Tats (25 page)

“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want, but how’d she die?” Vivian asks.

“Killed herself,” I say without inflection. “That was the second time she left me.”

Vivian’s quiet. I mean seriously, what can she say.

“Let’s go,” I say, turning for the road, “I don’t know why I came.”

Vivian says, “Try to see it from her side. You know, maybe she just thought you’d be better off without her. Or maybe...you know for a lot of people life hurts too bad. Maybe she just hurt too bad all the time...  Maybe she was just tired. You know, just plain sick and fucking tired.”

“I’m ready to go, Viv.”

“Stay here for a minute. Just for a minute. You came all this way, so it must mean something to you. I’ll wait in the cab.”

I watch her her walk away before I turn back to the grave. I know I should feel something, but I just don’t know where that something is. It’s buried down deeper than she is.

The last time I saw my mother in the flesh was when she showed up for my sentencing.

I hadn’t seen hide nor hair of her for over a year, then she had the fuckin’ nerve to show for my sentencing. She sat right behind me making a big show for the judge and jury with her tears and hand-wringing. I stiffened my shoulders toward her and refused to give her the satisfaction of even a glance.

The chamber’s door swung open and the bailiff made everyone get up and the judge came in with a flourish of black robes and with one pound of the gavel I’m sentenced to Mabel Bassett prison for the next fifteen years.

Depraved mind. They said I had a depraved mind. It took all that time in the courtroom to rule that I had a depraved mind.

Hell, I could’ve told them that.

Mom screamed like she was being tortured. She rushed out of her seat and threw herself against me, pulling on my baggy jail clothes.

“Lee Anne! I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry,” she sobbed pitifully. “Please forgive me, baby, please.”

A guard pulled her off. I thought of a billion nasty things I could’ve said to her, but I didn’t. Instead, I gave her my back and allowed the guard to handcuff me and push me toward the exit.

I’m shoved in the back of a police car and a couple of female cops drove me to Mabel Bassett. The cops talked about nail polish and their husbands and how they don’t get any and what they’re going to do Friday night. All I thought about was that I’d never have the chance to paint my fingernails or have a husband (didn’t want one anyway, thank you) or do anything on a Friday night for about fifteen years.

Fifteen years. When I finally got out, I’d be an old woman. An old woman whose life has already passed.

It was all a blur. The cops signed me in. A guard made me strip down naked and then she scrubbed me in the shower with a stiff brush and some god-awful lye smelling soap. She stuck gloved fingers up every orifice without so much as a thank you.

The guard was a big woman, but not muscle, mostly flab. She seemed to actually enjoy the way she took up too much space by crowding me out of my own. She was none too gentle with the cavity search either, like she wanted me to know she was the one in control and my body wasn’t my own anymore.

She didn’t even let me dry off good before she threw my prison issue clothes at me and said, “Get dressed.” The gray pants were too big in the waist and too short in the legs (so that’s where the term ‘jailin’ came from), a baggy gray shirt and some kind of slipper/shoes. I was barely dressed before the guard said, “Warden wants to see you.”

She led me down a series of gray halls to a big gray door. What the hell did they have against color? It was like I was in an old black-and-white movie.

The guard rapped on the metal door and a voice ordered, “Come in!” The guard swung the door open, put her big hand on the small of my back and pushed me inside.

Behind a metal desk in front of a computer sat a square-shaped woman with a military-style haircut and no-nonsense shoes. She wore all gray too. “I’m your warden,” she said, looking at me over her glasses perched on the tip of her nose. “Warden Johnston. Sit down, Ms. Hammond.”

I sat down in the metal folding chair she offered. She studied me a minute before taking her glasses off. In direct conflict with the rest of her body, she had really soft eyes. I decided to concentrate on her eyes.

“I received a phone call, Ms. Hammond. Your mother passed away.”

“I just saw her,” I uttered, as if that meant it wasn’t true.

“Yes,” she said. “She passed away...just this afternoon.”

“How?” I asked.

“Suicide.” I guess she wasn’t one of those women who believed in sugarcoating the truth to make it easier to swallow. I didn’t breathe for a full minute or more and actually thought maybe I might pass out. When I realized it was because I was holding my breath, I let that one out and sucked in another.

“Okay,” I mumbled, because I couldn’t think of anything else to say and because the warden was studying me for a response.

“You can go to the funeral if you like,” Warden Johnston said. “We can arrange for you to attend the funeral with a police escort.”

“No, thank you.”

She put her glasses back on and looked at her computer monitor. “You’ll let me know if you change your mind?” she asked.

“I won’t.”

She nodded, then addressed the guard without looking at her, “Put her in with Teddy.”

“You sure?” the guard asked.

Warden Johnston shot her a reproachful look and that’s all that was needed to shut the guard’s mouth.

That was my cue to leave, so I stood and the guard guided me toward the door. Then I thought of something and before I chickened out, I turned and asked, “Warden, ma’am? You think I could get some paper and a pencil or something?”

“You have somebody to write?” she asked.

“Just for myself,” I answered.

She studied me a moment. “Two sheets of paper and one pencil for an hour a day,” she ordered the guard.

“That’s it?” I asked.

The warden moved her gaze to me without blinking and said, “Write quickly and tersely. You’ll thank me later.”

The guard ushered me back out the door. I felt Warden Johnston watching me over her glasses all the way out.

I was led outside and across a basketball court then into the maximum security building. A big guard pod was in the center with four wings shooting off the pod. Each wing held around eighty prisoners, two to a cell. That meant there was at least three hundred and twenty women behind bars. We were all murderers or attempted murderers. We were the reason people didn’t sleep at night.

The guard opened the cell door for me and I stepped in. The door clanged shut and locked behind me.

The cell was maybe eight feet long and eight feet across. There were two little cots against the concrete block walls across from each other. There was a sink. A toilet with no tank. The toilet sat right out in the open. I knew right then and there that I’d never shit again.

My cellmate, Teddy, was lying on her bunk and she raised up on one elbow and glared at me.

I reflexively looked away from her stare.

Teddy was huge. She was big and black. And by big and black, I meant she was the biggest, blackest woman I’d ever seen. She took up so much room in that tiny box, I didn’t know how I was ever going to fit in there.

I stared at my own feet a few moments, then I moved to the empty cot across from Teddy’s and sat on the edge. What was I supposed to do? Just sit there and wait for Teddy to beat me or rape me or both?

She was the first to speak. “Rules: stay on your own side. I stay on mine. Don’t fuck with me. I don’t fuck with you.”

I raised my gaze to hers and nodded the tiniest bit.

“And don’t fuckin’ look at me,” she said. “Don’t never fuckin’ look at me.”

I looked away and nodded again.

That first night after lights out, I cried into my pillow. No tears, just dry, racking sobs.

“Shut the fuck up,” Teddy snarled. “You ain’t the onliest one who’s ever gone to jail.”

I stuffed the pillow in my mouth to drown out my noise.

I turn away from my mother’s grave and don’t even realize I’m crying until I feel the snot dripping out of my nose. I snuffle it back up and wipe my wet cheeks with the back of my hand.

Shit. Now I have the hiccups.

I head back to the cab. I hate to admit it, but I actually feel a little bit better. Maybe I should have a catharsis more often. It’s kind of like washing your insides then hanging them out to dry.

The cab’s not where it was.

Where the hell?

I turn in a slow circle.

Where the hell?

She didn’t, did she?

Did Vivian really just leave me out here in the middle of a cemetery? I don’t want to think that. I really don’t want to think that she just left me hanging out here in the middle of a bunch of dead bodies. But that’s exactly what she just did.

There’s a definite pattern developing here. She met me in a cemetery. She left me in the same cemetery. Vivian would understand and appreciate the full circleness of that, if that’s a word. What she doesn’t understand is that I’m not that easy to get rid of. Or maybe that’s what she’s counting on.

I walk down the middle of the gravel road toward the main highway. Damn hiccups. I stare at my boots and think. I kick a big rock, walk up to it and kick it again. I kick and walk and think. Vivian’s last words scare me. Like she understood why somebody would kill themselves. Surely, she wouldn’t. But she did say she was sorry for dragging me into this. She has been hinting about us “breaking up.”

I kick and walk and think so hard I walk right into the back of a big, black hearse and fall face forward over the trunk. A short, fat man dressed in a black suit with a cowboy string tie throws opens the driver’s door and jumps out. “What the hell’re you doing?” he yells.

“Think you can give me ride into town?” I ask, wiping away my palm prints from the car with my jacket sleeve.

He sniffs hard and looks me over harder. “Yeah, okay,” he finally decides. “I was just headed back anyway.”

“I don’t have any money, though,” I add.

“Me neither,” he says. “Hop in.”

I open the passenger door and climb in. There’s no way in hell I’m going to look behind me. Just in case there’s a coffin with a dead body in it back there.

Where could she be? I close my eyes and think. Full circle. Vivian’s going to keep going in circles. She wants me to find her. I have to believe that she wants me to find her.

“Redman Motor Lodge, please,” I direct.

I give the driver a thanks for his trouble and climb out of the backseat. As he drives away, I look around the lot. There’s maybe a dozen beat-up, seen-better-days cars. The shabby motel looks even shabbier in broad daylight. The concrete teepee is lonely and more ridiculous than the first time I saw it.

I walk into the motel office and ding the little bell at the front desk. It smells like burnt cheese in here. And if I’m not mistaken there’s the tangy odor of pot underlying the food smell.

A skinny kid with bad acne and greasy long hair hanging over his bony shoulders comes out of the back, munching on some kind of gross-looking meat sandwich.

“Room?” he asks. “Thirty bucks a night. Cash.”

“No,” I answer. “I need to know if a friend of mine just checked in.”

The kid does something with his lips that may or may not be a smile. “Can’t tell you that, ’gainst the rules,” he says around his sandwich.

I put my elbows on the counter and lean over until I feel my tits grazing against the dirty veneer. I roll my eyes slowly over him and say, “I’ll give you a blow job if you tell me.”

He backs up a step. I see myself through his eyes: Dreads, dirty, tats, a full foot taller than him. No wonder he looks scared. He probably thinks I’m going to bite his dick off.

“Lady,” he says, “I’ll give you the info if you promise
not
to give me a blow job.”

“Deal,” I say, standing back upright. “Her name is Vivian Baxter.”

He puts down his sandwich and taps away on the computer keyboard. “Nope,” he says, “no Baxter.”

She wouldn’t use her real name, how can stupid can I be?

I hold my palm out so high, “She’s maybe five foot seven. But wearing heels. Sexy, you know, short skirt. Long red hair.”

“Oh, yeah,” he leers. “Red hair. She signed in as Lucille Balls.”

I laugh. Good one, Vivian.

“What room number?”

“Seven. She said she had to have number seven.”

I hold out my palm to him.

He jerks his sandwich back like I’m actually asking for a bite of it or something. “I don’t want your sandwich, numbnuts. Gimme the keys to number seven.”

“Lady, look...” he starts to protest.

“Gimme the keys or I bite your little dick off.”

He hands them over. I walk to the door, then turn back around. “And if you wanna keep your dick, you never saw either one of us.”

He holds his sandwich up and gives it a little shake in my direction. I guess that means okay.

I don’t knock. I just turn the key and open the door. The room is beyond dark and the still air is stifling. I can make out Vivian’s silhouette on the bed, but the air is so heavy, the stillness so deafening, I’m immediately filled with dread.

I flip on the overhead.

Vivian is sprawled on the bed, face down, with the covers bunched in a ball at her feet and the bags of money sitting on the table. Even though the harsh light makes me flinch, she doesn’t move at all.

“Viv?” I whisper and ease the door closed.

No movement. Nothing. I stare at her back and can’t make out if she’s breathing or not.

I rush to her side and shake her by the shoulders. She doesn’t move; she’s just deadweight. I roll her over and take her face in my hands. “Vivian! Wake up!”

“Wha...?” she slurs and throws her arm across her eyes.

My relief is immediate and humbles me to my knees. I shake her leg and beg, “C’mon, Viv, talk to me. What’s going on here?” When she doesn’t answer, I crawl up on the bed with her. I point her face to mine and command, “Wake up! Tell me what’s wrong with you!”

She opens her eyes to slits, sees me, and jerks her face away from mine.