A silent pause. Nothing. Everything stopped, and it seemed this person had overdosed in front of Macon, because the wretched creature barely blinked and seemed to not be breathing. His eyes just tweaked while something inside was stirring, the inner workings of his clockwork brain firing hard, perhaps short-circuiting. Maybe this was over and Macon could go home.
Suddenly a huge flinch, a couple facial tics, and the man jumped high in the air.
“Ohhhhhh! You are him. Yer the guy! The guy who can pay. Says he can pay? Ha. Oh, you can pay… my ten thousand billion dollars. That is you? You came here to pay? Where is it then? Where’s this money?”
“I don’t have it yet, but I can get it. I needed to talk with you first. You let me go, and I can get it.”
“Okay, okay. You don’t have it. Si, señior, I will let you go. Let you go, okay? Let you go. Let you go… let’s see.”
The man dashed across the cave, giggling and cursing, and then the snorting noises came again. Snnniiifff, followed by an “ahhhh,” followed by another sssnnniiifff and “ahhhh.”
“Just one problem! Just one. Oh, well, there are many problems; there’s water that seeps in here, and no toilet paper to shit with, and cold nights, and bitchy wives, and radio-wave transmissions, and those dirty TJ paraditas that infected my nerve cells. But the problem you have is—problem, I mean, for you is: my face.”
The man hopped in the air, first on one foot, and then the other, and took turns pointing to himself with one hand and then the other. Every movement shifted the crack in Macon’s skull and squeezed his brain in like a vice grip. He was sure the blood was seeping. Nausea built in his gut; he might throw up, vomit, the same way he’d seen some puke in the bucket from the pain of his tattoo gun.
“But my face. My face! You see, you messed with my face. Money doesn’t help that. I need food for me. Kids don’t be eating that. Wife does. Need my salts, which make my brain itch, but it’s okay. I got CalFresh cards, knives… I fuck her. The tribes good to me. I got brothers. I got…
“Wait! You got a CalFresh card? You got one? Oh, I need to search. I need to search you… search through all of you. First your pockets, and then I search yer insides.”
The being was reaching for Macon’s pockets when a child’s voice from behind made the creature flinch.
“Q doesn’t know how to be nice. He doesn’t know.” It was a girl’s voice, but coming from where? Macon didn’t know, but the man immediately screamed back.
“Fodder! Fodder!” The man’s voice echoed in the tunnel. “Little chunks of meat—come get your big chunks of him.” Then he jumped in the air, dancing like a dirty leprechaun.
“Gonna hurt you a li’l more than the smash you got from my friend out there. Yes, that man he gave you a good smash. You got a smash from the tribe. He’s a scout, see—a scout that helps me. Oh, not too much. ‘You got to stay in the dark,’ he tells me. My brother—oh my nice brother, he wants to please. He don’t give a shit about me.”
“You got a brother, monkey-man? Oh, my nice brother. He loves me. He loves these kids. He loves to have them eat. He bailed me out of jail once. But I can’t go nowheres—can’t go nowheres but here, so here’s where I stay. We eating li’l fuckers of the tribe, so they don’t get too big, too overpopulated. It’s okay that way for them. Brother brings them things.”
“I’m not ‘like other people’ he says to me. ‘Don’t belong out in the light.’ I take care of my wife here. If you were like me, you’d live here, but yer not, see? Yer not like me. Fodder!”
“Where is she?” Macon cried. “I can pay… for her and my daughter. Let me just pay and move on. And I can get a ring. It’s worth a lot of money, and you can have it. I can go get it, and then we can walk to the pawn shop.”
The ring’s actually still wrapped in my pocket. If the man finds it, he’ll take it and then nothing.
The man dove on top of him with tweaker speed and squeezed his face. Pain shot through his skull. It felt like the bones and plates were shifting in his head and digging into his brain. Consciousness was seeping in, then seeping out. He got ready to vomit.
“Listen, fucker. You got a ring? Where’s yer ring? You call for it and bring it here. You do that. Better even this, you got people who will pay? Who you got? Who you got, monkey-man?”
The creature held up cell phones in the air, both of them. He had both their phones. Where are the girls?
Macon’s brain filtered through fractured thoughts, searching for an answer of Who could pay? when the creatures fist came crashing down on his head. The noise that Macon heard echoing through the tunnel was his own scream from the skeletal plate in his head shifting.
“Oh, you got life in you. Never mind paying. You got something for me. Fodder! Fodder!” The man raised his head to yell in the air, like a wolf howling in the night, and then he straddled Macon, sitting on his stomach. The man’s hands reached for something in his pants.
I’m about to be sodomized by this tunnel creature, Macon thought, I won’t live through it.
His head pulsated, and with each beat of his heart the blood was getting pushed through his veins and seeping out the crack in his head. Each firing of his thoughts made electrical currents that burned his brain.
I should have called the police. I shouldn’t have run alone.
And so he waited to be sodomized by this animal and punished to his death. But instead he heard metal on metal. The man had dug something out of his pockets and was holding it in the air. The utensil was illuminated by the yellow light of the lantern, and Macon realized what it was: X-Acto knives, a handful of them. Their abrasive handles scraped against each other, making a noise that was almost like music.
Behind the creature, somebody was approaching. He could hear voices, giggles, and then saw children. They were just shadows of dirty twigs, reflections of each other standing side by side, twins but not twins. Or maybe old memories from the children at the pier had squeezed into the crack in his skull.
They inched closer, walking next to one another, and Macon lay there as if on an operating table, but without anesthesia, under black lights and beside dirty knives.
He squirmed with all his might, twisted his body, tugged at the rope, until the creature had enough and slapped his face. The pain seared into him, and he wished it killed him. He wanted to die but he didn’t. He was alive, but his brain felt punctured by part of his skull. A last-chance, desperate protest came screaming out of his mouth, but it was nothing decipherable and fell on deaf, cold ears anyways.
Unless someone is on the trail. They could hear from the trail. So he screamed louder, but this brought another fist to his head. More of his brain was bruised, and consciousness started to leave him.
The knife descended. They were about to cut.
The incision didn’t even hurt. Pressure left his head, like little men were rushing down to his arm to help, leaving a warm trail everywhere. It was like scratching an itch really hard, so hard it bled, and it didn’t itch any longer. Tiny waves of well-being flowed through him, but he feared what lay ahead. The creature was slicing at his gut, and the children were waiting. Just as the blood began to flow, Macon looked down his chest and saw them gather. Like kittens at a bowl of milk, they lapped it up eagerly. Wet tongues felt cold against his skin.
The creature put his forearm across Macon’s neck, cutting off his air stream while he made long cuts down his sides, from his armpit down toward his hips. Macon’s body jerked. Like being given an EKG, his system went spastic, but he was held in place, and the forearm was lifted just in time, before he blacked out. Tongues licked at his sides.
“Thank you, Daddy,” came from one side. “Per-perf-purr-fact,” came from his other.
Macon’s body was flipped over, the contents of his skull shifted and squished, and the underside of his tied arms were cut while the creature knelt on top of him. Macon felt the incision from his elbows to near his wrists, the soft flesh giving way to warm blood that traveled down
his arm and then was licked away by tiny tongues. Coldness started to fill his veins. Endorphins in his body seemed to be leaving, and the blood flow began changing from warm to searing pain. Cuts of the cold metal went deeper, the knife diving into him, not just slicing over the surface but shaving.
A primitive spark fired from deep within and made him thrash like a fish flipping in the open air, but still he couldn’t break free. Rope was tied tight around his limbs, and his body was weighed down like he had an anchor on his gut. His vision started to fade; his dazed eyes looked up and saw the bloody faces of the children, the carving and sawing of the knife, and then their mouths and tongues slurping on pieces. The sight of their muddy, red cheeks faded to the black and grey shading of his mind.
Chapter Fifteen
So many times he’d felt incisions before, and the sweet, grinding purr of the tattoo gun had soothed him during these moments. The high-pitched tone of the needle had become the backdrop of his life, and the smell of green soap was the scent of his days.
The last person to cut into him was Tency. Tency, who he first approached at the Chicago Tattoo Arts Convention after observing her work, had agreed to look at his portfolio, and the next thing he knew, she was his Mr. Miyagi.
Macon’s stone face melted when Tency watched him. Tency’s eyes made his iron jaw loosen and then shake. They beamed a gravitational pull at his heart and kept him under her control, and he could only move on when she allowed it. The time spent as her apprentice was as much learning about Tency as about tattooing, and he wanted to know her backstory, but never would. Macon would have to guess, and this sucked him in deeper. It wasn’t love. Passion wasn’t there—no trace of lust even. It was respect, motherly fondness. She looked at him as a child who was worthy, strong and capable, and she was the place he could run back to no matter what.
“Whoever inks you stays stuck in your fabric forever,” she had told him.
I couldn’t keep her safe.
For months he had been her apprentice and watched over her. He took on charity tats, freebie piercings, and helped sterilize her equipment and power the machines. All the while, he did constant drawings and made piles of flash art that customers who weren’t sure what they wanted, but would know it when they saw it would look through. His art was dark, comical, tragicomic maybe, with big, googley eyes, and bright colors shaded for depth.
Tency had pitch-black hair and ivory skin full of black and grey tats. Just like the work she did, the black and greys were shaded with such perfect gradients, you swore you saw colors, rainbows, and motion. Her signature piece was a profile of her father, or, as she said, “That’s my dad if he had lived.”
Macon’s sleeve of tribal tattoos seemed trite, cliché, and he figured she saw his colorful new style work as childish. Macon secretly feared having visible black and greys on his body. Prison, incarceration, jails; that’s what some folks thought of when they saw only the black and grey ink, so he filled himself with a vivid rainbow instead. Even the words Attack Life. It’s Going To Kill You Anyways were inked on him in a cursive blue.
Despite this, she agreed to ink the colorful monkey on his back. “Finally, that picture is you,” she had told him.
Macon sat still and firm as her canvass and felt like the roof of the Sistine Chapel. The first bite was like a succulent bee sting. With each stroke of her needle, Macon felt like he was being caressed by a beneficent goddess. She was the Virgin Mary, Lady Madonna, both Scylla and Charybdis. The hum and purr put him in a trance, and he imagined his body sucking at hers through the needle, that their blood was being transfused, spilling out of her veins, going into his and then back to her again.
Tency had no living family or partner that he knew of, but Macon did snoop once at a yellow post-it note with the message Call grand-poppa (630) 425-5244 written on it.
So, when the man came walking in the door with her same pitch-black hair, hawk-like nose, and deep-set, exotic eyes, Macon should have been more aware.
Tency stood silent at the front counter, waiting for the man to speak. There was no such thing as a “usual” customer in the shop, but still, he did not seem to be the usual customer. Most customers instantly swiveled their heads at the kaleidoscope of images that surrounded them. This person did not. He simply glared straight ahead at Tency, and his business seemed something else. Macon was listening, but kept his eyes on his piece of work. He was working on a Candy Land piece of flash art with an oversized and slightly sinister King Kandy.
“Tency. How are you this evening? You are open?”
“That’s what the sign says. How’d you find the place?”
“I know the phone number. After that, it’s not hard. But this neighborhood.” He shook his head. “And you here nearly alone.”
“I’m not alone. What do you want?”
“Well, sure, but let’s just suppose I was carrying and had been staking out the place. You are not behind glass. You’re unarmed. You’d be easy prey. Let’s suppose you don’t know what you’re doing here. Let’s just suppose.”‘
“I’m fine; it’s all locked down.”
Macon had heard her argue with customers before, heard her refuse to ink shaved heads with tats of ‘88’ (Heil Hitler) or pierce the nipples of skinheads, but Tency’s voice had become deflated and shaken. Macon looked up from his spot and saw the man take a step behind the counter.
“And the people you serve here. They are safe? Those you bring in willingly. Those you unclothe and mark up. Troublesome. Or how is that you call them… real and raw? Is that one of them back there?”
This was meant for me.
“She’s safe, old man, and I’m here to keep her safe, too,” Macon said, and got up off his chair, took steps toward the counter, and stood tall.
“And if I was a robber… if I had a gun… if I was here to do you harm, maybe have plans for this woman, maybe shoot her, maybe rape her, maybe steal everything… you could do something about that then?”
The stare-down was short, but the eye contact could not have been more direct, more clear, more alpha-male to alpha-male, and with Tency watching, Macon would not allow himself to be castrated and defeated.
Macon’s fists flew sooner than he’d ever have known them to. This threat needed to be knocked down, and he was just waiting to do so. After one smack that glanced off the man’s ducking cheek and a surprised look on his face, Macon found himself tripped up by a quick leg swipe. He fell flat on his back, and this man was on him in an instant and reached into his jacket.
Macon was eye to barrel with a Glock. Tency’s grand-poppa was apparently paying her a visit, and he apparently was a cop. And, Macon figured, he hated her black-and-white “prison” tattoos and hated this place.
Macon’s public defender gave little fight against the power of the police force, and Macon did six months in jail for assaulting a police officer and another six years of probation, which was to end this year. After his release he found a partner and a new place to tatt, and Tency cut off all ties. He met Erin shortly after and never pursued finding Tency like he had planned. He didn’t need to.
But in this tunnel carved into the earth, Tency had come back to him. She was here with him in this cave, carving on his stomach, cutting and cutting and then wiping the tiny spots of blood away with a dab of her towel. Through the stench, Macon smelled the green disinfectant soap that would make everything clean, and underneath it all the scent of ink burning into his body.
But something was wrong. Instead of wipes and dabs from Tency’s towel, there were licks from little mouths, and Tency had forgotten everything she knew, forgotten how to perform her art, and she was cutting deeper into him—not stenciling but carving, pulling out a few tiny bits.
Tency, that hurts. Timeout. I need a break. Something’s wrong. I’m going to puke.
But Tency couldn’t hear him over the sound of the grinding needle. Robbers came in and out of the store that she tried to fight off on her own, but they were too much. Her psych
e was raped again and again. Tency was stuck here, trapped doing tattoos of prisoners, skinheads, and worthless beings who weren’t as smart as her, weren’t as strong as her, and her grand-poppa with the hawk nose and terrible eyes was holding the door open for five-year-old twins carved in swastikas. Yet through it all, Tency still worked on Macon, carving his whole body up, moving down to his thighs, inking on the thick of his quadriceps with tiger stripes, barbed wire, or more tribal tatts.
Macon tried to look, but could not see; his eyes were blurred, his head scattered, and his body at times jerked side to side. Stay still, he said to himself. Stay still. She’s drawing. He knew she was making a scratchy mess on him; both his legs burned and burned more than any run could ever have given him, more than that marathon planned for tomorrow. Was that me who was supposed to do that? Was it?
His brain continued to leak out of his skull, drip by drip. Tency, I’m so sorry. I have to see you. He forced his eyes open, and no, it wasn’t Tency anymore. It was the two of them: Erin, who was going to be his wife, and Lyric, who was going to be his child. Both of them were on top of him, operating on him like medics, but ready to pull the covers over his eyes.
I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t save you, he wanted to whisper to them, but wasn’t sure if it was coming out or not. Do you hear me? Do you hear me? I can’t save you.
But they were gone. The cuts still burned, the tatts still dripped, and his brain still seeped, but they were gone. Heavy, banging footsteps scuffled off. Echoes from the dank cave hit him between gaps of nothing. The tunnel echoed his breathing.
How long was it he had been alone… seconds, hours, or days? He maybe slept, maybe died little deaths and came back to life. Round boulders in his head moved. He saw himself emerging out of a cave, dusty and brown like a mummy, and just as dead as one.
Criss-crossed beams of light flickered. Footsteps were coming from the trail. Rescue workers were here: authorities, the cops, an ambulance. Their voices came in and out of his consciousness.
On the Lips of Children Page 13
