Grave Markings: 20th Anniversary Edition

by Arnzen, Michael A.

  He knew that soon he would be free—from himself, from his past, from those images that writhed unseen in his mind. Free to create. In total control. Soon.

  Kilpatrick turned from the photos on the wall and began to unload his equipment on the soiled and wrinkled sheets of his bed. The stained latex gloves went straight into the trash can, slapping the side like wet and ugly used condoms.

  Half-empty plastic vials of ink—running the rainbow of colors—jiggled on the bed where he tossed them. And then, with wide eyes and a proud smile, Kilpatrick lifted his prized creation out from his carrying case.

  The ultimate portable electric needle. It was simple to make, actually. He just used the mechanism of an electric screwdriver, made a few adjustments, added a plastic feeder tube and the barrel of an inkgun—along with a sharpened extra-thick nib for a needle—and voilà, instant professional inker, ready to rock and roll on the road. It was amazingly quick and accurate. Sure, the tattoo turned out a tad rough, and the job was a bit more bloody, but he could tattoo a full body in as much time as a regular ink slinger could do a bicep. It was like carrying an industrial sewing machine around in his kit. It was a perfect invention—a piece of art in itself.

  A rapid-fire engine. A mechanism that I built with my own hands. Dad sure would have been proud.

  It was the only reasonable way to go public. To take his show on the road. To get the job done quick, easy, and wherever he wanted to do it. Instant ink.

  Kilpatrick wondered if the girl in Coolie’s apartment would finger him. It was possible. But he wasn’t too worried…Kilpatrick had been careful. Painfully so. He had abandoned his garage and home, paid all his bills, and made sure his neighbors knew that he was moving out of town. Then he shacked up with a new landlord—a biker who had given him a tat once, but who kept to himself. And this landlord was the only one who knew where he was nowadays. Lucky for Kilpatrick, he was never home most of the time, and when he was he was usually blackout-drunk. Plus he was a scooter tramp Kilpatrick knew he could trust—fellow bikers like to keep their mouths shut when the cops come snorting around, in order to both protect their own and give the pigs a hard time. The other people in his apartment building were bikers, too, probably laying low for a while just like him.

  Kilpatrick knew from experience that biker pads were hard to come by in Colorado Springs—especially since he was a loner, not a gang banger. Other pads were scattered on the outskirts of the city, in the foothills and far from the city streets, and it would be difficult to go public in a place where there was hardly any public at all to begin with.

  It was the perfect setup.

  Smiling, Kilpatrick cleaned out the electric needle in the bathroom sink, watching the watery colors swirl down the drain, imagining Coolie on the streets, a mean machine out on the road. His masterpiece, walking around for the world to see. A walking museum of intricately crafted flesh. Kilpatrick’s inner flash, alive and set free.

  You wanted a “realistic” tattoo, Coolie. You got it. You don’t deserve such craftsmanship, but you got it.

  You got life, man. Life. And I created it.

  Kilpatrick went back to his bedroom and took the freshly scrubbed needle to his own skin. Its humming vibration and numbing pierce were comforting. He flicked on the six-inch black-and-white television set on his dresser, a voice to keep him company while he worked.

  He started on his right wrist, etching black, circular tubes that interconnected, twisted and gnarly. Just doodling, actually—making a pair of barbed wire handcuffs. The ink was black, thick black, which soaked into his spongy flesh as if the skin were dying of thirst. Now that he thought about it, it had been a while since Kilpatrick had been inked. He raised the ink gun from his wrist and looked at his other tattoos. They were top-rate work, especially the ones he had crafted himself. There was a brown and hell-red Doberman with snarling, drooling teeth on one bicep, charging toward the viewer. A large, bullet-riddled crucifix splintered on his back, with two grotesque vultures picking red flecks of meat from rusty spikes on each end of the cross. Snakes of unreal color and metallic scales slicked up and down each of his unhairy, girlish thighs, with forked pink tongues that lapped toward his groin. His chest was a montage of color: dragons and swamp creatures wrestling over a woman’s body, breaking her in half as she cried out in agony, eyes popping cartoonishly from their sockets. The usual flash tattoo pictures were onlookers to the montage, encircling the terrible slaughter, jealously drooling: eagles, panthers, pirate’s skulls, and on and on.

  He avoided the light pink scar on his palm, the serial number and logo of a bike from his distant past.

  He stared at himself for quite some time. The inker still hummed in his palm, draining juice and sloppily dripping ink.

  Soon, Kilpatrick clicked off the ink gun and watched television. He’d finish the barbed wire handcuffs later…he had all the time in the world now.

  The television set was foggy and blurry. Like the images in his mind. Kilpatrick dreamed of a flesh that was so mutable, so moving with ever-changing imagery like a television screen, pictures that he could control and create, scenes and images that could meld and blend together in a sequence. If only the human skin were so alive….

  And then Coolie’s face stared out at him from the TV screen. Mechanical eyes. Exposed skull.

  Kilpatrick fell back onto the end of his bed, numb. His inks sloshed behind him.

  It was the news. “…Jim Kuhlman was twenty-six years old, worked for the Colorado Springs Municipal Water Department, and has no known next of kin. Funeral services will be held at…”

  Stunned, Kilpatrick watched as the image of Coolie’s fried flesh—complete with the subtle mechanized skull tattoo with wiry veins and intricate computer circuitry—was replaced with a pair of black-and-white police mug shots, Coolie smiling with the number board hanging from his neck like a dog collar. “If you have any pertinent information on Mr. Kuhlman, you are urged to contact the Colorado Springs Police Department…”

  Did that newswoman say “next of kin”? “Funeral services”?

  Kilpatrick’s shoulders slumped. His head boiled with fury. And then he felt the tiny hole opening in the back of his head, expanding, sucking him inside that blasting hell that he had only recently escaped. He felt the coursing burn of imaginary ropes whipping around the soft skin of his armpits and pulling him back toward the dark labyrinth of his mind. He whipped his arms out, flailing them away, and for a moment he escaped their intimate pain.

  He dove into the corner of his bedroom, landing in a ball near his trash can. He watched as the television news went to commercial, and Kilpatrick wanted to scream. What happened? Was Coolie really DEAD? Did I hit him too hard with that damned crowbar? Did I fucking KILL the bastard?

  The ropes that had moments ago ensnared him turned into scaled metallic tentacles with hooked, barbed endings that swung around his bedroom from the ceiling, searching for him.

  Panic swarmed his mind, a locust wind of angry, buzzing thoughts. It wasn’t the fact that Coolie was dead that bothered him. That was no longer important—if ever. What really made him mad, what angered him, what really PISSED HIM OFF was that his plan had somehow failed. Coolie couldn’t possibly be his walking museum—his mental flash could not be alive and public—if he was stinking dead and rotten and buried six feet under in a pine box, like buried treasure—a masterpiece that the world would die to see if it only knew the art existed.

  And now his hell was returning.

  Kilpatrick began to wonder if he had ever really escaped that infernal gallery of nightmare images, his mind, at all. The tentacles began to caress his cheeks, his tattooed flesh, his groin, and then suddenly, violently, Kilpatrick realized what was happening.

  His tattooed hell—the mural that he had drawn in the mental gallery of pain to endure the torment of isolation in its dripping cavern
ous trap—was coming to life.

  Because his masterpiece—Coolie’s flesh—was ruined, fried to a crisp…somehow blackened.

  Because his plan to go public had failed.

  Now the barbed ends of the tentacles hooked into his flesh and began to tug him gently, coyly, lovingly back toward the labyrinth. He knew the grandmaster demon with the torturous, fanged mouth was smiling, pulling the living ropes, controlling it all as it squirmed inside his skull….

  And then a thought hit him.

  And as the thick ropes of anguish were unshackled from his shoulders, Kilpatrick fell back into his heavenly notion of revenge, of going public, of escaping the torment, realizing that there couldn’t be a more sure-fire way of going public than getting his masterful creations on the evening news.

  Dead or alive, the tattoos would live on.

  The world was now his museum.

  III.

  As they stepped out the springy aluminum screen door and onto his back porch, Roy Roberts swept his arm, presenting the blue May sky like a circus ringleader: “You were right on target, once again, Danny. The weather’s perfect!” A subtle breeze tousled his thin brown hair in agreement.

  Dan Schoenmacher proudly puffed out his chest, pounding his black T-shirt like an orangutan. “No job is too hard for Weather-Man!” He gave his best superhero impression—hands on hips, elbows akimbo and biceps flexed—and Roberts chuckled. Dan Schoenmacher was about as far away from a superhero as one could get, with stringy muscles which emphasized the way his flesh precariously depended on his bones, complete with oversized feet, hands, and a long skinny neck like a stork’s. He did a good job of covering all that up, though, by dressing in athletic shorts and a black T-shirt with a fluorescent logo that announced a certain brand of tennis shoe as if KOPT’s weatherman was on air and costumed in high fashion even during his leisure time. But what really made Roberts laugh was Schoenmacher’s hair: dirty blonde, perfectly trimmed and moussed as if he were wearing a wig straight out of the old Superman television program. Bad actor that he was, he almost fit the part.

  But for some reason, Roberts felt even less attractive than Schoenmacher. He never gave a second thought to the way he dressed, because he wasn’t a local celebrity like Dan. He was almost embarrassed standing beside him in his Bermuda shorts and white breast-pocket generic T-shirt—he felt like an old man. Or, more accurately, a homeless person in Salvation Army hand-me-downs, hobnobbing with the elite.

  Unlike Schoenmacher, who not only dressed the part, but lived it in the upscale mountain homes in the Colorado Springs’ suburbs, Roberts didn’t feel the need to flaunt his income. He was happy right where he was, living downtown with the rest of the blue-collar workers and soldiers of the city.

  But when Schoenmacher came to visit, he felt poor.

  Feeling self-conscious, Roberts dug into the red cooler that lay beside his dome-shaped barbecue grill, and withdrew an icy brown bottle. “Light beer?”

  Schoenmacher’s shoulders slumped as he reeled back in mock fear. “Arrgh! Krypto-light!”

  Roberts tossed the bottle in the air, and KOPT’s weatherman swiftly stood and caught it. Together they toasted the fine weather—the cloudless blue sky and huge orange sun above drenched Roy’s backyard grass with rainbow tints that cascaded through hissing sprinklers behind the porch.

  They downed two beers and Roberts put up with Schoenmacher’s dumb jokes before starting the coals in the grill, drenching them with pungent lighter fluid and tossing in a few matches. The red, meaty T-bones sat bleeding on paper plates atop a picnic table beside the chaise lounge chairs they were sitting in. Flies attracted to the meat, but both of them ignored the food, watching the flames turn the coals gray and red.

  The beer was good, and Roberts began to put the vision of Kuhlman’s tattoo behind him—as if it had happened in another life. Writing the story, and watching Judy Thomas—KOPT’s star anchorman (“Anchorperson,” she’d always remind him)—read his words had made the disgusting body of Kuhlman somehow both more real to him and more distant from him; the nightly news transforming his vague, horrified feelings into an objective reality. A thing of the past. But the beer was what really made it better, right now.

  “What do you think about that guy tattooed like a machine?” Roy asked, curious.

  “You’re gonna win awards for that story, Roy.” Dan popped his knuckles—a nervous habit that always got on Roberts’ nerves.

  “Right. But, really, what do you think happened? He couldn’t have done it himself, could he?”

  “I dunno, maybe.” Schoenmacher leaned forward over his shorts and pulled down his tennis sock, revealing a pale white ankle which contrasted with the dark tan he had acquired on the rest of his legs. “I did this one myself.”

  Roberts leaned forward. Beneath Schoenmacher’s bony knob of ankle, in the circular pocket of pale flesh above his heel, was a weak attempt at a tattoo. Its shape vaguely resembled a tiny pterodactyl with long, skinny wings, a jagged beak, and an oddly pointed head. Roberts was surprised. “I didn’t know you had a tattoo, Dan. And just what the hell is that supposed to be, anyway?”

  “A bird! What are you blind?”

  “Looks like Rodan to me.”

  Dan’s eyebrows crinkled. “Who’s Rodin? That painter guy?” Schoenmacher cocked his head to one side, to appreciate his own handiwork. “I mean, sure, I did a good job of it, but…”

  “Never mind.”

  A pause while both of them looked at the blackened ankle.

  Dan said, “They used to call me Birdy in the army. Partially because I was skinny, but mostly because of the one time I fell out of a tree.” He took a swig from his beer. “We were in the field, doing a routine mock-ambush, and I decided to climb a tree to be a sniper, just like the Cong did in ‘Nam.”

  “Uh-huh.” Roberts listened, but had heard a lot of Schoenmacher’s “war stories.” He thought it was funny—and kind of sad—that Dan had so many tall tales for a peacetime soldier who never went to a real war. What made it worse was the fact that Schoenmacher looked so smooth and polished that it was hard imagining he’d ever really been in the US Army at all.

  “Anyway, when the guys who were supposed to be the enemy came along, I was ready to shoot the shit out of all of them—with blanks, of course—when the limb I was perched on cracked and I fell right down in front of them. Man, that hurt.” Dan rubbed his elbow, as if reliving the moment.

  “Geez, did you get a purple heart?”

  “Very funny, you civilian you.” Dan swallowed more beer, smiled a pearly white, camera-ready grin. “Anyway, I became a P.O.W. for their camp, and the guys kept calling me Birdy because of the way I looked when I fell out of that tree. The name just stuck with me.”

  “So you tattooed yourself?”

  “Sure,” he said, leaning back. “Most of the time we were in the field we just sat on our asses. I was bored one day, so I used a sewing needle and an ink pen. Looks pretty damned good for an amateur, doesn’t it?”

  “Yep.” Roberts understood what boredom could drive a man to do. He felt much the same way as Dan must have felt in the field, sitting on his ass at the city desk at the TV station. Waiting for faxes and phone calls. Waiting for the intern reports from the kids out of Colorado College. Waiting for the news to come to him, the middleman who got it prepped for the anchors. Waiting.

  In a sense, Roberts admired Schoenmacher. Dan was one of the lucky few at KOPT who actually stood in front of the camera. They were the ones who got all the glory, while the rest of them really worked, gathering the news, writing the copy, running the equipment. The anchors got all the credit, while all that Roberts and the others got were credits—the kind that flash a name for one or two seconds on the screen.

  That was all: two measly, insignificant words, ROY ROBERTS.

  Words were h
is life: he wrote the stories, putting the words into Judy Thomas’ mouth; he read reports from underlings, correcting their horrendous spelling and grammar; he studied the printed words of the newspapers, making sure the station was still competitive; he researched books and magazines at the library, looking for suitable background material and checking facts and figures…and all he got from the millions and millions of words that made up his life were, again, words—the two words of his name that flashed briefly on the screen. They were also probably the only two words that he worked with that people ignored, too. Unimportant filler.

  And Schoenmacher was a weatherman, too. The only bad news he had to deal with was a possible snowstorm, or a high wind chill factor, or a cloudy day on a holiday. Not terrorists, or civil wars, or bad economics, or local problems like unemployment and crime. The weather always changed, but news always remained constant: bad. Never anything good to say, because it didn’t interest the public. And while Roy didn’t know why the public really cared about a five day forecast, he did know that it was a hell of a lot better to listen to than a bombing in the Middle East or a local drive-by shooting.

  Plus Schoenmacher had personality. Roberts enjoyed listening to Dan’s dry, worn jokes and silly war stories. Dan was corny, but that was his style—it took getting used to, but once Roy warmed up to Dan’s way of seeing the world he began to appreciate it. Because Dan was crazy. He’d done some pretty stupid things in his life, and he could never be trusted—he could be depressed as hell one day and manic as a schoolboy the next—but that’s what Roberts liked about Dan. He gave reality a twist that always opened his eyes to a different way of seeing things.

  And now this tattoo—Birdy. It was refreshing to see this part of Dan. It gave him a new edge; an unexpected look into his past. It made him unique.