by Watts, Peter
Dell shook his head, walked away smiling. I could see his reflection in all the stainless steel, and, as it turned out, Dell’s uncle’s reference didn’t mean much when the boss man’s just-dead, honor-student, choir-singing, yoga-bunny niece he’d been saving for the morning to embalm personally turned up with an evil bug-eyed lizard of some kind trying to crawl up her side, its tongue reaching up to circle her nipple in the most lecherous fashion.
Some people got no sense of art, I mean.
Dell in particular.
~
Like he had to, he came over, did what he needed to do to my face, to my television and my lamp. The television wasn’t mine, but I wasn’t saying anything. And then, so I would remember, he dug my tattoo gun up from my backseat, came back in and pulled me off the couch by the shirt I wasn’t wearing, sat on my arms with his knees so he could drill some bathroom-wall version of a penis into my chest. Or maybe it was a novelty sprinkler, or a leaky cowboy hat, I don’t know.
Chances are I could have bucked him off, but I kind of deserved it too, I guessed. Though if he’d been a real friend, he would have lit a cigarette for me. And maybe done a better job.
When he was done he threw my rig into the corner, slammed through my screen door, told me to forget his number if I knew what was good for me.
I spent the next two days turning his punishment tattoo into a Texas bluebonnet, because that’s where I’d been born. At least that was the new story I was going to have ready.
How a flower was going to fit with the iguana theme I’d been studying on lately, I had no idea, but maybe it didn’t matter so much either. Soon I wasn’t going to have any skin left.
A week passed, then another, and, standing outside a bar one night with my shirt already gone, I saw the last girl Dell had been shacking up with. I’d taken her to prom once upon a time, when prom still existed. She was riding by on the back of another guy’s motorcycle. Really pressing herself into him. Glaring us all down.
“She thinks we care?” I said to whoever was beside me.
“Probably thinks we did it,” whoever it was said back, taking a deep drag and holding it, holding it.
I narrowed my eyes, looked over through her smoke: Sheila. From when I was a community-college student for three weeks.
“Story?” I said, offering her one from my pack.
She held it sideways, ran her fingers along the white paper and sneered about it like she always did, like she hated cigarettes, like she was just smoking them to kill them. But she threaded it behind her ear all the same. Your monkey’s always whispering to you, I guess.
She shrugged, told me about Dell.
He’d been found not just normal-dead, like OD’d or stabbed or drowned in vomit in a bed across town. No, he’d been like exploded behind a club. A dental-records-only kind of thing. Smeared on the brick, important footsteps leading away, the whole trip.
I eeked my mouth out, stood on the stoop for more smokes than I’d meant.
The bluebonnet on my chest was waving with each inhale.
I went home, watched it in the mirror. Added red buds in the blue, in memoriam. I think that’s the word.
When I searched Dell up on the newspaper site, two hits came up.
One was his obituary, the funeral I’d missed, and the other hit was about impropriety with the dead.
The blotter had nothing at all about the late-night, involuntary tattoo on the owner’s car-wrecked niece—I guess I could have been famous, started a career right there—but it did mention how Saddleview was getting the funeral home version of an audit. Evidently, one month it had taken in more bodies than it had buried.
I shook my head, clicked away. Dell.
He’d probably got the orders wrong. Pushed one too many into the oven one night, then tried to fix the manifest, had to burn a to-be-buried stiff as well.
It didn’t have anything to do with me, anyway.
That part of my life was over.
Lie number ten-thousand, there, I guess. But who’s keeping count.
~
As for why Dell had turned inside-out behind the bar, I had no clue. He’d always been high-strung. In junior high, he’d always been the first one to put his lips to the freon tube, the first one to spray thinner into the rag, press it against his mouth, so I figured it was some accumulated chemical reaction. Something the military would probably pay big bucks to the get the formula for. They should have been monitoring us the whole time. Every night, we were out there, experimenting.
And, just because Dell was gone, that didn’t mean the lab was closed.
One night maybe three weeks after the funeral where I probably should have been a pallbearer, there we all were, miles out of the city, in a field with a bonfire, like the bonfire had always been there, waiting. There were sparks and, when the wood started to run out, everybody had to donate one article of clothing. And then two.
It was interesting in a decline-of-the-world kind of way. I was kicked back in a lawn chair, zoned out, just mellow, my shirt burning, keeping us all warm. I was watching this one girl named Kelly, already down to her pink clamshell bra, and thinking I might have to wait this situation out when another car pulled up and we all kind of sighed.
Too many cars meant the cops wouldn’t be far behind.
Then, too, depending on who was in that car, it could all be worth it.
I shrugged to myself, leaned back to see who the new victims were going to be: first was a guy who could have been a surf bum in a movie ten years ago, second was his clone, and third was a red-headed girl I thought I knew from somewhere.
When the fourth stepped out, I knew where I knew Red from: my sister’s friend from down the street at the old house.
Gigi was here.
“Hey!” my non-buddy Seth called out, dancing behind her, pointing down to her with both hands.
I settled deeper into my chair, looked back to the fire like maybe I could blind myself by staring.
Soon enough she found me, stood there with a silver can in her hand and said, “Dad’s been trying to reach you.”
“Dell?” I said.
“You were his best friend.”
“He was a punk. A wastoid.”
“And what are you?”
“You should leave,” I told her.
“I’m the one who should be doing things, yeah,” she said, and that was it.
For a while some guys were running at the fire and jumping over it, but that was short-lived. It was mostly quiet and surly, at least for me. Just music and muttering, and too many snapshot flashes of my sister with surfer boy two, his arm draped over her in a way that was making me swallow hard.
Before the night was over, there were going to be words. And probably more. But first I’d need to make sure he was eighteen—too old to press charges, according to Dell, who would have learned the hard way.
I was nodding to myself about how it was all going to play out, how I was about to step across to the cable spool they were using like a love seat, and was even halfway counting down in my head when a chainsaw pulled up to our little gathering in the sticks.
It was Dell’s ex. On her new guy’s motorcycle. She stepped off—dismounted, more like—and he just sat there still holding the grips, inspecting us all, the fire dancing in the black glass of his helmet.
I swallowed, looked away like I’d never seen them, tried not to track Gigi even though I did register the t-shirt she’d had on at one point. It was in the fire. The first chance I got I went to pee in the tall grass, never came back, just stopped at a convenience store, called the party in.
You do what you can to save your little sister, I guess. Even cash your friends in.
In my living room the next morning, still awake—I hadn’t planned on coming home this early—I ran my hand over the elaborate, dragon-scaled salamander on the right side of my left calf.
I tried to keep the hair there shaved down, to really show it off, but, running my hand over it, it was crac
kly. And smelled worse than bad.
I sleuthed through my head, made the necessary connection: this was the leg I’d had kicked up on the cooler, close to the fire. On purpose, to show off my work, show what I could do. I’d even been wetting down the scales with beer when nobody was looking, just waiting for anybody to say anything.
Nobody had.
Instead I’d just curled all the hair on my leg, and singed the heel of my favorite shoe.
Everybody had to have seen, though. It was beautiful, it was crawling, it was alive.
I smoothed it down, passed out on the couch with that lizard warm under my hand, its eyes open for me, wheeling in their orbits, the pupils just slits, like rips you could climb through, into another world.
I should have tried.
~
I woke at dusk and flinched back hard, deeper into the couch.
There was a black motorcycle helmet on my coffee table. Watching me.
“Recognized your work,” a guy said from the kitchen, and punctuated it by closing my refrigerator hard enough to rattle the ketchup.
Dell’s ex’s new boyfriend.
“Be still my heart,” I said, clutching it, sitting up.
“Don’t be stupid,” he told me, and stepped in, my tub of butter in his left hand, his right index finger smeared glossy yellow.
He ran it into his mouth, pulled his finger out like he was sneaking frosting off somebody’s saved-back cupcake.
“Dairy,” he said, running his finger along the edge of the tub again, then shaking his head to get his oily bangs out of his face.
I nearly screamed.
His eyes.
There were two crude X’s tattooed over them. Two X’s I’d done. When he was cold and dead on a rolling cart, two bullets punched through his chest.
“Been looking for someone with your particular . . . talents,” he said, downing another fingerful.
I shook my head no, no, saw Dell smeared on a brick wall and stood to crash my way to the screen door, escape out into the night, into some other life.
The boyfriend’s helmet caught me in the back like a bowling ball, threw me into the wall by the door, the whole house shaking when I hit.
He turned me over with the toe of his boot, stared down at my chest. Eating butter the whole while.
“Thought you were into reptiles,” he said, about my bluebonnet, his accent tuned to the UK station, and just dialed over all the way to it.
I coughed, turned to the side, threw up.
He stepped his boot out of the way.
When I was done he kneeled down, jammed his butter finger into my mouth, smearing yellow all around inside. It was cold, wet, tasteless.
His face so close to mine.
“I’m sorry?” I said.
He laughed, pushed my head down, bouncing it off the carpet.
“You know cow milk is ninety-eight percent the same as cow blood?” he said, dipping his finger into the tub again.
I was just trying to breathe.
He shrugged, said, “Close enough,” and set the butter down on a speaker.
From my angle on the floor, he was forever tall, and still pale like a junkie. But he did carry himself something like a British Invasion reject, definitely. Something self-consciously waifish and bad attitude about the way he caved his shoulders in around his chest. The hollow where his stomach should be. His lowslung jeans, like he was just daring you to trace his belt line.
There weren’t supposed to be any of his kind anymore, though. Them and the dragons, they were on the extinct list, right? All there were that was even close anymore was all the goths, I guess, the Sandman dreamers, the Bauhaus die-hards, the velvet vest crowd who’d read too much Anne Rice, were probably going to grow up into good little steampunk rejects one day.
This boyfriend, though, I had a sense he was their original. That Neil Gaiman had seen him at a party in the UK, that Anne Rice had followed him through the streets of New Orleans one night, that Sid Vicious had taken a cue or two from him.“This,” he said, giving me some jazz hands action over his face, his eyes, those X’s, “this isn’t just permanent, you know? With me it’s kind of forever, now, yeah? Get what I’m saying? What do you think of that, Jamie Boy?”
I pushed myself up against the wall, let some butter dribble from my mouth, down onto the bluebonnet.
“Jamie Boy?” I managed to say.
My dad was the only one who did that.
He just stared at me about that.
“She was nice,” he said, falling back onto the couch like it was a throne, licking his lips in the most exaggerated way. “But little sisters are always nice, aren’t they?”
“Who told you?”
“You did, telescope eyes.”
Meaning he’d followed her home. Thinking that’s where I was going to be. And then he’d made do with who was there.
I stood, but it was just to fall across the coffee table, into the hall. Not for any window but for the bathroom, for the toilet. To throw the rest of the world I used to know up.
In the shower, exploded, smeared all over the tile, was Dell’s ex.
She had a bar of soap stuffed in what was left of her mouth.
“Sorry for the mess,” the boyfriend said from the door, his leather pants somehow vulgar. “Got to clean up after you eat, though. If you don’t, they come back, all that. I’m sure you’ve heard.”
He was bored with it, trailed off, looking down the hall like at something important.
I knew where he was looking, though.
Four miles over, into the Crane Meadow subdivision. Into what could no longer really be considered a living room, I was pretty sure.
~
So, monsters are real. Surprise.
For some reason I’d never considered this.
Or—I’m lying again: one monster’s real, anyway.
And I get the sense that’s just how he likes it.
When I was done emptying myself into the toilet, I zombied my way back to the living room, my peripheral vision just a smoky haze.
Instead of killing me like I expected, like I wanted, like I deserved, he slapped a pair of blue nitrile gloves down on the coffee table, told me to rubber up, whirred my gun in his other hand.
I looked down at myself to see what room was left for him to do his damage on.
I had it backwards.
Until thirty minutes before dawn, his left hand cupped around my balls the whole time—he’d crunched a metal thermos into tinfoil, to show what he could do—I worked on his face.
Every tattoo artist has to be able to repair somebody else’s work. To cover up a name, fix a misspelling, fudge a date. Put a bikini top on that girl, make a pistol into a submarine, a submarine into a flying saucer, a flying saucer into a shadow, all that.
What I was supposed to do was make those dashed-on X’s over his eyes into something presentable enough for the coming eternity. Something he wouldn’t have to hide behind a helmet, a helmet he could only explain if he had a motorcycle, and he hated motorcycles. Everything went by too fast.
While I did my thing, holding his dead, cold skin tight—I’d had practice—he told me about 1976. How glorious it had been. No cell phone cameras, no bullshit DNA, no credit cards in the system, to track people with. Back then he never woke up in morgues, had to sneak out. Back then he was keeping the morgues stocked.
In his raspy singsong voice he told me about concerts and brushes with fame, and about a milkmaid he’d known with blond hair that curled on the side like she was an orthodox Jew, and how that framed her face so perfect, even though, where and when she’d lived, she probably hadn’t even known Jews existed. How he never knew her name, only her insides. How she tasted.
Because I didn’t have the barber patter down yet, and because this was my first time inking a face, I just worked, and kept light on my toes. It wasn’t on purpose, but his hand on my balls—going up on your toes is kind of a natural response.
Still, even work
ing fast enough to sweat, I was only able to get one eye done.
I was being careful, I mean.
I handed him the mirror, let him look, my balls still in his hand.
He looked side to side at himself and squeezed gently, rolling me like marbles, my spine straightening from it, and then he looked me straight-on.
It wasn’t bad.
That mime make-up trick, with a tapered, upside-down cross kind of coming through the eyebrow, leaking down onto the cheek? I’d taken some of that and mixed it with the diamond eyes harlequins in comic books have, and filled it all in solid, so that his right eyeball, looking out from all that black, it was seriously wicked. I’d gotten the idea . . . well, first from what I needed to cover that stupid X, but second from a facepaint band I’d seen one night—not KISS, please, and this wasn’t a juggalo night, and I’ve never seen Marilyn Manson live. Reading the show’s write-up the next day, though, the show-off reviewer was saying how the lead singer’s black-bagged eyes had been an insult to everything The Misfits had ever not stood for.
I didn’t know Glenn Danzig’s make-up well enough to make the link like the reviewer was—I was always more of a Sex Pistols kind of punk, I guess—but the guy with my balls in his hands seemed to recognize something. “Sick like a dog,” he said, and held the mirror over to get a proper angle on his face. Run his other hand over the stubble he would probably never grow.
He liked it.
I breathed out for what felt like the first time in hours and he stood up into that one moment of relief I had, his lips right against mine, my balls tighter in his hand now, so that I was practically floating, my eyes watering whether I was telling them to or not.
I turned to the side to let him do what he was going to do and caught the sun, just starting to warm the very top of my gauzy ancient hand-me-down drapes.
“Hey,” I said about it.
He hissed, brought his mouth down to my neck, his teeth grazing my skin there, and said, “We finish it tonight,” tapping his naked eye, and then him and his black helmet and his perfumed stench were gone, stalking out the back, leaving my kitchen door open behind him, his bike tearing the morning open.