oer
by
AJ Balkin
The Tattoer
by AJ Balkin
Copyright 2012 AJ Balkin
All Rights Reserved
Cover Photo by AJ Balkin
Cover Design by AJ Balkin
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, trademarked products, events, and locations are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any resemblances to actual events or persons, living or dead, are entirely coincidental.
Table of Contents
The Tattoer
Acknowledgements
Who's AJ Balkin
The Tattoer
It was the middle of June, and the solstice sky – which struggled to stave off the night, slowly relenting and relaxing its colors from pink and gold to indigo and black – had finally been greeted by the rising moon. The moon was in its waning gibbous phase, two nights since it had been full, and its face appeared orange as it first rose above the purple-black hills on the eastern horizon. By the time it was perched high enough to blanket Eugene in its cool silvery light, most of the city was tucked away to bed, asleep to the world and oblivious of the starless sky.
Rosa Velasquez had just risen from a late evening nap. She had fallen asleep fully clothed – not even bothering to unlace her black mid-calf combat boots. Her sleep had been deep and without dream, and upon awakening, she only wanted a bath. She drew a lukewarm bath and submerged herself in its water. In her left hand she held a book of poems by Li Po. Rosa sparked a spliff, puckered her lips and puffed its first smoke in double rings that levitated out the bathroom window. The muscles along the back of her neck untensed as she flipped through the book, stopping at a page that had once been dog eared. The page was lit by the flame of an oil lamp, which was full with red kerosene.
“Lazily I stir a white feather fan / Lying naked within the green wood,” Rosa whispered the first two lines of the poem. She closed her eyes and memories began to flutter behind her eyelids. Dusty, sepia images of her childhood bubbled up in her consciousness. Eight years old, playing through the muggy spring night in Estero de San Miguel, a Manila slum and a zone of contradictions: a crescent and star ascending to heaven from the Green Mosque on the backdrop of the neon-lit concrete and glass skyscrapers; the babble of toddlers coddled by mothers rocking side-to-side, eyes peeled and alert; a dozen tired red eyes nodding off after a three day ride with shabu, cheap street meth; the muezzin of the balut hawkers lauding the crunch and tenderness of their fare.
Her mind drifted to colorful memories at Lady's Thorn, the tattoo parlor where she did her art. Forearms, calfs, torsos, napes of necks, eyelids, the inside of lips were all open and game for her deft hand to roam as it clenched the tattoo gun. She remembered the truckers, food hawkers and pushers that would stream in to her parlor and hire her to scar their bodies with the pet names of lovers, memories of the dead, virile and mythic animals. They also recorded her own contradictions – dreams filled with skulls and scorpions; hawks soaring through Manila's electric sky, with languid slums stretched below.
“I hang my hat on a crag / And bare my head to the wind of the pines.”
Rosa opened her eyes and mouthed the last two lines from the poem. She rose from the bath, cupped her hand over the glass rim of the oil lamp, and patted herself dry with a blue towel, which she wrapped around her body. Very high and hungry – and an ocean away from Manila's street food – Rosa was content with her own kitchen concoctions: sweet potato tater tots, baked with eggs and chicken, and covered in a soy sauce infused with chillies and garlic. Her ailing uncle, a history professor, who brought Rosa to Eugene so she could care for him until he passed, stocked a very American kitchen.
Rosa picked her fork at the casserole. The pit in her stomach, which she mistook for hunger, was vapid. No longer hungry, she decided to take a walk down to River Wood Park. She scribbled a note and left it by her uncle's bed, just in case he woke up and found her missing, slung her messenger bag over her shoulder, and quietly closed the front door behind her.
The walk to the park was refreshing. A cool breeze banished the half-baked nostalgia from Rosa's mind. Her eyes were drawn up to the sky, and she was taken by the bright reflection of the moon.
“Tonight I'll paint the lady of the moon.”
At the top of a grassy knoll she found a bench that overlooked the sandy and sloped shore that hugged the Willamette River. From her messenger bag she dug out her sketchpad and a graphite pencil. The boundaries of the imagination, vision, nostalgia, memory, desire dissolved as the strokes from her pencil filled the page. She captured the dancing light of the moon on the shiny black surface of the river, trees occulted along the snaking bends of the river, a staircase that rose to heaven and was draped with fine white silk, soft enough to entice the lady of the moon down to earth.
Lifting her eyes from the page, Rosa noticed a gentle wake parting the middle of the river. Moonlight bounced off the back of a man swimming in the waters. He was headed towards shore where his clothes were folded over a low hanging arm of an oak tree. She admired the construction of his arms, built to cut seamlessly through the water. When he emerged from the river, his nude body stretched to the sky and the earth, awakening from the dirt to the stars. He was oblivious to her gaze.
Rosa's attention was interrupted by a sonorous tune being sung behind her. A frail middle aged woman, cloaked in a white shawl and crowned with a laurel of purple and white lilacs, meandered down the river path with her eyes closed.
“I saw a beggar leaning on his wooden crutch / he said to me, 'You must not ask for so much.' /
And a pretty woman leaning in her darkened door / she cried to me, 'Hey, why not ask for more?' / Oh like a bird on the wire / like a drunk in a midnight choir / I have tried in my way to be free.”
The singing trailed off as the woman disappeared down the path. Rosa looked back to the man on the river bank. He had slipped into a pair of cut off denims. A mandolin was nestled between his arms and lap and he plucked its strings with his head cocked, listening for the right tune. Once it was found, his face turned up to the sky and innocently offered it his song. Rosa sketched the scene before her with quick wisps of her pencil. Her arms started to tingle, and a warm, undulating aura rose from her chest as her body was engulfed in inspiration.
Ding ding, ding ding, ding ding ding, ding, ding ding. A hahah, ha ha! Ding ding ding. Ahaha-ha! Ding ding.
A cackle of laughter and bells cut through the tranquil air. Rosa turned her head and caught a blur as a bike sped past, whirring in the same direction as the singing woman in white.
“Fucking asshole tweaker,” Rosa muttered.
She got back to her sketch and the man with the mandolin and the moon. But her hand was paralyzed and trembled above the page. A thin layer of sweat collected above Rosa's brow. Something in the air smelled off – it was familiar but misplaced, a smell encountered neither in Manila nor Eugene, or anywhere in between. A single cloud passed over the moon, perched at the height of the witching hour, and the shade of night darkened.
Aaaaaaaaah! A shriek sounded from an unknown distance.
“That fucking tweaker again.”
The man on the riverbank stopped strumming the mandolin. Rosa set her sketchpad down and got up from the bench. A naked body came running towards her, barreling across the grassy field. The figure slowly came into focus – first, deep reds, then torn white shreds, and finally a face: the sonorous woman who was cloaked in white. Fifty feet from Rosa the woman's body fell to the ground and flailed in pain and writhing screams.
“He tried to take me! Man on bike! Knifed me, hit me down!”
Rosa was frozen with fear. Her feet were earthen bricks sunk into the ground, and her hands were clods of dirt, absolutely u
seless.
“What did you see?”
The man with the mandolin came up from behind Rosa and barked the question in her ear.
“Where did that fucker on the bike go?” he demanded.
“I dunno, I just … he whirred past, in a blur of lightning, a cackle of dings.”
“My name is Joe Berber, I'm a volunteer firefighter, just stay here.” The man shook his head at Rosa's elegant phrasing and abandoned her to tend to the woman on the ground.
Ding ding ding, aha-ha! Ding ding ding!
“Hey, he's coming back!” Rosa shouted as the man on the bike appeared on the path.
Joe rushed and tackled the man from his bike, and they wrestled on the ground. Rosa watched