I was tattooed as an infant.
The tattoo was on the back of my left hand, and was the
number “1”. Nothing at all fancy, prison
style, really. How it got done without
me going through the roof, I don’t know. Flavored brandy on my pacifier, maybe.
One Saturday, when I was thirteen, my buddy Moose McManus
and I were in a neighborhood other than our own, shoplifting cigarettes. This was in the day when cigarettes weren’t
so expensive they were under lock and key, but even so they were close to the
cashier, right up next to the register. We
thought we had perfected our technique: Moose
would buy a pack of gum and distract the cashier, and I’d grab the
Marlboros. We were usually
successful. Not this time.
The cashier caught my moves out of the corner of her eye,
and fast as that, grabbed my wrist just as I slipped the pack out of the rack. She looked me in the eye as I was twisting
away, and Moose was out the door, and then she looked at my hand, shrieked, and
grabbed me by my t-shirt.
Who are you?
Nobody, lady, I’m nobody. Let me go.
No, just a minute, just a
minute, let’s all calm down. I’m not
gonna’ call anybody. Calm down, ok?
Lady, I’m calm, just let me go.
Promise you won’t run.
Promise.
She let me go. I
ran. She ran after me, and caught me
before I was out the door.
No, no, it’s ok, I just want to
talk to you.
I was thinking, god damn, but she looked more freaked out
than I was, so, ok, I cooled it.
Alright, lady. I’m sorry.
Just let me go and I’ll never come back.
My mom’ll freak out.
Your mom? Who’s your mom?
You don’t know her, never mind.
Lemme see your hand.
I showed her.
That’s
a nice tattoo. Aren’t you a little young
for a tattoo?
I’ve
had it forever.
I
knew a kid, once. Had a tattoo just like
that.
I’m thinking, bullshit, in all my life I’d never seen
anyone with a number one on their hand.
Oh,
oh, gee, that’s something, but I’m not him.
No, you’re not. Get out of here. Don’t come back. And listen, keep the cigarettes, you need
them so bad.
Ok, thanks lady, wow, see ya,
I’m goin’.
So, I beat it, and turned into the alley where Moose and
I planned to duck in case we had to run for it.
There was Moose. Just for the
record, Moose was a skinny, red-headed kid, and how he got the name “Moose,” I
don’t know; must have been some kind of family thing. Anyway, I told him what happened, and we
kicked pebbles, and spit on the ground, and shook our heads.
Hey,
Moose, check it out.
I tossed him the hard pack. Cool, he said, and rapped its top end on his
palm to settle the tobacco, spun the red cellophane, cracked the pack, got rid
of the foil, and drew two new sticks for our smoking pleasure.
Hey,
you got any matches?
Oh,
shit. Let’s head to the Broken. Uncle Andy’ll give me some.
C’mon.
That night, late, I’m sitting in my room, half in and
half out the window, sneaking a smoke, and thinking about the day. Well, not the whole day, just the part about
the cashier. I’m thinking about how
freaked out she got, and I’m thinking I’ll go see her, even though she told me
to stay away. I couldn’t just stay away.
I didn’t go right back, it was a couple weeks, and when I
did, she wasn’t there. It was earlier
than when Moose and I were there, so I figured I’d kill time, and see what
happened. City saturday, sunshine, and
concrete. I walked around the block,
walked around another block, dropped into a candy store, bought a bottle of
chocolate pop, lifted some smokes using my never fail solo technique, and took
a break in an alley. I liked
alleys. Quiet, cool, usually some place
to sit down, and nobody bothered you. Smoking,
drinking pop, looking at my tattoo – I’ll give you a number one, I thought, and
popped a left jab into the air – and enough time passed for me to wonder what I
was doing, figure I wasn’t sure, and decide to do it anyway. I headed back to the store.
I have to admit, I didn’t beeline. I shuffled around, looked in a bunch of
windows at a bunch of stuff I couldn’t care less about, looked at myself a lot,
but slow and sure made it to a half block from the store. I saw her coming from
the opposite direction, and my nerves jumped. Without thinking I rushed up to
her and cut her off before she took three more steps.
Hey!
She stopped, and I took a good look at her. She must have been in her thirties, which is
to say, ancient, and there was nothing about her to distinguish her from
anybody else walking down the street:
blond, pale, lipstick, only thing at all different - a little scar
running alongside her right eye. I think
she was surprised to see me, and clutched her handbag, but she wasn’t scared.
Well,
hi ya.
Remember
me?
Sure.
Remember
this?
I showed her my tattoo.
Yeah.
Well?
She took a deep breath, relaxed her shoulders a little, and
set her lips into a straight line.
I asked her again:
Well?
Well,
what?
Well,
who was this kid you knew?
Oh,
c’mon, just some kid, I don’t know…
Oh, c’mon yourself, lady. Nobody ever told me they knew anybody with a
number one tattooed on their hand.
Everybody pretends not to notice.
You noticed, you made some funny noise, and then you asked me about it. What do you know, that I don’t know?
Oh, Jesus, kid…
We stood there looking at each other.
OK, listen, I’m only here to
pick up my check, so I’m in no big hurry.
Let’s go sit down at that bus stop and talk.
The bus stop was back at the beginning of the block. We walked down, and as there was nobody else
around it was a good place to have a seat.
Wanna’
smoke?
No,
kid, and you’re too young to be smoking, anyway.
Yeah,
well, I won’t have one either. So, what
do you know?
What’s
your name, kid?
Frankie. Just call me Frankie. What’s yours?
I’m Mary Ann, and I’ll tell you Frankie,
I don’t know much. I had this friend
about fifteen years ago. How old are
you?
Thirteen.
Yeah, that’s about right. I had this friend, and she was trouble, or she
was in trouble all the time; this, that, the other thing. You sure you want to hear this?
Uh-huh, I’m sure. What was her name?
Helen, her name was Helen, and
anyway her father drank, and her mother – I don’t know – but Helen had a
boyfriend, and she got pregnant – Jesus, kid – and anyway, she didn’t go to a
home, or go live with relatives, she just, I don’t know, she just figured out
how to have this baby without a lot of people knowing about it.
Where’d she have it?
Mary Ann closed her eyes, and took a
deep breath. Her hand went up to her face, and brushed the scar by her
eye. Then she looked at me in a sad and
resigned kind of way.
She had it in our garage, and I
helped her. Between her and me, and some
other kids we trusted, and this spooky, old doctor we kept it all quiet, and
kept the kid alive and healthy for about three months.
Holy Christmas.
You said it, Frankie. It was like some weird Christmas story, with
no adult supervision.
Geez.
Mary Ann and I sat there, staring into space for about a
minute, not saying anything. The
sunlight had shifted into that 5 p.m slant.
So,
then what happened?
So, then it just got too
hard. People were whispering, even our
friends, and the doc started asking for favors we didn’t want to do for
him. Helen decided the kid had to –
here’s exactly how she put it – “he has to be given into the hands of God or
the law, whoever gets him first.” But
before she let him go she wanted to put a tattoo on his hand. She learned how to do tattoos from some old
J.D. boyfriend she had. She said it was
going to be the number one, because he would always be the number one child of
her heart. That’s how she put it, “the
number one child of my heart.” And then
she took whatever stuff she had, and whatever money she had, and upped and
left, and she left the baby in a sink in the ladies’ room at the bus
station. The bus station called the
cops, the cops turned him over to CPS, and then, I guess, to St. Joseph’s, and
ain’t none of us seen or heard of Helen ever since. Or you.
Jesus, kid, Frankie, we were just kids, we didn’t know…
What do you mean, me? You don’t know that was me. I bet there’s lots a kids with tattoos just
like mine. What the hell! You’re just making shit up.
I took off from the bus stop and ran my ass off. And where did I get to? Yeah, inside the Greyhound station, under
yellow lights, looking at the yellow pine ladies’ room door, trying to catch my
breath in nicotine heaven. I didn’t know
what. I pushed the door open, stepped
in, looked at the sinks, and felt my stomach heave, but I choked whatever was
coming up back down again. I was
sweating as I backed out. I looked at
the clock above the ticket counters. Six-thirty. I was going to miss dinner. I went out to where the busses come and go
and sat down on a bench, and started smoking one cigarette after another. I stayed there until I got sick of the cigarettes
and the diesel fumes and headed home.
I walked with my head down, stared at the ground, and
pretended I was in an airplane, and the sidewalk was a big river I was flying
over. You know, that kind of kid’s stuff
where you go away in your brain ‘cause there’s no good reason not to. I’ve always been good at that. Too good, maybe.
On the way I stopped at Moose’s house, and called up to
his window.
Nobody answered, so I walked home.
What the hell. You
know?
Richard Wells
Seattle
7/1/2015
