The More They Disappear (16 page)

“You're drunk,” Mark replied in an eerie monotone.

Lew pushed Mark to the edge of the dock. “Five thousand,” he said. “You or your daddy. Do you understand?”

Mark didn't respond, so Lew unholstered his gun and let it shimmer in the moonlight. Mary Jane couldn't stand by and do nothing. She stepped out of the shadows and screamed, “No!” In the pale glow of night, she could see Mark's eyes—dull and unimpressed. He shook his head.

Lew took a step back and swiveled his eyes between Mark and Mary Jane, the gun swaying loose in his hand. “That's cute,” he said, lifting the gun languidly toward Mary Jane as if it was a crooked finger. “You got a girlfriend. I didn't think you were the type.” He bent his wrist effeminately and laughed. Smiling, he turned away from Mary Jane and pointed the gun back at Mark. “Take off your clothes.” Mark hesitated and Lew cocked the hammer. Mary Jane stood in shock as Mark pulled his shirt over his head and unbuttoned his jeans. His belt buckle thudded against the wood with a dull knock. “All of it,” Lew said and tapped the gun against Mark's crotch. Mark slipped off his shoes, methodically peeled off each sock, then dropped his boxers to the dock. He looked as vulnerable as a plucked chicken and his lip quivered slightly as he cupped his genitals.

“Stop,” Mary Jane said, her voice a whisper. And then louder, “Stop it!”

Lew holstered the gun and in a flash his arms uncoiled and sent Mark toppling into the river. Mary Jane ran to the edge of the dock as Lew kicked Mark's clothes over. “Say hello to your mama for me,” Lew said before walking away.

Mark paddled in the water after his clothes, tossing them up before hoisting himself with two scrawny arms. It took a minute for him to catch his breath and despite the warm, humid night, goose bumps rose along his skin. “I hate him,” he said, shaking. “I fucking hate him.”

Mary Jane wrapped Mark in her arms. “It's okay,” she said. “I won't let him hurt you. We'll do whatever it takes. We'll kill him if we have to.” She'd been high—just talking shit—but the words ended up prophetic.

Now Mary Jane was in Lexington and she needed to forget about that past. She raised the blinds and looked out as students scuffled toward campus. It was midmorning but most wore pajamas or sweatpants, had hair freshly slept on. They looked less like scholars than junkies and those who made an effort stood out. A boy in a crisp blazer and jeans, his thumbs cocked under the straps of his backpack. A girl wearing motorcycle boots, peacoat, and a long red scarf.

It was the first day of her new life and Mary Jane decided to make the most it. At least Lexington wasn't Marathon. She ran a hot shower and pretended she was spaghetti boiling in a pot, softening and loosening and letting go. Afterward, she put on her favorite oxford shirt and a black skirt, did her makeup and straightened her hair.

Out on Euclid Avenue, she fell in lockstep with the other students, even stopped at the bookstore to pick up a backpack and reading material. The shelves were arranged according to course. Most held heavy textbooks stamped with boring titles, but a class titled Acid Trips and Flower Power: Literature of the Sixties caught her eye. She bought copies of
On the Road
and
Divine Right's Trip,
the back of which said it was about a Kentuckian driving across the country in a VW bus. Mary Jane had never been much of a reader but she thought she could use the books as guidance for her own journey.

With the backpack slung over her shoulder, she moved with the confidence that comes from belonging. She followed a girl with pink streaks in her hair to a grease spot named Tolly-Ho, where muscled line cooks worked the flattop while punk-rock waiters poured coffee. She took a booth next to a grimy window where dead flies lay on their backs and a fluorescent sign hummed. The tattooed forearm of a waiter shoved a menu onto the table. The tattoo was of a mermaid clutching a rock. Behind the mermaid, a sinister castle rose to a quarter moon and a horde of bats flew to the elbow. “Drink?” the waiter asked.

“Coffee,” Mary Jane said as she looked up.

He had a scruffy beard, white boy dreads pulled into a tall, colorful cap, and a barbell in his left eyebrow. “The corned beef hash is on special,” he muttered.

The sound of pans clanging and the smell of bacon frying filled the diner. The chatter of students melted into the din as Mary Jane cracked open one of her books. “Here comes D.R. Davenport, Divine Right he calls himself after that incredible stoned-out afternoon.…”

Mary Jane paused and thought about how she'd tell her own story. “Here comes Mary Jane, MJ she calls herself, after that fateful day in Marathon.…”

A coffee mug came down with a clang and sloshed onto the book.

“Damn,” the waiter said.

“It's okay.” Mary Jane dabbed the pages with a paper napkin.

“It's been a shit morning.”

“It's okay,” she said again.

His face relaxed into a grin. “My bad.” He had a crooked, toothy smile.

“I like your tattoo,” she said.

The waiter looked down, as if noticing it for the first time. “My brother did it. He works at True Blue down the block.”

“It's awesome.”

“He's good. And cheap. Just ask for Madcap.”

“Maybe I will.”

“How about something to eat while you think on it?”

Mary Jane bit her lip softly. “The hash sounds good.”

“Hash always sounds good to me,” the waiter said.

Mary Jane laughed. “Me too.”

“I'm Vince,” he said.

“Mary Jane.”

Now it was his turn to laugh. “The hash for Mary Jane,” he said. “You gotta be kidding me.”

The food was oversalted and undercooked but Mary Jane didn't complain. She picked at the plate long after other customers had come and gone, and Vince refilled her coffee time and again. They talked whenever the flow of customers slowed down. He was older, almost thirty he said, without getting specific. He wasn't a student. He was busy living and that was hard enough. She told him she wasn't a student either and when he asked about the books, she said she didn't need some professor telling her how to think. He liked that, told Mary Jane she was wise for her age.

It had been so long since she'd flirted with someone who wasn't Mark that she'd forgotten the thrill of a stranger's attention. She didn't want to leave, but she worried that if she stayed, it would become awkward, so when Vince went to pick up an order for a four-top, she left a tip with an Oxy beneath the bills.

A couple of buildings down, she stopped in front of True Blue. Its walls were graffitied with tattoo stereotypes—an anchor, an arrow-struck heart, a rose, and a cross. A pair of gutterpunks with a dour pitbull sat against the building smoking cigarettes and panhandling for change. As Mary Jane hesitated in front of the door, a hand touched her shoulder softly. “Hey,” Vince said. She turned to look at him. “You know that tip you gave me?”

Mary Jane gave him a sly smile.

“Can you get more?”

She nodded.

Vince took a pen from his ear and the waiter's pad from his pocket. “I'm having a party in a couple days. You should come.” He handed her the address, stooped to kiss her cheek, and she returned the gesture. He was the tallest boy she'd ever kissed.

“You getting a tattoo?” he asked.

Mary Jane nodded again. She would have nodded to anything.

“Say hi to my brother for me.”

Mary Jane turned back to the tattoo parlor with a new confidence. Mark wasn't the tattoo type, but maybe she was. She'd never much thought about tattoos; her parents wouldn't approve—tattoos were low-class—but her parents weren't in the way anymore. She undid the top button of her oxford shirt and flared the V so that the top of her bra became visible, adjusted her skirt so that it rode high on the hips, and stepped inside.

The girl behind the counter had a face full of piercings and a star tattooed above each breast. She lisped a syrupy hello and introduced herself as Eva. When Mary Jane asked after Vince's brother, Eva pointed to a stocky man with close-cropped hair dancing to drum and bass. He wore tight black jeans and a ripped T-shirt, held together by safety pins, that said
DISMEMBERED
across the chest. It looked as if he'd been attacked by a slasher and Frankensteined back together. Nearly every inch of his skin, even parts of his face, were tattooed. When he came over and put out his right hand, she noticed the word
mad
inked from his ring to index finger. The left had
cap
from index to ring. “Madcap,” he said in a soft voice. There were bits of gray above his temples.

“You here for a tattoo or a piercing?” Eva asked.

Looking at the tattooed man and pierced girl, Mary Jane was torn. “Both,” she said.

“A double-dipper,” Madcap hollered. “Awesome. Eva here does the piercing.”

“Where can I put a hole in you, hon?” Eva asked. A stud flashed from the back of her mouth.

“The tongue,” Mary Jane said.

“And I do the tattoos,” Madcap said. “Did you have something specific in mind?”

Mary Jane shook her head. “No. But Vince said I should come see you.”

“Well, a friend of my brother's is a friend of mine. As long as you have cash.”

“How much?”

“Well, that depends on the tattoo.”

“I have about five hundred.”

Madcap nodded. “That should work,” he said. “Let's look through the binders while Eva sets up.”

A flood of images filled the pages. There were ten roses, thirty decorative bands, dragons, bosomy ladies, and birds. So many birds. Chinese symbols. Love. Peace. Strength. A page of black cats, a few nymph fairies. “There're so many,” Mary Jane said.

“Most people want something personal,” Madcap said. “Not just a pretty picture. Each one of my tattoos has a story behind it.” He asked her what she was passionate about.

Mary Jane didn't know. “I'm moving out of my parents' house,” she said. “You know, being on my own.”

“That's a great reason for a tattoo,” Madcap replied, all positivity. “It makes me think of this painting I saw. It was this girl—this woman, really—walking along a dirt road. She was alone but she was strong.”

“That sounds cool.”

“Let me draw it for you.” Madcap pulled a pen from behind his ear and inked the woman's dress and then her legs. It seemed like she was walking away—into the page—but she was walking on air. Then he added two curved lines around her feet. A path. When he finished her body, he drew hair blown by the wind.

“Could you add some trees?” Mary Jane asked.

With a couple strokes of the pen, there were trunks and branches arcing over the path, protecting the woman. Madcap took out a gray pen to add shadows and blurred the edges as if she were in a fog. Mary Jane couldn't believe how quickly he'd drawn it, how much she felt like that woman. “It'd be cool on the back of your shoulder,” he said. “The fog thinning out over the top.”

“Right,” Mary Jane said. “It has a certain
je ne sais quoi
.”

“What's that?”

“It's French. A phrase for something that's hard to describe.”

“Spell it,” he said, and soon he'd inked the words beneath the woman in cursive. “Now it's yours.”

Mary Jane signed the consent form and snuck away to the bathroom to chew another Oxy. As she opened her mouth for the stud, Eva cooed sweet nothings to distract her and Madcap held her hand. She squeezed when Eva's muscles tensed and the needle pulsed through. It hurt despite the Oxy but it felt right. Salty blood pooled in her mouth, and Eva said, “Here, let me get that,” and daubed gauze around the stud. “Sometimes the tongue bleeds.” She held up a mirror and a little piece of silver glinted from the hollows of Mary Jane's mouth. A bright red outlined her gums. She looked like a cannibal.

Madcap moved her to his tattoo chair and asked her to take off her shirt. Normally she would have felt too self-conscious but Madcap put her at ease, and when the tattoo gun buzzed to life, he placed a reassuring hand to her skin and said not to worry. The needle touched down and he kept saying “good” as he dabbed the excess ink. To her left, painted on the wall, was a big pool of goldfish. Mary Jane counted them, named them, closed her eyes, counted again, renamed them. Madcap talked the whole time and asked her questions. She kept saying yes or no without really listening. She kept telling him it didn't hurt and he kept saying, “Good. Good.” It did hurt though, and she liked that, and she liked the way the Oxy dulled it and made it a hurt she could bear.

When Madcap finished, Eva turned up the stereo, and Mary Jane examined her new body in the mirror. The glass rattled to the pounding bass of a rap song. The trees around the woman shook. An earthquake. Mary Jane imagined Mark's reaction when she showed him. Mark was square. He wouldn't understand. And for a moment she imagined showing Vince, imagined leaving with Vince, imagined kissing Vince.

Mary Jane smiled as a deep voice came over the speakers, cool and unaffected.
Yeah, Mista Busta, where the fuck ya at? Can't scrap a lick, so I know ya got your gat.

Madcap came and stood beside her. “You like it?” he asked.

Mary Jane nodded.

*   *   *

Jim Gardner didn't stand up so much as lean his substantial self over his oak desk and wave Lewis and his mother into the office. Jim was a friend of the family and the only lawyer whose presence his father had been able to stomach, and for that reason alone, he was the executor of Lew's will. As they sat across the desk from Gardner, the secretary brought Lewis and Mabel each a miniature bottle of water. It seemed very official. Gardner started by talking about the estate and held up a blue folder. Two identical folders sat on the desk before them. It was a funny word,
estate
. It made Lewis think of plantation homes and pasturelands—not a house in the suburbs.