Tats Too: The Case of the Devil's Diamond

by Layce Gardner

  “Amen!” they shout and froth into the aisles.

  I make sure to stretch all my words out to ten syllables long and scrunch my face up a lot. “The Spirit is in me! The Spirit is commanding me to heal you!” I yell.

  A couple of other people babble in tongues only it sounds like the real thing. The piano woman starts pounding out the cheese song again, and the room is a loud cacophony of amens and hallelujahs and babbles and shrieks.

  A middle-aged woman with tease-it-to-Jesus hair skips down the aisle toward me, alternating slapping her hands on her hips and tits and moaning. I figure she’s pretty close to orgasm, so I hold out my palm and yell at her, “Stop right there, sister! Get down on your fucking knees and pray to Holy God above to save your goddamn soul!”

  She stops, drops and rolls to the floor. I wave the Bible over her trembling, ecstatic body and continue, “Pay no attention to the cussing and swearing! That’s just the demons working their way out!”

  “Amen! Out, demons, out!” they shout.

  The piano woman pounds the keyboard harder in a staccato, ear-popping frenzy.

  Through the open front door, I catch a glimpse of the hearse screaming its tires down the street.

  Time for me to get the hell out, but I’ve done such an awesome job of diverting, I don’t know if they’ll let me leave.

  I step over the orgasmic woman and work the spirit down the aisle, bopping a few people on the head with the Bible like little rabbit Foo-Foo, while letting my cussing flow, “All you sinful motherfuckers! Listen to the holy words of God!”

  Bop on the head.

  “Fuck your money!”

  Bop on another head.

  “Fuck your power!”

  Bop on another head.

  “Fuck that new house, fuck that new car—”

  Bop! Bop!

  “Fuck that job promotion!”

  Bop!

  “I am here to tell you that you are not going anywhere but straight to hell and eternal damnation if you don’t get your motherfucking, goddamn, cock-sucking souls in order! You!” I point to a woman on the back row. “The whore in the black dress with the big tits and tall hairdo! Yes, I’m talking to you, bitch-slut! Get down on your knees and pray to God above to save your blasphemous, cheese-licking soul!”

  She drops to her knees, puts her hands behind her head and keens long and hard. I reach down, grab a handful of her tit (just because I can) and point my Bible to heaven, saying, “God, please help this heathen woman. Rid her of her slutty, sinful ways! Everybody! Lay hands on this woman and invite the Spirit into her wicked fucking body!”

  The crowd converges on the woman, touching her body anywhere and everywhere at the same time as she writhes and moans under their caresses.

  “Praise Cheeses!” I give her one last good bop on the head with the Bible and run out the front door.

  ***

  I run for two blocks but don’t see the hearse. I stop for breath, bend over with my hands on my knees and the hearse screeches up alongside the sidewalk. The passenger door pops open, I dive inside and Viv takes off before I even get my door shut.

  “How’d it go?” Vivian asks like I had just been taking a Sunday stroll in the park.

  “Those Pentecostals aren’t as repressed as you’d think. I left them in an orgy of flesh. It was like opening Pandora’s box.”

  She laughs.

  “I just hope God has a sense of humor,” I add.

  “Honey, She put testicles on the outside of men’s bodies. You can’t tell me She isn’t laughing about that one.”

  “Yeah, I hope you know how She plans to get us to Vegas in a high-profile hearse that we just stole and are stuck in downtown traffic. The cops are gonna catch us before we even get out of the city limits.”

  “Watch this,” she says, flipping on the hearse’s headlights.

  Immediately, the car in front of us pulls over to the right side of the road. Then the car in front of it pulls over. And the one in front of it. The cars in the left lane pull over also. Within two minutes all the traffic on the road is parted like the Red Sea and we have a clear shot all the way to the land of milk and honey.

  “Wave,” Vivian commands.

  “Huh?”

  She smiles broadly and secure that she can’t be seen behind the hearse’s dark-tinted windows, she waves at a beige van pulled over to the right.

  I wave at the Goodfellas who are scowling as we drive by.

  We’re in our own private little funeral procession heading to the promised land.

  ***

  We only stop for food and to pee. Vivian stole a map and according to her we only have six more hours until Vegas. I stole a bag of Doritos. We’re living high on the hog.

  I’m driving now, and Vivian has her head in my lap. She’s munching on chips and making greasy footprints on the passenger window, tap dancing to an old Suzi Quatro tune I found on the radio.

  We have six more hours of boring highway and nothing to do but look at passing cacti and sand.

  I’m bored.

  My grandmother always used to tell me, “Only the boring are bored.” The first six years of my life I spent summer vacations at my grandma’s farm just outside Tahlequah, and the first time I ever complained of boredom she took me noodling.

  We stood knee-deep in Welling Creek with our pants rolled up above our knees. We were right under the rusty old bridge. Cars passed over the top of us and made clank-clank noises as the bridge groaned under their weight.

  “Noodling ain’t for the faint of heart,” Grandma said between nips off her flask. “I know fully-growed men who’re too scared to noodle.”

  “I ain’t scared,” I said and puffed out my chest to prove it.

  “There’s a thin line ’tween stupidity and courage,” she warned. “Just ask ol’ Nubby.”

  “Who’s Nubby?”

  “Man who lives down the creek a ways. He lost three fingers to noodlin’.”

  Okay. Maybe I am a little bit scared.

  “What’m I supposed to do?” I asked.

  “Roll up your sleeves,” she said. “Stick your hand in the water along the bank, and I wouldn’t use my favorite hand if’n I was you. Stick your hand in the water along them rocks and feel around. Find yourself a little catfish cave ’tween them rocks. Then stick your hand in the hole and wiggle your fingers about.”

  “That’s all?”

  “Yeah, that’s all. Just keep wiggling your fingers ’til somethin’ big happens,” she said, stowing her flask into her back pocket.

  “What big’s gonna happen?”

  “A big old catfish is gonna bite your hand.” she smiled.

  “Bite it off?”

  “Not if you’re quick enough. Soon as you feel it strike, curve your fingers up like a fish hook and hold on tight. The secret part is to curve your fingers up like a hook. Then toss him outta the water.”

  I nodded and stuck my left arm in the water. I found a wet, dark hole, stuck my fingers in and started wiggling them about. A fish nipped. Nipped again. I curved my fingers up like a fish hook and he clamped his jaw down hard. I jerked my hand out of the water and flung the catfish up onto the bank.

  I caught three catfish that day and still had all my fingers intact when we had the fish fry that night.

  I got to be quite the noodling expert by the end of my sixth summer.

  I put one hand on the steering wheel, slip my other hand down Viv’s pajama bottoms and silently thank my Grandma for teaching me how to noodle.

  After her spasms still—Vivian has the longest orgasms ever; they can go on for what seems like a good ten minutes—and her breathing evens out, she pops another Dorito into her mouth and chews for a while.

  “Thank you,” she crunches. She digs deep into the bag of chips, pulls one out and feeds it to me.

  “You’re welcome,” I crunch back.

  “I owe you one.”

  “You actually owe me two,” I correct. “I’m counting the incident
in the back room at the Lion’s Den as one.”

  “Hmmm…” She thinks with one finger poised lightly on her chin. “You’re right. I owe you two.”

  “Wanna make it three?” I ask, walking my fingers across her mountains and down into her valley.

  “Mmmhmmm,” she answers, pushing my noodling hand back down to her catfish cave.

  ***

  Two hours and four noodlings later (I had to stop at four because my hand was cramping), Vivian is asleep with her head in my lap, her arm still stuck down the Doritos bag and a little trail of orange slobber oozing down her chin. I glance in the rearview mirror and see a glint of something shiny. I eyeball the mirror until I see it again. This time I catch a hint of gray.

  It couldn’t be.

  I slow the big boat down to around sixty mph until I see it again.

  Yep. It’s definitely who I thought it was.

  I shake Vivian awake. “Hey, Viv. Wake up. Dillon and Festus are on our ass.”

  She pulls herself out of her orgasm and Dorito delirium and sits up. “You’re sure?”

  “Look for yourself.”

  She turns around on her knees and studies the highway behind us for a while before offering her opinion, “Son of a bitch. How’d they find us?”

  “I dunno how. There must be hundreds of people matching our description, stealing a hearse and driving it out of Albuquerque.”

  “What’re we going to do?” she asks, choosing to ignore my sarcasm.

  I don’t answer for a mile or two. Then I see our answer in the form of an oasis. The Oasis Diner to be exact. “We need a new ride.”

  I wheel into the parking lot and punch the gas when I see a beige van nosed up near the front door. They must’ve passed us when we had our pee stop.

  Damn. The Mafia and the FBI all at the same place at the same time. I guide the hearse around the corner of the building to the back side. There’s a couple of beat-up cars pulled up close to the back entrance. This must be where the employees park.

  I cut the engine and power down the window.

  There’s a teenage boy standing by a couple of metal trash cans. He has long stringy hair cut into a mullet with shots of purple dye streaked in back. He’s wearing a dirty apron tied around his waist and is tending a raging fire in one of the barrels.

  He dumps another load of rubbish into the flames and squints at me through the smoke.

  That’s when I notice his T-shirt. It’s black with the silhouette of a green alien on the front a la Close Encounters of the Third Kind. “Let me handle this kid,” I say to Vivian.

  “Hey,” I say to him.

  “Hey,” he says back with a chin-nod. He scratches his hairless cheeks, looks over the hearse, and asks, “Who died?”

  “It’s not dead yet,” I deadpan.

  He gives me a huh? look followed by a profound, “Huh?”

  “This is going to sound kind of crazy,” I say conspiratorially, “but we found something out here. On the desert. Something that the government didn’t want to be found.”

  He perks up and edges toward me, but I stop him with a raised hand.

  “You ever heard of the Men In Black?”

  He nods without blinking.

  “They’re about five minutes behind us. What we got in here,” I hook my thumb toward the back of the hearse, “you don’t want to see.”

  “Alien?” he asks.

  It’s my turn to nod. I do it as solemnly as possible and add, “They’re going to kill us if they find us. We need your help.”

  “Me?” he asks, swallowing the story hook, line and sinker. Thank God for all those Spielberg movies. There’s a whole generation of kids who think bikes can fly and aliens are real and eat Reese’s Pieces.

  “I’ll pay you to drive this baby into Vegas. And you let me have the keys to your wheels. If the MIB catches you just scream innocent, they’ll cut you loose, but they’ll kill us, you know. All’s you gotta do is park this in Vegas at a hotel parking garage. I’ll park your ride next to it. We can switch again and that’s all you have to do.”

  “What hotel?” he asks.

  Good question. I have no idea.

  “Bellagio,” Vivian blurts out. “Bellagio Hotel right on the drag.”

  The kids nods. “That’s the one with the dancing water, right?”

  “Right,” I say like I know. “I’ll pay you after you do it.”

  “Lady,” he says, “I’ll do it for nothing. Anything to stop washing dishes and burning trash.”

  “Okay.” I get out of the hearse and toss him the keys. “Remember, straight on to Vegas and no stopping.”

  He digs in his pocket and tosses me his keys. “That alien you got back there. Will it hurt me?”

  “No. Just don’t scream during the anal probe and you’ll be okay.”

  He eyes widen in terror. I laugh. “Just kidding. God, how dumb are you kid? The alien is knocked out cold, it won’t bother you.”

  He laughs and says, “You had me going there for a minute.” He jumps behind the wheel and starts the car. He starts to drive away, but I stop him with “Hey!”

  He stops and peeks his head out the window to me.

  I dangle his keys at him, asking, “Which ride is yours?”

  He points between the two cars, saying, “That one.”

  He peels out in a cloud of dust, and I watch him merge onto the highway without the faintest tap of brakes.

  I walk over to where the kid pointed and sigh.

  Vivian comes up behind me. “Shit a brick.”

  “Looks like we’re going to Vegas on a scooter,” I laugh even though I don’t feel at all like laughing.

  Chapter Ten

  We barely both fit on the damn scooter. Vivian’s legs keep getting all tangled up in my legs so she finally wraps them around my waist with her feet crossed in my lap and her purse sandwiched between us. I have the throttle opened up all the way and our top speed is thirty-five. We must look like those Shriner guys in all the Christmas parades who ride the little scooters and cars. All we’re missing are the Grand Poobah hats.

  Dark finds us before we find Las Vegas. And since the scooter doesn’t have headlights, it looks like we’re doomed to a night on the empty desert.

  I stop when I just can’t see any more. I push the scooter off the road and over behind a rocky formation so we can’t be seen from the road. At least if Dillon finds the kid driving the hearse and backtracks, she won’t sneak up on us in the middle of the night.

  Viv and I lay down on the warm sand near the scooter. She pulls off her shoes and sets them aside. Next she takes off her pajama pants and wads them up under her head as a pillow.

  I do the same. Might as well get as comfortable as possible. Besides, we’ve slept in worse places than the desert floor.

  We lay side by side. I listen to her breathe and try to match my breath to hers.

  “We could have sex,” she says. “I owe you quite a few.”

  “We could,” I reply, but without really meaning it. I’m just too tired and really don’t want to be in my body right now.

  “The stars are beautiful,” she says a moment later.

  They are, too. I had no idea there were that many. I open my mind, will it to go blank and let it roam bareback and unharnessed around the bazillions of stars. By the time my mind comes back to the barn Vivian is asleep.

  She can fall asleep at the drop of a hat. I’ve never been that lucky. After Georgia was born I couldn’t go to sleep at all unless she was laying froggie-style across my belly and chest with her head right over my heart.

  But Georgia isn’t here. I can’t sleep.

  I wish Vivian had some of those pills she used to love so much. I’m so tired, they’d probably knock me right out. Maybe she has one left over in the bottom of her purse, buried in all the lint and crap. She never cleans her purse out, just keeps adding to it.

  I sit up and ease the purse away from her. I take it over to the scooter where I won’t wake he
r and rummage around in its depths. The stars are just bright enough that I can make out some of the stuff I pull out. Lots of makeup. Nail polish. Nail polish remover. Some of those fluffies she sticks between her toes when putting on the nail polish. Keys. (Which now unlock nothing.) Wallet. A couple of different hairbrushes. Our toothbrushes. Toothpaste. More makeup. Tampons. Good Lord, is there anything she doesn’t have in here?

  I wrap my hand around something big and solid. A gun?

  I pull it out and squint. It looks like…

  I hold it up to catch the starlight. I gasp out loud and drop it.

  I pick it back up. It’s a dildo. A great big, heavy-duty dildo with a black harness dangling off it. What the fuck? She’s carrying around a dildo in her purse and I didn’t know it? Is she hiding it from me? Where the hell did she get it and who’s been using it?

  I hear Vivian utter, “Uh-oh.”

  I turn to her with the monster in my hand. I hold it by the base and jiggle it in her direction. “What is this?” I accuse.

  She sits up and brushes sand off her legs. “You really don’t know what that is?”

  “I know what it is, Vivian. I want to know what it’s doing in your purse.”

  She yawns and takes her time tying her long hair back in a knot. I feel like an idiot standing here with a big fake dick in my hand, which is probably exactly how she wants me to feel, so I sit sidesaddle on the scooter seat with Mr. Happy balanced on my knee and wait.

  Vivian rises and struts over to me. She takes the dildo and holds it up, catching some star rays, and smiling at it. “It was supposed to be a surprise.”

  “Oh, I’m surprised all right.”

  She turns it over and admires it like it were some sort of… diamond or something.

  “I bought it off the Internet from a place called The Pleasure Chest.”