A Good and Useful Hurt (11 page)

I came back around, obviously. Wasn’t easy, but probably could’ve gone a little bit smoother if I weren’t so pigheaded. I refuse to share any of the blame with Sid. She was a child as an adult, and even more of a child when we met. I dragged her through all the chemicals and depression that my divorce would have caused either way, only I knew in my guts I’d make it through. I never told her that, but I’m pretty sure she knew it anyways. We would have been perfect together for about two weeks, but anything longer than that was dangerous for both of us. Four years, though? That was only dangerous for her. By that time I was over those wounds, I was done being destructive. She knew as well as I did that it was only a matter of time for us, and that had to have been a weight. Who am I kidding—another weight.

I s’pose that’s all of it.

Phil reveled in the power after a kill, and that had been no ordinary kill—the little bitch had put up a fight.
He was proud of himself as well. Sleep had been wonderful, long nights spent torturing that bitch over and over again in his dreams, taking everything he wanted at his pace. As far as Phil was concerned, he may as well have been stealing their souls, such was the psychic residue left over in his head to play with, to distort and twist, to make pain an endless loop, a tidal wave of blood and thresholds crossed. His mind could be hell, and it was wonderful.

In reality, the girl, who according to the paper was named Annie, had died very quickly. Phil had been sodomizing her, holding her down with his big frame, which, after her broken arm, hadn’t taken much effort. He was thrusting in and out of her, awash in blood, as he slowly tightened the garrote. He could feel the shiver of a death rattle through the rope and dowel rods, and came simultaneously. After he’d taken the rope off of her neck, Phil stripped the rest of the way and used the bitch’s shower. No reason to rush. If the law was coming, it was already too late.

The law hadn’t been, though, and Phil was starting to doubt whether it ever would. How could they catch a god? If they caught him, it wouldn’t matter much. Phil had the utmost confidence that in prison the girls would come back, that other acts of violence could force them back to him. Seven memories, strong memories, and Phil relished the new one most of all.

When Mike and Deb went to the museum that Monday, both were amused to see that it was free on Mondays for city residents.
Mike happily handed over his driver’s license, and they walked in. Unlike the last time he’d been there, when his mouth had filled with irrational bile, this time was different. Today was a mission. Deb took a notepad from her cavernous purse, and the two walked hand in hand through the foyer and into the main hall. There was a mundane exhibit on automobiles to the left, and above them hung the enormous skeleton of a finback whale.

“Good thing they took that. Your apartment’s way too small.” Deb grinned at Mike, even as he elbowed her in the side to keep it down. “Jeez, relax. Nobody heard me. Now let’s see your damn museum.”

Mike sighed and walked ahead of her. Deb followed him through a modest archway and then underneath the whale. They passed a small, glassed-in area, full with both real and replica fossils, and then they entered the transferred little city from the old museum.

The smell of it was old and familiar, yet foreign all the same. The shops were myriad, and Mike pointed out all the ones that he recognized as the memories of their old home came back. He stopped in front of the apothecary to say, “It was winding, but not nearly as winding as it is here. I recognize three of the four storefronts so far.”

“No butcher shop yet though.”

“Let’s keep moving.”

They saw a gun shop that Mike saw contained a good quarter of the firearms, and all of those fit to the period. He said as much to Deb, but she just smiled and they continued. When they’d finished the trek through the small town, Mike felt quite sure that better than a third of the storefronts were new. Most of the old decorations had made the move, but several of the storefronts he could recall as being open, such as the doctor’s office, were now no more than just empty buildings with false fronts and blackened windows.

After the little town they passed down a short hall filled with all manner of hats. Turning a corner, they ascended the first of the two massive staircases that led to the upper floors of the building.

At its top the route curled again, past the enormous internals of a gigantic working clock, and then through an exhibit that Mike felt sure was new, an obvious corporate sponsorship on the wonders of furniture making. Deb near to jogged through the labyrinthine quarters, finally landing them back to its beginning. Just to the right of its exit, Mike found another reason to sigh. What had been a blank wall was now a case full with guns.

It was, he assured himself by way of Deb, certainly not all of them. Unfortunately, it was definitely most of them. Aside from a pair of pepper-box style revolvers, he couldn’t remember any firearms from the old building that weren’t in the case, and even those not in the case could be in the new location in storage somewhere. Dejected and frustrated, he led the still beaming Deb up the final staircase.

They strode first into an exhibit on the early natives of Michigan, the Chippewa and Ojibwa. Mike found little he recognized and felt his spirits soaring again. The exhibit took up at least a third of the space on the floor. The next rooms were filled with a legion of animals and skeletons, but nowhere near the number that the old museum had housed, or had at least housed in Mike’s memories.

There were four dioramas with stuffed animals inside of them: one with three wolves hunting against a backdrop painted with deer, another with a moose family visiting a well-constructed watering hole, the third with a possum family clambering over their mother atop a log, and the last contained a warren of fox children being offered a fellow in stuffing, a rabbit, as dinner. All of them had been well maintained, and when Mike and Deb turned the corner to see that those were the only such things to have made the trip, they smiled and linked hands.

They saw fiberglass fish, two larger pieces built just for the new museum that housed whitetail deer, owls, ducks, geese, fish, and a number of other forest, river, and lake animals. The next chamber had a case harboring a giant dead rat that was being devoured by a bevy of enormous insects; sitting atop a large cavity in its chest was a mealworm. There were a few other cases but nothing of merit, and certainly no more transported collections. Across the hall sat the sparse Egyptian offering.

The museum had a mummy, which Mike recognized immediately, as well as a head purchased under dubious circumstances just better than a hundred years prior. In the news article accompanying the head, which Deb read aloud, there was the information that the head had been bought at a street market during a period in Egypt where the gentry were quite desperate to own a mummy, and not so likely to care of its age. The article wondered if the head housed in the case was actually ancient or merely unlucky.

“Why don’t they just carbon date it?”

“Because if it’s not a mummy—”

“Then they’d have to give it back to Egypt or at least bury it! That’s pretty evil.”

“Well, if they gave it back, all we’d have is that lady over there. That head’s been here for a while, and at least it gained the owner some notoriety.”

“Yeah, that seems fair. C’mon, this stuff gives me the creeps.”

“Thousand-year-old bodies creep you out? You?”

“It just seems kind of shitty. These people busted their asses to be interred in as close to a natural, living state as possible, and now they’re here for us to ogle. I think if I could take these guys, I would.”

“They’d fall apart the second you touched them. Look, there’s a thermostat right there in the case.”

“You’re no fun.”

“Don’t pout. Let’s get out of here.”

“Are we still a go?”

“I can’t think of any reason not to. Well, besides the obvious ones. Those are still pretty glaring.”

“Nothing risked, nothing gained.”

“You keep saying it, I’ll keep trying to believe it.”

They walked hand in hand down the staircases, under the whale, and through the main doors.

The wind bit, but not hard, as they crossed the street to return to the apartment. It was a longer walk than Mike usually took in weather like this, but Deb didn’t complain about it and neither did he.

The morning after the museum, Mike slept more poorly than he had in recent memory.
Deb slept next to him, and Mike fell back into a similar abyss a few times too. Finally the waking stuck, and when he’d cleared the fog from his eyes he saw that she was up too, sitting in the bed and using the sheet to cover her breasts. She smiled at him and said, “What do you have today?”

“More work on that young kid’s pirate sleeve. His name’s Jeremy, the one with the orange hair. What do you have?”

“I’ve got a scarification appointment tonight but mostly just piercings. Oh yeah, I know that kid. His tat’s turning out nice. You need to tattoo me one of these days.”

“God, where?”

She feinted as if to smack him, and he pulled his hands up in mock defense.

“I have plenty of space left—you should know that better than anybody.”

“I could use a refresher.”

She smiled and rolled her eyes. “If last night wasn’t enough of a crash course on where I do and do not have tattoos, I don’t think anything’s going to help.”

“You know, you’re right. I think I saw some space on your left butt cheek, but like I said, though, memory’s a little fuzzy. Perhaps if I were to see—”

She tackled him before he could finish, batting at him for a few moments before he could throw her off. The sheet covering her breasts was off now, and he spared them a quick glance before she demurely recovered herself.

“What was the worst time for you?”

“How do you mean?”

“At work, what was the worst time you ever had in this job? And no crappy answers like you’d give a customer asking what the weirdest tattoo you ever did was. I want to hear the real thing.”

“You still owe me a story. Why should I have to go first?”

“I don’t want to talk about that this morning, but I will go first. Is that good enough?”

“It’ll do.”

“My worst happened in the second shop I worked at in Toronto. Two of the tattooists had split from the old shop I worked at because the owner was a dick, and they invited me along with them. I was young enough not to know that our owner wasn’t all that bad when you got right down to it, and I hadn’t come to appreciate the idea of a shop clientele. I thought that since we were the three most talented people working there, the customers would come right along with us.”

“Did they?”

“Some, not nearly enough. The ‘perfect location’ that the two artists had picked out was perfect: the area was nice and arty, but only during the day. At night it changed a bit—dealers, prostitutes, that whole mess. Not scary enough to keep the hardcores away, but for regular people the area had a pretty rotten reputation. It ended up being a nice little renaissance zone, but we were just a little too early.

“Anyways, after about six months I was just totally burnt out. I’d taken to eating dinner at my aunt’s house, and she was nice enough not to ask what was going on, but I’m sure she just really didn’t need to ask. It was probably written all over my face. I ended up getting a couple of credit cards just to keep my head above water, and it took years before they were all the way taken care of.

“The worst was in the middle of all of that. It was a Friday, and I hadn’t done anything in two days. Half an hour before close a couple comes in, young, attractive, and look like they have the money to afford us. She wants to get her nipples pierced, which I was immediately excited about because it was two piercings; I wasn’t going to get rich, but I was going to make some money. She fills out the form, her ID passes muster, and I bring her back to the room.

“She takes off her top, and I draw on her boobs—which are completely fake, by the way, not that I care, but it’s important later—and when I’m done I let her check them out in the mirror. Immediately she looks at the guy she came in with, and he examines the marks for a bit and finally says, ‘OK.’ I get the rest of my stuff ready and show her the jewelry. He’s got his nose right in my stuff by this point, but I don’t want to queer the deal; I’m already getting a vibe like I misjudged these people pretty severely.

“He takes one look at the barbell, which is a perfect starting size for her, and immediately says, ‘No way, it’s way too big. I paid way too much for those tits for them not to have the right jewelry, and frankly, for what you’re charging I’d think you’d try and sell me something that would fit.’

“I’m just struggling to stay calm at this point. On a busy day I’d have given that guy the boot so fast his head would’ve spun, but like I said, those weren’t busy days. Instead of telling him to get the fuck out and take his store-bought boobs with him, I politely explained why the jewelry had to be long to start with, that we had to allow room for swelling and cleaning, and that once they were healed she’d be able to get a size that would fit better. The whole time I’m talking it just feels like shit in my mouth, because I know that I’m begging.

“You know what he said in response? That I was trying to scam him. He thought I wanted to use longer bars as a trick to get them to come back and buy shorter ones. The girl lets him finish, he’s getting all red-faced and self-important as he’s yelling at me about being a hustler, and when he does finally shut up she says to me, ‘We need to leave before he gets angry and takes a swing at you.’ She got dressed and they left.”

“What a piece of shit. Why didn’t you have the guys you were working with thump him?”

“I don’t know, I guess it felt like it didn’t matter at that point. He was a piece of crap, and I was poor and felt even poorer for trying to keep such awful people in the room. I stayed at that shop for another month or so and then moved on. It was never the same after that. I think that’s why that other couple bothered me so much, the one with the wife that seemed off. OK, now it’s your turn.”

“Mine’s a lot shorter. It was when the first shop I owned went belly-up. I didn’t have a clue what I was doing as an owner. Every tattoo shop I’d ever seen seemed like it just ran itself; I’d missed all the nuts and bolts that go on behind closed doors. I made mistake after mistake, just constant fumbling of everything. One week we actually ran out of gloves because I’d forgotten to order them. I was trying to wear every hat when I could barely wear the tattooing one.

“I put that dog down myself—at least I had enough dignity to do that. I knew that we weren’t going to make rent on time again, and with our lease up a few months later, I ended up begging my landlord to let me out early. He was nice enough to do it, but I think it had more to do with not being the biggest fan of having a tattoo shop as a tenant than it did with just kindness.

“Next few jobs I had I watched everything going on behind the scenes, and besides a few little wrinkles, things went a lot better my second go-round. Honestly, they couldn’t have gone much worse.”

“What a couple of sad sacks we are.”

“Nah, it all worked out OK.”

“And at least we have our looks.”

“I don’t think I’ll be falling back on that anytime soon.”

“Oh, you’re cute. You know, they’re not all bad stories. Do you remember that couple I was telling you and Lamar about a couple of weeks ago?”

“What?”

“That couple, the one that made me feel all weird? Well she came back in yesterday, made me feel better about the whole thing. She was after some jewelry, and I think the whole thing really was her idea.”

“So we don’t need to get funny haircuts and listen to emo music?”

“You first. I’m gonna take a shower. Want to come?”

Mike pictured Sid on the floor, waiting for whatever the hell she was waiting for while he showered with Deb. “I’m gonna pass. You have fun without me.”

“Your loss.” She leaned over and pecked him on the mouth. “I can’t wait until we break into your museum.”