Tats Too (14 page)

CornNuts whips Gay Cop around and sticks the business end of his pistol in the guy’s mouth. “Where are they?” he yells.

Gay Cop blubbers something around the gun’s barrel and starts crying real tears. The other Goodfella comes to the front of the car and aims his shotgun at Gay Cop’s crotch. They both start screaming at once and CornNuts frisks Gay Cop. That’s how he finds the tracking device in his pocket.

CornNuts throws the tracking device into the middle of the street, letting loose with a stream of Italian obscenities. Both Goodfellas jump back in the van and speed away.

Gay Cop stands in the middle of the intersection with a big piss stain on the front of his pants, shaking and sweating. Traffic starts moving again, cars honk at Gay Cop and one truck driver even flips him the bird, taunting, “Get the fuck outta the street, asshole!”

Damn, real life is way better than TV.

I pull the curtain closed and look at Vivian.

“What d’ya want for dinner?” she asks.

***

I get out of the shower, wrap the thin motel towel around me and find Vivian lying on the bed, wearing just an old OU T-shirt and panties, surrounded by fast-food wrappers and looking as content as a well-fed cat.

I grab the burger bag from the top of the TV and pull out a cheeseburger, large fries, melting chocolate shake and an empty fried pie wrapping.

“What happened to my pie?” I ask, tossing the empty container at her.

“I ate it,” Vivian purrs. She picks up the empty container and shakes it over her open mouth to catch any crumbs.

“You ate two pies?”

“Sure,” she says matter-of-factly. “I’m not afraid of getting fat anymore.”

I plop down in the gold velour chair under the green swag lamp next to the bed and unwrap my cheeseburger while she sucks down the dregs of her own shake. I turn the burger upside down to eat because I like the cheese to hit my palate before the meat does. “So you’ve gone from never eating pie to eating my pie,” I mumble around a big mouthful.

“Sure seems that way.”

I chew and swallow. “From now on I would appreciate it if you would just eat your own pie.”

“Honey, if I could eat my own pie, I’d never leave the house.”

I laugh and toss a french fry at her. Vivian picks it out of her hair and holds it like a cigarette. She turns over onto her stomach and pulls a piece of crumpled paper and a pencil out of her cleavage. She nibbles on the french fry while ironing out the paper with the side of her hand.

“What’s that?” I ask.

“Your bucket list.”

“Not again…” I groan.

“I never got past number one. I want to read the rest of it.” She reads, “Number two. Read the Bible all the way through.” She gives me a horrified look. “Are you insane?”

I shrug. “I wanna know what all the brouhaha is about.”

“Brouhaha? Did you really just say the word
brouhaha
?” She laughs, then affects a stiff, proper accent, “You sit there in your pantaloons, supping on a cheeseburger and dare speak to me of brouhaha?”

“It’s a real word, Viv.”

“You need to lay off those damn crossword puzzles.”

“I just want to read the Bible is all,” I say. “I’ve only gotten through a couple of books.”

“Well, I’ve read it all,” she says. “It’s scary as hell. Take my advice and just read the sex parts. Okay…” She goes back to the list and continues reading, “Number three. Parachute out of an airplane.” She sighs deeply and draws a line through number three, saying, “Not happening.”

“Why?”

“Because you could plummet to your death. You don’t write death wishes on a bucket list, Lee. That’s like an oxymoron or
something.”

“Are you calling me a moron?” I grin.

“Nope, you’re an idiom.”

I stick my leg out and tickle the bottom of her foot with my toes, teasing, “You just don’t want me to die. Why don’t you just admit that you love me so much you couldn’t live without me?”

Vivian smiles slyly and turns onto her side, resting her head on her hand. “It’s just logic, Lee. If you died how would you ever complete number one?”

“That’s why they’re in order,” I explain, running my foot up her leg as far as I can reach.

Vivian pulls her leg away. “Fucking a fat woman is number one on your to-do list?”

“Was,” I say quickly. “Feel free to mark it out.”

She draws a big black line through number one and, I notice, moves her leg back so that my toes can tickle the inside of her thigh.

“Number four,” she continues, “have sex on my motorcycle.” She looks pleased with that one as she says, “Oh, that’s an easy one.”

“That one can happen?” I ask eagerly.

“Sure. I don’t have a problem with that. It’ll be parked, right?”

“Whatever.”

“Okay, as long as it’s parked, and it’s not with a fat woman.”

I scooch my butt down in the chair a little further. Just far enough that my big toe can tease her through the thin fabric of her pantaloons.

“Number five,” she reads around the french fry cigarette clenched between her teeth. “Write a book.” She draws a line through that one, too, saying, “Number five accomplished.”

She wiggles a tiny bit against my toe and continues, “Number six.”

Six? I only wrote five. That I remember, anyway.

She continues reading, “Make love with Vivian in a Fu King motel because she’s not on her Fu King period anymore.”

She doesn’t need to tell me twice. I set down my burger and fall to my knees on the shag carpet beside the bed, grinning from head to toe. I mean, if it was actually possible to grin from head to toe then that’s exactly what I’m doing.

“I believe you owe me a piece of pie,” I say, grabbing her by the ankles and pulling her to the edge of the bed.

***

I’m up at the asscrack of dawn taking another shower when Vivian walks in to pee. “Please don’t flush,” I say nicely.

She flushes.

I jump out of the scalding water with soap still all over me. I slip in my own suds and trip over the edge of the tub, knocking my shin on the toilet. “Goshdangit, Vivian!” I yell through the open bathroom door. “How many times are you going to boil me in shower?”

I rip one of the towels off the rod, clench it around my dripping, sudsy body and hop into the bedroom. She’s sitting on the edge of the bed, rubbing the miniature jar of free-with-room lotion on her legs.

“I can’t believe I’ve been reduced to motel lotion,” she says like she can’t even see me bleeding half to death.

I thrust my skinned shin under her nose. “Look what you did.”

“Poor baby,” she coos, leaning down to kiss it.

I jerk my leg away from her approaching lips. I don’t want to be mothered right now. I’m feeling a certain amount of righteous indignation about my boo-boo, and it’s high time she realizes how much damage she does by invading my privacy with her ill-timed peeing. “I’d like…just for once…to take a shower without you flushing the toilet.”

“Gawd,” she drawls, “Look who woke up cranky this morning. I guess PMS is contagious.”

“It’s not PMS,” I say, throwing the useless towel to the floor and grabbing my dirty pants off the dresser. “It pisses me off every day of the month when you do that. Especially when I’ve asked you a million times not to.”

“I can’t help it that you always take a shower at the exact same time that I always have to go to the bathroom.”

“You’re not going to turn this into my fault,” I say, hopping around the room with one foot in and one foot out, trying to get my pants on while I’m still dripping wet.

She pulls her shirt off over her head and reaches down to grab the little lotion bottle.

Dammit. All the blood rushes out my head and goes south and now I can’t remember what I was going to say. And that pisses me off even more. “And you always do that, too.”

“Do what?” she asks innocently, pouring some lotion on her tits and rubbing it in in little circles that completely mesmerize me.

I turn my back to her, pull the pants up and take a deep breath. “Every time you’re losing an argument, you whip out your tits and I forget what I was arguing about.”

“Oh, so now you’re mad at me because you’re so tit-obsessed you can’t think straight? That’s my fault, too?”

I grab my sports bra and wiggle into it. “You do it on purpose.”

“You can turn around now,” she says with a not-very-well-hidden chuckle.

I peek over my shoulder. She has a shirt on. Now that her tits are stowed again, I remember what was pissing me off. I decide to take a stand. I need to be firm. So, I tell her in a fed-up voice, “I just want some privacy in the shower for five minutes. Just five fucking minutes.” I even point my finger at her just so she can see how very serious I am.

She shoots me a warning look while she laces up her tennis shoes. I pretend not to see it because I’ll be damned if I’m going to be one of those hen-pecked old men who swallow their pride every time their wife looks at them cross-eyed. “Is that too much to ask?”

I guess it is because she stands up and cocks her head at me with one eye squinted like she’s targeting down a scope. “You know what I ask, Lee? I want you to stop drinking the fucking milk out of the jug and get a goddamn glass to pour it into. That’s what I ask.”

I snort through my nose to tell her how childish she’s being. “Is that all?”

“No. While we’re on the subject of listing all my faults, let me tell you a few of your own.”

I shrug. “Go ahead.”

“I hate it when you eat the spray cheese straight out of the can.”

“Well, you don’t eat spray cheese. I’m the only one in the house who does. So who cares if it’s just my lips that’ll be touching it anyway?”

“It’s germy, that’s why.”

I pull the shirt over my head where she can’t see me roll my eyes at her. “Everybody in the world does it, Vivian. They made the can to do that. If they didn’t want you to spray it right into your mouth they wouldn’t have made it so damn easy to do.”

“Well, by that logic, they shouldn’t have put the toilet next to the shower where it’s so damn easy to pee while somebody’s taking a shower.”

“You don’t have to flush it and make the cold water go away!”

“I’m not going to pee and not flush! That’s so gross!”

“And you always put the toilet paper roll on backward. It’s supposed to go on like how a motorcycle throttle works. Roll toward you.” I rev an imaginary throttle at her. “Vroom, vroom. Toward you.”

She scoops all her girlie crap off the nightstand and back into her red bag. “At least I put the toilet paper on the doo-hickey. You never even change it. And…I hate it when you use your finger as a knife to scoop the peanut butter out of the jar.”

“You really should get some therapy about your weird food issues,” I say, grabbing my socks and shoes.

“If everything were left up to you, you’d be eating right out of jars and never flushing the toilet.”

“I flush!” I throw a sock at her. “I always flush.”

Vivian snatches the sock out of the air and hot-potatoes it back to me. “I also don’t like it when you dust the furniture with your dirty socks.”

“What?”

“Don’t act like you don’t know what I’m talking about. I’ve seen you. You take off your stinky socks and dust the furniture all the way to the dirty clothes hamper with it.”

I didn’t know she’d seen me do that. “It’s called multitasking,” I explain. “The whole house stays dusted and I don’t have to set aside time just to dust. All I have to do is take different routes to the dirty clothes hamper each time. It’s a brilliant idea.”

“It’s a friggin’ gross idea,” she says disgustedly. “And I hate it when you pee while in the shower.”

“How the hell do you know that?”

“I didn’t. I just guessed. Because that would be another one of your brilliant multitasking ideas.” She lowers her voice a little and puts on a stupid hillbilly accent, imitating me, “That way I don’t have to set aside time just to pee.”