Anonymity (24 page)

AFTER LORELEI fled the fight, she had come upon a church and slipped around back to the burial grounds. She bedded down in bushes, but there was no way she could sleep. She rocked, clutching her knees to her chest, her heart's rhythm matching her flurry of thoughts.

So Leo had found her. He had warned her that he would. The tail feathers on her phoenix had been tingling at the edge of her eye, making her think about him, so she should have known he would show up.

Lorelei had thought she could just leave him behind like she had so many other situations. She'd run away from her home, an unbearable life filled with her weeping mother and her angry father. Since then, her life had become a progression of a few months here a few months there. The community house, different friends. Her year with Leo had been a long stay in her otherwise transient existence. It had started out safe, romantic even, but ended up quite another way.

After her Haida boyfriend left in the middle of the night, Lorelei had taken up with a group of travelers. Along the way, she'd met Road Dogg. He was in his early twenties, tall and thin and sprinkled with tattoos. He had the traveler railroad tracks on his arm. Each letter of his name was inked across one of his knuckles. He talked about road literature like Jack Kerouac and Jack London. He liked Ray Bradbury's work and Stephen King.

He'd gotten her a job picking up nails on construction sites. Road Dogg had been all over the country and said that kids in the north worked while kids in the south begged. He said, “Never be a beggar.” She'd earned enough that she didn't have to wear shelter clothes. She had a nice sleeping bag and a small tarp. Road Dogg kept her jumping, finding day jobs for them on Craigslist. They did drywall, framing and gardening.

The day he decided to leave for warmer climes, Lorelei had tagged along. They piled into an old minivan with a ragtag bunch of other kids. They left the massive green trees of Oregon for the steely cliffs of the Pacific Coast Highway. Lorelei had never seen the ocean and was so enthralled that she imagined flinging herself over the edge to see if she could fly off into the golden horizon.

The trip had taken weeks. New friends flowed in and out of their lives. They stopped at festivals where they found temporary work serving up vegan meals to patchouli-smelling crowds of groovy music lovers. They slept in fields and abandoned houses. But what started out as the best road trip ever took a turn for the worse when they rolled into Southern California.

Los Angeles was a tangle of highways. The first serious urban center she'd ever experienced, L.A. was all hard edges and concrete. She'd been surprised by the amount of barbed wire. To her, barbed wire was for keeping cattle in, but apparently in the city, it was for keeping people out. She liked the graffiti, but some of it was poorly rendered, and it gave her a creepy, depressed feeling. It reminded her of her latest tattoo, a lightning bolt she'd let someone scrape under her eye, an immediate regret.

They were disappointed to find that the community house where Road Dogg usually crashed had burned to the foundation. Somebody told them neighbors set the building afire because it had turned into a squat.

The rest of the pack decided to drive on to Vegas, but Road Dogg stayed to visit a friend with a tattoo studio. Road Dogg had become like a big brother to her, so Lorelei stayed too.

Inside Leo's L.A., mesmerizing music pinged softly underneath the razz of tattoo guns. It smelled sterile, like the entire studio had just been autoclaved. The walls were covered from floor to ceiling with colorful Japanese dragons and vivid lotus flowers, scarlet swelling hearts and 1940s hula girls. Snakes, skulls, crossbones and flames were tacked everywhere.

Road Dogg walked into the back, where the buzzing grew louder. Artists leaned over tables and massage chairs where clients exposed various body parts.

He stopped at an open doorway. Tracing paper with sketches lifted gently from the walls. There were pages cut from magazines and black-and-white photographs of arms and legs and backs.

It was magical.

“Hey, man. What up?” her friend said.

“Dogg! Come on in. Good to see you, man. Who's your chick?”

“This is Lorelei.”

“Right on, man. Nice to meet you, Lorelei.”

Leo wasn't like anyone she'd ever met. He had the exaggerated muscles of a body builder and the thick neck that Lorelei had always found repulsive on her school's football players. But somehow it all worked on Leo. The tattoos were plentiful, but not excessive. Somehow she felt an attraction to him even though he had to be in his thirties.

Road Dogg and Leo knuckle bumped like old friends.

“Still working I see,” Road Dogg said.

“Yeah, man. You know me. I've got ink for blood.”

“Got any new work?”

Leo pulled his shirt over his head to show an orange koi swimming from under his arm up over his left shoulder. Lorelei had never seen such an exquisite tattoo.

“That's freaking awesome, man,” Road Dogg said.

Leo examined one of Road Dogg's arms. “You've got to do something about those rough tats. Stop with the stick and poke, dude.”

“You know me, man. It's like a bad habit. Once you start, you can't stop. I don't have the money for somebody with your talents.”

Leo turned to Lorelei. “What about you? This idiot here do that to your face?”

She touched the sad excuse for a lightning bolt.

“Hell, no. I didn't do that mess,” Leo said. “You should fix her up, man. Can you make it look better?”

Leo nodded. “Sure, I can fix that.”

“I don't have any money,” Lorelei said.

“That's cool. Girl as pretty as you shouldn't be left with that mess on her face. You've got to think about it though. I'm not going to do a cover on you just to do a cover. It's got to be something you like.”

“He's serious,” Road Dogg said. “He won't do somebody who just walks in off the street and wants to pick one out of a book.”

Leo gestured to one section of wall where recognizable designs dominated. “This is what you call flash stock art.” He pointed to another section. “That's my original artwork. I prefer to do something that means something to a person.”

She scanned the designs.

“Tattoos—longest shelf life of any product, highest buyer's remorse,” Leo said.

Road Dogg and Lorelei found a camp of kids outside the city because he didn't like shelters. Road Dogg worked a lot and included Lorelei when she would come. They picked strawberries and broccoli in enormous fields where she met families of migrant workers who shared their beans and rice. They were illegals, the people her father talked about who took jobs in factories and slaughterhouses that rightfully belonged to Americans. Lorelei wasn't so sure that these people were hurting anybody.

One afternoon, while Road Dogg was out harvesting Brussels sprouts, she came into the city by herself. At the tattoo studio, a chesty brunette was in Leo's chair. He was detailing a flower on her hand while a drunken, sullen man looked on. The woman seemed so stoned that she might go to sleep even while needles punctured her skin.

It took Lorelei only a second to realize that the man was talking smack about his woman, and it was making Leo mad.

“Put my name on her ass,” the guy said.

The woman nodded, “It's okay,” she said.

Leo locked eyes with the man, but said to the woman, “I won't ink his name on you.”

“You put what I tell you to put on her,” the guy said.

“That's it,” Leo said, stripping off his latex gloves—snap, snap. “We're done here. Take your business somewhere else.”

“You got to finish her.”

“You don't want me working on anybody as pissed off as I am right now.”

“You haven't even done me yet. I want one of those hula girls there with her tits all hanging out. I want it here.” He pointed to a vacant space among the lewd sleeve on his arm.

Something changed in Leo's eyes. He said, “Fine, have a seat.”

The woman got up, and the man settled into Leo's chair. Lorelei watched from the doorway. Within minutes the idiot's forehead was sprinkled with beads of sweat. Lorelei could tell Leo held the needle in the same spot longer than necessary. She'd seen him work twice as fast. When the guy ended up with his head between his knees, his girlfriend moved in to console him.

As the idiot was leaving, he had turned to Leo and said, “You're the worst damn tattoo artist I've ever seen.”

Leo just smiled.

“I can't believe you made him sick,” Lorelei said.

“He deserved it. You don't treat a woman that way.”

That was all it took.

She never went back to the migrant camp.

Leo lived in a modern apartment above the studio. Not the worst place she'd ever crashed. The first night was awkward. She'd assured him that she was eighteen. He looked dubious, but let the subject drop.

He was a considerate lover, but nothing like her Indian love. Just the thought of that lean, dark-skinned boy caused her owl tattoo to pulse. But Leo made her feel wanted and protected. And for a while, that was enough.

They looked through books and discussed the meanings of certain tattoos to fix her eye. She decided on a phoenix, the bird that self-destructs in flames, then rises from her own ashes, reborn beautiful and strong. After he'd drawn a dozen options, they finally arrived at a carefully considered bird that would mask her previously shoddy work.

Before she starting getting tattoos, the worst pain she had ever endured was the prick of a dentist. But being tattooed gave her a crystal clear burn that brought her clarity, a searing sensation, as if the world were made of glass. After a while, pain became a background to the hum of her thoughts, and she relaxed into a trance.

Once her face work was finished, Lorelei began to sneak into Leo's workspace and watermark the inside of her arm where the skin was thin and tender. It was worse than a bee sting, but the adrenaline jolt that seared her for that second left her alive and tingly. She'd be happy and calm for days afterward.

Leo had walked in and caught her blood lining—small strikes she had cut into herself using water instead of ink.

“Stop it,” he had said when he caught her. “What are you doing? Hurting yourself just to hurt yourself?”

“I like how it feels.”

“Girl, you can't do that.”

“Isn't that part of what you like about it? The rush?”

“Yeah, okay. That's part of it, but shit, you can't do it for recreation.” After that, he secured his gun in a metal cabinet, and the other artists who rented space from him started locking their doors.

Leo fixed her other ratty tattoos. He took care of her and bought her clothes. He took her to Venice Beach, where nobody stared at her face. Leo bought her a pair of old roller skates, and she spent hours cruising Ocean Front Walk while he lifted weights at Muscle Beach. She sat in the sand and admired the bearded palm trees. She watched black neoprene clad surfers on waves in the distance. She danced to cheerful mariachis and watched fire-eaters and a magician with a monkey on his shoulder. Along the boardwalk, she ate shaved ice and shopped for cheap sunglasses. For the first time in her life, she grew tan. She streaked her hair blond. She was a California girl.

But one day, she noticed that she couldn't stand Leo's funky breath from the Asian food he favored. Soon came a feeling of dread at the end of the day when his cowboy boots clomped up the stairs.

In the beginning, she had felt better about herself when she was with Leo, but somehow things had soured like his breath. Without warning, her pleasant life with him was reduced to something disturbing. She quickly grew to dread his attention.

He'd take her out to eat and want sex when they got home. He'd buy her a pair of jeans and then expect a blowjob. His touch made her skin crawl. Twice, she threw up after they did it.

She hated who she became with him. And she hated him.

Leo noticed the change in her. As she'd pulled away, he'd grown controlling, desperate to hang on to her. She resented his condescending way of saying, “You'll understand when you're older.”

She even hated the way his clothing, all metal buttons and studs, clanged around in the dryer in a foreboding rhythm—
You don't want this, you don't want this, you don't want this.

So, she ran away.

Leo found her in Venice before she'd even had a chance to get out of town. She had put up scant resistance when he led her to his bike and drove her back to his apartment. He had given her a lecture on the dangers of the streets, as if she wasn't already aware. When he saw he wasn't getting anywhere with that line of reasoning, he professed his love and pleaded with her never to run away again. He started to cry, and she almost felt sorry for the sobbing hulk, but while she braced herself for his touch, her mind was calculating escape.

Soon after, Road Dogg showed up at the studio to say he was on his way to Phoenix.

“Please, take me with you,” she begged when she finally got him alone. “I can't stay here another night.”

“But what about Leo?” he asked.

“I have to get far away,” she told him. “If I don't leave L.A., he'll keep finding me. He won't leave me alone. You have to let me come with you.”

Road Dogg warned her that they would be hopping a train, a loud and dirty and dangerous proposition.

“Keep him talking,” she said. “I'll meet you out back in ten minutes.”

Road Dogg had burned his friendship with Leo to help her. She would never be able to repay him. But his was just another kindness that she'd never be able to repay.

She had a string of those—kind people, fun people. But of course there were also mean people and crazy people. And people who turned out to be problems.

Leo was just another one of those problem people she'd been trying to leave behind.

Morning approached, and she gathered her things and headed out. She stuck to second streets as she worked her way toward the train yard. Better safe than sorry.

She hated to leave Austin, but she was fresh out of options. Her steps were heavy. Blackness pushed at the edges of her mind, but she forced herself to put one foot in front of the other. She could take herself away from another bad situation. She'd just have to do it one step at a time.