Tats

by Layce Gardner

  God, this woman drives like she talks. Ninety miles an hour and in five directions all at once. “You’re on the wrong side of the street!” I scream, jerking the wheel to the right.

  “Sorry,” she says, “habit. Light me a cigarette, will ya?”

  This woman is nuts. Truly nuts. I mean, I thought Ginger was nuts but this woman—I light a cigarette and stick it between her lips—takes the proverbial cake.

  “Can I drive?” I ask hopefully.

  She swerves around a slow-moving car in front of us. No signals, no looking, just pure swerving.

  “Is this the adventure you mentioned before?” I ask.

  “This is it,” she says, clenching the lit cigarette between her teeth.

  “I should’ve known.”

  “What’d you think I meant?”

  “I dunno,” I say. “I was just hoping...” I catch myself and change thought direction, “it wouldn’t involve pointy shoes and car chases.”

  Vivian barely taps the brakes, jerks the wheel hard to the right and careens into a Kum and Go. She brakes just a couple of feet shy of the plate glass window.

  “Go in there,” she points at the convenience store’s door with her chin, “and get some more smokes and a pop.”

  “What, you don’t want me to take your shoe and rob the place while I’m in there?”

  She tilts her chin down and looks at me over the top of her glasses like I’m not funny at all. She fishes a twenty out of her cleavage and hands it to me. “Get yourself something, too.”

  I twist around and look over both shoulders and out the back window.

  “What the hell’re you doing?”

  “Looking for the camera,” I explain. “You’re with some reality show, right? Where you get people to do weird stuff and film it?”

  Vivian grips the steering wheel with both hands and says very, very seriously, “This is real life, Lee. Real. And there’s some real money in it for you, too. If you just go get my POP AND CIGARETTES!”

  “Okay, okay.” I give in, opening the door.

  Inside the store I saunter over to the pop machine and fill a large cup with ice and Dr. Pepper.

  Why do I always hook up with the bossy ones? Why do I always let them boss me around? That’s the question. Maybe it’s the shoes. I should stay away from women in spikey heels. Bossy women wear high heels. Or maybe it’s because the heels cause so much pain it makes them bitchy. I don’t really know. The only time I ever wore heels was at Junior Prom. They made me six foot two and my date was only five eight. He was an identical twin, I remember that. He sauntered up to me in the hall between classes and asked me to the prom. I said why not and he just walked away. He didn’t even say his name. And to this day I don’t know which twin I went to the prom with. And the fumbling almost-sex was nightmarish. I once saw a veterinarian stick his gloved fingers up a cat and it screeched bloody murder. The twin probably grew up to be a vet.

  My teeth feel as if they’re wearing sweaters, so I stop in the toiletry aisle and grab a toothbrush, toothpaste and mouthwash. I get the little traveling miniature ones ’cause I like things when they make them tiny. Plus, they fit in my jacket pockets.

  This weird kid with a purple mohawk, like maybe sixteen years old, is checking me out. He tries to impress me with his jailin’ jeans and he actually grabs his baggy crotch and licks his fuckin’ lips at me. What the hell? I have tattoos older than him. Suddenly, I’m in a really foul mood and I hate this tit-showing shirt.

  I throw the twenty on the counter and pay for all the shit. The mohawk kid walks up beside me and tips his head at me in a hello gesture.

  “I can see your ass crack,” I say to the little pockmarked pervert, grab my change and walk out the door.

  And I am so not prepared for what isn’t there.

  “Shit!” Oh, shitshitshitshitshit, I yell repeatedly inside my head. She’s gone. She’s fuckin’ jacked my El Camino and taken off. I throw the Big Gulp where my car used to be. That wasn’t such a good idea. Splashback hits me right in the face.

  The little mohawked pervert walks up behind me. “Need a ride?” He grins and gestures to his VW bug.

  I grab the waistband of his baggy-ass jeans and pull up as hard and as high as I can. He drops his pop and grabs his crotch at the same time. I walk him on his tippy-toes to his VW and shove him headfirst through the open window.

  Okay, I don’t really do any of that. But I do think about doing it.

  The kids just shrugs, gets in his car, turns the radio up full volume and leaves. I sit on the curb and fumble open the cigarettes I just bought. I shake one out of the pack and light it with shaking hands. My brain is spinning. Calling the cops is out. Calling Ginger for help is definitely out. This figures. I should’ve seen it coming. Women like her always do this to me. Lead me on, then jerk me off. What the hell am I thinking about? It’s not her I’m missing. It’s my car I’m missing. Isn’t it? She’s probably just getting back at me for the high school ice incident. This is her payback.

  I brush my teeth and gargle. The only difference between me and that homeless guy walking by is that I still brush my teeth. Even if it is in a parking lot, sitting on a curb. I don’t have a home and I don’t have a car either. Last time I was homeless was because I actually ran away from home. My mom had left me and my stepfather and not long after that I left the bastard, too. I’d break into Chopper’s shop to sleep at night.

  Chopper was my mom’s third husband. He was a biker, the real deal. He rode a chopped down Harley with big ape-hangers. He had a handlebar mustache and long hair that he wore in a braid. He had naked ladies tatted up both arms. He wasn’t my dad, he was better. I hung out at his motorcycle repair shop when I was a kid, and even after my mom kicked him out, I would sneak over to his shop and he’d let me watch him work.

  I haven’t seen Chopper in years. I wonder if he still owns the shop and if I can sneak in there tonight to sleep.

  Fuckin’ Vivian and her fuckin’ tits.

  I crush out my third cigarette on the sole of my boot and suddenly, there’s a squeal of brakes and the smell of burning rubber and this putrid little metallic green Pinto lunges to a stop just inches away from my toes. The Pinto’s passenger door flings open and Vivian smiles at me from behind the wheel.

  “Need a ride?” she asks.

  The longer I sit here silent, watching her smoke and drive, drive and smoke, the madder I get. It’s like everything in the past year has been leading up to this one point, to this one second in time when all it takes is just one more bitch to make me lose it.

  Vivian is on another talking jag. “So I just walk around the lot looking for an unlocked car. One row over, Voila! I get this beauty! Unlocked with the keys still in it, can you fuckin’ believe? Who in this day and age leaves their keys in the car? Sometimes I wish stupid hurt. Then maybe there wouldn’t be so much of it, you know?”

  “Where’s my car?” I ask a full notch below calm.

  “Oh, it’s safe,” she exhales.

  I want to choke the casual right out of her and I don’t care how much jail time I’d be looking at, it’d be well worth it. I unclench my teeth long enough to ask, “What do you call safe exactly?”

  “Walmart parking lot. In the employee section. Nobody’ll even know it’s abandoned for days.”

  I explode. “Stop the car!”

  “You didn’t happen to get any baby powder, did you?”

  “I SAID STOP THE CAR!”

  She does. She stops so quick and looks at me so concerned... that I forgot what I was going to say. I grip the dashboard with both hands until my knuckles turn white.

  “Do you have some anger issues we need to resolve?” she asks.

  I jump out of the car. I need to breathe and Vivian is sucking up all the air inside that little Pinto. I take off stomping down the side of the highway. Vivian obviously never watches the animal channel. She’s never seen what dangerous animals can do. Especially snakes. Especially snakes that’ve bee
n poked once too often. Don’t poke a snake, everybody knows that. Vivian has no idea what she’s doing, she just keeps pokin’ and pokin’ and pokin’.

  She guides the car slowly up next to the right-of-way alongside me.

  “Get back in the car, Lee,” she says.

  I inhale some more air, and bend and look though the passenger window. “I need to know...” I say, “...I need to know a few things.”

  “Okay,” she says. “But first I need to know...did you get any baby powder? My bangs have lost their fluff.”

  “No, I didn’t. And here’s your change back.” I throw it into the front seat. “I need to know why you jacked my car, where and why you got this piece of crap, who you’re running from and where you’re running to.”

  “Well, I already told you where your car is. What’re the other questions again?”

  “I need to know if this is something illegal. You know, something I can’t get mixed up in.”

  She drums her fingers on the steering wheel, then looks at herself in the rearview mirror and fluffs her bangs. “Depends on what your definition of illegal is.”

  “Don’t poke me,” I mutter. “Who the fuck is chasing us?”

  She turns and looks directly at me. Is she pouting? Her lower lip is pooched out a little and twitching, and I’m thinking she’s about to cry or some goofy shit like that. “A boyfriend, okay?” she answers with a hitch in her voice. “An ex-boyfriend. And, believe me, I don’t want him to catch me.” A couple of fat tears slide down her face.

  Damn. I can’t stand to see a grown woman cry.

  I straighten up and hang my hands off my hips. A couple of cars zoom by and I watch them disappear over the horizon. We’re surrounded by pastures. Pastures and cows, cows and pastures.

  “Lee?” Vivian sniffles. “What’ve you got to lose? Where were you going anyway?” She leans through my window and tugs on my jacket. “I can’t...I don’t want to be alone anymore. And you’re kinda alone. I just thought maybe we could be alone together.”

  God help me, I take a deep breath and climb back in the car.

  “Good line, huh? I saw that in a movie once,” Vivian says lightly, pulling back out onto the highway and pushing the little Pinto harder than it’s meant to be pushed. “Fasten your seat belt, you’re in for a bumpy ride,” she adds.

  Chapter Four

  Crickets, bullfrogs, and the hum of locusts and june bugs make my ears vibrate. Anybody who ever said the country was quiet is just plain wrong.

  All five feet eleven inches of me is stretched out across the hood of the tiny Pinto, the warmth from the engine seeping into my very bones. This is pure heaven. I feel as if I’m levitating and there’s nothing more important at this moment than studying the blanket of dark sky and making dot to dot connections with the stars. If there’s anything that feels better than this, I honestly don’t know what it is.

  I look over at Vivian lying on the hood next to me. If anything she looks better than she did in high school. Life can surely take some strange turns. She wouldn’t have been caught dead with me fifteen years ago. Now we’re more on equal footing. We’re both stoned out of our gourds and neither one of us has anything except the clothes on our back (and in the trunk of the Pinto).

  Vivian sucks hard on the joint before passing it back to me.

  I take a toke and hold it in until I can’t stand the burn any longer. “This is perhaps...” I completely forget what I was going to say, then I grab the thought again and run with it, “...the best high I’ve ever had. I mean, it is really, really, really...” Why do I keep forgetting what I want to say? “... good.”

  “Enjoy. ’Cause that’s the last of it.”

  I crash back down to earth. “Well, you just pissed on a perfectly good high,” I say.

  Vivian takes another toke—“I smuggled it over here in my girlie hole.”—and passes it back.

  It takes every ounce of my self-control not to sniff it.

  She exhales and continues, “The guy I got it from is young. Good-looking. Fantabulous sex. This one time—”

  “Good for you,” I interrupt, not wanting to hear about her sexcapades with men. I change the subject. “You know, I’ve never even seen this alleged spooklight. Every time I’ve ever come out here, I wait and wait, but it’s a no-show.”

  “I’ve seen it,” she says. “I’ve definitely seen it. It’s just this little ball of light bouncing down the road. Like those old sing-along cartoons, follow the bouncing ball. This one time I was parked out here with the cute guy who worked at Reasor’s, you know the one with the sideburns, and this little ball of light bounces down the road, right into the car and right out again. Scared the bejeezus outta the guy.” She takes another slow drag and holds it in. “Saved my virginity.” She exhales slowly. “If it weren’t for that spooklight I’d probably be married to Lloyd with sixteen kids and raising them on a bag boy’s salary.”

  “Nah,” I say, taking the joint from her. “He’s probably been promoted to checker by now.”

  “Nice scar,” she says, running her finger lightly over the thin white scar on my forearm. “That hadda hurt.”

  “I don’t remember,” I reply a little too quickly, pulling back.

  “On cop shows they’d call that a defensive wound, right there on the arm like that.”

  “I don’t remember,” I say again, “I was just a kid when it happened.”

  “Oh,” she says and adds pointedly, “I thought maybe it happened in prison.”

  I look at her. “Nothing happened in prison. It was like the same day over and over again, every day.”

  Vivian pulls a lipstick out of her cleavage and adds another coat.

  “How much stuff you got tucked away in your cleavage? You’re always pulling different shit out all the time. It’s like a magician’s hat or something.”

  “What were you in for?” she asks, putting the lipstick back down her top.

  “Guess.”

  “Shoplifting makeup from Walmart.”

  “No,” I answer quickly, “and quit laughing, it’s not that funny.”

  Vivian taps her fingernails against her chin. “Let’s see...”

  But before she can guess, I offer up, “I wore white after Labor Day.”

  “Ooooh.” She smiles. “I hope they didn’t go too easy on you.”

  I grumble, “Twelve years.”

  “You deserved it.” Vivian sighs contentedly, putting her hands behind her head. “I just adore women in prison movies.”

  “Can we change the subject?” I ask.

  “Sure.” Silence for a while. “You want I should give your parole officer a blow job so he’ll go easy on you?”

  “It’s a woman. And my parole ended last month.”

  “I don’t like blow jobs anyway,” she says. “It just bothers me that they’re called blow jobs and you don’t really blow.”

  “Yeah, blow jobs suck,” I say, happy to just be onto a different subject.

  “You ever have sex with anyone from high school?”

  I ponder. I have a cheerleaders-are-a-bitch story, but no way in hell I’m telling that one to Vivian. “Do hand jobs count?” I ask.

  “They do when you’re fifteen,” she pronounces.

  “Then I slept with three guys from school,” I say. “When I was a sophomore, Clint Green and I used to park in the school’s parking lot and feel each other up.”

  “Really?”

  “Kinda freaked me out. His dick felt like a chicken neck.”

  Vivian laughs. “They all feel like chicken necks.”

  “And I let one of the Hampton twins feel me up on the dance floor at Junior Prom.”

  “Which one?” she asks.

  “I don’t know,” I answer truthfully. “It wasn’t a very good experience. He kept shoving his finger up my butt.”

  “On purpose?” she asks.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Who was the third?”

  “You probably don’
t remember him. We had first period speech together. I just walked up to him and whispered in his ear, ‘What’re you doing tonight?’ He said, ‘Nothing.’ So I said, ‘You are now. You’re doing me.’ I showed up at his house that night and he took me to the garage and we did it in the backseat of his daddy’s Town car. It was awful. He just like pounded me for ten minutes, my head banging against the door. When it was over he spewed some kind of grape liquor all over me. I had a headache and smelled like grapes for two days.”

  “What was his name?” Vivian asks.

  “I don’t remember his name. He played football, I remember that. He was tall, kinda cute, blond.”

  She sits up and looks at me. “Joey?”

  “That’s it,” I say, “that was his name. Joey.”

  She sits straight up and stares me down. “You fucked Joey Hanes?” she demands.

  “Yeah...” I say apprehensively.

  “Goddammit!” she yells. “I wanted him so bad and he wouldn’t give me the time of day! Goddammit! I was throwing myself at him and all the time he was fucking you?”

  “Well, you don’t have to be mad about it,” I say. “And it wasn’t all the time.”

  “I can’t believe this shit,” she bitches. “I was the cheerleader not you.”

  “Look at it this way. I saved you from getting thrown up on.”

  There’s a weird vibrating sound. BZZZZZ. I hear it again. BZZZZZZ. It’s Vivian’s tits. She sticks her hand down her shirt and pulls out her phone. She looks at the caller ID then sticks the phone back from wherever she got it.

  “Boyfriend?” I ask.

  She sighs with an exaggerated roll of her eyes.

  I shake my head. I can’t believe I’m jealous of a phone call. A phone call she didn’t even answer. Plus, she’s lying here with me, not him. Maybe I should make my move now. Maybe I should just grab her and pull her to me and lay one on her right now.

  Vivian derails my thought train by sitting up Indian-style and asking, “Ever been to France?”

  “No,” I giggle, “but I’ve been to Funkytown.”