J. Osborne: Black Gum

Charlie gifted him a tattoo back. Shane’s face and his arms were covered in them, tiny knives and cats and lightning bolts and numbers and names. Tonight he wanted something different. He wanted Charlie to tattoo his gums.

Shane’s torso and legs were completely bare. When I asked him why only his arms and face were tattooed, he told me that in the underworld, the ink was all anyone could see. That they glow neon down there. I asked, “But won’t you be naked when you die?” and he said, “It’s cold in hell. I’m going to be wearing clothes.”

I said, “So why tattoo your gums?”

He said, “When I meet the devil, I want him to know that I’m a friendly guy.”

I ate two capsules and cringed and watched my friend power up his gun. His foot tapping the pedal. That sound. When the needle hit the softness above Shane’s teeth he howled and when his mouth was full of blood he gurgled.

When it was done we played beer pong with Kentucky Deluxe. I looked down at my phone every time Shane took a drink, his scream caterpillaring up atop the mushroom clouds of Archie Lee bass rattling the small speakers alone on the floor by the stack of magazines.

After Charlie sunk his third shot and Shane hollered again, my friend came around the fold-out picnic table and tilted his cousin’s head back, the blurry green tattoos of his hands on Shane’s inked face like two warring clouds of gnats. Charlie peeled back Shane’s lips and shook his head at the magma flow of ink and blood. “We’re gonna have to redo this soon.”

Shane slapped his hands away and said, “My shot.” He metronomed his forearm looking down the length of the table with one open eye. Tongue between his teeth split down the middle like a snake, the left end curling up into the wiry hairs growing over his lip.

Cups stacked/table folded/us on the couch. Shane held up a finger and spit blood into an empty beer bottle and smiled. Charlie peered at his cousin’s gums and clapped his hands. “Evil, man. Ugly shit.”

The next morning Shane was gone. Charlie walked into the living room looking like hell and poured us each a glass of cranberry juice and vodka. We drank it and sat out on his porch. The weather was turning and I didn’t have a jacket. Charlie went inside and came out with a hoodie and gave it to me. We watched the folks riding by on bicycles and walking past swinging their arms up to the sky. Men and women without teeth talking to themselves or singing loudly.

A deep low cloud came in and soon it was snowing a bit.

Charlie cursed and got a blue tarp out of his garage and covered the car parts and the frame and weighed it down with cinderblocks.

I set the empty cup down and got a beer from inside and sat back down.

We each tensed against a sudden wind.

I said, “So what’s going on with your cousin?”

Charlie arranged the cigarette butts on his porch with his toe. “He’s a little off.”

“I gathered.”

“He does his own thing, I guess.”

“And what’s that?”

“I’m not sure.”

“He grew up here?”

“He moved around.”

“Seems like a character.”

“Yeah, well,” Charlie stood up to get a beer. “He’s family.”

We went to Walmart and bought sleds and drove out to the only hill in town. The college stadium was pocked with kids and others like us and we slid down the hill and laughed. We texted friends and soon we had a whole group of us out there.

The whole flat of the land was white and I was freezing in my hoodie but I remember that as the first time I was able to take my mind off things. In my spare time, high or not, I’d been checking my phone and I’d go to her Facebook page and look to see who was liking her status updates. I’d convinced myself that there was a way to tell whether the likes were casual or something else. Most of them came from the man or a few others who I didn’t know but they were there and I investigated them thoroughly. I checked their profiles and felt my heart hurt but also I had this odd thing like being stuck in the lobby of a movie theater.

I was living in a present that the past hadn’t caught up to yet. I didn’t think of anything but that there was this situation and that I had nothing.

But that day when it snowed in October I forgot all about it for a second and all I could think of was how the bulbs on the scoreboard looked so dim and the goal posts stretched up and caught snowflakes in the upturned paint. I watched all my friends slide down the hill, some of them scared and others without any hands at all.

Charlie went down one of those last times and hit a strange bump and flew up in the air and flipped end over end.

When he reached the bottom, he stood up and pumped both his fists in the air.

Bill’s was mostly empty that night but for us and the drunks and two good-looking women sitting at the bar.

The snow had kept on throughout the day and everyone was wrapped up until the night went on.

Eventually the two of us drank enough that we went up to these women and talked. I can’t remember what we said but I know myself enough to know that as bad as I am in the long run, I’m just as good in the short. We bought them drinks and on it went and I could see that the one with the tattoos up her arm was looking at me in that way and so we went out into the snow to smoke cigarettes and work on keeping our balance.

Even now, if I smell this woman’s perfume somewhere in a room I can pick it out and I get quiet for a long time.

I knew her name, I can say that much.

We fucked in the car and she rode me for about thirty seconds before she got hers and quit. She pulled up her pants in the passenger seat and I kind of looked at my dick and she said, “Well I’m not gonna fucking blow you. You figure it out,” and got out of the car and went inside.

I sat there with my pants down and thought to myself, All right. This is your life now.

In the car on the way home, Charlie trying not to skid, he asked me for details. When I told him, he said, “She manned you.”

“I guess so.”

“You got bitched.”

“I did indeed.”

“So you never got it done?”

“No.”

He turned a corner and nearly ran us into a ditch. “Well don’t fucking jack off on my couch.”

A few days later, Charlie had a big party at his house. He’d ordered a bunch of speed from the internet and everyone there was warm and rolling. Everyone moved between the rooms and said things to each other and I picked out women to talk to but most of them politely found themselves elsewhere.

A few GIs showed up. One of them, Raul, had cocaine and he put a bit of it on the fat of his hand between his thumb and forefinger and I inhaled it.

Raul said, “I saw him die right there. He was looking up and then his eyes went out and he just looked like a dummy. There’s a waxy thing to death. I cried like a bitch. I was covered in all of his blood.”

His buddy was a wiry fellow who took to annoying anyone he could. This Asian girl showed up and he called her Toyota, Suzuki, Honda.

Raul moved on somewhere else and I ended up next to his friend. He told me I looked like I was bummed and I told him he looked like an asshole and he said, “You’re an asshole,” so I hit him as hard as I could. He went down and I picked him up by the shirt and hit him over and over. The party quit and everyone surrounded me and him and I got the door open and he had his foot jammed under it like we might let him back in if only he pushed hard enough. He got a good one in and my right eye went shut. We hit him back and finally Charlie came up over me and put out a cigarette on his face and he fell into the snow. He stalked around until Raul peeked his head out and told him to call a cab.