He gently pulled the binder away from Talman.
“Let’s not talk of books or patterns. You said you need something different than the rest, so it won’t do to look at things that others already have. Let’s talk awhile, and from there your own particular image will grow.”
Talman shrugged and humored the old man, following him to the back of the shop to sit in old, cracked red vinyl chairs. They talked about each and every design that covered his body, from the mundane skull grinning amid decaying roses drawn when he was just 16 to the more recent, more elaborate serpents, clowns and mystical symbols. Gradually he told the old man of how it started. Of how he would get tattoos to hide the bruises and scars and cigarette burns left by his stepfather and of how he’d joined the circus to leave that abuse behind. He told the man of how he’d stood at the deathbed of the circus matriarch Yvette and watched as she bore freak after three-headed freak before expiring in the arms of the ringmaster. He told of how he fell in love with the matriarch’s daughter Skyy, and how they struggled to keep the circus on the road moving from town to town never stopping, never resting.
“But why?” the artist asked. “Why did you stay with them, why didn’t you go to school? Do you really want your whole life to revolve ‘round the colors of your skin?”
“It’s as good a job as any,” Talman said.
“Do you care about your patrons?”
“They pay us.” Talman shrugged. “What more do I need to care about?”
“What are you running from now?” the man asked. Talman looked away. A moment passed while neither spoke.
“Take off your shirt.”
Talman didn’t question. He already had lifted the shirt before to show the serpent and the dragon wings crossing his back. Now he rolled the white T-shirt over the top of his head with a single pull and the old man appraised him slowly, walking around and around him, one finger to his lips, nodding.
“There is room on your chest,” the old man said. “You already have heart, but how would like to have some more?”
“What, we’re going to put a valentine on my chest?” Talman laughed, but the old man did not smile.
“Let me tell you something about my tattoos,” he said. “When I draw on you it is not just a picture; with my ink I will scratch into your soul. My art is deeper than skin.”
««—»»
On the way back to the circus grounds, Talman felt weak. Getting a tattoo always left him a little knock-kneed, but this was worse than usual. His entire chest seemed seared. It tingled as if a cascade of blue electric arcs ranged across it. He forced himself not to touch the bruised, angry spot in the center of his chest; he didn’t want to ruin the heavy sheen of antibiotic ointment that glistened there.
The main street was lightly trafficked for a sunny mid-summer afternoon, but Talman felt oddly clumsy, as if no matter which way he turned, he couldn’t get out of people’s way. He dodged and weaved at every passerby.
A small boy in a black and yellow striped shirt caught him unaware from behind. As the boy shoved past him and darted away, Talman’s chest seemed to burn hotter than before. The tattoo above his heart seemed alive with electricity, and both boy and street faded for a second.
The child ran into the Hobby Shop at the end of the block. The boy threw open the door and raced across stained yellowing tile towards an aisle overflowing with boxes and boxes of model cars and space cruisers. He grabbed at a model of a red Mustang convertible, and held it up. “This one,” he cried out to the store.
The vision slipped away and the street was back. Talman could see the yellow and black shirt a block away, still darting in and out of passersby, a zig-zagging Charlie Brown.
What the hell was that?
he thought to himself. He shrugged, and checked his step to stare through the window of a pawn shop. Instantly, the warm crush of another shoulder slapped into his own.
“Excuse
me
,” a voice rapped sharply.
Talman turned back to see a wizened old woman with silvered hair pulled up in a beehive and horn-rimmed glasses scowling over her shoulder at him, though she didn’t slow her march.
The strangest thing happened. The harrumphing woman’s back shivered and slipped, as if in mirage. Again the street slipped away. Day faded to night and Talman was in a small, dark room.
An old man in blue pajamas slept peacefully on a bed piled high with blankets and pillows. The old woman stood at the head of the bed, her two gnarled, blue-veined hands poised just above the man’s face. They held something that glittered in the dim light of a candle flickering on a dresser.
Her bony hands came down, and he saw what she held. Long silver knitting needles. She brought them down fast to punch with an audible clap into the ears of the old man. Black blood spurted onto the shadowy bed, and the man’s body jerked from snores to frenzied spasms.
Talman’s heart triple jumped and the vision vanished. He stumbled and fell to the pavement as daylight and the street sprang back to his eyes. The old woman was just a few steps behind him, moving with authority.
Talman scrambled back to his feet. His new tattoo burned like fire and he stepped off of the sidewalk to lean against the building. Nobody seemed to have noticed his spill. He shook his head and stared at the hard white cement at his feet, waiting for it to turn into something or someplace
else
. When he was satisfied that it wouldn’t shimmer away into a vision of murder, he began to walk again towards the edge of town. As the blocks slipped by, his step grew faster and faster.
He crossed the open field behind the town’s lone grocery store, and at last the gravel of the fairground parking lot crunched underfoot. The dirty canvas of the Big Top beckoned comfort like a well-worn coat; he longed to slip inside its mildewed folds.
Skyy was working the ticket booth. She grinned at his approach and ran up to give him a quick peck on the cheek. At her light embrace his chest seemed to burn with a sudden blaze of heat.
“Where’ve you been?” she asked. “I was starting to worry.” She stepped back and after a penetrating gaze shook her head. “You got another one, didn’t you?”
He nodded.
Skyy rolled her eyes. “You’re going to run out of room before you’re 25, you know that? What is it this time—a swamp demon? A vampire?” When he didn’t answer immediately, she raised an eyebrow and guessed, “a girly-girl?”
“A heart.”
She blushed. “With my name in it?”
“Just a heart. I’ll show you later.”
Skyy stepped back to the booth to deal with the growing line of patrons and made change for a $10 bill.
“Better get to the show tent,” she warned. Then with a flash of cheer she nodded to the next customer. “Welcome to the Barnett and Staley Circus, the strangest show on earth!”
Talman changed out of his walking clothes and into his red silk and gold-fringed costume. He buttoned the shirt gingerly, cringing as the fabric stuck and slipped across his wounded skin. He wanted to lie down and sleep for a day. But while the tattoo gave a good excuse for feeling like that today, the fact was, Talman felt like that more and more lately. He was burnt out. When he’d met Skyy, just months before, he was just a kid looking for a way out. He’d seen it in Skyy and the circus. Their life seemed ideal; self-contained, they moved from town to town, never staying long enough to get bored, never falling into the rut of the mundane 9-5 day-in and day-out. Every week they woke up in a different town, and while the show remained the same, the people around them always changed. Endless interest.
What he hadn’t foreseen was that constant, tedious packing and unpacking and the fact that while the faces in the audience changed, those were not the faces he ever interacted with. In some ways, the circus was more isolating than being stuck in a 9-5 rut in an office building. At least when you lived in the same town, at the end of the day you could build new relationships with different friends you could choose to see again and again…or your bartender. But the only relationship that Talman could build was here, in his closed community. His work was his home and his town. After a while, it all got stale.
Talman stabbed his shirt tail into his pants and clenched his teeth, willing the feeling away. The circus was his life now, and his family. They had taken him in, and Skyy had taken his heart. He should need no more than this, want no more than this. He blew his nose and forced the moisture from the corner of his eye to dry in the tissue. Need and want knew no boundaries, listened to no leash. Taking a deep breath he fled the changing room to take his place on the wings of the stage.
The show must go on.
“And for your artistic pleasure, we bring to you the man of mystery, the man of art, a man illustrated with your dreams and terrors. He collects your secret thoughts and wears them proudly on his skin. We bring you, ‘the tattooed man.’”
Talman took his cue and strode proudly onto the stage, bowing at the proffered hand of the ringmaster.
This was a more intimate audience than the center stage, and the performer moved from face to face at the tiny stage’s edge, flexing his leaping biceps skull, and stretching to allow them a glimpse of the deadly shivering snake that wound ‘round his torso. The ringmaster called the shots, telling Talman when to allow the paying crowd to see the hidden dragon at his thigh and begging their attention as the tattooed man shed his shirt and long pants to display the full breadth of his well-inked body. His skin glowed in the narrowed spotlight, dragons and snakes and deadly teeth laughing and prowling across his skin for the patrons who
oohed
when expected and
aahed
when suggested.
Talman had thrived on the attention at first, but now he only went through the motions. He knew that it didn’t matter that it was
him
on the stage. All the crowd wanted was a garishly painted man; someone whose excess would make them feel secure in themselves. They didn’t care about the beauty of the illustrations, or their meaning. They only reveled in the freakishness of it all, and walked out saying, “thank God, I don’t look like that.” Talman’s tattoos set him farther apart than he already was, and that gulf made his audience feel good. But for Talman, it only accentuated the realization that he was alone.
Even with Skyy, and his newfound family of performers and fellow freaks, he was alone.
Sometimes, after his shows, he would stand behind the tent as the chattering patrons filed away to lose money on the watergun and frog-leaping “games of chance” on the Midway, and cry.
When he was a kid, his stepdad had beaten him, literally, and he’d hoped that attention meant he was loved. Now, he was surrounded by people who loved him, and he felt completely isolated.
Talman finished displaying his tattoos and smiled and bowed his way off the stage to applause. He slipped behind the tent to crouch down until the grass tickled his thigh like feather kisses. A salty flow quickly kissed his lips with heat, and with the back of a hand he roughly brushed aside the wetness his eyes betrayed.
“Mister, are you okay?” a tiny voice asked at his elbow.
Talman flinched, and roughed a hand across his eyes once more.
A young boy stared at him from around the edge of the sideshow tent. He looked about six, and was dressed in stiff blue jeans and a too-old-for-him striped button shirt. His head was covered in freckles and fiery orange hair.
Talman shook his head and tried to stand, fumbling forward in surprise. He started to fall, but the young boy grabbed at his elbow to steady the performer.
“Careful, mister,” he said.
Talman’s chest suddenly burned hot orange like a forge, and he grabbed at the boy’s arm to steady himself. The circus faded away.
The boy lay in the dark, tears wetting his pillow. A damp curl of fiery hair was plastered to his cheek.
“But what about mom?” the boy cried.
“Mom isn’t going to help you anymore.”
The air shuddered with the crack of a hand on skin. The boy winced and shook with every strike, but he didn’t make another sound.
Crack, crack, slap.
The sound of fingers slapping flesh seemed to echo louder and louder as a brutal voice screamed, “you will never, ever, speak to me like that again.”
“What did you say?” Talman whispered.
“I just asked if you were okay,” the boy said. “Are you?”
He opened his eyes and the room was gone, the sounds faded. They stood, a querulous boy and a young melancholy man, behind the freak show tent, hands gripping each other. The grass rippled in a soft summer breeze.
“Yeah,” Talman said, ruffling the boy’s head with shaking fingers. The image of that head being struck with a fist again and again entered his mind, and as he parted the boy’s hair he noticed a purpled spot deep beneath the carrot twists. “I’m just fine.”
“Did you get spanked?” the boy asked. His eyes were wide.
“Not today,” Talman smiled. He held out his hand, and the boy looked confused. After a moment, he pressed smooth, porcelain white fingers to Talman’s own weathered ones.
“I’m Talman. What’s your name?”
“I’m Jimmy Jenkins.”
“Pleased to meet you, Jimmy Jenkins. Did you see the show?”