Ink

by Sabrina Vourvoulias

  “Sure. I think I can help a bit with those who are staying, and then whatever else they need me to do here.”

  He gives me a considering look, far too keen for my taste. “Maybe when I finally take Mari and Gus up – let’s call it the adrenaline run – you’ll come along for a ride.”

  “It sounds like the gavilanes have everything under control up there,” I say.

  I wheel myself out to the parking lot to watch the load up. The light falling on the people is like the light that shines through pieces of amber and the people milling around are caught in its resin. There’s some last-minute jockeying and pleading from those who haven’t been able to get theirs on the boarding list for first or second run, but as soon as the blond gavilán makes a show of taking out her gun and checking the clip, it all dies down.

  After the cars drive away I go back inside. Some St. Adalbert parishioners trickle in with me, informed of need by a hidden network that’s only a little slower than the one that has brought the inks here. Some of them carry platters of food, others pillows and sleeping bags, and gallons of milk or iced-tea. The meeting room’s kitchen area is a center of activity. It’ll be a six to eight hour roundtrip for the limos and cars, barring unforeseen problems, and the second round of passengers won’t be abandoned for even a minute of the wait.

  I make a number of forays out to in-between apartments, though not nearly as many I would have hoped. And who can blame the inks who look at me with a mix of polite indulgence and underlying alarm when I approach them? If I didn’t feel the stir in my heart and under my palms, would I believe the inexplicable grace of what pours through me to effect change?

  When I have nothing left to do I wheel myself over to the kitchen area to help with the food.

  “Hey,” a familiar voice pulls me out of the reverie of routine about a half-hour later. Sarai’s eyes are trained on me. “Didn’t think you’d be here.”

  “Ditto.”

  “I’m pretty sure there are already people who’d love to see me and mine corralled in some kind of reprogramming version of the inkatoriums,” she says. “Slippery slopes being what they are and all, I figure I better help create some speed bumps. Hey, are Cassie and Satchel around somewhere?”

  “No. Francine was. She’s the one who got me involved with this group. She’ll be back in some hours if you want to wait around.”

  “God, no. Unlike you, I’ve never gotten off her shitlist.” She looks around. “But I do have to find Father Tom. I’m thinking of using my parents’ credit line to rent some school buses to get some more of these folks out of here, and I need his estimate of how many we might need.”

  “I think I may have just fallen in love with you,” I say.

  She laughs. “Maybe you better wait and see if I can pull it off before you buy the engagement ring. And don’t tell Allison, she’s the jealous type.” She winks at me as she ambles off to intercept Father Tom.

  Allison turns when she hears her name but keeps talking to the group of inks and parishioners clustered around her. “I can’t counsel any course of action but compliance,” I hear her say. “Lawyers from advocacy organizations across the nation will scramble to file lawsuits, of course. But, I won’t lie to you, it’ll be a long time before any sort of decision about constitutionality is handed down, especially given the careful alien/non-alien language, and the exclusions in place for citizens.”

  I’m following her words so closely I hardly notice who sits next to me. When I turn around, it is two sets of madonnas I see – Mari with Gus in arms and Cassie with Satchel.

  “Gang’s all here,” Cassie says as she hands Satchel to me. My little boy plays with the buttons of my shirt, and through the fabric, the bee.

  “At one point you would have been literally right,” I say.

  She looks around the room. “I’m not sure I get why disappearing up there seems any better than just staying put. I mean, if you’re going to hide out there’s no easier place to do so than a city.”

  “I don’t know,” I say.”Didn’t most of the partisans head to the hills during fascist occupations of World War II?”

  Cassie makes a face. “We’re not talking fascists and partisans here. And, as a form of resistance, it seems an awful lot like what the government wants anyway. What’s the difference between disappearing into the hinterlands or deportation? It ends in the same place, no ink faces next to us on the bus or the street or the elevator.”

  She’s right, and the expression that must be on my face prompts a smile. “You can agree with me and not lose all your cred, you know,” she says, amused.

  “Anyway, I think there’s more courage in the blue tats staying put and working for change from within the system,” she says then. It’s not directed at me for all that she’s looking at me when she says it.

  “Because second-class citizens are going to have so much power to effect change, you mean?” Mari says.

  “And what change does disappearing and hiding bring about?”

  “None. But it makes a difference that I’m the one making the decision of how, and to where, and for how long I disappear.” Mari hugs Gussy so hard the little boy squawks.

  “All of the alternatives suck,” Cassie says after a moment.

  “No, really?” Mari says, then quickly turns away. After a time she puts Gussy down, takes his hand and leads him to the upper church.

  * * *

  The drivers take just enough time to chow down before getting back on the road for the second run. With the unexpected construction up toward the end of the run the turnaround has taken an additional hour, and everything’s going to cut dangerously close to announcement time.

  Even with the single school bus Sarai is able to scare up there are still many people left behind. It’s excruciating to see them pick up, resigned to the fate of the unchosen. The hall empties out. A couple of parishioners linger, tidying up, along with the handful of inks like Mari who’ve decided to chance a third run. As the hours wear on, a few of us – Cassie, Father Tom, Grace, Mari and a guy named Ephrem – sit together, watching for the news to officially break.

  Around 7:30 a.m., before the drivers are back from the second run, Twitter starts to flood with the rumors. It’s a bit scary, actually, how little time it takes. And we’re only really tracking the English and Spanish-language tweets. There are hashtags in Urdu, Vietnamese, Korean and a dozen other languages.

  Then it all crashes – or is crashed – and we’re back to waiting for the traditional media to trot out what’s going to happen, and the official version of why.

  Looking around the faces left in the hall it dawns on me that on the third run, if the instaskin fails and if the portable scanners are really as unreliable as Francine believes, there won’t be a single absolutely undeportable person in Neto’s limo.

  “Gussy,” I call the boy over. “You want me to ride up with you?”

  The boy doesn’t answer, but the hug he gives me is so tight it hurts.

  Thank you. Whether it’s Mari or twin, the surprise and gratitude comes through the same.

  Cassie motions me to come away from the table.

  “I don’t understand,” Cassie says as soon as we’re about half a room away from the others.

  “Insurance,” I say. “For Gus.”

  She shakes her head, exasperated. “That’s Mari’s job, not yours. She should just stay put. Or leave Gus with mom.”

  “But she’s not going to, Cassie. And it’s little enough to do. If not for her or Gussy, for Finn.”

  Her face doesn’t change, but I know what the mention of her brother does to her. “Cheap shot,” she says.

  “No,” I say. “I mean it.”

  She sighs, looks away, then back again. “How’re you going to get back?”

  “As soon as the limo drops people at the sanctuaries, I’ll catch a bus. There’s one that stops right in front of the hardware store in Smithville, remember?”

  Cassie’s face turns stony. “Fucking
Smithville. That’s why you offered.”

  I feel my stomach drop. “No. Gus and Mari are why I offered. The wheelchair’s changed me, Cassie. Satchel’s changed me, and you have, too. I’m grounded here now.”

  “Right.”

  Satchel picks up on the tension between us and starts wailing. Without thinking, I take the gold bee out from under my shirt. He reaches for it and makes a game of yanking it so my neck bobs up and down. He gives me a gurgling laugh. Then, he opens his palm and bounces the bee. It hangs above his open hand, quietly suspended for a good seven seconds, before it lights on his palm and he clutches it again.

  So air’s his element. Like Chato.

  “Did you see that?” I ask Cassie when I look up.

  Her mouth twists. “He’s going to get cut on that thing.”

  “No, I meant what he did. How he kept it floating above his palm. His magic.”

  She gets up and plucks Satchel from my lap. “Goddamn it, Del, just stop already. Magic is the vain hope of the desperate and powerless, and I hate that you feel so damaged you need to believe in it. But that’s you. Not Satchel. Never Satchel, you hear me?”

  “Cassie….”

  “Give that thing to me,” she says.

  I take off the pendant and put it in her hand. She wraps her fingers around it.

  “Come back when you understand what’s real,” she says. Then she leaves and takes what I love best with her.

  At 9 a.m., when the press conference starts and drivers still aren’t back, all our eyes turn to the TV images resolving themselves into what we wanted to believe wouldn’t really happen.

  Grace gets up, busies herself making coffee for everyone.

  “What kind of world is this when you can’t tell the good guys from the bad guys?” she asks while she stirs milk and sugar into the cups.

  Nobody ventures an answer.

  “Breathe,” she says roughly as she places a cup in front of me.

  It startles me into meeting the eyes looking down at me.

  “Sorry?”

  “Too late for sorrys,” she says.

  2.

  I end up in the front seat of Neto’s limo. The partition is down, and I can hear Gussy snoring and what passes for conversation between Mari, Ephrem and the others in the back seat.

  Lionel, the oldest, is an engineer, and originally from Mexico; Max, a young Dominican who until a week ago sold food from a rolling stand on the streets of Hastings; Elpidia is a college student whose Nicaraguan parents brought her when she was a couple of months old; Ephrem, a Guatemalan working at a bakery; and Gracielle is a Haitian storeowner with ties, she tells me, to the ruler of crossroads.

  It is tense in the car, and not only because we’re all counting the number of military vehicles on the road. This is a charge into a different type of future than any of us ever imagined. Provided we make it to the sanctuaries, it is a “laying low and peeking under,” as my Smithvillians are fond of saying.

  Everyone’s been fitted with what we believe are acetone-resistant instaskin patches from the Gang of Five’s store of the stuff. Except for Gracielle whose patch, she tells us, was purchased off an old Tonton Macoute who runs the sole Haitian gang in Hastings. She hadn’t had enough cash on hand to buy transport to one of their safe houses in the south.

  So far we haven’t hit a barricade. But two-and-a-half hours after the press conference and a half-hour before we should have hit the outskirts of Smithville if we hadn’t been driving hellbent for leather, we’re going to.

  We all watch the minutes tick off on the large digital clock above the remarkably well-appointed National Guard checkpoint while we wait. It had to have taken them longer than a day to erect, I think, but Neto shakes his head when I ask him if it was here on his way back from the last full run.

  From both left and right drivers aim their cars like wedges to cut in front of us, as if going first will be some advantage in getting through. It’s a ludicrous superstition, but we’re infected by it also and not letting anyone cut in.

  “Motorcycle at 10 o’clock,” Mari says. She’s preternaturally attuned to the hunt this has become. Every so often I try to make the road buckle a car – or in this case, motorcycle – back to its original spot. But if the land beneath the asphalt is listening to me, it doesn’t agree that this jostling for place is important and keeps still.

  12:38 p.m. The radio announcers squawk about what’s happening in different quadrants of the state. Had we been going south rather than north we wouldn’t have hit a checkpoint yet because municipalities down there have been less efficient at mobilizing reserves. Figures. Luck has its favorites, and we aren’t among them. On the other hand, at least we aren’t on the West Coast where the resistance and counter-resistance has turned dead violent already.

  A small Honda sideswipes the limo in an attempt to dislodge the car in front of us. Neto inches forth so there is no space visible between our fender and third-in-line’s bumper.

  12:45. We’re third in line. From here we can see the yellow barricades at the checkpoint that mark the place behind which I – and probably Neto – can hide us for an eternity in the wild pockets of Smithville. There’s a contraption just beyond the barricade that a guard cranks as each car stops in place. It brings a line of sharp iron spikes upright during the inspection, then lays it flat again when the car has been cleared to pass.

  1:01. “You don’t think we’re going to make it through, do you?” I say to Neto.

  He doesn’t answer.

  “Did I tell you to call me Ernest?” he says after moment. “Ernest Horn, from the Akwesasne Mohawk Territory.”

  “How’d you do that? My grandmother actually had Seminole blood and she wasn’t on the rolls.”

  “Abbie’s father relayed his mother’s go-ahead. Most of the folks up at the reservation are quietly interested in seeing just how far we can get with our particular brand of defiance. I hear some of the younger Adamses and Horns might even be considering joining the gavilanes, at least on the digital end, and the upshot of everything is that our stories stand,” he says. “For now, anyway.”

  “Which means?”

  “We’re getting through, Bro.”

  Behind us, the crunch of metal and glass. The fifth car in our line plows into the fourth, knocking it clear across one of the feeder lanes. I manage to shift the divider just enough so the car isn’t totaled in its spin out.

  1:20. We’re still second. Nobody in the car currently at the checkpoint has passed the swipe test. Even the smallest, no older than Gussy, is cuffed and marched at gunpoint to a transport bristling with other cuffed inks.

  1:35. The car in front of us pulls into the checkpoint. We’re first in line, finally.

  “What if Gracielle’s instaskin patch is one of those that isn’t acetone-resistant and dissolves?” Elpidia gives voice to what others have been worrying silently.

  “We don’t know,” I say when nobody else answers. “Maybe the soldiers swipe and reswipe everyone. In which case everyone’s instaskin will end up dissolving.”

  “Maybe they take her and leave us.” Lionel. He sounds like he’s considering setting Gracielle outside the car preemptively.

  “Nobody’s getting taken,” Neto says. “I’ll run the limo through the barricade before that happens. It’s as bulletproof as any vehicle can be made to be, and has a badass V12 Lamborghini engine customized to gavilán needs. So stop worrying.”

  He doesn’t mention any countermeasures for the spikes but maybe the people in the back seat can’t see them.

  “My patch won’t dissolve,” Gracielle says. “Haven’t any of you noticed what they’ve done by positioning the checkpoint where they have?”

  She waits a beat, then continues. “They’ve made this whole area a crossroads. And Legba holds all points of a crossroads.”

  I hear Max groan. It sounds like a bunch of others back there join in. I’m in no position to question anyone’s faith but I’m not reassured either.


  Neto motions for me to feel under my seat. My hand lands on a metal clamp-like device and then, the distinctive stock of a shotgun. Sawed-off, if it fits under there.

  “You know how to shoot, I believe?” he says quietly when I look back at him.

  I nod. “Deer, anyway.”

  He gives me a grim smile. “Aim higher.”

  “Is it going to come to that?”

  “Who knows, Bro. I’m not used to anticipating what National Guard or reservists will do. By my measure we’re flying way light on weaponry. I’ve got a piece on me, but that’s it…. Either of us flinches, the people in the back seat are going to be toast.”

  1:55. “This is it,” Neto says.

  The car currently in the checkpoint moves forward half a foot, then lurches to a stop.

  “I’ve got to pee,” Gus says.

  Nobody answers, because we’re all holding our breath.

  2:15. The car in the checkpoint is still there, not moving. All of its occupants are marched away in cuffs. A soldier slides in the driver seat, waits for the spikes to be lowered, then pulls the car over with the others repossessed from their unlucky inks.

  2:25. The limo slides into the empty checkpoint almost without noise. Four of the guards crowd the limo and knock on the windows with the muzzles of their semi-automatics. Neto rolls down all the windows at once.

  The boy who looks in my window is just that, a boy. In uniform and a little green around the gills. I feel sorry for him.

  “Wrist,” he says.

  When I hold mine out, he pours the acetone on it. A long, steady stream that splashes over his boots, the asphalt, the side of the limo. I hope the other soldiers aren’t quite so extravagant with the solvent or we’re cooked.

  Of course, it doesn’t do a thing to my wrist. As soon as the kid steps away from my window, nodding, I sneak a look at Neto. His skin’s intact over his tattoo.

  He’s answering some questions from the oldest-looking of the soldiers, chatting him up. He’s a good liar. Convincing and at ease.

  I chance a glance through the rolled-down partition. Max is already closing the window on his side. Elpidia and Ephrem’s arms are in, and Gracielle’s got hers folded in her lap. She winks at me. Only Mari and Lionel still have arms outstretched on the other side of the car.