— Oh! Easy up there. That’s not good, kiddo. Steady as you can, steady as you can. It’s honestly better if you don’t clench that hand.
Cy wiped up the fluids and gave the boy a chance to catch his breath. The others, beginning to bore or hunger, strolled shirtless over to the sausage stall. They had been suspicious of Cy when they arrived, they hadn’t trusted him to freehand them or hadn’t had the extra money for it. Or perhaps it was just his profession that worried them, made them skittish, he was after all the bogeyman. But he’d spent so long wading through the muddy bog of disapproval that he was beyond its reproach and could not separate out the various components any more. His long, trussed-up hair was too obvious in contrast to their similarly shaven heads. They were based upstate, outside the city. They must have headed out to Coney for the sole purpose of getting tattooed, having heard that’s where it was best or easiest or cheapest done. It was early in the day when they arrived, and already they were planning the rest of the excursion. One of them addressed Cy with gusto.
— We heard there was Chinamen freaks and Negroes with plates in their lips and tiny pin-head men down here.
— Is that right? Well, go to Luna Park and catch a show. All the wonders of the world in there.
Cy had taken money from all of them before starting the first, so that they would know a contract had been agreed upon. They liked this, it added to the sense of brotherhood. He had locked it in the metal box and put it in the counter drawer behind him. With his friends having briefly deserted, the blond’s mouth was now belying him his pain. His thin upper lip was riding high on his two front teeth and gums. Cy paused his work and leaned back to light a cigarette. He wasn’t one for encouragement or sympathy usually but today he felt generous.
— Try to think about something else, lad. Let your mind wander along. Talk it out if you like. But relax, it’s easier. It’ll pass through you better.
For his advice he received a look of sceptical disbelief. The boy wanted only for it all to be over. Cy shrugged and lifted the needle back into position, placing the cigarette in a comfortable corner of his mouth.
— Try to think of those things that make you fall asleep. So you are no longer really in your body.
Both men looked up. It was Grace’s voice. She was standing at the entrance of the booth in a tobacco coloured dress. Cy lifted the needle off again, smudging the frail black stencil a little as his pinkie passed over the traced image. Smoke stung him sourly in the eye and he removed the cigarette. She had one of the bound books of flash in her hand, was browsing through the skull page with a finger moving from one skeletal orb to the next, as if testing for ripe fruit. Her eyes moved to Cy for a time and she observed him with jurisdiction, as if he was in the wrong place somehow, intruding on her interaction with the man on the stool. He thought at one point she might be about to ask him to leave. Then she looked back at the soldier.
— What did you say?
— Nothing ma’am. I didn’t say a word. It was you who talked to me.
— Don’t you realize that soon you’re going to have to be able to put your mind in a box and bury it in the ground and remember where you left it? Otherwise you’re going to lose it, one way or another. You can practise now, this man here will help you, he will oblige you with some pain. So do it, think of those safe things that make you sleep.
She was a bully. She was either a bully or some kind of blunt, combative angel, too concerned with issuing warnings and reinforcing weak spots in the spirit of her wards to waste time with pleasantries. She repeated her demand. Hearing a single female addressing their comrade the other army boys came back to the booth with mouths full, wiping splashes of ketchup off their bare chests, and they wound up their noise to declare their presence. Had they been walking round Central Park or the Upper East Side they would have tipped their hat at an unescorted woman and stood back off the sidewalk. At Coney there was licence to depart from the polite rules of etiquette. It was a flophouse, a brothel-style place for satiation, or like a music-box populated by performing characters who defied regular social ordinance, beings who slipped into the chained sack of the underworld with a key to the lock in their teeth, they knew the deal, so why bother with courtesy, why court the whores?
— What’s that, lady? Sure, Donny, what d’ya do before you sleep — think about that buddy, just don’t take your hat outa your lap when you stand up.
The friend was rocking his groin back and forwards in a quick motion to much laughter.
— Margie! Helen! Oh, Fraaances …
Grace turned to the man behind her. She smiled.
— You’ll see. You’ll also be trying to get away from the pain. Look at you, so fresh in your uniform, you think you understand what it is to fight.
— Well I have an idea, but why don’t you inform me, colonel.
— Let me tell you then. They tie the tubes off in your stomach with small metal clamps before you die, so that your shit can’t come out of the bullet holes while the priest reads last rites. It’s not possible to have a priest vomiting over a dying man because of the smell of guts and food turning into shit, you see. Have they told you what the most common injury is in the war? It’s your brain. The war punches an asshole in it and whenever it feels like it, it fucks the asshole. Always it feels too small, like it’s tearing open. You’re never going to get used to it — like a virgin will make herself stronger and stop bleeding. It always hurts when the war fucks you, but you know it’s rubbing on a place in your brain that you can’t control so you’re going to respond like you want to be fucked by it — maybe you’ll beat your wife when you get home or put your fingers in your little daughter, put her up on the table and make her dance for you in her mother’s shoes and pearls. And when the war is done fucking it comes, this stinking mess, this juice just like your own, and then the children of the war will live in your brain too. Even when you’re an old man with your polished medals, all bent over and can’t get hard and smelling of piss, sometimes the war will want to come back and fuck your brain in its asshole. All your life. Or until you put your gun up to here and pull the trigger. Yes. Yes.
Only the noise of the bobsled chicaning on its runners and the screams of its jubilant riders and the creak of shutters and signs leaning into the breeze on Oceanic Walk could be heard in the ensuing quiet. Grace was still smiling, broadly now, with her ringer pointing to her temple like a gun barrel. And it was a terrible smile, terrible for the lack of psychotic characteristics, for the peaceful crescent moon it made of her mouth while the words escaping it had been rank. Cy could smell the tide coming in four hundred yards away, though he was holding his breath. She removed her hand and nodded again.
— Yes.
— Jesus Christ! Alrighty then, missy, no need to get crazy. Why the hell did you have to go and say all that for, anyway?
The young man turned to face Cy, to find out where his allegiances lay.
— This your girl? ‘Cause, she sure is a swell lady. A real charmer.