Tattoo the Wicked Cross

by Salas, Floyd;

  “Barney! Barney! Oh, Barney!” as the figures around him spin by, as he wobbles, bumps against a boy next to him, spins completely around once, and falls, headfirst, to the pavement.

  Part Ten

  Good Time

  I

  Harsh fumes burned Aaron’s nasal passages. But strong fingers gripped the back of his neck and forced him to inhale. And he awoke, with a frightful jerk, to a world of white, white blur, white streak, and found a wavering focus for reality in the steel-rimmed lenses of the nurse. He lined his eyes up with them. And the bottle of smelling salts was withdrawn from his nose. And the strong fingers let his head lay back upon the gurney.

  A pimpled, pocked surface, shadowed by twilight, formed an empty sky of stale white. Figures, objects hovered on the edges of his vision with the distant, shifting, now looming, now receding emphasis of dream forms. Sound passed through antechambers of echo and reflection: voices sputtered like wet matches. Shut doors flashed yells in the darkness and blotted out low moans. Footsteps clapped bright and brighter and brighter and burst into ribbed tubes of fluorescence upon the ceiling, and, totally awake, his memory returned with a jackass’s grin, and he asked the hovering pointed brim of the nurse’s cap:

  “What happened to Barney?”

  Broad hips belled out of a pinched starched waist, but there was no answer.

  “Tell me.”

  Huge busts then ballooned with a deep sigh, and she said, simply:

  “He died.”

  Sucking air dried his parted lips, lips still marked by the red welts of new skin, but he didn’t sob. Waves of pitying tears for his dead friend rose up in his eyes and spilled over the shallow brims of his lids, and his nose ran heavily with mucus, but he didn’t sob. The tears ran in silent curving trickles into the ridges of his ears as a cabinet door opened, a plastic vial top popped with suction, and the nurse’s big face swelled between mountainous busts above him, a paper cup and two capsules in her hands, but he didn’t sob.

  He swallowed the capsules with the water and undressed in front of her without shame, put on a clean nightgown, then padded barefoot behind her to a private room, entered as if he had not been absent for a week, and, as she locked the door, climbed between fresh sheets, and settled into them, while still breathing through his mouth, and with tears still streaming down cheeks now smarting and sensitive from them. But he could not sob nor could he shut out of his mind the image of Barneyway’s twisting, flopping body and the silent bray of his open mouth.

  Drowsiness came and blurred the visions of a dying Barneyway, slurred Aaron’s mumbled pleas for that final penance, that unbroken sleep, dried the streams of tears, the damp blots on the pillow, and dropped him into a long and relieving and untroubled sleep, from which he awoke, without fear, to the stern face of Big Stoop, hovering over the bed.

  A strange hue neutralized Big Stoop’s ruddy complexion, and Aaron could not tell whether it was caused by the pale light of morning, which cast a blank tint over all the white objects in the white room, or the blank sleep.

  “I’d like to ask you some questions,” Big Stoop said; and Aaron sat up but made no attempt to brush the strands of hair away from his eyes.

  “Did you have any idea that anything was wrong before you heard the siren?” Big Stoop asked and cleared Aaron’s mind with the question but disgusted him; and he shook his head, lying in a simple defense against a con-job and the severe, microscopic examination of him, but disgusted with himself, too.

  Big Stoop’s blunt features seemed to sharpen with superiority, as if he knew he could turn any answer to his advantage; and Aaron could tell when he was ready to ask the next question by the tightened knife-edge of his lipless mouth.

  “When did you know they died of strychnine poisoning?”

  “They?” Aaron gasped, tongue caught on his lower teeth, stuck where the word had ended, and remembered that he had dumped two cans of poison into the soup, that the white powder had dissolved into the thick creamy liquid twice. And the knife-edge became loose and dull and Big Stoop added, reluctantly:

  “Three boys died: Barnham Aragon, Oliver Wiley, and Thomas Rodriguez. Three others are in bad, though not critical, condition. They’ll pull through.”

  “My God! My God!” Aaron cried and hid his face in his hands, wondering how he could have possibly forgotten the Buzzer’s twitching body, those jeering teeth; and his shoulders rocked with his shaking head, and he scraped his fingers down his dry face and pulled his eyes, his cheeks, his mouth into distortion, but he didn’t cry.

  “Are they the boys who jumped you?” Big Stoop asked, his mouth tight again.

  “Not Barney,” Aaron said. “The Buzzer raped him, too.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “How?”

  “I saw it,” Aaron said.

  And Big Stoop straightened up, took off his cap, and ran his hand over his gray hair, which had been flattened by the cap’s pressure, and then rubbed the red cap line which marked his forehead.

  “Do you see what you’ve done to those boys and yourself for not telling me who attacked you?” he asked; and the explanatory tone of his voice brought Aaron closer to tears than the news that he was a multiple murderer, for he could not pity himself, and he did not want pity, and sympathy from Big Stoop would be unbearable.

  “You know, sometimes I may seem cruel, and I might be cruel. I don’t try to be a Good Joe, my job’s too hard. But I’m a guard, a cop who’s taken an oath, and my job is to keep things like this, what you did and what was done to you, from happening, and it takes being cruel sometimes to do it.”

  Aaron wanted to shout at him to stop and just ask if he, Aaron, did it, so he could confess and hopefully drop back into the blank sleep, but found himself denying what he wanted to admit in defense against another con-job.

  “Now, you’re going to have to do a lot of time for this, years, and maybe they’ll try and give you the chamber, it’s not out of the question, and I could probably help you get a better deal from the judge if I could tell him that you co-operated with me, that you were really sorry for what you did? Do you follow me?”

  Aaron pursed his lips to keep from speaking and shook his head again. He didn’t care if he got the chamber, and he wasn’t going to let Big Stoop scare him.

  “You don’t, huh?”

  Aaron shook his head.

  “Well, let me make it clear for you then,” Big Stoop said and flipped his cap on and fitted it down tight on his forehead.

  “If you don’t give me all the facts now and without any nonsense, before the sheriff shows up again, I’m going to toss you in the hole, and I’m going to keep you there on bread and water until you do talk. Do you follow me?”

  Aaron didn’t answer, and he expected a slap, which he would have welcomed.

  “Those boys are gone forever, wise guy, and you’ll have to spend the rest of your life with their lives on your conscience. No punishment’s going to be worse than that! Your life’s ruined already, and if you’d co-operate, you might be able to get some mercy.”

  “Mercy?” Aaron said.

  “Mercy,” Big Stoop repeated, leaning down with a sharp mouth again; and Aaron could have laughed just to disturb the mouth, to loosen it a little, and to make the welcome slap follow, let alone laugh at such a thought as “mercy,” but he shook his head.

  “You’re a tough guy, huh, kid?” Big Stoop said, and Aaron tensed for the tightened lip, the betraying blink, the slight lift of an elbow which would signal that a slap would follow, so he could roll instinctively with it, roll but not from fear, roll only to make Big Stoop miss.

  The huge hands did lift but only to slap against the huge thighs, and Big Stoop stepped to the doorway, where his cap almost touched the upper frame, and he hesitated there, with one shoulder, a hip, a leg pinched in the narrow opening, and warned:

  “This is your last chance, kid.”

  “Go to Hell,” Aaron answered, with a calm that com
pletely concealed the thrill he felt.

  II

  Discolored streaks and hollows erupted into scabrous, cracking bubbles of old varnish on the walls and ceiling of the courtroom antechamber, where Aaron sat on the edge of the varnished bench seat and away from the back rest so his feet would touch the tile floor.

  He sat with a studied disinterest in the tall frosted window behind him, with a studied disinterest in the shadow ribs of bars behind its sheathed surface, and with a studied disinterest in the traffic noises of the free people on the street.

  He sat in a new blue uniform but with a studied disinterest in the cool antechamber he had been locked in for over two hours. He sat with a studied disinterest in what was going to happen in that courtroom behind the locked door, where his family and the judge and his future were supposed to be.

  He sat with a studied but unsuccessful disinterest in the shrunken and mummified vision of a Mexican mother in black veils, who had haunted his dreams in the place of an unseen, although dead, Rattler. He sat with a studied but unsuccessful disinterest in the nightmare vision of a Bible-spouting Mrs. Wiley, who had flapped with wide black sleeves over flickering glimpses of the squeaking Buzzer. He sat with a studied but unsuccessful disinterest in the beer-bloated and lipstick-smeared face of Juanita, and with a totally unsuccessful disinterest in the flopping stretcher-bound body of Barneyway.

  Prayers had failed as usual and had only quickened his despair, and he could no longer force himself to even try and recite them. The sense of weightless peace that he had prayed for and that used to accompany unburdening his soul on bended knees in the dark cubicle of a confessional booth was an unfulfilled promise he now reserved for his death.