Tats (23 page)

“I didn’t enjoy it!” I scream at the top of my lungs. I suddenly realize that what I’m yelling about isn’t really what I’m yelling about. I take a deep breath and let it out slow. “It doesn’t count if I didn’t like it,” I say slow and calm.

Vivian nods and says softly, “Yeah, I know what you mean.” She takes a deep breath of her own, then throws her hands up in the air. “Well, where the hell is he?” she asks.

“Looking for me?” a voice slurs behind us. We both spin around.

Prince Charles leans in the doorway, naked and drugged and holding a gun. His eyes sluggishly take us in and he raises the gun, pointing it right at Vivian.

Hold on a minute. That’s not a gun. It’s an empty champagne bottle. He laughs and almost falls to the floor before catching hold of the door handle and straightening up again. “Vivian...” he laughs, stumbling a few feet forward. “Tsk, tsk, tsk. Shame on you, dearie.”

“Charlie, I’m so glad you’re not gone,” she says, slinking his way. “I thought you’d left me.”

“Don’t!” he points the champagne bottle at her chest. “Move! Don’t move.”

Vivian freezes. He squints one eye, aiming the bottle at her like some kind of English Wyatt Earp. “Bang!” he slurs. “You’re dead.”

He raises his imaginary gun to his lips and blows a short puff of air on the bottle neck.  And that’s the last thing he does before he falls over, smashing face-first on the carpet.

I must stare at him for a full five seconds before asking, “You think he’s dead?”

Prince Charles’s butt twitches a couple of times, then he lets out a loud snort and snore.

“Nope,” Vivian answers. “Just sleeping. But I think he’s going to be really pissed off when he wakes up.”

Chapter Eleven

We go from the lap of luxury to a rent-by-the-hour motel named Dick’s Halfway Inn. I let Vivian register us at the front desk, which may have been a mistake because she signs us in as Fred and Ethel Mertz.

We’re back to one room and one queen-size bed and I try not to think about the sheets. The carpet is so matted and gross I don’t think about that either.

I jump in the shower and scrub like Karen Silkwood while Vivian runs next door for a bottle of something brown and cheap and strong. When I come out of the bathroom in my boxers and wifebeater, she pours me a lethal dose of the liquor and helps herself to several pills. We lie on the bed for a long time, staring at the ceiling without talking.

Finally, Vivian aims the remote at the TV, turns it on and there’s nothing but horizontal stripes flipping by on every channel. I get up and land the TV a couple of solid kicks. The picture flips and holds and stays there. I lie back down again. I must’ve found the animal channel because some documentary about prairie dogs is on. Vivian sets the TV to mute just as one little fuzzy dog climbs on the back of another and starts rutting away.

“Remind you of anything?” Vivian snorts.

“Fuck you.”

“You changing teams or what?” She snickers.

My residual anger leaks out. “It was a mistake!” I take a big drink and choke out a miserable, “It was a mistake. You ever make mistakes?” I swipe away a couple of hot tears and look away from her searching eyes.

“C’mon, Lee. It was just one time. One guy. Nothing to cry about.”

“That’s not why I’m crying. You saw it and...I dunno.”

Vivian reaches over and pats me on the knee. “Darlin’, I don’t care.”

“That’s why I’m crying! ’Cause you don’t care!” I throw her hand back at her and finish off the glass in one big gulp. Vivian gets off the bed, grabs the bottle and pours me another. She sticks the bottle between my legs and lays back down with her hands behind her head, staring at the TV. The prairie dogs are still going at it.

“Sorry,” I mumble, finally breaking the heavy silence.

“Do we really need to have this talk again?” she asks without looking at me.

“No.”

Through the paper-thin walls, I hear the bed springs next door creak. The headboard bangs against the wall separating our beds. I watch the prairie dogs hump but the soundtrack is coming from next door. It’s like humping in surround sound. And it really does seem like those cute little prairie dogs are the ones saying, “Do it, Daddy, do it, do it, Daddy, do it!” Or maybe I’ve just had too much to drink tonight.

“Maybe we need to break up,” Vivian says.

“We’re not going steady.”

The banging headboard gets louder. Vivian looks at the shaking wall then back to me. “I just think I’m not so good for you. You go out and pick up a man when you clearly didn’t want to. Then you blame it on me. You lesbians are so weird. And I mean that in the nicest way.”

“I don’t want to break up,” I say. “I don’t know what I’d do if I didn’t have you.”

Viv sits up cross-legged and looks at me long and hard. “You’re tired and drunk. My pills are kicking in. Neither one of us is going anywhere tonight.”

Now the headboard next door bangs the wall so hard our bed bounces. Vivian turns to the wall and pounds it with her fists, screaming, “Hurry up and come, already! What the fuck is taking so long!”

I giggle a little. She giggles back. The headboard stops.

“Thank you, Gawd,” she drawls.

I reach out and take her hand in mine. I trace the lines in her palm with my fingertip. “I just want to know something, Vivian.”

“What?”

“At the funeral...why’d you leave with me? Outta all those people there, why’d you ask me to take you away?”

She pooches out her lower lip, thinking hard. “I recognized you.”

“From high school?”

“No,” she says, quickly. “Not that kind of recognize. I mean I did, but that’s not what I mean. I just saw something familiar in you.”

“Like what?” I ask.

“I’ve always felt like an outcast. Like I never quite fit in. And that’s what you looked like too. Like you were on the outside looking in.”

I nod.

“We just fit,” she says.

I nod again.

“Why’d you take me away? You didn’t have to, so why did you?” she asks.

Because I just saw you and immediately I knew you were the one
. But I just think that because I know I can’t say it out loud to her. So, instead, I shrug and say, “I liked your pom-poms.”

“You’re such a man sometimes,” she laughs.

“I know.”

I take a deep drink straight from the bottle and feel the burn work itself down to my toes.

“Vivian?”

“Yeah?”

“Where we going?”

“Wherever the road takes us,” she says simply.

She looks to the TV and I follow her gaze. The female prairie dog is now giving bloody birth and shooting the pups out one at a time. I grab the remote and turn it off.

Vivian and I lie in total darkness and quiet for a long time. I listen to her breathing and am soothed by the rhythm. I’m drifting off to sleep when Vivian leans up on one elbow, facing me. She traces her finger across the scar on my forearm.

“Why were you in prison?” she asks gently.

“Where’d that come from?”

“Why haven’t you ever told me? You think I’m going to freak out or something?”

“Maybe.”

“Well, I won’t.”

“I don’t like to talk about it.”

I get all goosefleshy from her fingertips and she senses this and rubs some warmth back into my arm.

“Murder?” she asks.

I pull my arm away. “I don’t like to talk about it.”

“I heard it was murder.”

I sigh. “Depraved-mind second degree murder to be exact.”

“Your father?”

“Stepfather.”

She wraps her hand back around my forearm and caresses the scar. “He raping you? That how you get this scar?”

“Why’re you asking if you already know?”

“I want to hear it from you, not from everybody else. I wish you’d trust me enough to tell me.”

I’m quiet for a long time. She listens to my quiet and waits patiently for me to say something. So I close my eyes and try to find the words. “I got the scar when I was fifteen. I guess I’d had enough and I tried to fight back. It’s my fault, really. I mean, I knew better than to fight. My mom left not long after that. He was doing the same thing to her, beating her and shit. I guess she thought I was okay, I dunno. She never put her bottle down long enough to see me. So, she just packed up one day and never came back.”

Vivian snuggles up next to me and pulls me close. I open my eyes and look at her for a second.  She wipes away the wet under my eyes with her thumb, and I continue, “He didn’t do it all the time, you know. There’d be a couple of months go by...then he’d wake me up, drunk and sweaty... My senior year I hardly ever went back to the house anymore. There was this biker guy I knew when I was a kid.  Chopper. He was actually married to my mom for like a year maybe. That’s his pocketknife I have. With the red Maltese cross? I stole it off his nightstand the day Mom made him leave.”

I laugh a little. I don’t know why, it’s just easier than crying.

“Chopper was cool. I worked in his shop when I was a kid, just cleaning up and stuff. So, I went there. I started living in his shop at night. He didn’t know. I slept there and ate stuff out of his fridge. Then I’d go to school in the morning before he came in. But I had to go home sometimes. Get clothes and do laundry. I’d sneak in when the bastard was asleep and go through his pockets and shit and get whatever money he had in them. One time...he woke up. He grabbed me by the throat. Threw me down. He took his time. I didn’t fight back...just...let it happen, you know. When he was done, I got up to leave. He went back to bed, was actually snoring and shit. I’m almost out the door and I dunno, I snapped or something. I looked at my body and it wasn’t mine. I looked in the mirror and it wasn’t even me looking back. The person looking back was horrible. She was beyond angry, had this crazy look about her. This other person, this girl... I watched her go to the closet and get the shotgun off the top shelf. She cracked it open to make sure it was loaded. She clicked the safety off. She walked calmly down the hall to his bedroom. She pushed open the door with the butt of the gun. She braced her feet and raised the shotgun and held it tight against her shoulder. She woke him up by saying, “You should’ve kept your dick in your pants.” He sat up and she fired. It threw him back against the headboard and she spread her feet wider and aimed and shot again. She watched the blood spread across his chest and...actually marveled at how pretty it was. Then she laid the gun down on the foot of the bed and walked to the kitchen and picked up the phone and called the police. She said, ‘I just shot the bastard. You don’t have to hurry. He’ll still be dead when you get here.’ She hung up and went outside and sat on the porch steps and waited for the cops.”

Vivian pulls me to her chest with my face in the crook of her neck and holds me tight.

“You’re the only person I’ve ever told,” I say softly.

“Thank you,” she whispers. “Thank you for telling me.”

I fall asleep with her arms wrapped around me and the sound of her heartbeat in my ears.

Chapter Twelve

According to Vivian, the only way to get rid of a hangover is hair of the dog. Or in her words, “If you just stay drunk, you don’t get hangovers.” Which explains why we are in Boomer Sooner Sports Bar drinking one Bloody Mary after another. I think the bartender recognizes my hangover and is kind enough to help out by giving me more Mary than Bloody.

Boomer Sooner is like heaven for OU fans. The whole place is decorated in red and white, with OU memorabilia covering every square inch. There’s a huge wall-sized TV set up in a corner of the bar and all the patrons watch the football game and scream obscenities at the coach and the other team.  Personally, I think football would be a hell of a lot more interesting if they’d just take off all those pads and beat on each other.

Viv and I sit at a corner table, leaning back in our chairs with our feet propped up on the bags of money. I chow down on a dish of peanuts and pretzel sticks while Vivian licks on a celery stick. I’m a little embarrassed about my emotional incontinence of last night and, thank God, Vivian hasn’t brought it up again. But at least she wasn’t a scrooge with her tits and she let me hold onto one all night long.

“I’m allergic to nuts,” Vivian states.

“I’m allergic to seafood.”

“I had clams once. Not the seafood kind either,” she states.

I raise an eyebrow and question, “Don’t you mean crabs?”

“It was some kind of crustacean,” Vivian says with a shrug. “Do you think they serve food here? I’m hungry. You think they have pie? Lemon or chocolate or something like that.”

“This is a bar, Viv. You don’t order pie in a bar. Just like you don’t go into a Chinese restaurant and order a hamburger. Besides you won’t eat it anyway.”

“Don’t tell me what I won’t eat,” Vivian says and takes a bite of her celery stick.

“We are talking about food, right?”

“Right,” she chews.

I finish off the peanuts and scoot the bowl to the far side of the table. “I wish we’d known each other in high school.”

“We did know each other,” Vivian objects.

“Yeah, but we never talked. Did we? I don’t remember us ever talking.”

“I don’t think you talked much,” Vivian says.

“Not to you, I didn’t. You were too popular to talk to somebody like me.”

“I wasn’t popular,” Vivian says.

“Bullshit. Cheerleader. Football Queen.”

“No boys ever asked me out. I never had one date in high school. I didn’t even go to junior prom. Nobody asked me. I had to ask Mark Thompson to take me to senior prom. His girlfriend was a sophomore and couldn’t go. I didn’t even ask him myself. My daddy called his daddy and they set it up. I wasn’t popular. Not by a long shot.”

“I didn’t know that or I would’ve asked you to the prom.”

“Oh, that would’ve changed things. That would’ve made me real popular.”

“You know I just did that night with Mark in order to get closer to you.”

“Hmmm...” she says, squinting one eye at me. “How’d that work out for you?”

“Not too good,” I admit. “If I could go back in time, I’d talk to you. I’d march right up to you and say, ‘C’mon, let’s go find some trouble.’ Your dad would have to bail us out of jail.”