Tats Too

by Layce Gardner

  “I threw it away.”

  She had to be fucking kidding me. “But Miracle Whip doesn’t go bad.”

  She turned and pointed the knife at me.

  Okay, maybe she didn’t exactly point a deadly weapon at me, but it was still in her hand and inferred in my general direction. She said with heavy sigh, “Which is exactly why I threw it away. It’s full of yucky, bad-for-you chemicals, and I don’t want us eating anything that can’t go bad.”

  “You don’t get to do that, Vivian. Just throw away things that I like.”

  “This is my kitchen. You don’t get a vote,” she said in her ultracalm voice that she uses to signal the end of an argument.

  I stomped my boot and crossed my arms. “I should get a vote. I’m a grown-up. I’m even a landowner.”

  Vivian slammed the pointy end of the knife into the cutting board and left it sticking up. “This is not a democracy, Lee. I shop for groceries. I cook the groceries. I do the dishes. All you do is eat my hard work. Therefore, I rule the kitchen.” She used both hands to pull the knife out of the cutting board.

  “So this house is an autocracy?”

  “No,” she said, “just the kitchen. You can rule the yard. You mow, you rule.”

  I mowed the yard that day really crooked just to make my point and the wavy lines bothered me all week. She pretended not to notice.

  It took me a couple of days before I outlined a revenge plot and gathered all the necessary ingredients.

  After a shower, Vivian walked into the bedroom and a couple of seconds went by before I heard, “Lee, sweetie? I’m requesting your presence in the bedroom.”

  So, I walked in all sheepish and said, “What, honey?”

  She looked at me then looked at the scarves I had laid strategically out on our bed. “Is there something you want to tell me?” she asked.

  I toed my boot into the floor and answered, “I was just wondering if we could…you know?”

  She dropped her towel and stood before me in all her naked glory. I sucked in my breath and held it.

  “Does your fantasy include me?”

  I didn’t answer with words. I shucked off my boots and stepped in to her. My hands had a mind of their own and it took no time at all to get her pretty bothered. I laid her back on the bed and tied her wrists to the bedposts with a couple of scarves. I stepped back to admire my handiwork and she said, “I hope you’re not stopping now.”

  “Hold on a minute,” I said and ran to the kitchen. I opened the fridge and took out the Cool Whip carton. I ran back to the bedroom and sat the container on the nightstand.

  “Oh,” she said, grinning. “You want to combine fantasies.”

  I picked up the third scarf and tied it around her eyes and made sure there weren’t any peepholes.

  I popped open the top of the container and used two fingers to scoop out a good-size portion. I rubbed the white stuff on her nipples first.

  I took my time licking it all off.

  I held the container over her belly and used my fingers to scoop every last drop of it onto her stomach. I smeared it all over her body. Then I licked and cleaned my favorite parts.

  She squirmed and moaned and tried to move against my face, but I held her hips down and right about the time she was about to explode…

  …I stopped.

  “Don’t stop, baby, don’t stop now,” she panted.

  I gently untied the scarf from her face. She blinked a couple of times then giggled. “You have Cool Whip all over your face,” she said. “You look like a deranged Santa Claus.”

  “Lick it off for me,” I teased and leaned in close to her.

  Her tongue lapped at my lips, then suddenly she pulled back and looked at me hard. “Goddammit!” she screamed. “That’s fucking Miracle Whip!”

  I jumped off the bed just in time that her kicks connected with nothing but air.

  “Untie me!” she screamed. “Untie me so I can fucking kill you!”

  After that, she didn’t talk to me for five days. She just shot icicles out of her eyes like she was Queen Frostine blocking the path to Candyland.

  I knew the ice had melted when I saw the jar of Miracle Whip sitting in the fridge door between the ketchup and the mustard. I was back in the game.

  My stormy thoughts are drowned out by a huge roll of thunder in the distance. I scan the sky but there’s nothing, not even a single cloud.

  The thunder rumbles louder.

  I look in my side mirror and blink at what I see. A storm cloud of motorcycles are cresting the sand dune behind us and coming on fast and this is no mirage.

  I ease down to about seventy-five miles per hour and move to the far right so they can pass.

  But they don’t. They ride up my ass instead. Or rather, make that Vivian’s ass.

  I slow down to seventy.

  So do they.

  The lead bike’s front tire edges in close to my back tire. Way too close. Like maybe only a foot or so behind mine.

  Vivian leans into me and wraps both arms around my middle.

  I study the lead biker in my mirror. It’s a woman. She’s riding a souped-up, chopped-down flat black Harley with ape-hangers and long-ass leather fringe on the grips. The three-foot fringe flogs her arms and her bitch’s thighs like a dominatrix’s cat-o-nine tails. I’m pretty damn sure she’s somebody I don’t want fucking with me.

  I slow down to sixty and wave her around.

  She pulls up alongside me, but doesn’t pass. She rides right next to me for half a mile without even giving me so much as a glance.

  My mirrors reveal that she’s got two other motorcycles behind her. Three bikes, each with a passenger. We’re outnumbered six to two. And there’s nobody around for the next hundred miles or more.

  I check out the leader from the corner of my eye. She’s big with shoulders like a trucker and has two sleeves of black tribal tats zigzagging from her wrists clear up to her chin. Her dark hair is knotted in a long, thick braid hanging halfway down her back. Black leather chaps cover her faded jeans and she’s wearing a dirty wifebeater under her cut. Something about her looks familiar. Maybe I’ve seen her mug in the papers or on the news.

  Her top-heavy bitch has on knee-high leather boots with ass-showing leather shorts that lace up the sides. Her peaches look like somebody’s been shaking her tree way too hard. She has bottled blond hair with dark roots showing down the center part like an inverse skunk, and she’s wearing so much bright makeup it glows like war paint.

  I drop off the throttle just a tiny bit until I can see the back of the leader’s cut. It has a top rocker that reads Hell’s Belles in red embroidered cursive.

  Well, fuck me.

  I’ve heard of them. They’re the sister gang to their more notorious brothers. And if anything, they’re meaner. They’re into all kinds of illegal shit, mostly drugs and guns, and they pillage their way across the desert states. I don’t know exactly what pillage means (read it in the Bible when I tried to work on bucket list number two and it always goes hand in hand with rape), but I bet they’ve done it. They make dykes on bikes look like tykes on trikes.

  The leader, the “P” in biker parlance, looks over at me, long and slow. Her eyes travel over my bike and lock and hold on Vivian.

  Shit.

  She throws her left hand in the air, giving some kind of signal, then speeds up and cuts in front of me, missing my front tire by only six inches.

  Another bike pulls up alongside and the last bike pulls up close behind, boxing us in.

  The leader slows, forcing me to slow right along with her. I stop because I have no other choice, but I leave my bike in gear and my clutch pulled in.

  The other bikes form a tight circle around me and cut off their engines. The P’s bitch swings her leg over the sissy bar, giving a full show of leather crotch.

  The P un-asses and slides her eyes to her next in line, probably her VP, who’s a scrawny mess of a gal with stringy dishwater hair and eyes that look like two pic
kled, hard-boiled eggs poking out of her skull. She’s all jittery and jumpy and has skin the color of bologna, which isn’t bad for a sandwich but doesn’t look so appetizing on a person.

  The P nods and this must be the signal for everyone to get off their bikes because they both kick down in unison and crawl out of their saddles.

  All six of them crowd round me and Vivian. The VP snakes one bony hand out and flips my kill switch. When she reaches down for my key, I grab her wrist and squeeze hard, but before I can so much as blink, she has a switchblade in her other hand and its blade is twitching right under my nose.

  The P snaps her fingers and warns, “Toxic.”

  Nice name.

  Toxic flicks her knife away and it disappears back in her front pocket. I turn loose of her wrist.

  The P saunters over and plants her big black boots right beside me. The name tag on the front of her cut says Mikey. She hooks her thumbs in her front pockets, cupping her crotch with her palms and stares long and hard at Vivian.

  I look at Viv’s reflection in my side mirror. She’s looking right back at Mikey, her expression unreadable.

  “Nice bike,” Mikey says, her eyes dropping to Vivian’s tits.

  I don’t say anything. Not because I don’t have anything to say, more like I don’t have anything to say that won’t get me killed. I’m a mother now, I remind myself. For Georgia’s sake I don’t want to say something stupid.

  Mikey reaches out slowly, picks up a strand of Vivian’s hair and rubs it between her thumb and finger. I know where her hands have been, and I really don’t like her touching Vivian. The hair raises on the back of my neck and my spine stiffens. Toxic moves her hand to her pocket and since I’m rather fond of my nose being on my face, I stay frozen.

  “Get your fucking hand off me,” Vivian says in a whisper laced with arsenic.

  Mikey grins and gently turns loose of Vivian’s hair, taking the time to arrange it back on her shoulder. She points her chin in my direction, but keeps her eyes stuck on Vivian as she asks me, “You always let your bitch talk that way?”

  I grit my teeth and keep my mouth shut. There’s no way I’m going to give Toxic a reason to start slicing and dicing.

  “No,” Vivian finally answers for me, “sometimes I let her on top. Just to spice things up.”

  I throw Vivian a shut-the-hell-up look, but she squints one eye back at me. What am I thinking, Vivian’s never shut the hell up in her life.

  Thank God Mikey laughs. A long beat later the rest of her gang joins in like canned laughter on a sitcom and as soon as she stops laughing, so do they.

  Fuckin’ eerie is what it is.

  I look up and down Mikey’s arms, openly admiring her sleeves. Now I know exactly why she looks so familiar. It’s not her, it’s the artist I recognize. I take a calculated risk and try to play nice, “I like your art.”

  She scans my ink in return.

  “Gina does good work,” I add. “I hand-made all her tat guns. Probably even the one she used on you.”

  Her cold eyes bore right through me and I get the distinct feeling she’s not going to play nice back.

  This time I try the prison bonding thing. “I was inside Mabel Bassett for twelve years.”

  She snorts through her nose like a bull. “Mabel’s an old whore,” she says. “We’ve all been inside her once or twice.”

  Okay, maybe she’s not into the shared experience. I keep pushing the nice because I don’t know what else to do. “I’m Lee,” I introduce. I hook my thumb toward Vivian, saying, “That’s Vivian.”

  “Mikey,” she says, giving me her gang name. “They call me that ’cause Mikey will eat anything.”

  Her bitch steps forward and wraps an arm around Mikey’s waist, saying, “I’m Anything.”

  The laugh jumps out of my mouth a little too quick and a half second later, they all join in, even Mikey. That seems to have broken the tension because Mikey takes turns pointing out the rest of her crew. “That there’s Toxic. And her old lady, Shock.”

  What is this, a Roller Derby crew or a bike gang?

  I nod at Toxic like I just now saw her. She rubs the tip of her nose and sniffs. I don’t know if she’s flashing me a cutting-off warning or if she’s just got coke-nose. I catch sight of a bio-hazard symbol tatted on her bicep. I start to tell her she put the symbol in the wrong place, but thankfully this is the one time I don’t blurt everything I’m thinking.

  I slide my eyes to Shock and nod. She has one of those Bettie Page-style haircuts and eyes that are too green to be real. She has so many face piercings that you can be pretty sure she’s pierced everywhere else, too. She’d be halfway pretty if her face didn’t look like a pincushion.

  “Off,” I order Vivian, slapping her thigh.

  Vivian gets off the bike, but I can tell by the way she hitches her purse up high on her shoulder and puts her fists on her hips that she’s not at all pleased with me giving her orders. I shoot her a reprimanding look anyway and turn to face Mikey.

  I look up at her as she continues the introductions, “That’s Scratch and her bitch, Cat.”

  I nod to them, too, trying not to stare at all of Scratch’s thin white scars running up and down her arms, neck and shoulders. Some are old, a few are fresh and still red. She has a shaved head and a tattoo of a black leopard on her pale skull. Cat is black with a big, tight afro and that real pretty color of skin that looks like slippery, freshly waxed mahogany. She has red fingernails a good three inches long and I’m pretty sure I know how Scratch got her scars.

  “And you two are…” Mikey pauses, thinking hard, then smiles, “Tits and Tats.”

  “Which one of us is which?” I deadpan.

  Everyone has a good laugh at that. I even smile a little. I share my smile with Vivian, but she doesn’t look nearly as amused as the rest of us.

  Mikey holds two fingers up in the air and Anything jumps into action, pulling a soggy cigarette out from between her sweaty tits and lighting it. She sucks hard on it once to get it going good, then places it between Mikey’s fingers.

  Mikey takes a deep drag and blows the smoke right into my face. I hold my breath and do my best to not flinch. This is what I call the macho-preening dance. I saw it in prison a million times. The two enemies square off and walk big circles around the other, puffing out their chests like banty roosters, trying to outbluff their opponent.

  I think my best move would be to skip the dance, land my best punch right in Mikey’s gut, hope like hell she falls over, jump on the bike with Viv swinging her big-ass purse and try to get the hell out of here. I figure we have about a tenth percent of half a chance of making a clean getaway.

  Thank God, I’m saved by the sound of a Harley engine sputtering down the highway toward us. We all turn our heads and watch it come our way. The motor coughs and misses about every fourth beat, forcing black smoke signals out its pipes.

  The rider pulls the bike up right behind us and the pipes emit a couple of death gurgles before it finally takes its last breath. The rider gets off, pulls off her brain bucket and hangs it over the sissy bar. It’s the same woman I saw at the gas station yesterday. The one who poisoned her bike with ethanol-laced gas.

  Long, black hair flows around her shoulders as she walks over to join us. She has all the stereotypical Indian features and they’re in all the right places, too, because she’s a vision in her deerskin fringed boots, tight pants and leather vest. She has long legs that go all the way from her ass to the ground. Most people do, I know, but her ass sits particularly high up there.

  And her tits aren’t bad either. I think I’ll name them Tonto and Scout.

  “This’s Poke,” Mikey says.

  Poke barely glances at me, but takes a long cool drink of Vivian.

  Vivian tosses her hair over her shoulder and inflates her tits in Poke’s direction, (how does she do that?), letting her eyes caress every inch of Poke’s body. “I bet I know how you got that name,” she says.

  “It’
s short for Pocahontas,” Poke answers.

  “Oops.” Vivian smiles seductively. “I was wrong.”

  They share a small laugh, and that’s when the ugly, green J-word gets all up on its hind legs and bites me in the ass. I try not to show it because I’m thinking maybe Vivian has a plan. Maybe Vivian is just flirting with her so we can get out of this potential mess we’re in.

  Maybe Vivian really does want her.

  Maybe Vivian is going to try and fuck her just to show me she can, like how she fucked whoever else when I wasn’t looking.

  “They call me Tits,” Vivian says, thrusting her namesakes right under Poke’s chin.

  “I bet I know how you got that name,” Poke says with a small grin that makes me want to poke her right in the puss. And, I don’t mean that in a good way either.

  I shoulder my way in between the two of them, making sure to block Vivian and her girls behind me. “Looks to me like you got some bike trouble,” I say, nice enough.

  “And it looks to me like you got some lady trouble,” she responds not-so-nice.

  “There’s no trouble. The bitch knows who she belongs to,” I say with authority I don’t feel in the least.

  Vivian grabs me by the back of my pants and yanks so hard I almost fall on my ass. I swipe at her hand, but she grabs me again, this time by the front of my pants and pulls me about twenty feet away from the gang.

  “What the fuck?” I spit at her.

  I hear them all laughing at me behind my back and it pisses me off even more. “What the fuck are you doing?” I say harder and lower.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” she says back. “Belong to you?”

  “You’re goddamn right you belong to me. And you’re over there handing her your tits on a silver fucking platter.”

  “She was flirting with me,” she says.

  “And you were practically fucking her with your eyes.”

  “What about Magilla Gorilla over there fondling me? You didn’t say shit about that. And then you give me orders and call me your bitch.”

  “You are my bitch,” I say. “As far as they’re—”

  “I’m not your fucking bitch!” she shouts.

  “Sshhhh!” I warn.

  “Don’t sshhhh me!”