Sam Weller - Shadow Show

MacGregor thanked her, and the young woman went back to reading, and finally MacGregor let himself look at her tattoo. Today she was wearing a purple evening gown, and on her skin there appeared a woman with snakes for hair, and MacGregor watched, mesmerized, as they twisted out from her scalp. One of the snakes lunged out suddenly and snapped at him, and he jumped back with a yelp.

A big man came into the tent and told MacGregor his time was up.

“We don’t allow screamers in here,” the big man said.

When MacGregor didn’t move away from the velvet rope quickly enough, the man grabbed him by the arm and pulled him out of the tent. As the man dragged him along, MacGregor saw that he had a tattoo on his biceps and that the tattoo was an image of the man himself. In the image, the man was flexing his biceps. MacGregor was pretty sure those tiny biceps also featured an even tinier image of the man, and so on.

“Did Madame Needles give you that tattoo?” MacGregor asked.

“Get lost.”

MacGregor found the tent with the sign MADAME NEEDLES: TAROT, FORTUNES, AND BODY ART, and when he stepped inside, he found a small, plump woman whose skin shone with a strange golden hue. Her hair too, which at first had seemed gray, was gold. Or maybe it was the angle of the sun as it pitched toward the horizon that made it seem so.

He introduced himself and said that the Illuminated Woman had sent him.

“And what can I do for you?” Madame Needles asked, a bright curiosity in her eyes. MacGregor didn’t believe in future telling, but he felt a bit disappointed that she didn’t already know. He explained that he wanted a tattoo.

“I’m looking for a husband for my daughter, Mr. McGregor,” she said. She grinned and her teeth were pure shining gold. “And for that reason I’ll give you a beautiful tattoo. You are the first man she’s ever sent to me.”

“Well, I, ah, I want the tattoo. Very much,” MacGregor said. “But I’m already engaged to be married.”

“I don’t see a ring.” She sounded like her daughter, but it wasn’t a strange accent; it was more that both women made each sentence seem like the line of a song they happened to be singing.

“But men don’t usually wear engagement rings,” he said. Or did Madame Needles somehow know that he hadn’t bought Silvie a ring yet? “And it’s true. We’ll be married next May. She’s a wonderful woman, my fiancée.”

“You seem very single to me, Mr. MacGregor, and May is nine months away.”

“Your daughter seems nice. I’m sure she could date if she wanted to.”

“Nice? Ha!” The woman stood and shook her head. “She’s an impossible child! She’s twenty-five and she just reads and writes all day.” Madame Needles’s scowl marred her exotic demeanor.

“She’s mesmerizing,” MacGregor said. He hadn’t found anything pitiable about her. “Girls don’t have to get married these days if they don’t want to.”

“If you have ideas about despoiling my daughter out of wedlock, forget it.”

“Oh, no, nothing like that,” he said. It was just that she seemed content with her reading and writing, although MacGregor did wonder what she’d been crying about the previous day. Had she known how the story was going to end, that the father and son would go over the falls and drown? Did she make the story end that way?

“Soon she’ll be an old maid,” Madame Needles said, “and I’ll never have any grandchildren. I’ll die miserable and alone in the poorhouse while she’s writing her magnum opus. Better if she were like her aunt. I tattooed my sister, and those tattoos sit still and behave. None of her colors creep around and excite the marks—I mean customers.”

“I want a tattoo that moves.”

“You want. You want. Everybody wants.” She gave him a sidelong glance. “But how badly do you want it?”

“I want it very much,” he said. “Please. Can you really do it?”

She shrugged her golden shoulders. “I’ll do what I do, but there’s no telling how it’ll turn out. The rest is up to you.” She opened the drawer in her desk and took out several sheets of paper. “First, I’ll need you to sign some forms.”

There was a liability release in case he got blood poisoning from the needles and a nondisclosure form, saying he would not to give away Madame Needles’s tattooing techniques, and it contained a noncompete clause forbidding him from joining a sideshow. He read through the forms and reached for the pen in his pocket, but Madame stopped him with a hand on his wrist. She lifted his hand and pricked his finger with a needle and then smeared his blood across each of the signature lines in turn.

She named the fee, and MacGregor fought to keep from gasping. It was ten times the outrageous amount he’d anticipated, but he paid it. He described the tattoo he wanted, the size of a playing card, of a red bird perched on a branch above a blue stream, against the golden sun. It was an image he’d seen in dreams.

She pulled a wooden bowl off the table and shoved it into his hands. “This is going to hurt,” she said. “You can bite down on the edge of the bowl.” She slipped a black satin sleep mask over his eyes and had him lie back in the chair. When the first needle penetrated the center of his chest, he howled. It sank deeper, seemed to enter his heart.

He felt Madame Needles pull back and heard the rustle of the tent flap.

“Does the screamer need an escort off the premises?”

MacGregor recognized the voice. It was the man with the tattoo on his biceps.

“I’ll let you know,” Madame Needles said. She leaned in close to MacGregor’s ear. “Do you want this badly enough?”

MacGregor took a breath. He recalled watching the girl’s tattoo, feeling it move his senses, his thoughts, and his emotions. He remembered how it had thrilled Silvie. But it was more than that. He didn’t just want the tattoo; he needed it. There was something primal bubbling inside him that needed a way out, and he was sure this was the way, through his skin. He bit down again on the edge of the bowl, nodded for Madame to continue. As she drove the needles in again and again, the pain became surreal, moving beyond any pain he’d ever known. He squeezed his eyes shut, but his tears seeped out anyway and soaked the mask over his eyes. His teeth cut into the rim of the wooden bowl. He did not open his eyes until she was finished. He thought that about a half hour had passed, but when he walked shakily to the door of the tent to look out, the sky was dark, and even the midway lights and music were off for the night. The rattle of cicadas was almost deafening.

MacGregor kept the tattoo a secret until the following weekend, when he and Silvie took a three-day vacation to Sanibel Island in Florida. Their suite overlooked the Gulf of Mexico, and on their first day there they saw pileated woodpeckers, roseate spoonbills, and alligators from their balcony. When Silvie picked up her novel that night in bed, MacGregor took off his shirt, pulled the gauze from the tattoo, and sat before her.

“You got a tattoo!” she said, her expression one of mild alarm. She reached up and touched it. MacGregor had avoided looking at the tattoo himself, even when he cleaned it and applied new bandages. He had wanted to share the experience of first seeing it with Silvie. As he had hoped, it began to move under her fingers, at first slowly. The wind rustled the bird’s feathers; the wings opened and closed. They watched as the bird on his breastbone lifted and flew through air. It soared above a boat, which sailed from a port into a blue-green ocean. Waves gently slapped the sides of the boat. MacGregor saw upside down what Silvie saw and marveled at how the tattoo swelled and changed to show every detail.