Tats

by Layce Gardner

  I glanced over at Maria. She winked at me.

  That night during free time, I was lying on my bunk, reading aloud to Teddy who was lying on her bunk when Maria slithered into our cell. She began to unbutton her shirt. I glanced over to Teddy.

  Teddy rolled her eyes and faced the wall, turning her back to us.

  Maria stood in front of me and slipped out of her prison clothes like a snake sheds its skin.

  I sat my book upside down beside me on the cot. Maria straddled my lap and offered me a taste of her brown nipples. “You didn’t answer Rosa’s question. Gusta bajar al pozo?” Maria teased.

  “I can’t speak Spanish,” I said around a nipple.

  “...do you eat pussy?” she breathed in my ear.

  I laid back and pulled Maria forward until she was sitting on my face. And since it’s not polite to talk with your mouth full, she answered the question for me, “Si...Oh, Dios mio, si...”

  I knew this wasn’t exactly love, but it sure as hell was the next best thing.

  When I wake up from the trip down memory lane, the car is parked in a big circular driveway in front of the biggest mansion I’ve ever seen in my life. The house looks like a movie’s happy ending. Some guy in a suit is opening my door and beckoning me out of the car. I look over to Delia, but she’s gone. “Miss Delia told me to take you to your room,” he says.

  I follow the little guy into the house and through a series of hallways and stairs. Finally, he opens a door for me and says, “Goodnight, ma’am, I hope you’re comfortable.”

  Holy shit.

  I’ve lived in entire houses that could fit into this room three times over. There’s a monster bed and chests and fancy artwork and even a huge television set. I look at all the buttons and gadgets that make up the entertainment center. I don’t even know where to begin. Plus, there’s a huge bathroom all just for this bedroom. You don’t have to share it with anybody. There’s a separate tub and shower and two sinks and a toilet and one of those French bidet things.

  I strip off my clothes and climb into bed. I don’t know what Delia’s game plan is, but I have a feeling she’s just fattening up the pig before the slaughter. That’s the last thought I have before falling asleep.

  The next morning there’s a knock on the door that wakes me up. For a minute I think it’s the motel manager coming back, then I remember where I am. I sit up and go for my clothes on the floor—but they’re gone. I jump up in panic and see some folded clothes on the foot of the bed with a note: Lee Anne—I am having your clothes laundered. In the meantime, these should fit. Delia.

  My money! Shit! I had twenty grand stuffed into the pocket of my jeans! I glance around the room, already knowing the money’s not there. I throw on the starched white button-down shirt she’s left for me and grab for the pants. That’s when I feel it. I reach into the pocket of the linen pants and there’s my money. I quickly count it. Twenty grand minus the little I spent yesterday. Even my pocketknife is there.

  What the hell? Twenty grand must be chump change to her.

  I tippy-toe to the bedroom door (I don’t know why, but tippy-toeing just seems appropriate) and open it a crack. There’s a tray sitting on the floor. I glance both ways down the hall and bring the tray inside.

  I lift the lid and get a whiff of the most mouth-watering breakfast I’ve ever seen. Eggs, bacon, toast, sausage, coffee, juice, and even some kind of green fruit that I have no idea what it is but I wolf it all down anyway.

  My next stop is the bathroom and I pee and brush my teeth. Somebody left a new toothbrush and toothpaste out for me. I go for a bath next because I’ve never been in a tub this big before, and I want to give those jacuzzi jets a try. I slide down into the steam and watch my skin turn pink. Damn. The creamy soap feels so good on my skin I wash with it twice. I ease down into the bubbles and sink under the water, holding my breath for as long as I can. When I come back up, Delia is sitting on the toilet with her legs crossed, smoking a whopper of a joint and looking at me. I sputter away the bubbles and look right back at her.

  She holds out the joint, offering it to me, but I shake my head. I need to keep all my senses about me for right now.

  She speaks first. “I’m sending out for some new clothes for you. What size bra do you wear?”

  “I dunno,” I answer.

  She bends forward a little and gives me the once-over. “Thirty-four B.”

  I really want to cover up, but I make myself sit still.

  “Thirty-six inseam, I’m guessing?”

  I answer with a question of my own, “What do you want from me?”

  She takes a long toke and holds it in, never moving her eyes from mine, then exhales. “You’re thirty-two years old. Went to prison when you were eighteen. Second-degree murder.” She raises her eyebrows when she says the word murder. “Out at thirty. Held a few jobs over the past year and a half. Bartending. Convenience store clerk. Bartending again. You’ve lived on and off with a series of women. Ginger being the latest. You’ve got twenty G’s in your pocket and I don’t think you earned it bartending. Sound right so far?”

  “You forgot that I’m a Gemini with Cancer rising. You know, it’s hardly fair that you know so much about me and I don’t know anything about you.”

  “Ask,” she says.

  “You own the strip club?”

  “I do.”

  “You’re rich, obviously.”

  “I am.”

  I can’t resist the next question. “Thirty-six D?”

  “Double D, smart ass,” she laughs.

  I rest my arm on the edge of the tub and balance my chin on my elbow. I study her for a moment, then say, “Tell me something about yourself I don’t know.”

  She formulates her answer with another toke. “I used to strip in the club when I was young. I got out and married rich. Bought the club and a few other properties. I got older. I bought new tits. A new ass. A tummy tuck. Had my face done. My husband got a younger woman so I got my tits done again. Now he has a Viagra prescription and an even younger woman. He does what he wants, I do what I want, and we both look the other way.”

  “So you just pick up strays and bring them home.”

  “Something like that,” she says.

  “And...” I begin, “...I’m supposed to be your girl toy or what?”

  “Or what,” she says.

  I laugh. A stray thought flickers across my mind. I haven’t laughed since Vivian. “I still don’t know who you are,” I say.

  She licks her thumb and forefinger, snuffs out the joint and does an eerily familiar thing—stows the joint down her ample cleavage. “That’s the way I like it,” she says. She winks at me and walks out.

  I scoop up a handful of bubbles and blow them all over the bathroom. I take a deep breath and sink back under the water.

  I stay inside my room for five days without leaving. That’s not as bad as it sounds. Everything I need is either already there or delivered to my door. I write a lot. I watch a lot of TV and stare out the window. I see Delia coming and going in the orange Caddy. I see her butler or whatever he is, opening doors for her and carrying packages from upscale department stores. Sometimes when she’s getting in her car, she glances up at my window, but I hide behind the curtain.

  I think too much. Mostly about Vivian. I replay our one interlude together over and over in my head and wonder if that’s what made her run. Or was she running from me? Probably. They always do.

  My closet up here in my hidey-hole is brimming with new clothes. Men’s linen pants and slacks and pretty damn cool tailored shirts. Delia let me keep my leather jacket and motorcycle boots, but got me a new stack of boxers. She bought me some bras too.

  One day I see Delia leave and decide I’m bored enough to get out and explore a little. I open my bedroom door and step into the hallway. When nobody comes running at me shouting Boo! I walk in what direction I think will maybe lead somewhere. I get lost several times and have to retry. I pick out some landmarks to keep
me oriented. Turn right at the naked lady painting, turn left at the blurry painting of the pond...

  I find the stairs and walk down them and across a squeaky clean tile floor and find myself in a kitchen. There’s two fridges built into the wall and a total of three stoves and I wonder who the hell she’s cooking for that she needs that many stoves? As far as I can figure it’s just Delia and the butler and a ghost husband that she alluded to but that I’ve never seen. And me, of course. There’s one of those fancy island things in the middle of the kitchen. Copper pots and pans hang above it. There’s another sink in the middle of the island and the faucet is drip drip dripping. I reach out and turn the handle tighter, but it keeps on dripping. All this money and she’s still got a drippy faucet that a twenty-nine cent washer could fix.

  I decide to fix it for her. It’ll give me something to do for the next half hour. I don’t have any tools, so I get out my trusty pocket knife and rummage around in all the kitchen drawers until I find a butter knife. That’s all the tools I need.

  I open the cabinet door under the sink and turn off the water supply line. It stops dripping. Yep, it’s the cold water just like I thought. I use the butter knife and my pocketknife as a makeshift screwdriver and remove the knob assembly. I pull out the stem and wedge out the spring and cup. The cup’s not in too bad of shape. Just a tiny little knick, but that’ll make her drip every time.

  I accidentally drop the spring on the floor. I’m down on my hands and knees combing the tile for that tiny little spring when a pair of animal skin high heels appear right under my nose. My heart fuckin’ stops and I’m about to yell Viv’s name when Delia says, “Lose something?”

  I look from the shoes all the way up to Delia’s smiling face and reply, “I was just fixing your faucet.”

  “You’re good with your hands?” she asks without the slightest trace of sarcasm.

  “I’ve never seen anything yet that I couldn’t fix. With the right tools.” I locate the spring right by the toe of her shoe and stand up and lean against the counter. I hand her the cup, saying, “You need a new one of these.”

  She holds out her key ring and smiles. “Go get it. There’s a complete set of tools in the garage if you need them.”

  I take the keys and walk out the door.

  I guess Delia figures I can start earning my keep now. Because the next day after I fix the leaky faucet, she leaves me a note on my breakfast tray. Can you take a look at the tub in the master bath? It’s dripping. I fix that too.

  The day after that her note wants me to fix the toilet near the foyer and the toaster is going on the fritz. I fix those too. Then the day after that I get a huge list of things to be fixed signed by Delia with a P.S. Take your time.

  Months go by. I mark time by the weather change. Sleet and snow comes and goes. Christmas appears out of nowhere. Delia gets me a subscription to Tattoo magazine and I get her a deviled egg platter. She really likes it, go figure.

  Time rolls on and I take my bike to the hardware store when it’s a sunny clear day and when it’s not I take Delia’s Caddy. Sometimes Delia pops in when I’m fixing something and keeps me company.

  I’m lying flat on my back with my head under a kitchen sink replacing the sprayer doodad and Delia’s sitting on a stool smoking a joint. I ask her a question I’ve been thinking about lately, “What’s it like stripping for a living?”

  “What d’ya mean?” she asks.

  “Did you find it demeaning? Getting paid to take off your clothes and sell yourself like that?”

  She pauses long enough that I think maybe I’ve offended her. Then she replies, “Demeaning? No. Everybody sells themselves, Lee Anne. That’s what makes the world go round. And selling yourself, whether you’re a stripper or a prostitute or a trophy wife or a politician is powerful. You have all the power. It’s the getting older that’s demeaning.”

  “You look damn good,” I say and mean it.

  “I used to have a body just like yours,” she replies.

  I laugh out loud at that one. “Right.”

  “Before the boob job,” she amends.

  “Of course,” I say. I finish tightening down the doodad and ask the next question on my list, “Did you ever have any kids?”

  When she doesn’t answer, I peek out from under the sink. She’s already left the room.

  Squeak, squeak.

  I pause the DVR and listen. There it is again. A squeaky noise. A weird squeaky noise is coming from the room next door.

  I get up off my bed and enter the bedroom next to mine without knocking. Howard, the butler, (that’s all he’ll tell me about himself, his name is Howard), kneels on the floor with a screwdriver in his hand. He’s taken off an electrical outlet plate and is unscrewing the wires from the plug. He doesn’t hear me as I walk up behind him. I look over his shoulder and watch him turn the screwdriver to the left. The wires look to me like they’re hooked up right, but the dumbshit is turning the screwdriver the wrong way.

  “Righty tighty, lefty loosey,” I say.

  He flinches and the screwdriver touches the hot wire. Howard throws it like he just got bit. “Damndamndamndamn,” he says, sticking his fingers in his mouth.

  “It’s just a one-ten, Howard, you’ll live. But you gotta turn off the main power before you start working with electric.”

  “Now you tell me,” he says.

  “Why’re you doing this anyway?” I ask. “I can fix it tomorrow.”

  He shakes his head and murmurs, “Don’t tell Miss Delia you caught me,” before scurrying out of the room.

  What a strange little man. I go back to my room thinking that at least I have some job security as long as Howard can’t learn to fix anything.

  In the morning I find a note that reads: Lee Anne, the electrical outlet in the bedroom next to yours isn’t working. Delia. I go to the basement and am almost turning the main power switch off when clickclickclick sounds off in my brain. Howard was unscrewing the plug. At night. That’s a weird time to fix something. And he told me not to tell Delia that I caught him.

  I march back upstairs, head straight to the master bedroom and throw open the door without knocking. Delia is lying in bed reading a book, wearing some kind of black lace lingerie getup looking hotter than a woman half her age and I almost forget how mad I am before I find my anger and start in. “What the hell?”

  “Lee Anne?” she says. She jerks her book toward the nightstand, knocking over a framed photo. She doesn’t pick up the frame or even acknowledge that she knocked it on the floor. “What’s wrong, baby?” she asks.

  “Is this some kind of fuckin’ joke?”

  “What’re you talking about, honey?” she asks. She grabs a matching lace robe and pulls it on.

  “You have Howard break shit, then you have me fix it. Has he been breaking everything all along? Why? What the hell is that all about?”

  “Sit down,” she says, gesturing to a chair in the corner.

  “You can tell me while I’m standing.”

  She throws her long legs over the edge of her bed and ties her robe. She looks back up at me and takes her reading glasses off. (That’s the only concession to aging I’ve ever seen her display.) She sets the glasses on top of her book and looks at me again.

  “I’m waiting, Delia.”

  “I didn’t want you to leave,” she explains. “It’s that simple.”

  I look around the room while I digest this bit of information. I still don’t get it. Why she wants me here bad enough to invent shit for me to do.

  “I was afraid you’d get bored and leave. So I made things up to keep you busy. Keep you feeling useful,” she says.

  My eyes are drawn back to the book she was reading. Something’s not right. I look at the framed photo on the floor by her feet. It’s laying facedown. I reach down and pick it up. Delia grabs it out of my hands a little too quickly and lays it facedown on the bed beside her.

  “Can I see it?” I ask.

  She doesn’t look to wh
ere I’m pointing. She knows exactly what I’m talking about. Suddenly, she ages about ten years in the next few seconds. I reach over her and and grab the photo.

  It’s a picture of me when I’m maybe nine years old. I’m riding my bicycle down the road in front of my house. I look like a wild child with uncombed hair and dirty clothes, but I have a huge smile on my face.

  “How’d you get this?” I ask.

  “You look so happy there,” she says.

  “What’re you doing with this picture? Did you know my mother?”

  “You wanted a bicycle so badly,” she states.

  “Answer my question.”

  “You know how your mother got the money to buy that bike?”

  I shake my head the tiniest bit.

  “She got it from me.”

  I digest this bit of information for a moment. It brings up more questions than answers them. “And you are...?”

  She pats the bed next to her and this time I sit. She takes the photo out of my hands and looks at it. She inhales deeply and begins, “I ran away from home when I was sixteen. I ran away to be with a man I thought I was in love with. As soon as he found out I was pregnant, he left me. I gave the baby to my older sister to take care of. I was so young and stupid and...I was a stripper. I couldn’t take care of a baby.”

  “What’re you saying...” My voice sounds so far away, like it’s coming from somebody else.

  “That baby was you, Lee Anne,” she answers softly.

  I slam face-first into a brick wall. All I can see are stars and blinking geometric shapes.

  “I’m your mother, your biological mother. I kept track of you, though, I watched you grow up, on and off...”

  “What the fuck?” I yell. “What the hell is it with you people? Always leaving and shit?” I close my eyes and pinch the bridge of my nose to keep the hot tears back.

  “Lee Anne, honey...”

  I jump up, grab the framed photo from her hands and throw it across the room. It smacks into the far wall and splinters into pieces.

  “You leave me! Mom leaves me! Vivian leaves me! Am I really that unfuckingloveable?”