Inked Over

The Coldwater King who walked into Callie's shop that Thursday wanted another woman's name gone from his chest, and he wanted Callie's hands to do it.

The bay door was up because the swamp cooler had quit at noon, and the whole highway came in with the heat. Diesel off the grade. Dust off the shoulder. A cattle hauler downshifting for the long pull toward Ellery, the sound of it rattling the flash sheets she'd pinned to the pegboard by the door.

Callie had the chair wiped, the tray stripped, the autoclave running its last cycle of the day. Four o'clock on a Thursday at the end of August, and she'd done one walk-in since lunch: a nineteen-year-old from the Cutbank mill who wanted his daughter's birth date on his wrist in a font Callie had talked him out of. He'd thanked her for it twice. She'd charged him the shop minimum and told him to come back when the kid could walk.

The shop was one chair, one bench, one long counter that used to hold a tire machine, and three years of her own hands on every surface. She'd painted the cinderblock a warm off-white and the floor a hard gloss black, hung her drawings in plain frames, lettered ARDOIN INK on the glass of the old office door herself with a quill brush and a steady breath. The tire shop's ghost was still in the concrete if you knew where to look, in the bolt holes where the balancer had stood and a stain by the drain that no amount of degreaser would lift. She'd stopped trying. Things that had been somewhere before you got there were allowed to keep a little of it.

She was bent over the sketchbook at the counter, clip loosening at her nape, when the sound reached her.

Not a bike. A truck, an old one, the idle loping and a little rich. Gravel crunched in her lot. A door opened and shut with the flat clap of heavy steel.

She didn't look up right away. You learned, alone in a bay off a highway, to listen first. One set of boots. Unhurried. No second door.

Then a shadow filled the open bay, and she looked.

He was tall enough that he ducked out of habit under a door that didn't need it. Long through the arm, lean, flat across the chest and shoulders in a black henley that had been washed soft and fit like it knew him. Dark jeans. Engineer boots with the leather gone grey at the toes. And over all of it, the cut, black leather worn to a dull shine, and the patch she didn't need to see the back of to know: Coldwater Kings.

Callie set the pencil down very precisely, parallel to the edge of the book.

"Help you?"

"Hope so." He stood in the doorway and let his eyes take the room, the chair, the frames, the pegboard, and then her, in that order and at the same speed, like each of them was a thing to be measured before it was a thing to be talked to. Hazel eyes, dark. A face that had been out in a lot of weather. Short hair, a deep auburn-brown going grey at the temples, longer on top and pushed back with his fingers, by the look of it, not a comb. A heavy moustache, grey-brown, over a mouth that didn't do anything unnecessary. Late forties. Not trying to look younger, which was its own kind of arrogance, and she found she didn't mind it.

"You do cover-ups," he said.

It wasn't a question; it was on the window, under her name, in smaller letters. Custom. Walk-ins. Cover-ups.

"Depends what's under it."

He nodded like that was the right answer and walked in. He didn't look at the chair. He went to the counter, stopped a polite arm's length from it, and shrugged the cut off his shoulders. He folded it once, the patch turned in, and laid it on the end of her counter like a man setting down something that belonged to somebody else. Then he took the hem of the henley in one hand and pulled it up to his collarbone.

Callie had seen a lot of men take their shirts off in this room. It was a professional fact. She looked at skin the way a mechanic looked at a block, for what it was and what it would take.

She looked at this one a second longer than that.

He was lean in the way of a man who'd built his body doing one patient job for decades rather than lifting anything for show: hard flat pectorals, a stomach with no give in it, ropes of muscle down the long forearms. A sleeve of older work wrapped his right arm, shoulder to wrist, decent lines, some of it faded to blue. Over the right ribs ran a long pale scar, old and clean. Fair skin, tanned to a hard line at the neck and the forearms and pale below it, a light scatter of hair across his chest gone partly grey.

And across the left pec, over the heart, the way they always were, a name.

KRISTA.

Old script. Somebody had wanted it to look like handwriting and hadn't had the hand for it. The letters had blown out over the years, the lines bled soft into the skin, the K swollen, the tail of the A dragged into a smear. It had been black once. It was a tired blue-grey now, the color of a bruise two weeks gone.

"Done with her nine years," he said, before she could say a word. "Should've done this eight years ago." He didn't look down at it. He looked at her. "Didn't. Doing it now."

Callie came around the counter. She didn't touch him yet. She leaned in and looked at the lettering in the flat light from the bay door, and then she pulled the magnifier lamp off its arm and swung it over.

"Put your arm down on that side. Relax the shoulder." He did, and the pec settled, and the K pulled less. "Who did this?"

"Kid in Butte with a machine in his kitchen."

"It shows."

The moustache moved. It might have been a smile. "I was twenty-six."

"That shows too." She tilted the lamp. The blowout under the S was deep, a halo of ink spread wide into the skin where the needle had gone in too far, too many times. She could feel the old fault in it the way you felt a crack in a windshield, before you saw it. "I'm going to tell you something you won't like."

"Go ahead."

"I don't do these."

He waited. Didn't argue, didn't sigh, didn't shift his weight. The shirt stayed at his collarbone and his eyes stayed on her face, and the cattle hauler finished its downshift somewhere up the grade and the room got quiet.

"Ex-names," Callie said. "I don't do them for men. Not as a rule. Because nine times out of ten the man in my chair is back in a year with the next name, and I've spent fourteen hours of my life covering one woman with a rose so he can go get another one done in the same spot by a guy with a kitchen." She clicked the lamp off. "I don't need the work that bad."

"I'm not back in a year."

"They all say that."

"Probably." He let the hem of the henley fall. It slid down over the name and the scar and the flat stomach, and she was annoyed to notice that she noticed. "I don't want another name. I don't want a rose. I want it gone, and I want it done right, and I'm told you're the one between here and Missoula who does it right."

"Told by who?"

"Man whose wife has your swallows on her shoulder."

She could think of three women in the county with her swallows on their shoulders. One of them was married to a King. Callie had done that piece in March, with the husband in the corner of the shop the whole three hours, arms folded, cut on, pleasant as a church deacon and twice as watchful, and she'd decided right then that one was going to be the last.

Not because anybody'd been anything but polite. They had. That was the thing. You let one patch in your door and then there were two, and then the trucks in your lot meant something to everybody who drove by, and then people stopped asking whether you owed anybody, because they'd already decided the answer. She'd come to this town owing nobody. She'd built this room with her own money, on her own lease, a dollar at a time. She meant to keep it that way.

"I'm not a club shop," she said.

"Didn't ask you to be."

"You've got your patch on my counter."

He looked at it, and then back at her. "You want it in the truck?"

He meant it. She could tell he'd walk out to the truck and put it on the seat and walk back in. Something low in her stomach turned over, and she frowned at it.

"Leave it," Callie said. "It's fine where it is."

She went back behind the counter, because the counter was a good place to be, and pulled a consult sheet off the stack and uncapped a pen.

"Name."

"Shane Dempsey." A beat. "Gauge, if you're asking what anybody calls me."

"I'm asking what goes on the form." She wrote Shane Dempsey. She did not write the other one. "What do you do, Shane Dempsey?"

"Paint and body. Iron and Ash."

She knew the shop. Everybody did. Two bays off the dead highway on the far side of town and a yard of dead iron behind it, and some of the cleanest paint she'd ever seen on a bike tank had come out of there. She'd stood behind a Harley at a gas pump in Ellery once and looked at the fade on the tank for a full minute, the way the black went to a deep wine red with no line in it at all, and thought: somebody has hands.

She looked at his. Long fingers. Clean nails, which surprised her; most of the men from that end of town carried their trade under them. A white nick across one knuckle. Steady on the edge of her counter, perfectly still, a man who didn't fidget because there was nothing in him that needed to.

"Okay," Callie said. "Here's the job. Not what you want it to be. What it is."

"Go."

"That name doesn't come out. Nothing takes it out but a laser, and you'd be six months and a couple grand into that before I could touch it. You don't want that. So we go over it." She turned the sketchbook to a blank page and drew while she talked, fast, a rough box for the pec, the slant of the name across it. "The old lines are blown. Spread. That's the hard part. You can't cover blowout with something pretty and light, it ghosts through in a year. So the first thing is ground. Heavy black." She hatched it in, solid, across the top of the box. "A dense black field, here and here, packed. That's the first sitting. Maybe the second. Then the overlay goes on top. It's built in passes. Each pass has to heal before the next one goes in, or you're tattooing through scab and you'll end up with a mess I won't put my name on."

"How many passes?"

"Five. Maybe four if you heal like a teenager, which you won't."

"No," he agreed.

"Three weeks between each. Minimum. That's skin, not me being difficult." She put the pen down. "So you're looking at the end of November, if you show up and you take care of it. Three hours a sitting, give or take. And chest work hurts. Over the sternum, it's going to hurt like hell."

"I've been hurt."

"Everybody says that too." Her eyes went, without her permission, to the place on his right side where the scar was under the henley. "And then they're sitting there at hour two looking at the ceiling, telling me about their mother."

That got the moustache to move again. "My mother's been dead eleven years. Not much to tell."

"Then you'll be quiet. I like quiet."

"I can do quiet."

She believed him. That was the annoying part. Most men who walked in here wanting something talked the whole way to it. This one had said maybe forty words since he walked in and every one of them had been the shortest way across. No story about the marriage. No joke about the ex. No sideways little line about Callie being prettier than she was, or how a woman got into this work, or whether she was seeing anybody.

He'd said done with her nine years and then stopped, like that was a measurement and he'd given it to her.

She'd heard men say a lot of things about women they were done with. She'd grown up listening to one say it from the other side of a trailer wall. She'd decided a long time ago that she wasn't ever going to be the one who waited at a window to see whether somebody meant it.

So she didn't take done with her nine years at face value from anybody. But she noticed he hadn't asked her to.

"There's one more thing," Callie said.

"Okay."

"The design is mine." She said it plainly, the way she'd say the price. "Not a flash sheet. Not something you saw on a guy at a rally. I draw it. You don't see it until it's on you."

He was quiet a second. Out on the highway a pickup went by too fast and the flash sheets lifted on the pegboard and settled.

"Not even the stencil?"

"Not even the stencil. You keep your eyes on the ceiling. I'll put a towel over the mirror if I have to."

She waited for it. The pushback, the wheedling. What if I hate it. Give me a hint. At least tell me it's not a butterfly. She'd had grown men try to haggle her down to a sketch they could approve, try to bring their girlfriends in for a vote. She had her answers lined up for every one of them, because this was the line she held, every time, and the men who couldn't stand on the other side of it went somewhere else.

"Okay," Gauge said.

That was all.

Callie looked at him. "Okay?"

"You're the one with the hands." He shrugged, one shoulder. "I don't tell the man painting my tank what color he's mixing. I tell him what I want it to do, and I get out of his light." He glanced, briefly, at the frames on her wall. At the hawk she'd done in graphite the second summer, the one she'd never sold. "I want it gone. I want something there that's mine when you're done. You know what'll sit on top of that better than I do."

"It won't be yours," she said, before she'd thought about it. "It'll be mine. On you."

He looked at her for a long, level moment.

"Yeah," he said. "That's what I meant."

The heat was suddenly a little much in the bay. Callie reached up and fixed the clip at the back of her head, twisting the weight of her hair back up off her neck, and felt his eyes follow the line of her arm and then go deliberately, politely, back to her face. She had on a black ribbed tank and her high-waisted black jeans, gold hoops, nothing she hadn't worn to work a hundred times. She was aware of every inch of it.

She pulled the calendar book across the counter. Paper; she didn't trust the cloud with her week. "I've got Saturday. After close. Six o'clock, you'll be here till nine."

"Saturday's fine."

"Eat first. Real food, not a beer. No drinking the night before, no aspirin. Wear a shirt that buttons, or one you don't care about, because you won't be pulling anything over your head for a few days after." She wrote it in. Dempsey, 6–9, chest, ground. "And you won't be wearing that on it." She tipped her pen at the cut. "Leather on a fresh chest, sweat, road dust under it, no. You're not riding with it zipped over that for a while."

That stopped him, she saw, for a half second longer than the design had.

"How long a while?"

"Till I say."

He let out a breath through his nose that wasn't quite a laugh. "Club's going to love that."

"Club's not my problem."

"No," he said. "I guess it's not."

She quoted him the price, for the whole job, flat, the number she'd give anybody. He didn't flinch at it and he didn't try to bring it down, and he didn't, either, say anything about the Kings taking care of it, which she'd half braced for. He reached into his back pocket and laid the deposit on the counter in cash, folded once, and she counted it in front of him because she always counted it in front of everybody, and it was right.

"Saturday," she said.

"Saturday." He picked up the cut and shook it out. Shrugged it on. The weight of it settled across his shoulders, and the man in her shop was a King again, the way a man in a uniform was a uniform first. He stood there a second, like he was going to say something else.

He didn't. He just nodded once, at her, at the room, like he'd measured it and it had come out true, and went out through the bay into the white heat.

Callie did not go to the door.

She stayed exactly where she was, behind the counter, with the pen still in her hand. She could see the lot perfectly well from there. Everybody could; it was a bay door.

He walked to the truck without hurrying. Old Ford, two-tone, faded red over a grey that had probably been white, and she'd bet the paint under the dust was better than it looked. He had a long, loose, even walk, a man who knew where his feet were going to land. The cut rode easy on him. The sun caught the grey at his temples. At the truck he stopped and looked up the highway toward town, the way you'd look at weather, and then he opened the door and folded himself in, and the old engine caught and loped.

He didn't look back at the shop. She noticed that too.

The truck pulled out onto the shoulder and up onto the asphalt and went west, toward Coldwater, until it was a glint and then the heat swallowed it.

Callie realized she had been holding the pen hard enough to whiten her knuckles.

She set it down. Parallel to the edge of the book.

"Idiot," she told the empty bay.

End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.

Get the e-book