The Petty Details of So-And-So's Life (25 page)

It was a mixed blessing. It's what allowed her to walk down a street reeking of multicoloured popcorn and into the ice cream parlour next to Ripley's Museum of Believe It or Not and tell the manager she was interested in applying for the job. She sat in the freezer and memorized the thirty-two flavours in less than ten minutes and the manager told her that was the fastest anyone had ever done it and said she'd probably look really pretty in the brown-and-pink-striped uniform. She sighed and pulled the apron over her head.

The knife came out of Blue's pocket, swam like a samurai's sword in front of the bug-eyed bastard's face. Polygonal eyes, taunting and threatening, lecherousness replicated a thousand times over. The bastard spoke like he had mud settled in his lungs. Spoke slow and water-laden and then swept over Blue like a giant wave sending him crashing to the floor. Blurry, too blurry for Blue to remember in any detail, so blurry that he could almost pretend it had been a nightmare. But there were tangible indicators: a scar across Blue's forehead, part of his ear missing, Amy, sullen and worried.

“Don't leave me, Amy,” he begged her.

“Just try and talk to me,” she said, squeezing the back of his neck, holding up his sad and injured face.

He would have to win her back again. He would have to grovel and sweeten. It was easy enough to do because there was a hammer knocking so hard against his skull that he was lying prostrate on the floor. He'd been humbled flat by whatever had happened. Above all, though, it was easy to find his way back because Amy loved him. She'd been terrified by what she'd seen, but she was able to forgive the man who
was a boy because she knew he was full of dark secrets and she'd rather they erupted in the light than see Blue implode like a dark star.

He promised to stop drinking, and he took to cooking extravagant meals for her over a camping stove in their hotel room. It was amazing what he could do with two burners and two pots.

“Maybe you should become a chef,” Amy said.

“Yeah, right,” he laughed.

“I'm serious.”

“And would you be my waitress?”

“No,” she shook her head. “I want my own career. And it won't be dancing. I won't be dancing that much longer. You know, at twenty-five, these won't look so perky any more,” she said, cupping her breasts.

“You mean, I'll have them all to myself one day?” he said, lifting up her shirt and kissing her between her breasts.

“You have them all to yourself already, greedy boy.”

“What kind of career are you thinking about?”

“Don't know. Maybe a hairdresser, or a makeup artist.”

“You'd probably have to go back to school.”

“That would be okay. As long as I knew there was a reason for being there, it would be okay. Are you still thinking about a tattoo shop?” she asked him.

He nodded. He had been, loosely, for a while now, thinking of being a tattoo artist. Drawing purple and green on young skin. Drawing out the bad blood and sealing the skin with art. His own. He was sketching more and more. Exhausting napkins, he'd moved on to bigger canvases. He'd flipped over the plastic tablecloth on their table and drawn the horizon across its entire length. A weak sun crept up over mountains in the distance. Amy couldn't bear to set her plate down on
it. She sat instead, with dinner in her lap. “It's so beautiful, Blue. And all that with just a black marker.”

“What's missing?” he prodded her.

“The elk?”

He nodded and picked up his pen. He drew girl-elk and boy-elk and black bears and marmots. An eagle flew overhead, a hot-air balloon descended in a valley. Mounties rode horses in single file. He added Bambi and Winnie-the-Pooh just for her. On the table was a map of a beautiful world. Heaven-bound, he added butterflies.

Amy brought him colour. An extravagant set of acrylic paints, all housed in a cherry wood box with a gold clasp. Blue brushed tears away; he told her about Picasso and the blue faces broken up into squares. He added colour to the tablecloth, and Thumper the Rabbit at Amy's request.

Next, Amy bought him five huge sheets of expensive paper and rubbed his shoulders as he sat and ran his palms in circles over the paper in gratitude. She was formulating a plan in her head, thinking about their futures. “Babe?” she whispered in his ear. “You know, maybe we should take a break and go back home for a while.”

“To Niagara Falls?”

“Yeah.”

“But you hate the place. And I'm not going anywhere without you.”

“It's a shit hole,” she agreed. “But I could handle it for a while. I could handle it with you.”

“But what would be the point?”

“I just thought maybe you needed some family around you. Some familiar scenery. Something. Maybe it would help.”

“But you're family. You're familiar.”

But I'm tired, and I'm worried, and I can't be everything, she thought to herself.

He walked down the main street in the late afternoon, walked right to the edge of town and blew smoke rings in the direction of home. They floated out of his mouth and travelled east, dissipating in the distance. He took that as a sign. If the wind had carried them back west, he'd have had reservations.

When Blue heard that Oliver had gone west, he knew in his heart that he would eventually follow, even if he didn't really know it in his head. He thought he might just find him. That he would walk into a bar one day and the guy would just be sitting there as if he'd been waiting for years for Blue to walk in and say, “Hi, Dad, how's it going?” He'd come in search of his father and he'd found true love instead. True love that felt like everything. Amy couldn't be everything. He understood it because he often wasn't sure whether he could be anything, let alone everything, for her.

“So what are we going to do in Niagara Falls?” he asked her over pork and beans that night.

“I don't know,” she shrugged. “Pretty much the same as we do here, I guess. Work a lot, drink a lot, fuck our brains out,” she laughed.

“Guess that doesn't sound so bad,” he smiled.

“Well, what about getting your business started? It's what you want to do,” she encouraged him. “Why wait?”

“Could,” he said, nodding his head. “But there is a small issue of money.”

“So you work for someone else for a while. And besides, I'll help you.”

He blushed, pulled up his sleeve, and then said, “First tattoo I get is going to cover up these lame-ass initials.” It was his last chance of becoming another boy.

Emma and Elaine are waiting for Blue at the bus station. He's come home alone to set things up for when his girlfriend arrives at the end of the month. Emma is alarmed by her brother's appearance. He's wearing a tuque pulled down to his nose and he's obviously covering something up, because although he might think it looks cool, there's no way he can really see. She hugs him and gingerly pushes his tuque up over his eyebrows. He's got a big scar across his forehead and his ear looks like a dog's breakfast.

“Oh fuck, Blue,” she winces. “What the hell happened?”

“Oh, don't worry about that,” he shrugs. “What the hell happened to you? Did you lose it this summer, or something?”

“Come on,” Elaine says, separating them and taking them each by the hand like they are four and five years old. They seem like children again. She's not sure she can handle it—she didn't do well with it the first time. In the distance she'd inflated them into adults with happy independent lives. It was much simpler than the reality that has arrived home.

Blue picks away at his food that night with idle distraction. “What do you call this?” he whispers to Emma.

“It's called moussaka,” Emma tells him.

“No kidding,” he nods. “You know, she sent me pickles.”

“She sent you what?”

“Pickles. With fancy labels and stuff.”

“That's weird.”

“You're telling me.”

Emma stares at Blue with her fork suspended in mid-air.

“What?” he says. “What are you staring for?”

“No reason,” she shrugs. “Just haven't seen you in a while.” She's taking him in and he's uncomfortable being scrutinized. His face has become harder, less baby, more square, and there's a twisted line so deep between his eyebrows that Emma imagines slipping a quarter through it, pretending he is a parking meter. His mouth hangs open. His jeans are too tight and sit just underneath the belly he proudly calls his “Miller muscle.” He has a shaved head, a scruffy goatee, and sideburns on his face. Her baby brother is disguised as a biker daddy. If I didn't know you, she thinks, I would cross the street if I saw you coming.

“What are you thinking?” he asks, a little annoyed by her silent stare.

She says, “I was saying ‘booly boo' to you, telepathically.”

“We've been trying that for years—you know it doesn't work. It's not even cute any more, Em. It's stupid. Meaningless.”

But it used to mean everything, she thinks, feeling hurt. “Too grown up now for baby speak, are you?” she asks him.

“It's a little embarrassing, Em.”

“You sound like somebody who's ashamed of his native tongue. You know, you lose your language, you lose your identity, your origins, your culture.”

“Thank you, professor,” Blue says snidely.

He thinks about it later. If it were that simple, as simple as changing your language, he'd be fluent in everything but English. But he is gearing up to defect. He's headed for initiation into a new tribe—a band of tattoo artists, where it's all about survival of the fittest, and he's being groomed for Alpha Male.

It begins with a systematic survey of tattoo shops in Niagara Falls, not a huge deal, considering there are only two and a half. The survey leads him straight through the door of the Artful Dodger. The owner, Billy, is the only artist in town who categorically refuses to do “I Love Mom” tattoos, and it is this display of defiance and originality that stops Blue there.

He soon ingratiates himself. First, he has Billy stencil a Celtic dragon over the initials he's been embarrassed by for years. “No worries,” Billy says. “We'll fix it for you, man.” He then proceeds to punch needles into Blue's arm. Blue watches in fascination as his skin bubbles with pinpricks of blood and childhood's lame attempt is suddenly masked with an image of the fierce.

In gratitude, he buys Billy a six-pack of Molson Canadian. They drink it together on a Friday night while Billy is finishing up a nine-hour stretch on a man's shaved back. Blue asks if he might be able to hang out and watch Billy work. “I really want to learn how it's done,” Blue says.

“It's a strange job,” Billy tells him. “You've got to have artistic talent, real patience, people skills, and business sense. You've gotta be fearless and smart.” He hasn't exactly said yes, but he hasn't said no either.

The next day, Blue brings his sketchbook. Billy flips through it quickly and says, “Yup. You got talent. No question about that. But what about people skills. Have you got those?”

“Like what?” Blue asks.

“Okay. What are you going to do when a twelve-year-old girl comes in here wanting a tattoo?”

“Um … Ask her if she's got her parents' permission?”

“You're going to say
no
. Even if she has her parents' permission. You tell her that she hasn't finished growing yet. That whatever she does, that tattoo's going to grow with her.”

Blue knows that only too well. He's got a mess on his arm to prove it.

“It's going to distort,” Billy continues. “Like if you draw a heart on some little girl's butt, it's gonna look like some old guy's testicles by the time she's forty. You know what I mean?”

“Okay,” Blue nods, getting it. “So give me another situation.”

“Say a guy hates the tattoo you've just given him.”

“Um … Try and convince him it looks really good?”

“First of all, you always make sure they choose the design, not you. If they hate the design in the end, they have no one to blame but themselves. You make a stencil of the design and rub it down onto their skin. You get them to approve the stencil. If they're at all hesitant to begin with, send them away and tell them to come back only if and when they're sure. It's a lifetime commitment—they've gotta be prepared. That's their responsibility, not yours.”

“Okay,” Blue nods. “Next?”

“You've just done a big piece of work on this guy. He tells you he doesn't have any cash. He offers you drugs as payment.”

“Just say no?”

“That one,” he winks, “is your call.”

By the end of the following week, Blue is officially Billy's apprentice.

Apprenticing seems to involve wiping down counters and answering
the phone, and when he isn't busy cleaning, punching needles into grapefruit. “Resembles human skin,” Billy had explained, dropping a bushel full of them at his feet. Blue laughed, and covered dozens of grapefruit a day in black ink for the next week.