by Aric Davis
He set the empty beer down on the table next to its fellow expired soldiers, and got to work on the fourth can. He felt anxious, and he knew why, but that didn’t help matters at all. He’d killed that bitch less than a week ago, and it had done nothing to fix him, nothing at all! It was going to have to happen again, and soon.
Phil frowned. He never got emotional about this, not ever, and knowing why didn’t help. He had to push the emotions aside, pick one of the prospects that he had, or hell, pick a new girl altogether, and then he needed to get to work, make this next bitch suffer double.
Killing the last bitch hadn’t helped him sleep any better, and he didn’t expect any of the rest of them to clear up his dreams. But Phil did know another way to get through a night. The fourth can gone, Phil walked to the fridge for two more.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
That night, Mike and Deb walked from work to a framing store. The wind was cold, but not as biting as it had been, so even though it was still frigid, it felt better than it should have. Becky carried the parcel of old prints from the building under her arm.
“How did she know you’d do it?”
“A guy I tattooed before is her accountant. I guess he found out about what happened and told her it made him feel better.”
“Three sons. That’s just crazy. We’re wasting our time over there.”
“Violence always seems that way when it shows its true colors.”
“I’m surprised they even let the third one enlist.”
“How could they say no?”
“It’s like that movie, like when they have to go get Private Ryan because his brothers died.”
“That was a movie. We need soldiers.”
“It’s not fair.”
Mike kicked at the piled snow in front of him. “No, doesn’t seem too fair to me either.”
“Why do things like that happen?”
“That’s just life I guess.”
“Will you ever tell me what happened?”
“How do you mean?”
“You’re carrying a weight with you. It might help to talk about it.”
“When are you going to tell me what happened to you in Detroit?”
“I’m not ready to yet.”
“I think that answer suits me as well.”
“Can we make a deal?”
Mike looked at her to see if she was serious. The snow sparkled in her hair, the streetlights carving iridescent waves through the blowing crystals. She was smiling, but it was a very small smile, and not one he’d seen. He said, “What’s the deal?”
“If we get to the point where it would be right for one of us to talk, the other of us has to talk as well.”
“OK.”
She stuck a mittened hand at him, and when he looked at her face, the big smile had returned. He took the mitten, and without thinking pulled her into an embrace. The light was beautiful, the sky cloudy but full with snow. He tipped her chin up and kissed her, softly at first, but when she pulled herself against him, he kissed her harder. They stood framed in the false glow of streetlights and the true glow of the moon. When they finally parted, the snow that had been on the fronts of their coats had melted from the heat between them. Mike held her hand for a few moments, and then they were walking again.
They made it to the frame store about ten minutes before closing. When they reached the front counter, Deb smiled at the older gentleman working and laid the parcel down atop the wood. It was tied with twine, and she unwrapped it slowly.
He said, “What can I help you folks with?”
“We want to get these framed.”
He reached over to the parcel to inspect it and whistled when he opened it. Four cheesecake posters from the middle of the century spilled out, women in various states of undress hawking information about long-vanished burlesque palaces.
“Where’d you come across these?”
“Family heirlooms.”
The man looked at her over his glasses and smiled. “Sure. You want to do all four?”
“Please. How much, do you think?”
“You want mats?”
“I think so. Mike?”
He smirked. “Whatever will make them the classiest.”
“Mats then.” The man sighed and rubbed the stump of a long-disappeared pinky across his lips. “Probably get all four done for eight hundred bucks.”
“How long?”
“You stop by in a week, they’ll be here for ya.”
“Sounds great. Pay you now?”
“Pay when you pick it up. Need to get some information.”
Mike stepped over to look at the paints while Deb handed over her info. Inside his chest, his heart was still thrumming from the embrace. He could hardly believe it was something that had actually happened. He could hear Deb talking in a voice that sounded almost as though it were passing through water. Mike placed a hand on one of the racks of fountain-tip pens and took three deep breaths. He steadied himself and looked over quickly at them. Deb and the shopkeeper were laughing about something, but mercifully it wasn’t at his expense. He watched her turn from the counter and wave at him.
“All set?”
“Yeah.”
Mike followed her outside into the wind and snow.
He’d been too quiet, he discovered, when halfway through the walk to her apartment she said, “Cat got your tongue?”
“No. Just thinking.”
“What about?”
“What do you think?”
“It was just a kiss.”
“Really?”
She laughed. “No, at least not to me. It’s OK with me, though, if that’s all it is to you.”
“That’s what I’m thinking about, I guess. It wasn’t anything I planned to do.”
“Are you glad you kissed me?”
“Yeah. I’m just—I don’t know. I’m such a fucking mess.”
“You seem like you keep it together pretty well to me.”
“I don’t feel like I have much to offer in a relationship.”
“Can I decide that?”
“How do you mean?”
“I know there’s a part of you that wants to be with me. Why don’t you let me worry about the rest of you?”
Mike stopped. The snow was coming down harder now and covered her hair. He brushed at it, and she looked at him, waiting.
“Alright.” Mike sighed deeply and said, “Alright, let’s give it a whirl. You aren’t allowed to be mad at me when I fuck it up.”
The mittened hand returned, but this time it was Deb pulling him closer. They embraced again, under a different streetlight, different clouds, but everything else the same.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Other than a few days of gentle ribbing from Lamar, nothing changed for Mike. He and Deb were friends at work, and outside of it they were something else entirely. Lamar had some dating prospects of his own, and Becky always seemed to have some sort of dysfunctional relationship going.
Lamar wasn’t used to long relationships, a month being about the average, but the last one had managed to make it to the quarter-year mark before imploding. The young lady, a woman named Lucy, had been the one to end things, and that was the backhanded slap of the thing. Lamar didn’t date long, and Lamar was always the one to choose the terms.
It hadn’t really been much of a relationship, he’d told Mike a few weeks afterwards—this was just about a month or so after Deb had started working with them. It had mostly been just good sex, but he’d still put himself out there for her. Mike, who knew exactly what it was to put oneself out for a relationship after the hot fires of his marriage had cooled, had just nodded at the younger man. Lamar explained how he’d really wanted everything to end anyways, probably would have done it himself in just a few days, but she’d beaten him to the punch. Again, Mike found it better just to nod.
The girls who had come after that arrived in rapid spurts of dating; Mike didn’t even bother trying to learn their names after identifying on
e incorrectly. Deb and Becky had no such trouble, and Mike believed secretly that the two women shared a cheat sheet or black book to help identify the shockingly similar women.
All were taller than Lamar, which was the first way to tell they were with him. If Lamar had ever dated a girl who was shorter, it had been before Mike’s time, and Mike’s time covered a pretty broad stretch. Lamar was short, but not especially so, so it was an odd sort of accomplishment for him to find so many tall girls to couple with. They all dressed, as Deb politely put it, scandalously. Becky just said, out of Lamar’s earshot of course, that they all dressed like hoochies. Whatever the term for it, they really did dress in a way to expose optimum skin. The last Lamar trait was the oddest, especially considering the other two. While one would expect the Lamar girl archetype to include nothing but the bubbly and stupid, his taste in women in fact required a high level of at least external intelligence. He wasn’t fucking rocket scientists, but he was doing pretty well. Tall, slutty, and book-smart—an odd combo, but one he stuck to with amazing consistency.
The truth of it was that he wanted a girl who could intimidate him, yet was still easy to discard because there was never much in common besides a mutual lust. He liked them tall because short men typically only date tall women if the man involved has a hard time sitting due to the fatness of his wallet. He liked them dressed the way they were because it was yet another way to throw middle fingers to the world. He liked them smart because he was smart. He read voraciously, and though he’d never completed high school, he could easily have held his own in a high-level history class.
The mold was so set that Mike, Deb, and Becky weren’t sure what to make of it when Lamar mentioned he had a date and didn’t bring the young lady around. It was common for Lamar to have the women he was dating pick him up and then be paraded around the shop. It was a good chance to show off in front of his coworkers, both male and female, and one he rarely missed out on. That night, during one of those weeks where the days lie of spring and the nights slap that welcome hand away, he finished with his last customer and left quietly on his own.
Becky could see a car idling in front of the shop, and Lamar hopped in. As it sped off, she said, “What the fuck?”
Mike peeled a pair of gloves off and left the dirty room where they cleaned tools. He poked his head into the hallway. “What’s going on, Becky?”
“Lamar mention his date to you?”
“Barely, why?”
“He just got in some car and drove off.”
Deb called from her room, where she was doing a series of small microdermal implants under a customer’s eye, “No show and tell?”
“Doesn’t look like it.”
Over the wall of her room Mike and Becky could hear her explaining to her customer what was going on.
Becky said, “Did he think I wouldn’t notice? I like the girls he brings around. I’m kind of pissed.”
Deb called out, “Me too!”
“That’s both of us, Mike. You’ve got to talk to him about the mystery date.”
“Do you think it’s the dud?”
Deb said, “Wait. You played Mystery Date?”
“I had a big sister.”
“Not that I’ve heard about. I call bullshit.”
Mike and Becky could hear her customer laughing, a heck of a thing for someone having his cheek invaded by needles, forceps, and small pieces of steel. The microdermals were a fairly easy procedure when done singly, but to have a few done at once could be rough for the client.
“OK, fine,” Mike said, “not a big sister, a nice neighbor friend. One day G.I. Joe, the next Mystery Date. All fair trade stuff.”
Becky said, “Did you play Barbies, Mike?”
“Yeah, Mike, did you play Barbies?”
“I need to get back to cleaning this shit, you guys. I want to leave at some point tonight.”
“Backpedal!”
“Total copout, boyfriend! Weak. Very weak.”
“Sorry to let you down, but I’m going to get back to work.”
“Mike,” Becky called from the front, “it’s your duty to drill him over this tomorrow.”
“I’ll do my best.”
And he did, he really did. Lamar stayed mum though, not out of embarrassment due to a girl below the Lamar standards of beauty, as Becky claimed, but out of what he said was a renewed vigilance to be decent. Actually, he said, “I don’t want y’all fuckin’ up my prospects. This girl is cool.”
Still it was odd, especially for Mike, for his friend to have such a secret from him.
Odd or not, there was nothing about Lamar’s secret that could keep the rest of the world from moving on. For Becky that meant an endless string of appointments to book, credit cards to run, and care instructions to pass out. For Deb it was piercings and scars and implants, one after the other in an endless chain. For Mike it was work as it had always been, tattoos both large and small in a constant string, and none of them involving ashes.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Wes Ogden played baseball most nights with his son, but sometimes it was soccer or street hockey, and when he woke he felt like he really had seen Josh. He looked at the tattoo after one of those nights, the black ink still so foreign on his arm, and the baseball seemed different to him. It was just a crude outline of a baseball, true, but Josh had been gone before he got it poked into his arm.
Would his son grow in his dreams? Almost a horrible thought, but if the older Josh were real, why should that be horrible? It was all real in his mind, like no dream he’d ever experienced, and when Wes woke up one morning with a grass stain on his knee from where he’d fallen playing soccer, he just looked at it and smiled.
There was still pain in Wes, still sadness, and he didn’t expect either of those things to go away—part of him wanted to always be bitter. Still, something like waking with a grass stain on his knee was exactly the kind of thing that would have made the old, pre-tattoo Wes Ogden seek psychiatric help. The new Wes just stared at this other sort of tattoo and smiled. He’d fallen playing with Josh, and as long as this other version of his only son stayed with him, he felt like he could probably keep on living, and maybe, someday, even let the sadness of a dead wife and son become part of living, and not part of dying.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Deb moved into Mike’s small apartment above the studio after they’d been dating for about eight weeks. She was going to be sharing the rent and bills with him, it would be more convenient for both, and it had been some time since they’d not shared a bed, anyway.
She’d asked to hang the burlesque pictures in the living room above the small television, her sole addition to the already covered walls in the living space. Mike had decorated as he saw fit, and his paintings adorned almost all of the wall space in the apartment. It was an explosion of art and made the walls almost loom in and fade out as the perspectives of the paintings shifted.
While Deb was out in the living room hanging the four pieces, Mike retreated to the kitchen to draw at the table. It had taken Deb better than three hours to get the wall marked to her liking, and Mike had withdrawn to maintain sanity.
“I’m done. You can come back in now.”
Mike went in to see the pictures and found them hung just as he would have hung them, only perhaps a bit slower.
“They look good.”
“Good answer. You want to watch a movie?”
“I’d love to, but I need to get this finished.”
“Alright.”
The piece he was working on was going to be covering a new client’s lower leg. It was to be a tall ship in the moments before a giant squid dragged it down. It wasn’t exactly giving Mike fits, but there were a number of little details the customer wanted incorporated that presented challenges.
The ship was to be of French make, and Mike had photocopies of ancient sketches to copy the number of portholes and masts from. The ropes that hung from the sails needed to be rendered accurately, as did the anchor and ev
erything else that was to be visible. The ship was one thing, the squid another. Where the ship was to be presented with precise historical realism, the squid was to be an amalgamation of a real squid and some sort of steam-punk revisionist beastie.
Mike had drawn the squid in quick thumbnail sketches but had been unhappy with all of them. Now, with his tattered copy of Watchmen held open with a stone next to him, he felt he had a reference he could work with.
The version in Alan Moore’s graphic novel wasn’t perfect, either—it too was more squid than he needed—but it did start to bridge the gap of fantasy and reality. Mike had earlier tried to use some old wood cuttings and sea monster sketches off of maps, but the creatures weren’t nearly squid enough. With the new reference next to him, he began to draw. Thin, weak lines at first, which thickened as certainty came to him, bold lines that foretold the form that was now on the paper.
The squid took shape under wispy apertures, uncertainty birthing something that could never exist. A squid with thicker than normal arms, enormous bright green suckers covering them. The monster’s parrot-like beak looked large enough to devour one of the sailors in a single bite. The squid’s head itself was huge, the point of it sharper than an actual animal’s. The water under the ship Mike imagined, and subsequently drew, as murky, mottled with blood and broken lifeboats. The last detail, for him the one that settled the matter of the squid, was a legion of its progeny in the water and on the boat, attacking and devouring the sailors.
When he was ready to combine the sketch of the squid with that of the boat, he took a break. Hunger pangs roiled his stomach, and he called to the living room.
“You hungry?”
“I think so.”
“We’ve got leftover Thai.”
“Nuke it up.”
Mike took one last look at the squid and smiled. Not too bad.
Before Deb, Mike had never eaten Thai food. He’d never eaten Indian food, or Japanese, or Ethiopian, either. His diet had consisted mainly of sandwiches, hamburgers, and on an ethnic day, Chinese food from the awful buffet a few doors from the shop. Had Mike been told that a myriad of other, better cuisine surrounded him like a wall he would have laughed in disbelief.