“Is she in that bad condition?” April asked faintly.
“Well, the buzzards got to her face.”
“Oh, God.” April took a deep breath. “Who will be investigating the case?”
“The sheriff in the jurisdiction she was found.”
“I know that,” April said. “Do you have a name and number for him?”
Sergeant Grove gave them to her.
“Newt,” April said. “Isn’t that some kind of lizard?”
“Yes. Do you have some kind of New York accent?”
“It wouldn’t surprise me, Sergeant. That’s where I’m from.”
She hung up and sat there. It was the end of the day. The room was stale now. Sanchez was out on a call. She felt kind of bad about that. This was the kind of situation when she felt better just having Sanchez there. He was always good making this kind of call. In Chinese she could do it just fine. She steeled herself to do it in English.
She probably wouldn’t get what she needed for a day or two and, and then it would take more time to get it out there. She punched out the numbers. For some reason she made the hardest call, the one to the mother, first.
21
Troland set up the tray. Five needles, six tiny cups for the colors. A thick dab of A & D ointment. The rubber gloves. Alcohol. He laid the girl out on her back on the bed. She didn’t resist at all. After running up and down the stairs and masturbating and foraging like a rat for the rest of the coke all night, she had finally crashed. He tied her wrists with thin nylon rope long enough to reach the legs of the bed.
“Troland is good, very good, he thinks of everything,” he muttered to himself. Right down to the towel he tucked around her to keep the sheets dry as he shaved her from neck to thigh. He had been right. Coke addicts didn’t feel a thing, not a thing, when they crashed.
He rubbed the body all over with Mennen Speed Stick, and carefully positioned the transfer, then pressed it down on the sticky surface. Perfect. The paper came away leaving the outline of the drawing on the girl’s chest, neck, and stomach. He put the tattoo machine together, debating how many needles to use. It would go faster with three. He put in three needles and pressed the button. The whine sounded, but the girl didn’t move. He decided to tape her mouth anyway. She didn’t resist this either, and continued breathing noisily through her runny nose. Troland sat down on the stool he had put by the bed. Then he remembered he needed the jacket. The guy in the movie had his jacket on. Troland had to wear the jacket. He went to get the jacket and put it on. Then he sat on the stool with the jacket open, snapped on the gloves, and checked his watch. Willy was with him the whole time, reminding him of things and whispering encouragement.
All this was new. He could take a minute to relish the triumph of finally finding a way to make a burning last forever. He touched the flames on the wheel, on the eagle’s wing. The picture he had created was electric. Richly patterned snakes, an eagle with huge wings, and two wheels were entwined in a blazing inferno that covered the girl’s torso, neck, arms, and legs. She’d be on fire all the way down to her toes.
Troland picked up the machine again. Never had he felt calmer. He’d only actually tattooed someone once himself, but he’d been watching the process almost all his life. He’d even drawn the last tattoo Willy had done before he went to Nam. Tro’s tattoo was supposed to be his good luck and bring him back.
He pushed the button and the contacts closed. Electricity from the battery made a magnetic field that attracted the iron armature. It moved toward the magnet against the spring and forced the needles to pop out, breaking the contact. For a fiftieth of a second the magnet lost its magnetism. The spring pulled the armature back, and the needles popped in. In and out, fifty times a second. The whine filled the room, covering the sound of the girl’s thick breathing.
At first contact with her white skin, Troland held the needles too close. The black lines on the soft slippery flesh beaded with blood. A single stripe of red formed where Troland wanted it to be black. He knew it would still come out black when it healed, but it would scab instead of scale if he drew blood. And he didn’t like letting the poison out. He shuddered. For a second, nausea rolled over him. Even with the gloves on, he didn’t feel good with the blood of a coke whore on his hands. He didn’t have to be a genius to know she was more than likely to be HIV positive.
He cursed himself and looked at her face. It occurred to him he could put her away with no trouble. Once she was dead, the blood wouldn’t come out and he’d be safe. Not a twitch disturbed her features. She didn’t feel anything. The fear passed as quickly as it came. No way was he going to die of AIDS. Willy told him not to kill her, so he covered the spot with ointment and went on.
The sun rose in the sky, warming the upstairs room. He didn’t even consider taking his jacket off. Sweat poured down his chest and sides, but he didn’t feel it. He was completely absorbed with the process. He lost all sense of time and place.
The buzz of the machine, the same as that in the movie, was the first noise he ever heard that covered all the voices in his head. If he kept it on, no one talked to him, not even Willy. Only the machine was talking, telling him how good he was, how he had found something new to add to his work.
He was an artist, an artist of the flesh. He actually trembled with pleasure when he thought of branding her at the end. That part couldn’t ever change. But now the beauty of the everlasting flame and the searing punishment of the brand would be merged in a single vision. She’d be awake by then. She’d feel like she was burning alive.
Red was good. Blue and pink and green were good. Black was the most durable. Black never faded. Most of the other colors faded after time. But he liked the tattoos with many colors best. They weren’t so crude as some of the bikers’ tattoos that were all black, or black and blue, with only a few dabs of red. Not well done. Many were very crude. Troland wasn’t crude.
He loved how the needles sucked up the ink like tiny straws, and then released it in the thousands of tiny holes he made in the skin. Several hours went by. Troland sat over the sleeping girl, deep in his work. The position he was in was far from ideal. He was sitting on a stool, leaning forward to the body on the bed. There was no resistance to the bed. She should be on a hard surface, like a table. An operating table that could be positioned would be best. He had to get one.
After three hours, he could stand it no longer. His back and left hand were painfully cramped. It occurred to him that there was something wrong with the machine, and he raged once again at the world for being backwards. He hadn’t considered the possibility that the machine was a right-handed machine.
The girl’s eyes were closed, and she was still breathing like a dog with a cold. Troland stood and surveyed his work. The outline of one side of her body was nearly complete. He wanted to finish it in one day. Her skin had puffed up in places. It was irritated and red. He knew that if she were awake, all the places where he had worked would be stinging badly. She must really have had a lot. He knew of cokeheads so filled with shit they had their whole bodies tattooed in a single go. Every once in a while, there was a case of someone going into tattoo shock and dying.
There were cramps in his left hand. He cursed his fate. No matter how much he worked on it, he still didn’t have much control in his right hand. At his first school, they used to say left-handed people were crazy. Told him that when he was five, six, learning to write. Said it was proven without a doubt lefties were crazy and no good. His father tied his hand behind his back so he’d grow up straight. The fucker almost killed the hand that could draw beautiful pictures and write like the writing in old books.
The school people were wrong, too. It was his right hand that was a monster. It couldn’t draw or form letters at all. Troland hated it. It could hold a screwdriver. It could light a match. But it couldn’t do anything
22
