A Good and Useful Hurt

by Aric Davis

  “Mike.”

  “That’s funny, mine too.”

  “That’s awesome. Crazy. So what’s in Grand Rapids?”

  “Well, other Mike who I met on the bus, my tattoo shop is in Grand Rapids.”

  “You tattoo? That’s so cool. I used to want to do it, but I quit drawing. My dad said it was for faggots.”

  “My dad used to say stupid shit like that too. Your dad won’t be around Chicago will he?”

  “Fuck no, he’s half the reason I’m leaving.”

  “Then why not start drawing again when you get there?”

  “I’ve been away from it too long. I’ll probably suck now.”

  “Well if you think you will, then you’re right already, problem solved. But what if you’re wrong and you can still draw? You could have done anything you wanted with it, and instead you never even knew. I’ve kept a lot of secrets from a lot of people that I never should have, but the ones I kept from myself stung a lot worse than any of those.”

  “I guess so. How did you start tattooing?”

  “I just fell into it, really, nothing more than dumb luck. My old boss needed a kid who knew how to keep his mouth closed and push a mop. I did all his bullshit work for about a year and a half, and then he offered to teach me how to do it. I was blown away—I thought he’d been teaching me the whole time.”

  “That’s a pretty shitty trick.”

  “Are you sure? I didn’t know how to mop a floor or how to wash windows until I worked there. I didn’t notice it all that much at the time, but it turned out I learned a lot just by keeping my eyes and ears open.”

  “Have you ever taken a bus anywhere before?”

  “Just school, and to get down here.”

  “I never have either.” The boy leaned forward as if to tell Mike a secret. “I’ve never even left North Carolina.”

  “Quite an adventure for you then.”

  “I’m never coming back. I’m going to miss my sisters, but I’ll be OK.”

  “You think they’ll look for you?”

  “My dad won’t.”

  “Does he know where you’re going?”

  “No.”

  “Mike, how old are you?”

  “Eighteen.”

  “Let me see your ID.”

  “No. I don’t have one.”

  “Kid, how old are you really?”

  “I’m eighteen, just like I said.”

  “I’m not an idiot. I understand what you’re trying to do, and I believe most of it. But you need to level with me, because I think you’re biting off a chunk bigger than you ought to be munching on.”

  The boy looked at Mike insolently, and Mike felt sure that was to be the end of his involvement. Then he broke.

  “Yeah, alright. I’m sixteen, and I just can’t take being there anymore. I hate it so much. He’s such an asshole.”

  “Look, you seem like a nice kid, and I know you weren’t trying to lie to me, but you need to know there are a lot of people out there who would happily take advantage of you. Probably some right here on this bus. Is there a cousin in Chicago?”

  “Yes.”

  “Does he know you’re coming?”

  The kid stared at his feet and, just audible above the hum of motion, said, “No.”

  “Here’s what we’re going to do, Mike. Because we share a moniker, I’m going to do you a favor. When we get to the next stop, I’m going to pay your way back to North Carolina. No, don’t. I’m going to pay your way back, and I’m going to give you my business card. You are going to draw like a fiend for the next two years, and you’re going to send me everything you draw. Send it to either the e-mail address or just use the post. If you do that, and send me a minimum of one drawing a week, starting six weeks from now, I’ll hire you the day you turn eighteen and pay your way up to Michigan.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Seriously. This plan you’re on is going to end one way—bad. Get your crap together, and when you get an ID to prove how old you are, you can come up and work.”

  “What if my art sucks?”

  “Then I’ll have to work extra hard to help you make it good. You do what I said, and I’ll hire you either way. But I won’t do any of that stuff if you don’t go home tonight.”

  “I don’t know if I can handle it.”

  “You can—you’ve got a good reason now. Just work on your art, do good enough in school to keep your dad off of your case, and don’t get wrapped up in a bunch of dumbass drugs or dumbass friends.”

  “Do you promise?”

  Mike extended his hand to shake. “I’d never lie to a fellow Mike.”

  He saw the kid off a couple hours later. The return ticket cost more than he had left, but Mike talked to the woman at the ticket counter and made it work. He hoped that Mike would call him, but he wouldn’t hold his breath over it. He tried to sleep on the rest of the ride, but it never happened.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  Mike walked into the shop, and Becky jumped away from a customer.

  “You’re back!”

  “Yeah, I just came down to say hey though. I need to catch some winks.”

  “Should I go get Lamar?”

  “Is he tattooing?”

  “Yeah.”

  “No, I’ll talk to him tomorrow, I’m sure. Will you make sure you have all the books ready for me to check out tomorrow?”

  “Yeah. Everything alright?”

  “Yeah. Just budget concerns with the reduced workforce.”

  Becky looked at the floor then, and Mike felt bad. They’d been healing, and he was going to rip their scabs off, whether he wanted to or not.

  “Alright.”

  “Cool, I’ll see you in the morning.”

  “Alright, Mike.”

  He left the store and went around back to the stairs. Pollen kicked from them as he climbed. His trip had been as much a failure as a success. Sid had said to bring home Deb. He’d brought as much as he could. The apartment was not unclean, but it felt that way. The bathroom he hated to enter, the just-there bloodstain on the floor that he felt sure Lamar had worked at removing for the entirety of his trip, the twin burns on the table. It was cold, foreign, and familiar. It was a home that, for Mike, had more in common with a tomb.

  He sat at the table, then stood to pour himself a glass of water. He sat again and drank. The tap water was gritty, and it assuaged none of his thirst—since the fire in the woods, his thirst had been unquenchable. He had a thought that he should unpack the ink and used supplies, but instead he went to bed. At first quite sure that sleep was impossible, his eyes winked shut moments after his head hit the pillow.

  When Mike woke, he was seated in a room he did not recognize. It came after a moment: he was in the interrogation room where he’d spoken to the detective. He was unbound at both his wrists and ankles. He felt his waist to see that his belt and wallet were still in place, and a quick look to his shoes revealed his laces. There was no sound. Even the from the lights there was no humming or noise.

  He didn’t know how long he sat because there was no clock, and he had neither his watch nor his phone. He sat long enough to decide that either his mind had deluded him into believing that Sid had come to him and that he’d been to Deb’s grave, or that he’d been apprehended for grave robbery. Neither was easy to discount. Then there was noise. Shoes on concrete, likely women’s, from the sound. The lights flickered, once, twice. The door swung open, and Deb walked inside. She looked as she had when he’d last seen her at the apartment, like she’d been through hell. It wasn’t shocking this time; he knew that she had been to war with a demon in the skin of a man.

  She kept her gaze on him, and though Mike wanted to jump to his feet, he did not. He stayed glued to the chair, and she sat across from him.

  She blinked and said, “I can’t believe you’re here.” The jaw of this broken version of Deb was slack when she spoke, her speech coming unnaturally from her throat. The bruising on her throat was black, with
a patina of yellow fading under the thick rope marks. She was broken, but to Mike her wounds were injuries he wanted to heal, not shy away from.

  “Am I dead?” he asked.

  “No. No, of course not.”

  “Then what is this place?”

  “Well, I’d imagine it’s some sort of police station. You picked it.”

  “What do you mean I picked it?”

  “Maybe not consciously, but this is where your brain went to, for one reason or another. You could do better, I’ll give you that.”

  “Are you dead?”

  She laughed—and she had to be Deb. Had to be.

  “I’d think you’d know that better than anybody. I never would have expected grave robbery, Mike. You didn’t even like break-ins. Quite the criminal.”

  “Alright, you need to give me a hand here. What in the hell is going on?”

  “Well, that really depends on you, Mike. You do love me, and I do love you. We couldn’t be here otherwise—it wouldn’t be possible. Now the question is, what do we do with this? It’s your mind, your head; I’m only allowed to visit if you want me to. In time I’ll fade and so will these memories, just as that tattoo on your hand will fade.”

  Mike looked down at the crude little heart on his hand. It was beating, pulsing in rhythm not with his heart, but hers. “I’ll always love you,” he said. He looked into her eyes. Blood that had collected in the left was dissipating. It was slow in its doing, but he could see it happening.

  “As long as you do, I can be here with you. But Mike, these sorts of things work better with children or brothers. You ought to know that better than anybody. You never put ashes in somebody over a girlfriend, did you?”

  “We were better than that.”

  “Oh, don’t get upset, we’ve got too much to talk about. You love me and I love you—that’s enough. It would be unfair of me to expect that to last forever for you. You’ve got a long time to live, Mike. At least you should.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “Ahh, the root of it at last.” She smiled at him, and her jaw snapped back into place. “You’re right to think that way—this is very much about what I want, but I think the reason I want what I do would come as a surprise for you. You invited me back to you through blood, and whether that’s what you meant to have happen or not is immaterial now. If you want this to stop, you can make that happen at any time. If you want to listen, well, that’s your decision as well. I want you to find a man.”

  “The man who killed you?”

  “Yes, the man who killed me. But more importantly, the man who will kill again in two weeks. The one he’s watching now is nineteen, she’s a single mother, and he’ll probably kill her in front of the child.”

  “What’s her name? We have to warn her!”

  Deb shrugged her shoulders. She was animated, more Deb than before, more alive. The rope marks on her neck were all but gone, the bruising on her just yellow now. She was smiling, radiant.

  “How could I know that? My bond isn’t with her.”

  “Then how do you know the rest of it?”

  “Because when he killed me I could feel it in him. Not all of it, but enough to know that part. I can’t help her—there’s no way of knowing who she is. You can help her by finding him.”

  “Who is he?”

  She smiled. She was whole. “It’s hard to be in good spirits about this, Mike, but believe it or not, when he was raping and strangling me, we didn’t exchange names. I know, kind of rude, but for me the whole encounter was a bit off.”

  “You’re still sarcastic.”

  “Of course I am—I’m still everything I was. I know almost nothing about him, Mike. I know that he hates women and that he’s at least six and a half feet tall. I know that he killed me with a cord, but for others it’s been bags or shoelaces. He likes to mix it up. That’s really about it though, Mike. He was in a hurry on me; some of the others he had more time to work on. They are who we need.”

  “Who? What others?”

  “The other women he’s killed. They can tell us about him. Some of them have to know more than I do, and if we can put together what we all know about him, you might have enough time to find him.”

  “You want me to get their ashes? How could I do that? Even if they’ve all been cremated, I’ll never be able to convince their families. I’ll get committed.”

  She stretched her arms out and placed his hands in hers, their fingers interwoven like lace on the steel table.

  “Mike, this is all up to you. If you don’t want to try and do this, that’s fine. I’ll still be here for you at night for as long as you need me to be, and we can go wherever you want and do whatever you want while we’re together. But if that’s what you want to do, it will be on you when that girl dies. Her and whoever comes after. Right now, you and I are bound as tight as we will ever be. There is a limit to how long I can influence some of the other women to see you. First you need the ashes—there’s no power, no link without them.”

  “How do I even begin to do this?”

  “Start with Doc.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  Mike found that he was able to work, but not able to draw—the apartment was just too awful for that. Nights were his escape, but he knew Deb was worried that it was taking so long for him to talk to Doc. She never said as much, but he could see it in her eyes and hear it in her voice. He felt like she thought he was stalling, and he supposed in a way he was, but Doc would be a dangerous person to talk to about this. He could see to Mike being committed, if he wanted. Three days after Mike had first talked to Deb in the interrogation room, and eleven days from when Deb said the next of them would be murdered, he met with Doc.

  He’d had Becky call him and tell Doc that Mike wanted to see him to discuss Deb’s death. She said that Doc sounded awful on the phone, and Mike wondered how much worse Doc was going to feel when they were done speaking. What would be worse, for him to listen to Mike and decide he was insane, or to decide that Mike was telling the truth? Mike didn’t know much about group hysteria, but he knew it described people going crazy together. If he was just infected with madness, could he pass it on? Mike believed everything that was happening was real, but wasn’t that how insanity worked?

  Doc agreed to meet him in a park a few miles from the shop. Becky hadn’t mentioned if he’d questioned the location, and Mike was glad the she didn’t. Mike sat on a bench near the parking lot and waited for him. The sun was out, but it wasn’t warm enough to sit outside and talk. When Doc’s car pulled in, Mike walked to it. Doc waved to him, and then he reached across the seat to open the passenger side door. Mike got in and sat.

  “Mike, I was horrified to hear about poor Deb. She was a lovely girl, and if there’s anything I can do to help you, please tell me.”

  Mike let that thought roll in his head like hard candy and wondered if he might burst into laughter and ask Doc if he were really sure about that “anything” bit. Instead, he said, “Thanks, Doc. I need to tell you about something, and then I need you to tell me what you think. I’ll do whatever you suggest, no matter what it is. But one way or the other, I need your help.”

  “Well, then tell me, Mike. We’ve been friends long enough. Just spit it out.”

  Mike started with Sid. Told Doc about the bathroom and everything else. He told Doc next about Wes, and the others who’d come to him with ashes. He told him about what Jeffery had said about fixing up a car with a dead son. He told him about Sidney, a bathroom, and a pair of burns on a table. He told him about the trip to North Carolina. He told him about the dream. He told him about ashes and how to coax them from a bone in the woods. He told him about love, and Doc listened to all of it without expression.

  When Mike finished, Doc said, “Alright. What do we do to prevent this man from killing again?”

  Mike had not expected to be believed. Half the time he didn’t believe himself. It seemed just as likely that something was wrong with him, that someth
ing in his mind had been destroyed when Deb had died.

  “Deb said we needed to get ashes from the other women he killed. She thinks some of them might know more about him.”

  Mike felt like Doc was looking through him. The older man was inexpressive, but Mike could practically hear the wheels turning in his friend’s head. Finally, Doc said, “Mike, I will allow this possible delusion to exist for just a little longer because I consider you a dear friend. I’ll go and speak to my sister this afternoon; my niece’s ashes are kept in a little urn on her mantle. At some point my sister will use the bathroom or go to check on dinner. We’ll try her ashes on my foot. If you’re crazy, I’ll get you the best help I can. If you’re not—well, I guess we’ve got some work ahead if you’re not.”

  “So you believe me?”

  “No, none of it. But I do believe that you believe it. I like you well enough to try this myself, and if it works we’ll have something. If not, I’ll have a nice memorial to a person I loved very much, and a friend who desperately needs my help.”

  “We have eleven days.”

  “It will be tough to pull off, but we’ll do our best.”

  “I never thought you’d take me seriously.”

  “I don’t feel that I have a choice. If I were to commit or medicate you and then in eleven days read that a single mother was killed in her home, I’d probably put a gun in my mouth. Your Deb thinks time is of the essence, and so we must act quickly. I’ll be at your work as soon as I retrieve the necessary bits.”

  “Have you ever heard of anything like this, Doc?”

  “Frankly no, but the idea of humans marking each other goes back a great while. I suppose it’s just possible that this is some ancient magic that died thousands of years ago. Perhaps an Indian shaman of four thousand years ago ran a brisk business of tattooing dead relatives on tribesman. If it’s real, it’s been done before. Be ready for me when I get to your work, please. And Mike?”