Tats Too

by Layce Gardner

  I hear myself say, “Why don’t you draw on some of your ancient Cherokee skills and make them yourself. Then you can dig a hole fifty feet from the barn and bury them just like your people did.”

  “Indians never did that.”

  “You’re just bitchy because there’s no room service,” I say under my breath.

  “And you’re just bitchy because I’m not jumping up and down at the prospect of fulfilling some weird-ass fantasy of yours. Next thing you know you’ll want me to gain weight so you can live out your big woman fantasy.”

  Oh, shit. She must’ve found my secret stash of Lane Bryant lingerie catalogs. I hold my breath and brace myself for the sucker punch. I don’t have to wait long. She continues, “I threw them away.”

  Damn. Those catalogs were one of the things I was truly hoping wouldn’t blow up in the explosion.

  It’s not like I have a special thing for big women. I like all women. And it doesn’t take a genius to figure out the bigger the woman, the bigger the tits. So when I got a catalog in the mail, I just kind of kept it. And I kept the next one and the next one. I didn’t mean to collect them. It just happened. And why would I throw away perfectly good pictures?

  Also, if I’m being honest with myself, I’ve never had sex with a plus-size woman so it’s always been on my bucket list. But there’s no way in hell I’m going to tell Vivian that.

  I decide that now is a good time to steer the conversation elsewhere. “I’m not on my period.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” she throws back.

  Oops. I guess I shouldn’t have said that. I remember a little too late that old Indian story about the rattlesnake that asks the little kid to carry it up the mountain. The kid carries the snake all the way to the top of the mountain and then the snake bites him. The kid says, “Why’d you do that? I just helped you out.” And the snake replies, “You knew I was a snake when you picked me up.” Well, I knew Vivian was bored, spoiling for a fight, pissed off about the Lane Bryant lingerie catalogs and on her period, but I carried her up the mountain anyway.

  Something in me just won’t leave it alone. “Just sayin’,” I mutter.

  Vivian’s silhouette sits straight up. “Just sayin’ you want me to make love to you?”

  I take a mental step backward. “Whatever.”

  She sinks her fangs into me, “Why, Lee, I’d like nothing better. I’d like nothing better in this free world than to make love to you while I’m cramping and have a headache and my knees hurt and my back hurts like a bitch and I’m bleeding profusely out my hoo-ha than to make love to you. May I please?”

  I retreat to the far side of my mind and wave a white flag, “Okay, okay.”

  She lays back down and continues under her breath, “…In a barn surrounded by hay and cow shit.”

  “It’s not cow shit. It’s goat shit.”

  “So now you’re an expert on shit.”

  I don’t even know what we’re arguing about anymore. Vivian does that to me. Weaves an argument around and around until I don’t know where we started or where we’re going and that’s how she always wins.

  I counterattack anyway, “I should be an expert. You give me enough of it.”

  There’s a long moment of silence and the tension slaps me in the face. Finally, she snarls, “You know if you were really smart, you’d shut your mouth and go to sleep.”

  I think she truly means that, so I crawl over next to her and spoon up behind her back. “I’m sleeping already.”

  After what seems like forever, I ease my tittie-dominant hand around her and lay it on her right tit. She doesn’t move my hand. I guess she’s not all that mad at me. I take another chance, asking, “Your tits are off-limits, too?”

  “Yep.”

  I wait a while longer, until I hear her breathing even out long and slow, then I move my hand a little. Her nipple hardens. I move my hand to her other tit and lightly brush my palm across that nipple, too. When it gets hard, I whisper, “Well, if you don’t want to have sex, you forgot to tell your nipples about it.”

  She grabs my hand and throws it back at me, whispering harshly, “This is exactly why I don’t allow guns in the house. Because if I had a gun right now…”

  Story of my life. Women either love me or they hate me. Vivian’s the first one who does both at the same time. Defeated, I turn onto my other side, facing away from her.

  “I love you anyway,” I breathe.

  “Love you anyway, too.”

  We go to sleep like that, cheeks to cheeks.

  ***

  I don’t dream that night, but I wake up to a nightmare. A hot gust of sour breath assaults my nostrils, and I jerk my eyes open to see an alien staring at me from only inches away. The alien is hairy, has a goatee and…

  Wait a second. It’s not an alien, it’s a goat.

  I slap the goat’s face away from me and sit up. I take inventory. We’re on the run. Headed to Las Vegas. A storm waylaid us. I’m in a barn. In a haystack. The sun is up and shining bright. Where’s Vivian?

  A coyote howls loud and long.

  No, wait, that’s Vivian howling. Over and over, she screams, “Leeeeeee! Lee, goddammit, help me! Oh my God! Lee!”

  I jump to my feet and run out the barn door. I smash to a stop and try to figure out exactly what it is that I’m seeing.

  Vivian is backed up to the side of the barn. A billy goat has her cornered and is butting her with his head. She screams and kicks at him with her dragon claws, and uses her red purse as some kind of gladiator shield, but Billy keeps on coming. He butts her in the side hard enough to flip her around then sticks his nose in her butt. She screams and kicks some more, turns back around and presses her ass harder into the side of the barn.

  I don’t even know I’m laughing until Vivian yells, “It’s not fucking funny! This motherfucking goat is trying to hump me!”

  Oh my God, I’m laughing so hard it actually hurts. I grab my belly and sink to my knees, laughing between tears.

  She lashes out and lands a solid kick to Billy’s head. He reels a little, then regains his balance and butts her again.

  “Help me out, goddammit, Lee! I was squatting down peeing and this damn goat took out his thing and started trying to hump me!”

  I sputter between guffaws, “He thinks you’re in heat! He smelled you and thinks you’re another goat in heat!”

  I can’t stop laughing. I can’t stop. I’m not even laughing with sound, that’s how hard I’m laughing.

  “I’m gonna kill this motherfucking goat and then I’m going to kill you!” she screams. Suddenly, she makes a mad dash for the edge of the pasture. She sprints for the barbed-wire fence, barefooted with her purse clutched over her ass, screaming like a wild banshee, her tits bouncing every which way and with Billy running after her, his hooves kicking up clods of mud.

  She hits the fence line, heaves her purse over and holds the barbed wire strands apart to crawl through when Billy catches up with her. She’s bent over and even I can see the bull’s-eye painted on her ass. Billy lowers his head and butts her so hard she shoots through the barbed wire and rolls into the ditch by the road.

  Oh my God…I’m laughing so hard I can’t breathe…

  ***

  By the time I finally stop laughing and Vivian gets out of the ditch (she refuses to look at me while she dusts herself off and collects her bag) and I get us all packed up and my bike back out on the gravel road, she’s nowhere to be seen. I put the bike in neutral and scan the pastures for her red hair.

  She couldn’t have gotten too far. I put my hand over my eyes, shielding from the morning sun, and look up and down the highway for any red blotches. Nothing.

  The only place she could have gotten to in that short amount of time is the old ramshackle weather-beaten farmhouse about two hundred yards back up the road. I put the bike into first and slowly make my way up the gravel road to the house.

  I pull into the shade of a huge oak tree and sure enough, Vivi
an is sitting in a swing on the big wrap-around porch and two women in faded calico dresses are on either side of her and they’re all laughing.

  I turn off the bike and kick her down. I stick my hands in my pockets and walk slowly toward the porch. The two women stand at the same time and in perfectly synchronized steps, meet me at the steps.

  “Welcome,” says one, “I’m Flora—”

  “—and I’m Fauna,” says the other.

  “We’re the Winkle sisters,” they say in perfect unison.

  Remarkable. These Winkle women are mirror images of each other. They’re seventy, maybe eighty years old, wearing identical dresses, with identical steel-gray buns pinned to the back of their heads and when one moves, the other does the exact same thing except opposite. Like they’re looking in a mirror.

  “Hi,” I say. “I’m…” I stop. I better not tell them my real name. I continue, quickly, “I’m pleased to meet you.”

  Ten minutes later, the old Winkle sisters have Viv and me washed up and sitting at their kitchen table, eating heaping plates of leftover sausage, biscuits and gravy. There’s a fifty-year-old wear pattern in the linoleum going from table to fridge to sink to stove, and they sprightly move their feet around each other like two dancers who have spent a lifetime together knowing the steps of the other. Their graceful movements are mesmerizing to watch. And they talk nonstop, beginning and finishing each other’s sentences.

  “Flora and I were born two minutes apart,” says Fauna.

  “I’m the oldest,” says Flora.

  “Twin sisters who married twin brothers—”

  “—met them at a barn dance—”

  “We were seventeen at the time—”

  “—as fresh and stupid as they come—”

  “—Had a double wedding a week later—”

  “—We all lived here together—”

  “ —Took us two months to be able to tell them apart—”

  “—For all we knew we could’ve been honeymooning with the wrong husband!”

  They both stop, look at each other and laugh loudly. Vivian and I politely laugh along with them. I sop up some more gravy with my buttered biscuit and shove it all in my mouth.

  That’s when the pig waddles into the kitchen. I completely forget to chew when I see this two-hundred pound, pinkish, three-legged pig snort its way across the floor. It beelines right up to me and places its speckled snout in my lap.

  Flora pushes the pig off my knees, apologizing, “Sorry ’bout that. That there’s Wiggly. No manners a’tall. He thinks all food belongs to him.” She looks at the pig, shakes her finger in his face and scolds, “Bad piggy. Bad piggy.”

  Fauna adds, “That’s because somebody’s always feeding him at the table.”

  “How can I resist?” Flora coos into the pig’s face, rubbing noses with him. “He’s so dern cute. Aren’t you cute? You’re just the cutest li’l thing I ever did see!”

  Fauna rolls her eyes at her sister and tells me, “Wiggly is our guard pig. Best dog we ever had. Eats like a pig, though. But he’s house trained and everything.”

  “He only has three legs,” I say because what the hell am I supposed to say to all that?

  “Yep,” Fauna replies. “A good pig like that, you don’t wanna eat him all at once.”

  I choke on my biscuit.

  The old sisters laugh. “She’s just joshing you,” Flora explains. “We don’t eat pork outta respect for Wiggly.”

  Vivian and I nod at them, but I can tell we’re both thinking the same thing: If the sausage isn’t pork then what the hell is it?

  Wiggly limps over to a corner of the kitchen and sprawls his considerable bulk out on an old quilt. He keeps one beady eyeball on my breakfast, though. I move my plate a little so he can’t see it.

  The Winkles both turn to us and smile one of those tight-lipped smiles you give somebody who has a really ugly baby and you don’t want to be rude. Flora shakes her head sadly and says, “So…y’all have only been dead for a day?”

  I choke on a biscuit for the second time. I put the biscuit down. I might not be so lucky a third time.

  Vivian looks at me for help, mouthing, “Dead?”

  Fauna chuckles and pulls out a chair across from us. She sits and explains, “We commune with the dead. It’s our special gift. It’s okay, girls. We know you’re dead and it’s all right with us.”

  Vivian sputters gravy. “You really think we’re dead?”

  Flora and Fauna look at each other and lay their palms across their respective hearts, exclaiming, “They don’t know!”

  Flora sits in the empty chair, reaches out and takes Vivian’s hand in hers. “Yes, darlin’, I hate to break it to you like this. But sometimes when you’re taken away unexpectedly, it takes the soul a little while to realize. Our husbands lived here with us for a good ten years after they died in that sinkhole accident.”

  Fauna lays a newspaper in front of me, ordering, “Read.”

  I look at the paper and immediately recognize the photo on the front page. It’s a picture of me and Vivian in the hospital with Georgia in my arms. Delia snapped the photo just a couple of hours after Georgia was born. The big, bold headline reads: EXPLOSION KILLS TWO LOCAL WOMEN.

  So that’s why they think we’re dead. They read about us in the morning paper. I was worried there for a minute.

  I push the paper under Vivian’s nose, saying, “They’re right, Vivian, we’re really dead.”

  I tap my finger on a paragraph, silently asking her read it. I see her eyes skim the words: The mysterious explosion surrounding the deaths of Lee Anne Hammond and Vivian Perelli aka Vivian Baxter is under investigation by the FBI. According to an anonymous source the two women were prime suspects in the disappearance of the renowned Devil’s Diamond. The two women were being watched by the FBI with the intent that they would lead the authorities to the La Cosa Nostra godfather responsible for the diamond’s theft two years ago…The remains of the two women and their child have not yet been found…ongoing investigation…”

  “If we run into that hateful-looking woman again, we’ll tell her you two are passed on,” Fauna says.

  “What woman?” I ask.

  Flora explains, “There was a woman all dressed like a cowboy with a badge and everything. She was down at the bingo hall last night showing your pitchers all ’round. Babbling on and on about diamonds and Eye-talians. Said she was with the…Federal Government.” She whispers the words Federal Government like how most people say the word cancer. “Those two words are a sure-fire way to get people to close their mouths for good.”

  Fauna continues, “She sure thought highly of herself.”

  “She’ll never catch a husband with that poor attitude,” Flora agrees.

  Vivian blinks a couple of times and nods at me.

  “Well,” I sigh, standing and wiping my mouth on a napkin, “I guess we better be getting along then. We need to get to heaven before they lock the doors on us.”

  “Yeah, that’s right,” Vivian says, “heaven, here we come.”

  Fauna stands, too. “Will you still talk to us after you’re there?”

  “Oh, sure,” I answer. “We’ll…uh…we’ll call you.”

  Flora smiles up at me and for a split second she looks seventeen again, “Will you tell our husbands hello for us? We haven’t heard hide nor hair of them for thirty years.”

  Vivian answers, “Of course we will. That’s the first thing we’ll do.”

  Fauna giggles, “Husbands, hell. Tell Elvis to look me up.” She fans herself with her fingers and blushes three shades of red all at once.

  I laugh. “I’ll do better than that. I’ll get him to sing a song just for you.”

  Fauna grabs me in a bone-crushing hug and I just have to say, “Uh, you do know that sausage is pork, right?”

  “Ssshhhh!” both sisters shush me at once. Flora leans in to my ear and whispers, “Don’t tell Wiggly. He doesn’t know.”

  “Oh. Okay.” I c
an’t help but laugh. I set a couple of our Hollywood premiere tickets on the table. “I know you probably can’t go, but here’s some tickets to a Hollywood movie premiere if you want.”

  “Hollywood?” both sisters say at the same time, giggling.

  “Yeah,” I answer, “we obviously can’t make it because…well, because we’re dead, you know.”

  Vivian and I work our way through the goodbyes and the thank-yous and the hugs and the sisters pack us a lunch of sausage biscuit sandwiches and we’re back on the road with Flora and Fauna and the FBI to keep our thoughts company.

  Chapter Four

  Western Oklahoma doesn’t look a damn thing like eastern Oklahoma. The western part is dry and flat and dusty and anemic looking. Unless you have a thing for The Grapes of Wrath, it makes for some really boring motorcycle riding. When you’re headed toward the sunset the best thing you can do is try to speed through. Or better yet, drive at night. That way you don’t have to look at it.

  We’re deep into the Oklahoma panhandle and it’s dusk by the time I slow down to twenty-five mph like the speed limit tells me to. A gaudy sign with painted clouds and a golden halo surrounding the words Welcome to Heaven, pop. 350 looms up on the side of the road.

  A second sign follows the first, this one in somewhat fresher paint, and it greets us with the rainbow-colored words Meet God at The Pearly Gates.

  The signs give me a really bad, creepy all-over feeling like maybe Flora and Fauna actually did know something I don’t.

  Heaven looks like a ghost town from the Old West days. Main treet is only about a block long, and I don’t see a soul anywhere. Pun intended. Most of the businesses have boarded up windows and the asphalt street is covered with a thick layer of dirt that kicks up in a big red dusty cloud behind my back tire.

  I pull the bike over at the tiny little eight-unit motel named The Pearly Gates. It looks just like any other seedy motel. I don’t see any gates of any kind anywhere. It is pink, though. Looks like it used to be a really hot pink but the sun has faded it down to pale pink. I kill the engine and look over my shoulder at Vivian.