Tats

by Layce Gardner

  “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.

  “Why do I have the eerie feeling you just made me dig my own grave?”

  “You’re kidding, right?” Vivian leans over the hole and peers down deep. “Actually, that’s pretty good. You did a good job, Lee.”

  “Thanks, Viv, I really appreciate that.”

  “Think you can open the lid now?”

  “Me? I’m not messing with a dead person. I did the digging, you do the opening.”

  “Oh, fer chrissakes, why do I have to do everything around here?” she actually has the nerve to say. “Dead person, my ass, I’ll just pretend it’s an Englishman and walk on his back.”

  She hops down into the grave and when she lands on top of the coffin she does a little extra bounce on her toes. I half-expect her to clap and yell, “We’ve got spirit, yes, we do, we’ve got spirit, how ’bout you?” But instead, she crawls off the coffin and into the space next to it. She bends, grabs the lid of the coffin and grunts and groans until her face turns red, but she still can’t get it up.

  “Use your legs, not your back,” I encourage.

  She takes a deep breath, grits her teeth and tries again. The lid groans and makes a weird sucking noise. I stick the lip of the shovel in under the edge of the lid and two groans and a couple of sucks later, voila! as Vivian would say. The lid is up and I’m looking down at the whitest, deadest person I’ve ever seen. “Gross, man, that’s just horrible to look at.”

  Vivian shakes her head sadly. “You’re sooo right. That make-up is just awful. Poor thing. They’ll never let her into heaven looking like that.” She licks her thumb and corrects the dead woman’s makeup, smearing the red stuff on her cheeks around in little circles.

  “Viv, I don’t think we have time for a makeover right now. I’m breaking about ten different laws up here.”

  She takes one final swipe at the dead woman’s cheeks. “Do you recognize her now?” she asks.

  “Nope,” I answer.

  “It’s Tanya, silly.”

  “Tanya who?”

  “Tanya Spencer? The basketball queen our senior year? She was a good friend of mine. She got really fat, but you know she just lost over a hundred pounds? Then she died. Figures, right? That’s why I don’t quit smoking. If I did, I’d probably just get hit by a bus the next day. She had her stomach stapled so she wouldn’t eat so much, then she had an Alka-Seltzer and her stomach inflated, the staples flew off and she imploded. It killed her instantly. Sad story, really.”

  “Mmhmmm, okay. Now can you tell me why I dug up the former fat basketball queen?”

  “Okay, check this out,” she says, pulling up on the dead body’s ankles, trying to raise its legs. The legs refuse to bend. “Rigor mortis, damn...” Vivian says.

  Vivian puts her shoulder into the job and tries again.

  Nothing.

  “I need some help here,” she says, looking up at me.

  I shake my head. “We went over this already. No fuckin’ way I’m messin’ with a dead body.”

  Vivian glares at me a moment, then tries again. This time she braces one leg against the dirt wall, grabs the ankles and pulls with her whole body.

  Snap!

  Oh my God, I don’t want to even think about where that snap came from.

  Unfazed, Vivian lifts Tanya’s legs and pulls two big leather bags out from under the body and her miles of taffeta. She heaves the bags up to me. I catch them and set them on the dirt pile.

  “Open ’em up,” Vivian dares.

  I kneel and unsnap a bag. I open it and cannot believe what the hell I’m seeing: stacks of money, more money than I’ve ever seen or even ever dreamed of seeing in my lifetime.

  “Good hiding place, huh? Nobody would ever think to look here.”

  “How much is here?” I ask, awestruck.

  Vivian shrugs. “Half a mil give or take.”

  “How the hell did you get it in her casket?�
�

  “They had a private viewing of the body yesterday,” she answers like it’s the most logical thing in the world.

  “That’s a little on the sick side, Vivian.”

  “It worked didn’t it? And it’s not like she minded,” she reasons.

  There is a certain logic there, I have to admit.

  I open the other bag and, yep, it’s full of bills, too. I grab a handful, stick them under my nose, close my eyes and take a deep whiff. Newly minted, crisp hundred dollar bills. “They should make car air fresheners that smell like this,” I say, looking down at Vivian.

  But Vivian isn’t looking at me. She’s looking at something behind me. Her eyes are open wide and her mouth is in the shape of a big O. I whip my neck around and—

  “Freeze!” A flashlight beam hits me full in the face.

  Shit fire. It’s a Rent-A-Cop. The fat kid in school who plays with action figures and grew up but still lives with his parents type of Rent-A-Cop. The bad thing about Rent-A-Cops is they’re wannabe policemen and they have a tendency to try too hard. The good thing about Rent-A-Cops is they couldn’t pass the I.Q. test to be real cops. At least that’s what I’m counting on when I whisper, “Help...Please, God, help me.”

  “What’s goin’ on?” he asks and takes a couple of tentative steps closer to me.

  I chance a glance behind me and see that Vivian is crouched down, hiding, in the open grave. “You gotta help me,” I whisper plead to R.A.C. I throw in a couple of fake sobs to make my act seem more realistic. “They killed my friend. They’re making me bury her. They’re going to kill me next.”

  R.A.C. plays his light beam over the freshly dug grave. I edge a bit closer to the shovel, saying, “They’re making me dig my own grave.”

  “Where they at?” R.A.C. whispers back.

  Hook, line and sinker, this guy. Dumb as a rock.

  I point into the darkness behind him. He spins on his heels and in one swift movement, I grab the shovel and land a solid whack against the back of his head.

  The sound the shovel makes connecting with his skull makes my stomach lurch.

  R.A.C. drops to his knees and stays that way for so long I think he’s going to get back up. But he doesn’t. He finally falls face forward into the mud.

  I drop the shovel, look down into the grave and straight at Vivian. “I killed Rent-A-Cop in the graveyard with a shovel,” I say. “And I know I just said that like it’s the end of the game of Clue, but I wasn’t trying to be funny and I think I’m actually going to throw up.”

  “Just breathe,” Vivian says, “and help me outta here.”

  Vivian holds out her hand and I pull her out of the grave. She stands still beside me looking at the motionless body. “Is he breathing?” she asks.

  “I dunno, I’m too afraid to look.”

  Vivian runs over to him, squats down in the mud beside him and puts her fingers on the inside of his neck. “He’s alive,” she says. “You just gave him a helluva headache for when he wakes up.”

  “Are you sure?” I ask.

  She nods. “You going to be okay?”

  I nod. “I really wanna leave, though.”

  “Okay,” Vivian says, taking control of the situation. “Get the bags and go to the car. I’ll take care of stuff here.”

  I do what she says because my brain has declared mutiny and refuses to work on its own. I toss the money bags in the back of the Pinto and sit in the passenger seat and practice taking deep breaths so I won’t hyperventilate. I roll down the window and light a cigarette and try not to think about how easy that was for me. I could’ve killed that man just like that. Just that easy. Oh my God, I’m still thinking about it. I need to stop.

  I think I just reached the point of no return. I’m in this as deep as Vivian now. Deeper maybe.

  Two cigarettes later, Vivian gets in behind the wheel and starts up the car.

  “What were you doing out there?” I ask.

  “Wiping the fingerprints off the shovel and the casket.”

  “Where is he?”

  “He’s down in the hole giving Tanya a thrill,” she says.

  “You buried him?!” I scream. I don’t know where the fuck that scream just came from, but it hangs in the air until Vivian screams back at me, “I didn’t bury him! He’s alive! I’m not going to bury a live person!”

  “Oh. Good.” I go back to concentrating on breathing again.

  Vivian pulls her big-ass red bag into her lap, digs out the aspirin bottle, pries the lid off with her teeth and shakes some pills into her palm. She hands me two little blue pills. “Take these.”

  “What are they?”

  “Feel good pills, just take them.”

  I don’t even argue. I just throw them in my mouth, dry swallow, lay my head back on the seat and close my eyes.

  I feel Vivian throw the car into D and take off.

  Am I asleep or awake? My eyes are closed so I must be asleep. But this dream seems really real.

  I open my eyes. Vivian is driving with one hand and smoking with the other. I turn and peer into the backseat. Two bags are sitting there as easy as you please. That part wasn’t a dream.

  Half a million dollars. Holy shit. If she gives me half of that then I’ll have half of a half of a million dollars. My brain can’t calculate right now, but I still know that’s a lot of money.

  What the hell will I do with that much money? I pull my journal and pen out of my jacket and make a list. At the top of the list I write Harley Heritage Softail.

  Vivian is talking. Has she been talking this whole time? What are those pills she gave me? She’s right about them, though, I feel really, really good.

  Vivian’s constant stream of words weave around thoughts of my future Harley: “One Thursday I went over to Prince Charles’s mansion and I’m early and I find him wearing my favorite Victoria Secret lingerie and my lipstick and my heels. I hate it when men wear my clothes, don’t you?”

  Black or two-tone purple and cream? Black. You just can’t go wrong with black.

  “So I drop a couple of viagara in Prince Charles’s scotch and handcuff him to the bed and after four hours his willie hurts and he’s crying my mascara down his face. So I take pictures of him with his cell phone and send them to his entire address book.”

  Whitewall tires. I love that retro look.

  “And I leave him there in my panties with a blue willie that won’t wilt and I break into his safe because he’s stupid enough to have his birthday as the combination, but even that took me a while to figure out because you know how we write the month, the day, then the year? They write the day first, then the month, then the year.”

  Maybe I can find a Softail with some ghost flames. Or even some orange flames shooting up from the front fender and along the tank.

  “But once I cracked it, I took everything in the safe, and his wife had this stupid toy poodle that was always shitting on the carpet, so I took some of that poodle poo and locked it back up in the safe. I hopped a plane and here I am half a million richer for it.”

  Vivian pauses, so I jump in, “Is that the boyfriend who’s chasing you? Prince Charles that you stole the money from?”

  “Honey, I earned that money. Every cent of it.” Vivian dismisses me with a wave of her hand. “And now you and I are a couple of rich bitches driving off into the sunset.”

  “Sunrise.”

  “What are you going to buy?” she asks. “Whatever you want, darlin’, it’s all yours, compliments of Prince Charles.”

  I whisper reverently, “A Softail. My dream bike. A Harley Heritage Softail.”

  “It’s yours,” she says, “it’s all yours. As long as you promise to take me wherever I wanna go. Do you know where I can find Choo shoes in Oklahoma?”

  That one makes me laugh. I am so laughing now. Great big bubbles of laughter. She begins laughing, too, and the Pinto weaves around the road.

  “Drive!” I yell. “Don’t forget to drive.” Then I add as an afterthough
t, “Thelma.”

  “Nu-uh,” she says, bringing the car back to the American side. “You’re Thelma. I’m Louise.”

  “No, I wanna be Louise. You can be Thelma.”

  “That wouldn’t make sense, Lee. I have to be Susan Sarandon,” Vivian explains. “I always drive, number one. You’re taller, number two. And, number three, I have bigger tits.”

  “Touché,” I say. “So, where we going, Louise?”

  “Any fuckin’ where we want,” Louise says, with a cackle. “Any fuckin’ where we want.” She lights a cigarette off her last one and asks, “What d’ya keep writing down over there?”

  “It’s my journal,” I explain. “I’ve written in it ever since I was a kid.”

  “Am I in it?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Can I read it?” she asks.

  “You’ll have to wait for the movie to come out,” I answer. “Right now this would be the montage scene. You’re buying Choos inside a fancy shoe store. Cut. I’m riding a new Harley. Cut. More Choos. Cut. I’m trying on some bitchin’ leather chaps. Cut. You’re buying thigh high leather Choos. Cut...”

  She jumps in, “I’m getting liposuction. Cut. Botox injections. Cut. Modeling my new, huge pert tits. Cut.”

  “New tits? Since when do you need new tits?”

  “Oh, honey...” she sighs. “These have been through the wringer. I’m ready to trade them in for a newer model. I’m thinking something French this time.”

  “I emphatically disagree.”

  “Then you can keep your own little titties. But mine are going to be sufuckingperb.”

  I try to look at the bright side. “Can I least help you pick them out?”

  “Sure,” she agrees, then whoops gleefully, pounding the steering wheel, “Mama’s getting a fucking overhaul!”

  “You swear too much,” I say. “Louise didn’t cuss as much as you.”

  “Why, I hardly swear at all,” she says.

  “I bet you can’t go an entire five seconds without cussing,” I dare her.

  “Five seconds? No problem.”

  And just to prove me wrong, she does. An entire five seconds. I count the seconds down on my fingers, one Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi...

  “Okay,” I say, “but you didn’t even talk. It doesn’t count if you don’t talk. I dare you to talk and not swear at the same time.”