Tattoo the Wicked Cross

by Salas, Floyd;

  Yet the cultivated speech, so different from institute slang, had an almost feminine undertone to it which made Aaron feel uneasy and gave him the impression that something womanly lay beneath the correct manner, the too erect, military posture, and the graceful gestures of the slender hands.

  “I just wish I had received my naval discharge in time to do something about him. I might have prevented this fighting spree. I—”

  “Why don’t you men leave him alone? You act like a bunch of nagging old women. We came here to cheer him up. Remember?” Nora cried. “Isn’t that right, Juanita?”

  “Yesh,” Juanita said, holding a breast of chicken a scant two inches from Barneyway’s open mouth, and whipping her head with an expert motion that removed the hennaed locks from her cheeks but obscured her view of Nora.

  “Yesh, that’s right,” she answered and filled Barneyway’s mouth.

  The frilly lace of her slip and bra was conspicuously visible beneath her sheer blouse. For she had insisted on putting the jacket of her pin-stripe suit about Barneyway’s shoulders in spite of the heat, and he sat, his eyelids sagging with contentment, like an infant cradled in one of her arms while she stuffed him.

  Aaron detested him for allowing it and remembered with sarcasm the lonely dinners Barneyway ate at home: the pre-prepared, warmed-over food, the single plate, and, for company, the wooden back of an empty chair across an empty plain of oilcloth.

  “Let’s see yuh go, Aaron. I don’t know if you got any spunk left. Barneyway can take this place better than you can. Come on,” Stanley challenged, and Aaron jumped up from the blanket, stepped out of the shade and into a clear, sunlighted space, where he charged into Stanley without putting up his guard, eager to prove who had guts and who was a punk.

  But Stanley pawed with his open palms as if he were dog-paddling and effortlessly tapped, tapped, tapped at Aaron, until Aaron, in frustration, took two of them in the face and snapped a jab to Stanley’s stomach.

  “That’s it, think!” Stanley said, grinning, thick lips curling mischievously back from big teeth, and he side-stepped Aaron’s next charge, met the next one with body punches, evaded the following one with an open-handed slap, then skipped away in low, fluctuating clouds of dust with every succeeding charge.

  His balking tactics became more frustrating with the increasing heat, yet Aaron disregarded John’s advice:

  “Don’t hide your face when you charge him. You can’t see what he’s doing,” thinking, with malicious satisfaction, that John was smart, but no fighter, and might have become a Barneyway in the institute; and he charged again, but ran into three fast, stinging slaps; and Stanley moved away, warning:

  “Do what he says. You gotta look at a man to beat him.”

  Aaron’s right eye watered. His cheek tingled. He panted. The bright sun was unbearably hot. He tensed himself to charge a final time, to drop his guard and punch back with doubled fists, but relaxed with Nora’s order:

  “Stop it, Stanley. That’s enough. His face is all red. Now stop it. You come here, Aaron.”

  Stanley lowered his guard, bright teeth big under a curled lip, and stepped toward the blanket as if he had stopped, but suddenly pivoted and sank a fast hook into Aaron’s belly, doubled him up, grunting, more surprised than hurt, sucking breath in to fill the balloon of pain in his rib cage.

  “You rat, Stanley,” Nora cried and, standing, guided Aaron to the blanket, where she sat him down next to her, then slapped Stanley’s shoulder.

  “I’m just helping him keep in shape,” Stanley protested, winking at Aaron, and was joined in laughter by the other men, while Barneyway pretended to be preoccupied with his mouthful of chicken.

  “All you men are alike,” Juanita said, and her pale eyes slanted like an unconscious coquette to look past a hindering lock of hair at Stanley.

  “You’ve got to hurt people just to prove that you’re men. And you’re not satisfied unless you do. I hope my Barnham doesn’t grow up to be that way.

  “Well, you can’t say he’s not already on his way. He’s in here for fighting,” Stanley replied; and Aaron, whose eye still smarted, but who had regained his breath, felt like settling their doubts for them about Barneyway, and, in comparison, his own choice of the slaps—and more: a blade.

  “Tha’s just the trouble. He sees how the rest of you men act and he thinks.…” She stopped to catch her breath and blew out heavy whisky fumes. “And he thinks he’s got to do the same, he—”

  “Well, a boy has got to be manly,” John interrupted, his raised eyebrow a chevron of authority, “but he has to learn that there’s a difference between manliness and brutality, between a gentle man and a bully. The fighting these two boys did to get themselves put in here was nothing less than that of a pack of niggers.”

  “Worse,” Edwin D’Aragon said, stuffing a piece of chicken into his mouth.

  “No, not worse,” Stanley said, “but they’ve got to learn to take it out in the gym, through sports, that’s all. All boys are that way, really. They just gotta use it up in the right place or they’ll keep ending up in jail.”

  “Can’t you men leave them alone?” Nora asked, twin dimples of exasperation in her cheeks. “Do you have to keep punishing them?”

  “Well, by God,” Aaron’s father said, as if Nora had not spoken, and grunted as he reached down to the blanket and pressed against his belly, grabbed a knife, a fork, and his plate of potato salad, set the plate, which was heavy with cubed chunks, egg yolk and egg white, mayonnaise, and pungent onions, upon his closed knees, then began to pry apart the fork tines with his knife blade, to help him spear more salad with each thrust, and said again:

  “Well, by God. The sooner he realizes that about the gym the sooner he’ll get out of here and stay out of here.”

  He shifted his weight, carefully, upon the camp stool and spoke to Aaron.

  “In all my life, me, Edwin D’Aragon, I’ve never been to jail. I’ve outworked five men at a time, and I’ve been in every state in the country, and I’ve been in places full of crooks and bums and even murderers, and I’ve never been to jail. And I’m forty years older than you are, and I can still outwork most men walking, buddy, and I haven’t done any laboring since I was a young man. Acting tough and getting tossed in jail don’t make you a man. You take it from me. You listen to me and you won’t get into trouble like this.”

  He stuffed a big forkful of potato salad into his mouth to signal that he was through, but Aaron resented what he considered a mouthful of food-thickened, self-praising words too much to risk even admitting that he had heard, for he wanted to call his father a belly full of fat in a starched shirt.

  “Why don’t you leave him alone?” Nora shouted and threw her plate on the blanket, and the fork bounced off and smeared potato salad on the red nap.

  “Don’t you remember? We came here to see him and cheer him up! And all you men have done is pick on him. Leave him alone! Can’t you see that he’s almost ready to cry?”

  She tried to put her arm around Aaron, but he pulled away, resenting her insinuation; and she appealed to John.

  “Can’t you make them leave him alone? And can’t you stop it, too?”

  “Late advice is useless,” John said, “and we did come here to have fun with him. But remember,” he glanced at Juanita, “although it never hurt anyone to be loved, overindulgence will only make them weak.”

  “Yeah, but every guy, no matter how rugged he is, likes to be babied a little,” Stanley added; and Aaron began chewing vigorously on his chicken in order to endure their sympathetic glances.

  He then didn’t know which was worse: all the bickering over him or their awkward attempts to enjoy the picnic.

  Their faces were mobile but not contented. Chewing mouths said nothing, but the uncomfortable topic was not closed. It hung in the still air like the hum of Sunday traffic. It floated above the picnic blanket in as disturbing and yet as distant a manner as the strains of jazz from a visitor’s car, which p
assed on the main road. It filtered the sunlight like shading oak leaves, dappled his father’s bald head, played tremulous shadows over the olive skin, spread appealing patches of dark color over the cheeks, and made it appear as if his father was pleading to be understood; and he wanted to speak to his father and break the spell. But time and distance and resentment were as solid as a wall between them. And he was startled when his father lifted himself off the creaking camp stool, with an agility that Aaron had forgotten he still possessed, and said, showing his strong teeth and smiling with mock bravura:

  “Come with me, my leetle boy.”

  John started a conversation which faded out of Aaron’s hearing along a haphazard trail of dusty shrubs and scattered oaks. But it was a conversation which Aaron would have preferred to the useless, uncomfortable one in which his father was going to try and justify his good intentions by a few simple unfamiliar words; and he, himself, was going to agree with too simple answers in order to get the ordeal over with; and his father was then going to feel better, and everything was then going to be exactly the same. He managed to stall and to keep it from starting for a while, but his father finally said, from a tight mouth:

  “We’re trying hard to get you out of here by the end of summer. We weren’t going to tell you, because it’s not sure yet. But your brothers and me have talked to the head of the Community Chest, and he says that because of it just being a fight and if you behave here, we might be able to get you out and put you in a private boarding school. There’s one in San Francisco that might take you.”

  Aaron’s heart palpitated, not with shame or surprise at the unexpected news, but because three months was too long, and the news was like all his father’s promises: too far in the future to help when they were needed and too late to do any good when they were kept.

  “It’s the best we can do,” his father said, shortening his steps, trying to stop. “You’ve got to stay here three months before the county will review your case, and you’ve been here almost a month now. We’ve tried, Sonny, but it’s the best we can do.”

  Mournful syllables of “too-long, too-late,” nearly formed in Aaron’s mouth, but he could not break a long self-disciplined habit of keeping his business to himself, of asking as few favors as possible; and misshapened knife blades flitted through his thoughts in place of an explanation.

  “We’re trying to do the best we can for you … Son-ny,” his father said and his voice cracked; and Aaron looked up and saw his father, truly, for the first time that afternoon.

  Eye whites were yellow. The mouth was slack. And the fat hands trembled so badly that Aaron wanted to clasp them. But he no longer believed his father could suffer for him, that it was for him; and his inability to ask for help stifled his sympathy, a sympathy which he associated with women, punks, and Barneyway, a sympathy which would leave him too weak to stand off the Buzzer.

  “Don’t you have anything to say …? Sonny?” his father asked, stopping. “Don’t you see that’s the very best we can do? We’ve tried, Sonnyboy.”

  Aaron stared at the tufts of grass at his feet to escape the yellow eyes. He then flattened one with his foot, and shook his head, and became aware of a big hand, half-raised, half-extended toward him, as if it were afraid to touch him, but then dared to touch him, and ran thick fingers through his hair.

  “Try to understand, Sonnyboy … Sonnyboy.”

  But the rough massage only raised a tingling resentful shame to Aaron’s scalp, for he didn’t want affection, nor did he want to return it. He cleared his throat. He swallowed. He tried to say something which would stop his father. And he finally managed to nod.

  But his father then hugged him against his fat belly, and pinned his arms to his sides, and kissed his forehead.

  Aaron struggled, and started to cry out, to complain, then gave up, and suffered it, but mouthed silent cries for the blade, the blade, the blade.

  IV

  Whispering blades of tall grass seemed to bend beneath the weight of Aaron’s shadow, which pressed quickly ahead of him toward the creek hide-out, spread the blades, brushed swiftly off the compound wall, and vanished around the corner of the compound before he reached it.

  He glanced back once before turning the corner, although he had already double-checked for stray guards and inmates before leaving the road, then side-stepped along the dirt ledge to the rusted extension of steam pipe which pierced the back wall, leaned gingerly upon the warm metal for balance, dropped into the creek bed, while searching the hedge of branches on its opposite side for a glimpse of blond hair, blue shirt, brown shoe, squatted down, still searching, pulled at the red limb of manzanita, duckwalked into the tunnel, and spotted Skip’s feet hanging below the main pipe channel as the limb swung shut behind him.

  He hopped easily through the intertwining branches, stepped on a hot-ashed butt Skip flipped down at him, and examined the flat face for an answer before the answer, found no answer in the stoical pattern of the face but in the spatula-tipped fingers which unbuttoned the shirt, exposed a black-taped handle, and drew out eight inches of rat-tail file ground into a shiny hatpin point.

  “Wow!” Aaron said and reached for the knife, wanted to touch it, to claim it, to feel its rough-ground surface, both impressed and disappointed by its deadly lead color, its quarter-inch stiletto blade, which was too thin and too light for the sticky black tape of the heavy handle, and yet gave the knife a dangerously swift appearance.

  But he forgot all reservations when he gripped the handle and felt its power surge into his arm, reach his shoulder, tighten his back, and spread through his body, down into his stiffened knees; and he stabbed at the air with vicious strokes, swung around and around, stabbed at leaves, pierced one, two, ripped them into ragged parts, knocked his knuckles against a hard manzanita branch and stabbed again.

  “Easy! Easy!” Skip cried, covering himself with his arms. “Besides, you’re not holding it underhand. Remember? Hook! Hook!”

  Aaron made an underhanded thrust with an easy twist of wrist and hand.

  “Hey! Yuh got control this way,” he said, pleased, and did it again. “Jesus, this blade is so sharp and smooth it oughtta go into a guy’s guts like an ice pick. The Buzzer’ll never know what happened.”

  “Now you’re with it,” Skip said and slid off the pipe. “Better put it away now. Let’s strap it on your leg. That’s the only way to carry it if you’re gonna have it on you all the time. It’ll hold and rip right off. Up!” he said, and he pulled a small roll of tape out of his pocket, blunted the blade’s sharp point with a black gob, bound the blade against Aaron’s shin bone with two bands, bit and tore them with a ragged sound, smoothed them, then patted Aaron’s calf, and said, “There she is, man.”

  Aaron eased himself off the pipe onto his toes, then his heels, slowly, carefully, until the cool, unbending strength and biting pressure of the slender steel, bound to his leg like a splint, felt part of him, until he was unbending, cool, and deadly, and shared its peculiar lead-colored beauty.

  “Yuh like it, huh?” Skip said, biting on his tongue, proud, blond hair illuminated by a beam of sunlight which broke through the canopy of leaves.

  “Yeah, thanks. Yeah. I like it,” Aaron replied. “Just let the Buzzer mess with me now. I’ll show him what it can do, alright. The first chance he gives me.”

  “Show him, then. Show him the first chance you get.”

  Aaron hoped for a chance as he stalked back through the long grass, and Skip had to hurry to keep up with him. He hoped for a chance as he scanned the courtyard through the compound gate, and every linked space was a telescopic lens. He hoped for a chance as he hurried across the courtyard, as he threw open the screen door, as he stepped into the dormitory, but was disappointed by the empty beds and the bare white walls. He still hoped for a chance as he rushed back to the washroom, hoping the Buzzer and lots of guys were inside, hoping he could rip the blade from his shin bone in front of all of them and stab, stab, stab, but there were only empty
toilet stalls and the long yellow urinal, and Skip honked:

  “You’ll get your chance. Don’t worry. You’ll get your chance, but you’ve got to wait for him to start it. Take it easy. Let him start it.”

  Aaron stalked the grounds until dinner time, searching for the Buzzer, hoping to make the Buzzer start it. But the blade taped to his leg did something to his step, and he felt as if he were counting the paces around the boundaries of his own kingdom. He began to survey his fief from a duke’s sight, from a tall, tall height. He grew and he swaggered, and he bounced into the gym, where he shouted instructions to a boxer, criticized a guy punching a heavy bag, gave the guy an example of how it should be done, mocked a guy shadowboxing in front of a mirror, and shadowboxed his way back out the gym door, grandstanding, and wishing, just wishing, Dominic could see him.

  The whistle interrupted Skip’s efforts to calm him down. But after dinner, Skip warned him again that he had to let the Buzzer start it, that he had to use both his speed and a surprise, that he was acting too bad, that the Buzzer was going to back away, do a little planning, and maybe show up with a blade of his own.

  Aaron creeped through the gate at lockup, and he kept Skip’s face in mind across the courtyard. But he let the screen door slam behind him, and it thrilled him, and he purposely slammed his locker door. Then he sang in a loud voice. And he laughed too loudly. And he hung around the Buzzer’s bed. And he could barely keep himself from bragging about his blade, from making smart remarks. And he still overplayed it. And the black face was less annoyed than perplexed. And it remained silent and suspicious until lights out.

  The garbage wagon was his royal coach around the grounds the next day. He hardly saw the Mexican kid who worked with him, and he felt as if he lifted all the cans himself. He waved to “regulars,” at work on their daily jobs, he usually passed without a nod. He rein-slapped the old horse into a close gallop on every return trip from the dump, and he made every guy in his path jump out of the way.