Shadow Show: All-New Stories in Celebration of Ray Bradbury (35 page)

THE TATTOO

Bonnie Jo Campbell

A
t the county fair, MacGregor bought a long strip of tickets from a man with one arm, and he and Silvie Ross climbed aboard the Tilt-A-Whirl and then the Zipper, the Starship 2000 and then the double Ferris wheel. They swooped, circled, and spun so wildly that they all but set themselves free from gravity. As they perched momentarily at the top of the Ferris wheel, MacGregor kissed both of Silvie’s flushed cheeks, then her lips. Beyond her pretty bare shoulder he saw the whole world stretching out, full of possibility. Then the huge contraption heaved them toward the earth, and MacGregor, caught up in the excitement of falling, shouted, “Marry me!” He didn’t even consider that they’d only been dating a few months or that he had no ring to offer her. Apparently Silvie didn’t think of these things either, because at the bottom, she said yes. The embrace that ensued on the way back up nearly knocked off MacGregor’s glasses.

As they reached the top again, MacGregor glimpsed his home to the east, a quarter mile from the fairgrounds, the house he’d just inherited from his parents, may they rest in peace. He held Silvie close and pointed out the visible bit of gray-green roof not shaded by the big sycamore tree; they couldn’t see the white clapboards or the dark-green trim, but recognizing that familiar place just now, just after the woman he loved had agreed to be his wife, brought tears to his eyes. His parents had lived in that house until seven months earlier, when they were killed in a car crash in Nevada, their first vacation since visiting the Wisconsin Dells on their honeymoon. MacGregor had never meant to be president of MacGregor Ball Bearing Inc., where he had worked every position from delivery boy to engineer, but he knew that fifty-three employees, including Silvie, the head of accounting, were depending on him to keep the company going.

MacGregor and Silvie returned to the ground and took their time moving along the midway, seeing each other in a new way as they strolled through the balmy evening, holding hands so as not to lose each other in the throng of teenagers and families. They stopped at the shooting gallery, and MacGregor went first. He picked up the BB gun and aimed. The tin bird cutouts seemed to slip around even while he had them in his sights. Then it was Silvie’s turn. When she aimed, MacGregor marveled at her solid stance, her heavy mane of nearly black hair, and her slim figure that felt strong and sweet in his arms. Her first, second, and third shots hit home, and she chose a polka-dot snake and wrapped it around her neck.

“I’ll put this behind the door to stop drafts in winter,” she said.

She was the practical one between the two of them. People said MacGregor was a daydreamer, not suited to run a company, but with Silvie at his side, he thought he just might be able to do it.

At the coin toss, it cost MacGregor four dollars to win a shell-shaped ashtray.

“I can help you quit smoking, you know,” Silvie said, dropping the ashtray into her purse. “And if you do, it’ll take down the company’s insurance rates.” She had wanted him to quit smoking since he’d met her, but it meant something different to him now that they were going to be married. For the first time, he felt as though he could really kick the habit.

They entered a tent with a sign advertising
WORLD OF NATURAL WONDERS
in which they saw a tiny pony, too small to be ridden even by a child. While they stood there a young carnival worker came in and put a striped kitten on the pony’s rump, and the kitten lay down and curled up sweetly there. There was a goat with five legs, a calf with two heads, and a pig so fat it couldn’t stand, but MacGregor felt uneasy looking at the animals’ deformities and their drooping eyes. Just past the mirror maze they found another tent with a sign whose peeling paint read
THE ILLUMINATED WOMAN
.

“I’m not sure,” MacGregor said when Silvie pulled him into the line. He felt shy at the notion of ogling a tattooed lady in front of his bride-to-be.

“Oh, don’t be a prude,” Silvie said. Silvie, his future wife! Her face was incandescent in the fading light. He wrapped his arms around her and lifted her off the ground. He’d long known her mind to be sharp as an axe—though she was only thirty, just three years older than him, his father had made her head of the accounting department—but until they’d started dating, he hadn’t known how kind she was, and how much fun. His mother used to accuse him of living with his head in the clouds, but this was the closest he’d ever come to feeling that buoyant.

He doled out a few more tickets, and they entered the twelve-by-twenty-foot tent. MacGregor expected to see a big woman posing in a bathing suit, her skin covered entirely with tattoos, but the woman seemed of average height and size, and she wore glasses. It was hard to tell her shape precisely, because she was sitting on a cushioned stool facing away from them. She seemed young, or certainly no older than MacGregor. She was paying no attention to the half dozen carnival patrons in the tent, who were mumbling and pointing at her, but was instead engaged in writing something in a notebook. Her hair was pulled into a sensible bun, and she wore a backless black evening gown that revealed the brilliant colors stretching from her tailbone up to her hairline. MacGregor noticed that the images on her skin appeared to be moving.

“They must be playing a film on her back!” Silvie said, moving closer to the burgundy velvet rope, of the type found at old-fashioned movie houses. It was the most elegant piece of equipment at the fair, MacGregor thought, but it kept him eight feet away when he wanted to move in and get a closer look. The sign dangling by a gold chain warned that patrons stepping over or under the rope would be
violated.
He stood behind the woman and waved his hand around, trying to locate the beam of light from the projector he thought must be directed at her.

Playing across the young woman’s back was a scene of a man and a boy paddling a canoe on a pristine river. Aspens quaked in a light breeze, and weeping willow tendrils dragged in the water. MacGregor leaned over the rope and saw fish moving beneath the surface, dozens of speckled trout and whiskered catfish. It’d been years since he’d been fishing or canoeing, though he and his father had gone most weekends in the summer when he was a boy. His father had loved being outdoors, and it pained him whenever they found trash caught in a snag or saw the remnants of a dirty campsite on a sandbar. Now, in the scene on the young woman’s back, a blue-eyed dark-haired boy in the front seat turned, and MacGregor started at the sight of the familiar face. Could it be him? Could that man in the back of the canoe with the round face and salt-and-pepper hair be his father? Oh, how he missed his father! Was that his mother, waving from the riverbank? Was there some alternate universe in which his parents were still alive to advise him?

Silvie elbowed him and pointed out a pair of mallards landing on the river, and MacGregor shook away the crazy idea that his own life would intersect with a carnival illusion. In a matter of months, the momentum of his decisions would carry him down a road he’d never anticipated traveling. He was the president of his father’s company! About to marry a bright, beautiful, accomplished woman! When he was the age of that boy in the canoe, he’d dreamt of being an astronaut, of exploring other planets and maybe even alternate universes. But it had been a foolish desire, considering how poor his vision had been since third grade; astronauts, like all pilots, needed excellent eyesight.

“This is just marvelous!” Silvie said, her face aglow.

MacGregor loved seeing Silvie enthralled—so often he feared he was boring her with his melancholy talk about his parents and his musing about the properties of ball bearings. Just today as they’d driven to the fair, he’d been explaining to Silvie how radically they could reduce friction and extend equipment life through the use of enhanced surface finishes and special coatings.

“Look, it’s changing,” Silvie said. The young woman’s back seemed to waver, and then they could make out an old-fashioned steam train coming around a curve. It passed through a stand of woods, beyond which a herd of deer grazed on the side of a hill.

As the train chugged over a river, MacGregor pointed to the tattooed woman’s shoulder blade, upon which a couple sat eating drumsticks and potato salad.

“Maybe that’s you and me,” MacGregor said.

“We look very happy and handsome,” Silvie said jokingly.

MacGregor could tell from the way that she put her hand on his arm and sighed that she was ready to leave the tent. But he wanted to stay in order to understand how the pictures were forming and reforming. To him it didn’t seem like a movie. For starters, the movement was slow, and the scenes were perfect in every detail, and when the scene had changed, it hadn’t done so abruptly. For a moment it had seemed that each cell on the surface of the woman’s skin contained both the previous image of the river and the new image of the train, before becoming fully the train and its landscape. MacGregor couldn’t help thinking the scene was moving by some power of the young woman’s body. As he watched, the man and woman on the picnic blanket moved away from each other. Their faces had gone serious. The man’s eyebrows were drawn down, and the woman seemed to be saying something angrily. What might they be arguing about? He took Silvie’s hand and pulled it to his heart. What could they possibly argue about in such a beautifully illustrated world?

As MacGregor and Silvie watched the scenes move across her back, the tattooed woman remained engaged by whatever she was writing. MacGregor tried repeatedly to get a glimpse of her notebook, but each time he adjusted his position to see over her shoulder or past her arm, she would shift slightly (deliberately?) and block his view. He was moving along the velvet rope, his eyes on her curved profile, when, without warning, tears began streaming down her cheeks. The hand holding the pen continued to move across the paper as she quietly cried.

MacGregor stepped back a few feet from the rope.

“Poor girl,” he said to Silvie. “It must be exhausting to be in a sideshow.”

“Well, at least she’s got a job,” Silvie said. “I worked with girls like this in Scouts.”

“Girls like what?”

“Girls without a solid upbringing,” Silvie whispered. “A job helps them make sense of their lives, helps ground them.”

MacGregor nodded. After being a Girl Scout herself for years, Silvie had volunteered as a troop leader, and she now sat on the local board of directors. She was a woman who cared about the people around her as much as she cared about the figures in the red and black columns at MacGregor Ball Bearing Inc.

“Let’s go look in the 4-H animal barns,” Silvie said, and moved toward the exit. “I love seeing which chickens and rabbits won the blue ribbons.”

MacGregor looked over his shoulder at the Illuminated Woman one last time and saw the father and son in the canoe again, except that now the canoe was plunging over a waterfall, and the fiberglass canoe was crashing onto the rocks. Half of the canoe bobbed in the frothy water where the limp bodies of the father and son floated. MacGregor didn’t turn away until Silvie took his hand and led him out of the tent.

That night, MacGregor lay alone in his bed, unable to sleep after the excitement of the day. He had tried to persuade Silvie to stay with him, but she’d wanted to go home and call her mother to tell her the good news. When MacGregor closed his eyes, he saw a brief image of Silvie’s face, but then that image wavered and he saw again the colorful visions on the Illuminated Woman’s back, the water flowing more dramatically, more realistically than real water had ever flowed. The sun shone on the river to make it sparkle, to reveal the gleaming fishes below, and the man and boy in the canoe sparkled too as they paddled. He saw once again their broken bodies at the bottom of the falls and felt again the sorrow he had experienced that afternoon, but he had never been afraid of sadness in a story. The last image, the ruined canoe bobbing alongside those bodies, made him think and worry and reflect. He didn’t know why the story of the canoe trip had been interrupted by the story of the train, unless someone from the train was going to see the tragic scene and make a wise observation.

He wondered what stories would play across his body if he had such a tattoo. Maybe the images would play out the history of ball bearings, culminating in his future successful development of new hybrid ceramic ball bearings that operated so smoothly they would last a thousand years without lubrication or replacement. Maybe an image would appear of his crowning achievement: a machine the size of a three-story building that purified polluted air using almost no energy—he and his father had invented the bubbling, humming antipollution machine during one of their jaunts on the river. He imagined cars that flew along the ground and then rose up into the sky effortlessly. He imagined a rocket ship taking off, its destination another galaxy. Then he saw Silvie shimmering in her wedding dress. He saw his mother’s wedding ring gleaming on her finger. He hoped he and Silvie would be as happy as his parents had been, growing closer and more affectionate over the years. He wanted Silvie to gaze upon him with pure delight, as his mother had gazed upon his father, as his father had gazed upon his mother in return.

The following afternoon, Silvie was tied up with an audit and had to stay late at work. MacGregor kissed her goodbye and started to go home but then decided to return to the fair. He walked along the midway with his hands in his pockets. He bought a short string of tickets and handed them over at the entrance to the tent of the Illuminated Woman. There was no one else inside. He approached her with his eyes focused on the grass so as not to get distracted.