“I can do that,” Clyde said. “I’m real good at special 3-D effects. I can make it look like you’re split wide open, showing guts and all, with an arm coming right out of the midst of it, giving the finger.”
“Great, that’s what I want.”
“That’ll cost you extra. I gotta do a whole new drawing and . . .
“You don’t have to explain, I understand.”
“Thanks.”
“The only other thing I want to make clear,” Margold said, “is that none of it can show when I have on a dress shirt with the sleeves down.”
“I dig.”
“I may have to go earn a living again some day.”
Clyde laughed. “God forbid.”
“On the one hand, yes. On the other, that will mean I ain’t dead.”
“Yes, right, I forgot. I didn’t mean . . .”
Margold smiled. “Don’t worry, I know what you meant.”
“Good. You wanna see the drawing?”
“Of course.”
Clyde took out a large piece of brown drawing paper.
“That’s wonderful,” Margold said, examining the work. “You’ve captured it perfectly.”
“Thanks, man. You ready to start?”
“Let’s go.”
Clyde santized and shaved Margold’s back and started to transfer the drawing. “So, you really think you’re gonna die?”
Margold was lying on his belly on a large table. “I don’t know.”
“You saw Death?”
“Yes, at least that’s who he said he was.”
Clyde transferred the entire drawing and began to ink it. “Did anyone else see Death?”
“Yes. An Indian at one of the ceremonies I did with them, and a medium here in New Orleans.”
Clyde laughed. “I bet you paid these people.”
“Of course.”
“Oh, man, they was jus’ tellin’ you what you wanna hear.”
“I thought of that, but I think they were sincere.”
Clyde pulled some skin tight with his thumb and index finger and inked the outline of a skeleton. “Maybe, but I don’t trust ‘em.”
“You know someone?”
“I do. I have a friend who will tell you straight. And she does see the spirit world, and she has talked to Death.”
“Maybe I should talk to her.”
“Yessir. I’ll arrange it.”
“Do me a favor. Don’t tell her about Death, just tell her I want a reading.”
“Good idea. Keep it pure.”
“Exactly.”
Clyde salved up a new area and started to ink it. “Let me ask you somethin’”
“Sure.”
“How old are you?”
“Fifty-five.”
“When a man gets that age, he starts to thinkin’.”
“Sure does.”
“He starts to thinkin’ that there ain’t much time left.”
“There ain’t.”
“That’s a fact. But you know, there never was.”
Margold lay quiet for a moment, his forehead resting on a pillow. “That’s true, but we never knew it until it’s almost too late. When you’re a kid, the notion of being fifty, or even thirty, is absurd. You can’t picture yourself that old. You read in the paper that a guy fifty-nine dies, and you think, hey, that’s pretty old. Then when you get near it, you realize it ain’t.”
Clyde shook his head slowly.
“When you’re twenty, you cannot fathom the notion of thinking about twenty years in the future. Again, it’s an absurd and even abstract notion. Then comes fifty. And it’s like ‘oh fuck, time is marching.’ And by God, it’s marching fast. The speed of fucking light. You think back twenty years, or even thirty years, and it seems like yesterday. You think of what you were like then, compared to what you are like now. Not that much difference, really. Fatter, gray hair, but still physically sound. Then you think about what you will be like after the next thirty years, and it occurs to you that the those years are not going to be so kind. They are going to ravage you. Brutalize you. Turn you into a frail, crippled, shriveled old man, and that’s if you’re lucky enough to survive. And the time may well turn your brain into a bowl of gray slop encased in an ugly, fragile and misshapen skull. Ears too big, spots on your fucking face, hair sprouting where there should be none, and where there should be hair, baldness encroaches. Heart all caked up, liver don’t work so good, gotta piss every five fucking minutes, getting up in the night. And the whole fiasco is punctuated by death. And in death we can only hope that we are one of the few who do not die in gut ripping shriek inducing agony. All I have to look forward to from now on is declining health, increasing pain, decrepitude, and idiocy. A blabbering, dithering, shriveled up old fool.”
“You got a complex, my man,” Clyde laughed.
“You ever been around a really old person?”
“No, can’t say as I have.”
“Well, they are horrible and disgusting. They are ugly, you can’t talk reason with them, either because they are without their mental facilities, or because they are so certain of their crazy fucking notions that nothing can change their creaky minds. And they smell. They smell of death.”
“A rather dim view, my brother.”
“It is indeed a dim prospect.”
“I think that’s why you saw Death. You are so afraid of it that your mind creates living manifestations of it.”
“That’s pretty high thinking for a guy in your station in life.”
Clyde buzzed ink into Margold’s skin, expertly tracing the outline of a man hanging on a tree. “In this business you come a philosopher. An observer of and talker to men.”
“You could have been a bartender.”
“No art in it.”
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