Tats Too (25 page)

I grab Vivian’s hand, she slings her big-ass purse over her shoulder and we head for the door.

“This isn’t the end,” Dillon whispers to my back.

“You bet your sweet ass it’s not,” I say, closing the door softly behind me.

***

I lead the way down the dark streets of downtown Albuquerque as if I know where I’m going. Vivian straggles behind me a few paces. I left the building feeling all full of myself and swollen up with courage, but with each step I take the steam whistles out of my body leaving me empty like a burnt teapot.

We don’t have any money on us. I’m dressed in Festus drag. She has on mismatched flannel pajamas and tennis shoes.

“Got any food in that big-ass purse?” I ask already knowing her answer.

“Nope,” she says.

No food. No phone. No money. No transportation. No idea what to do next.

I stop walking. I turn loose of Vivian’s hand, lean my back against a brick building and sink to my ass on the cold concrete sidewalk. I’m deflated. I bury my face in my hands.

Vivian sits down next to me. “Baby?” she whispers.

“I don’t want any fucking diamond.”

She doesn’t say anything.

“I just want our life back,” I sputter.

She places her arm over my shoulders and pulls me close.

“I want Georgia,” I full-out cry.

“Me, too.”

Oh, friggin’ great. Now we’re both crying. And the harder I cry, the harder she cries.

I cry until my tears run dry and my voice is hoarse. Then I still shake and dry sob.

I only stop when I see a ten-dollar bill in my face. I look up and there’s a man. A man wearing a backwards ball cap and a kind smile. “Take this,” he says. “Use it for some food. No drugs. No liquor. Food. Okay?”

“Okay,” I sniffle, accepting the money. He nods and walks away happy knowing he did his good deed for the day.

Son-of-a-bitch. We’re homeless people.

Vivian cuddles up next to me and lays her head on my lap. She closes her eyes and I play with her hair. She makes little mewing noises and just when I think she’s asleep, she says, “Tell me one of your stories, Lee.”

I look around. Here we are sitting on our asses in the middle of a downtown street in Albufuckingquerque and nobody around us. It’s dark and more than a little stinky down here and the concrete is cold and hard and scratchy on my ass. And Vivian wants a story.

Maybe I should do an uplifting one. Something inspirational. ’Cause right now reality sucks hard.

“Story…okay.” I just start talking with no real idea where it’s going. “Okay… Once upon a time… In an enchanted land not so far away and a time that’s so close it’s somewhere between yesterday and tomorrow there lived a beautiful laughing Princess with gorgeous, long red hair. They called her the Laughing Princess because she laughed all day long. She laughed in her sleep. She laughed while she crocheted afghans, she laughed while she mopped ceilings, she laughed while she drank, she laughed on the toilet, in the tub, she laughed all the way through school and then she laughed halfway around the world and back again. Her laughter caused her great pain. You see, because of her laughter nobody would have her as their wife. One day the King sent out a proclamation that read:
My daughter, the Laughing Princess, wishes to marry. I will choose as her mate the man who can cease her laughing sorrow.
The very next day the castle walls were bursting with eligible bachelors. The King sent the first candidate in to the Laughing Princess. The man raised his fist in anger and yelled, “Stop laughing! Or I will beat you!” Well, this made the Princess laugh so hard she tinkled her panties. The King sent in another man to the Princess. This man gave the Princess magic pills to make her stop laughing. But the pills just made her laughter uncontrollable. The King sent in another man. This man was a foreigner from another land who talked with a funny, sissy accent. He offered her money and a great big diamond if she’d stop laughing. But he just made her laugh even harder than ever before. By the end of three days, the Princess had laughed at every man in the Kingdom. Then one night soon after, a strange mist crept into her castle bedroom. The mist curled its fingers around her bed. And the Princess awoke to see a woman standing at the foot of her bed shrouded in this mist. “Who are you?” the Laughing Princess asked. The strange woman said, “I followed t
he sound of your laughter and I swam the moat outside the castle grounds and catapulted myself over the castle wall and scaled this tower with my bare hands. All to find the source of this beautiful laughing music.” The Princess laughed. The woman thought the Princess’s laughter sounded like choir bells and ginger snaps and Christmas presents being opened and baseball cards in bicycle spokes and puppies growling at squeaky toys and everything good in the universe all at the same time. So she laughed, too. When the strange woman laughed…little by little…it took away some of the Princess’s pain and sorrow. Each chortle, each chuckle, every giggle from the strange woman eased the Princess’s sorrow and she stopped laughing. The Princess grabbed the woman in her arms and kissed her ecstatically. The kiss confirmed what the Princess already knew in her heart—that this woman was sent to her, and to her only, to walk the kingdom grounds with her and make her castle a home and to raise a family together and to love forever. The End.”

Vivian yawns contentedly and closes her eyes.

“And the important part of this story,” I continue, “is that they live happily ever after.”

“No,” Vivian counters with a deep yawn, “the important part is that I’m a princess.”

She yawns again and drifts off.

***

My butt falls asleep and wakes me up. The sun is peeking over the buildings, promising to be a real scorcher. I moan and stretch out my shrunken muscles. Vivian jerks her head up. We’re exactly where we were—on a sidewalk in Albuquerque.

“I smell something,” I say, not yet decided if it’s a good or bad something.

Vivian sits up. “It wasn’t me.”

I sniff the air a couple of three times. “It smells like…incense.”

I haul my stiff body to a standing position and follow my nose to an open door in the building we were sleeping against. Long strands of beads dangle in the doorway. I part the beads with my hands and stick my face inside.

It’s a little room. Dark except for a billion burning candles. They must be the incense I smelled. There’s a little card table sitting in the middle of the floor with two wooden chairs on either side. Heavy fabric rugs hang on the walls.

“Come inside,” intones a croaky voice.

I step through the beads.

A figure enters the room. She pulls back her lace veil showing a dark wrinkled face like a walnut. She’s dressed in a grab-bag of scarves and polyester. Her long fingernails and long toenails are painted deep purple and she wears so many bangles and beads that she rings like a wind chime as she walks over to a chair.

“Madame Zora has been expecting you,” she says, gesturing for me to take the chair across from her. I wonder if she’s Madame Zora or if there’s an older, wiser woman hiding somewhere.

“I don’t have much money,” I say.

She clicks her nails together like castanets, then holds her gnarled hands out to me. I walk toward her and she grabs my hands in hers.

“You are searching,” she intones.

“Yes,” I agree, noticing that she doesn’t clarify what I’m trying to find.

She leads me toward the empty chair across from her and I sit. She flips my left hand over, palm up, and traces one pointy fingernail over the lines in my palm.

“What do you see?” I ask, breathlessly.

“You are lost. You are looking for direction.”

“Yes.”

She squints harder at my hand. “Your feet follow your heart.”

“I guess so,” I say. “Can you see my future?”

She closes her eyes and lays my hand over her chest. I feel her heart flutter like a hummingbird’s wings against my palm. Her eyes jerk back and forth under her eyelids. She rocks and moans without opening her mouth. It sounds like it hurts.

“I see…” she whispers. I have to lean in closer to hear her words. “I see…death’s chariot. Death’s chariot will follow a diamond hanging like the north star to…La Ville Lumière,” she says with an amazingly good French accent.

“What else?” I urge.

She jerks out of the trance and looks at me scared.

“What?”

“That is all,” she says, turning loose of my hand.

“You saw something, what was it?”

“I told you all I saw.”

“Something scared you. What was it?”

She shakes her head.

“Tell me,” I say, grabbing her hand and insisting.

Her wrinkles all point down into a sad, sad frown. “I saw you…in a coffin,” she relents.

“Can you read my palm?” Vivian asks.

When did Vivian walk in? I guess I was so engrossed in my future I didn’t notice her. Vivian thrusts her palm under Madame Zora’s nose and asks again, “Can you read
my
palm?”

I look at Vivian’s hand. Written in red ink across her palm are the words,
Eat Me.

I stand and shout, “Vivian! Madame Zora and I were having a serious conversation here!”

Vivian rares back and kicks me in the shin.

“Ouch!”

When I open my eyes, Vivian is hovering over me, kicking me in the leg. “Wake up sleepyhead,” she says, toeing me in the ass.

I push myself into a sitting position and look around. I’m on the sidewalk. I guess I was sleeping. Sleeping and dreaming. What the hell was I dreaming about? I can’t remember.

“I smell something,” I utter, groggily.

“It wasn’t me,” Vivian says. “C’mon, get up. We need to find
us a car.”

***

We meander the streets as morning breaks hot and hard over the rat maze of city buildings. I follow Vivian’s shoes as she winds a path through the early morning business crowd. The streets are thick with people and cars and briefcases and cell phones and all the trappings of a middle-class life. Somewhere along the way the American Dream has turned into a nightmare and all these people are searching for the cheese at the end of the maze. They’re scurrying about like little mouse-zombies.

Blisters are forming on the backs of my heels from flip-flopping in these big shoes. It seems like we’ve been walking for hours with no real direction and my up-and-at-’em has done got up and gone.

Vivian freezes and I bump off her back. She grabs my arm and points across the street.

I look to where she’s pointing, but all I see is a white clapboard building with a hand-painted sign out front:
Mount Olive Holy Zion Calvary 1
^st
Pentecostal Church.
People all dressed in black are streaming through the front doors. A big, long, black hearse is backed up to the side door and its engine is running.

Oh, hell, no.

“No,” I whisper. “No hearse, Vivian, no effing way.”

“It’s just sitting there. Running. Ready to go,” she says, like it’s begging to be stolen. “It’s a sign from God.”

That is definitely not a sign from God. A sign from God is a burning bush or a swarm of locusts or frogs dropping out of the sky. I’ve seen that Charlton Heston film at least a dozen times and a hearse at a funeral was definitely not in that movie.

“There’s too many people,” I argue. “They’re having a funeral service. They’ll stop us before we’re even out of the driveway.”

“Not if you go in there and create a diversion,” she says.

“A diversion?” I squeak. “Why me? You’re much better equipped to divert than I am.”

“Because I’m wearing pajamas and you at least have on something that looks funeralesque,” she says. “You go in and divert, I’ll steal the hearse. And I’ll meet you two blocks that
way,” she points, then shoves me off the curb. “Go!”

I turn back to her and plead, “It’s a frickin’ church, Viv. I don’t feel right about diverting inside a church.”