Ink

by Sabrina Vourvoulias

  When nothing happens she turns to Mari.

  It’s interesting. I’ve been thinking of Nely as the leader of this duo. But she defers to the smaller woman in a way that makes me think I’ve misread the dynamic.

  Mari frowns at Nely, then closes her eyes.

  “Try it now,” she says after a minute. “The porter’s looking back this way and where the eye goes, the ear follows.”

  Nely pounds on the door with the flat of her hand and soon enough the yellow light stops flashing. The door lists open as if it was never closed.

  When I turn to look at Mari, she shrugs. “Trick from childhood.”

  There is another metal door ahead with a massive hasp and what looks to be an expensive combination padlock hanging on it. I see a shadow loose itself from the wall and begin to walk toward us. It’s a big shadow. Built like a bouncer.

  “Non fecit taliter,” the man says. There’s an interrogatory lilt at the end of the phrase, making it a question.

  “What the hell?” Nely’s voice is barely a whisper, but in this place it carries.

  “Password,” I hear Mari whisper back. “Toño didn’t tell you anything about this?”

  It’s a tidy system, I think. If we had gotten here by mistake rather than intention there’d be nothing illegal to report. The phrase is in Latin, a dead language that doesn’t violate the language bans, and there’s almost no way anyone would chance on the right combination of words to say in response.

  Witness Mari and Nely.

  “Omni nationi,” I finally say to the bouncer.

  He sweeps past us and blocks our view while he fiddles with the lock. I hear the click of tumblers falling in place. When the door opens, it is to light, the smell of charcoal and a babble of Spanish.

  As soon as we’re through Nely turns to me, hands on her hips. “What the fuck?”

  I can’t help grinning at her. “Last line of Psalm 147. ‘God has not done this for other nations.’ Allegedly what one of the popes said about the apparition of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico.”

  She doesn’t say anything, just turns and stalks toward a makeshift bar set up in one corner of the dingy grey utility room that houses the peña this week. I like watching her go. And not because she’s leaving.

  “How did you know?” Mari asks.

  “I used to be a good Catholic boy. Used to be Catholic. Used to be good.” I’m grinning again. Moreso after I see her roll her eyes.

  “Father Tom warned me you like to pretend to be wicked.”

  “He lies a lot, for a priest.”

  Her laugh is young. It reminds me that, despite her eyes, she’s only a twenty-something Catholic girl. And an ink, to boot. Which makes her very unlike the women I’m used to keeping company with.

  Except I’m not keeping company with her, I remind myself. I’m cultivating her as a source.

  “I’m hungry,” I say, looking around. “Let’s go find some food.”

  There’s a tin washtub on legs being used as a makeshift grill at one end of the room, filling the air with smoke and the smell of shrimp searing in a brick red sauce. Next to that is a garbage can filled with tamales and several industrial-size jars with juice.

  Despite the drab space that contains it, the peña is a riot of color: party dresses, oilcloth, cowboy boots in shades nature never intended. In the corner opposite the bar a really old man is inking a child’s wrist. He’s working manually, with a small mallet and needles stuck to the end of a wooden measure. He dips a needle into an ink bottle – he’s got black and green, ancient and crusted like hepatitis in a jar – then taps it under the skin. The child squawks.

  “My turn to ask how you did it,” I say as we make our way over to the food tables.

  “What?” she yells. I know there’s a guitarist playing – I can see him – but I can’t hear him over the din of kids with their parents and grandparents, young singles and couples at the bar and folding tables, all eating, drinking and chattering.

  “The thing with the bouncer or porter or whatever. Like you saw him, even though he was behind the door. How’d you do it?” I ask, bending close to her so I don’t have to shout.

  “Oh. That,” she says. “I told you already.”

  She gives me a half-mysterious, half-shy smile. It’s endearing. Pretty too.

  “So you’re like psychic, or something?”

  “Something.”

  “Okay, see if I care. Keep your secrets.”

  She raises her eyebrows.

  “Except the ones about Hipco.”

  She matches my grin.

  We end up at a recently vacated table near the tattooist, and although she swears she doesn’t want anything to drink, I come back from the bar with six shots of tequila.

  Her eyes go round when I slide three shots her way.

  “You’re kidding, right? You have noticed I’m a tad smaller than you?”

  “Yes, you’re wee,” I say, then laugh when she wrinkles her nose at the word.

  “So … besides the rampant language violations, the price gouging and the tattoo forging, there are at least a dozen drug and gun deals going down. Any other illegal activity I’m missing?” I ask.

  “Well, if the city council has its way we’ll all be in violation of the 10 p.m. curfew they’re voting in. All of us with tattoos, that is.”

  I’m not sure when I get it out, but suddenly my reporter’s notebook is in my hand. Melinda derides reporters who take digital notes the same way she does people who can’t drive standard, so I’m badass at both scrawl and clutch.

  “When?”

  “Tomorrow morning in open session. It’s a formality, though. The enforcement wing of pop control has been on alert since this morning. And there’s more stuff rumored to be coming down soon: public transit restrictions, gated neighborhoods.”

  “Jesus.”

  “I overheard my boss saying Morrow is the only councilperson who still has some misgivings.”

  I drum my fingers while I think. “Maybe I can ambush her before they go into session. That way I can file before anyone else. I think I have her home address somewhere.”

  “There you go,” she says.

  “How can you stand working there?”

  “I’m tougher than I look?”

  I laugh, but I know it isn’t funny.

  In the silence that follows we look anywhere but at each other. My eyes end up at the bar, on Nely. She’s flirting with the tender, whose shirt has just enough open collar to show some figural ink and what appears to be the end of a hellacious scar.

  He glances over at me. His eyes are intelligent, appraising. He runs his fingers over a perfectly dark and sharp-edged goatee before he rests his chin on his hand and turns back to Nely. I wonder why it’s always a soul patch, chin strap or goatee with the gangs, never a full beard.

  “What’s the deal with them?” It’s an excuse to get Mari talking to me again.

  “That’s Toño. His gang runs this peña. She likes him and, I think, kind of toys with the idea of joining his gang.”

  “Really?” I look at him more closely. He’s probably a foot shorter than me but I wouldn’t want to mess with him. “He’s … intimidating.”

  “Kettle. Pot.”

  “Hardly. I’ve been told I look like a teddy bear.”

  “From where, Land of the Giants?”

  I lean in to her. “Okay, so that’s Nely and Toño’s story. What’s yours?”

  “I believe I already gave you a story. At least I thought I saw you taking notes.”

  “The other one.”

  “About the border dumps? It’s still speculation on my part. A pattern I’ve noticed as I track the GPS readouts from the pop control implants in temporary workers. That’s all.”

  “You’ll tell me that one next time.”

  Because I’ve just decided this. Even if she never again gives me a lead for a story, there’s going to be a next time.

  “But that’s not the story I meant. The othe
r, other one.”

  She toys with the last shot of tequila before her. When she drains the glass, I push one of mine her way.

  She laughs. “I’ve had plenty already. And there’s nothing left to tell.”

  “Sure there is.” I reach for her hand, turn it over and pull her sleeve up.

  I can hear her intake of breath.

  It is a breach, I know. Something along the lines of undressing her without her permission. But I can’t regret doing it.

  The skin of her wrist is a soft plush and the lines of the tattoo cut it sharp and precise. All those fine blue lines filled with the story of her life – the way the government sees it. They don’t look remotely like blood, but they make me wonder if this is the kind of wound that never stops bleeding.

  “Did it hurt?” I ask, raising my eyes back to hers.

  She looks stricken.

  The hairs on the nape of my neck stand on end. Sixth sense, remember? She understands something about me I’m not sure I want her to know. Something maybe even I don’t want to know.

  She tries to disengage, to reclaim her wrist and her privacy, but I won’t let go.

  So she tells me a fairy tale. As if I were a child. Or maybe, as if she were.

  * * *

  A long time ago, but not so long ago that it couldn’t have been yesterday, a little girl lived in a far away land with her grandmother and grandfather, and her mother and brother. He was really her half-brother, but she was little and didn’t know what that meant. He looked like a whole brother to her, and very big. He was four. Which was three years and eleven months older than she was.

  They lived in a house up in the mountains. A house with dogs and chickens running through the rooms because the doors were always open to the winds. All around them stood the houses of the little girl’s aunts and uncles, and they too had open doors and cousins who ran in and out after the animals. Even though the girl’s brother was the youngest and smallest of the cousins he was the fastest runner, and the girl followed him with her eyes.

  Because she was so little, people thought she was sweet. Wherever her mother took her, people stopped to touch the girl’s cheeks as if a trace of sugar would come off on their fingers when they did. Her brother knew she wasn’t sweet. He had licked her cheek to be sure.

  The girl’s family garbed themselves daily in fine things. Necklaces with strands of red bead and coin to wrap around their necks. Headpieces with symbols running their length. Clothes woven with threads the color of bird feathers. All of them wore these things, except the girl, who didn’t wear anything.

  One day, though, the girl’s mother put her in a dress twice as long as her baby legs. Her brother’s hair was combed down with lots of water and he looked cross when their mother made him put on stiff, new shoes. Soon the whole family started to walk down to the village, and it seemed that with them the very stuff of the mountain – winds, birds, clouds – descended to the valley also. Midway, the girl and her brother noticed things floating above the trees. She didn’t know what they were. He knew more and thought, “They’ve gotten kites to celebrate her special day.” It made him want to cry. He pinched his sister instead.

  When they got to the village, the girl’s brother sat with his uncles and aunts and cousins on wooden benches in the church. The girl went with her mother and grandparents up to where a man stood. He was an inside-out man, the blue veins and their little red feeders were visible through his skin.

  Everyone paid attention to the man, except the girl. She reached for what she understood was there but couldn’t yet see with her own eyes.

  Spectral beings accompanied her family.

  Maybe the girl was trying to touch the small feline that twitched its tail at her mother’s side. Perhaps she reached for the weasel that scuttled three steps behind her grandfather, or the monkey clinging to her grandmother’s shoulder.

  But wherever she turned, the girl’s hands closed on air. She wouldn’t be able to see the animal counterparts until her seventh month, when her own magical twin would be called from deep within her and coaxed to step outside her body. That day her grandmother would weave a garment for her in a design that told the story of twinned beings who walk a layer of world like and unlike our own. The girl would be married in that garment, and buried in it.

  The inside-out man – who had no animal twin next to him because he wasn’t born on the mountain or in its shadow – poured water on the girl. She cried.

  Outside, people screamed.

  The girl’s mother placed her hand over the baby’s mouth to muffle her crying and turned to see the children running out of the church, driven by their curious natures. Uncles and aunts scrambled to follow.

  The children were fast, and the girl’s brother the fastest of them all. The girl’s mother made the sound a cat makes when you step on its paw, then handed the girl to the person on her right and chased after the boy.

  The girl was passed from hand to hand until there was no one else to pass her to. Finally she was placed on the floor and left alone at the foot of the sanctuary. The adults ran after the children who ran after the strange beings that drove other children and villagers before them, like goats to be corralled and milked.

  It was hard to pin down exactly what the beings were. Viewed sidelong they seemed dwarven and formed from granite; head-on, they had human faces twisted by something harsh and unyielding. No matter what they were, the adults gave chase and the girl was left alone in the church.

  Alone, but not completely helpless.

  She had an infantile magic, something she’d lose as soon as her real magic rose to take its place. She could see the world through other eyes.

  She had looked out of her mother’s eyes and seen her father’s face on a piece of paper creased with folds. She had looked out of her grandmother’s eyes as the threads shuttled on the loom. She had looked out of her grandfather’s eyes and seen the lush estates where he sometimes traveled to work.

  This time, it was her brother’s vision she shared.

  He had tucked himself behind one of the water troughs in the plaza and watched as the strangers in boots and clothes the color of clay and mud drove the villagers out of the square, past the buildings. He saw uncles, aunts – even his mother – scurry past his hiding place without noticing him. After they passed, he inched out behind, keeping close to the shadowy hideouts too small for any but him.

  The strangers drove the children to the edge of the village where others of their kind waited. They caught them up – first the ones from the village but soon the cousins as well – and swung them by their ankles, slamming them against the huge tree that marked the entrance to the community. The children’s heads went out of round, the tree’s trunk ran wet, and the children’s spirits wafted away from them like smoke abandons a fire.

  It wasn’t until the shooting started that the girl’s brother turned and ran. On the ground, the abandoned parachutes he had thought were kites blurred from his speed. At his side – the girl saw it only because she looked through his eyes – a button buck matched his stride.

  The girl raised her arms to her brother when he burst through the doors of the church. He looked down at her. Doubled vision or single, there was a brother’s heart broken open in that look.

  “Psst.”

  The inside-out man motioned from the altar. He unlocked the gold-colored cupboard underneath the cross. The girl squirmed when he picked her up and carried her over. He put her inside, even though there was already a covered cup there and she hardly fit. He kept catching her feet as she kicked them, then held them as he slipped a piece of paper between the folds of her diaper.

  “What’s that?” her brother asked.

  “Birth certificate. I hold the ones of all the children I’ve baptised,” the man answered. “Yours too. Here.”

  The inside-out man shoved a folded paper into her brother’s hand. “Tuck it somewhere safe. In case none make it back.”

  The girl started to cry as the p
riest closed the cupboard door. The last thing she saw before the shadows stole her sight was the lid knocked off the top of the cup and a multitude of white discs showering out. Full moons of the instant, brilliant in the dark.

  Back to seeing out of her brother’s eyes, the girl saw the key the man handed him. He pushed the boy toward a full-size statue of Our Lady and slid open a door hidden in the statue’s pedestal.

  “In there,” he said, then nudged him to climb inside the cobwebbed space. “Wait until I come get you. If I don’t come back, wait until you don’t hear any more shooting and take your sister from the tabernacle. Run, as fast as you can, until you get to the next village. And if the soldiers are in the next village, then run to the next and don’t stop until you are far from them. Understand?”

  Her brother nodded, even though some of the words were big and others were garbled. He waited. He heard distant screams and heavy thunking noises far, and then near. There was the sound like belts of firecrackers set off on the village feast day, and the boom of bigger loads of gunpowder. Obedient, the boy spent a long time hidden, long enough to fall asleep. When he woke and couldn’t stand the dark and the hot air any longer, he put his grubby, sticky hands flat on the sliding door and dragged it until a small gap appeared. He wormed a finger through the gap, then pushed it open.

  The church was quiet.

  Her brother saw a chair knocked on its side, close to the side door and not too far from the altar. Sticking out from behind it was a pair of shoes so shiny they glinted across the room. He inched forward until he could see around it. The inside-out man was there, eyes and mouth open. There was something metal and jagged wedged inside him.

  The girl’s brother dragged the chair, then stopped when he heard the loud squeal of wood on stone. When nobody came to the sound, he started dragging it again – stop, start, squeal, stop, start, squeal. He stood on the chair to reach the cupboard. He stuck the key in the lock and turned it first one way then the other until he heard a click, then opened the door and reached inside.

  The girl grabbed her brother’s finger, held it tight. He gathered her in both arms and jumped to get off the chair.