by Eric Beetner
She made her way to her feet and weaved through stacks of newspapers. On top of one heap, a headline announced, “Reagan by a Landslide.” Atop another stack, “Bussing Riots Turn Violent.” Halfway in the living room and in the corridor, an Indianapolis Star headline said, “Mission Accomplished.” A giant picture of Neil Armstrong saluting next to a flag planted on the moon took up the rest of the page. She remembered watching the first landing on TV with her family, telling her father she wanted to be an astronaut. The bastard laughed and said, “Girls don’t do that stuff.” Mr. Duncan had asked her, once, what her goals were. Just to make him happy, she’d slipped in the bit about how she wanted to walk in space, fly to Mars.
“You good with math?” he’d said.
“I’m not terrible,” she’d said.
“What’s stopping you?”
Not too long after, she dropped out and moved in with her friend Heather, who told her how much money she could pull at Sugar Cookie’s. Those were the days when anyone who had the audacity to be nice to her needed to be punished. And she disciplined them the best way she knew how—she hurt herself. If they cared so much about her, surely they’d suffer along with her.
As she pushed aside the door leading to Mr. Duncan’s bedroom, she held her nose. Dirty laundry, mostly socks and briefs, covered the floor. She saw him put a shoebox on a shelf in a closet filled with sports jackets and short-sleeved, button down shirts.
“A thousand for two rounds?” he said.
“That’s right, honey.” She took the money from him and folded it into her purse. “Get undressed, sweetie.” She set the purse on a nightstand next to the unmade, twin-sized bed. The tiny table was the cleanest piece of furniture in the house. The only thing on it was a picture in a heavy, brass frame. A younger, more handsome Mr. Duncan, his arms around a brunette with a poofy, 1960s haircut and a bullet bra under her sweater that made her boobs look like rockets. She picked it up. “She’s beautiful,” she said.
He looked away as he unbuttoned his shirt.
What a crock of shit. Life. They were putting shuttles in the stratosphere now and women were on board. Too late for her. She ran a finger along the frame of the picture of Mr. Duncan and a woman who had obviously fucked him up. “Hey,” she said, “did you hear me?” She crossed the room, the picture still in her hands.
“Yes,” he said. He removed his shirt. Judging by the sick, lemon shade of his undershirt, nobody had ever taught him how to separate colors from whites.
She smiled and waited for him to do the same.
He looked at her, paused, and said, “Sally?”
She drew the picture back and slammed it into his face. He hit his head against the wall as he fell. The glass covering the photograph cracked and cut his cheek open. He slumped between the bed and the wall, motionless. She put her ear against his chest. His heart beat, his lungs filled and collapsed. “Pleasant dreams,” she said.
The shelf in the closet was just high enough that she had to drag the bed over and stand on it to reach it. She pulled the shoebox down and opened it. Gobs of money inside. As she left the house, she flipped furniture and kicked over stacks of newspapers like Godzilla, crushing Tokyo.
She hurried down the front walk, looking left and right to make sure nobody saw her. Holmes leaned out the passenger window. “What’s going on?”
“Early Christmas,” she said. She held the shoebox up.
The driver nodded. He sparked the engine and opened the door for her.
They booked out of the neighborhood and onto the freeway. She showed him the cash.
“Holy shit,” he said.
“Halfsies?”
“Right on.”
“We’ll slide a couple of bills to Mr. Lime,” she said. “Tell him I let the chump splooge on my tits.”
“What if this guy calls the cops?”
“Are you kidding?” she said. “He’s a public school teacher.”
“Sweet.”
She rested her head against her window. Streetlights reflected in the glass. Looking past them, she searched for the sky, for the stars. Nothing but clouds and pollution. No planets, no comets, no moon. Then she took the lid off the shoebox and counted the money.
Back to TOC
TATTOO
Joe Clifford
You never claimed to be one of the good guys. But this? This will probably go down as one of the shittier things you’ve done. If there’s a heaven and hell, you’re ending up on the south side. No doubt about it. But that’s a pretty big if. What you do know is that pretty girls shouldn’t go around breaking hearts.
There’s a contract you enter into when you date someone. An unspoken, mutually agreed-upon understanding. Might not be signed and legal, no lawyers shystering their fifty percent cut. But it’s binding just the same. And Karah fucking knew that. She knew that when she’d lie there, both of you spent after a long night of fucking in your trailer, still a little drunk, high, naked, talking about a future together; she knew it every time she’d trace the outline of your tattoos, asking why the pretty things always cut deepest, as the big rigs rumbled on the concrete overpass above, quaking the park. With each lilted word she was asking for a piece of your heart. Might not have been explicitly stated. But that’s what she was doing. And you gave it to her, said, “Here it is. Please don’t break it.” That was the deal. So this is on her as much as it’s on you. And if it turns out that there is someone, somewhere, sitting up high and judging, then you’ll have some company.
Funny thing is, Karah said she was never into guys with tattoos. Said you were the first one who really did it for her. Though she teased you enough about it. Said, “Sure, they look good now. But what about when you’re old, when they’re all blue and faded and your skin’s all wrinkly, what then?”
You told her you didn’t live your life that way.
She called you a cliché. She laughed when she said it so you’d know she was kidding. Like when someone sends you an email, calling you a self-centered asshole but closes with a winky face at the end of it.
Maybe you are sensitive. Karah always said you couldn’t take a joke. But it’s easy for people like Karah to say things like that. Pretty girls with money and options. That’s the part that really got to you, when it was over. You were a phase. The bad boy, the starving artist with the motorcycle and tattoos. Uptown girl slumming it with trailer trash. A mixed-race affair slotted just after a two-month, bi-sexual college relationship. Lesbian until graduation? Now who’s the cliché?
She used to bust your balls about living in a trailer park, as you struggled to make your stamp on the art world, like everyone who lives in a mobile home fucks his sister, eats raccoon meat, has to reuse his cereal milk for coffee creamer. You dropped twenty grand, cash, your own hard-earned money, on that trailer. And that mobile home she mocked as so “Americana and kitsch?” That same one where she let you fuck her deep in the ass? You owned that shit. All yours, free and clear of any bank. No other choice. Mom and Dad weren’t bailing you out. You’ve always seen the larger plan, the greater landscape, the grand picture. While the Karahs of the world were getting hocked up to their eyeballs, overextended with credit card debt, you were your own man. No landlord telling you what to do. No bank. No boss either.
Because you flipped that little trailer and lot, yes you did, doubled your profit, and you kept flipping, investing, until you had enough left over to start this little tattoo shop, far away in the city. Built it up from scratch, got a nice clientele, a good reputation. You didn’t chintz on guns or color. Only the best for your customers. Now people pay good money to see you. Because you are a real artist. Earn a nice payday, too. A hundred and eighty an hour for your time. Some doctors don’t make that.
Got a good little life, you do. Which is why, anyone ever found out, they might have a tough time understanding. Karah was, what, almost five, seven years ago? Shit, man, get over it, they’d say. You’ve dated a lot of girls since th
en, fucked even more. But that one always stung. She hit a sore spot. Brought up a lot of shit for you. Maybe if it had been anyone other than him.
You’d been losing out to the Bretts of this world your whole goddamn life. It wasn’t the fancy cars or the more tangible, profitable future. When she picked him over you, she was saying, in effect, that you were expendable, a castoff, a bum. You’d hustled for everything you’d gotten. He’d been handed his good fortune. So she was fucking him behind your back? Big deal. You could’ve lived with that. You didn’t cry or slash his fucking tires like a bitch; you didn’t take a crow bar to his knees like your old man might’ve done. You never confronted him; it was beneath you. You sucked it up. You drank. For a while. You wallowed, then you moved on. And look where you moved on to. Nice apartment in the good part of the city. Stopped the pills, the booze. No more partying. You were doing just fine.
Until that motherfucker made an appointment at your shop. Oh, it was the same Brett, you made sure of that. You checked. Even then, you stayed calm, swallowed ego when he didn’t know who you were. You weren’t upset when he mentioned the “surprise tat” for “his wife, Karah.” A rose with barbed wire thorns, of all the cheesy bullshit. You grinned and nodded through the half hour consultation, as he showed you his shit, third grader outline; and you listened politely as he detailed the big ceremony at his big house up on the Ridge. (Like that’s how people want to spend their afternoon, celebrating someone else’s love and dropping a hundred bucks on an overpriced cheese plate. You gave it two years.) No, what finally got to you wasn’t another pasty, day-trading whiteboy deciding to get “inked up” as a fashion statement—if you turned away all the whiteboys desperately searching for culture, you wouldn’t have any customers—it was this doughy, pasty whiteboy trying to steal some of your hard-earned culture.
The rest was easy. Gina had always been crazy about you. A nurse at the clinic, Gina drew blood from sickos all day long. Looking for narcotics? Good luck. But tainted blood work? Fuck, nobody wanted to touch that shit. And it was practically untraceable. Hell, Brett was probably sticking it in half the office anyway. Guys like him treat pussy like currency.
It’s not like you’re a monster. Gave you a little pause. But you weren’t killing the guy. Just sending him home with a nice, little communicable souvenir to share with his lovely new bride.
The night of, you almost got cold feet, considered avoiding Sanguine Red altogether. But it was late at the shop, just you two. He brought out the flask, said he could use a nip before you got started, if that was all right. Sure, you said. Then he offered you a taste, half an Oxy too, just to take off the edge. Why the hell not? It had been a while. You could handle it. Lightheaded and buzzed, you told Brett the red would contrast nicely against his fair, virgin skin.
Once you got to work, you stopped worrying so much. When the motherfucker left without tipping you, you didn’t feel bad at all.
And you never would’ve thought about it again, wouldn’t have wasted another minute of your time. Except you felt like celebrating. Raise a toast to closure. You were finally ready to cover up her name over your heart. You broke two cardinal rules of your profession: never tattoo drunk. And never tattoo on yourself.
Wasn’t until you noticed the discharge a couple days later and felt the burn when you tried to piss that you made the connection. You played back the other night, rewound to the part where you tossed the corrupted cup. Couldn’t get a clear picture.
So now you find yourself back at the clinic, slinking in your sweatshirt, hoping it’s Gina’s day off. You thumb the “STDs and You” pamphlets, waiting for the on-call, as you mentally brace for the needles and thin surgical rods they’ll insert into tiny holes, the parts of a man’s body that should never be invaded.
Watching through windows, you stare at the lonely cars on the highway, and you think you finally have an answer to Karah’s question, the one about why the pretty things always cut the deepest. That’s the only way the razor’s edge can penetrate the scars.
Back to TOC
THE BUSINESS OF DEATH
Eric Beetner
Times are tough in the death business.
That’s what I thought to myself as I stood in the empty viewing room. No appointments at all for the rest of the day, and it was only ten a.m. As I looked more closely I could see the wallpaper peeling in sections. The stains on the carpet left over from Mrs. Needleman who spilled her wine last year. A clear violation of our no food or drink policy, but sometimes when a loved one has just died people need a damn drink. I wasn’t about to get all hardass on her. Then she went on wailing about her dear departed and a full glass of merlot hits my carpet, which should have been changed during the Bush administration anyway. The first Bush administration.
It doesn’t smell good either. What funeral home does? That weird mixture of death and flowers. And not even real death. The after effects of death. The chemicals of the trade. Real death smells much worse, like when they come to us. All the lilies in the world can’t cover that stench.
The place doesn’t even sound good. The front left speaker that pipes in the calming sounds of strings has something wrong with it and buzzes now like the harps are summoning both angels and a swarm of bees.
Like I said, times is tough. So when I got an offer, who was I to refuse?
The neighborhood has changed since my dad opened the place forty-six years ago. I wouldn’t say we’re overrun with crime now, but a few guys on the street would like to see it that way. They run around like extras in a traveling road show of Goodfellas. I won’t call them the mob because the level of organization these guys display would be an insult to organized crime. But still, they do business in my neighborhood and unlike mine, their business is booming.
So one of the top guys, Bobby, came to me a few months back. He wants to talk, he said. He palms me an envelope before he even gets to what he’s asking me to do. Smart move. Once I had that money in my hand it became real tough to hand it back. I feel like I might have been able to resist and not accept it once he started explaining what he wanted from me, but feeling the weight of that envelope…hoo, boy. Even if it was stuffed with singles, I’d have been doing okay.
Honest to God, I thought of the people on my payroll. I got an embalmer, ushers, a woman who comes in to play the organ, an assistant manager, a hearse driver. These are people who depend on me.
So I took the money.
Here’s what he wanted: and let me say off the bat, it was a great plan and I was kinda pissed I had never thought of it. They had a body to dispose of. I didn’t ask and didn’t want to know how or why they had a dead body on their hands, but the body already existed so something was going to happen to it one way or another.
My part in it was to take the body and slip it into a coffin with someone else so when that person gets buried, the body they want to get rid of goes with it and it’s like their body vanishes. Genius, right?
All I had to do was to remove the padding and little bed cushion—which is all for appearances anyway—slip the new body under the old one, and they would piggyback ride into eternity together. The next day I had a woman who passed in her sleep at the ripe old age of ninety-two. She was already shriveled up like an apple left in the sun, so there was enough extra room in her coffin for a party of two.
After Hector, my embalmer, had gone home they brought the new body over. He was a male, probably mid-thirties. Since he wasn’t for display I didn’t have to do anything to him. He went in wearing the T-shirt he came in with, no lip glue, no makeup. Which was good. The makeup job to cover the deep red welts and abrasions across his neck, likely from a rope or heavy strap of some sort, would have taken hours and two tubes of makeup.
So out came the Eterna-Rest mattress and in went Mr. T-shirt.
The next day Edna Friedman’s family had no idea and into the ground went a two-for-one special. And I got my carpets changed.
Over the next three month
s I had four more envelopes slapped into my hand. Bobby brought me a rather heavy guy who, luckily, went into a closed casket with Mr. Edington. Getting the lid shut on those two was like trying to close an overstuffed suitcase. It took me and Bobby and one of his guys all leaning on the lid before it clicked shut. Good news is a coffin is made to close forever, so once you hear that click, you’re good.
After that I re-papered the walls.
I doubled up a skinny guy who came in wearing only his underpants with a middle-aged woman who lost her battle with cancer. Everyone was so distracted by the hideous wig her family put on her that nobody noticed the weird lumps in the mattress pad she made her eternal rest on top of.
After that I fixed the speakers.
It was all going so well…
Bobby brought me a body. Well, an envelope and a body. I’d given up worrying if I was doing the right thing or not. Obviously I wasn’t, but the people he brought me were already dead so at least I wasn’t contributing to that part of it. And my employees were getting paid, the lights were still on, the place was looking better.
I didn’t have anything scheduled for another forty-eight hours; a body coming down from up north so the man could be buried in the family plot. So Bobby had to cool his heels, and his corpse, until then.
Then came a rush job. A hospital passing from an old lady who’d been clinging to her last breath far longer than the family expected. I can tell when I speak to family members if they are truly grieving or not. This lady was not. I don’t know if there was a will involved or what, but the whole family wanted to wrap it up and get out of town and back to their lives as quick as they could. Everyone had already added days to their hotel stays waiting on the old lady to expire. They wanted her planted—and quick.
I called Bobby and told him. He wanted in. His corpse wasn’t in a refrigerator. It was getting nasty. I told him to bring the guy by.
