Tats Too: The Case of the Devil's Diamond

by Layce Gardner

  “To begin with you faked your own deaths.”

  “Nu-uh,” I protest. “Our house exploded and we drove off. It’s you people who assumed we were dead.”

  “Assault and battery on a U.S. marshal,” she continues.

  “Oh, I just squeezed his balls a little,” I say. “Is Festus still whining about that?”

  She leans forward and smirks, “You’re in a heap-a-deep, Lee. That’ll send you back to prison for quite awhile. Is that what you want?”

  I lean forward until my nose is almost touching hers. “I really didn’t want to pull this ace outta my sleeve, Dana, but you’re giving me no choice here. I recorded you and Poke. Your little tête-à-tête right here in this room.”

  She blinks and grits her teeth. I move in a little closer and put my mouth next to her ear. “I was standing on the other side of that mirror while you had your hands and mouth all over her. I hit the record button and got it all on disc. I’d hate to have to hand that over to your superiors. But I will. I sure as shit will if you don’t let us walk out of here.”

  Dillon sits back in her chair. She fidgets. She wads up the Lucille Balls paper. “Where is this alleged disc,” she whispers.

  “Safe,” I echo her own words back at her. “Now you have to let us go. Either let us walk out of here or charge us with something.” I know my rights. I didn’t watch all those episodes of Hawaii Five-O for nothing.

  She looks away. The muscles in her jaw clench and unclench. I can hear her teeth grinding together.

  I grab Vivian’s hand, she slings her big-ass purse over her shoulder and we head for the door.

  “This isn’t the end,” Dillon whispers to my back.

  “You bet your sweet ass it’s not,” I say, closing the door softly behind me.

  ***

  I lead the way down the dark streets of downtown Albuquerque as if I know where I’m going. Vivian straggles behind me a few paces. I left the building feeling all full of myself and swollen up with courage, but with each step I take the steam whistles out of my body leaving me empty like a burnt teapot.

  We don’t have any money on us. I’m dressed in Festus drag. She has on mismatched flannel pajamas and tennis shoes.

  “Got any food in that big-ass purse?” I ask already knowing her answer.

  “Nope,” she says.

  No food. No phone. No money. No transportation. No idea what to do next.

  I stop walking. I turn loose of Vivian’s hand, lean my back against a brick building and sink to my ass on the cold concrete sidewalk. I’m deflated. I bury my face in my hands.

  Vivian sits down next to me. “Baby?” she whispers.

  “I don’t want any fucking diamond.”

  She doesn’t say anything.

  “I just want our life back,” I sputter.

  She places her arm over my shoulders and pulls me close.

  “I want Georgia,” I full-out cry.

  “Me, too.”

  Oh, friggin’ great. Now we’re both crying. And the harder I cry, the harder she cries.

  I cry until my tears run dry and my voice is hoarse. Then I still shake and dry sob.

  I only stop when I see a ten-dollar bill in my face. I look up and there’s a man. A man wearing a backwards ball cap and a kind smile. “Take this,” he says. “Use it for some food. No drugs. No liquor. Food. Okay?”

  “Okay,” I sniffle, accepting the money. He nods and walks away happy knowing he did his good deed for the day.

  Son-of-a-bitch. We’re homeless people.

  Vivian cuddles up next to me and lays her head on my lap. She closes her eyes and I play with her hair. She makes little mewing noises and just when I think she’s asleep, she says, “Tell me one of your stories, Lee.”

  I look around. Here we are sitting on our asses in the middle of a downtown street in Albufuckingquerque and nobody around us. It’s dark and more than a little stinky down here and the concrete is cold and hard and scratchy on my ass. And Vivian wants a story.

  Maybe I should do an uplifting one. Something inspirational. ’Cause right now reality sucks hard.

  “Story…okay.” I just start talking with no real idea where it’s going. “Okay… Once upon a time… In an enchanted land not so far away and a time that’s so close it’s somewhere between yesterday and tomorrow there lived a beautiful laughing Princess with gorgeous, long red hair. They called her the Laughing Princess because she laughed all day long. She laughed in her sleep. She laughed while she crocheted afghans, she laughed while she mopped ceilings, she laughed while she drank, she laughed on the toilet, in the tub, she laughed all the way through school and then she laughed halfway around the world and back again. Her laughter caused her great pain. You see, because of her laughter nobody would have her as their wife. One day the King sent out a proclamation that read: My daughter, the Laughing Princess, wishes to marry. I will choose as her mate the man who can cease her laughing sorrow. The very next day the castle walls were bursting with eligible bachelors. The King sent the first candidate in to the Laughing Princess. The man raised his fist in anger and yelled, “Stop laughing! Or I will beat you!” Well, this made the Princess laugh so hard she tinkled her panties. The King sent in another man to the Princess. This man gave the Princess magic pills to make her stop laughing. But the pills just made her laughter uncontrollable. The King sent in another man. This man was a foreigner from another land who talked with a funny, sissy accent. He offered her money and a great big diamond if she’d stop laughing. But he just made her laugh even harder than ever before. By the end of three days, the Princess had laughed at every man in the Kingdom. Then one night soon after, a strange mist crept into her castle bedroom. The mist curled its fingers around her bed. And the Princess awoke to see a woman standing at the foot of her bed shrouded in this mist. “Who are you?” the Laughing Princess asked. The strange woman said, “I followed the sound of your laughter and I swam the moat outside the castle grounds and catapulted myself over the castle wall and scaled this tower with my bare hands. All to find the source of this beautiful laughing music.” The Princess laughed. The woman thought the Princess’s laughter sounded like choir bells and ginger snaps and Christmas presents being opened and baseball cards in bicycle spokes and puppies growling at squeaky toys and everything good in the universe all at the same time. So she laughed, too. When the strange woman laughed…little by little…it took away some of the Princess’s pain and sorrow. Each chortle, each chuckle, every giggle from the strange woman eased the Princess’s sorrow and she stopped laughing. The Princess grabbed the woman in her arms and kissed her ecstatically. The kiss confirmed what the Princess already knew in her heart—that this woman was sent to her, and to her only, to walk the kingdom grounds with her and make her castle a home and to raise a family together and to love forever. The End.”

  Vivian yawns contentedly and closes her eyes.

  “And the important part of this story,” I continue, “is that they live happily ever after.”

  “No,” Vivian counters with a deep yawn, “the important part is that I’m a princess.”

  She yawns again and drifts off.

  ***

  My butt falls asleep and wakes me up. The sun is peeking over the buildings, promising to be a real scorcher. I moan and stretch out my shrunken muscles. Vivian jerks her head up. We’re exactly where we were—on a sidewalk in Albuquerque.

  “I smell something,” I say, not yet decided if it’s a good or bad something.

  Vivian sits up. “It wasn’t me.”

  I sniff the air a couple of three times. “It smells like…incense.”

  I haul my stiff body to a standing position and follow my nose to an open door in the building we were sleeping against. Long strands of beads dangle in the doorway. I part the beads with my hands and stick my face inside.

  It’s a little room. Dark except for a billion burning candles. They must be the incense I smelled. There’s a little card table sitting in the middle of the
floor with two wooden chairs on either side. Heavy fabric rugs hang on the walls.

  “Come inside,” intones a croaky voice.

  I step through the beads.

  A figure enters the room. She pulls back her lace veil showing a dark wrinkled face like a walnut. She’s dressed in a grab-bag of scarves and polyester. Her long fingernails and long toenails are painted deep purple and she wears so many bangles and beads that she rings like a wind chime as she walks over to a chair.

  “Madame Zora has been expecting you,” she says, gesturing for me to take the chair across from her. I wonder if she’s Madame Zora or if there’s an older, wiser woman hiding somewhere.

  “I don’t have much money,” I say.

  She clicks her nails together like castanets, then holds her gnarled hands out to me. I walk toward her and she grabs my hands in hers.

  “You are searching,” she intones.

  “Yes,” I agree, noticing that she doesn’t clarify what I’m trying to find.

  She leads me toward the empty chair across from her and I sit. She flips my left hand over, palm up, and traces one pointy fingernail over the lines in my palm.

  “What do you see?” I ask, breathlessly.

  “You are lost. You are looking for direction.”

  “Yes.”

  She squints harder at my hand. “Your feet follow your heart.”

  “I guess so,” I say. “Can you see my future?”

  She closes her eyes and lays my hand over her chest. I feel her heart flutter like a hummingbird’s wings against my palm. Her eyes jerk back and forth under her eyelids. She rocks and moans without opening her mouth. It sounds like it hurts.

  “I see…” she whispers. I have to lean in closer to hear her words. “I see…death’s chariot. Death’s chariot will follow a diamond hanging like the north star to…La Ville Lumière,” she says with an amazingly good French accent.

  “What else?” I urge.

  She jerks out of the trance and looks at me scared.

  “What?”

  “That is all,” she says, turning loose of my hand.

  “You saw something, what was it?”

  “I told you all I saw.”

  “Something scared you. What was it?”

  She shakes her head.

  “Tell me,” I say, grabbing her hand and insisting.

  Her wrinkles all point down into a sad, sad frown. “I saw you…in a coffin,” she relents.

  “Can you read my palm?” Vivian asks.

  When did Vivian walk in? I guess I was so engrossed in my future I didn’t notice her. Vivian thrusts her palm under Madame Zora’s nose and asks again, “Can you read my palm?”

  I look at Vivian’s hand. Written in red ink across her palm are the words, Eat Me.

  I stand and shout, “Vivian! Madame Zora and I were having a serious conversation here!”

  Vivian rares back and kicks me in the shin.

  “Ouch!”

  When I open my eyes, Vivian is hovering over me, kicking me in the leg. “Wake up sleepyhead,” she says, toeing me in the ass.

  I push myself into a sitting position and look around. I’m on the sidewalk. I guess I was sleeping. Sleeping and dreaming. What the hell was I dreaming about? I can’t remember.

  “I smell something,” I utter, groggily.

  “It wasn’t me,” Vivian says. “C’mon, get up. We need to find us a car.”

  ***

  We meander the streets as morning breaks hot and hard over the rat maze of city buildings. I follow Vivian’s shoes as she winds a path through the early morning business crowd. The streets are thick with people and cars and briefcases and cell phones and all the trappings of a middle-class life. Somewhere along the way the American Dream has turned into a nightmare and all these people are searching for the cheese at the end of the maze. They’re scurrying about like little mouse-zombies.

  Blisters are forming on the backs of my heels from flip-flopping in these big shoes. It seems like we’ve been walking for hours with no real direction and my up-and-at-’em has done got up and gone.

  Vivian freezes and I bump off her back. She grabs my arm and points across the street.

  I look to where she’s pointing, but all I see is a white clapboard building with a hand-painted sign out front: Mount Olive Holy Zion Calvary 1st Pentecostal Church. People all dressed in black are streaming through the front doors. A big, long, black hearse is backed up to the side door and its engine is running.

  Oh, hell, no.

  “No,” I whisper. “No hearse, Vivian, no effing way.”

  “It’s just sitting there. Running. Ready to go,” she says, like it’s begging to be stolen. “It’s a sign from God.”

  That is definitely not a sign from God. A sign from God is a burning bush or a swarm of locusts or frogs dropping out of the sky. I’ve seen that Charlton Heston film at least a dozen times and a hearse at a funeral was definitely not in that movie.

  “There’s too many people,” I argue. “They’re having a funeral service. They’ll stop us before we’re even out of the driveway.”

  “Not if you go in there and create a diversion,” she says.

  “A diversion?” I squeak. “Why me? You’re much better equipped to divert than I am.”

  “Because I’m wearing pajamas and you at least have on something that looks funeralesque,” she says. “You go in and divert, I’ll steal the hearse. And I’ll meet you two blocks that way,” she points, then shoves me off the curb. “Go!”

  I turn back to her and plead, “It’s a frickin’ church, Viv. I don’t feel right about diverting inside a church.”

  “You’re a lesbian. You’re already going to hell,” she reasons and shoos me with a flapping hand. “Just go have fun with it.”

  Oh my God. Have fun? I stumble across the street and join the line of people going inside. Divert? How?

  The place is packed. I take the only empty seat on the front pew and grab a Bible so people maybe won’t notice that my hands are shaking.

  Divertdivertdivertdivert. I’m thinking hard, but I got nothing. What would Lucy do? I think of all the I Love Lucy episodes I’ve ever seen. But she always had costumes and props and stuff. Vats of grapes and big fruit hats and wax noses. And I don’t think she ever did anything inside a church.

  I nervously look over my shoulder and through the still-open front door. I see Vivian run across the street, angling toward the parked hearse.

  I gulp and look back to the front just as the preacher stands up behind the podium and says, “Brothers and sisters, we are gathered here today to celebrate the life of Evelyn Farley. Please join me in singing hymn number one hundred and thirty-one, ‘Bringing in the Cheese.’”

  Cheese? Did he just say cheese? Bringing in the cheese?

  A woman off to the side pounds on some piano keys and everyone stands up, opens their hymnals and begins singing.

  Sowing in the morning, sowing seeds of kindness.

  That’s when I finally notice it. Sitting on a pedestal right there in front of the podium. It’s a coffin. It’s white. Its lid is open and it has a purple, silky lining.

  We shall come rejoicing, bringing in the cheese.

  It can’t be, though. Can it? What’re the odds? Surely, this isn’t Vivian’s layaway coffin with the diamond tucked inside the lining. But what if it is? What if we go all the way to Vegas in a stolen hearse only to find out they already sold the same coffin to the Farley family of Albuquerque?

  Bringing in the cheese, bringing in the cheese.

  I don’t have a choice. I walk over to the coffin and look inside. Yuk. It’s a great big dead person.

  We shall come rejoicing.

  I close my eyes and my nose and swan dive over the coffin with a heart-wrenching, daytime Emmy-winning wail of sorrow.

  Bringing in the cheese.

  The piano stops playing. The people stop singing. Silence. A pin drops.

  I belch out a few loud, racking sob-like moans to
fill the silence, while surreptitiously feeling around the lining for a diamond.

  I don’t feel any lumps that don’t belong to the dearly departed Evelyn.

  I lift my head, sneak a peek at the congregation, see that everyone is staring back at me open-mouthed, so I gulp down some air and wail louder. I duck back into the coffin and feel around some more.

  Nope. Nothing.

  I hear a horn beep twice. Then an engine revs. Shit, it must be Vivian and the hearse.

  I look up just in time to see several people’s heads turn to the windows where the hearse is parked.

  I need to divert harder.

  I quickly turn to the congregation, throw my hands in the air, holding the Bible above my head and shriek.

  Everyone snaps back to me, wide-eyed. A couple of people even jump to their feet.

  “Ooooooh oooooohhhhhh ooooohhhhhh,” I moan. I shake. I quake. (I’m so nervous I’m not really faking that part.) I throw in a few tremors and spin in a circle.

  “The Holy Spirit!” somebody shouts. “The Holy Spirit is upon her!”

  Encouraged, I do my best Linda Blair neck roll, with a wet gargle or two and somebody else yells, “Praise the Lord, the Holy Spirit has overtaken her!”

  I don’t know what to do next so I just keep on shaking, open my mouth and hear myself say, “Oly-hay irit-spay!”

  I’m glad I learned Pig Latin in grade school.

  “Tongues! The Holy Spirit is talking to us! Tongues! Speak to us, sister!” the room shouts. They all stand and dance and cavort and twitch like a bucket full of worms.

  I don’t know what the hell to say next, so I babble-scream the only thing I’ve ever committed to memory, “Oo-tay e-bay o-ray ot-nay oo-tay e-bay, at-thay is-ay e-thay uestion-quay!”

  I sure hope these people don’t know Hamlet.

  I continue, “O-tay ace-fay e-thay ing-slays and-ay row-ays of-ay out-tay age-ray eous-ay is-may ortune-fay!”

  That whips the room into a feeding frenzy, and I have to admit I kind of like this feeling of power. So, in the spirit of the Spirit, I slap the Bible in my hands a couple of times, hold it up high like I’m Hamlet and it’s Yorick’s skull, do a little high-step dance, some deep knee-bends and start preaching in a Sunday morning TV voice. “Alas, poor brothers and sisters! I’ve been sent by the Spirit to show you the evil of your ways!”