Ink Read online

  “And them,” I motion to the sleeping children. “I don’t really know them, but I know this: they’re just like your kids were. Or are. Sweet, trusting, good in ways we adults hardly even remember. We have to look out for them. Not because of the tattoos, or in spite of them, but because they’re kids and we’re supposed to look out for kids.”

  “They just need one good, lucky break, Ted. Just one,” I say.

  He doesn’t say anything, but he doesn’t look away from me either.

  I see us out of his eyes.

  We’re darker and smaller but no less human than those he loves. I hadn’t seen that when I looked out of Jan’s or Carl’s eyes. Not even Steve’s. Ted is the only one who sees us as made of the same flesh and blood as he is.

  “I don’t think this border dump was your idea,” I say, keeping my voice low. “I don’t think you really want to be here. I think it makes you uneasy hurting women and children. You didn’t swing the tire iron, and you didn’t cut the chips out of the kids’ necks. I can see it in your eyes – you still own your soul. But you won’t if you go through with this.”

  “You and I aren’t any different, Ted,” I say after a pause. “We’re both looking for a way to get out of an awful situation we never thought to be in.”

  He stays silent so long I start dozing off.

  “Thing is, you’re wrong,” he says quietly. He comes to stand beside me, then squats to look me in the eye. “We are different.”

  He reaches out and touches the side of my face. Tender.

  He keeps his fingers soft as he trails them down my cheek, and what comes to mind is the image of grown-ups doing something similar in my father’s fairy-tale retelling of my early days. Like I’m reminding Ted of something sweet and almost forgotten.

  I can’t control the shudder that rips through my body.

  Ted’s shoulders draw in and his pupils get tiny as if they’re reacting to a strong light following the dark. He clamps his hand over my mouth.

  I’ve been scared of Carl, but it’s Ted who rapes me.

  There’s a dusting of snow on the ground in the morning. The tents are packed in their bags. The fire is out, not even smoldering since Steve dumped a bucketful of dirt in the pit. Someone’s driven the van and a pick-up I haven’t seen before down to the campsite.

  I flinch when I feel Ted’s touch on my shoulder.

  “Thank me later,” he says. I choke back the gorge rising in my throat.

  He guides me to the pick up truck where Carl is half in, half out of the passenger seat.

  “Ted reminds me I haven’t verified your ink,” Carl says, looking up. “And, for some reason, he’s suddenly believes it might be real.”

  Carl grabs my wrist and turns it over to look at my tattoo. He rubs his thumb hard through the lines, then reaches under the seat to retrieve something. It’s a portable scanner, but not one of the cheapo knockoffs they’ve started hawking on infomercials. This is a sturdy, government-issued one like I used in my work at the Hastings Pop Control office before they demoted me to the archives. It has a border patrol insignia.

  I meet his eyes.

  He smiles. Not a nice smile. “Told you, no official gives a shit about border dumps.”

  He scans my tattoo and peers into the machine’s small monitor for the readout.

  “Mariana Girardi.” He pronounces the name properly, then starts laughing. “Well shit, girl, you are a citizen.” He looks up, “We’ll leave you here then. No damage done.”

  I swallow back the hysteria that rises to his words.

  When I finally find my voice I say, “I’ll report you. I’ve got your first names and faces, and I memorized the plate number on the van.”

  “You could report us, but you won’t,” he answers. “Funny thing about inks, you don’t trust cops or authority figures even when you’re on the right side of the law.”

  “Want to bet? I’m carrying evidence of rape and the attacker’s DNA around in me. All I need to do is find my way to a hospital, or even a phone, and your friend here will be wearing cuffs.”

  He looks over me, to where Ted stands, and narrows his eyes. He seems angry, but when he speaks again his voice is even and expressionless.

  “That’s unfortunate. On the other hand, this is a very isolated section of the country’s largest national park. It’s going to take you a long time to stumble back onto civilization.”

  “Then why bother dumping the others across the border? Leave them here with me. We’ll probably die anyway. Make you happy.”

  His eyes crinkle as from mirth. It makes him look even more handsome. “Oh, I don’t need you to die.”

  “Well then?”

  “Your tat is legit, theirs aren’t. That’s what you inks never get. The legitimacy makes a difference to me.”

  “Go swap the plates on the van,” his voice is harsh as he addresses Ted. I feel the man beside me hesitate, then trundle away. When he does, Carl turns back to me, “I don’t have to prove anything to you, but I will.”

  When he motions, Jan drags the children to him.

  “We didn’t find GPS trackers when we cut their necks,” he says. “If you really work in pop control you know what that means.” He flashes the scanner at each child’s wrist in turn. None brings up a valid Hipco record.

  “Not even anchor-babies,” he says as he pushes them away. “Just border jumpers.”

  I feel a moment of relief when it’s Nely who’s led up to be scanned, but when Carl motions for me to look at the scanner’s read-out, it, too, is gibberish. The tattoo’s a fake. I never knew. I hadn’t ever thought to scan her myself.

  And if I had? Would I have turned her in?

  “You can’t trust,” Carl says, but his voice isn’t as hard as it has been. More like he’s trying share his wisdom with an especially dense colleague. “You may be an ink who plays it straight but, the sad fact is, the majority don’t.”

  He turns to Steve. “Get them in the back of the van and pack the rest of the stuff. We’ve got to get out of here pretty quick to get them through where I’ve mapped to cross.”

  I understand as soon as he says it where he’s thinking of heading.

  “You can’t dump them in a wilderness area. They won’t survive. If you need me to beg, I’ll beg.”

  I drop to my knees heedless of what the percussive jolt wakes in my shoulder. “I’m not saying don’t dump them, but do it near an attended border crossing. Somewhere they’ll get medical attention.”

  The look he gives me has a trace of sympathy in it. “Go home, ink. Someone cares that you’re gone, your tat’s been flagged.”

  He pauses before climbing in the driver side of the pickup. Jan’s already in the passenger side, boot up against the dash. “This park is pocked with old corduroy roads,” he says. “Maybe, if you try real hard, you’ll find one.”

  I’m still on my knees when the pickup and van disappear from sight.

  Sunlight filters through the woods in patches. The early dusting of snow has melted off, leaving glittering droplets of moisture hidden like jewels among the evergreen needles.

  At first I believe I’m surrounded by a great silence, but the longer I listen, the more I hear. Wood creaking as sunlight warms it. A cone tumbling from the heights to land on the needle-softened floor. The rhythmic thunking of a woodpecker, five rapid taps then a pause, and over again.

  Everything – noise or silence, breath or pulse, love or loss – has a pattern. You can try to alter it but, in the end, the pattern wins through. This is mine: through no merit of my own I luck through terrible and into survival. Most of the people I love do not.

  Not mother. Not best friend. Not the children who trusted me to get them out of our situation. Most likely not my half-brother left behind in Guatemala.

  It is a bitter fairy tale. No colorín colorado, no happily ever after.

  So, with my knees pierced by needles and my shoulder sewn together by the slender thread of endorphins, I keep to my genuf
lection and end my story the only way that really fits. As a prayer that seals surrender.

  World without end.

  Amen.

  4.

  Nothing is as it should be.

  I was supposed to be woken from my slumber through ceremony: a grandmother or mother pouring song in the child’s ear. The strains would have reached down through muscle and bone to that place so hidden no science can track it.

  Where I was waiting, like all of my kind, just one breath from waking.

  Had it been as it should, Mari would have known my company on the edge of every moment and of every memory.

  But I slumbered undisturbed, and around me her being settled dense and stratified with the accretion of years.

  Still, there is ceremony resident in the act of love, and a kind of song that streams in with it. I heard it. I stirred. And woke to the hard work of surfacing in an adult rather than infant.

  I learned the ways of increment. So she would come to know me as a companion, not a possessor. So she would understand I’m a part of the whole, not a break from it.

  But when instead of love the sounds that filtered down to me became those of fear and pain, I faced a dread choice: to jump free of Mari’s body and shift the fight onto the layer of world where I can protect her, or not.

  I could have shredded her aggressors. Especially the last one. After I was done with him, he wouldn’t have inhabited their common layer of world in the same way. Not all that hobbles the body comes from a physical source, and in my fury I would have left him little more than a skin envelope around a dead zone.

  But instead, I chose to wrap myself around the little grain of heart Mari has been harboring. With claw and tooth I made sure it would not be dislodged. Love must triumph over violence or there is no reason for my kind.

  Or Mari’s.

  So I emerge, twinned, but late.

  I step fully outside of her in that northern woodland, under trees welling with resin and stars rushing to their winter habitats, She’s curled tight on the forest floor, knotted with hurt and despair. She will not move. Not for the child she carries, not for herself.

  But I am not so easily dismissed.

  I nip and prod. I drive her safely through the forest and, days later, when we win through to where her kind gather, I harry her until she seeks out the ear that should hear her story.

  I am her protection, and these things I do from nature, and in service.

  Still, during the recounting we are caught by the sickness that isn’t sickness but simply a sign of life growing and, because of that, instead of justice we find a cage.

  I will not see her suffer again, I vow as we’re locked behind walls.

  But even I am sometimes wrong.

  Time passes unmarked, except for Mari’s growing belly.

  When they take the baby from her, I have to hold her heart in my teeth so it doesn’t go to pieces.

  When they move us to yet another enclosure, another place to lose track of time, I jump and soar so she won’t forget what joy feels like. Remember, I tell her. A child. A love. A life. A hope.

  But she believes the walls more than she believes me, and keeps to her silence.

  So I do it.

  Even though she is the storyteller, I am the one who moves her lips in the telling.

  Del: Words written on wind

  1.

  We talk about loss while we’re laying carpet. Ray, the owner of the business and my father’s friend for years, speaks about his son who died in the Persian Gulf War and about my dad; the way he went and the emptiness we’ve both felt since.

  Ray is in his 70s but he still manages to take the lead in the carpeting process, though he doesn’t carry the rolls anymore.

  “That’s what the temporary help is for, Boss,” Chato says to me. Every so often Chato calls me Del, but mostly Boss, though I’m not.

  Chato and I are foremen of the carpeting crews, but it’s clear to both of us that Ray prefers to give me the important jobs. Chato believes this is as it should be, that as Ray’s best friend’s son, I am entitled to the preferential treatment. Inks believe in obligation to family, and to friends who might as well be family.

  Truth is, Chato is a better crew manager. By all rights he should be Ray’s right-hand guy. But Chato’s Mexican and, despite the green tattoo, Ray doesn’t count on permanent residence from any ink.

  When the tattoos were first instituted, the black tats – temporaries – rotated in six months at a time but now, a couple of years in, we face an entirely different crew every three months. We don’t even bother to learn their real names, we mostly call them by the name of their country of origin. Since Chato likes to hire as many Mexicans as possible – and they all can’t be called Mexico – we call them by Mexican regional names. Right now, we’re on our third Puebla and second Michoacán – both on Chato’s crew, along with Liberia and Haiti; Honduras, the third Jalisco, and Salvador are all working on Ray’s crew, and I’ve only got Oaxaca – the fifth worker we’ve called that – on mine because the residential job we’re working is relatively quick business.

  I don’t know how much English Oaxaca knows, but most of the time he nods in time to my conversation as we lay carpet. It isn’t until I tell him one of my father’s stories, though, that he breaks his silence.

  It happened during the Great Depression. My father was young, and though my grandparents didn’t have much, they were farmers and perhaps a little less affected than city dwellers. That’s the thing about farming – it’s hardscrabble in good times as in bad.

  One day my father walked into the barn where the tractor was parked and found two strangers sleeping in the heifers’ hay. They were shabby and unshaven, and my father said he had never before, or since, smelled anything as bad as the body odor emanating from the two of them. Around their sleeping bodies were the scattered remains of a meal: chicken bones, apple cores, the feathery greens of carrots pulled clean from the ground.

  As my father stood there, wondering whether to go get his BB gun, one of the strangers stirred into wakefulness. When he saw my father he poked the other one.

  “Your family let us stay the night,” one of them said, quick, as if he was scared my father wouldn’t believe him. “And fed us.”

  “Are you hoboes?” my father had finally asked.

  “No, just looking for a way to make enough to feed our families back home.”

  It’s here that Oaxaca interrupts the story.

  “Like me,” he says. “And Chema and Rogelio.”

  “Who?” I say.

  “Salvador and Jalisco. We also slept in a barn here until we got our tattoos.”

  Except there’s no official tattooing station in Smithville.

  I suddenly understand that there is a good possibility that all Chato’s recruits have a falsely black tattoo. And that leaves me, good-as-a-son to Ray, with an awkward choice to make.

  * * *

  The snow’s deep enough when I get to the top of the field that I consider donning snowshoes. I pull on a pair of pac boots I keep in the truck instead, and by the time I’m on the path I’m glad of my choice because the snow tapers and is only deep enough to tickle the roots of the old oak that somehow seeded itself in a multitude of hemlocks.

  When I knock the snow off my boots on the porch, the cabin door flies open. Light from the propane fixtures pours out of the door along with the smell of venison stew.

  “Oh, it’s only you,” Cassie says.

  “Whoa. Should I be worried by that greeting?”

  “You’ve forgotten,” she says. “Haven’t you?”

  She’s right, I have forgotten whatever it is.

  “You invited someone over for dinner,” I cast about hopefully.

  She makes a face at me, then walks to kitchen to stir the stew. It’s an open floor plan so it’s not like she’s putting a room between us. Still, it reads like dismissal. She’s irritated more than angry, though, and that’s good, or I’d be sleeping in on
e of the guest rooms.

  The sleeping arrangements make it click.

  “When are the houseguests scheduled to arrive?”

  She snickers. “You are so lucky, buster.” Then, “They were supposed to be here already.”

  “If they don’t hurry,” I say, “they’ll lose the light and it’ll be a bitch driving down.” After a moment, I add, “I hope they rented a car with four-wheel drive.”

  “Sarai’s in charge of transportation so they’ll probably arrive by pontoon. Or maybe Venetian gondola,” Cassie says with affectionate irritation.

  I help her set the table because that’s what husbands do when they’re trying to ingratiate themselves. Midway through the napkin rings and linen, she remembers the wine. Which I forgot. So I bundle back up, and walk to the truck.

  The night is going to settle clear and cold even though it’s misty now and still a couple hours from twilight. The snowy trees on the far hill are barely visible in the vaporous light that halos them. White on white on white. It’s an afternoon out of a storybook and, as if on cue, I hear a chorus of coy-dogs start howling across the creek.

  The last thing I want to do is go back into town although it’s only fifteen minutes away. Moments like this are why I moved onto this property. All I really want to do now is wander about the woods, in this strange light, and hope for a glimpse of the spirit-creatures my maternal grandmother swore hid in the gorges when she and my grandfather lived here. I never could figure out if the beings she described in such vivid detail to me were born of Seminole or African or French tales – she claimed all three bloodlines – or from her unique imagination, but I don’t disbelieve their coexistence with us.

  The prospect of a weekend full of houseguests and no alcohol, however, doesn’t thrill me. The trip to town is quick. Walking back from the liquor store, I look into the window of the pizzeria where the college kids from the next town usually hang out after a night of drinking. It’s early yet, so the place is empty except for the corner booths where the whole ink crew sits wolfing down slices. I wave to them as I pass, then I double back and go inside.