The spacious front room had a glossy Santos mahogany floor and walls papered with dozens of imaginative designs. Of the four chairs provided for customers, two were occupied by bearded men in their thirties who seemed to style themselves after the band ZZ Top. Their arms were sleeved with interwoven images. A younger man perched in a kind of barber’s chair with tilt-back capability, where hand and arm decorations could be outlined and colored while interested parties observed. In the back, past a bead curtain, there would be rooms with padded tables for those who needed to lie down to present their backs and chests and more intimate areas of anatomy to the needle master.
Bibi was accustomed to men’s interest, but the three in the tattoo parlor paid more complete and solemn attention to her than usual. They were talking animatedly when she opened the door, but fell into silence as she closed it behind her, as if a celebrity or a goddess had arrived. She knew it wasn’t beauty that hushed them as much as it was what the beast had done to beauty: her scraped left ear caked with blood, the bruise along her jaw, the half clotted and half weeping cut at the swollen corner of her mouth.
To the twenty-something guy in the barber’s chair, she said, “How long a wait till I can get a tattoo?”
Climbing off his perch, he said, “No wait at all. Kevin here, and Charlie, they just stopped by to bullshit.”
Charlie, whose hair and beard were prematurely white, nodded at Bibi and said, “Ma’am.”
Kevin wore a black cowboy hat, which he lifted off his head and put back again. “Pleasure.”
“I’m Josh,” the tattooist said. When Bibi didn’t offer a name, he continued, “I can do anything you want, anything on the walls here or in one of these albums of customer photos.”
“No dragons, no skulls, no hearts,” Bibi said. “Nothing but four words on my wrist, all where a sleeve will hide them.”
Josh produced a notepad and pencil. Bibi printed the four words, one per line, just as she wanted them.
After holding up the pad so Kevin and Charlie could read what she’d printed, Josh said, “I got a book of scripts here—”
“Block letters,” she interrupted. “Simple and black.”
“I can garnish the words with bats or birds or—”
“Just the words.”
Disappointed, he said, “Don’t seem worth doing—just letters.”
“It’s worth it to me,” Bibi assured him. “What’s the price?”
He named one, and she accepted.
When Bibi got into the chair, Josh said, “You’ll have to take off the jacket.”
Because she was carrying the pistol in the shoulder rig, she said, “That’s not how we’re going to do it.” She pulled the jacket sleeve up to her elbow and with it the long sleeve of her T-shirt. She pointed to a spot about two inches above the most prominent wrist bone. “Start there, centered on the arm, and please keep the lines tight.”
As he set out his instruments, Josh said, “You want a couple of aspirin or Tylenol?”
“Will it hurt much?”
“Oh, well, what I meant is—aspirin because of what happened to your face there. But this’ll sting a mite.”
“Thanks, but I’ll do without.”
Charlie glanced at Kevin, and Kevin nodded solemnly, and Charlie shook his head, and they both looked sad.
“You don’t seem spittin’ angry,” Josh said, “which maybe you should be. Sorry for sayin’.”
“I’m not angry,” she said. “Anger doesn’t solve anything. I’m just damn-all determined.”
“Determined what?” Charlie wondered.
“Determined nothing like it’s going to happen to me again.”
Silence ruled until Josh had completed three letters, and then Kevin said, “Hope you don’t mind my sayin’, miss, but a woman like you doesn’t need to put up with that kind of crap.”
“With any kind of crap,” Charlie elaborated.
“That’s nice of you,” she said. “But I didn’t put up with it.”
“Glad to hear it,” Charlie said.
After a while, Kevin gave her another opening to share her story. “I got a feelin’ I’d hate to see the other guy.”
“You would,” she agreed.
“Hope to hell he’s nursin’ a broken nose or somethin’.”
“He’s dead,” Bibi said.
They were all quiet then, until Josh finished.
The flesh was slightly inflamed and swollen around the four words, one per line, but they were neat and readable. Josh wrapped a few layers of gauze around his work, taped it in place, and gave her a small tube of antibiotic ointment to guard against infection.
“Treat it like a wound for two or three weeks. Don’t wash it. When it itches—slap, don’t scratch.”
When Bibi paid for the tattoo, he said, “It didn’t fulfill the artist in me, but it was nice doin’ business with you, Ashley.”
“That’s not my name,” she corrected. Under the bandage was a promise scored into her right arm: ASHLEY BELL WILL LIVE.
Tattooed and renewed, Bibi returned to the Honda, where she had parked it on Via Lido. She sat watching the street and its businesses melt away in the thick tides of mist, partially re-form, and melt away again, over and over, as if some celestial power had ordered the end of the world but kept having second thoughts.
When she worked out what she would say, she used the disposable cell phone to call her mother.