The Ram (14 page)

The end of his foot is trimmed with a set of black knots that look like ties made out of dark fishing line. The meat of his foot is still dark purple. Where the top of his foot begins to curve up to his ankle, Riley points and nods. There is little flesh there; nerves, tendon and bone will absorb the pain delivered via tattoo gun.

“Right there will be good,” and then he hiccoughs five times before holding his breath and willing his diaphragm to relax.

Roman picks up his tattooing needle and attaches it to the ink base. He flicks a switch and the contraption buzzes to life. He pulls a squat, wheeled stool toward him and takes a seat. “This’ll hurt like fuck, man.”

Riley comes back with a reasonable retort. “Just lost five toes. Think I can handle it.”

The first prick reminds Riley of stepping on pine needles when he was young, running around the family’s favorite campsite near Redfish Lake. The after-burn of the sap and pollen zooming through the bloodstream caused massive itching and swelling. He doesn’t watch Roman at his work but sits back flush in the chair and thinks of summers on the unspoiled lake near the Sawtooth Mountains.

A moment later, the needle clicks off and Roman swears, pulls a wad of tissue out of a box of Kleenex perched on the tray of supplies and dabs at the foot.

“This is why I don’t tattoo drunks. Your blood’s too thin, man. I can’t see what I’m doing in this mess. You’ll have to reschedule.”

Riley looks down and can see the barest line of black running down the slope of his foot, hidden by a steady flow from the opened pores.

“It’s not like I’ll bleed out,” Riley pleads. Walker pulls his attention away from his phone and comes over to look.

“I’m just punching through the epidermis, but all this blood ain’t good. You shouldn’t be bleeding like this with me shooting ink into you. A little blood is okay. A lot is a problem. Blood and ink don’t mix.” Roman sets his needle down on the tray and pushes his wheeled stool away from Riley.

Riley knows arguing won’t get him what he wants. Then, the flavor of a beef hotdog, held over a campfire, spitted on a branch of peeled willow flares across his tongue and he’s back to his memories of summer.

“Okay,” he mumbles, “I’ll come back. I want this design, came up with it myself. I’ll come back for you, Roman centurion. ”

“What the hell you call me?”

“Don’t be offended. It’s a good thing,” he tells the man before reaching out and patting him on his forearm. “For the empire! For Rome!”

38 Peach

The little Miata wasn’t hard to follow in the light traffic of a Boise evening. The men drove slowly, hip hop blasting from their open windows. The crippled one hung his good foot out the window, shaking it to the beat of the bass drum.

Peach kept her distance when they pulled into a little strip mall on the bench of land overlooking downtown, full of residences, ethnic markets and dive bars. It was the shelf of land where her home sat, too. She drove into the same narrow parking lot, but shut off her engine a few doors down from their destination.

A man was waiting for them at the tattoo parlor. Peach had to squint to see the name of the shop. The sign wasn’t illuminated and it took a moment for her eyes to adjust so she could pick out the letters and form them into words with meaning.
Crucible Tattoo.

She smiled right then. She still smiles as she sits in her small Honda Civic. She doesn’t know what she’s waiting for. Going into the shop is out of the question and she wonders if she should go back and watch Nell do another dance. She considers the men might go back to the strip club after the tattooing and this both exhilarates and frustrates her.

Her purse, a small white and gray square, vibrates on the passenger side seat. She pulls out her phone. It’s Linx again. But this time she doesn’t hit the decline button. She lets it vibrate on silent until her voicemail clicks on. Then she digs around in the bag and pulls out a Mars bar, unwraps it and takes two large bites, savoring the chocolate on her teeth.

Rolling down her window, she watches the front of the tattoo parlor and wonders what the man named Riley is having done to his skin. What could be so tantalizing in form he felt it needed to be drawn on his flesh for the rest of his life? It must be something special or important to make such a late appointment. She understands how when you want something done to your body, you do it, no matter the cost. It’s as if art possesses humans, entire societies, once a symbol or sign is considered beloved.

Perhaps, she considers, he’s commemorating something. A victory? A new path in life? He didn’t look the type to get a tattoo. He was clean shaven, hair long enough to slick back but not quite long enough to put in a ponytail yet. He wore dress pants and a nice, black patent on his right foot.

Peach doesn’t know what he’s getting done or why, but she’s proud of herself for following him to the tattoo shop. When she set out after them, her heart beat wildly, her eyes darting around at every intersection and stop sign. Now she feels in charge. Her body is relaxed, the chill air seeping into her car doing little to chill the warm blood running through her.

The man she saw greet the boys outside the shop was striking enough. Peach can sense the distant suns overhead through the metal roof of her Honda. They make a suggestion. So she closes her eyes for a moment and commits the man’s face to memory. She thinks of what she might want if she can’t have Nell. Perhaps a tattoo. Or even the tattooist. It all depends. She will look into this place, find the man’s information and portfolio online. It will be part of her personal education. It may create options.

She undoes her seatbelt and cranes her head outside the window. The stars are mere suggestions of light against the heavily lit parking lot. She wishes her short term paramour, the star she wishes to speak to now, was overhead.

“It’s called Crucible Tattoo,” she whispers to the universe. “It couldn’t be more perfect.”

Saturday, the 4
^th
of April, 2015

39 Riley

“So he has me down for an appointment then? He’s the only one that can do it, okay?” Riley asks into the phone. His head is pinched, right at the center of his temples and the morning coffee and slabs of bacon have done little to ease his hangover. Worse yet, his left foot is flush with pain in another place now, thanks to the addition of a line of ink down the front of his ankle.

“You scheduled last night. Nothing has changed in the last twelve hours.” The woman on the other end has a clipped edge to her voice. “Anything else?”

“No,” Riley says. “Thank you.”

He hangs up and puts down his coffee. It’s lukewarm and needs a nuke in the microwave. But he suddenly doesn’t have the stomach for more food or drink and he decides to go outside instead.

This time he doesn’t force his foot into a snow boot and use his old footbag as ballast. It does feel markedly different; his missing toes make his left foot lighter and his center of gravity while walking is affected. He’s still dependent on stable things like tree trunks and door frames or his arms held out to his sides as if he looks ready for a game of airplane. Instead of trying to compensate for his missing appendages, he pulls a roll of saran wrap from a kitchen drawer and spins the clear plastic around his bandaged foot.

He has very vague memories of last night. He remembers the blood when he looked down to see how the tattoo was coming and then the ride home, Walker helping him inside and re-bandaging his foot. But before that, the time at Blaze Lounge, is a fuzzy blur. He thinks he may have hit on a woman other than Nell but he can’t be sure. He cannot recall the woman’s hair or figure to mind. She is nothing more than a sense of the feminine without any definition.

When his foot is bound in plastic wrap, he slips a runner on his good foot and takes his time walking down the driveway. He passes the place he fell when he tried to run. He thinks if he concentrates on using just the heel of his left foot, he’ll be done with the crutches in no time. But today, he’ll take them along. The morning sun hasn’t warmed the day yet and clouds moving in from the west allude to a light rain. In the yard across his street, purple tulips flank spots of bright yellow daffodils.

He shuffles along on his crutches, challenging himself to put more weight on his left foot every ten steps. When he gets a few houses down the street, his weight is almost divided fifty-fifty on his feet. A shock of color catches his eye at the curb by a single-story house. There, in a clump of ratty yellow and green grass is a plastic Easter egg of brilliant orange.

A man calls at Riley from across the lawn. He has a pale pink Easter basket in the crook of his arm. It’s full of other brightly colored eggs. He pokes his hands in bushes and trees, leaving spots of color as he moves.

“I know you want the malt balls in that egg but leave it there,” the man jokes and keeps on with his job of hiding eggs.

Riley stops and watches the man plant a blue oval in a mess of deep purple grape hyacinths, their tiny flowers creeping up stalks, clustered together like a pyramidal cap.

“Easter is on Sunday,” Riley suggests. “Think you’re a day early. Not sure about the dollar short part, though.”

His neighbor stops and puts the basket down on the grass. He’s wearing open-toed sandals and a sun visor. “I know, but I only get the kids today. Their mom’s taking them to brunch tomorrow and church. Hell of the thing is one of my kids is fifteen. And he still wants to search for plastic eggs full of candy on the front lawn.” The father shakes his head. “He never gets tired of it. Wants it every year.”

Riley can imagine a teenager, tall and gangly, pushing a young sibling out of the way to snatch up all the candy for himself. He wishes he could have had Easter egg hunts when he was a teenager. But after he got out of grade school, he was limited to dying white eggs with his mother, dipping them in cups of vivid pigments, hot water and white vinegar. He can remember the smell of acid, the crackle as the shells were lowered into the coffee mugs.

“Easter egg hunting sounds fun,” he says, but sees the man isn’t listening as much as he is venting.

“I told their mother I wanted them this year for Easter. But she just had to schedule away their Sunday. But I suppose we don’t get to choose when the hunt is on, eh? I guess the hunt just starts when the fox breaks out of a bush and begins to run. So a Saturday Easter Egg Hunt. I guess it is what it is.”

The man picks back up his basket and resumes his tucking of plastic eggs into hidey-holes and mounds of vegetation. Riley turns around and heads back home when a steady patter of rain drops from the firmament above him, turning his blond hair brown from wetness. This time, with every ten steps, he puts less weight on his left foot, careful to not let the rubber nubs on the ends of his crutches slip on wet leaves or get stuck in softened mud. It’s like the rainwater makes him feel less capable and sure of his foot so he doesn’t expect anything of it anymore. He retracts his dependence on it until he reaches his front door and it swings freely from his ankle, doing nothing at all.

40 Peach

She spent the afternoon chatting with Linx over the phone, setting up plans for Easter morning, and when she finally ends the conversation, the sun is waning in power and dipping low. She has significant, potent work to do. If she leaves her apartment now, she might even catch sight of her star in the sky if she is truly lucky, truly blessed. Peach figures the trip will take her a few hours including driving, waiting, acting. She wants to leave soon, get a little sleep in the car before carrying out her task, observe the environs long enough to make sure everything is as it should be. The return home isn’t of much concern to her currently. She hopes the process will be invigorating, completed with aplomb, and then she will take her time getting home, simmering in the spectacular events of the evening.

“Another bold step. Another bit of ritual,” she says to her empty apartment. Peach thinks it a good sign if she is sure of the success of her outing before it has even begun.

She goes to her bedroom and opens her closet. There lies the dark green duffel bag. It’s the same bag she took out the night she forced Linx out of her apartment and took to the streets with the joke stuck in her mind of going out for a run. She pulls it out and unzips it, checks its contents. A few things are needed and she makes a mental list of what she must dig out from other parts of her apartment and add to the bag.

Her dark wool hoodie slips off a hanger easily and she swings it on. She’s cleaned it the best she could of her vomit and the red specks of color. Then she tugs on the end of her wig and it comes off, the synthetic netting scraping her scalp. The itching has been intense for the past few days and she’s glad to be free of it. She lays the blonde wig on her pillow, spreads out the hair and looks at the way it flows over her pillowcase. Lying against the white sheets on her bed, it’s beautiful. She realizes she must be beautiful when she’s wearing it.
She leaves it there, as if she cares to collect the scalp of her former self. Because the wig is representative of just that: her former self. Old Peach. And she’s taken it off for tonight and someday, for good.

She checks to see if her bloodstone pendant is still around her neck. Of course it’s there; she never takes it off. She tells herself she would feel its weight leave her collarbone if the chain were to break and the stone were to fall.

“You are like the engine outside my body, friend,” she speaks down to the rock. “You and the others present at this time.” She looks around her bedroom again before snatching up her work bag, rolling back her shoulders, and saying goodbye to a room empty of another living soul.

Sunday, the 5
^th
of April, 2015

41 Riley