Grave Markings: 20th Anniversary Edition

by Arnzen, Michael A.

  But he was far more frightened of something else: that he had almost pulled the car over to meet the challenge of those red-veined eyes. To walk right inside and pull up his sleeve, bearing his cheesy white bicep for want of a needle’s pierce.

  He felt that empty, inside and out. But as he sped away from the tattoo parlor, the entire route home now seeming unreal and new—like an entirely different city—that emptiness inside filled up with what felt like fear.

  IV.

  O’Connor’s Pub was one of the quieter bars downtown, a small wooden tavern that sold to the just-one-martini-after-work crowd. Other than Schoenmacher and Roberts, the bartender and a pair of young (probably underage) girls in sweat suits were the only people there, speaking privately and nursing drinks, their voices all whispers.

  Schoenmacher slammed down half a beer and ripped out his trademark belch: “So what’s up, Roy? You’ve looked like shit for the past few days. Especially this afternoon.”

  “I dunno,” Roberts replied, spinning his bottle in his hand. “Guess I just needed this drink. Man, it hits the spot.”

  “What you need is A.A., my friend.” Dan raised his bottle in a toast. “And here’s to Assholes Anonymous. Salut!” They tapped glasses and finished their brews right away, downing too much too fast like adolescents.

  Schoenmacher repeated his belch. “You’re right, that does hit the spot…my liver spots!”

  Roberts tried to suppress his own gas, but it burned out his nose. His eyes watered. He covered it up by laughing.

  “Another?” the weatherman asked, his smile crooked.

  “Sure.”

  He retrieved two more—and two shot glasses brimming with curdling brown whiskey.

  “Actually,” Dan said, continuing a conversation that hadn’t been started—another habit in a list of his neurotic tendencies—“you’ve been zombified ever since I came back from the beer run at the barbecue. Really, Roy. What gives?”

  Roberts thought it was obvious: the tattoo killer was on the loose and he was scared shitless. He couldn’t believe that the news about the psycho hadn’t bothered Schoenmacher a bit. He considered talking it out with him, but opted instead to try to forget about it all. And besides, Dan was rarely in such a good mood.

  “Bad steak. Really upset my stomach.” Roberts shrugged. “I’m surprised you didn’t catch the bug yourself.”

  “Never! I never get sick.” Schoenmacher put on a pirate’s voice, squinting one eye like Popeye the Sailor, and he swung his brown beer bottle into the air. “Notsk sko long as me gots me mediskinals.”

  They laughed. Roberts wondered if he was referring to real medication—he’d always suspected the weatherman to be on something or another—or just the booze itself. Whichever, Roberts didn’t really care at this point. His mind was being comfortably washed by the liquor, the crazy tattoo business being cleansed away by the magic of alcohol.

  “Uh, excuse me, but aren’t you the weatherman at Channel 12? Dan Schoenmacher?”

  Roberts and Schoenmacher looked drunkenly up at the youngish girl in sweatpants who had come over to their booth. She had a finger twisted around a curl of red hair, with her head crooked to one side as if she were pulling it down as she swirled the hair.

  “Why yes, my dear. That’s me.” Schoenmacher had switched on his on-air voice, quick as a multiple personality.

  “Could I, like, have your autograph?” She nervously shoved a pencil and cocktail napkin down on the table in front of him. Schoenmacher scribbled out a message and signed it before handing it back with a glitzy smile full of pearly shark’s teeth. Roberts held back a guffaw as the girl curtly pirouetted—as if giving him a good look at her body—and stepped lightly away in her aerobics shoes.

  “Does that happen often?” Roberts asked, feeling a little jealous.

  Schoenmacher grinned wickedly. “Not as often as I’d like, but it’s one of the many perks of broadcast meteorology. You wouldn’t believe it. Being a weatherman is a good job. A very, very good job.” He peered over Roberts’ shoulder to peek at the girl. He gave her a wink.

  “Big deal.”

  “Oh yeah? Look at this…” Schoenmacher held up a cocktail napkin and waved it in front of Roy’s face like a flag of surrender. It had curvy letters in blue ink on it. “She slipped me her phone number. Can’t beat that, can ya?”

  “Can’t beat twelve years in prison for statutory rape, neither,” Roberts replied.

  Dan looked down at the table, as if to hide his reddening cheeks.

  Roberts purposely switched gears to change the subject: “So what’s the latest with Judy Thomas?”

  Schoenmacher sat up eagerly. “Not much to tell, Roy. I haven’t seen her in weeks, really, except on the set.” He frowned his childish frown. “I think she’s trying to avoid me.”

  Roberts knew he had pushed a button, maybe the wrong one. He didn’t want Schoenmacher to go into one of his “God, I’m so depressed” modes, but it was better than letting him get his hooks into the jailbait across the bar. “Why do you say that, Dan?”

  “Well, she doesn’t talk to me during commercial breaks like she used to. She either practices hard copy or works with makeup. She’s changed somehow—you can see it in her eyes. She used to go out of her way to talk to me during breaks; she’d even wave at me from behind the desk while I was doing the forecasts. Not anymore.” He punctuated his sentence with a swallow of whiskey.

  Roberts followed suit.

  “Probably found another guy. Maybe Mr. Co-anchorperson himself, Rick Montag…what a jerk.”

  “Naw,” Roberts urged. “Rick’s an ugly bastard. Judy wouldn’t fall for him. How long has she been acting this way toward you, anyway? Exactly one week, I bet.”

  Schoenmacher’s eyes perked open. “Yeah! How’d you know that? You notice it, too?”

  Roberts just smirked.

  “Ooo-oh. I get it. TV anchorperson on the rag, eh?”

  “It happens to you celebrity-types, too, ya know.”

  Schoenmacher’s lips curled faintly as he rolled his eyes and stared down at his bottle.

  “I’m sure everything’ll be all right between you two next week.”

  Schoenmacher kept his eyes averted, casually slipping the scribbled phone number into his pocket as if he actually intended to call the girl.

  Roberts sipped on his beer as he waited. He set fire to the end of yet another cigarette.

  “I think you’re full of shit, Roy. She just doesn’t want me, that’s all.”

  Dan looked like a little boy. Roberts sat up, seeing an avenue. “You know what you need to do with her? Cook. At your place.”

  “Ha! What are you? Oprah Winfrey?”

  “No, really. Invite her over, give her the most intimate and romantic night of her life. Show her that you’re a real person, let her know who you really are. Tell her little secrets about yourself, thing’s she’d never have guessed.”

  “Like what? That my ex-wife is on steroids? I wouldn’t want to scare her away…”

  “Oh, there’s lotsa stuff you could tell her. Like all that malarkey about your nickname in the Army. What was it? Birdy?”

  “Yeah,” he said flatly.

  “Birdy…see, that’s unique and interesting. Hell, I think I might start calling you that myself.” Roberts chuckled. “Anyway, you could tell her all about that, and you could even show her that tattoo you got on your leg, and the way you fucked up that ambush and were a P.O.W….things like that, ya know?”

  “You think that’d work? I wouldn’t want to make her think I was weird or something.”

  “Weird is good. Weird is different. And if what you told me about Judy is true, which I don’t think it is, then what have you got to lose, huh?”

  Dan smiled, sat up straight, and nodded. “
You’re right.” He took another swallow of beer. The bartender brought two more. Perfect timing. Roberts paid for them, and noticed that the pair of underage girls were exiting the bar. The redhead kept looking over her shoulder at them. Dan wasn’t paying attention, and that was good. His advice had worked.

  He knew that it had worked better than he imagined, when Schoenmacher asked, “You think she’d like my tattoo?”

  “Of course,” Roberts replied seeing the pterodactyl-like image form itself in his mind. “But you gotta have a good reason for having it, rather than just because you were bored. C’mon, get real!”

  “But that’s the way it was, Roy. I was so damned bored that I tried to give myself a tattoo, and damned if it didn’t work. What’s wrong with that?”

  “You gotta have a better reason. Something that will catch Judy’s interest.” Roberts extinguished his smoke, lit another. “Otherwise you won’t impress her.”

  “But there is no other reason…”

  “Make one up!”

  “Lie to her?”

  “Sure…why not?” Roberts began shaking his legs beneath the table, getting excited. “I’m sure you knew lots of guys in the army who got tattooed. Why’d they do it? They ever tell you?”

  “Yeah!” Schoenmacher’s voice becamed drawled, and Roberts could tell that he was warming up for another “war story” sort of thing. That was fine with him—tall tale or not—he needed to know why people wanted tattoos, what motivated them to stitch ink permanently into their skins for the rest of their life. The booze had loosened his curiosity; Roberts was well aware that he himself was being drawn into the world of tattoos…hell, he almost pulled over on the way home from work and got one this afternoon. It was an attraction, a compulsion he didn’t understand.

  He had never known anyone who had a tattoo—Dan’s “Birdy” was the first one he’d ever really seen in the flesh—and it was so private, so unique…he needed to know why it captivated him so much.

  He knew that part of it was the journalist inside of him who needed the information, too. That was okay. He was happy to give his reporter alter ego full control. He listened to Schoenmacher’s story with wide open ears, mentally taking notes.

  “I knew lotsa guys in the service who had tattoos. Hell, nearly my whole platoon had ‘em. One guy named Ollie had a big fat face of Oliver Hardy drawn above his right tit. He could make that fucker’s double chin go up and down by flexing his chest. That was neat; especially when he did push-ups. And then there was this guy named Pederson who did the stereotypical thing and got one that said MOM on a bleeding heart. Corny guy, man, but that was how he was, corny as hell.” Dan chuckled in remembrance.

  “So why’d they get such silly tattoos? Bored like you?”

  “Some of them were. The army’s more boring than you’d think. I mean, sure, they do more work by 7 A.M. than most people do all day, but most of it’s just loafing around. Plus they got all that money to blow, so why not waste it on a tattoo—something to bring back home to prove to the mom and dad how much you’ve changed. Show ‘em you’re an adult now and all that good garbage.”

  Roberts had difficulty thinking of Schoenmacher as an adult, let alone a soldier. He was a big kid, a guy who never grew up.

  “Other guys were just expressing themselves, I guess. It’s hard to have an identity all your own when everyone looks, talks, dresses, and acts like you do.”

  Roberts nodded. Self-expression. That made sense.

  “But then there were some guys, I swear, they were a little more into it than Ollie or Pederson. Some guys went bonkers over their tattoos. I remember one guy, his name was O’Brien. He made a damned ritual out of the things. Every paycheck he’d get stinking drunk all by his lonesome in the barracks, and go off on his own, roaming the streets around the base. We all ignored him. The next day he’d return, looking like hell, and he’d have a new tattoo on his body. Every fucking paycheck. You could set a clock by the guy’s skin. And he was so proud of his tattoos, showing them off at every opportunity he had. I tell ya, all that swirling color sure looked funky in contrast to his camouflage uniform. Anyway, when O’Brien was short—almost out of the army, that is—he started to freak out, running around during drills complaining about how his tattoos weren’t done yet. I’m incomplete, he’d scream. Who knew what the hell he meant? We just ignored the dumb bastard. I figured he meant that he hadn’t gotten laid yet, or something. But then one day, we all figured it out.

  “O’Brien’s tattoos weren’t a bunch of different ones, like most people get. Like different parts of a puzzle, they were all supposed to fit together to make one big, mongo tattoo.” Schoenmacher clasped his fingers together like the edges of jigsaw cutouts, emphasizing the point. “I don’t know why the hell he did it, but his goal was to get his entire body tattooed. He didn’t make it, though. He had these bare spots that kinda stuck out, on his back and in his groin and all—you shoulda seen him in the showers. Anyway, he didn’t have time to get those bare patches of skin filled in. You could see him sweating out the days…he borrowed money from the guys and went to that secret tattoo shop of his every night. But still, there was too much blank space.

  “It ended up that his day had come to out-process and get the hell out of the army. He wouldn’t go. The captain bitched him out, the sergeant major made him do a zillion push-ups, but even then, he still wouldn’t leave. It was silly. I remember him screaming, crying with real tears in his eyes, I can’t go home this way! I’m not finished. I’m incomplete! It was kinda spooky, really, seeing a big guy like that bawling like a baby.

  Anyway, Sarge ended up calling the MPs to force him to leave. You’d think they were doing the poor bastard a favor, right? But by the time the cops got there, it was too late. O’Brien had jumped off the barracks roof and killed himself.”

  Roberts didn’t believe a word. “You mean he committed suicide because his entire body wasn’t covered with tattoos? That’s crazy!”

  Schoenmacher swung his head from side-to-side, tsk-tsking. “I don’t think so, Roy. I think he was pretty damned sane. You gotta understand: some kids join the service to make a change in their lives. It’s sort of a religious thing, actually. To wipe the slate clean, and return a different person. Most won’t go back home until they make that change…until they’re complete, so to speak. O’Brien couldn’t go back until the tattoo was complete, until his change had come full circle. So he killed himself.” Schoenmacher inappropriately chuckled. “I don’t see why he didn’t just re-up. But if he did that, then he really would have been crazy.”

  Roberts finished the foam in the bottom of his beer and smiled. “You know what, Dan?”

  “What?”

  “You’re full of shit.”

  “See! That’s exactly what Judy’s gonna say if I tell her some story about my Birdy tattoo.”

  Roberts could see that he was getting nowhere. “Maybe you’re right. Forget I said anything.” Roberts hadn’t learned a damned thing about tattoos, though his belief that you had to be a bit off-center to get one was reinforced. He imagined some big tattooed soldier, crying that he wasn’t complete. He considered the man’s psyche, what made him tick. Obviously, O’Brien had been going to the same tattoo artist to get the puzzle of ink across his body finished…why couldn’t he just get complete somewhere else? What was so special about that particular tattoo artist?

  That’s what Roberts needed to know about: these mysterious tattoo artists. After all, the guy Lockerman was hunting down was giving tattoos, not receiving them.

  They drank another beer apiece, talked about the office, and generally bullshitted the night away. Soon, they paid up and left.

  As they walked to their cars parked diagonally in front of the curb, Roberts said, “Hey, Dan!”

  “Huh?”

  “Your ex-wife didn’t really take steroids, did
she?”

  Schoenmacher smiled. “Sure she did! She was a contender for gymnastics at the Olympic Training Center, and….”

  “Oh, get out of here.” They exchanged the rigmarole of their clubhouse type handshake, and went their separate ways into the night.

  Though it added a few minutes to the journey, Roberts purposely took his route home from work, driving past Corky’s Tattoos. The eyes on the sign seemed to glow in the dark.

  V.

  In the dream, Roy Roberts kept going back to the faceless man for tattoos.

  Years condensed to the hours of his sleep; paychecks came every few minutes, and every time he’d go through the same routine: go to the bank, flirt with the teller, show her the development of his exterior mural—“See, the snake turns into a mermaid in this spot…just got that one last week, baby…”—and then head directly from the bank to the tattoo parlor, a thick roll of green cash in his hand.

  The tattoo shop wasn’t really a shop, actually. It was in the basement of a tenement building, the type of which didn’t even exist in his hometown of Colorado Springs. It was the sort of ghetto one would find in New York City, and every journey there was an adventure. One time he had to beat his way out of a circle of gang members; another he had to crawl through a junglelike tangle of vines and trees, batting them down with his money roll like a machete. He was the hero, so naturally he always made it to his destination. He felt like a soldier.

  The tenement building was like an Aztec ruin towering geometrically over the grimy landfill of the rest of the city. Inside its dark heart, he would discover the tattoo man, and listen to his wisdom. Each visit would revolve around listening to a story, getting the wise moral at the tail end of it, and leaving…tattoo on arm or leg or back, even though he couldn’t remember actually being inked and stuck with needles. It was as if the story itself added to the tattoo, building on it, creating a mural of wisdom on his flesh.