Tats

by Layce Gardner

  I sneeze a couple of times.

  New jeans, new T-shirt, new boxers, new sportsbra, and new socks, all compliments of WalMart. I’m a brand-new person. I even dabbed a tester of men’s cologne behind my ears. I thought I’d like it, but now I just smell like a man and cologne has always made me sneeze.

  “Bless you,” Vivian says.

  I survey my handiwork from the hammock. I did a pretty good job of setting up a nice campsite. I cheated a little by blowing up an air mattress and grabbing some pillows and blankets, but I really don’t want to have to sleep on the hard linoleum if I don’t have to. The tent is one of those fancy ones that sleeps a whole family. I couldn’t drive the pegs into the ground (obviously) so I held the ends down with free weights from the sports section.

  And, yes, I got the s’mores fixin’s which we cooked over the open flame of a gas grill. That made Vivian happy. She’s eaten about twenty of them already. Now that I stop and think about it, I’ve never seen her eat anything but sweets.

  “You ever eat anything but dessert?”

  “Nope. Why would you eat anything else when sugar is readily available?” she reasons.

  “But you never eat your pie.”

  “I don’t like pie,” Vivian answers.

  “You always order it.”

  Vivian shrugs. “I just like to know it’s there if I ever do want it.”

  There’s a red flag in there somewhere but I’m too fucked up to put it all together right now. “How many of those blue pills did I take?”

  “Just enough,” she says.

  “At least I’m not crocheting an afghan,” I sigh. “I can’t believe the stuff you talk me into.”

  “I don’t talk you into anything you don’t already want to do.”

  “You’re probably right.”

  Vivian stands and stretches her arms high above her head. “So what do people do in WalMart at night for fun?” she asks.

  “We could have sex,” I say, figuring what the hell maybe someday she’ll give in and that’s what her stretching like that in front of me does to my thoughts.

  “No, thank you,” she says politely, then adds, “I don’t get the whole lesbian thing. It’s so confusing.”

  I hang one leg off the hammock and put my boot on the floor, rocking myself back and forth. “Sometimes I don’t understand it either.”

  “I don’t understand the sex part. How it all works.”

  “There’s more to being a lesbian than just sex,” I say.

  “Like what?”

  “I can have sex with a man...I mean, I have had sex with men, a long time ago, and sometimes it was okay. But I just can’t imagine living with a man. Having to talk to him all the time. Sharing my bed with him. Sharing a bathroom with him. All that hair. Chest hair grosses me out.”

  Vivian crawls into the hammock and lays her head down by my boots. I pull her feet across my belly and massage them.

  “What do lesbians do in bed?” she asks.

  “Everything.”

  “Except there’s no penis.”

  “No real penis. You can buy a penis if you really want one,” I say.

  “Do you have one?” she asks.

  “Ginger got it in the divorce.”

  “So you’re sans penis right now.”

  “Yep,” I say. “And I don’t think WalMart sells them either.”

  “Don’t get mad at me,” Vivian states, “but, I don’t think two women having sex is really sex.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s more like heavy petting. It’s like back when you were parking out at the spooklight with a boy and you let them feel you up. That’s not sex.”

  “Some people think it is.”

  “It’s not sex.”

  “Well, in that case, do you wanna not have sex with me?”

  “No, thank you.”

  I grab her other foot and massage it. “Okay, then. You wanna have sex with me?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “I’m getting a little confused now.”

  “See? I told you it was confusing.”

  “Having sex with a woman is something every woman should experience. It’s way better than sex with a man,” I say with a tad of hope in my voice. “’Cause a woman knows how a woman works, you know. It’s about pleasing the other woman and not just getting yourself off.”

  “This is going to sound crass,” Vivian says, “but sometimes I just want a man. I just want to be fucked.”

  “I can fuck.”

  She pats my knee like a beloved pet. “I’m sure you can, honey, I’m sure you can.”

  “I bet if you didn’t know I was a woman...like if we were on The Dating Game and I was sitting behind the wall with two other men...and you couldn’t see me...based on just my answers to your questions, you’d pick me. You would chose me above the guys.”

  She laughs. “Okay, Bachelor number one...What is your favorite food?”

  “Toast,” I answer without hesitating.

  “Toast? Why?”

  “Because toast is the best vehicle for butter. I love butter.”

  “Hmmm...okay,” she thinks out loud. “So, if you and I were on a date in a restaurant, what would you order?”

  “I’d order a plate of butter, smear it all over your body, everywhere, and then roll you in sugar,” I say.

  “Good answer,” she laughs.

  I sit up and swing both legs over the side of the hammock.

  “Where you going?” she asks.

  “The dairy section.”

  Vivian swats me on the arm and laughs. “Finish my feet, goofball.”

  I lay back and Vivian rests both her feet across me again. She resumes the game with another question. “Bachelor number one...Tell me something about yourself. What do you like to do?”

  “Well...I like to poke dead things with a stick. I believe in aliens and ghosts and Bigfoot. And G-spots. I’m also a professional Roller Derby player.”

  “Ooh, how exciting! What’s your Roller Derby name?”

  “Lezzie Borden. Sometimes Phyllis Killer. Or Shelly Splinters.”

  “You’ve spent some time thinking about this,” Vivian laughs.

  “Yes, I have.”

  Vivian yawns big. “Do you really believe in aliens?” she asks sleepily.

  “I am an alien,” I confess. “I just wear this human body costume while I’m here visiting earth. My inside doesn’t match my outside at all. I’m here in this costume to collect earth specimens to take back to my home planet.”

  “What kind of specimens do you collect?”

  “I’m glad you asked,” I say. “Orgasms. I collect female orgasms. I collect all that massive energy and put it in one big jar. So far I’ve collected about five times the energy of an atom bomb.”

  “What’re you going to do with all that?”

  “Dominate the universe.”

  “Of course,” she says, closing her eyes and drifting off to sleep with a smile on her face.

  I watch her sleep for a moment. She’s beautiful. I wish there were some way I could show her just how beautiful she is to me.

  “You’re the best friend I’ve ever had,” she mumbles.

  “I love you too,” I say softly.

  I can’t sleep. I settle down and write in my journal for a long while, then walk aimlessly around the store, snacking on cold chicken nuggets, and end up in the book department. Since there’s nobody around to stop me, I do something I’ve always wanted to do. I pull all the Bibles off the shelf and restack them in the fiction section.

  I almost drop Vivian. Damn, she’s heavier than she looks. She’s like dead-lifting three big dog food bags. I stuff her head first into a cart on top of our bags. Her legs hang out over the sides and kind of flop around when I push, but there’s not much I can do about that. I roll her as gently as possible toward the front doors when I see one of those things the clerks walk around with. One of those sticker guns or whatever you call them. This is a big blue gun alre
ady loaded with a big roll of yellow happy face stickers.

  I can’t resist. I grab the gun and sticker Viv from head to toe. I put a yellow happy face sticker on every square inch of visible skin I see. I play nice, though, and don’t put any on her face. I put on stickers until the gun runs empty. That’ll teach her to pass out on me.

  I hide in the aisles with my loaded cart until the doors to Wally World slide open. I waltz right on out the front doors, wheeling Viv and her happy faces. The little old Greeter even calls after me, “Have a good day!”

  Chapter Ten

  I sit on the bench just inside the doors of WalMart with a cart full of Vivian in front of me and no idea what I should do next. I haven’t thought this through very far. I know I can’t take my new Harley. Once P.C. discovers the kid in Hell Camino, he’ll be looking for the bike.

  I keep one eye on the lookout and the other eye on Viv to make sure she stays breathing. A dead body in a cart right now would really complicate things. Plus, I don’t know how I’d explain the happy face stickers.

  Vivian looks pretty dead, but she keeps on breathing. She even snorts a little once in awhile.

  I finally come up with an idea. Maria, in prison, told me about it. It’s how she always got around town. Of course, she got caught a lot and ended up behind bars. That’s not what made her a lifer, though. She’s got life because of her hot Latina temper. She told me her lover wasn’t paying enough attention to her during a three-way so she accidentally killed her. I never asked how you accidentally kill somebody with your bare hands.

  What the hell, I decide to give Maria’s transportation scheme a try. I’m in it so deep now, one more little crime’s not going to hurt.

  A little old lady walks by me with a cart full of groceries. She pushes through the exit and out into the parking lot. I follow behind her a ways, pushing Vivian in my own cart.

  The lady stops her cart at the trunk of a big white Lincoln Continental and beeps the alarm off. I push past her car to the other side and pull my cart up next to a Honda Civic. I try to look busy, like I lost my keys in my pocket.

  The lady opens her driver’s side door and puts her keys and purse in the seat. So far Maria is right about the stupidity of people. She unlatches the trunk, walks behind its open lid and begins to pile her groceries in.

  That’s my cue.

  I open the passenger door to the Lincoln and as quickly as I can, I lift Vivian out of the cart and toss her in headfirst. I throw all the bags in on top of her and quietly shut the door. I run to the driver’s side and scramble inside. I check the rearview mirror, but the old lady is hidden behind the trunk lid and is busy with her groceries.

  I stick the key in the ignition and fire up the engine. I look over my left shoulder and see that the little old lady is frozen with a what-the-fuck? look on her face.

  I lay on the horn and the lady jumps to the side.

  I throw the car into reverse and peel out of the parking space, slamming into her cart and crunching some of her groceries under the tires. Whoops.

  By now the lady is flailing her arms and hopping up and down and yelling. I power down the passenger window and toss her purse out.

  “Sorry!” I shout and peel out of the lot.

  We’re not five minutes down the road before Vivian wakes up and is none too happy to find herself sitting on her head with her feet on the ceiling. She moans and groans a lot, but manages to get herself into a sitting position. She looks out the car window a couple of long, tense minutes and finally says, “What the fuck? Every time I go to sleep around you, I wake up in a different world.”

  “I couldn’t get you to wake up,” I explain. “And we had to get out of Wally World before P.C. came in after us.”

  She looks down at her body and blinks a few times.

  “I know, I know. You got really fucked up on pills last night and before I knew it you were putting those stickers all over yourself. I couldn’t make you stop.”

  I concentrate on the road, but feel Vivian staring hard at my profile.

  “I will get even,” she whispers. “Don’t think that I won’t.” She peels the stickers off one at a time and resticks them to the dash.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I say in total innocence. “I also just stole this car and don’t know where we’re going. Any ideas?”

  “Miss Jackson’s,” she orders. “I need some new clothes.”

  “We were just at WalMart!” I complain.

  “Oh, my God!” she gasps, horrified. “You don’t really think I’m going to wear WalMart clothes?!”

  The highest priced, fanciest women’s clothing store that Tulsa has to offer is Miss Jackson’s. Or as I prefer to call it: the seventh circle of hell.

  Vivian is in her element. She’s like UberWoman with shopping superpowers. Chameleon-like in her appearance, German in her appetite for expensive clothes, dangerous and deadly with her tongue, she’s able to find sales where none existed before.

  I stand guard on the sidewalk outside the front doors, smoking, reading some of my Zen paperback and hoping the cops don’t find the stolen car before we can get to wherever we’re going next.

  “It’s not called cheap, it’s called reasonable,” I argue.

  “We have two bags of money. We don’t have to be reasonable. Reasonable is for poor people,” Vivian reasons.

  She hands a hundred dollar bill to the bellhop after he drops the umpteen dozen Miss Jackson’s bags inside the front door.

  As soon as the bellhop (do they still call them bellhops?) closes the door behind him, Vivian smiles and says, “Money’s no good unless you spend it.”

  We’re in a different suite at the Crowne Plaza. The Presidential Suite was taken so Vivian had to settle for another. This one only has one bathroom, which is sandwiched in between two bedrooms. (The two bedrooms thing is rapidly becoming a sore spot with me.)

  Vivian throws open the door to the first bedroom and says, “This one’s yours.”

  She throws open the door to the second bedroom, the one with the view of the city, and says, “Put my bags in here.”

  I dump all the sacks of clothes at the foot of her bed and scooch the money bags under the bed with the toe of my boot.

  “I don’t think coming back here is the best idea you’ve ever had,” I complain. “This Prince Charles guy is probably scoping the place out.”

  “Wrong,” she counters. “Coming back here would be stupid and he knows I’m not stupid, so he won’t look here.”

  “But if he knows you’re not stupid, then he knows that you know he won’t look for you here, so he’s going to look for you here first.”

  “What?” she asks.

  “I’m just saying that if I were him and I was looking for you, this is the first place I’d look.”

  “But he’s too stupid to figure all that out,” she says.

  “He can’t be too stupid. He’s found us everywhere we go.”

  She doesn’t say anything. I point at the back of her knee. “You missed one.”

  She reaches down and pulls the sticker off, wads it into a tiny ball and flicks it at me like a booger.

  “So what’re we going to do now?” I ask, plopping down on her bed.

  “I’m going to shower and change,” she says.

  “You don’t have to change for me. I like you the way you are.”

  “Off my bed,” she orders.

  “You still mad about the stickers?”

  “Would you please remove your ass from my bed?” she asks, ever-so-politely with a light British accent.

  I don’t move. “Can I take a shower with you?”

  “Nope.”

  “Can we just make out some?” I ask.

  “I’m straight.”

  “So? I’ve made out with lotsa straight women. That didn’t mean they were gay.”

  She opens drawers and piles her new clothes in. “No, thank you,” she answers politely.

  “You can close your eyes an
d pretend I’m a man.”

  “How very Yentl,” she says.

  “I can just watch you masturbate.”

  She orders, “Get out of my room.”

  “Or you could watch me masturbate.”

  Vivian marches to her door and holds it open, gesturing for me to exit.

  “Okay,” I say, dragging my feet out the door. “But if you change your mind...”

  “...you’ll be the first to know,” she says, shutting the door behind me.

  I go into my own room and slam my door. I sit on the bed and bounce. I hear the shower turn on in the bathroom. I lie on the bed with my hands behind my head and stare at the ceiling.

  I can’t believe I’m actually thinking that somehow someway someday Vivian is going to let me love her or love me back. I weigh my chances and know the odds aren’t good. So why do I keep on keeping on? I guess I don’t really have anything better to do. It’s not like I left something better behind.

  I must’ve fallen asleep because a man’s voice jerks me awake. I sit up and will the grog to leave my brain. Maybe I just heard the TV or something.

  I get up and open the door to the bathroom. It’s steamy and there’s two towels lying on the floor next to a pile of clothes that Vivian was wearing. She’s finished with her shower.

  I hear his voice again.

  I press my ear against the door leading to Vivian’s bedroom. I can’t hear anything. I’m thinking about using one of those wrapped glasses by the sink—like how they do in movies—press it up against the door and stick your ear over it—then I hear the voice again and recognize a definite British accent.

  Shit. I look around the bathroom for a weapon. My choice is wet towels or a drinking glass. Shit. I ease the door open and put one eye up to the crack.

  I can’t believe what I’m seeing. Vivian is full monty-showing naked. She’s one of those women who look even better out of her clothes than in them. (Well, according to me, that’s true for all women.) But then that thought disappears as soon as I see Prince Charles. He’s wearing slacks, shirt and a tie. Vivian slithers up to him and rubs herself against him. She kisses his neck and works his belt at the same time.