Tattoo the Wicked Cross

by Salas, Floyd;

  “How’s your family?”

  “Everybody’s pretty good,” Aaron replied, answering a polite question in a polite way, but since it was an attempt at reconciliation by his best friend, he then tried to give an honest answer.

  “My old man is still as big and fat and healthy as ever and talks about this place as if it’s for summer vacations. Nora’s prettier than she ever was, I think, but after a visit from her it takes me a couple of days to get back my guts. And Stanley’s the opposite. He pretends being locked up’s a joke, but he’s supposed to fight for the state title in a month or two, knocked a guy out last month. John’s an intern at UC Hospital now, and even though he tries to be nice to me, he always makes me feel like I’m on trial. You know. All the things I’m supposed to do and that.”

  “Yeah, I know. You got Stanley though, Aaron, and he’ll probably be champion of the world,” Barneyway said, and he seemed to mean it, for Aaron noticed the note of idolatry and envy of himself, too, for having a main-event fighter as a brother, in the wistful way in which it was spoken, and he asked, “How’s your mother? She been to see you here, yet?”

  “Once. Probably again soon though. I sure need the visit when she comes. But, then, she’s the only person who does visit me.”

  “You’ve got a pretty mother, Barney,” Aaron said, then realized the compliment had touched a tender spot, and appreciated the night which masked Barneyway’s face and helped him hide his painful memories. For he was reminded of how welcome the darkness of the hall had been on a Sunday evening a year before when they returned from a movie and started up the stairs to his bedroom as a woman’s cry of “Someone’s there!” made them pause, then pad up the carpeted stairs, without comment, although they both recognized the voice, for Barneyway’s mother had been drinking in the now darkened front parlor with his own father, and her auburn hair was mussed and her gray-green eyes were fuzzy with gin.

  “She’s a good mother, Barney,” Aaron said, trying to apologize, knowing it still hurt Barneyway to catch her, although he had already had three stepfathers and a dozen “uncles.” “She tries to take care of you. You live good. Have plenty of money. All the clothes and everything else you want. A mother can’t be everything. She’s no man, and she’s young and pretty. She’s supposed to live, too.”

  “I know,” Barneyway said, accepting the apology. “Yet, I can’t help but wish she was like your mother. A real mother. But, then, you might be even worse off. Your mother might have been great but she’s dead. In a way, neither of us have the mother we want.… Huh, Aaron?”

  “Yeah, that’s the truth, Barney,” Aaron replied, aware that Barneyway was asking him to agree so he could apologize for stepping on hallowed ground. “Neither of us actually has the mother he wants.”

  “Any more letters from Judith since DT?” Barneyway asked, trying to change the subject.

  “Two,” Aaron answered, but without any desire to elaborate, and the squeak of bats grew louder and closer, almost sinister as the conversation stopped altogether, killed by the unpleasant turn it had taken.

  Aaron looked nervously about, and the cold glitter of the stars, unblurred by the dense city atmosphere to which he was accustomed, increased his melancholy. He started to speak but heard the distant bellow of a diesel truck passing along the highway and folded his arms, instead. Then he felt chilled and sought the warmth of his armpits with his fingers.

  He then began to feel surrounded by crickets which muttered incomprehensible rumors about mysterious and unsolvable problems, and each time he decided to say something, he became distracted by them. Finally, the night and his thoughts became so oppressive that he couldn’t bear them any longer, and he slapped Barneyway on the back and jumped to his feet.

  “Come on, Barneyway,” he said. “We don’t have to be sad, man. We might be in jail but we’re together just like we been for three years. Hell. We’ll make it here like every place else. We been through a lot together. This ain’t nothin’!”

  “We’ve been like brothers, huh!” Barneyway said and jumped to his feet, too.

  “We’re like brothers now,” Aaron said, still more enthusiastic.

  “We have almost the same last name,” Barneyway said.

  “We’ve cut school together.”

  “Got suspended together.”

  “Had our first gang fight together.”

  “Got put in the DT together.”

  “Got sent away together.”

  “We’re better than brothers because we don’t have to be together and do.”

  “We’re bad-acting brothers, and we’re going to let every guy in the dormitory and every guy in the whole institute know it. Ain’t that right, Barneyway?” Aaron cried.

  “Ain’t that right?” he repeated when Barneyway didn’t answer, but his tenor voice lingered in the night air, the boast sounding forced, needing Barneyway’s baritone to confirm it, and his enthusiastic attempts to talk the mysterious problem away had brought him full circle back to it.

  “Why don’t you tell me, Barneyway? We’re buddies. We’re not supposed to keep anything from each other. We’re supposed to help each other,” Aaron said, and could sense that Barneyway wanted to speak but needed support, badly.

  Dominic’s contempt was like a shadow in Aaron’s mind, which kept prompting him and prompting him until, in an intuitive vision, he saw the perpetual gold-toothed smile of the Buzzer.

  “It’s the Buzzer, huh? Tell me about it, Barney. So I can help you. Tell me!” he said.

  “I’d … I’d … I’d like to kill ’im! Kill ’im! Aaron!” Barneyway shouted and frightened Aaron so badly he remained silent and stunned until the act of reaching out for his friend helped him regain his speech.

  “What for? What did he do? Tell me! Tell me, Barneyway!”

  “I caaan’t. I caaan’t, Aaron,” Barneyway cried and ran up the steps, his figure a flicker of shadow in the doorway, through the screen door, and gone more quickly than the slap of the door itself as it slammed behind him.

  Aaron then stood alone at the foot of the stairs, with the fat kid’s warning and Buckshot’s warning echoing and intermingling in his mind, and with the answer to the question that his life, at least his happiness and his future, seemed to depend upon as brittle and as fragile and as untouchable to him as the question made by the dim light bulb on the high ceiling of the hospital hall.

  Part Three

  Schoolin’

  I

  The long hollow blast of the morning get-up whistle boomed deep into Aaron’s sleep, disturbed the peaceful night in which he had escaped from his troubles, and he pulled the covers over his head without opening his eyes and wiggled farther into the snug, warm oblivion of the pillow.

  But the whistle blasted for a full minute and blew like a shrieking wind and blew into Barneyway’s scream and blew all sleep away.

  He opened his eyes to escape the image and lay without moving, staring at the crumpled sheet which covered his head like a shroud, listening to the muffled tones of sleepy voices, the steps of rubber-soled shoes on the concrete floor, knowing he was back in jail, knowing he would have to get up, but clinging to one more moment of rest, although that rest was troubled, too, until the Buzzer scared him completely awake.

  “Outta the sack, you lazy punks, or I throw you out.”

  He threw the covers back and sat up and his pillow fell to the floor, but he snatched it up before the Buzzer could say anything, and hopped out of bed, and toes curling away from cold concrete, pulled his nightgown down from his hips with a long shiver just as the Buzzer shuffled by.

  “Fix your bed quick. Then wash up,” Dominic said, tucking his own blankets under the mattress, looking strangely stump-legged in the long nightgown; and Aaron began to fix his bed with practiced but automatic movements in the weak burn of yellow bulbs, the dismal semidarkness of an overcast morning.

  He made a tight stretch of the sheet and blankets and folded the top part of the sheet back over the blan
ket to frame it neatly, but his eyes and thoughts were on the Buzzer, who shuffled back and forth, rushing the boys, trying to get the dormitory ready in time for count.

  He watched the weird waddling of the powerful figure while he tucked both sides of the covers under the mattress so that no fold or crease marred the blanket surface. He noticed how the light spread shadows on the black face that pulled the coarse features into swollen distortion while he smoothed the pillow with careful strokes. He watched the busy figure with such intense and constant preoccupation that when it moved down the aisle toward him it swelled to gigantic proportions, and he had to thrust his hand into his locker for his towel to clear his sight.

  With his towel hooked around his neck and nausea in the empty pit of his stomach, he then followed Dominic to the washroom, where he stood in dejected silence, staring at the floor, moving a step forward every couple of minutes when the skirt of the nightgown in front of him left an absent space, space he had to fill, space as empty as Barneyway’s face at the “good news” the night before, space—

  Hot water splashed, steaming, to the concrete, and he jerked his foot back, and escaped the stinging sprinkle as he recognized the kid bent over the washbasin by his knobby backbone as Tommy Rodriguez, “Rattler,” the guy with the cross on his forehead.

  The thin back made Aaron wish that it was Rattler, instead of the Buzzer, who was bothering Barneyway, and he let himself take offense at the spilled water, for he was certain he could take Rattler in a fair fight. He wouldn’t even have to box. He could just charge a skinny guy like that and either punch him or throw him to the ground, then stand victorious as the thin arms and legs flailed wildly in the air, stand—

  Black and stiff-lashed eyes, cold with the tattooed cross between them, the snow-white nap of the towel below them, banished the picture as Rattler turned away from the washbasin, drying himself, rudely shoved by Aaron, and began combing his hair in the long mirror above the urinal.

  An angry heat filled Aaron’s head, but a weakening nausea rose from his stomach, too, and he kept his temper. For in spite of his thoughts about whipping Rattler, he didn’t have one buddy he could depend upon in a fight, and he concentrated upon the hollow cavity of the bowl before him in order to avoid trouble with a buddy of the Buzzer’s, trouble he couldn’t possibly handle by himself.

  Water freshened his face but the nausea stayed in his belly, and seemed to be the cause of the strange presence and the severe outlines that permeated and framed everything. The foot railings of the beds he passed on the way back to his own bed fenced off a path for him as rigid as guard rails set there for that purpose. His locker was like a squat sentry standing against the wall, and he hesitated for an anxious moment before he put his towel in it and took out his clothing. His shorts and his trousers, his shirt and his nightgown could have been the belongings of a stranger. His brogans fit like wooden shoes, and he clumped back to the washroom in them while buttoning his shirt, rocked before the mirror in them while combing his clipped hair, and was having trouble patting his short hair into place when Dominic entered.

  “The first days are the hardest,” Dominic said, winking at Aaron in the mirror, getting the sides of his unruly hair first with fast sweeps of the comb, pressing a finger in them to even the waves. “I’m gonna talk to the man as soon as we get to the dairy and ask him if you can work with me before the Buzzer gets any ideas. I’ve had one of his punks picking up the garbage with me for the last week or so, and he ain’t shit, and the man knows it.”

  The word sounded odd coming from Dominic’s fine-featured face. Yet the vulgar sound of the word, the contempt with which he used it, and the snarl of his lips seemed to enhance his good looks. He shook the locks above his forehead and they fell into a mass of curls upon it, then, misunderstanding Aaron’s stare, he stepped away from the mirror, explaining:

  “Your hair will be as long as mine again, fast, man, and I’m giving you a hand because I like you. You got guts. Come on.”

  Aaron followed him, but the nausea was worse. He felt lightheaded and high. He floated back to his bed and stood for count. And when he filed out onto the porch and fell into march formation, his legs appeared and disappeared below the white buttons of his blue shirt as if they were disconnected from him.

  Yet, he was aware of everything. He watched his body walk, saw his legs, saw the buttons, saw the Buzzer and knew where he was at all times. He kept himself paired with Dominic, began marching on order, kept step, but didn’t feel the rhythm. And when the column turned right on the road, under an overcast sky just beginning to clear, under low clouds whipped along by a strong wind, the full force of the institute’s cold, impersonal routine, a routine he was now entering completely for the first time, seemed to sweep over him with the bleak glow cast by the pale sun, chill his queasy guts, swamp all hope, and promise a future as ashen-hued as the black face of the Buzzer.

  “That’s the way to march. That’s the way,” Dominic said, and Aaron arched his back and raised his chin and tried to get some snap into his marching.

  But his movements were listless. It took work to plod up the hill, to move his cumbersome legs, and the patch of weak sunlight which filtered through the clouds onto the white watch-tower at the main gate quickened his nauseous fear; and he marched into the heat and roar and steam of the dining room as if he were totally alone and Dominic did not exist.

  A row of heads stretched before him, shortened, then vanished abruptly, and he was at the food counter. He took his tray and slid it down the wooden tracks, put a tin bowl of oatmeal in a scratched crater, accepted two slices of raisin bread at the end of the counter, turned into the uproar of the tables, took several steps, and found himself at the dairy table.

  He picked at the thick, pasty food until its shallow pool of milk was gone, without once rousing himself to ask Dominic a single question about the proposed job or the day before him. He then began to dip his bread into a cup of hot chocolate but paused to lift it in a feeble wave when Barneyway appeared through hovering mist of chocolate-and-coffee steam, tray held high before him.

  The cleft in Barneyway’s chin flicked up and down in a semaphoric greeting, but his face was expressionless; and Aaron nipped without appetite at his bread, hurt by the snub, in spite of his own slight greeting, feeling it was undeserved because Barneyway seemed to be the cause of his misery.

  He raised the cup to wash the bread down but sensed something, hesitated, with the tip of his tongue tasting the tin lip, kept his head still, let his eyes roll into the Y’d corners of his lids and into direct focus with the Buzzer’s eyes, then looked quickly down his nose into the moist heat of his cup. He sympathized with Barneyway, but was so impaled by the Buzzer’s pointed stare himself that he was unable to move until Dominic stood up to leave.

  Dominic first wiped the muddy streaks of oatmeal out of the tin hollows of his bowl with his last crust of raisin bread, then stood, and with what appeared as a mighty flourish to Aaron, reached for the ceiling with a cup of chocolate held like a gun, emptied the cup, aimed it at Aaron, beckoned with it, and left the table before anyone else in the dormitory had finished breakfast.

  Aaron was quick to follow and drop his tray upon Dominic’s at the scullery counter, his bowl in Dominic’s, his spoon upon Dominic’s spoon, but almost carried his cup out the door with him, and he had to lean back and toss it into a rack, then rush to catch up. He followed Dominic around the corner of the dining room to a wooden annex, waited while Dominic went into the officers’ dining room, marveled at Dominic’s courage, and credited Dominic with freeing him from the Buzzer’s stare.

  But the gravel pebbles along the walk soon took on the color and distinction of the Buzzer’s eyes, and the walk itself offered the doubtful safety of a concrete platform elevated only a single inch above them. He began to wonder if the pebbles endangered him only because Barneyway was his buddy, and this was such a disloyal and fearful thought that he skipped away from it and went to meet Dominic when he
reappeared with the man.

  “Aaron’s your name?” the man asked, holding out a tanned hand, looking curiously, kindly at Aaron through a lock of light-brown hair which had evaded his khaki cap and streaked across a smooth brow.

  “I’m Mr. Handy. Think you’re strong enough to lift those garbage cans onto that wagon?”

  “Yes,” Aaron said and tightened his grip, although he didn’t know what wagon. He held onto the man’s hand as much for the safety it promised as to prove his strength, and he held onto it until the man pulled free.

  “Got a shake alright. Okay, give ’im a try, Dominic, and if he ain’t worth a shit, fire ’im, and I’ll put him to work shoveling road apples. You can start now if you want to. I’ll include you in count.”

  Aaron followed Dominic again, and he stepped in each of Dominic’s steps, stepped on a line if Dominic stepped on a line, drifted near the edge if Dominic drifted near the edge, although with misgivings and was careful not to let a shoe stick over, but he had to walk next to Dominic along the road and was no longer safe; and while the bleak glow that had chilled him before breakfast was now gone, his vision was so excessively clear that every object before him had a peculiar and unsettling illumination.

  He tried to blame this on the still overcast sky, and the chalk white of the gym seemed to verify this. But the chapel wing adjoining the gym was in sunlight and the sky that framed it was a clear patch of blue and yet its outline was as emphatic as an engraving. The front walls of the trade shops lined the sloping hill below the gym like shields, and the dirt road that he and Dominic took at the bottom of the hill stretched straight across the untilled fields to the dairy in the distance as if it had been machine graded and lacked only pavement.

  He walked in a wheel rut to limit his view and refused to lift his head when Dominic spoke to him, but the trudging sound of his shoes lingered in his ears with an evasive yet distinct overtone which was as disheartening and mysterious as Barneyway’s cry on the hospital steps. And an occasional and isolated track of a single iron wagon wheel in the soft earth of a rut had an effect upon his emotions as great as the flick of Barneyway’s chin at breakfast.