Tats Too

by Layce Gardner

  She leaned forward and placed her tits out on display. I put my imaginary blinders on and didn’t give her the satisfaction of even a glance. However, Georgia did see them. Which meant she stuck out her fat little fingers and wiggled them in a gimme gesture, straining to reach them, squealing something that sounded a lot like “Tee-tee, tee-tee!”

  “I swear to God, I don’t know who’s worse, you or her,” Vivian said as she picked her tits back up and crossed her arms over her chest.

  With her tits properly stowed both Georgia and I went back to thinking straight. “I’m waiting,” I said, drumming my spoon on the table in time with Georgia’s banging.

  “So, you even wanna hear my side of it or are you going to believe a couple of thugs?” Vivian asked flatly.

  “These Goodfella guys said that you’re married to Perelli. That you were laundering money and fencing uncut diamonds through Prince Charles. That one day you took off with the money and some diamond. Perelli doesn’t care about you, but he wants his diamond back. You telling me that’s all wrong?”

  Vivian uncrossed her arms, shifted in her seat, and crossed her legs. She watched Georgia for a long moment before answering, “That’s all true.”

  “How come I have to find out about it this way?”

  “Cheech was in prison. Is in prison. For tax evasion. He might be out, I dunno.”

  I didn’t answer. I put the knife down and stared out the window. The beige van was parked about five cars down from us. I nodded toward the van and Vivian’s eyes followed my own.

  She inhaled sharply and continued, “I thought I had time to figure all this out.”

  “I have it all figured out,” I said. “Give back the diamond. You have a day and a half to give it back before they kill us and Georgia.”

  She shook her head. “We give it back, they kill us for sure. As long as we have it and they want it, we’re safe.”

  The waitress brought our food and set the plates in front of us like she was dealing from a deck of cards. Neither of us touched our plates. Georgia screamed when she saw the pancakes so I broke off a piece and put it in her little hand. She sucked on it and asked for more, so I put my whole plate in front of her. She tore into it with her chubby little fingers and double-fisted pancake into her mouth.

  Vivian started in again, “He won’t have us killed as long as I’m the only one who knows where the diamond is. He’s not going to piss away ten million dollars like that.”

  I gulped. “Ten million?” I reached for my water and swallowed hard.

  “At least. It’s one of the largest uncut diamonds ever found. Please don’t let her eat pancakes.”

  “A little pancake won’t hurt her any,” I said. And maybe just to prove who was boss, I poured half a bottle of syrup over Georgia’s plate.

  Vivian sighed and finally said, “I did it for us, Lee. I did it for our family. I mean, at first I did it for me. But after I met you…I thought when Prince Charles was gone that would be the end of it. I thought Cheech would think it was Prince Charles who had the Devil’s Diamond and he’d leave me alone. I didn’t know he’d come after us. I thought we were safe.”

  “Stupid question,” I began. “Why’s it called the Devil’s Diamond?”

  “Oh,” she said, waving her hand in front of her face like she smelled something bad. “There’s a legend or something about curses and selling your soul to the devil and dying a horrible cruel death.”

  “Oh, is that all?” I responded.

  She leaned forward a little and asked, “You don’t actually believe that kind of crap, do you?”

  “Before today I didn’t believe in a lot of things. Like how my wife could steal a ten-million-dollar diamond and have the Mafia after us and have our house bugged, so selling my soul to the devil is just going at the bottom of that list.”

  “Well, I don’t believe in devils and curses,” she said matter-of-factly like that made it so. “And your daughter is getting syrup all in her hair.”

  Every time. Every time Georgia screams or makes a mess she’s my daughter.

  A thought struck me. “How the hell’d you smuggle a ten- million-dollar diamond over here on a plane anyway? Where’d you hide it?”

  Vivian raised one eyebrow meaningfully. “Do you really have to ask?”

  Damn. Only Vivian would fly five thousand miles with a diamond nestled up her girlie parts and act like it was something she did every day.

  “How big is it?” I asked. Because a ten-million-dollar diamond sounded a little uncomfortable to me.

  She shrugged one shoulder. “Size of a large egg.”

  My first thought was ouch. “Didn’t that kinda hurt?”

  “Honey, for ten million, I’d stick a basketball up there and smile while I was doing it.”

  “Ouch.” My second thought was…sure, you can stick it up in there, but how the hell would you get it out? I’d heard of women that can shoot Ping Pong balls out of there, but I’d never actually seen it.

  Vivian read my mind and laughed. “I tied a string around it, silly.”

  Okay, there was a visual I wasn’t going to shake for a while.

  “Where’s the diamond now?”I wondered out loud, because honestly it’d been far too long since I’d had the energy to check her hiding place and she could be sitting on it right now just like a hen on a nest for all I knew.

  “Safe. It’s hidden.”

  “Not another grave,” I said wearily. The last time she hid the half a million dollars, I’d had to dig up a dead body and almost killed a security guard. I didn’t think I could go through all that again.

  “Nope. Just another casket,” she said.

  “What is it with you and dead bodies?” Then a thought hit me and made my stomach churn. “Please, God, tell me you didn’t stick the diamond up inside some woman’s dead vagina.”

  Vivian hee-hawed like that was the funniest thing she’d ever heard. “No,” she wheezed. “It’s not. But only because I didn’t think of it.”

  “Where exactly is this casket with the diamond in it?”

  She answered, “Feinberg Funeral Home. The same place that buried Tanya and the half million. I hid it in the lining of a casket that was for sale and on display. I snuck away during Tanya’s viewing and hid it.”

  “They’ve probably sold the casket by now,” I said, alarmed. I said this alarmed because I will absolutely not dig up another dead Tanya. Ten million be damned. That’s how much I hated dead bodies.

  “They’ve sold it all right,” Vivian said. “To me. I have it on layaway. It’s in their storage room all safe and sound. I go in every month and give them fifty bucks to keep it for me.”

  “Layaway? You can buy caskets on layaway?”

  Vivian grinned. “You can if you’re me.” What she meant by this was—you can if you have big tits and a short skirt. And she has plenty of both.

  I watched Georgia smear pancakes and syrup in her hair and all over her face. All I could think was that I didn’t want ten million dollars. I mean, I didn’t not want it either, but all I really wanted was a nice quiet life with the woman I loved and our daughter. We’d worked out a kind of middle-class existence and that was more than fine with me. How did Vivian keep getting me all tangled up in…shit. Maybe the question should be why did I keep letting her?

  I looked back across the table at the woman who was the love of my life and maybe for the first time since I met her, I let myself imagine a life without her.

  “Give me one good reason not to just walk away from you right now. Never see you again,” I said hollowly.

  “Ten million?”

  “Nope,” I answered.

  “My tits?” she said, cupping them up high to show me in case I actually hadn’t seen them before.

  “Not good enough.”

  “Because you love me?” she said hopefully with her bottom lip all pooched out and twitching like she was going to burst into tears.

  I knew Vivian was playing me with that who
le misty-eyed, lip-pooching thing she had going on. But I also knew that she loved me. And she knew that I knew that. I also knew that I loved her no matter what. And in the next five seconds, I saw a series of scrapbook photos slideshow in front of me: Vivian and I mopping the ceiling; me giving birth with her right beside me; Vivian’s tears when she thought I was dying in her arms, her holding me while I cried and told her about how I’d been raped by my stepfather and then sent to prison for shooting him. Vivian’s been there through the worst times of my life and the best, too. She was right. Because I love her. And I didn’t want to imagine a life without her.

  “Okay. Let’s make a plan,” I utter, giving in. “A plan where we get out of this alive.”

  “And get the ten million,” she stresses.

  We sat there drinking coffee while Georgia sugar-crashed herself to sleep with her face in her plate. I wrote on my napkin as we brainstormed. When I was done it read like a bad B-movie plot: Georgia with Delia. Get diamond. Fake death with hot water heater exploding. Go to Mexico. Get baby back. Live happily ever after.

  I underlined that last sentence.

  It was a damn good thing I love B movies.

  ***

  I rang the doorbell and banged the gold lion’s head knocker against the metal door twice and rang again before Delia finally answered. Delia’s my birth mother. She didn’t raise me, and I didn’t even meet her until a year or so ago when she found me down and out and took me in. She’s beyond rich and doesn’t mind spending her money. She bought the old strip club where she used to work and now she owns a big part of Tulsa.

  She also happens to be a knockout, especially in the knockers department, so it’s always kind of depressing to remember she’s my mother.

  ***

  Delia opened the door wearing nothing but a skimpy red teddy and high heels with little feathers on the toes. Vivian took one look at Delia and said what I was thinking, “Holy shit, Delia, you look amazingly hot.”

  “You look pretty good yourself,” Delia said to Vivian. “Where’d you get the shoes?”

  “Oh, these things…” Vivian smiled. “I’ve had them forever.”

  I looked at Vivian’s shoes for the first time and realized they were the heels she’d bought just last week. Femme small talk has always confused me.

  “Give me my favorite granddaughter,” Delia cooed and took Georgia out of my arms.

  “You always answer the door dressed like that?” I asked. That might have sounded a little harsh, but what I really meant was “You don’t look like any grandmother I’ve ever seen.”

  “I thought you were Chopper,” she said. “He’s due back any minute. Gotta keep the man’s interest.”

  Chopper is my dad. Not my father. I don’t know who that honor belongs to. But Chopper’s always been the male role model in my life. If I were a man, I’d want to look just like Chopper: long hair, wiry muscles, tats of naked ladies on both arms, wrinkles from riding the bike, goatee and flavor-savor. Chopper looks rough, but is the sweetest guy on the planet. He taught me everything I know about motorcycles, which is a lot, and he also taught me everything I know about women, which isn’t so much. Delia and Chopper met over my almost-deathbed and fell in love with each other. They’re perfect for each other.

  “C’mon in,” Delia said, stepping back inside. “What’s she got all over her?” she asks, unsticking her fingers from Georgia’s face.

  “Maple syrup,” I said. “We don’t have time to come in right now. I was just wondering if you could watch her for a little. We have something important to do, and I know it’s last minute, but can you keep her for a bit?”

  Delia smiled. “Of course.”

  “Great,” I said. I hung the diaper bag over Delia’s free shoulder and kissed her on the cheek. “Thanks.”

  Vivian and I took turns kissing Georgia’s sticky cheeks and slowly walked back to our car.

  Vivian guided the car down the long driveway as I turned in the seat and watched my baby grow smaller and smaller.

  ***

  “I forgot it was Sunday. They’re closed,” I said.

  Vivian threw Hell Camino into P in the alley behind Feinberg’s Funeral Home and turned off the engine.

  “No worries,” she said and hopped out of the car. “I have a key.” She kicked her door shut behind her. If my car had a decent paint job, I’d have been pissed.

  I followed her to the back door of the funeral home. “How’d you get a key?”

  “Stole it last time I was here,” she replied like I should’ve known the answer.

  “Of course you did.”

  “Mr. Feinberg is about this tall,” she said, holding her palm out at chest level. “I could’ve drug a dead body out of here and he wouldn’t have noticed anything else.”

  Magicians call this trick the art of distraction. Vivian calls it using her feminine wiles. I call it tit misdirection. Whatever you call it, it works.

  She pulled a key out of her magic tits and with one last look over her shoulder, opened the door. We stepped into a dark room. Vivian shut and locked the door behind us then turned on the overhead lights.

  Caskets were stacked everywhere. I smelled Lysol masking the odor of something so bitter it made my eyes water and knew it was probably embalming fluid. I shuddered at the cold chill racing down my backbone.

  Vivian walked over to the far wall and pointed at a white casket. “That one’s mine.”

  “Pretty,” I said, adding, “but white’s gonna show dirt real bad.”

  Vivian wrinkled her nose at me. She bent over and looked closer at the side of the coffin and said, “I don’t see the scratch. The scratch was why I got ten percent off.” She held her hand up over the side of her mouth and whispered (like there’s actually somebody else in the room), “I put the scratch there myself.” She giggled at her own coup.

  “Maybe they buffed it out.”

  “They better not try to charge me for it,” she said menacingly.

  Vivian excels at shopping. Specifically at shopping for discounts. She can pick out a flaw from a mile away and haggle until she gets a cut rate. I don’t think she’s ever paid full price for anything in her life. Our pantry is full of dented cans (that she dropped herself at the grocery store) and her closet is full of clothes with flaws that can’t be seen with the naked eye. She refuses to cut out coupons, though. I think she considers that cheating.

  She lifted the lid and gestured for me to come closer. I reluctantly dragged my boots over beside her and looked down. It was all pillowy purple satin inside.

  “I thought you hated purple,” I said.

  “I do. That’s lavender.”

  To my untrained eye, lavender is purple. To Vivian’s trained eye, lavender is not purple, it’s just in the purple family. I can’t quite comprehend all the intricacies of color family trees. To me lavender and purple are identical twins, but to Vivian they’re second cousins twice removed. Just goes to show you how stupid I am about feminine stuff. I didn’t even know what window treatments were until Vivian told me. I thought it meant the glass was tinted like how they do in cars. I can’t even tell you the color of the pillows on my own couch. But I can name fifty different hues of nipples. And I can tell the make and model of a motorcycle by just listening to it downshift. I’m kind of like Rainman except instead of numbers it’s tits and bikes.

  So, I just nodded at Vivian’s color distinction and said, “Oh. Whatever. Just get the diamond and let’s get outta here.”

  Vivian leaned over the coffin and pulled and prodded at some of the lining. She straightened up for a moment, knitted her eyebrows, then bent back in and felt around the opposite end. She straightened back up and put her hands on her hips. “What the hell…?”

  “What?”

  She didn’t answer me. Then she actually lifted one leg up into the coffin, hitched her skirt up higher and crawled inside the damn thing.

  “What the hell are you doing?” I whisper-shouted. I didn’t know why I was
whispering, but it seemed like a good idea.

  “Trying to find the damn diamond. It’s gone,” she answered. She was on her knees inside the coffin and patting the lining all the way around.

  “It’s gone?” I asked panic-stricken. “What the hell do you mean, it’s gone?”

  But before she could answer, I heard a key in the back door. I looked at Viv. She looked at me. We both opened our eyes real wide.

  The door handle jiggled.

  Vivian quickly laid down flat on her back and ordered, “Get in!”

  I didn’t even think. I jumped in on top of her and she pulled the lid closed.

  Shit. Shit. Shit.

  I hate tiny cramped spaces. I hate dead bodies and caskets and funerals and funeral homes and bitter smells. I’ve always freaked at being in such close quarters. Just another piece of evidence to support my theory that I was Anne Frank in a previous life.

  And it didn’t help when I read about that beautiful giraffe that was being transported to the Tulsa Zoo. They put him in a too-small box, bending his neck like a clothes hanger, and when they took him out he had two big zigzags in his gorgeous neck. He died after a week or so.

  I scooched around and tried to stretch the crick out of my own neck. I was laying on top of Vivian and should’ve been enjoying it, but I wasn’t. I must have whimpered or something because Vivian grabbed the back of my head and pushed my face between her tits, saying, “Ssshhhh.”

  Good idea. I concentrated on her tits so I wouldn’t think about where I was or what was happening.

  “Ssshhhh,” Vivian shushed again. “Stop making yummy noises.”

  Yummy noises? Was I really? Well, I guess that’s better than scared, screaming noises.

  She moved my mouth over to her other tit and pulled her phone out of her cleavage. I heard her dial a number.

  A phone rang from outside the coffin. The ringing stopped and a man’s voice from about ten feet away from us answered, “Feinberg Funeral Home.”

  “Hello, Mr. Feinberg,”Vivian whispered into her phone. “This is Mrs. Perelli.”