by Jack Ketchum
The faces in Mabel’s were mostly black now. But they seemed to him the same tired faces he had always seen there, working people’s faces bent over working people’s food.
He realized that Mabel’s always had depressed him, even angered him somehow.
It had not just been the accordion lessons.
But the girl didn’t seem to mind.
He took her arm and led her past a shoe store, a dress shop, thrift shop, and the Arthur E. Doyle Post of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, to the Roxy.
The Roxy was boarded up. It had probably been closed for years. Graffiti was sprayed across rotted boards thick and colorful as the patterns on a Persian rug. He walked her across the street to the Palace.
The Palace was open.
“How about a movie,” he said.
She brushed a clean fine strand of blond hair off her pretty face and nodded.
They sat in the dark, alone but for three other patrons slouched low and scattered in front of them, and watched Jean-Claude Van Damme fight his way through a double feature, and he thought how they were the only couple there.
At intermission he bought popcorn. Midway through the second feature he unbuttoned her blouse and massaged her naked breast and rolled her pale wide nipple between his fingers, letting it harden and then go soft again, feeling the nipple beneath the palm of his hand and thinking, if only I had gotten this thirty years ago. Jesus.
When it was over it was really dark. They had dinner at a place called Rogerio’s a few blocks over. He thought the place had served Chinese take-out once, but now it was Italian. He ordered a double scotch for himself and iced tea for the girl and then ordered himself another. They ate pasta and thick, hot crusty bread, and she was very quiet.
They walked out into streetlights shining.
Across the street he saw the sign.
Like so many others the shop had not been there when he was a boy. He would have remembered it. But someone was inside. The place was all lit up.
He felt the flush of pleasure and swelling of his cock inside his baggy trousers.
“Come on.” he said.
She sat on the wooden bench in front of him naked to the waist, nipples going hard and then soft just as they had in the movie theater, while the bearded man sat behind her working on her shoulder blade, his needle buzzing like a barber’s electric trimmer over the soft rock music on the radio.
The music was meant to be soothing. The man had warned them that there would be more pain than usual because the bone was so near the surface of the skin in this location. He could see the pain skitter in her eyes. She had been under the drill for over half an hour now.
“What’s it like?” he asked her.
“Feels like . . . cat scratches,” she said. “Hundreds of little cat scratches. Then it’s like . . . he’s peeling me. And then . . .”
The tattooist smiled. “Like a dentist’s drill, right?” he said.
“Yes,” she breathed.
He saw the sweat beaded on her upper lip.
“Scapula,” he said. “Can’t be helped. You’re a helluva subject, though, you know that? You don’t move a muscle. You’re like working on a canvas. I’m gonna give you something special. You’ll see. A rose is just right for you. Just a few more minutes.”
From the hundreds of drawings that lined the walls he had chosen for her a simple red rose no more than an inch and a half in diameter. He thought the rose was beautiful and that the man had quite a delicate hand. You could see veins in the green leaves, the creamy blush of red, the thorns that studded the graceful stem.
The buzzing stopped.
“There now,” said the man. “Give me your hand. Hold the gauze here and press. Not hard.”
She did as he said. The man stood up from the bench.
“You want to see?”
He got up and walked over behind her. The tattoist lifted her hand away. He was very gentle.
Beautiful, he thought. The rose looked even better than it did on paper, more detailed and more delicately formed, its stem tracing precisely the natural curve of bone as though it belonged there, as though it had grown there in her silky flesh.
The man looked at him, nodding, appraising his reaction. He had a long bushy beard and his greying hair was tied back into a tail as long as a horse’s tail and his eyes were unreadable. But he saw no judgement there. Though it was impossible that he had missed the marks along her back and shoulders.
He saw no judgement there at all.
“Anything else I can do for you?”
His eye drifted to the glass display case by the register. There were rings and studs of gold and silver and semiprecious stones.
“Yes,” he said. “Yes, there is.”
She had not sat so well for the piercing.
On the first try she had flinched despite the topical anesthetic, and her flesh slid free of the instrument that was similar to a paper punch just as he had begun to apply pressure. The man had cursed and then apologized to her for cursing. The girl said nothing though it had hurt and tears streamed down her cheeks. The man had reapplied the anesthetic and tried again, holding the tip of the nipple more firmly between thumb and forefinger and pulling so that it was possible to see that that hurt, too, telling her soothingly that it would only be a second, just a second, then squeezed the handles together.
She gasped and then was silent.
He was surprised there was so little blood.
The man threaded her flesh with the thin silver band he had chosen from the display case.
Then bent to the other breast.
The lights went out behind them, and he heard the tattoist draw his shade as they stepped into the street.
He took her arm and led her to the corner.
On the bus trip home he was annoyed with her. It was as though she didn’t want the nipple rings. She had shown no reluctance about the rose tattoo. It was as though she accepted that. Whereas to him they were one and the same. Both rose and rings marked her as his—they would for the rest of her life. And if he could not bring her fecundity, if he could not bind her to him by fucking a girl-child into her depths of her womb, he could at least do this. Children were the glue, his mother had said, and he thought it ungrateful of the girl to wish to deny him.
It had been such a good day in the city.
He opened his flask and drank. In the darkness there was no one to see. Towns faded by and dark suburban homes. He drank some more.
The towns grew smaller. Houses yielded to woods and thicket and stands of pale birch trees and old weathered stone fences.
Finally they were home. He got off the bus ahead of her and held out his hand. She took it, and they walked up the unpaved road in the moonlight. He could see the small grey spot on the back of her blouse where the tattoo had bled through the gauze. There were no such spots on either of her breasts, but he thought that the blouse would still need washing before the blood had set, and that annoyed him, too, for some reason he wasn’t aware of. He tilted the flask and finished it as they came to the door and he took out the keys and opened it and turned on the lights as they walked inside.
“Get ready,” he told her.
“Why?”
“Why? Why are you asking?”
Her face looked pained.
“Get ready. And put that blouse in some cold water.”
He walked behind her to the kitchen and watched as she ran the water in the sink and stripped off the blouse. He could see the outline of the rose on her shoulder beneath the thin layer of gauze. The man had said it would scab for a few days and then heal. That was fine. He wouldn’t touch her there. Nor, for the moment, would he touch the rings.
“Turn around.”
He reached for the short leather riding crop on the peg-board behind him on the kitchen wall hanging amid the pots and pans.
“Raise your arms,” he said.
He began on her stomach.
He lay across his sheets drunk with too much scotch on
top of too little of the greasy Italian food and heard her shift in the box he’d built for her beneath the bed. He knew that it was hard for her to sleep. Her nipples would hurt. Her back would hurt from the tattoo. Her thighs and stomach would still be stinging.
It was nothing new. In the four years since he’d found her in the parking lot at K Mart and bluffed her into the car with his toy pistol pain had become something she was used to. There had been a thousand such nights. Tonight was only different, really, in that he’d had hopes again in fucking her. Perhaps his arousal would translate into her own, and arousal into a baby. He wanted the baby because it would be a continuation of her when she was gone. But it hadn’t happened. He knew it hadn’t.
It was dark as the grave inside the box. He knew that, too. He’d tried it out himself to see if the casters worked and found that it was darker even than the basement where he’d kept her the first two years of her captivity, listening to her whine to please, please set her free—to let her call her parents or go to the toilet or loosen the wire coils around her wrists—until finally there was no more whining and no more talk at all for a long time.
The box was better than the basement and darker. It was what she deserved. To be buried there.
It was a sin that he loved her.
“Barren,” he muttered. And finally he fell asleep.
The following day was Monday, and he went to work as usual, leaving her bound naked inside the box beneath the bed. The bonds were not really necessary. The bonds were merely custom. It was over three years ago that she had attempted to escape him twice over the period of a single month and he had discouraged her with the red-hot blade of a kitchen knife and the suggestion that he had contacts everywhere, that he was part of some vast vague criminal machine and that should she try a third time, first her mother and then her father would meet with accidental death, reinforcing this by showing her that he had their address and her father’s business address in his Rolodex and even knew the make, model, and year of the car sitting in their driveway.
He told her stories of this criminal network frequently, mostly of their viciousness in matter of retribution. He told that her name was registered in their central computer and that should anything happen to him, should he die or be arrested, they would be honor bound to find her and torture her to death according to their code. In his stories he described these tortures in loving detail and saw that she soon came to believe them.
She no longer tried to run away.
He returned from work at noon to let her feed herself and use the bathroom and saw that she had her period again. Her first day’s flow was always heavy. He had her change the thin grey sheets in the box before he put her back inside again. The period meant that he probably wouldn’t want to touch her for a few days. He’d probably just watch cable.
Nights he’d come home to a liter of scotch and “Nick at Nite,” and he’d be able to forget that she was there doing the dishes, the laundry, even the vacuuming if he turned the sound up loud enough. He’d be able to forget his phone installation route and his goddamn supervisor and the long-dead woman whose home he was living in even though her ghost was everywhere. He’d get a little smashed and think, Ma, if you could see me now.
On the fourth night he fucked her.
He had to have been blind drunk to fuck her because there was still some bleeding, some residue inside her, but fucking her blind drunk was nothing new either, and he pulled and tugged on the rings in her nipples until she screamed, and he came in her from behind with a power that astonished him. And he must have been pretty blind drunk indeed because as he fell away from behind her across the bed and she stepped away he thought he saw not one rose but two branching off the same central stem that curved along her shoulder blade.
He even thought he smelled them.
The following night, he was blind drunk, no question, raging.
“You want to call your parents? We’re back to that shit? You’re giving me that shit again?”
He had all kinds of whips all over the house just for times like these when he needed one instantly and did not want to go looking for one and this one on the living room mantel was long and thin. It was meant to produce pain and it was studded to produce blood.
She knew that about the whip but didn’t run away—just stood there looking at him, defiant. He’d thought they were long past the defiance.
“Take off your clothes.”
She didn’t move.
So he whipped them off her.
She was wearing just a light summer skirt and blouse he’d picked out for her at K Mart, and when he was done they were just tatters hanging off her hips and shoulders, spackled and streaked with blood.
He put her in the bathtub and ran a tub for her and closed the door.
By the time she came out again he’d killed the bottle. He watched her crawl meekly into the box and roll herself under the bed just moments before he fell asleep in the heavy overstuffed armchair in front of the television.
She was naked. The welts across her body looked like runners, like heavy creepers—serpentine, overlapping and intersecting inside her flesh—the ripe red wounds that the metal studs had made like the small blossoms of flowers.
And then it was the weekend again.
On Saturday he left her alone, feeling bad about the beating of the night before. Though she’d provoked him.
The girl kept her distance. She made them lunch and handed him a shopping list, and when he returned with the groceries she was on her knees scrubbing the kitchen floor. She wore an old red sweatshirt and sweatpants which had once belonged to him but which had shrunk with repeated washings so that they were even tight on her now, and because the front of the shirt was wet he could see the outlines of the nipple rings when she stood to change the water.
Still he left her be.
That night they watched a movie together—Poltergeist—about a family battling supernatural forces which threaten to drive them apart and winning.
The children were the glue, he thought. He looked at her sadly.
“That could be us, you know.”
“What could?” she said.
He drank his whiskey.
By Sunday night he was still feeling tender toward her.
It was partly because she didn’t look good. Her face had a grey-brown cast to it that he didn’t like. She needed sun. But Sunday was as overcast as Saturday had been. Rain threatened. So there was no point in letting her sit out in the backyard deck sewing his buttons or mending his socks.
Plus she was off her feed. She’d never been one for breakfast, but she usually had a little lunch at least and a fairly decent dinner. Chicken was normally her favorite, but tonight they had chicken and she barely touched it, seeming to prefer the vegetables—though she didn’t do much with them either.
He wondered if she were coming down with something.
Or if that beating Friday night had been more extreme than he remembered.
It was possible that she needed a treat, some kind of pick me up. A boost to her morale.
So when it was time to go to bed he told her as she came out of the bathroom in her pajamas that she did not have to sleep in the box tonight, tonight was special, she could be beside him on the bed. She said nothing but crawled in next to him and rested her head in the crook of his arm.
He smiled. The girl smelled of musk and roses. He wondered how she had managed that. He was not aware of having ever bought her any perfume, but perhaps at some point he had. It was considerate of her—even loving—to wear it for him now.
She slept in the moonless night.
He could tell by her breathing.
He almost fell asleep, too. It had begun to rain, and he lay listening to it patter on the roof for a long while, and then he thought about her young girl’s body, marked by his hand and bearing his sign, so wet and soft inside; which he had not seen or even touched in nearly two days now, and he felt himself begin to rise.
Perhaps t
onight, he thought. He knew nothing about a woman’s fertility, only that it was there, and that somehow he might touch it if he were to go deep enough to dig it out of her.
He turned her toward him in the dark. He unbuttoned her pajama top and felt something prick his middle finger as the third button slid through the buttonhole and thought that she would have to replace that in the morning, that it was broken and jagged and might hurt her.
He drew the bottoms down off her legs, felt the welts like thick coils along her thighs. She stirred and in her slide across the sheets he heard a sound like the rustle of leaves.
