Tats (8 page)

I explode. “Stop the car!”

“You didn’t happen to get any baby powder, did you?”

“I SAID STOP THE CAR!”

She does. She stops so quick and looks at me so concerned... that I forgot what I was going to say. I grip the dashboard with both hands until my knuckles turn white.

“Do you have some anger issues we need to resolve?” she asks.

I jump out of the car. I need to breathe and Vivian is sucking up all the air inside that little Pinto. I take off stomping down the side of the highway. Vivian obviously never watches the animal channel. She’s never seen what dangerous animals can do. Especially snakes. Especially snakes that’ve been poked once too often. Don’t poke a snake, everybody knows that. Vivian has no idea what she’s doing, she just keeps pokin’ and pokin’ and pokin’.

She guides the car slowly up next to the right-of-way alongside me.

“Get back in the car, Lee,” she says.

I inhale some more air, and bend and look though the passenger window. “I need to know...” I say, “...I need to know a few things.”

“Okay,” she says. “But first I need to know...did you get any baby powder? My bangs have lost their fluff.”

“No, I didn’t. And here’s your change back.” I throw it into the front seat. “I need to know why you jacked my car, where and why you got this piece of crap, who you’re running from and where you’re running to.”

“Well, I already told you where your car is. What’re the other questions again?”

“I need to know if this is something illegal. You know, something I can’t get mixed up in.”

She drums her fingers on the steering wheel, then looks at herself in the rearview mirror and fluffs her bangs. “Depends on what your definition of illegal is.”

“Don’t poke me,” I mutter. “Who the fuck is chasing us?”

She turns and looks directly at me. Is she pouting? Her lower lip is pooched out a little and twitching, and I’m thinking she’s about to cry or some goofy shit like that. “A boyfriend, okay?” she answers with a hitch in her voice. “An ex-boyfriend. And, believe me, I don’t want him to catch me.” A couple of fat tears slide down her face.

Damn. I can’t stand to see a grown woman cry.

I straighten up and hang my hands off my hips. A couple of cars zoom by and I watch them disappear over the horizon. We’re surrounded by pastures. Pastures and cows, cows and pastures.

“Lee?” Vivian sniffles. “What’ve you got to lose? Where were you going anyway?” She leans through my window and tugs on my jacket. “I can’t...I don’t want to be alone anymore. And you’re kinda alone. I just thought maybe we could be alone together.”

God help me, I take a deep breath and climb back in the car.

“Good line, huh? I saw that in a movie once,” Vivian says lightly, pulling back out onto the highway and pushing the little Pinto harder than it’s meant to be pushed. “Fasten your seat belt, you’re in for a bumpy ride,” she adds.

Chapter Four

Crickets, bullfrogs, and the hum of locusts and june bugs make my ears vibrate. Anybody who ever said the country was quiet is just plain wrong.

All five feet eleven inches of me is stretched out across the hood of the tiny Pinto, the warmth from the engine seeping into my very bones. This is pure heaven. I feel as if I’m levitating and there’s nothing more important at this moment than studying the blanket of dark sky and making dot to dot connections with the stars. If there’s anything that feels better than this, I honestly don’t know what it is.

I look over at Vivian lying on the hood next to me. If anything she looks better than she did in high school. Life can surely take some strange turns. She wouldn’t have been caught dead with me fifteen years ago. Now we’re more on equal footing. We’re both stoned out of our gourds and neither one of us has anything except the clothes on our back (and in the trunk of the Pinto).

Vivian sucks hard on the joint before passing it back to me.

I take a toke and hold it in until I can’t stand the burn any longer. “This is perhaps...” I completely forget what I was going to say, then I grab the thought again and run with it, “...the best high I’ve ever had. I mean, it is really, really, really...” Why do I keep forgetting what I want to say? “... good.”

“Enjoy. ’Cause that’s the last of it.”

I crash back down to earth. “Well, you just pissed on a perfectly good high,” I say.

Vivian takes another toke—“I smuggled it over here in my girlie hole.”—and passes it back.

It takes every ounce of my self-control not to sniff it.

She exhales and continues, “The guy I got it from is young. Good-looking. Fantabulous sex. This one time—”

“Good for you,” I interrupt, not wanting to hear about her sexcapades with men. I change the subject. “You know, I’ve never even seen this alleged spooklight. Every time I’ve ever come out here, I wait and wait, but it’s a no-show.”

“I’ve seen it,” she says. “I’ve definitely seen it. It’s just this little ball of light bouncing down the road. Like those old sing-along cartoons, follow the bouncing ball. This one time I was parked out here with the cute guy who worked at Reasor’s, you know the one with the sideburns, and this little ball of light bounces down the road, right into the car and right out again. Scared the bejeezus outta the guy.” She takes another slow drag and holds it in. “Saved my virginity.” She exhales slowly. “If it weren’t for that spooklight I’d probably be married to Lloyd with sixteen kids and raising them on a bag boy’s salary.”

“Nah,” I say, taking the joint from her. “He’s probably been promoted to checker by now.”

“Nice scar,” she says, running her finger lightly over the thin white scar on my forearm. “That hadda hurt.”

“I don’t remember,” I reply a little too quickly, pulling back.

“On cop shows they’d call that a defensive wound, right there on the arm like that.”

“I don’t remember,” I say again, “I was just a kid when it happened.”

“Oh,” she says and adds pointedly, “I thought maybe it happened in prison.”

I look at her. “Nothing happened in prison. It was like the same day over and over again, every day.”

Vivian pulls a lipstick out of her cleavage and adds another coat.

“How much stuff you got tucked away in your cleavage? You’re always pulling different shit out all the time. It’s like a magician’s hat or something.”

“What were you in for?” she asks, putting the lipstick back down her top.

“Guess.”

“Shoplifting makeup from Walmart.”

“No,” I answer quickly, “and quit laughing, it’s not that funny.”

Vivian taps her fingernails against her chin. “Let’s see...”

But before she can guess, I offer up, “I wore white after Labor Day.”

“Ooooh.” She smiles. “I hope they didn’t go too easy on you.”

I grumble, “Twelve years.”

“You deserved it.” Vivian sighs contentedly, putting her hands behind her head. “I just adore women in prison movies.”

“Can we change the subject?” I ask.

“Sure.” Silence for a while. “You want I should give your parole officer a blow job so he’ll go easy on you?”

“It’s a woman. And my parole ended last month.”

“I don’t like blow jobs anyway,” she says. “It just bothers me that they’re called blow jobs and you don’t really blow.”

“Yeah, blow jobs suck,” I say, happy to just be onto a different subject.

“You ever have sex with anyone from high school?”

I ponder. I have a cheerleaders-are-a-bitch story, but no way in hell I’m telling that one to Vivian. “Do hand jobs count?” I ask.

“They do when you’re fifteen,” she pronounces.

“Then I slept with three guys from school,” I say. “When I was a sophomore, Clint Green and I used to park in the school’s parking lot and feel each other up.”

“Really?”

“Kinda freaked me out. His dick felt like a chicken neck.”

Vivian laughs. “They all feel like chicken necks.”

“And I let one of the Hampton twins feel me up on the dance floor at Junior Prom.”

“Which one?” she asks.

“I don’t know,” I answer truthfully. “It wasn’t a very good experience. He kept shoving his finger up my butt.”

“On purpose?” she asks.

“I don’t think so.”

“Who was the third?”

“You probably don’t remember him. We had first period speech together. I just walked up to him and whispered in his ear, ‘What’re you doing tonight?’ He said, ‘Nothing.’ So I said, ‘You are now. You’re doing me.’ I showed up at his house that night and he took me to the garage and we did it in the backseat of his daddy’s Town car. It was awful. He just like pounded me for ten minutes, my head banging against the door. When it was over he spewed some kind of grape liquor all over me. I had a headache and smelled like grapes for two days.”

“What was his name?” Vivian asks.

“I don’t remember his name. He played football, I remember that. He was tall, kinda cute, blond.”

She sits up and looks at me. “Joey?”

“That’s it,” I say, “that was his name. Joey.”

She sits straight up and stares me down. “You fucked Joey
Hanes
?” she demands.

“Yeah...” I say apprehensively.

“Goddammit!” she yells. “I wanted him so bad and he wouldn’t give me the time of day! Goddammit! I was throwing myself at him and all the time he was fucking
you
?”

“Well, you don’t have to be mad about it,” I say. “And it wasn’t all the time.”

“I can’t believe this shit,” she bitches. “I was the cheerleader not you.”

“Look at it this way. I saved you from getting thrown up on.”

There’s a weird vibrating sound. BZZZZZ. I hear it again. BZZZZZZ. It’s Vivian’s tits. She sticks her hand down her shirt and pulls out her phone. She looks at the caller ID then sticks the phone back from wherever she got it.

“Boyfriend?” I ask.

She sighs with an exaggerated roll of her eyes.

I shake my head. I can’t believe I’m jealous of a phone call. A phone call she didn’t even answer. Plus, she’s lying here with me, not him. Maybe I should make my move now. Maybe I should just grab her and pull her to me and lay one on her right now.

Vivian derails my thought train by sitting up Indian-style and asking, “Ever been to France?”

“No,” I giggle, “but I’ve been to Funkytown.”

“Really? What’s it like?”

“Not as fun as Margaritaville.”

She laughs, accepts the joint from me, licks two fingers and snuffs it out. It disappears back down into her magic hat. No telling what else is down there. Maybe if I wait long enough a rabbit will pop out. I giggle again.

“Frenchmen are really weird, but for some reason they just love me,” she says. “They think I’m smokin’ hot.”

“Well, you may be smokin’ hot, but I’m smokin’ pot. So there. I win.” I laugh at my own joke, but Vivian just looks at me like I’ve lost it.

She continues, “I met this one Frenchman, Oliver, who was a narcoleptic and fell asleep right in the middle of it.”

That mental image makes me laugh even harder.

“I gave him my phone number. Then he starts calling me. I can’t speak French. He can’t speak English. All he says is ‘Hallo, Vivvi, Hallo.’ And I just say, ‘Bon jour and fromage.’ ”

Fromage. That’s funny. Fromage is like the funniest thing I’ve ever heard in my whole entire life.

“Sometimes when he calls I teach him to sing stuff like ‘Beans beans, the musical fruit’ and ‘A horse is a horse, of course, of course.’”

I’m laughing so hard by now I think I’m going to pee my pants. I’m floating outside of my body, hanging up there somewhere in space and looking down on us. I can’t believe that’s me down there, doubled-up and laughing. Laughing my ass off on the hood of a Pinto parked out at the spooklight with Vivian the Cheerleader from high school.

“I think I just peed my pants,” I wheeze. “I can’t believe I just peed my pants in front of a cheerleader.”

“I’ll buy you some more tomorrow,” she says, lying back against the windshield. “I’ve got tons of money.”

“Where is all this money?” I ask. “Down your shirt?”

“Not yet,” she says, leaning up on one arm and grinning at me slyly. “You know where I can get a shovel?”

“I can’t believe I’m doing this. I can’t believe I’m doing this. I can’t believe I’m doing this,” I chant out loud to myself.

I’m going to blame it all on getting high. Because I like to think I wouldn’t be doing any of this in my right mind. Also, Sonny and Cher have more to do with it than I like to admit. Between her joint and her tits, I’ve lost all common sense.

Not only did I steal a shovel out of some poor sap’s open garage, but I let Vivian drive me back to the cemetery and now I’m digging up her poor friend’s grave. And it’s raining. It’s fuckin’ raining again. No wait, X that out, now it’s hailing. I guess the only good thing that’s happened in the past two hours is that they left the tent up. I’m still soaking wet but at least I’m not being pounded by hail.

I’ve been digging for two hours.

“That’s one hour for each tit,” I say out loud.

And I’m down in a mucky hole over my head. Vivian smoked cigarettes and watched me dig, but took off about twenty minutes ago, leaving me with strict orders to keep digging.

I make a mental laundry list of all the illegal crap I’ve done in the past twenty-four hours: stole a car. Smoked some dope. Broke into a garage. Stole a shovel. Destroyed public property with a stolen shovel. Grave robbing.

I hit wood. Finally. I scrape a few inches of dirt off the casket with my boot and scramble back out of the hole. I set the shovel on the dirt pile and sit wearily on the edge of the grave.

“I found it!” Vivian hollers from out there in the dark somewhere.

“Found what?” I yell back.

“My shoe! My Choo shoe! My Choo shoe you threw!”

“What is this, a Dr. Seuss book,” I grumble. “When I’m in jail it’ll all be so worth it.”

I wipe the sweat and rain out of my face and see her walking my way, dodging hail bullets. God, nothing can faze this woman. 

“Done?” she asks sweetly.

“I could’ve used some help, you know.”

“Well, if you had stolen
two
shovels maybe I could. But nooo, you’re not thinking ahead. You just steal one,” she scolds.