oing to do to you, Steve?” Sam rolled up his sleeves, showing the long red snakes printed on his hairy arms. There was a tinkle of instruments, a sound of liquid being stirred. The faces of the men looked down upon Steve with benevolent interest. Steve flickered his eyes and the TATTOOS sign wavered and dissolved in midair, in the warm tent. Steve stared at that sign and did not look away. TATTOOS. Any color. TATTOOS. Any color.
“No!” he screamed. “No!” But they unloosened his leg straps and cut his pants off with a pair of shears. He lay naked.
“But yes, Steve, yes indeed.”
“You can’t do that!”
He knew what they were going to do. He began to shriek.
Quietly, mildly, Sam applied some adhesive tape over Steve’s lips just after Steve screamed, “Help!”
Steve saw the bright silver tattooing needle in Sam’s hand.
Sam bent over him, intimately. He spoke earnestly and quietly, as if telling a secret to a small child. “Steve, here’s what I’m going to do to you. First, I’m going to color your hands and arms, black. And then I’m going to color your body, black. And then I’ll color your legs black. And then, finally, I’m going to tattoo your face, Steve, my friend. Black. The blackest black there ever was, Steve. Black as ink. Black as night.”
“Mmmm.” Steve shrieked inside the adhesive. The scream came out his nostrils, muffled. His lungs pumped the scream, his heart pumped it.
“And when we’re done with you tonight,” said Sam, “you can just go home and pack your clothes and move on out of your apartment. Nobody’ll want a black man living there. Regardless of how you got that way, Steve. Now, now, don’t shake; it won’t hurt much. I can just see you, Steve, moving over to nigger town, maybe. Living by yourself. Your landlord won’t keep you on; his new tenants might think you were a nigger, lying about your skin. Landlord can’t afford to risk tenants, so out you go. Maybe you can go north. Get a job. Not a job like you got now: ticket agent at the railway, no. But maybe a redcap job or a shoe-shine boy job, right, Steve?”
The scream again. Vomit erupted in two jets from Steve’s nostrils. “Rip off the tape!” said Sam, “or he’ll drown himself.”
The adhesive came off, biting.
When Steve was through being sick, they replaced the tape.
“It’s late.” Sam glanced at his watch. “We’d better start if we want to finish with this.”
The men leaned in over the table, their faces wet. There was a humming electric sound of the needle purring.
“Wouldn’t it be a joke,” said Sam, high up over Steve, pressing the needle onto Steve’s naked chest, sewing it with black ink, “if Steve got shot for rape someday?” He waved his hand at Steve. “So long, Steve. See you in the back section of a streetcar!”
The voices faded. Deep inside, as Steve closed his eyes, he was wailing. And he heard the voices murmuring in the summer night, he saw Lavinia Walters walking down a street somewhere in the past, a child in her arms, he saw bubbles rising, and something hanging from a rafter, and he felt the needle gnawing and gnawing at his skin, forever and forever. He squeezed his eyes tight to fight his panic, and suddenly he knew only two very clear, certain things: tomorrow he must buy a pair of new white gloves to cover his hands. And then? Then he would break every mirror in his apartment.
He lay on the table, crying all night long.
SIXTY-SIX
2003
I’M GOING TO TELL YOU a story and you’re not going to believe it, but nevertheless I’m going to tell you. It’s kind of a murder mystery. On the other hand, maybe it’s a time-travel story, and come to think of it, it’s also a story of vengeance, and then throw in a couple of ghosts and there you have it.
What I am is a motorcycle officer with the Oklahoma police on what used to be called Route 66, somewhere between Kansas and Oklahoma City. During the last month a series of very strange discoveries has been made along the route from Kansas City to Oklahoma.
I discovered the bodies of a man, a woman, a younger man, and two children in fields along the way in early October. The bodies were widely distributed over an area of more than a hundred miles, and yet the way they were dressed indicated to me that, somehow, they were all related. Each of the bodies appeared to have died from some sort of strangulation, but that has not been definitively ascertained. There are no marks on the bodies, but all indications were that they were slain and left not far from the road.
The clothes they wore did not belong to this day in this month, in this year. Indeed, the clothing was not at all like what you’d buy at shops today.
The man appeared to be a farmer, dressed in work clothes: denims, a ragged shirt and battered hat.
The woman resembled a timeworn scarecrow, starved by life.
The younger man was dressed as a farmer also, but with clothes that looked like they had traveled five hundred miles in a dust storm.
The two children, a boy and a girl around twelve, also looked as if they had wandered the roads in heavy rains and blistering sun and then fallen by the way.
When I hear the phrase “Dust Bowl,” memories come back that are not mine. My mother and father were born in the early 1920s and were alive during the Great Depression, which I heard about all my life. We people here in the center of America suffered that nightmare, which we’ve all seen in motion pictures—dust blowing in great billowing gusts across the land, destroying the barns and leveling the crops.
I’ve heard the story and seen it so often that I feel I lived through it. That is one of the reasons why my finding the bodies of these people was so strange.