A Good and Useful Hurt (10 page)

The mapmaking had to wait until the next night.
The day had seen a deeply hungover Lamar—who had apparently found, in his infinite wisdom, a thought that suggested he close the bar—struggling to make it more than an hour without vomiting. His customer, a longtime client having a leg covered in an impressive group of Hollywood heroes, was nice enough to allow for the necessary breaks. Though, as Mike was happy to point out to a laughing Becky, not quite nice enough to allow Lamar to beg off of the day entirely.

When finally the chaos of a busy day in the tattoo shop had subsided, Lamar staggered off to his secrets, Becky went to have a friend do her hair, and Mike and Deb went upstairs to work on what Deb was already referring to as “The Heist.”

Mike sat on one end of the kitchen table, Deb across from him. The bathroom door was shut. On the table between them lay a pad of eighteen-by-twenty-four-inch paper. Deb was grinning at Mike like an idiot, and he smiled back.

She said, “Well, c’mon, let’s get started.”

“I’m trying to find my muse.”

Deb grimaced. “C’mon, Mike, you’re killing me.”

“I don’t want to screw it up.”

He sketched a line just above the edge of paper closest to him, and then added little lines to indicate the doors. He added three more lines to section off the little foyer, and then he drew a long rectangle that covered about a third of the paper. Off of this he added four doorways that exited into separate chambers. In one of these he wrote the word “Bones” and added a hallway that connected it with the other chamber on that side of the main floor.

The other side mirrored the first, only this one bore the word “Animals” at its center. It too connected with the other chamber at its side, but it was a fair bit larger than the other. At the middle of that side Mike had drawn a question mark. He looked at Deb for the inevitable question, but she was busy boring a hole through the paper with her eyes. He spun the pad around and drew stairs ascending and descending at the end opposite the entrance and sketched staircases at the corners nearest the door as well. That done, he flipped the page.

Here he drew a rectangle similar in size to the first, but crossed out the center and said, “This is the second floor.”

“So it looks over the first?”

“Yup.”

Off of the rectangle Mike drew stairs at the rear and two more sets at opposite sides by the front doors. He sketched in three rooms on either side of the structure; predictably, those rooms that were over the larger rooms on the ground floor were longer than their counterparts. Unlike the ground floor, none of these rooms connected. The rooms on the larger side he labeled “Armor,” “Weapons,” and “Fossils.” At the rear of that side he added in one smaller room and wrote in letters than curled into the room, “Babies.”

Mike labeled the first two rooms on the opposite side “Mummies” and “Guns.” The third he left blank. He tore another sheet from the pad and placed it atop the other two. Almost as an afterthought, he set the pencil down and folded back to the first of the three sheets.

“Alright, I was starting to lose hold of myself. We need to go to the new museum.”

“We can go Monday.”

“OK. My guess, and remember, I got eighty-sixed pretty fast from the new one, is that there couldn’t possibly be space for much of the big stuff. You can see where I wrote ‘Bones’ and ‘Animals’ on the map—those were absolutely stuffed with exhibits. I bet most of that was left just like it was. We’ll need to go to be sure, but I can’t see them dedicating three-quarters of a new facility to old taxidermies and bones. The back of the museum is gone for sure, and everything else is a crapshoot. We just need to go there and make sure this stupid plan is worth the risk.”

“Why are you sure about the back?”

“It was in the paper. The exhibit used to be set up as a mockup of an old town. It actually mirrored in part some of the streets we still use today.”

“That’s awesome.”

“It was completely awesome. Unfortunately, it got moved, or at least most of it did. Again, I’ll need to go to the new museum to better recollect what they took and what they didn’t. I know that the fake city’s there, and that’s about it. The other problem with that back part was that it was winding and busy; I couldn’t even do a bad sketch of it, to be honest. There was a planetarium back there as well; that got moved too.”

“Well, we have to at least check out where it used to be.”

“If we’re able to. They might have closed it off completely.”

“I don’t buy that. If nothing else, they could use it for storage.”

“Makes sense.”

Mike folded back to the first map. He drew a little X off in the upper right corner. “Assuming they didn’t close it all off, and I hope they didn’t, we’ll need to get through what’s left of the little town anyways.”

“Oh shit, yeah. I forgot we can’t use the front door.”

“Right. We’ll still be exposed to the road for the time it takes us to get the lock off, but beyond that we should be able to get in super fast. If you’re right, we can get to the good parts pretty quickly.”

“Aww, you’re getting excited too.”

“Well it’s not like I never considered breaking in there. I guess I just wasn’t stupid enough to do it before I met you.”

“It’s called bravery, not stupidity.”

“You call it whatever you want, miss.”

Deb stood and walked to the bathroom. Mike held his breath, watching the floor as the door opened. If Sidney had ever been there after the day she died, and Mike was quite sure that she had been many times, she was gone now. Deb closed the door behind her, and when she came out a few minutes later, drying her hands on a paper towel, Sid was still gone. Mike closed the bathroom door.

He said, “I want to talk to you about Sidney.”

Deb paled slightly.

“I won’t hold you to our agreement,” he told her. “I’m going to tell you my thing, and when I’m done, if you want to tell me yours, I’ll listen. If you need more time, you can wait. I can’t wait, not anymore.”

I told her I met Sidney one week to the day before September 11, 2001.
She came into the shop, the one I own now, about six months after we’d opened. It was the second time I’d tried to run my own shop, and I was convinced this one was going to work. I didn’t have Lamar or Becky yet, and there were a couple of yahoos working for me, nice guys but not the kind you could have working in a nice little thing like we have going now. Rusty and Joey. Couple of weirdos. Rusty stayed with me for about four years, and then about a year after I met Sid, he up and moved to Florida, just like that, no warning or anything. There are guys I’ve known, and my first boss was definitely one of those guys, who actually miss those old days where you’d come to work with a revolver at your waist, brass knuckles in your pocket, and an attitude that said
I take no shit from anyone.
Same kind of old-school code, of course, that had Rusty up and quit over nothing.

They were actually excited when I started really pushing myself to focus on custom work, because it meant they’d have to draw less. Drawing is why I’ve stayed in tattooing. I can copy for money if I have to, but I’d rather draw, and when I was a kid, if you wanted to draw for money you either tried to get in with Disney or you tattooed. For those two cats, drawing was something you had to do, not something you liked to do. The thing Joey did like to do was hit on women, and that’s how I met Sid.

I was coming up front because I heard somebody bellow, yelling like they were hurt pretty good. We used to keep a shotgun just over the door in the office, and I was halfway to getting it when I heard that noise again and figured I better just skip to checking it out. You know what I see when I get to the counter? Joey is doubled up on his knees, and there’s a girl, little wisp of a thing no bigger’n you, and she’s bending the shit out of Joey’s left wrist in a way that it didn’t look like it was supposed to bend. I walk out, and she says, “Are you gonna be a dickhead too?”

I said no, and she let Joey go. He went to go for her again, and she backed up a step and gave him this look. He just grabbed his wrist, stood up, and hightailed it out of there.

I said, “So what’s the problem, miss?”

“That piece of shit just smacked my ass.”

I didn’t say anything, but I already know she’s telling the truth—that was just Joey’s way. You either put up with it or you didn’t. Back then I was one to put up with it. Not that I’m a better man for changing, just different. Sidney, or Sid, as she introduced herself, was not. Joey probably had a hundred pounds on her and not just all beer fat; he was a big ol’ boy.

Sidney, as you probably already figured, had come by to get tattooed. She wanted to get a pair of lips on her butt, like a kiss my ass kind of thing. Joey had taken that request as an invite to smack her ass. If he hadn’t, well, who knows what would’ve happened? Things would be different. Sid would still be alive.

In any case, I had her put on lipstick real thick and then kiss a piece of copy paper. I traced that, made a stencil, and we went back to the booth to do it. We get in there and she just drops her pants, totally bare-assed, and hops on the table. I told her to calm down and stand up so I could get the stencil on. I think my lack of a reaction is what made her interested in me. I was younger then, but she was still almost ten years my junior. Either way, age wasn’t a factor. Before she left she asked for my phone number, and I gave it to her.

I was still a bit of a mess after my divorce, and frankly, a young little hot chick all interested in me, or at least pretending to be for a discount, was pretty appealing. My wife had fucked up my life pretty good, but she’d also fucked just about everyone else in town. It was a boost of self-confidence to have a girl like that all over me, so when she called me, I called back.

Sidney was nineteen, but she had a fake ID so we could go drinking together. That first date we had, she blew me in the alley before we even went in the bar. I thought I was just the cat’s ass. Everybody was eyeing my girl, and we were firing back drinks like there was no tomorrow. It wasn’t always like that with us, but usually, one way or the other, it would come back to getting fucked up. She moved into the apartment in less than a week, and I had her working the counter almost immediately—after she and Joey squared things up, of course.

It just all went smooth, really smooth. She was young and crazy, not unlike yourself, but she took things that extra mile too far. We were both doing coke for a good little bit, heroin too, and back then I was just proud I wasn’t using at work. Every now and again we’d both kick and tell each other how much we loved the other person and would never let them get back on shit. It was a lie, but we both meant it—I know I did, and I can’t see why she would want to lie about it.

That went on for a good while. Rusty got gone in that fog; Joey did too. Hard to blame them, but at the same time, it’s not like those guys were clean either. That was all in the first two years, and after that we really did get clean. Still the occasional relapse, of course, but nothing big.

I hired Lamar somewhere around then.

I know I told you a little about that, but what a wreck that kid was. He had stones. You walked in the first time and you had stones, but you also had a portfolio. All he had was swagger and a criminal record. When he came around more seriously, though, I hired him. I ended up having to hire a guy older than me, too, just so I didn’t look like a weirdo with all of the kids around. He was a funny one, big guy with a white beard named Stumpy; he couldn’t have been taller that five foot.

Lamar took to the work pretty well, but with everything I had going on outside of the shop it’s a miracle he turned out as well as he did. The only thing worse than a bad teacher is one who’s uneven. Lamar would get my best for a month, and then something worse than what I thought could be my worst for a week. I’ve asked him about it, and I guess I did well enough, because he doesn’t remember me being a dick, even if I still do.

Sid and I hit our first rough patch about six months after we’d agreed to stay clean. It should have been one of the happiest times of my life, but it wasn’t. My business was doing well enough that I was actually starting to put a little money away. That’s a damn good feeling, to not live hand-to-mouth every day. Lamar was coming along fast; he’d worked on a couple of cats from his neighborhood, and he’d done a damn good job, all things considered. Sid and I were falling apart, though, and fast.

I’m not sure exactly what started the problems that spring, but I know what kept it going: Sid was using again. I mentioned that we’d both had our relapses, but this wasn’t like that. She was full-blown again, and the scary part was that I’d been so busy with work I hadn’t noticed. It probably sounds like I was being judgmental, being as we hadn’t been quit all that long, but I was furious. She promised she’d quit, but that brought up a whole other set of issues. She’d run through all the money she’d saved up and had started in on the stash I used to keep in a shoebox. Three grand of mine, when I found out—my little nest egg for something, and that I didn’t have a goal for it made the theft even worse in my eyes.

“What if I’d been saving it to buy you a ring?” I screamed at her, and for the first time since we’d been together I really felt the age difference. I was acting like a shitty parent, and she’d already had one and a half of those. What made it doubly cruel was that she knew I would never buy her a ring; she was probably even more sure of that than I was. My divorce was still pretty solid in my rearview mirror, and marriage was the last thing on my mind. Not that I let her know that. She had to take all that from me while she was high as a kite, and probably going pretty near apeshit.

We stuck it out though. She went through all the withdrawals and mess that come part and parcel with quitting, and I just tried to keep the shop going. Now that I’d been spoiled by having a counter girl, I was having trouble putting that particular hat back on. In the booth I was as nice as could be, but in the lobby I was rough. I could see it, too, mostly where it really hurts, in the bank.

Sid came back to the counter eventually, and that was a blessing, let me tell you. I’ve never gone without counter help since, and I don’t intend to ever again. That was another way those old guys like Jack had it wrong: the money you pay some nice girl to run your counter comes back in spades. Something about not having to see my ugly mug until I actually work on you helps pay the bills, as it turns out.

Sid and I made it one more year before shit went bad again. This time I found out before she could steal from me, at least, but that would prove to about the only blessing. She’d been snorting heroin again. I found a little fold of it in her jacket pocket at the Laundromat, and remembering how bad I’d felt after I’d yelled at her the last time, I came home nice and calm. Probably shouldn’t have bothered. She’d been trying to get high the second I walked out the door, and she sure wasn’t surprised that I’d found the skag.

We got her in counseling down at the YWCA. It was free, and that was all we could afford, so the hope was that it would be good enough. I guess for the using it was. She did stay quit for a while, and that was nice to see.

But neither of us figured on the depression. We talked about it, but that was all I could do, and unfortunately talk was all her counselor would prescribe. She was worried that Sid would hook to any drug the way she had coke or heroin, and that the crutch would never get tossed away. I didn’t have the sense to argue with her, and I don’t know that I would have been right even if I had. I’m sure that even if I had it wouldn’t have helped. We just came merrily along, Sid getting more and more miserable and me right there with her.

She’d always been rowdy, that was just her way, so when she started to want rougher and rougher sex I thought she was just replacing the drugs, and I went right along with it. Mostly she wanted to be choked and held down. I’m not sure where my head was at that point; I knew that something bad was getting unearthed in all the therapy sessions, and I tried to make myself as available as possible for her to talk to, but all she wanted out of me was sex, and like I said, it was getting worse all the time.

That came to a halt when she told me she wanted me to dress differently than I normally did and pretend to break into the apartment to rape her. I told her that I just couldn’t, and she told me I was useless. I took that in stride, that and all the other lumps she tried to put on me. Rough sex turned into no sex. I slept on the couch for about two months before we decided to break up.

It was best for the both of us, even she agreed with that, and she got a room at the YWCA until she could get enough money for a security deposit to move into an apartment. That’s really where the two of us should’ve stopped, but we didn’t, because Sid kept working for me. A week later, she was back living in the apartment.

She said she was clean and things would be better. She wasn’t and they weren’t. I found out she was using after about a month; she was working the counter and her nose started bleeding so badly that she literally had to run to the bathroom in the middle of a conversation with a customer. I freaked out on her again that night. I told her she was fired and that by the time I was home from work the next night I wanted her and all of her shit gone.

She begged. She begged me, and you know what I did? I’d been twenty-eight when we met and she’d been nineteen. Now I was almost thirty-two and she was twenty-three. After almost four years, all I had for her was get the fuck out, get your shit and don’t come back.

She never left. That night when I came home, she was in there, dead on the floor with my old revolver next to her. No note, but I guess I really didn’t need one. We’d been right downstairs when she’d done it and hadn’t heard a thing. That was what messed me up the most: all she had to do was come down a flight of stairs and tell me what she was going to do, and maybe things would have been different.

The police held me for three days; Lamar was able to keep the shop up and didn’t cheat me an inch. He fired Stumpy without even asking me, because Stumpy told him they should only report about half the tattoos they did. I guess saying Lamar fired Stumpy is kind of an understatement—he thumped him up pretty good, too.

The cops asked all sorts of questions, and had a few threats for me, too. I didn’t say much; wasn’t much to say. The gun was registered in my name, and my tox screens came back clean for the dope she’d hidden in the apartment. Her counselor corroborated that Sid had been dealing with depression and that this wasn’t all that surprising. It made me sick to hear her say it, but it was true enough, I guess. Finally one of the detectives, a guy named Van Endel, put an end to the whole thing. He’d been the only one who acted decent since the start of it. He said they’d bullied me enough, and that was that, I was gone.

Lamar cleaned up the mess while I was locked up; I’ll never be able to square up that debt all the way. I stayed with him for a few days and only came to the shop to work. With it just being the two of us now, it was either sink or swim, so there was no time for any real grieving. I’d missed the funeral while I was in jail. Finally, after about a week, I came back to the apartment. It was cold and smelled like the disinfectants we use in the store. It was awful, but I stayed. If there’s one thing I can be proud of, it’s that I stayed. Of that time, there’s nothing else.

Lamar and I kept the thing going, but just barely. Appointments stayed steady, but we were much more of a street shop back then; we lived to do custom appointments but got fed by walk-in business. Lamar moved back in with his mom but didn’t tell me that until later, when I could take it. He was running the whole store like it was his then, and working as a nursemaid for me. He did my shopping, made sure my clothes were clean, and I’m pretty sure was just waiting for the day when he came to get me from the apartment and I was dead. It should be his shop now, because when it really needed somebody, I was gone. Just like with Sid. When she needed me the most, I pushed her out.