Tattoo the Wicked Cross

by Salas, Floyd;

  “I can’t make up my mind, because I do belong here,” Aaron said. “This is where I belong, in a reform school. And why should I believe you? What do you know what goes on here? Compromise! You’ve never had to fight in your life. Spent all your life in school with sissies, bookworms. Come around on holidays, with manicured fingernails and fancy advice. What do you know? You look like a judge right now, with that old man’s vest. What do you know? You don’t know nothin’! Nothin’!”

  His father spun around, as if ready to reprimand, but hesitated at the sight of Aaron’s face, then cried:

  “Let’s get out of here! He doesn’t want to be helped. I can’t stand this anymore.”

  “I know you can’t stand it,” Aaron shouted. “Yeah, I know you can’t. Go on, get out! Get out! Get out!”

  John started, and then snapped to attention, as if he were going to give an order, but his body slackened, and he motioned to the others to follow him, and left the room.

  “Pray, Aaron, pray,” Nora said and tried to kiss him, but he shoved her away.

  “Pray? Look who’s talking about praying? You haven’t been to confession since Mother died! You spit on her coffin. And you been having a ball since! What if she saw you in that suit coat? V-neck. No blouse. You go pray. You need it worse than I do. Go on! Get out! Go pray! Go pray!” he shouted at her, and he dropped back onto the pillow and stared at the ceiling, while her high heels tapped out of hearing, hurt because they made him feel at fault when he believed they were at fault and because they didn’t solve his problem for him, and then surprised when the chair scraped and he saw Judith.

  “Why don’t you go with ’em, stool pigeon?” he said, trying to stop her approach.

  “I wanted to try and explain, Aaron,” she replied and moved shyly but stubbornly closer.

  Her features were extraordinarily clear to him, but framed as she was by the bright window behind her, shadows hovered like a premature age upon her face, creating slight cheek puffs below her eyes, and he wondered if she had been crying.

  “I told them … Aaron … because … I wanted to help you … Aaron. I didn’t know.… I would have never believed … that something like—”

  “Just like you didn’t know why you put on that tattoo, huh?” he interrupted and made her wince. “Where are your tight skirts? What are you doing with a pleated one on? You’re nothing but a paddy chick. I should’ve never let that beauty mark fool me. Don’t hide it.”

  The tattoo was disappearing behind her profile.

  “I thought you were gutty. Promise together, hah!”

  “That’s not fair, Aaron,” she said, but the tattoo sat like a still target in the center of a blush spot, and her explanation was feeble. “I wanted to help you. Don’t you see that?”

  “I sure do see. I see myself in a hospital bed. I see what a weak bitch did to me.”

  “Bitch?” she said and her voice almost broke. But she pointed at the tattoo, which trembled, as if it were imbedded at the flabby base of the cheek puff, and stuttered: “I-I-I-I, I should have never come to see you in the first place, and, then, I, I, I wouldn’t have thisssss.”

  But he repeated: “Bitch! Bitch!” trying to drive her away.

  She bit her lips, but stayed. And there was a long pause in which the loud-speaker crackled, and squawked, and obliterated a name, and which she ended with her admission: “Aaron … I don’t know how to make up for my part, Aaron. I don’t know how to help. Everything I’ve done has …”

  She looked around her as if she were trying to find the answer in the hospital room, failed, and then faced him.

  “Why don’t you try and do what John said?”

  “I can’t. Don’t you understand that?” he asked her, pacified a little by her admission. “I’ve got to get back at ’em or they’ll never let me alone. Never. Never. I’ve got to get ’em. I’m gonna get ’em,” and he added, to put himself beyond any possible, weakening plea of hers: “I’m gonna make ’em pay.”

  “Don’t say that, Aaron. Think about the consequences. Think of what you’re doing to yourself. They might kill you next time, too. Think about getting out. Maybe if you behave real good, they might let you out of here sooner just because of what happened to you. They might—”

  “Sooner?” he said, turning a swollen burning eye upon her.

  “Sooner? Ha, ha. Ha, ha, ha. That’s a good way to get out. Just let yourself get.… Do you really know what happened to me? Do you? They treated me like a whore. Do you understand? Like a whore!” he repeated, getting a tremendous pleasure from the anguish he was causing her.

  “What if we got married? We wouldn’t know who was the woman. Ha, ha. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.”

  And he laughed with a forced but unbroken and unceasing snigger until he realized she was talking to him, trying to make him listen to her.

  “Huh?” he asked. “What?”

  “How could you …?” Her pale lashes were heavy with quick tears. “How could you be so bitter?”

  “How could I be so bitter?” he mocked, his cracked lips curling in a stilted grin.

  “It’s easy, easy eeeeeeeeeesssssyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy,” he said.

  V

  The box of candy bars from Judith lay opened upon the bedspread before Aaron, and yellow letters spelled out Mars with a big M and a yellow star upon each pale green wrapping. But each wrapping was so pale and so transparent that the chocolate-coated bar visible beneath it gave it a blended tone which was neither gray nor brown nor green, and he wondered if the fading afternoon light helped produce it.

  Toasted, the smaller letters on a bar said, and Almond, and chocolate, too, which he hadn’t noticed at first because it was written in brown. Mars Toasted Almond, with chocolate in letters of chocolate as an unnecessary afterword. Or was it necessary? And were the Toasted Almond and the chocolate part of the name or explanations?

  He snapped the card with his thumb, as he picked it up again, and read the “Get well! Love, Judith!” upon it, without caring for her love or the card or the candy bars. But he could comb his hair in the mirror without suffering from sore ribs now. He could sit straight up, too, and did most of the long day. He could also flap down the hall in his flannel slippers and his nightgown to the bathroom, endure the stare of any guy he met, do his duty, and walk directly back, in spite of his dread, and enter the blank white walls once again without shirking.

  The puffy moon face of a stranger still looked back at him from the mirror though. Black masked the eye around the bright green iris and its bloodshot ring. The bruise remained, his lips were still scabbed, his tan was fading again, and his complexion was more a sallow yellow than any color, but he didn’t care about that, either.

  He picked up a candy bar and examined it, and either it was smaller than they used to be or when he was smaller they looked bigger. It was only two by four inches at most and only half an inch thick at the widest part, where the unseen almonds must be. There were enough words on the cover, too, in tiny, small, and medium-sized letters to confuse anybody, not just Aaron D’Aragon, who got confused about everything.

  Maybe Judith wasn’t trying to con him? Maybe he tried to make something out of her that she wasn’t? Maybe he did that with Nora? and with his mother?

  No!

  He had crushed the candy bar.

  He opened his hand and the bar rolled out with a tiny rustle onto his fingers, and he saw MARS in a brown circle with a yellow star on the bottom of the bar, and TOASTED ALMOND written below it, and nothing else.

  Mars Toasted Almond was the name of the candy bar, but he had to see its opposite side by accident before he could figure it out. Otherwise, it was one extreme or the other for him, as John had said; and Dominic had been right because there wasn’t any buddy-up that Sunday night; and Stanley, a champ, had taken away his blade; and his father had been a great working man and had never been to jail; and Barneyway didn’t end up in a hospital room, boxed by four white walls and a white ceiling and a ha
rdwood floor.

  Could he bet that the floor was hardwood? Could he bet that the ceiling was darker than the white walls because it was still daylight, but there was no sun, and the center bulb wasn’t on? The room was a lot better than Queens Row, or the main grounds, or the empty rooms of the big house that he used to fill up with buddies like Barneyway, anyway. Buddies? Was that why he was the leader?

  He dreaded waking up in the morning most of all. For waking up to the daylight sounds of jail was.… He straightened up, for he heard someone in the hall and recognized Skip’s voice before Skip’s flat face poked around the door, with a conspiratorial smile spread across it.

  “Guess what, man?” Skip said, and stepped in, then, very carefully and very quietly, closed the door, and tiptoed like a schoolboy in a spook movie, with his back hunched, his head hanging, and swim-stroking for balance, across the room to Aaron’s bed.

  “Guess! Go on, guess!” he said, and he looked so proudly and purposely foolish that Aaron smiled.

  “Which hand?” he said and put both hands behind his back, fumbled with them, and held them out before him.

  “I don’t know,” Aaron said, wearied by the play acting, but he slapped the skin-cracked knuckles of Skip’s right hand, only to have Skip pull it back and put it behind him again.

  “Guess!” he said and put the left fist out in front of him, and Aaron slapped that, too, but Skip pulled it back also, and Aaron said, crossly:

  “Well, what is it?”

  Skip then put both of his hands out in front of him again, said, “Guess!” once again, and turned them over and opened them, exposing empty palms, but he threw his left arm out before Aaron could complain, and a black-taped blade fell out of his blue sleeve next to the box of candy bars.

  “There’s your equalizer, daddy-o!” he said, his voice rising triumphantly to his honking nose, as Aaron sagged weakly into the folded pillows.

  “How about it, huh? I told yuh I’d get yuh one.”

  The knife lay lightly upon the bedspread. Its taped handle tilted down with the slight incline caused by Aaron’s leg, and its shiny blade bridged the spread from the handle to its pointed tip, which was propped up by a fold and touched the candy box.

  “How about it, huh?” Skip said, squinting at Aaron.

  “Yeah,” Aaron said, but without enthusiasm, leaving it untouched. “It’s a blade, alright.”

  “What’s the matter, man?” Skip asked, wrinkling his nose.

  “Nothing,” Aaron said and laid his fingers on the blade. It was still warm from Skip’s body. “Thanks.”

  “It’s a good blade,” Skip said. “I took my time with it. I polished it with emery cloth and everything. Take a look at it.”

  Aaron held it in his hand but didn’t lift it from the spread. He examined it at arm’s length and saw how smoothly the blade creased his hand, how there were no grindstone marks nor ragged file edges on it, and how polishing had given it a blue overtone. He then noticed how carefully the tape had been wrapped around the handle, making even quarter-inch ridges from the blunted end to its final wrap, where it tapered to the width of the blade; and he said, with genuine appreciation:

  “It’s a beauty. It’s a beauty, Skip. It’s as pretty as a blade can be. I’ll keep it.”

  “Whatta ya think I brought it for?” Skip replied, but he was proud and he swaggered over to the window; and Aaron, to prove that he was grateful and that he wasn’t afraid to accept the blade, held out the box of candy bars.

  “Have a Mars, man,” he said.

  “Sure,” Skip said and swaggered back and crushed a bar, with a brisk crackling, in his hand.

  “Take another one,” Aaron said, and Skip grabbed another bar and jammed it in his shirt pocket, and Aaron set the box down and looked doubtfully at the black weapon.

  “Put it under the mattress, man.”

  “An orderly might see it when he changes the sheets,” Aaron replied, although Skip had misinterpreted his glance.

  “Put it under the candy, then.”

  “It won’t fit, will it?” Aaron asked, but in such a listless manner that Skip stopped tearing at the candy wrapper.

  “You could work it in, if you wanted to. What’s the matter, man?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Don’t you want the blade?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You don’t act like it, man. You ain’t ascared of that Buzzer now, are you?”

  “No!” Aaron answered and added, quickly:

  “Maybe the guys will think I’m hound if I use a blade?”

  “They’ll think you’re hound if you don’t try and get ’im, Aaron.”

  “I’m not afraid,” Aaron said and tried to talk himself out of any implications of cowardice. “I was thinking the guys might think I was afraid of the Buzzer, if I … I was thinking I could get my rep back better if I chose him with just my fists. Sort of man to man.”

  “He’s a duke, Aaron,” Skip said, and bit off the end of the candy bar, and chewed as he talked.

  “Nobody expects you to fight him fair. There ain’t no fair to it. He stomped you with a gang of guys when he was bound to whip you by himself. You’d have to be real lucky to beat him, Aaron. But that ain’t it, anyway. Beat him! Win! That’s all that counts. Do-him-in! Besides, you already proved you got guts. You made him stomp yuh. You made him use all those guys. And he knows it. Now, he’s goin’ around saying that the reason they all jumped you was so they could all get some. Some guys believe him. But I don’t. Most guys don’t. You already got a rep. You just gotta keep it, and anything goes.”

  He wiped the chocolate off his lips with the back of his hand.

  “Everything’s fair in love and war, you heard that. He stomped you, man! If you don’t hurt ’im, he’ll try again, and he might kill yuh next time. But if you come on him with a blade in the belly, he’s gonna be too scared to mess with yuh, and, by that time, guys’ll be willing to help yuh, not just me. And, besides, if you do get ’im, he might settle for just being even. He got yuh so bad, he might figure a blade squares it.”

  “I don’t wanta kill ’im, man,” Aaron said. “I’m tired of fighting. I just wantta do my own time, that’s all.”

  “I would’a never risked my ass to make that blade, man, if I thought you’d talk like that. Gimme it back,” Skip said and held out his hand. His teeth were streaked with chocolate.

  “I didn’t say I wouldn’t fight,” Aaron said, feeling ungrateful. “I said I was tired of fighting.”

  “I could get Youth Authority for making that blade, Aaron. You got me leery now. I went to a lot of trouble.”

  Aaron rolled the blade under the bedspread, and Skip dropped his hand, satisfied.

  “I’ll get a blade, too, Aaron,” he said. “And when you get out of here, we’ll make a battle plan. We’ll make it so cool, so smart, that every guy in the institute’ll know who did it and nobody’ll be able to prove it, and we’ll get ourselves a reputation as great avengers, and even the man will give us the nod. How about it? I’ll help yuh. I hate that Buzzer. I seen him whip on too many dudes my size. I wantta get ’im.”

  “When I get out?” Aaron asked, trying to keep the despair out of his voice.

  “As soon as,” Skip said, and he kept chewing as he described his scheme, splotches of chocolate on his lips, his teeth, and his tongue. “I’ll start tailing him now. Just like they do in the movies, man. Clock his habits, you know. Find out when he’s alone, everything. And when you get out, I’ll already have some good ideas and we can plan our strategy.

  “Great Avengers, man,” he said and aimed the candy bar. “We’ll get us a mob in here called the Great Avengers. That’s what we’ll do. And when we make probation, we’ll continue on the outs, we’ll shake down bookmakers and that for protection. Because they can’t tell the cops,” he explained. “But we’ll begin with the Buzzer and we’ll go on to Big Time. Okay?”

  Aaron nodded wearily, but was careful not to show his disbelief,
hoping that if he agreed, Skip would leave, and he offered the candy box to him again.

  “Take another one, man,” he said, and Skip, obviously surprised, glanced down for verification before taking one, then announced, quickly, as if wanting to take advantage of Aaron’s consent before more doubts occurred:

  “I better take off.”

  He hurried to the door, where he waved the candy bar, and repeated, before he left:

  “Anything goes!”

  Aaron set the box down on his thigh with relief, but he saw unhappy implications in the disorder Skip had made of the candy bars. For if Skip messed up with the blades as badly as he had messed up the rows in the box? then?

  He backhanded the box off his thigh, but without energy, and it landed upright on the bed without losing a candy bar. He could then make out the form of the blade through the bedspread, and he felt like ripping it free and throwing it out the window.

  The handle was bound so tightly and neatly that it had the general tapering shape of a blackjack through the spread. He tried to grip it, but the cloth rolled around it made it unwieldy, and he let his fingers relax and noticed that the sweat from his palm had slightly dampened the cloth. Still, he was impressed by the care Skip had taken with the blade, and it had taken guts to do it, in spite of the play acting, or was it because of the play acting?

  He slid his hand under the spread, and as he tested the tiny point of the blade with his finger, the room light went on, and he could tell that the chocolate wagon was in the hall by the noise the guys from the big ward made, getting into line for their cups. But he was too concerned with his fear, when his daring had helped make him a gang leader, to care about chocolate.

  Skip was a play actor, but maybe he, himself, had been playing a part when he had charged down the street against the beans from Santa Clara? He had been too carried away by the thrill to care what might happen, as he remembered, or to even realize that all his buddies had stopped running before it was too late. He then had to fight because he was trapped and couldn’t back down in front of so many guys.