Tats (7 page)

She pushes the plate toward me.

I stab a big forkful of pie and I guess I underestimate the size of the bite I’m about to take and half of it falls off my fork and ends up in my new cleavage. Vivian quickly leans across the table and scoops up the meringue with her finger and pops it in her mouth.

Wow. What the hell was that? I look around and see that every man in the whole restaurant is staring at us open-mouthed.

“Men are staring,” I whisper.

“Uh-huh,” she agrees.

“Well, I don’t like it when men stare at me,” I explain.

“They’re not staring at
you
. They’re staring at your tits,” she explains back.

“My tits
are
me.”

“Don’t be so naive,” Vivian says. “Your tits aren’t you. They’re just garnish.”

She reaches deep into her big red bag and pulls out an aspirin bottle. She opens it and scatters a few different colored pills across the tabletop. She picks out a blue pill, swallows it and puts the rest back in the bottle. I don’t ask.

I eat half the pie in silence while Vivian tears her paper napkin into tiny little confetti pieces and nervously looks around. Something’s going on with her, but I haven’t known her long enough to know what exactly.

“You mad at me?” I ask. “I said I was sorry.”

“Don’t be such a girl,” she says.

“I am a girl, though, you know.”

“You don’t have to act like it. Talk about something else. Anything, just talk.”

Okaaay. She’s so nervous and fidgety that I hope whatever pill she just took kicks in quick. If she wants me to talk, so be it. Rambling is what I do best anyway. So, ramble I do. “I like IHOP. I’d have to say it’s my favorite. No matter where you are, there’s an IHOP and the food is always good. I like that kind of knowing. You walk into an IHOP you know exactly what you’re getting.”

I pause for a bite.

“Uh-huh,” she mumbles, not looking at me.

I swallow and ramble on, “I love to ride my bike to out-of-the-way places. Just head out on a county road with no destination in mind and just see where I end up. You know? You find some of the best eating places that way. I love those small town greasy little diners that’re tucked back out in the middle of nowhere, don’t you?”

“Uh-huh.”

“I like to ride and just end up in some little town in some little diner where all the locals gather. I like to eat with the cowboys, farmers and those big-haired, big-boned women. I like to hear them talk and smoke and spit. I like to see their bellies dance when they laugh. I like to guess what they do for fun, and I like to overhear what makes their lives worth living. I like it that the old men always call me ma’am and never mistake me for a man even though I’m wearing hats and tats and boots. They know a woman when they see one. I just love the people I come from. Don’t you?”

“Sure,” Vivian says.

I shake my head and take another bite of pie. “I can’t believe you were over there in England. Why’d you ever wanna go there? All those bad teeth. I can’t understand what they’re saying half the time between those bad teeth and that accent. You know what’s weird? Listening to a black person speak with a British accent. It just sounds wrong. And when men speak with a British accent they sound like sissies. I mean, music aside...I love the Beatles and the Rolling Stones as much as the next person, but England’s full of wimpy guys. Why, just one ordinary Oklahoma farm woman could single-handedly beat up ten of those English boys. And outdrink ’em, too. My grandma lived through the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl at the same time. She drank moonshine that she made in her barn and she slaughtered her own food. She could’ve won that Revolutionary War all by herself. For instance,” I say, pointing my fork at a very proper looking man in a dark business suit, “that man there with the sissy accent. My grandma could eat him for breakfast and still be hungry.”

Vivian follows the trajectory of my fork point over her right shoulder and sharply inhales. I don’t even have her pie finished, but she slaps a twenty on the table and harshly whispers under her breath, “We’re leaving. Now.”

“But I’m not finished,” I mumble with my mouth full.

“That’s why you should always eat dessert first. Now put your fork down.”

I do.

“Nonchalantly,” she admonishes, putting a period at the end of each syllable.

I pick the fork up again and ease it back down to the table, resisting the silly urge to whistle.

“Follow me.” She holds a menu over her face and cuts elaborate zigzags around the tables until she’s out the front door.

As soon as we’re out the door, Vivian snatches the keys out of my hand.

“Hey!”

“You drive like an old woman,” she says, opening the door and sliding behind the wheel. “Get in!”

I manage to hop in the passenger seat a split second before she squeals in reverse. She slams the car into drive and burns rubber tearing out of the lot. I slam the door shut just as she turns onto the main road.

“What the hell, Viv?”

“Light me a cigarette,” she orders. “I can’t drive without a cigarette.”

Vivian screeches my car into the Redman Motel and whiplashes up alongside room number seven. The door is partially ajar and the lights inside are on.

“Shit. They’ve been here,” she whispers.

I take her cue and whisper back, “Who? The maid?”

She flicks her cigarette out the open window and says quickly, “The less you know, the better. You have a gun?”

“Noooooo,” I answer. “You’re scaring me, Vivian.”

“You have a knife?”

“Sure,” I say. I dig deep into my right front jeans pocket and pull out my pocketknife with the red maltese cross.

Vivian looks at it and rolls her eyes. “Not a pocketknife, goofball. A
real
knife.”

“This is a
real
knife. A
real
live pocketknife.”

Vivian sighs through her nose and slips off her stiletto heels. She hands me one shoe and grasps the other by its toe. She quietly gets out of the car and creeps up to the door barefoot, wielding her shoe like a deadly instrument. She flattens her back against the outside wall.

I roll down my window and whisper as loud as I can and still be whispering, “I think you’ve seen too many action movies.”

She puts her finger to her lips and hushes me. Then in one swift motion, she turns, kicks the door wide open and assumes a fighting stance with her shoe held high. She looks around and then disappears inside.

I wait a few tense moments, tapping the toe of her shoe into my palm, then just as I’m starting to get really worried, Vivian sprints back out of the motel room with an armful of clothes. She throws them through my window, dumping them over my head and dashes back inside.

I mostly unbury myself just in time for her to throw more clothes through my window. She hauls ass back in the car, slams it into gear and is out of the lot before I can even get her panties off my head.

God, this woman drives like she talks. Ninety miles an hour and in five directions all at once. “You’re on the wrong side of the street!” I scream, jerking the wheel to the right.

 “Sorry,” she says, “habit. Light me a cigarette, will ya?”

This woman is nuts. Truly nuts. I mean, I thought Ginger was nuts but this woman—I light a cigarette and stick it between her lips—takes the proverbial cake.

“Can I drive?” I ask hopefully.

She swerves around a slow-moving car in front of us. No signals, no looking, just pure swerving.

“Is this the adventure you mentioned before?” I ask.

“This is it,” she says, clenching the lit cigarette between her teeth.

“I should’ve known.”

“What’d you think I meant?”

“I dunno,” I say. “I was just hoping...” I catch myself and change thought direction, “it wouldn’t involve pointy shoes and car chases.”

Vivian barely taps the brakes, jerks the wheel hard to the right and careens into a Kum and Go. She brakes just a couple of feet shy of the plate glass window.

“Go in there,” she points at the convenience store’s door with her chin, “and get some more smokes and a pop.”

“What, you don’t want me to take your shoe and rob the place while I’m in there?”

She tilts her chin down and looks at me over the top of her glasses like I’m not funny at all. She fishes a twenty out of her cleavage and hands it to me. “Get yourself something, too.”

I twist around and look over both shoulders and out the back window.

“What the hell’re you doing?”

“Looking for the camera,” I explain. “You’re with some reality show, right? Where you get people to do weird stuff and film it?”

Vivian grips the steering wheel with both hands and says very, very seriously, “This is real life, Lee. Real. And there’s some real money in it for you, too. If you just go get my POP AND CIGARETTES!”

“Okay, okay.” I give in, opening the door.

Inside the store I saunter over to the pop machine and fill a large cup with ice and Dr. Pepper.

Why do I always hook up with the bossy ones? Why do I always
let
them boss me around? That’s the question. Maybe it’s the shoes. I should stay away from women in spikey heels. Bossy women wear high heels. Or maybe it’s because the heels cause so much pain it makes them bitchy. I don’t really know. The only time I ever wore heels was at Junior Prom. They made me six foot two and my date was only five eight. He was an identical twin, I remember that. He sauntered up to me in the hall between classes and asked me to the prom. I said why not and he just walked away. He didn’t even say his name. And to this day I don’t know which twin I went to the prom with. And the fumbling almost-sex was nightmarish. I once saw a veterinarian stick his gloved fingers up a cat and it screeched bloody murder. The twin probably grew up to be a vet.

My teeth feel as if they’re wearing sweaters, so I stop in the toiletry aisle and grab a toothbrush, toothpaste and mouthwash. I get the little traveling miniature ones ’cause I like things when they make them tiny. Plus, they fit in my jacket pockets.

This weird kid with a purple mohawk, like maybe sixteen years old, is checking me out. He tries to impress me with his jailin’ jeans and he actually grabs his baggy crotch and licks his fuckin’ lips at me. What the hell? I have tattoos older than him. Suddenly, I’m in a really foul mood and I hate this tit-showing shirt.

I throw the twenty on the counter and pay for all the shit. The mohawk kid walks up beside me and tips his head at me in a hello gesture.

“I can see your ass crack,” I say to the little pockmarked pervert, grab my change and walk out the door.

And I am so not prepared for what isn’t there.

“Shit!” Oh, shitshitshitshitshit, I yell repeatedly inside my head. She’s gone. She’s fuckin’ jacked my El Camino and taken off. I throw the Big Gulp where my car used to be. That wasn’t such a good idea. Splashback hits me right in the face.

The little mohawked pervert walks up behind me. “Need a ride?” He grins and gestures to his VW bug.

I grab the waistband of his baggy-ass jeans and pull up as hard and as high as I can. He drops his pop and grabs his crotch at the same time. I walk him on his tippy-toes to his VW and shove him headfirst through the open window.

Okay, I don’t really do any of that. But I do
think
about doing it.

The kids just shrugs, gets in his car, turns the radio up full volume and leaves. I sit on the curb and fumble open the cigarettes I just bought. I shake one out of the pack and light it with shaking hands. My brain is spinning. Calling the cops is out. Calling Ginger for help is definitely out. This figures. I should’ve seen it coming. Women like her always do this to me. Lead me on, then jerk me off. What the hell am I thinking about? It’s not her I’m missing. It’s my car I’m missing. Isn’t it? She’s probably just getting back at me for the high school ice incident. This is her payback.

I brush my teeth and gargle. The only difference between me and that homeless guy walking by is that I still brush my teeth. Even if it is in a parking lot, sitting on a curb. I don’t have a home and I don’t have a car either. Last time I was homeless was because I actually ran away from home. My mom had left me and my stepfather and not long after that I left the bastard, too. I’d break into Chopper’s shop to sleep at night.

Chopper was my mom’s third husband. He was a biker, the real deal. He rode a chopped down Harley with big ape-hangers. He had a handlebar mustache and long hair that he wore in a braid. He had naked ladies tatted up both arms. He wasn’t my dad, he was better. I hung out at his motorcycle repair shop when I was a kid, and even after my mom kicked him out, I would sneak over to his shop and he’d let me watch him work.

I haven’t seen Chopper in years. I wonder if he still owns the shop and if I can sneak in there tonight to sleep.

Fuckin’ Vivian and her fuckin’ tits.

I crush out my third cigarette on the sole of my boot and suddenly, there’s a squeal of brakes and the smell of burning rubber and this putrid little metallic green Pinto lunges to a stop just inches away from my toes. The Pinto’s passenger door flings open and Vivian smiles at me from behind the wheel.

“Need a ride?” she asks.

The longer I sit here silent, watching her smoke and drive, drive and smoke, the madder I get. It’s like everything in the past year has been leading up to this one point, to this one second in time when all it takes is just one more bitch to make me lose it.

Vivian is on another talking jag. “So I just walk around the lot looking for an unlocked car. One row over,
Voila
! I get this beauty! Unlocked with the keys still in it, can you fuckin’ believe? Who in this day and age leaves their keys in the car? Sometimes I wish stupid hurt. Then maybe there wouldn’t be so much of it, you know?”

“Where’s my car?” I ask a full notch below calm.

“Oh, it’s safe,” she exhales.

I want to choke the casual right out of her and I don’t care how much jail time I’d be looking at, it’d be well worth it. I unclench my teeth long enough to ask, “What do you call safe exactly?”

“Walmart parking lot. In the employee section. Nobody’ll even know it’s abandoned for days.”