A Tattoo and Afterwards
It was Sunday night and I felt aimless so I fixed myself up like I knew where I was going—a fancy red dress I’d bought at a thrift store a few days back. It was almost dusk as I drove through Knoxville, down Broadway, then Ludlow, heading to Willy’s, where I didn’t see a soul anywhere. Sunday evenings were one of the few times the hubbub of renovations died down. I liked those times and often found myself headed over there, walking the quiet halls. Weeks had passed and Willy’s was on its way to a grand opening, or so the sign taped to the outside of the main door said. My time here was almost over, and I wanted to memorize the oddities.
At the top of the steps leading from the big entryway a display case held giant luna moths, green and gray and gold ones pinned to a mounting tray. A taxidermied sloth and a huge bat, its wings spread and tacked to a cork board, completed a display dedicated to Exotica of the Farthest Reaches of Rainforests. I drifted past other cases filled with knives and bones, arrowheads and pottery bowls. Paraphernalia of Lost Tribes! I pushed aside a curtain to a room next to that one. I flipped the light switch, but the room was dark, black-painted shades drawn. I flipped another switch and a spooky recording played something that might have been wings swooping. “You have entered,” a voice-over said, “an exact replica of a cavern deep under the earth. Are you ready?” I was not.
I passed through the Lost Tribes room into a narrow hallway that ended at a small room lit only by candles you could get by the dozen at any local bodega—St. Christopher, mighty angels. I walked the walls, touching things, first a large mural made of cross sections of trees. Heartwood. The hardest part of the wood, a sign read. There was an aquarium, too, filled with pale white frogs, their skin so transparent you could see their tiny hearts pumping blood.
The ceiling made this my favorite place. I sank onto the floor and lay back, staring at my reflection, hundreds of me in cutouts from tin, mirrors cut to the shape of hearts. I’d seen mirrored ceilings before in motels that also offered auto-massage beds and a bar with aphrodisiacs and cinnamon-tasting drinks, but nothing like this. Every square inch of this ceiling was covered with shiny hearts—and my image was everywhere, small, large, thin, my neck as long as Alice’s in her Wonderland. Hearts aplenty, she said. It was Ruby, talking at me like she hadn’t for a spell.
I raised my hand and waved as a dozen reflected hands waved back, all of them mine. I lay still, listening to the silence of the building. I tapped my fingers against the floorboards and made a radio song of it, a Tom Petty song I’d have played over and over driving on a highway as the wind cooled off a summer night. Then a long-gone song, a tiny square of memory music, gathered inside me. Hold me, Radiance, honey. Hold me in the morning, hold me at night. My heart beat fast as I remembered Ruby’s hands trailing in the air, telling lives, conjuring lost love, letting love go one more time.
In the mirrors the lines beside my mouth were making their way down the center of my chest, furrows into my skin, waiting to open into some other me, these next years ahead. Hell for leather. Some lover or other had called me that, once upon a time, and I’d liked it, the way it sounded like biker boots and a Harley both. But what did strong mean, when you began to reach the other side of your own self with no hands to reach out for you on the rocky way down? Would I be raging or just sad as I packed my car the next time and headed east or maybe west, looking for my own horizon? Love’s been here and gone, Ruby’d say. In the mirrors overhead, I looked pale and tired and I knew the truth. It was long gone, my heart.
“You don’t look like you, Miracelle Loving.” Cody Black stood in the doorway, a coil of electrical wire looped over his shoulder.
“Who do I look like?” I stood up and ran my fingers through my hair.
“Like a word left out of some sentence.” His eyes traveled the length of my dress and back up.
“That’s one way to describe me.”
“What are you doing here by yourself, anyway?”
I shrugged, then suddenly felt light-headed as I remembered the hundreds of mirrored images of me. I took the can he held out to me and sipped Coca-Cola, pure and sweet.
I followed him downstairs, then outside to the gazebo where he and I often had lunch. From there you could see a little rise a couple streets over from Willy’s, one with a billboard of an angel and Jesus. I leaned next to the good sweat scent of Cody, my head on his shoulder.
He reached inside his jacket and whipped out a paper bag. “Miracelle,” he said as he unwrapped a cheese sandwich and tore off half for me. “What’re we going to do with you?”
“I didn’t know we were doing anything with me.”
“What are you going to do with you, then? What’ll you do after the museum is finished?” he asked.
“Find a new road out of Knoxville, I reckon. What about you?”
“Get a dog.” He laughed. “Can’t you see a big dog hanging out my car windows?”
“Pretty well.”
“You got another plan than a highway?” he asked.
In the distance someone had set a boom box going with a spacey fusion of night-sounding guitar and drums.
“Before I get a plan,” I said as I ate and swallowed the now-warm cola, “I’ll have to ask the stars about it.”
“I’m still not much on the fortune telling, Miracelle.”
I took a chance, reached for his hand. His hands were blunt fingered, a boy’s hands. But they were a man’s, too, broad-veined and strong.
“Maybe I’ll get one of these.” I traced the inked petals of a tattoo on his wrist.
“I didn’t think you were the tattoo kind.”
I finished the last of the sandwich, then held my hand there still, against his arm. Ruby would have done that. She was there now, on the tips of my fingers that strayed up his, trailed along the soft hairs that rose from the lines and paths his tattoos made.
“Looking at you is like looking into a valley,” he said. “Or a well, maybe. Someplace that has no end at all, but you want one, over and over.”
“I just wanted—” I began, and then hushed.
“Wanted what?”
“A stopping point.” There were other words inside my mouth but I wasn’t sure how to say them. Instead I looked at his face, the boy-cheeks, the one little earring he had in the side of his nose. Boys. I’d loved some of those, and I liked it, usually, how I could love them from a spot that felt so way up high. Me, taller than them, older and wiser and here, there, gone when I liked, with Ruby’s voice riding along beside me on some highway west, who knew how far. What would a stopping point look like?
Then I said the thing he least expected. “Where do you get a tattoo around here on a Sunday, Cody Black?”
We drove miles outside the city, then on from there, and I thought about Cody’s tattoos. Some of them must have hurt good, the way country songs hurt when you were dancing with one lover and wanted another one you couldn’t have. His new ones must have hurt even more, them fine edged and next to the bones of his hands and wrists, but if I had to guess, I’d have said he’d liked tattooing for just that—a pain he could name some nights when he couldn’t sleep.
“You sure you want to do this, Miracelle?” He’d tried to convince me often enough to go with him, see the tattoo places he loved, and now he was trying just as hard somehow to persuade me to head over to some juke joint for a bluegrass band instead, but I was set.
“Do you have any idea why you want a tattoo?”
I’d thought about it many a time as I lay awake at the Red Sari, but I had no idea how to tell him about that. Always before I’d been like wind blowing in the open window of a car, I’d been like cigarette smoke blowing past as I traveled two-lanes that turned gravel. I wanted what Cody Black described, that moment when a needle traced a fine-cut line on your body. Surely a tattoo would fix me to the earth in a way I’d never been before.
“Might as well take you to a place you’ll never forget,” Cody said as we pulled over at what was once a Texaco station. Christmas lights were draped over the former gas pumps. A sign lit up with more lights read Maura Swain’s Herbary. From a cage to the side of the building beagles bayed at us, their eyes red in the lights of the truck.
“This is the place?” I pictured the tattoo parlors Cody loved in Knoxville, their neon lights and lava lamps and juice bars.
“You really sure about this, Miracelle?” He held his arm out, underside up, and I saw a moon and a star hiding behind a cloud. “These last awhile.”
I followed him out of the car. “Ink can be my rite of passage,” I said, not liking how scared my voice sounded.
He knocked until a door was opened by a woman in foam curlers who must have been in her eighties.
“What you want this time of night?” She leaned out the doorway, peered close.
“Hey, Maura.” He grabbed her hand and shook it.
“Cody Black. You were just here a week ago.” She coughed into a bandana while she studied me.
“Brought you another customer.”
She eyed my red dress. “A looker, too, I see.”
“This is Miracelle. She says she likes your work.”
Cody held out his arm again and we all stood looking at the moon and star while Maura told about the night he’d gotten that tattoo. There’d been rain all day and she needed the moonlight, then the star, one Cody could make a thousand wishes on.
She folded her hands across her chest. “You got an idea what you want, Miracelle?”
A white cat with one ear rubbed at her legs as I nodded. “I know it in my head, and I brought a thing or two to remind me.”
“All right, then. This way,” she said. “And you.” She nodded at Cody. “And you fix Miracelle here the drink she’ll need.”
I went with her past the curtain into a narrow room with a long glass case full of sewing things. Big spools of thread. Yarns. Half-knit afghans. And on top of the case, enough needles and jars and colors of ink to tattoo half the country. I took a seat and she folded her arms again, looked at me.
“You got a picture in mind?” She smiled.
I fished around in my pocketbook and found what I’d brought. Ruby’s tarot deck. “This.” I drew off the top card. “And a photo.”
She drew the edges of her housecoat together and sighed. “I got a whole slew of designs in there. And a bunch on that poster yonder, too.” She shuffled to the other side of the room, picked up a yardstick, and pointed at some of the patterns on the poster. “What about a dream catcher? You look like you could use a few dreams.”
“If I’m gonna do this thing,” I said, “I’ve got to do it right.”
I sat with the card and the photo in my lap, sketching on a pad of paper Maura gave me. I was no artist, but the card was easy enough. A woman walking past a mountain. Priestess of Wands. The photo was the hard thing. Though I knew my mother’s face as well as any I’d ever seen or would, making the tarot woman into my mother was tricky. I wanted tattoo hands that reached out just as Ruby’s hands had for me, time upon time when I was a girl. As I sketched, Cody came in, handed me the drink he’d made, and mouthed words: Was I sure? I tossed the drink down. It burned like whiskey could, and it tasted sweet, like honey and almonds, and it came clear to me. The tattoo I’d wanted all along.
“Sure hope I can please you,” Maura said.
“What was in that drink, anyway?” I felt calm and sleepy.
“Just a few herbs,” Cody said as he smoothed my hair, massaged the back of my neck.
“Herbs?” The word floated out of my mouth as the road I was drawing began to flex and straighten. It became ribbon-slick, asphalt in the rain. It became every road I’d traveled and all the ones I still wanted but could not imagine I’d find. The woman I drew started out as me, but then it became Ruby.
“You’ll have to let down that pretty dress, honey,” Maura said as she took the paper from me, her forehead wrinkling. “Pleasing you is going to be a task.”
I unzipped, let the dress slide down to my waist as Cody handed me a sheet to drape over myself.
“Close your eyes. Think about relaxing.” Cody’s voice was warm in my ear as Maura dipped into jars, filled small shallow plates with ink.
My skin felt slick as oil, and the drink was a silk path I followed, feeling myself slide and ease along. My eyes closed, but not before I remembered a little road behind the woman on the card. Gray. I hadn’t told her about the color gray I wanted for that, but it was too late. I was drowsing as the drill started up and Maura’s voice soothed me. “Just you relax, now.”
Other voices stirred in my head, some of them I knew. I heard Marvis Temple telling me what was in the new files she handed me at Willy’s. The more odd, the better, honey, she said. Cody Black told me that tattoos rode an invisible line between pleasure and hurt. Then a voice I didn’t know at all curled around me as I slept in my car at rest stops and under streetlamps in the parking lots of service stations shut down for the night. You’ll be okay, girl, it said. In my tattoo sleep world, voices came and went, begging me to guess who they were. They became Ruby’s voice. Be careful, she said, her laugh ice in a glass. Be careful what you wish. Her hands held me above the shallows of a river smelling summer hot. Maybe God will make the difference, she said as I was lowered into baptismal waters that had never saved me at all. Memory voices washed me further back to the shore of a past I didn’t know. A torch singer on a record Ruby liked. Love me, Radiance, honey, till long past daylight. Blues at a raunchy bar at midnight where I was drunk and sad. A truck-stop voice. Order up, a waitress said, scratchy-throated with cigarettes and cheap whiskey, but that wasn’t it, either. The voice belonged to a street-corner preacher I’d seen back in Bucktown, West Virginia. Love ye the Lord. Some other voice, another time. That voice inside me as I’d ridden waves of drugs and nothing down streets and alleys where music crashed, ridden it all high and mighty into towns where no one knew my name. It was every sad woman or man I had talked to on the phone at Willy’s Wonderama, every voice trying to find out if their oddness was odd enough. And her voice, my mother’s. God help me, all I want is love. Her voice, or mine, full of every time and place and longing I’d ever felt. All the voices followed the lines of a tattoo as it crossed and cut onto my shoulder, made a picture of a woman looking for home.
A few hours before dawn Cody Black and I were at my door at the Red Sari, not bothering to turn on the lights, not saying good night and goodbye like we had done before on other Knoxville nights. I invited him in for coffee and he shook his head at first.
“When I look at you, I see the places you want and can’t reach.” He tilted his head to the one side like he did.
“Cleveland, and Fairbanks and then some.” I meant this to be funny, but all he did was trail his fingers across my face.
“Your eyes,” he said. “They’re the main part.” He followed me inside, shut the door behind him.
“About two parts wore out?”
“I’m serious, Miracelle.” He touched my hair this time, let one long strand of it wind around a finger and fall against my chest. “Sometimes when I look at you I kind of see myself.”
“You don’t know the first thing,” I said, and I meant about me, but by then he tasted like smoke.
He was warm and steady as he backed me against the wall, his arms moving around me and my knee moving up. My legs looped around him and we held on to each other, balanced, waiting to see what we’d do and how, though I thought I knew everything about how it would be. Thought I knew it inside out, the dance from door to hall, from fall of a dress on a floor to the length of a bed. I’d thought being with Cody Black would be a movie I’d rehearsed again and again in a hundred other places, with lovers whose faces I could no longer recall.
I’d thought I knew everything, the scents and tastes, the first moment another body founds its way beside or into and then away from my own. I’d believed nothing could surprise me, but I had never rehearsed this, the way my hand would touch Cody’s face, his chest, the warm stretch of his bare stomach. I thought I knew it like some script, the way we shed our clothes and forgot them. I knew nothing about the way I led him into the lukewarm waters of the Red Sari shower, how we washed each other clean of this night. His hands were gentle near the rawness of my new tattoo, and my hands were surprised by the surface of his skin. He was real and he was asking me to be real right along with him.
He lit a candle beside the bed, pulled back the blanket, smoothed the sheets while I wondered at how the boy he’d been was a ghost I could see so well in his man’s face. I folded my arms against my chest, too aware of the young woman I was not.
“Let me see you, Miracelle.” He pulled me to him and brushed my forehead with his tongue, laid his hands on either side of my face. As he touched each part of me, he named it. The crook of an elbow. A foot’s arch. The back of a knee. He said I had the scent of gingko trees as he stared up at me from between my legs.
“Look at me,” he said, but I closed my eyes and reached for him and let touch carry me. I went where I often did, to other rooms, other hands. Remembered wanting, more distant and safe. Towns east and west and south and north, places that weren’t here, were more here than now. Cody’s touch was fire on my skin and it warmed me, even if I held back, afraid of how easily I could crash and burn. I was with him and I was not, this lovely boy-man and his tattoos of the world, the spirit, the stars.’
Cody lined himself all along my back, his knees tucked in next to mine, his arm draped over my side. He rubbed a warm foot along my leg. “I wondered if we’d ever be this close.” He lifted the hair from the back of my neck and blew cool air there. “Close enough to feel each other breathe.”
There was a space between the words, just enough of one, and I knew he was waiting for me to fill that space in, but I didn’t. I rolled away from him and got up, walked around the room, looking at my own things like it was the first time I’d seen them. I picked up the snow globe on the dresser next to the bed, shook it. “My mother told futures from a globe like this.”
We watched glitter settle in the tiny street inside the globe.
“What fortune did she tell for you?”
“It’s all one more rented room,” I said. “That’s what she would have said.”
The long fluorescent lights from the hall hummed beneath the motel door, but morning wasn’t too far off. I settled back on the bed, put my arms around him. “There’s a lot you don’t know,” I said to him, but I wasn’t ready to fill in any of the blanks.
I want to say that in that one night, that one occasion of touch, I opened myself once and for all, that it was a tale told fine and good, how Cody reached inside me and fixed what scared me as good as magic. I want to say that we soared like the backdrop of a sunset in an old, old movie. That we made love and made it right and then smoked cigarettes from a pack beside the bed, drank the last of the wine in a bottle, made coffee so strong it burned our throats. That we got up at dawn and got in the car and drove away together, following our hearts along all the highways and byways they could possibly take. I want to say that I trusted everything from that night forward.
What I did was lie awake a long while, listening to Cody breathing and talking a little, quiet, sleep words. Here. Up there. Dreams of moving shelves and boxes at Willy’s, but I couldn’t sleep. I lay and counted things in my head. Road signs. States. Towns. The boxes I’d packed often enough in the back seat of my car, them all laid along the seat and the floorboard, an open map beside me on the empty passenger’s side. I counted the things that fortune-teller girl I’d called at Willy’s said. Love, she’d said, was the only thing I didn’t know how to do. There’d be no sleeping for me these hours.
As I wandered the room, I knew what I needed was a potion. I needed jasmine. I needed rose. Cinnamon. Saffron. Ruby used to steep all those, a tea for passion. Is that all that love lacked? Potions and charms. Spells against the world and its highways and byways and all the places I’d been and things I’d done that had never left me satisfied. I stood by the window, my hand on the bandage over the tattoo. It stung as I peeled back the tape. All my life I’d seen map lines. Interstates heading west and east and back again. On my shoulder, the road Maura Swain had etched was clean and simple, unhealed lines leading ahead with a woman standing there, her arm held out. The woman’s face was just a shadow, but it was Ruby and I knew her as well as I ever had. I touched the raw edges of the tattoo that made her part of me in this new way, made her part of me all over again. Suddenly I didn’t know of what I was more afraid—roads out or all the roads leading inside.