A Good and Useful Hurt (2 page)

Phil sat alone, ignoring the aching and ancient football injury in his left knee, and watching a woman who thought she and her infant daughter were safe.
It was funny how that worked, and it never got old. Being a god was almost magical at times, as long as you had the balls to deal with the consequences. Gods killed, just as they created, and even though Phil wanted quite badly to kill this bitch, he wasn’t going to. He was going to eat his food just like she was, and then he was going to leave.

The woman’s name was Shawna Danforth, and the baby’s was Tasha. They lived about ten miles from the diner where she was enjoying a meal of bacon and eggs, while the child slept in a stroller. Had she been told that she was less than twenty feet from a murderer and rapist, she would have been horrified. Had she been told that the same rapist and murderer knew where she lived and had full plans to follow her and her child home, she would have run screaming for safety. But she didn’t know.

Being a god was more than killing—Phil knew that as well as anyone. He was going to finish his dinner, pay his bill, and go to his truck. When Shawna and the baby left, he was going to follow them home. He was going to watch her leave her car and unbuckle the child from her car seat, and then he was going to park his truck a block away from where they lived. After that, he was going to watch her through her windows, first stripping from her work clothes, then giving the baby a bottle, and finally hopping online to peruse the dating website she’d been using. When she went to sleep, he was going to open her back door, and he was going to walk in and take a tour of the house. He was going to pay particular attention to the sometimes sleeping, sometimes not, baby Tasha. When he was done walking the house, he would sit at the dining room table and smell their collective smells. After five minutes had passed, he was going to leave. All for the thrill, just to do it, to own her in that way.

It’s good to be a god,
thought Phil. He sipped his coffee, watched Shawna, and dreamt of death.
Not her. Not tonight. She needed to be special. A reward. But someone, and soon.

Life happened.
The months after the ash tattoo were of monotony and business. The shop was doing well, and Mike had begun to seriously consider hiring another artist. Darryl quit after a disagreement over his pay, and Mike had watched him go with both a sad feeling over a friendship dissolved because of money, and with a harder feeling over whether it would even be worthwhile to hire another piercer. Not that he really had another option. The store owned thousands in jewelry, and it was either sell it to another studio for much less than it was worth, or hire another flake to poke holes. Not for the first time, he wondered if perhaps his old mentor hadn’t been right about the jewelry-inserting side of the industry. He’d had several applicants, but none had seemed right. The first had hit on Becky until Lamar had chased him from the lobby, and neither the second nor third had a portfolio.

He left the Piercer Wanted sign in the window anyway, and he had Becky add a similar notice to the store’s MySpace and Facebook accounts, two other necessary features of modern tattooing that would have made old Jack absolutely furious.

Jack had a whole litany of sayings that Mike decided later were more of a shield against Jack’s insecurities about his own talent than they were a screed. Most prized amongst them was being an outlaw: By tattooing in a shop in North Carolina, Jack had been flaunting his business against a state law that strictly forbade the art. Jack not only ran a shop in a territory where it was completely illegal, he did so just miles from a military base, and his clientele ran from criminals to lawyers and every occupation in between. People liked Jack and the sense of importance they felt in his chair just as much as they liked the old feel of the place—the revolver that sat on clear display on his table, the old designs, the stink of the tobacco—and the utter lawlessness of it.

What Jack had never seen was the revolution in tattooing, the reality shows that littered the high-numbered cable channels, the magazines that ended up changing from near porn to photo journals, and the idea that a guy who wanted some tats could become a collector in the same way someone who enjoyed fine art would seek out the work of the masters. Jack had missed the front of that storm by choice and the eye of it by death, but his protégé sure as hell didn’t miss the back end. Mike let the business stumbles, corrupt owners, and partners fall off of him like water. He absorbed the new ways the same as he’d absorbed the old, but with a different gusto; the old ways had been a way to make money, while the new were a way to live through art as he’d dreamt of doing while he’d doodled in class so many years ago.

Mike had two appointments scheduled for the early afternoon, one with a woman wanting a tattoo and the other with a woman looking to be hired as a piercer.

He talked to Becky while he waited for the tattoo appointment to show, and as always, she was a font of irrelevancies. Not irrelevancies he minded all that much, but still, a constant vocalization of celebrity gossip and other nonsense. Mike weathered the storm until a young woman wearing a sweatshirt from a local college with her hair pulled up in a bun walked in.

She approached the counter with confidence, and Becky bubbled out a greeting.

“I’ve got a consultation with Mike.”

He smiled and extended a hand. “What can I help you with, miss?”

“It’s nice to meet you, Mike. I’m Jean. I’d like to talk in private if we could.”

“That’s fine, follow me on back.”

He led her to his booth—past the paintings he and Lamar had done, past the vacant piercing booth, Lamar’s room, and past the vacant room he was using as an office—until they reached his tattoo space. Mike sat in the chair he worked from, and gestured at the old barber’s chair. She sat.

“So what do you have in mind?”

“I was referred to you by a man named Wes Ogden.”

“Doesn’t ring a bell.”

“He had a special request.”

“I’m telling you, I don’t remember him.”

She sighed. “My sister died last month. Wes and my dad used to play tennis at the YMCA a couple of times a week. When his son died, they stopped. At my sister’s funeral, he mentioned coming to you for his tattoo.”

And then Mike remembered Wes, his son, the wife, and the accident.

“Now that you mention it, I do recall Wes.”

The woman took a small envelope from her pocket and set it on her lap. “I’d like to have the same sort of work done.”

Something fluttered inside him, but he shoved it aside. Right now was work, not the time to feel uncomfortable about a reasonable request, no matter how heavy it might be. “That’s no problem. What kind of image were you looking for?”

She took a folded piece of paper from the opposite pocket she’d taken the envelope from, and handed it to him. He opened it, and it had a sketch of a bicycle wheel on it. Crude, but drawn with heart.

“Where’s it going?”

“On my hip.”

“You’ll be looking at ten for the ink and seventy-five for the tattoo.”

“That sounds fine. When can you do it?”

“I’ve got another appointment in an hour, but I think I could squeeze you in now, if you’d like.”

“That would be great.”

“Well, then you hang onto that envelope and head back to the lobby. Becky will get you some paperwork, and when you’re done, you can come back here.”

She left and Mike went to the office to make the stencil. He copied the design onto a piece of tracing paper and cut it out, then took the scrap and laid it onto a piece of carbon paper and ran that through his aged thermal fax, a machine once possessed by nearly every office in the world and now relegated to tattoo shops alone.

When it was done, he returned to the booth. He set the scrap on the bottom tier of his cart and then washed his hands. He dried them and shut off the water. He sat and set up the station, and then she was back. He wondered if he had the energy for this again. He pushed that thought to the back of his head and went to work.

“My sister died because of mountain biking,” she said when he started.

“She loved it though, so that’s OK. Her nickname was Bruce, because she liked the
Evil Dead
movies so much. She was awesome. She hit her head on some rocks in Utah after her bike pitched her off. She lived for just over a month in a coma, and my parents almost divorced over trying to decide what to do with all of those fucking gasping and wheezing machines.”

She winced. “That hurts, right there.”

“We’ll be off of the bone in a second.”

She was quiet for a minute, then started in again. “My sister was better than all of us. I asked those doctors over and over again if she could hear, and they all said no, but I know she could because of how she went—a blood clot from her hip, right where this is going, went to her heart and killed her. My dad was about two or three days away from taking my mom to court to see about unplugging Bruce, but she saved all of us a lot of pain by going the way she did.”

“That’s awesome.”

“She was a good person—my idol my whole life, and I never even told her. Last semester I was so stressed about school that I almost dropped out. I called her and told her, and you know what she said to her baby sister? She said if that’s what I needed, then to do it. That set me straight. Just knowing that I could if I had to was enough to fix me right up. All of a sudden dropping out seemed ridiculous. College was a privilege, and my sister was right—I could quit if it got to be too much, and my life would be just fine.”

He listened to the rest of it and bandaged her up. They talked about care, and she left to pay Becky. Mike sat in that lonely chair with thoughts of Jean and Bruce and Wes and Josh filling his mind. He hoped that there would be no more, but a part of him, a greedy part that he found it difficult to even acknowledge, wanted there to be more.

A tattoo is an energy exchange that can be addictive for both client and practitioner, and those two tattoos with ashes carried wild energy—lightning crackling and popping on clear-skied days—and made Mike’s hands wobble in a way they hadn’t wobbled in twenty years. His breath was high and greedy in his chest, and just the emotion, the connection of it, was unreal.

The next appointment was as different from the last as he ever could have imagined. She had dyed red hair, a flaming shock of fire that was cut short, molded into a faux-hawk in the bangs, and then split into a pair of moussed-down faux sideburns that stopped mid-ear. Her stomach was milky white, sliding into view with alternating shifts of her hips as she walked. About her waist were five rows of pyramid-spiked stainless studs atop a leather belt. Her jeans were black. She wore white Converses and black eyeliner and swung an Eastpack from her back. Her shirt, tight to accentuate her bust and waist, had a picture of a fallen man and said “Too drunk to fuck!” above her winking abdomen. Her arms were sleeved in tattoo work, her hands were covered, and her neck was wrapped in it as well. Jutting from her hairline were two split lines of ink, and those were finished with transdermal implants. Her lobe piercings bore enormous wheels of a dark wood, and her lower lip bore a plug of a similar color.

She stopped five feet from the counter, threw the Piercer Wanted sign across it at Mike, and said, “I got an interview with somebody.”

Mike laughed hard and long while Becky scowled at the woman.

The woman said, “Oh yeah,” and dug a card from her pocket. “Says to talk to Mike. You Mike?”

“I am.”

“I was talking to the chick, dumbass.”

“What?”

“Just kidding. You need a piercer, I need a job.”

“You got an attitude, girl.”

“This is correct, Dr. Science.”

Mike handed the sign to Becky. “Becks, put this back in the fuckin’ window.”

“Hang on, hang on.” The new girl grinned. “For working in a tattoo shop, you’ve got some thin skin, friend.”

She shrugged the backpack off of a shoulder, unzipped the largest pocket, and pulled an enormous binder from it that she set on the counter.

“Have a look-see before I get eighty-sixed.”

Mike fought the urge to resist and picked the thing up. He’d think about it later and figure his success with Lamar had to have been the reason. Lamar had been cocky too, and he’d proven to be a tremendous talent, not to mention a great friend. Another part of him seemed to think that perhaps he looked at her portfolio because she
was
pretty easy on the eyes. That last he banished to the place where he forced all of those thoughts to go since Sid had killed herself.

Mike figured later it didn’t really matter all that much. The girl’s name was Deb, and her portfolio was amazing. In addition to just the rote piercings his studio had always offered, she was well versed in implants, scarification—both cutting and branding—and the back of the book contained a gut-churning selection of horrible things that could be done to one’s penis.

He set the book down after a quick scan and watched Becky’s eyes widen at the page he’d left it open to. Mike looked at Deb and said, “Well, we do need a piercer, but I can’t help but think I’m going to regret this.”

She smiled. “You won’t.”

“I hope not.”

“You got any suggestions on where I can find an apartment?”