You’re not alone, Aaron. I’ll find some way.… I’ll.…”
She drew in her breath and didn’t finish, for she realized that he was staring at the tattoo, and she lowered her head, self-consciously, but in such a way that to him, above her, the pale lashes of her lowered eyes swept out to the rims of her cheeks, and the tattooed dot was like a dark tear clinging to the tips of long curling strands.
He became convinced that it was a tear, a dark pathetic tear of a little girl who didn’t even know how to double her fists, but who had fought back at her mother for him with it, and who had ruined her face for him with it, and it shamed him and his self-pity and the pleasure he had enjoyed at her suffering.
“I’ll find a way, Aaron,” she said, but was unwilling to look at him.
“I know you will,” he said, trying to make her feel better. “But forget about it now.”
“I’ll find a way.”
“Forget about it,” he said, loosening his hand, wanting to caress the tattoo, but he said, instead: “Say? I thought visits were supposed to be happy?”
“Huh?” she said, looking at him but covering the beauty mark with her fingers.
“Huh, what?” he said and touched the top button of her sweater.
“Huh?” she said again, confused, and looked down, and he flicked her nose with his finger tip, and her head jerked up, eyes wide-circled with surprise, then chinked with a smile, and she pretended to slap him, but tapped his cheek, and he clapped his hand against it and fell back against the gym wall, and they both began to laugh.
He noticed the cute quiver her small double chin had when she giggled and this increased his pleasure, and he said to hell with the beauty mark and the Buzzer and Rattler and Barneyway and Big Stoop, too. To hell with everything that might ruin his visit, the only chance in the week that he got to be with someone of his own choosing, who chose him. He loved her and that was all that counted.
Love?
The warm oval of her laughing face had strange, yet familiar highlights to it; and he thought that they might be caused by the tattoo. But he stopped laughing and stared at her.
Giggles bubbled up from her double chin more slowly and trailed off as she began to return his gaze with a curiosity that quickened the blue in her eyes, a blue that seemed to turn, gradually, to the warm shade of coral with her discovery, and then quickly vanished as she looked away.
The word love embarrassed him, for kids didn’t love each other. But the piquant face lifted slowly toward him, and the blue eyes, the pale freckles, the beauty mark came slowly into his view, as if confirming his thoughts, the important word he was trying to make himself believe. And the closed lips spread softly, in the faintest hint of a smile, and he knew that she had said yes, yes, she did … love … him.…
Part Eight
On Each Fist
I
Mirage pools of light shimmered on the varnished hardwood surface of the gym floor, giving it an appearance to Aaron, with the heedless and heavy bouncing of the many boys who boxed, shadowboxed, did calisthenics and jumped rope upon it, as transparent and treacherous as thin ice.
“Punch, punch,” Dominic said, joking, for Aaron’s shoulders twitched defensively, as if slipping the sloppy, roundhouse punches of a colored guy who boxed near him; but Dominic added, seriously: “A little blond guy, Aaron, called Skip. He can get you a blade if anybody can.”
“What’s the guy’s name?” Aaron asked, without smiling at the joke, wishing he could forget the whole project, not just the name.
“I’ve told you twice, man, twice! I know you ain’t hot for this idea yet,” Dominic said, leading Aaron past two boys working out with a medicine ball; and Aaron winced when the heavy ball thudded into one kid’s tensed stomach muscles and buckled slightly when it was snapped back into the other guy’s walled belly.
“But hot or not, you gotta have an equalizer after I go home. A long blade will keep that nigger at a distance.”
“I don’t wantta cut nobody, man,” Aaron replied, hoping the colored guy who shadowboxed by them with sharp smooth movements and whose body tapered from wide shoulders to a tiny waist hadn’t heard Dominic.
His own admiration for the guy’s skill and build was quickly stifled by the stink of the body and the T-shirt, which was yellowed stiff with sweat, and he feared that a blade would put him in the same class. For most of the colored guys from way down West Oakland carried them, and the Mexican guys from Seventh Street had blades in their black zoot suits, and the Okies in Government Village had them, too, while nobody in his gang had one.
“Would you rather be stomped? Punked like Barneyway?”
“Would you rather be dead?” Aaron asked, annoyed by the stupid question. “I’m here, aren’t I? We’re looking for the goddamned guy.”
But sweat hung in the still air, smelled warm, smelled stale, smelled like old leather boxing gloves, punching bags, smelled like all the black and worn equipment of crushed and scarred old pros, smelled like the old pros, too, and smelled like the sweaty tales they told in the battered locker rooms of dark gyms, for the victorious battles were just as gone and just as forgotten to everyone but themselves as all the lost decisions, the TKOs, and the never heard ten-counts.
He then stalled by watching a boy do sit-ups, still searching for some way out, but only saw a body coil painfully off the floor like a slowly wrapping spring, squeeze into a jackknife against the stiffened knees of outstretched legs, then uncoil slowly, punishingly, and become one trembling, suffering band from the toes to the sweat-limp hair of the scalp.
“Come on,” Dominic said, impatiently, and almost walked into a Mexican kid jumping rope, who seemed to hover an inch off the shiny floor with the easy grace of a hummingbird: skip-tap, skip-tap, skip-tap, skip-tap, but whose teeth were gritted with strain.
Dominic stepped around him and continued toward the open door of an adjoining room, from where the rhythmic pop of punching bags grew increasingly louder, and through which he led Aaron to a shirtless blond kid, who was punching a heavy bag.
“This is Skip, man,” Dominic said and the boy stopped punching, but breathed heavily, every muscle in his long trunk pinked with sweat and exertion.
“This is my boy, Aaron, Skip. He’s gonna need an equalizer to handle the Buzzer and Rattler with when I leave the end of this week.”
Skip popped a final, lazy punch solidly against the bag and turned a broad-cheeked, fist-flattened face to Aaron, squinting at him with eyes almost level with his own, but as if measuring him for a right cross. His blond hair was wild with pomade and exercise, and his voice, although congenial, sounded as if it honked through his crushed nose:
“Say! Isn’t this the little guy who kicked your butt a couple of weeks ago? and right after you stopped that spook?”
“The one,” Dominic said, “and the same little dude who battled against all those beans from Santa Clara. Remember we talked about that?”
“Yeah. Damn right, I remember,” Skip said and, pulling off his bag glove, he shook Aaron’s hand with a hot, slippery palm.
“Small man, bad man. Come on, let’s go somewhere where we can talk private.” He waved his glove at a boy who was punching a light speedbag, with a loud racket, against a top board, and added: “Wait for me in the gym.”
The seconds of the short wait were pounded out by punching bags, the minutes punctuated by the body thuds and head smashes of boxing gloves, filled with the busy sight of many boys sharpening their bodies to hurt each other, while Aaron waited for a blade which could kill; and he was not pleased when Skip swaggered across the gym floor, his face washed, his shirt on but still unbuttoned, its tails hanging to his knees, and twirling a black comb through his blond hair, led them out a side exit into the sunlight, midway between the chapel annex and the empty ring, opposite the caged windows of the metal shop.
“Now, what’s coming down?” Skip asked, buttoning his shirt.
“Yeah,” he said, listening intently, tucking i
t into his pants.
“Yeah, yeah,” he answered when Dominic had finished.
“Yeah, I’ll get him a blade. Take time and work. But when I do, he’s gotta forget where he got it, and I hope he sticks it up that nigger’s ass,” and he cinched his leather belt and hooked his thumbs in it, while waiting for Aaron to speak.
The weather vane cock on the dairy roof glinted brightly in the distance, caught Aaron’s attention, and remained fixed in his mind as he sat heavily down upon the stairs without speaking, although he was aware that he should thank Skip, that making a blade was not only work but dangerous, that Skip could get the hole for it at the very least, and that it was a great favor for a guy you didn’t know, even if he didn’t want it!
Wrinkles of annoyance lifted the swollen tip of Skip’s nose, and he unhooked his thumbs to say something, but Dominic motioned to him to keep quiet and said to Aaron:
“If you got it, you might not have to use it, Aaron. The Buzzer is a real hound when it comes to giving up some of his black booty for a bully job. Ain’t that right, Skip?”
“He’s a dog. He’ll run before he’ll risk a blade on his leathery rump,” Skip replied, and the colored glass in the chapel windows glowed with Aaron’s rising hope. But the weathercock was as thin and sharp as a blade, and Judith’s smile spread softly, subtly in his mind. Good was not a knife in his pocket or hidden under his shirt.
“Look,” Dominic said, sitting next to Aaron on the stairs. “You like seeing the little chick, right?”
“Yeah, and that’s the trouble.” Aaron wasn’t even surprised that Dominic had guessed his thoughts. “How’m I gonna face her with an equalizer under my shirt? Tell her I’m playing it cool when I’m ready to risk killing a guy?”
“Now, listen,” Dominic said, as Skip walked down the stairs and stood in front of them, his nose wrinkled with perplexed curiosity. “Now, didn’t I tell yuh once that you should hang onto that little chick because she was gonna help you do this time? Especially when it got so bad you felt like dying?”
“Yeah.”
“You know what I think about bitches that make you weak, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Have I ever bumrapped your little girl in any way?”
“No.”
“Read then,” Dominic said and stuck out both of his clenched, tattooed fists.
“Read!” he said.
“Love and Hate. One on each fist. Both! It takes both, Aaron. It takes your little girl. But it takes this bad-acting right fist of hate, too, and first! You can’t make it in this institute or anywhere without both. Somebody’s gotta care for you and you for them. But you gotta keep yourself strong enough to be able to care. A guy who’s not strong can’t really care. Look at Barneyway! Look at that punk! So weak, he has to use up all his caring on himself. He wouldn’t even help you when you were fighting for him! Can’t you see?”
Barneyway’s opaque, indifferent eyes and his crucified stand against the dormitory wall seemed to Aaron to make visual sense of Dominic’s words, and his own mother’s skull-like face in the hospital bed was the worst proof in a different way: caring without being strong got you done in young. Judith didn’t really know what he was fighting against, either, and how about her dot? It was a beauty mark and for pretty, but gutty, too: sort of a sign of good and bad, like Dominic’s two fists.
“How do I scare ’im?” he asked.
“Warn ’im,” Dominic said, but added hastily: “don’t tell him what you got for him. Then he can figure out a way to handle it, if he wants to bad enough. Just tell him you got an equalizer. That oughtta throw a scare in ’im.”
“But what if I don’t scare ’im?”
“Flash it on ’im. Let him see its metal.”
Click of a springblade knife, a sharp-edged shine, and Aaron could picture himself threatening the Buzzer with a push button.
“But what if that don’t scare ’im?”
“Then you gotta stick ’im, or he’ll take it away and stick you, screw you like he screwed your buddy,” Skip said, but calmed Aaron’s quick anger by the matter-of-fact tone in which he spoke, for it was apparent that he wasn’t trying to show off.
“You’d have to stick ’im,” Dominic said, reluctantly.
“Wow! I got no choice, do I?”
“If you act like you ain’t shuckin’, you do,” Dominic replied. “If he sees that you mean it, he won’t risk jumping you.”
“And if he does? Jumps me with Rattler and some of his boys, because he knows I’ve got the blade?”
A circle of guys surrounded Aaron, closed slowly in upon him, and he looked carefully into Dominic’s face to make sure he wasn’t kidded, and the weather vane poked like a thin horn tip above the curly head.
“Get the closest one, then,” Dominic said and jabbed with an imaginary blade and jumped off the stairs and jabbed again.
“Get him bad. Make him drop it goes in so far. And when the others see this, it’ll stall ’em. Then run, man. Get out in the open where you got lots of room, where you can do something. Move, use your speed, if they got the guts to try you some more.”
“How do I hold it?” Aaron asked, captured by Dominic’s dramatization.
“Underhanded, man. Like this.” Dominic held his hand with the fingers up and the knuckles down. “Just like a hook to the belly. They can’t block it easy or slip it without getting hurt, and yuh got control that way. Try it.”
Aaron jumped off the stairs and threw a hook to the belly, and Skip danced back, holding a blade in his hand, too.
“You can jab, jab, jab like you’re boxing, too,” he said, spearing at Aaron with his left hand, and Aaron danced back, and Dominic danced back, and they made a tense triangle: each with a blade, each poised on his toes, each ready to fight and die.
“And if he goes down?” Aaron cried. “Tries to get up?”
“Don’t change your grip. Jump in and poke down, that’s all. Like this!” Dominic shouted and hopped forward and jabbed down, grunting with each slow and deliberate corkscrew motion of his entire arm.
“But he’s getting up! Get ’im! Get ’im!”
“He’s tough,” Aaron cried and hopped in and jabbed, and then jabbed again.
“He’s tough! He’s tough! Help us, Skip! Help us! Help us!”
“I’ll kill that mutha’,” Skip said and hopped in and jabbed once, twice, and, face flattened with aggression, kept jabbing and jabbing and jabbing and jabbing and jabbing.…
II
Reflections wavered and stretched and distorted in the clash of glass and afternoon sunlight on the library’s bay window, yet heightened the contrast between Aaron’s wrinkled and soiled dungarees and Dominic’s immaculate steel-gray suit.
Aaron, too, while dreading the arrival of the man who would take Dominic home and Skip, who might arrive with bad news or too late or both, kept adding to the distortion and the contrast by constantly glancing at the window, wiping his hands on his thighs, sticking them in his back pockets, lifting his legs and pulling up his stockings, and kicking at the tiny blackened pebbles embedded along the edges of the asphalt road.
“Skip’ll be here, just like he promised, and he’ll bring good news about the blade. You can count on the guy. It takes time. The metal shop ain’t no knife factory, you know,” Dominic said, but Aaron couldn’t make himself respond.
For Dominic was going home and he wore his semidrape go-home suit with the casual ease of a guy who knows he looks good, and who can afford to ignore the envious stares of the passing guys and the boys in the library, whereas he, Aaron, still had to do his time, had to do it alone, had a for-sure battle coming up, still didn’t have an equalizer, and felt dirty and small as he looked in the window.
“Look, man,” Dominic said, explaining all over again, but without heat, without exasperation. “He stole the file Tuesday, right?”
Aaron didn’t answer, for going over the facts only made them more painful, and only to stand where Dominic was standin
g, and have that sharkskin suit fit himself with such good taste—the fingertip coat was buttoned on the inside of the double-breast and the fold which flapped free gave the coat a tapering, casual cut—would truly console him.
“Right?”
Aaron nodded but judged the knees of the slacks as twenty-eights, the cuffs as fifteens and compared them to the smaller knees and twelve-inch cuffs of most of his own drapes.
“Then he didn’t get to grind it down until Wednesday, right? Right?” Dominic insisted until Aaron had to look at him, but Dominic’s ruddy complexion and his black pomaded hair went so handsomely with the black knit tie and the wide white lapels of the spread collar, Aaron felt worse.
“He didn’t get to finish it yesterday. Ain’t that right now?”
Aaron nodded again, but it was useless, and he only longed for a pair of his own stompers, with their toes polished into as brightly burnished half-moons of dark cordovan as Dominic’s.
“He figured he’d get it done today if everything worked out, and he promised he’d come and tell us about it here, now, before I left. Now ain’t that right? Ain’t it? Ain’t it?”
“Yeah, yeah, I know. I’m not saying anything, am I?”
“You ain’t saying nothing at all, and I’m going home for good in a few minutes. Half hour at most. You oughtta be saying something,” Dominic said and jabbed Aaron’s arm hard, knocked him off balance, hurt him, and Aaron fell into a crouch and feinted, but did not punch, and tried to apologize:
“I’m sorry, Dominic. I don’t want yuh to go, but I am glad you’re getting set free, and that’s the truth.”
“I’m glad you’re glad,” Dominic chuckled, “’cause if you weren’t, I’d swear you were going to a funeral, for sure.”
Tattoo the Wicked Cross Page 20
