Ink

by Sabrina Vourvoulias

  He pulls me up to standing. His laugh is short, wounded. “Too late.”

  A low sustained whistle sounds clear through the room, and he steps away from me.

  John comes through the door with the last gavilán, this one hobbling badly. John looks over and crosses to where I’m standing, but his eyes aren’t really on me. And then … nothing prepares me for the way he handles my body in front of everybody, or the way he catches my bottom lip between his teeth with his kiss. I can’t help it, I whimper, then taste blood.

  “Do we really have time to waste?” says raspy-voice.

  John lets go with a laugh. I feel my face burning and I can’t look in the direction of any of the gavilanes.

  John performs all the incisions to remove the GPS trackers; I swipe with beta and staple the sutures in. My hand shakes all the way through.

  “Are we good?” John asks when I’m done. I nod.

  “All right. I’m going to ditch the trackers back at the infirmary, I’ll be right back.” He slips out.

  Toño grabs me as soon as John’s out the door. “You’re bleeding.”

  “It wasn’t intentional.”

  “Lie to me, lie to him, but don’t lie to yourself, America. If he hurt you once he’ll hurt you again.”

  “I made a sale, remember? Only it was me I sold, not you – no matter what you may think. And if the oath costs me more than I imagined, I’m still honor bound.”

  “This isn’t about honor,” he says, harsher than he’s ever been with me. “I told you before, leave it to me.”

  “And I told you, no. Not if you ever want to be with me,” I say. I know there’s no chance at all I’ll get to see him again after he drives out of the inkatorium, but he doesn’t.

  He lets go of me with something like a frustrated growl.

  The gavilán limos are parked where they should be, with their logos and plates obscured by magnetic sheeting. They’ll drive out of the property following the treeline, and then cut through Harper’s pastures and come out behind the abandoned motel Ravenswood had talked about. It’s John’s route, and a damn good one. The inks will hit no roadblocks at all on their way out. From there, it’s on Neto and Celia and Carlos to get the gavilanes through without the benefit of instaskin.

  I can’t look at Toño as he leaves, but before Neto gets in, I raise my eyes and meet his. He touches his fingers to his forehead and moves them leftward and high, as if trying to convey something by the movement. Or maybe he’s just pointing at a star. But if there’s anything kind in the night sky, it’s not shining down on me.

  Less than a minute after I text him the all clear, Jobs sets off the fire alarm. Around us the inkatorium goes noisily into emergency mode, but my mother’s office – dark and presumed unpeopled – isn’t disturbed.

  I can hear the fire engines roaring in the distance as John swings out of the inkatorium’s driveway.

  “Done,” I text Jobs.

  “Wait til u see what I did. No traces at all,” is the answering text.

  “Is that Lloyd you’re texting?” John looks over at me.

  “Yes.”

  “Tell him to go home. We’re going straight to my house.”

  “There’s stuff I want to pick up at home,” I say.

  “Tomorrow.”

  I look out the window while I punch my phone’s keypad. “Go hme. U cant imag how i fucked ths.”

  “Did some1 die?” Jobs texts back.

  “Me.” I hit send, then turn the phone off.

  5.

  Nobody can hurt you quite the way someone who has loved you can.

  The scars on my body are from that night. Produced with the tip of a knife, honed and precise, so when John’s done only my arms, neck and face are clear of the slashes that make me look furred.

  The four larger gashes on my face are his too. I think it is intended to look like the mark a wolf would make, so that even my family nickname and my father’s clan become reminders of who I really belong to.

  There is no sex because, I understand too late, none of it was ever about sex.

  When he’s done cutting me and entertaining himself with my reaction to the blood, he falls asleep. I dress and walk home.

  The lights are on in the trailer. When I open the door, my mother looks up at me from the kitchen table. Her eyes slide from my face to my blouse. I know it is soaked through. I’ve avoided looking at it so I can keep walking and not faint dead away but I can feel it clinging to the cuts.

  I drop in the chair beside her, and after she cleans and dresses the wounds, I close my eyes as she rocks me back and forth and strokes my hair.

  I fall asleep I think, for a little while anyway, and when I wake up I don’t open my eyes. I’m still being rocked and my hair is still being stroked, though the arms are different. I hear the whimpering of a wolf, and I imagine it must be my father keening as he holds me.

  But then I realize it’s me. My whimper, my hurt, my keening.

  I open my eyes.

  They’re Toño’s arms around me.

  “Why are you here?” I ask. Then I remember to duck my head to hide my face from him.

  “Because you’re here.”

  He brushes the hair gently off my face and tips it back up to him.

  “Your mom gave you a shot of painkiller. Is it wearing off?” His voice is controlled, but I can hear more beneath it.

  “Not yet.”

  “Good. You tell me when it does, I’ll go fetch her. She’s sleeping at the moment, but she says she has another dose for whenever you need it.”

  “You should go.”

  “Soon.”

  “No, now. If John finds out you’re still here he’ll follow through with his threats. He’ll come up with even more ways to hurt me.” Despite my best efforts, a shudder rips through me.

  “If he’s dead, there’s no threat.”

  I push away from him. “No. Not even after this. Swear it.”

  When he doesn’t say anything, I strike him hard, with the flat of my hand, in the middle of the chest. “Swear it.”

  He grabs my hand, holds it still where I’ve hit him. “America, I’ve never lied to you. A man who thinks he can own another human being is a man who deserves to be taken out.”

  I hate crying, and when I do, it is ugly. I hit him over and over as I howl, but I can’t seem to stop even as he pulls me tighter to him.

  Then, when I’m down to irregular dry sobs I turn my face up to his. There is no regret in his face, just determination. And pain. I pull away from him.

  “I’m sorry. I forgot you were injured too,” I say.

  “I’m fine, America,” he says, a hint of a smile playing on his lips. But the longer he looks at me, the more of the sweetness in that almost-smile leaches away.

  “I think I need to go look in a mirror,” I say after I put it all together in my head.

  “Not yet.”

  That bad.

  “Give it time, America. All wounds need time to heal. Believe me, I know all about this sort of thing.”

  “How long did yours take?”

  “Until you.”

  At his words something shatters inside me

  “Take me home with you,” I say. An echo from many months ago, but a broken offer now.

  If you can bear the disfigurement.

  If you can look at me and see what I was and not what I am.

  If you can ignore another man’s brand.

  I want to say these to him, but I don’t.

  He tips my head back and gives me a sweet, chaste kiss on the lips, but doesn’t say anything. After a while I lean back against him and close my eyes again. He doesn’t want to hurt me, I know that, but the silence between us is another knife.

  I try to will myself somewhere else. A place with stars.

  I hear the faint click of fingers on the keypad of a phone, and a brief, low conversation in Spanish. After five or ten more minutes of silence, I hear the limo pull up outside the door. I steel mysel
f for the goodbye. What’s a little more blood on this night?

  But he scoops me up and carries me outside in his arms. I open my eyes when he sets me down in the backseat of the limo. He disappears back into the house, and when I see him next it is with my mother – disheveled and still half asleep. He stays outside, speaking with Neto while she gets in the limo beside me.

  She reaches out, gingerly touches my injured cheek. “It’ll heal up, but it’s going to leave a scar. All of the cuts will, I fear.”

  She sighs, looks away for a moment. When she looks at me again, she gives me a wistful smile. “All those years of pounding it into your head that you should finish your education and not run off with a guy…. God, I hate that he’s taking you away from me.”

  “I asked him to. He feels sorry for me.”

  “I don’t think pity has a thing to do with it.”

  I shake my head. The pain from the slashes in my face flare with the movement.

  “I gave him another shot of painkiller for you, and some antibiotics, and anti-infective ointment to put on the cuts,” she says after a moment. “If there’s a problem, let me know, I’ll call in a prescription to a pharmacy down there.”

  “Mom … John’s going to make trouble for you and Jobs and anyone else he can when he finds out I’m gone.”

  She pats my uninjured cheek. “You stop thinking about him, okay?” Then, she’s gone.

  A few minutes later, Toño gets in the limo beside me.

  “Ready?” His eyes are on mine long enough that I have to look away.

  He must give Neto the sign because the limo starts rolling out of the trailer park.

  Later, much later, his hand reaches for mine and he pulls me to him.

  * * *

  Toño’s secret safe house is Meche’s brownstone, and this odd confluence of my past and my future makes me uneasy. The house is huge, and empty of people, and feels different than it did when I was here last. It doesn’t help that the first few days the only person I see is Neto.

  “Tests of loyalty,” Neto says after I ask him where Toño is. “I’m clear, of course, as are a few others. But until everyone’s clear they can’t know about this place. Or about you. ”

  “Do I want to know what’s involved in the tests?”

  “No. Sit,” Neto says, placing a plate full of tawny crisp pork pieces, red beans and yellow rice on the kitchen counter in front me.

  I eat so quickly he ends up refilling my plate before he sits down himself.

  When he does, he pulls a handgun out and lays it on the counter by my plate, “this is for you.”

  “I can’t shoot.”

  “I’ll teach you.”

  “No, that’s not what I mean. My dad taught me how to shoot his Thompson Contender a long time ago. And I’m dead on when I manage to take the shot. But I never could shoot a deer, or even a woodchuck or possum. Just targets. There’s no way I could even aim at a person.”

  “You’d be surprised what you can do if you have to. Keep it on you.”

  “Where?”

  “Waistband’s always worked for me.”

  “Leggings don’t really have waistbands.”

  “Underwear then. I don’t give a shit. Just have it on you, or I’ll pay for your stubbornness.” He shoves his plate away from him in disgust.

  I thrust the gun into the waist of my leggings, in the hollow of my back. Then I pull my shirt down over it. “Okay?”

  He nods. “Keep it under your pillow when you sleep.”

  He takes the empty plates, then rinses them and puts them in the dishwasher. He starts on the bean pot.

  “I’m having a hard time seeing you so domestic,” I say. “Doesn’t quite fit my image of you.”

  “The sooner you ditch the image, the better. I’m just like any other guy,” he says without turning around.

  “Only a surer shot.”

  He turns to look at me. “Yeah.”

  “You don’t much like me being here, do you?”

  “I know why he wants you with him. But he needs to focus on rebuilding the gavilanes. Having you around is going to create another problem for him to deal with. He might even lose more gavilanes because of it. Passion is always a weakness, something enemies exploit.”

  “I’m damaged goods,” I say, looking down at my hands. “Really damaged. I won’t ever again be who he was waiting for. It’s compassion, not passion, that made him bring me here, Neto. And if he didn’t have that quality you wouldn’t idolize him as you do.”

  “Idolize is a strong word.”

  “Respect, then. Or love. Whatever feeds your loyalty.”

  He gives me a long, inscrutable look, then turns back to his dishwashing.

  I wander into the living room and get on one of the computers. Like Meche’s, these are top of the line. Everything’s a ghost, routing through remotes and leaving tracks to countless innocent IP addresses. I lose myself in my world.

  When I rise I can hardly straighten up. I hobble to the stairs.

  I don’t remember what I dream about when I fall asleep, but it has me running hard enough for my chest to burn with each breath. I wake once, briefly, and hear a deep, steady rumble and feel something generating heat beside me. But before I can turn to it, I’m asleep again. In the morning there’s only an indentation in the memory foam to tell me Toño’s spent any time by my side.

  I spend the next day on the computer as well, this time with Remi – the tall, raspy-voiced woman from the inkatorium – as my protector. The day after that with Ana – the bleached blond – then Neto again, and like that the three of them alternating for a whole week. I don’t know the ways of gangs but I find myself worrying that they’re the only three who’ve passed the loyalty tests. But then maybe they’re the only three who can stand being around a non-ink.

  At night I change into a shirt of Toño’s I’ve appropriated, climb into bed and fall asleep almost as soon as I stretch out. It’s that way now, instant exhaustion. But not restful sleep. And in the morning all that’s left is the memory of Toño already gone for the day.

  Finally one night when the recurring nightmare chases me awake, I turn to see him stretched out next to me, one arm flung over his eyes. The moonlight is weak and glances off the bare skin of his chest in frail silver glints.

  “You’re here,” I say.

  “I’m here.” He doesn’t move his elbow from over his eyes. A triangular shield to block out the world.

  “Are you done with the loyalty tests?”

  “I think so.”

  “Are you okay?”

  He laughs. It’s not a happy sound.

  I stare at the tattoo dead center on his chest. It is an image of a heart struck through by three knives. The oldest, faded and a bit blurred, must represent his brother’s death. The other two knives are much newer tattoos; one is so fresh it’s still a bit inflamed. I don’t know what they signify. There’s so much about him I don’t know.

  He takes his arm from his eyes, then shifts to look at me. I don’t remember his eyes being this black or this inconsolably deep.

  “What about you, are you doing okay?” he asks.

  “I guess.”

  He reaches over, plays with a strand of my hair. “Are you regretting this?”

  “No.”

  “You deserve better than me,” he says after a while.

  I yank my hair out of his hand, then turn my back on him. “If you don’t want me anymore just say so.”

  He laughs again, another tortured sound. His arm comes around my waist and pulls me to him. His body against mine is hard. “Who said anything about not wanting?”

  Then I’m on my back and my shirt is open and all the scabbed-over cuts form a horrible pelt of possession that can’t be ignored.

  I flush and turn my face away.

  He grasps my chin and turns me back to face him. “America,” his eyes bore into mine. “It’s me, remember?”

  He kisses the marks. Then hikes himself up on an
elbow and looks into my face again. “Not tonight, America. Not until you’re healed and whole.”

  “I’ll never be that again.”

  But his mouth on mine insists that I will, and I give up arguing.

  * * *

  I’d like to say we’re together forever.

  I’d like to, because every month I spend with him, every day, every hour in which we turn to each other with love and desire and the delight of bodies that fit perfectly together, we become like the stars that blessed us.

  One night I open my eyes to the dark and Neto’s hand gripping my shoulder.

  “Get up. Now.”

  I blink a couple of times, then my eyes turn sharp. The bed beside me is empty. I look up at Neto, and I know.

  I feel a howl start to rip from my throat. He clamps his hand over my mouth. “There’ll be time for that later,” he says. “Right now, I need to get you out of here.”

  I grab under my pillow, then pull on jeans, shoes, whatever is at hand. I’ve never completely unpacked the duffle and for a second I wonder if I always knew it would end this way.

  I hear gunshots as we run down the stairs. Before I can pull out my gun and head to where I see Remi and another figure lit by muzzle flashes, Neto pulls me to the steep basement stairs. He moves me through fast and efficient. But I see it anyway.

  Toño’s splayed on the living room floor. There are ragged gunshot wounds to both shoulder and thigh. But neither of those are killing shots. Death came to him as a knife tore a path that is an eerie echo of his old scar. If it had been possible to heal from this wound he would have borne a perfect X in scar tissue across his torso.

  There is so much blood I feel myself sway. The weapons are on the floor, not too far from any of the bodies. Six people to kill just one. The man to Toño’s left is indistinguishable after a bullet to the face, and others also sport messy, obliterating wounds. There is a butterfly knife next to one of them. Celia.

  As soon as we’re downstairs, I stop. “Where were you?” I say.

  If it sounds like an accusation that’s because it is. The second is chosen because undisputed loyalty puts him there. So he’ll jump in front of the bullet, or knife, intended for the first.