Tattoo the Wicked Cross

by Salas, Floyd;

  He tried to relax and let the fatigue of his body seep into and still the crowding turmoil in his brain, while he focused all his thoughts upon the figure of his mother, hoping that the strong haloed glow which surrounded it would settle over everything nearby. For the standard he needed was there in her person: she was kind but her sons had to be brave, and she had insisted that he live up to the examples set by his father and his brothers.

  But the glow around Barneyway’s mother came from a jukebox in a downtown bar, filled with loud music and sailors. Its gaudy lights painted her drunken face with shifting colors, smeared her lipstick, spread her hair into wild tangles, and Aaron had to force his eyes open and keep them open in order to make the picture go away.

  Sleep and sounds then began to fuse together: snores groaned with the weight of his worries, then all ground together in his head with the slow revolutions of a concrete mixer, then spilled with the pressure of sliding mud down the chute of his throat into his body, smothered the beat of his heart, spread in a swelling mass into his aching stomach, sunk with expanding pressure into his bowels, and put such a continuing and uncomfortable strain upon his sphincter muscle that he finally had to force himself to get out of bed, while still asleep, and stagger down the dormitory to the toilet, only to stop and stagger back, like a cripple from the contracted muscle, at a dark shape which loomed in the faint light ahead and leered at him with eyes as vacant as mask slits.

  The toilet was such a long block behind it that Aaron kept backing up, for he couldn’t run because of the pressure and he was afraid to turn his back to the shape, until he was able to escape by a flight of stairs. He managed to climb its tortuous steps without losing control by keeping his legs together, and he reached a toilet on its top landing with the swinging, slatted doors of old-fashioned saloons he had seen in cowboy movies.

  A shape lingered inside but the cramps were too dreadful for him to care, and he pushed through the slatted doors only to stagger back from the stench of stale urine and dry clots of human stools which were scattered about the floor. His stomach retched. His eyes smarted and watered. And he feared he might have to squat and relieve himself on the landing, but, luckily, he saw another toilet at the far end of a long hall with a man inside it.

  He started toward it but each heel step against the hall floor was a sharp rectal pain, and yet his legs floated as if he did not touch the floor, and there was no sound to his steps, and he walked for blocks and blocks and it took him hours and hours, and the gas writhed in his bowels, and his sphincter muscle was cramped, and he could not wake up, and he began to doubt that he would ever reach it and then reached it, but there was no sound in it either, although he rushed in and staggered over a drunken man on the dirty floor, who had unbelted pants, a ghastly white complexion, and looked as if he had been knocked down, for there was a scratch of blood by his mouth.

  Shadows sat on bright enamel bowls, too, and Aaron backed out. He backed all the blocks to the other toilet, and it again took him hours and hours, and he began to doubt that he would ever reach it and then reached it, and the stench was gone, and business-suited men loitered inside, and a hand pointed to an empty booth, and a voice warned him to stay away from the other toilet.

  He unhooked his belt and started to unbutton his fly when veined hands grabbed for him. He slapped the hands and jumped out of the booth and knocked the charging shadow out with a smashing right cross and felt its powerful jolt in the bone socket of his shoulder.

  A rose bloomed on his flexed bicep, but none of the shadows on the bowls accepted his challenge, and he turned to leave.

  Several pairs of violently swinging doors blocked him and the shadow was behind him again. But he was no longer afraid, and he timed the doors, jumped through them with neat co-ordination, and climbed another flight of stairs.

  Splinters from the rough flooring of an old stage hurt his bare feet, and he discovered that a nude boy sat on a toilet seat upon the stage, facing a dark auditorium, with an older woman, whose naked breasts sagged down to her stomach, on one side of him and a teen-age girl, with pale nipples, on the other.

  Shrieking laughter.

  Rows of teeth fenced the ridged roofs of their gaping mouths.

  The wooden toilet partitions were only waist high and the three nudes could see each other. The water closets were suspended in the air above the seats, and rusty chains with wooden handles hung down by each sitter and were connected to a green, corroded wire, which connected all of the water closets and they could all be flushed together.

  All of the seats in the theater were empty, then suddenly filled with naked teen-age boys and girls. The boys’ laughter, counterpointed by the shrieks of the girls, exploded in the huge hall and waves of air pressure buffeted Aaron’s nude body. He saw that an extension wire ran from the water closets out above the audience, and a toilet chain hung low enough from it for members of the audience to reach up and flush the toilets.

  A hoarse chanting then rose from the audience and began to increase in noise and tempo like a football yell, and it took him a while to get accustomed to the sounds and to grasp that the nudes on the stage were having a contest and that he could look at the girl when she went but not at the older woman, for she was a mother.

  He tried to make out the features of the girl and the woman, for they were vaguely familiar. But they both turned their faces away from him, and he started to tiptoe out in front to get a better look at them when he stopped in horrified shame.

  Hideous grunts came from the woman’s twisted mouth, and she strained so harshly that all the muscles in her body swelled, her face turned a livid red, and her eyes bulged out. Finally, she farted, let go with a loud splash, and gave a deep, baying moan of relief.

  The entire audience clapped their hands over their heads and ducked their heads between their knees, then sat up with the synchronized movement of a formation of soldiers, and began to giggle.

  The giggling grew louder and louder and louder until it reached the roar of hysterical laughter, and at its very peak, a thin wan-fleshed boy jumped up and grabbed the handle of the toilet chain.

  He lifted it high in his clenched fist with an exaggerated, slow movement of his arm, gritted his teeth in a struggle to control either laughter or sobs, jerked the handle down, and snapped the chain and the extension wire into a loud rattle and a vibrating hum—a hum which sounded above the wild laughter and above the crash of water in the flushed toilets.

  Part Four

  King’s X

  I

  Rushing water crashed on Aaron’s skull and pounded into a laughing, shrieking, whistling, constantly increasing crescendo until he awoke, threshing about, to the get-up whistle, threw the covers back, hurried to the washroom, lifted his nightgown, and dropped upon the cold horseshoe of a toilet seat.

  He sat with the skirt of his nightgown hoisted around his waist, bunched in his lap, his feet chilled by concrete, and his sight swimming with sleep. He relieved his aching bowels and relaxed, but the rising fumes revived the nightmare, that baying moan of relief, that mother who sat as he sat, who …

  Stall walls shut him into his own stink.

  Light winked from a porcelain washbasin.

  He wiped himself with disgust and did not look in the toilet when he flushed it.

  He would not look in the steamed mirror above the washbasin, either. He even avoided the misty reflection of the nude light bulb in it, and tried to splash the memory of the grunting mother out of his head with cold water. He failed and stared at the running water as it whirlpooled to the top of the bowl, rather than look at any of the boys who were crowding into the washroom around him. But the animal sounds of blown noses, the trickle of urine in the trough, the flushed toilets, the growl of a mouth getting ready to spit out a lunger were so nauseatingly real that he took a deep breath, held it, and plunged his head into the water.

  The cold shock tightened his skin. He opened his eyes and rolled them. The white basin tilted and waved. Hi
s eyeballs chilled, smarted, and warmed with their own moisture when he closed his lids. Water sighed, sleepily, in his ears. But his ears popped with suction when he straightened up and the bellow of noise woke him completely.

  He ran his fingers through his hair, still staring at the bowl, grasping why people chose suicide by drowning, then pulled the rubber plug, stepped away from the washbasin, bumped into the first boy in line behind him, and walked with a dripping face and a haunted mind into the dormitory, where he was repelled by each nervous tic of Barneyway’s wiry body as it dressed facing the locker, by each quick peek over the shoulder of the timid eyes, by the fingers that worried so hopelessly over a single button, by a toe that took two, two, worthless tries to slip into a sock.

  At his own locker, he tried to rub the memory of the squatting mother away with his towel and rubbed so hard his face burned. But she sat on the bed when he fixed it, although she left no imprint. She sat close to the locker when he put his uniform on, and she sat next to him when he put on his shoes. She was in the mirror when he combed his hair. And she was in his head when he stood for count. She sat there, grunting, straining in his brain. Mothers did … they did … Mothers did … shit! And he winced and ducked his head, flattening his foreneck with his chin.

  “What’s the matter, man?” Dominic asked.

  “Nothing. Nothing,” Aaron answered, and held tightly to the foot railing of his bed for count.

  “Don’t let the Buzzer’s show last night throw yuh,” Dominic said, and Aaron didn’t reply, for he was quite willing to let Dominic believe anything in order to avoid an explanation of what was really wrong.

  And although furrows of concern creased Dominic’s brow, he kept the festering cause of his anguish to himself throughout the march to the mess hall, through the gantlet of the food counter, with its irritating clash of trays, pans and silverware, and safely into the obnoxious slurping sounds of a small army of boys at breakfast.

  “Look, man. I know you’re bumkicked over your buddy. But you gotta have something in your belly. You can die in a place like this. Nobody’ll notice. Drink some chocolate, anyway.”

  Aaron picked up the cup and let a mouthful of the warm slightly-bitter liquid glove his tongue, swallowed it, and then repeated the useless act. But he let a swallow linger and cool in his mouth once, started to consider why, and the mother took shape again. He then set the cup down and tried to respond to Dominic’s attempts to cheer him up.

  He heard Dominic say that it was Saturday, that there was no work, and that they were free to enjoy themselves. But his eye kept drifting back to the cup, back to the cup, back to the cup until he noticed a small piece of cooled chocolate clinging to its lip like coughed-up phlegm.

  The piece was nauseating and yet he kept looking at it.

  He listened to Dominic and still he looked at it.

  He turned his head and looked back at it.

  He turned his body and sneaked a glance at it over his shoulder.

  Finally, he forced himself to pick up the cup and drink the piece down to get it out of his sight, but shook his head with distaste when it slid down his throat.

  “I told yuh to forget the Buzzer and your buddy,” Dominic said. “Now, let’s get out of here.”

  Chocolate drowned the words of denial in Aaron’s mouth, but still willing to let Dominic misunderstand, he swallowed and, without speaking, followed Dominic outside, only to be confronted by the timid hump of Barneyway’s back a few feet from the doors.

  He guessed that Barneyway had not eaten, since he and Dominic were the first to leave the table, and heedless of Dominic’s well-meant but misconceived instructions, he tried to care about Barneyway’s plight, and think about the dangerous cost of caring.

  He tried to imagine a broken nose, black eyes, maybe a gang stomping, maybe a …

  But the coarse hairs which V’d, imperfectly, down the back of the neck into the blue collar struck him as being such a pitiful sign of weakness, of … the squatting mother reappeared with Barneyway’s face.

  “There’s gonna be boxing matches behind the gym quick, Aaron,” Dominic said, with unmistakable meaning.

  The clear blue of the morning sky heightened the luster of Barneyway’s eyes.

  “Let’s me and you kill time till then walking around, Aaron,” Dominic said and walked a few steps in the direction of the gym.

  “Let’s go, Barneyway,” Aaron said, looking squarely into his eyes, ignoring Dominic, trying to prove to himself that he did care.

  “I gotta get a book outta the library,” Barneyway said, squinting at Aaron, but glancing at Dominic. The lie as obvious as the groove the squint made in the bridge of his thick nose.

  “Come on, man. Come on with me.”

  “I gotta get a book.”

  “I want ’cha to go, man.”

  Barneyway plucked at the front of his shirt as if there were lint on it and ignored the plea.

  “Let’s make it,” Dominic said, and Aaron hesitated, feeling that he had a right to leave because he asked Barneyway to go with him, yet wanting to support his friend, even if he could see no worthwhile reason for either fighting or winning, and he stalled, hoping for some alternative to occur, for some kind of compromise to present itself.

  But Barneyway picked a piece of lint from his shirt and pretended to study it, and, as the woman reappeared, Aaron started after Dominic.

  “Yuh gotta forget about that guy’s problems,” Dominic said, “and start thinking about the good things that are happening. Think about those good bouts that are gonna go on real quick.”

  Dominic’s descriptions of the great fights he had seen behind the gym, and the buildings and trees and figures they passed, and the paths they followed on a long, rambling walk around the main grounds were no more than background for Aaron’s recurring nightmare visions—visions which fused with the background into that final, horrifying scene on the old wooden stage, with that mother grunting and straining and turning a livid red.

  He also found, as they walked, that whenever he let his gaze rest on a particular spot, a tree trunk, a bleacher, a compound bench, his idling mind conjured up a picture of the mother that was hard to shake because it in turn affected the rest of his thinking and his body, too, and his chest felt as empty as his stomach, and not one of the things he thought he believed in seemed worth a kicked-in rib.

  Groups of boys all rushing in the same direction disturbed him as badly as the shadowy shapes of the nightmare, and he tried to blame the phenomenon on his imagination when Dominic suggested they cut across the visitors’ lawn for the fights at the gym.

  He then attempted to rush away from his tortured thoughts, caught himself, and tried to pace himself, but it was difficult for him to make each step reach only as far and take only as much time as Dominic’s steps because Dominic leaned back as if someone were pushing at his waist and kicked his feet forward with a loose-ankled and confident nonchalance.

  The pace grew harder to control as they drew nearer to the gym and his desire grew to forget all his problems in the excitement of a boxing match; it became almost impossible to control when he glimpsed the white ring apron, a corner post, and the bristling yellow ropes. And the sight of a hundred or more boys standing around the ring behind the gym, shouting for two colored boys, who were stripped to the waist and who pounded away at each other in a wild slugging match, so excited him that his yells of encouragement, his shouted instructions to the fighters attracted attention even before he and Dominic reached the top of a hillock.

  “Right hand ’im! Right hand ’im! he yelled to the crouching boy because the tall guy carried his left hand low.

  “Jab-jab-jab! Machinegun ’im!” he called to the tall guy because the shorter boy charged in and didn’t punch until he had rammed his shoulder into the tall guy’s stomach.

  Throughout the round he wanted to jab for one and throw the overhand right for the other, and only the ring of a rusty bell and the crowd’s applause quieted his crie
s and caused him to notice the humorous shake of Dominic’s head.

  The sweating black bodies of the two boys disappeared below the ring in a blanket of blue dungaree, patched here and there by the white uniform of a guy from the kitchen crew. There was an anxious lull as the crowd waited for the next bout to begin. Faces tilted toward the empty ring, patient, quiet. But when several minutes passed and no boxers climbed through the ropes, a restless milling began, and the squatting figure reappeared in the very center of the ring, the sun spotlighting her sagging, tremulous breasts, her straining attempts to win the contest, and Aaron turned to Dominic, trying to rid himself of it.

  “Everything’s okay, man,” Dominic said. “Enjoy yourself.”

  But his face wrinkled into a perplexed scowl and Aaron had to turn away to hide his self-pity.

  “Be back,” Dominic said, and, without explanation, he began to push through the crowd. His curly head threaded its way to the ring apron, talked to the khaki cap of a man there. A tattooed arm reached up and dropped a blue shirt upon the apron. Both of Dominic’s arms reached back, elbows uppermost, and his T-shirt waved like a flag. Then he climbed up the steps, through the ropes, and frowned as the man tied his gloves.

  Feathers of anxiety for Dominic fluttered in Aaron’s stomach as a stringy-muscled colored guy, stripped to the waist, black flesh rippling with highlights, climbed into the ring and waited for the man. But Aaron was more scared by the large audience, by the risk of getting badly whipped in front of so many people than by the colored guy, a beating itself, or the fact that there was no matching of weights between the boxers.

  The bell rang and the two boys circled each other. Aaron crouched with Dominic, head down, heavy chin tucked into the thick mat of hair on his chest, massive shoulders and arms covering his face and belly, built of stone.