeman, when someone plowed between us and hurtled past, gasping, a young man obviously running at top speed. He had a bag or a package under his arm.
We followed in his direction and found him again, hunkered down between two parked cars. Some people glanced his way but without much interest. He had black hair to his shoulders and wore a loose white embroidered shirt like the kind sold in Mexican shops. His face was turned streetward but I saw his profile—jutting cheekbones, beak of a nose, beads around his neck like a hippie or maybe an Indian, someone America abused. I wanted to kneel beside him, offer him things, money, a place to stay, a ride out of here. His white shirt was spotless. Then a siren ripped through the night, blue lights swept a wide circle, a loudspeaker voice yelled, “Police action! Clear the area. Spectators, clear the area.”
“Right,” said CJ. “We do need to clear the air.”
Saint muttered, “Unload that dope, will you?”
“Not on your mother’s life!”
People were close, pressing us against the cars. CJ put the pipe in his teeth and extracted a lighter. “Toss it,” said Saint.
“I don’t know you,” said Vera.
CJ grinned. “I won’t name names. Trust me.” He lit the pipe.
Traffic was stopped dead. The bullhorn kept warning pedestrians back and away, but they didn’t hear or didn’t care or couldn’t move. Then the crouching man stepped into the pulsing blue pinwheel of light with his hands raised, either in surrender or to show he had no weapon. The bag had fallen to his feet; he kicked it away. A shot rang out and he fell.
There was silence at first, a mass intake of breath. Then murmurs and light, tentative screams. Panic rose like a tide. We had to escape, to get off this street, though to where, who knew?
Vera was beside me. We grabbed hands and slowly made our way to a quieter block, where a car of kids squeezed us in and drove us back to the ballpark. Eventually Saint and CJ arrived. Safe inside our car but still shaking, we tried to reconstruct what had happened. The guy could have stolen a purse. Or a car stereo. But even so, they didn’t have to kill him. Not that we knew for sure the man was dead. I didn’t remember seeing blood. Was he black, a light-skinned black? Man, he could have had a bomb in that bag, what did we know? But he was trying to surrender!
“I hope it was a bomb,” I said. “If not, it’s pure evil.”
“Or stupidity,” said CJ.
“Cops are evil,” said Saint.
“Cops are motherfuckers,” said Vera.
I kept wishing I’d done something. As he stepped down into the blue light I should have grabbed him, pulled him back onto the safety of the curb. I could have knelt by the guy when he was down, stroked his head, held his hand. Made sure, if he was breathing, that no one came and finished him off. I saw him in my mind’s eye stretched out on the street in his shining white shirt. “We could pray,” I said.
No one seconded me.
“Was he dead?”
Saint shrugged, but beside me I could feel him shaking. CJ shook his head no. Vera laid her head against the window and closed her eyes. All the way back home I kept picturing the purity of his white shirt in the light from the streetlamp, as if his mother had just washed and bleached it. If there had been blood, I’d have noticed. I sat straight up in the backseat, breathing in out, in out, as if it were his breath I was breathing, as if my breathing would keep his chest going up and down.
14
Vera
It’s two-thirty A.M., the house is blessedly dark, and she has never turned a key so silently, thanking the craftsman in her father that oils locks and hinges. There’s no sound downstairs; everyone is sleeping as they ought to be. 4EVER burns reassuringly in the hollow of her chest.
In the upstairs bathroom she removes the bandage, cleans the tattoo with Ivory soap, as she was told, and pats it lightly dry. She applies baby oil. Keep it moist, Marcus said. Don’t let it scab up. In the mirror the letters over the dip of her breastbone look clean and sharp, as do the wings and beak of Kay’s artful bird. Done bleeding, she hopes. She fastens two wide Band-Aids over the area to protect it while she sleeps, then towels off her underarms, towels her front teeth, careful not to run water. No toilet flushing. Back in her room she drops her clothes in a silent heap and slips naked under her covers, a violation of two of her mother’s edicts. In every way, it’s delicious.
Under the light, cool, clean sheet, lying on the edge of sleep, she imagines Saint loving her the way Garth does, with every part of himself—hands, lips, dick, and heart. Before her friends drove away she’d leaned over the open car, grabbed hold of Saint by his Zen-zombie head, and kissed him hard on the mouth, daring him to remain beyond desire when the point in life was getting what you wanted, and whoever denied it was a coward or a hypocrite. The guy who was shot tonight—he too wanted something that made him run like crazy. She’s sinking into sleep when her door swings open, admitting the smell of beer and sweat that means her father. She feigns a sleepy turn to the wall, winding herself inside a protective sheath of cotton sheet, but there’s no avoiding him. His bulk magnified by the emanations from his pores and his mouth, he plunks himself down in the space she vacated. “So what’s the story, girl? More midnight rambling?”
Master of herself, she grips the side of the mattress to keep a gap between them. She says, still sleepily, “Please get out of here.” He squeezes her upper arm.
“How much more do you expect me to take?”
“More what?”
“Don’t get smart, Vera. I know you like a book.”
Since when did you start reading books? runs through her mind, but she sits up wearily, holding the sheet to her chest. “Just punish me, okay? Get it over with. Hit me. Whatever you want.” She wants to kick him off her mattress. She’d try, if she had clothes on. “Or go back to bed.”
He leans toward her, pressing upon her his smell of alcohol and rank adult maleness. He’s not much taller than she is, with a belly of middle age, but his arms are strong and his chest is thick; sandy hairs press through his T-shirt. He played high school football, a little guy who’d break your collarbone if you messed with him, and sometimes when he just felt like it—he’d say that about himself. His hard, hairy thighs angle away from each other from out of his boxer shorts. “There’s no point in lying, Vera. Your brother told me.”
Her head jerks back and bangs the wall. Under the covers her toes grope for a hold on the mattress.
“He says you’re screwing around. Are you?”
She straightens her back. Her voice hurts her throat. She doesn’t believe Garth said anything like that. And to their mutual enemy. “Could you be more specific?”
He grabs her arm. “You have a mouth, little girl.”
“The better to eat you. I mean, to have a good heart-to-heart talk with you?” What is she saying? Her teeth are chattering. She raises her head to look him in the eye, but his upper regions seem cloaked in fog. Some nights are like that. “I don’t know what I mean,” she says.
His grip tightens. “Your baby brother says you’re a slut. He says you’re fucking one of your so-called buddies.”
An involuntary squeak rises up through her throat. She stares at her father, trying to see through his coarse fe
atures to what Garth might really have said. Lying to the perp is probably standard interrogation procedure. Divide the team. Sow distrust. She feels distrust. The little fucker, she’ll strangle him. Laughing airily, she tugs her arm away from her father. “Detective Garth? FBI Agent Garth? I can’t believe you believe him!” Especially confounding to her is the fact that she feels innocent of these particular charges, as if an event could be canceled out by what happened afterward, if that changed your feelings about it. She rubs her arm, which hurts where he squeezed. “He’s that age, Dad. Boys—that’s all they think about. They think everyone’s doing it but them!”
He nods like he has her number, like he’s cool. But he’s simmering down. He turns on her bedside lamp. Light shines on the wide sweep of his brow. He looks like a fierce but well-meaning soccer coach who just wants his team to win. “Why don’t you come down to the kitchen with me, make me an egg sandwich,” he says. Then cagily, proud of his shrewdness: “I knew you weren’t sleeping.”
She resists the temptation to roll her eyes. This is his benign, Father Knows Best mode. She doesn’t trust it for a second, though at age ten and eleven she’d get out of bed and cook him something, points for her in the old competition with her mother. “I don’t know, Dad.”
“You don’t know your dad? Listen, honey. Did you know I got a promotion? Got the news yesterday. Detective DeVito, in charge of District Nine. Somebody shoots someone’s dog from Grand Rapids all the way to Traverse City and I get to pick through the blood and fur—what do you think, sweetheart darling? Are you proud of your old man?” He stands. “Put on a robe or something, come on, rise and shine.”
Once, in Lourdes Page 13