Ink

by Sabrina Vourvoulias

  I decide to breathe.

  Uncle….

  Next to Gus, Mari’s face becomes something toothed and snarling.

  I bring the shotgun up in one movement and aim high above her foaming wrist.

  Does the soldier glance at me then? I don’t remember. He loses his grip on Mari the second the shell tears into him. This close the shot doesn’t spread, it blows out his shoulder, and in the instant before he drops his eyes meet mine.

  Neto punches the gas. I barely have time to project the drop of ground from under the spikes before the limo races over them. There’s a tidal wave of sound around me: gunfire, screams, sirens, the sound of a car pushing every last cylinder.

  Neto spares me a glance as he guides the limo down back roads at speeds only safe for jets. Then he takes the limo off road without seeming to slow down. The sawed-off is still held loosely in my hand and Mari is covered in blood, not her own. It’s all one to me, and insignificant.

  How can you tell the good guys from the bad guys?

  Look to see whose eyes hold the plea, whose the target.

  Then face up to what follows.

  3.

  The eye is a strange organ. Without compassion. Without filter. The true repository of memory.

  The administration keeps the images of the inks being loaded onto troop transports for deportation from public view. It’s a smart move. Numbers don’t mean anything until you see the scale of them, in flesh. When the original timeline proves too optimistic and congressional approval is needed for an extension on the deportation program, no one has an image of the human cost nested in the retina, and the measure passes without fuss.

  The inks from the first and second runs up to Smithville end up on Harper’s farm and his brother-in-law’s go-kart-track-turned-sanctuary. Elpidia and Max join them, preferring the youth-hostel feel of groups bunked in Quonset huts and ramshackle farm buildings to the solitary outfitter tents of those who live on my property.

  We’ve made the land immediately around those structures in-between places, like my land, but some of the residents – mostly older teenagers and their younger siblings or cousins – aren’t great at remembering boundary markers. And, let’s face it, they’re bored to death in their rustic surroundings. So they spend a lot of time at the go-kart track, watching the drivers pitting their skeletal vehicles against one another.

  It seems harmless enough to those who are looking out for them – the kids don’t really interact with other spectators and all of them speak English as well as any non-ink – but then no Hastings resident really understands how homogenous rural America can be. It takes a surprisingly long time but eventually someone reports the influx of darker-skinned go-kart enthusiasts to Sweeney. About a quarter of the residents of the Quonset hut are nabbed as the best race of the day takes place.

  As soon as we hear, Abbie, Mari, Jobs, Meche and I head into town in the hope that between us we have enough – wherewithal, magic, money, smarts – to do something. But if we do or don’t soon becomes immaterial, we’re too late. By the time we get down there, Sweeney has called the local TV stations and Main Street is choked with news vans. The police chief puts the inks in shackles and marches them down Main as cameras roll and townspeople gather on the sidewalks to gape at the ghastly parade.

  Meche and I are together, surrounded by a crowd that doesn’t hesitate to grab my wheelchair handles to jostle me out of the way. I’m hung up on the curb in front of Smithville’s bike shop, with a clear sightline, when the inks come through three abreast and in tidy lines. The young adults are at the back, deputies shadowing them. But that’s not what catches the eye. No, it’s the schoolyard worth of 7 and 9 year olds that precede them that does. The shackles around their ankles and wrists are jury-rigged adult ones and they clank and grind as if the metal itself were humiliated by its job.

  The children avoid the eyes of those they pass, shame and hurt battling for primacy on the small features. Metal has a good memory of the earth that once surrounded it so I beg those chains and fetters, implore them, to undo themselves right there on the street. An act of supernatural kindness, and a verdict.

  But nothing happens.

  The metal keeps to its dirge and the children keep to their hopeless march, and Cassie’s words about desperation and powerlessness ring in my ears.

  I feel Meche’s hand wrap itself in mine and when I look up at her, the beautiful, otherwise perfectly composed face is streaked with trails of salt. “Nothing’s working,” she says without looking at me.

  “I know.”

  She doesn’t resist when I pull her down to sit crosswise on my lap, but turns her face into my chest as my arms come around her. “Who does this to kids?” she says after a moment, her voice muffled by the flannel of my shirt.

  And because the eye is impartial, because it remembers the young inks’ march in exactly the same way it does the young soldier I shot, I have to admit it, at least to myself.

  People like me. We do it.

  * * *

  Magic is at work even when you think it isn’t.

  The nation reacts with fiery indignation to the televised images of young people driven, hobbled like cattle. I see the flames literally dance across the layer of existence that acknowledges no boundary and I know that, across the nation, others with Meche’s same elemental gift are fanning the indignation too.

  The public outcry is such that the footage gets yanked from the airwaves, but Abbie’s and Jobs’ mobile capture of events sidesteps Internet restrictions and goes viral.

  A still from Mari’s phone – an ugly shot of an 8-year-old with ankles and wrists bleeding from the rub of the ill-fitting shackles – runs as the full front page of the Hastings Gazette. Finn’s old editor gets fired for it, but later the photo earns her – in the name of her resolutely anonymous photographer – a Pulitzer.

  Vermont passes the first non-compliance and ink restoration laws a few months after Sweeney’s public display. Seven other states have copycat bills in committee, including ours. There are rumblings about a federal bill to be introduced in the next session, and talk of sanctions for top administration officials.

  The Ink Incidents, as our undeclared war comes to be called, limps along until its final skirmishes seem no more significant than a particularly hard-fought Super Bowl game. The faces at the top switch, the circumstances morph and the words start seeming less like acid cast on broken skin. But the heart changes more slowly, and it’ll be years before we know peace or understand the scope of our losses.

  At the end of every day, before opening the door to my cabin, my hand rests for a moment on the plaque of Our Lady of Charity on the doorjamb. I’ve found a strange sort of faith these days. Faith that when I open the door, it’ll be to friends who habitually finish off my beers, to a canvas prepped for the future, and to a woman who puts no borders on real.

  Mari: Fairy tales

  1.

  In the days we speak of, snakes twist and twine and braid themselves into one. Their scales slough off in a shower of iridescence, bright as rain on the dusty ground. Like one they will sprout feathers, and winged, take to the sky.

  In the days we speak of, the jaguars return. The marks on their bodies fade, ghosting under the dark of fur and night. The moon and stars will sing them home.

  In the days we speak of, a woman finds her way to the edge of the underworld, to a tree that hangs with faces. It is both a beginning and an end.

  * * *

  I am their storyteller.

  Others try: Francine retelling myths, Abbie turning tweet to story. But the children always come back to me. Satchel only hears my stories once a month, when he comes up to the woods to visit his father, but he’s got the kind of mind that holds forever. Even as the years pass and Gus gets tall, Lucero fills out, Satchel turns contemplative, they come for the stories.

  I tell them the one about the boy shapeshifter, and the star girl, and the child who bridges worlds. I tell them other tales, too, so
they will know that everyone is made of stories.

  Each of them at a different time obsesses about my tattoo.

  When Gus asks about it I sit with him on the threshold of the little house I built in Del’s woods – a structure that wouldn’t exist if not for the tattoo – the only home my son remembers.

  “This holds not one tale, but many,” I say as I trace the blue lines with the tip of a finger. “One of the stories is told in numbers. It is a record of the past, of what you inherit through blood. Another is the story of love it prompted. The third is a chronicle of a battle that is fought again and again. Which would you like to hear?”

  Gus, nine and impatient, opts for the version he believes will be the shortest. So I tell the story as he wants to hear it.

  Lucero comes to me when she is older, twelve and on the cusp of change. I take her to the part of the woods that flowers first every spring and sit her among the trilliums. The tales the tattoo offers her are complicated: two tattoos, two fathers, two wars fought on different but overlapping fronts.

  Her storm-water grey eyes hold mine for a long time after I’m done the telling, but she doesn’t say anything. When she gets up to leave she touches her fingers to her forehead and moves them leftward and high. I know it is a gavilán sign that means “don’t let the future be written for you,” and that it’s thrown during a fight when one of yours seems so overwhelmed he or she might be tempted to give up. What I don’t know is whether she throws it for me or for herself.

  Satchel asks for the tale of the tattoo youngest of all. He is six and so serious I hesitate. But I take him to the huge boulder and sit in its shadow with him. What to tell this child? Both of his parents are privileged; neither of them bore the mark or felt what such a thing leaves beneath the skin. And yet, Satchel’s life has been freighted by the tattoo. It is a hard tale to tell a child so young but I do it anyway.

  After each telling of the tale of the tattoo, I seal the story with the same words: world without end, amen.

  Because telling the truth is always a prayer.

  * * *

  Ephrem comes to see me one day in my little house in the woods.

  He sits where I’ve imagined Finn sitting, every night since I built this home.

  They are dissimilar men. One large and easy, the other small and tied in knots.

  “You know my name isn’t really Ephrem,” he says as I pour him an instant coffee. Anglos never like the stuff, but Latinos are mostly okay with the expedient.

  “I changed it when I came here,” he says.

  “New life, new name. Not so unusual,” I say, sitting in a chair across from him.

  “I’m from Guatemala,” he says. “Like you.”

  “I was born there, I’m not from there,” I correct.

  He hardly pauses to notice. “The undeclared war there that took your mother and my parents has long been over. The military records of that time have been unearthed and are being catalogued. History has broken open.”

  “That’s good,” I say.

  He leans back, studies me. “You sound as if it doesn’t concern you.”

  “My undeclared war was a different one,” I say.

  “They are all our wars,” he answers.

  I take a sip of hot liquid, feel it sear as it travels down my throat.

  “Come with me to Guatemala. Find the full story. Like, what happened to your half-brother? For all you know, he is still alive. For all you know, I’m him.”

  I lean forward, put my cup down, and reach for his arm.

  He lets me hold it and turn it so the tender inner skin of his wrist is exposed.

  “You had your tattoo removed,” I say.

  “I don’t want to remember,” he says.

  “Then what are you offering?” I ask.

  He leaves soon after that.

  2.

  But I do go. By myself.

  I have a moment of panic at the airport. I present my wrist to the customs officer and then, when she looks at me quizzically, I remember what she’s checking are passports. So many years of wearing my identity on my skin….

  I scramble to find the passport, praying I actually packed it. And in some moment of clarity I did. It’s pinned on the inside of my handbag, in a plastic baggie along with the one photo I have of my mother and father together. I study that sometimes, and wonder at what it reveals. No matter that my mother is seated on a rock by a rustic footpath, garbed in traditional clothing and hair dressed in a way I’d never think to wear, she is me. And, no matter that my father is much shorter and blonder than Finn as he stands beside my mother for the photo, he loved her despite – and because of – the same set of untranslatables Finn loved in me.

  It is a black-and-white testimony of a story that always repeats.

  In Guatemala City at the PDH office that oversees investigations into human rights violations – current and historic – I spend time searching through thousands of records until I find my mother’s and grandparents’ names. No details, just names. I might have gotten as much sitting in the comfort of the gavilán compound if I had managed to secure half a day of Abbie’s or Jobs’ time.

  In the listing of those killed in the village that day I also find the name of the American priest who had hidden me in the tabernacle. The order he was from still keeps a house in the city so I make an appointment to speak to the senior priest. I’m not sure why I do it, perhaps the longing for something familiar in this land I find so utterly foreign.

  The priest who opens the door of the Maryknoll house has the bearing of an army man. Father Roger Beckett listens to my story as I stand in the doorway, and when I’m done, studies me at length.

  “That village no longer exists,” he says. “Even though the structures remain intact no one from the surrounding villages will go near them. They are superstitious and claim the village – in fact, the whole mountaintop – is haunted by the nahuales of the people who died.”

  “You know this word, nahual?” the priest asks then.

  I nod. “The animal twins.”

  His expression goes sharp, curious. “It wasn’t too long after the incident at your mother’s village that my order decided to stop ministering in that region altogether. A lot of our priests and catechists got caught in the violence in those days.”

  “The priest you ask about was buried up in New York State, where the motherhouse for the order is,” Father Beckett adds. “Whatever record or personal journal he might have kept, if it exists, is most likely there too. I’m afraid I can’t do much for you.”

  “Would the priest have taken photos, maybe a visual record of the village?”

  “It’s possible,” Father Beckett says. “Our mission in Guatemala started in 1943, so the photos from the timeframe you’re interested in might be scattered over a dozen albums. But it’s worth a shot. Come with me,” he says as he ushers me into the cool, neat library of the house.

  Though it is large and full, he finds only one slim photo album labeled as being from the village.

  “I’ll go make us some coffee,” he says, then leaves me to open the musty pages alone.

  There are photos of the construction of the village church and of religious processions, each exactly like the last, though the annotations change handwriting and date.

  Father Beckett comes back when I’m two yellowed pages from finishing. He sets the cups of steaming liquid in front of us. “Found anything?”

  I shake my head. “I’ve only now gotten to photos from that year. Though, I must say, it’s hard to tell them from the ones 30 years older.”

  He laughs, then comes to look over my shoulder. “It’s the huipiles. The unchanging style of the blouse makes the photos look timeless. You have to look at the shoes to note the march of time.” He points to one of the photos. “See, plastic sandals instead of handtooled leather ones.”

  When I turn to the last page, I see his eyes come to rest on my tattoo.

  “Did your father explain to you about the
huipiles?” he asks.

  “Only that each village has its own distinct design and colors,” I say. “He could only ever recognize the ones from the villages where he’d installed water systems during his time in the Peace Corps.”

  “When the Spanish came to Guatemala,” the priest’s voice takes on a magisterial note, “they couldn’t distinguish one indigenous group from the next. So they codified the weavings. That way they could track when someone from the lowlands had inexplicably turned up in the highlands, and vice versa. They created the first truly systematic population control device.”

  I can feel my mouth twisting into a bitter little grimace when I look at him. “Oh no you didn’t. You didn’t just imply I ‘came by my tattoo honestly,’ did you?”

  “What I’m saying,” he says, “is that you aren’t the first to grapple with what that tattoo means.”

  I turn my eyes back to the photos, but I’m not really looking anymore.

  “You could have had it removed,” he continues, but gently, the way I’ve heard Father Tom address the kids he’s catechizing. “My understanding is that most people welcomed the new administration’s removal program as a way of getting past the misguided policies the tattoo represented, and the bitter history it marked.”

  “But that’s the point, Father,” I say, taking care to close the album without damaging the brittle pages. “I know inks weren’t the first to endure this sort of thing, nor likely the last. But years from now, when somebody points to my photo in a dusty album in a library like this one, I want him or her to be able to say ‘I don’t remember the face or the name, but here’s the story of the tattoo.’”

  “It won’t be enough,” he says sadly.

  “No. But it’s a start.”

  3.

  I rent a car and brazen my way through narrow roads and hairpin turns to the hotel closest to what remains of the village. The charming, colonial-style edifice has sprung up because there is an interest in native weavings these days, and there are always a few fabric artists and crafters on busman holidays and mini apprenticeships. I hear a smattering of French, German and English, along with Spanish as I register and walk the halls. But Quiché – my mother’s first language – only when I’m being served breakfast or when the rooms are made up. I don’t understand a word of it, but it tickles some deep recess in my brain.