Vampires in the Lemon Grove (21 page)

She gasps, just once, and Sergeant Zeiger says in a polite voice, “Thank you, ma’am. That feels nice.”

“Time is
up
!” Ed raps at the door. “Bev, you got a four o’clock!”

The door begins to open.

“Ed!” she calls desperately, pushing the door back into its jamb. “He’s changing!”

And when she turns around, Derek Zeiger
is
changing, standing behind the hamper and hopping into his pants. His arms lift and pull the world of Fedaliyah taut; Beverly gets a last glimpse at the sun, burning in its new location on the Diyala River.

Beverly swipes at her eyes. When she opens them, the tattoo is gone from view. Now Sergeant Derek Zeiger is standing in front of her, just as advertised on his intake form: 6′2″, a foot taller
than Beverly, and he is muddy-eyed indeed, squinting down at her through irises that are brown, almost black. He draws a hand from his pocket—

“Well, thank you, ma’am.” Inexplicably, he laughs, scratching behind one ear. “I guess I don’t feel any worse.”

“Sergeant Zeiger—”

“Derek,” he says. “Derek’s good.”

She notices that he winces a little, just walking around. He pushes a hand to the small of his back like a brace.

“Oh, it’s been like this for months,” he says, waving her concern away. “
You
didn’t do this. You helped. It’s a little better, I think.”

And then she watches him straighten for her benefit, his face still taut and bloated with pain.

She can feel her face smiling and smiling at him, her hand shaking in his:

“Then you have got to call me Beverly. None of this
ma’am
stuff.”

“Can I call you Bev?”

“Sure.”

“What about Beav?” He grins into the distance, as if he’s making a joke to people she can’t see. “Beaver? Can I call you The Beav?”

“Beverly,” she says. “Can you do me one favor, Derek? The next time you’re in the shower—”

“Beverly!” He swivels to give her a big, real grin. “I’m shocked! It’s only our first date here …”

“Haha. Well.” Beverly can feel the blood tinting her cheeks. “Just be sure to get all the oil off. And should you notice—if you feel any pain? Or—anything? You can call me.”

She’s never given her home number out to a patient before. As the sergeant turns his back to leave, shouldering his jacket, she mumbles something about muscle adaptation to deep tissue
massage, the acids that her hands have released from his trigger points. How “disruptions” can occasionally occur. The body unaccustomed.

At the Hoho’s Family Restaurant, Beverly treats herself to peanut butter pancakes and world news. She grabs a menu and seats herself. She’s a longtime patron, and waiting for service always gives her a crawling, uncomfortable feeling. Beverly often finds herself struggling to stay visible to waitstaff, taxi drivers, cashiers. She tries hard to spite the magazines and persist in her childhood belief that aging is honorable, to wear her face proudly, like a scratched medallion, the widening circles of purple under her eyes and the trenches on her brow. To be that kind of veteran. A woman aging “gracefully,” like the church ladies she sees outside Berea Tenth Presbyterian, whose yellowed faces are shadowed by wigs like cloudbursts. In truth, Beverly can never quite adjust to her age on the calendar; most days, she still feels like an old child. She spends quite a lot of time trying to communicate to strangers and friends alike that her life situation is something she chose: “I never wanted anything like that, you know, serious, long-term. No kids, thank God. My patients keep me plenty busy.”

But it’s been years …
Beverly thinks. And whatever need starts knuckling at her then is so frightening that she can’t complete the sentence. It’s been decades, maybe, since she’s been really necessary to anybody.

That night, emerging from the fog of her own shower, Beverly wonders what the soldier is seeing in his mirror. Nothing out of the ordinary, probably. Or almost nothing.

She places her hand against the green tiles and cranes around to peer at her back. She can’t remember the last time she’s done this. Her skin is ghostly white, with a little penguin huddle of
moles just above her hip, looking lost on that Arctic shelf. She can imagine her sister rolling her eyes at her, telling Beverly to get some color. Dmitri, whose skin is an even shade of gingerroot all year round,
tsk
ing at her: “Beeeverly, quit acting like the loneliest whale! Go to a tanning salon!”

Her hand glides along the curve of her spine, bumps along her tailbone. These are the “rudimentary vertebrae”: the fishy, ancient coccygeal bones. The same spine that has been inside her since babyhood is hers today, the exact same bones from the womb, a thought that always fills her with a kind of thrilling claustrophobia. So much surface wrapped around that old stem. She watches her hands smear the water droplets on her stomach. It’s strange to own anything, Beverly thinks, even your flesh, that nobody outside yourself ever touches or sees.

That night, under the coverlet, Beverly slides her hands under her T-shirt and lets them travel up and up, over her rib cage, over her small breasts and along the hard ridge of her collarbone, until she is gently wringing her own stiff neck.

Monday morning, Ed greets her with a can of diet soda. Eduardo Morales is the owner of Dedos Mágicos, and he’s been Beverly’s boss for nearly twenty-five years. He is a passionate masseur whose English is so-so.

“Beverly. Here. On accident, I receive the diet soda,” Ed murmurs. “The machine made a mistake.”

Beverly sighs and accepts the can.

“I hate it, you drink it.” He says this with a holy formality, as if this transaction were underwritten by the teachings of Christ or Karl Marx.

“Okay. It’s eight a.m. Thank you, Ed.”

Ed beams at her. “I really, really hate that one. Hey, your first
appointment is here! Zeiiiiger.” He gives her a plainly lewd look. “Rhymes with
tiiiger
.”

“Very funny.” She rolls her eyes. “You all love to give me a hard time.”

But Beverly’s hands are lifting like a teenager’s to fix her hair. She hasn’t felt this kind of nervousness in years.

Sergeant Derek Zeiger is waiting for her, lying shirtless on the table, facing the far wall, and once again the tattoo burns like a flare against the snowy window. The first thing Beverly does is lock the door. The second thing is to check his tattoo: all normal. The sun is back at its original o’clock. When she breathes in and rubs at it, the skin wrinkles but the sun does not move again.

Today, she tells Zeiger, she’s trying “crossgrain techniques”—bearing down with her forearms, going against the grain of the trapezius muscles. He says he’s game. Then he shouts a curse that would shock even Ed, apologizes, curses again. She tries to lift his left hip, and he nearly jumps off the table.

“It’s not my fingers that are causing you the pain,” she says a little sternly. “These muscles have been spasming, Sergeant. Working continuously. I’m just trying to release the tension. Okay? It’s going to hurt a little, but it shouldn’t
kill
you. On a scale of one to ten, it should never hurt worse than a six.”

“Ding, ding, ding!” he yells. “Eleven!”

“Oh, come on.” She can feel herself smiling, although her voice stays stern. “I’m not even touching you. Tell me if you’re really hurting.”

“Isn’t that
your
job? To know that kind of stuff? I mean, you’re the expert.”

She exhales through her nostrils. Knots, she tells the sergeant, are “myofascial trigger points.” Bony silos of pain. Deep tissue massage is a “seek-and-destroy” mission, according to one of her more macho instructors at the Annex, a big ex-cop named Federico—a guy who used to break up race riots in Chicago but
then became a massage therapist, applied his muscle power to chasing pain out of tendons and ligaments. Her fingers feel for the knots in Zeiger’s large muscle groups. Her thumbs skate over the oil, entering caves between his vertebrae and flushing the old stores of tension from them. She pushes down into the fascia, the Atlas bone that supports the skull, the top and center of each shoulder blade, the triangular bone of his sacrum, his gluteal muscles, his hamstrings. She massages the trigger points underneath the tattooed river, which seems to pour from his lowest lumbar vertebrae, as if the Diyala has been wired into him. Beverly imagines the
whoosh
of blue ink exploding into real blood …

Her fingers find a knot underneath this river and begin to pull outward. Out of the blue—so to speak—Sergeant Zeiger begins talking.

“The tattoo artist’s name was Applejack. But everybody called him ‘Cuz.’ You ask him why, he’d tell you: ‘Just Cuz.’ Get it?”

Well
, that
was a mistake, Applejack!
Beverly silently rolls her knuckles over Zeiger’s shoulders. With a birth name like Applejack, shouldn’t your nickname be something like Roger or Dennis? Something that makes you sound like a taxpayer?

“Cuz is the best. He charges a literal fortune. I blew two disability checks on this tattoo. What I couldn’t pay, I borrowed from my friend’s mom.”

“I see.” Her knuckles sink into a cloud over Fedaliyah. “Which friend?”

“Arlo Mackey. He died. That’s what you’re looking at, on the tattoo—it’s a picture of his death day. April 14, 2009.”

“His mother … paid for this?”

Under the oil the red star looks smeary and dark, like an infected cut.

“She lent each of us five hundred bucks. Four guys from Mackey’s platoon—Vaczy, Grady, Belok, me, we all got the same tattoo. Grady draws real good, and he was there that day, so he
made the source sketch for Applejack. After we got the tattoo, we paid a visit to Mrs. Mackey. We lined up side by side on her yard in Lifa, Texas. To make a wall, like. Mackey’s memorial. And Mrs. Mackey took a photograph.”

“I see. A memorial of Arlo. A sort of skin mural.”

“Correct.” He sounds pleased, perhaps mistaking her echo for an endorsement of the project. Beverly doesn’t know how to feel about it.

“That must be some picture.”

“Oh, it
is
. Mackey’s mom decided she’d rather invest in our tattoos than some fancy stone for him—she knew we were his brothers.”

The sergeant’s head is still at ease in the U-shaped pillow. Facing the floor. Which makes it feel, eerily, as if the tattoo itself is telling her this story, the voice floating up in a floury cloud from underneath the sands of Fedaliyah. As he continues talking, she pushes into his muscles, and the tattoo seems to dilate and blur under the oil.

“She circled our names in his letters home—Mackey wrote real letters, not emails, he was good like that—to show us what he thought of us. He loved us,” he says, in the apologetic tone of someone who feels that they are bragging. “Every one of us shows up in those letters. It was like we got to peel back his mind. She said, ‘You were his family and so you’re my family, too.’ Grady told her all the details of the attack, she wanted them, and then she said, ‘We will join together as a family to honor Arlo.’ She said, ‘Now, I want you boys to put the past behind you’—that was her joke.”

“My God. That’s a pretty dark joke.”

Sick
, she was about to say.

His shoulders draw together sharply.

“I guess it is.”

Thanks to the tattoo, every shrug causes a fleeting apocalypse.
The V of birds gets swallowed between two rolls of blue flesh, springs loose again.

“And—stop me if I’ve told you this? Mackey’s ma had another kid. A girl. Jilly. She’s a minor, so Mrs. Mackey had to sign a piece of paper to let Applejack cut into her with his big powerdrill crayons.”

“His sister got the tattoo? Her mother let her?”

“Hell yes! It was her mother’s idea! Crazy, crazy. Fifteen years old, skinny as a cricket’s leg, a sophomore in high school, and this little girl gets the same tattoo as us. April 14. Arlo in the red star. Except, you know, scaled down to her.”

His scalp shakes slightly in the headrest, and Beverly wonders what exactly he’s marveling at, Jilly Mackey’s age or the size of the tragedy or the artist’s ingenuity in shrinking the scenery of her brother’s death day down to make a perfect fit.