Chapter 21
Steele parked the Jaguar behind the tin barn and stepped into the blackness of night. He loved the night. In the night he felt a Zen-like connection with the world. The pungent alfalfa and manure scented air. The creak of a windmill. The wind rushing through leaves. The chirp of crickets. The moo of a cow. They were all a part of him.
He plucked the wooden case holding his razor from his leather coat and slipped it into his back pocket. Then he removed his coat and tossed it on the front seat of the car. He would come back for it later. The bulky coat would hinder him in his current task.
He stood in the patchy grass watching the dark windows of the old farmhouse. Anyone inside would have seen his car creep down the long drive leading up to the house, but he knew no one was home.
Steele quickly circled around to the front door. White vinyl siding, splotchy with green moss, covered the house and thick ivy constricted the porch lattices. The window curtains in the front of the house had been left open and he peered in confirming there was no one inside. When he’d last visited the curtains had been open as well. He pondered whether they were left open out of Eddie’s stupidity or the brunette’s need to play exhibitionist. He figured the latter.
He withdrew a key from his pocket. His time was limited. Eddie was coming. He unlocked the door and pushed it open with his palm. The door swung inward on silent hinges and Steele stepped into the living room. The house was still, the air stale from a full day’s emptiness.
Steele closed the door and walked to the center of the living room. Surveyed the seat dented couch, the telephone. Looked at the smoke detector that was much more than a smoke detector.
Framed paintings decorated the walls. Steele could easily make them out, even in the darkness. He’d seen them several times before: a rock formation, a sunset over sand dunes, a field of wildflowers.
He admired the potential of each piece. They were her works of course, and they reminded him of his own first fledgling works, although hers weren’t nearly as good.
Painting became his coping mechanism after his mother died, and he learned to pour himself into his work. That was the major difference between his works and the brunette’s. Hers lacked any exposure of her true self. They also lacked confidence, boldness. Great art can only come through risks. Risks she clearly hadn’t been willing to take. He saw it in her timid angles, in her distance from the subject matter, in her careful brushstrokes. With encouragement she would have continued creating such works. She would have progressed, put a little more of herself in each subsequent piece. She might have become great. But she had no such support structure. Her creativity had been strangled.
His grandmother had been the only real believer in his life. Once his father shipped him off to her, she taught him how to be bold and brave in his art, to free his mind of the limitations other artists place on themselves with their doubt. She encouraged him to paint. And when he watched her tattoo someone, he expressed an interest. She taught him how to make a tattoo gun, explained how to know the speed of the needles by listening to the hum, showed him how deep to pierce the skin.
Then she taught him how to tattoo, apprenticed him in the craft she had supported herself with for more than forty years. She started him off tracing vintage World War II tattoo flash of anchors and battleships, pinups and American flags. Within weeks he was free handing his own designs, tattooing them on pork hocks and later his own arms. He learned to tattoo with both hands. Tattooed his first customer at fourteen.
She was a young woman. She walked into the shop, her eyes puffy with emotion, walked up to him in the booth next to his grandmother.
She held one hand in the other.
“I want a tattoo,” she said.
“Of what?”
She didn’t answer for quite some time. “As long as it’s beautiful, it doesn’t matter. I want to be a work of art.”
Steele considered what she said for a moment. Then he went to his drawing desk. He returned a few minutes later with a simple black and white drawing of lily.
“How is this?”
She took the drawing, studied it. “Can you do this?” she asked.
He nodded. “Where would you like it?”
She pulled down the collar of her shirt and pointed to a place over her heart. “Here.”
There was an immediate connection between them. Anger and fear radiated out from her and into him as he worked her skin. She cursed him under her breath all the while begging him not to stop.
“You’ve changed my life,” she told him when she visited him again a few months later.
“How?”
“I’m no longer afraid to be who I am. I look at this lily and I see myself as standing apart from the rest of humanity.”
He nodded and she hugged him and she left.
And that was his first tattoo.
He and his grandmother traveled the country after that moving from tattoo parlor to tattoo parlor. They worked in Australia and Japan, New York and LA. But mostly they worked in little holes near the military bases where most of their customers were stationed.
His talent grew very quickly. When it surpassed his grandmother’s, she let him tattoo her.
She was covered in tattoos before his ink even touched her. Markers for the events in her life, for the places she’d been, for the people she knew. Cherry blossoms for their time in Japan. Two turtles on a beach commemorating a trip to Hawaii with her best friend. A dozen others like them.
Steele brought her hodgepodge collection of tattoos together. Turned several individual works into a singular collage. She liked his work. But he wasn’t satisfied. She didn’t have the reaction he’d expected. The mistakes in the works of the other tattooists left the piece imperfect, and less than a month later she let another artist tattoo her, essentially ruining the piece he’d created.
He saw then the flaw in the tattoo art form. The receivers of their works could not stop at one piece, even if it was fantastic, even if it took your breath away, even if it shocked you to the core. As if eating potato chips they had to have another and another and another. They were drawn to the needles, addicted to the buzz of the gun and the feelings of euphoria brought on by adrenaline and the scratching at their skin. They collected tattoos as one might collect rocks, cobbled them together just as they had cobbled together their identities. And in his mind the addition of each subsequent work had only the effect of watering down the previous.
His grandmother tried to sway him from this belief, but she could not.
“My tattoos are the story of the journey of my life,” she told him. “A story that will continue to grow until the day I die.”
“A collection of bad drawings cannot compare to a single great work that changes the way we see art,” he answered. “You think of your tattoos only as they apply to you and your life. You do not think of them as art.”
He was an artist. He created works because that was his purpose. It was the way in which he coped with the world. He could no sooner stop working than he could stop breathing. And he would not be told how to create his art. It was born from within him. To ask him to share his canvas was like asking Van Gogh to share canvas with Da Vinci. Such was an abomination. But he did what he must in order to provide the financial support needed for his great works.
Then everyone would see the truest form of art to ever exist. Art entwined within a life.
Steele’s eyes were drawn then to another abomination: A photo of the brunette and Eddie sitting on a cluttered desk. Both smiling. Both feigning happiness.
He had taken great pleasure in slamming Eddie against the wall of the nightclub. He loathed him. Loathed his kind. Loathed so-called men who lacked discipline, strength. Men like his father. Slack-jawed, indecisive, fearful weaklings who only played at taking control of their world. Eddie was passive, forced his wife to work, had been emasculated. And to what purpose? So
he could fit some imagined model of sexual equality? He had lost his way in the world, and for that Steele pitied him. But there was more to it than that. Eddie submitted to his wife because he believed mainstream society demanded it, not because he thought there was any true equality between them, and by doing so he had strangled that which was precious within her: creativity.
Something deep within the brunette groaned for something more than Eddie could ever offer. For an austere man, a man with the strength and discipline that he could provide. Steele felt it. He heard it in her voice. Saw it in her face. Felt it in her skin. She wanted guidance, training, correction, and true independence. She wanted to live. She did not want a boring life, in a boring home, in a boring place.
Steele roamed through the living room and into the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, drank milk from the carton. He closed the refrigerator and ran his fingers across the kitchen countertop. A black and white cow cookie jar, sugar canister, and salt and peppershakers decorated the ceramic surface.
The brunette wanted to be nurtured, loved, appreciated. She wanted to be placed on a pedestal, worshipped from afar by people who did not even know her name. She wanted greatness. But she didn’t know how to obtain what she wanted. She’d abdicated all personal responsibility from her life. She was adrift. Ironically, she’d handed responsibility for her life over to Eddie, who didn’t know what to do with it. He couldn’t even live his own life properly.
Together, they were pathetic, and that was Eddie’s fault. She was salvageable, transformable. Eddie could only be put out of his misery. Put down like a crippled horse. Like his father and all men like him, Eddie was incapable of change.
Steele sauntered into the bedroom, put his hand upon the bed, tested the tension of the springs. They were as stiff as the people who slept on them.
He walked to one of two wood dressers, opened the middle drawer on the second row, pushed his hand through the brunette’s panties to what was beneath them. He rubbed his hand over the slick texture of a magazine cover. He did not need to see it to know what it was. Nor did he need to remove it to know there were several dozen similar magazines beneath it. Vogue, Cosmo, Elle. Fashion and style magazines filled with images of the unreal, the unobtainable.
He closed the drawer, smiled at the alarm clock that was much more than an alarm clock, strode back into the living room. The wood floor creaked beneath his feet.
Later, he would return for his camera equipment: The smoke detector, the shower mirror, the clock radio, as well as the receiver, recorder, and half dozen other cameras he had wired into the house’s electrical system. He would take her paintings while he was at it. They would prove useful in her training and in keeping her properly focused. Then he would burn the house to the ground.
Standing in the middle of the living room, he turned to face the windows. They provided a nice view of the long driveway. He waited. Eddie was rushing home to him, to his doom. Steele felt him coming, and he wanted to watch him arrive.