Tats Too (26 page)

“You’re a lesbian. You’re already going to hell,” she reasons and shoos me with a flapping hand. “Just go have fun with it.”

Oh my God. Have fun? I stumble across the street and join the line of people going inside. Divert? How?

The place is packed. I take the only empty seat on the front pew and grab a Bible so people maybe won’t notice that my hands are shaking.

Divertdivertdivertdivert. I’m thinking hard, but I got nothing. What would Lucy do? I think of all the
I Love Lucy
episodes I’ve ever seen. But she always had costumes and props and stuff. Vats of grapes and big fruit hats and wax noses. And I don’t think she ever did anything inside a church.

I nervously look over my shoulder and through the still-open front door. I see Vivian run across the street, angling toward the parked hearse.

I gulp and look back to the front just as the preacher stands up behind the podium and says, “Brothers and sisters, we are gathered here today to celebrate the life of Evelyn Farley. Please join me in singing hymn number one hundred and thirty-one, ‘Bringing in the Cheese.’”

Cheese? Did he just say cheese? Bringing in the cheese?

A woman off to the side pounds on some piano keys and everyone stands up, opens their hymnals and begins singing.

Sowing in the morning, sowing seeds of kindness.

That’s when I finally notice it. Sitting on a pedestal right there in front of the podium. It’s a coffin. It’s white. Its lid is open and it has a purple, silky lining.

We shall come rejoicing, bringing in the cheese.

It can’t be, though. Can it? What’re the odds? Surely, this isn’t Vivian’s layaway coffin with the diamond tucked inside the lining. But what if it is? What if we go all the way to Vegas in a stolen hearse only to find out they already sold the same coffin to the Farley family of Albuquerque?

Bringing in the cheese, bringing in the cheese.

I don’t have a choice. I walk over to the coffin and look inside. Yuk. It’s a great big dead person.

We shall come rejoicing.

I close my eyes and my nose and swan dive over the coffin with a heart-wrenching, daytime Emmy-winning wail of sorrow.

Bringing in the cheese.

The piano stops playing. The people stop singing. Silence. A pin drops.

I belch out a few loud, racking sob-like moans to fill the silence, while surreptitiously feeling around the lining for a diamond.

I don’t feel any lumps that don’t belong to the dearly departed Evelyn.

I lift my head, sneak a peek at the congregation, see that everyone is staring back at me open-mouthed, so I gulp down some air and wail louder. I duck back into the coffin and feel around some more.

Nope. Nothing.

I hear a horn beep twice. Then an engine revs. Shit, it must be Vivian and the hearse.

I look up just in time to see several people’s heads turn to the windows where the hearse is parked.

I need to divert harder.

I quickly turn to the congregation, throw my hands in the air, holding the Bible above my head and shriek.

Everyone snaps back to me, wide-eyed. A couple of people even jump to their feet.

“Ooooooh oooooohhhhhh ooooohhhhhh,” I moan. I shake. I quake. (I’m so nervous I’m not really faking that part.) I throw in a few tremors and spin in a circle.

“The Holy Spirit!” somebody shouts. “The Holy Spirit is upon her!”

Encouraged, I do my best Linda Blair neck roll, with a wet gargle or two and somebody else yells, “Praise the Lord, the Holy Spirit has overtaken her!”

I don’t know what to do next so I just keep on shaking, open my mouth and hear myself say, “Oly-hay irit-spay!”

I’m glad I learned Pig Latin in grade school.

“Tongues! The Holy Spirit is talking to us! Tongues! Speak to us, sister!” the room shouts. They all stand and dance and cavort and twitch like a bucket full of worms.

I don’t know what the hell to say next, so I babble-scream the only thing I’ve ever committed to memory, “Oo-tay e-bay o-ray ot-nay oo-tay e-bay, at-thay is-ay e-thay uestion-quay!”

I sure hope these people don’t know Hamlet.

I continue, “O-tay ace-fay e-thay ing-slays and-ay row-ays of-ay out-tay age-ray eous-ay is-may ortune-fay!”

That whips the room into a feeding frenzy, and I have to admit I kind of like this feeling of power. So, in the spirit of the Spirit, I slap the Bible in my hands a couple of times, hold it up high like I’m Hamlet and it’s Yorick’s skull, do a little high-step dance, some deep knee-bends and start preaching in a Sunday morning TV voice. “Alas, poor brothers and sisters! I’ve been sent by the Spirit to show you the evil of your ways!”

“Amen!” they shout and froth into the aisles.

I make sure to stretch all my words out to ten syllables long and scrunch my face up a lot. “The Spirit is in me! The Spirit is commanding me to heal you!” I yell.

A couple of other people babble in tongues only it sounds like the real thing. The piano woman starts pounding out the cheese song again, and the room is a loud cacophony of amens and hallelujahs and babbles and shrieks.

A middle-aged woman with tease-it-to-Jesus hair skips down the aisle toward me, alternating slapping her hands on her hips and tits and moaning. I figure she’s pretty close to orgasm, so I hold out my palm and yell at her, “Stop right there, sister! Get down on your fucking knees and pray to Holy God above to save your goddamn soul!”

She stops, drops and rolls to the floor. I wave the Bible over her trembling, ecstatic body and continue, “Pay no attention to the cussing and swearing! That’s just the demons working their way out!”

“Amen! Out, demons, out!” they shout.

The piano woman pounds the keyboard harder in a staccato, ear-popping frenzy.

Through the open front door, I catch a glimpse of the hearse
screaming its tires down the street.

Time for me to get the hell out, but I’ve done such an awesome job of diverting, I don’t know if they’ll let me leave.

I step over the orgasmic woman and work the spirit down the aisle, bopping a few people on the head with the Bible like little rabbit Foo-Foo, while letting my cussing flow, “All you sinful motherfuckers! Listen to the holy words of God!”

Bop on the head.

“Fuck your money!”

Bop on another head.

“Fuck your power!”

Bop on another head.

“Fuck that new house, fuck that new car—”

Bop! Bop!

“Fuck that job promotion!”

Bop!

“I am here to tell you that you are not going anywhere but straight to hell and eternal damnation if you don’t get your motherfucking, goddamn, cock-sucking souls in order! You!” I point to a woman on the back row. “The whore in the black dress with the big tits and tall hairdo! Yes, I’m talking to you, bitch-slut! Get down on your knees and pray to God above to save your blasphemous, cheese-licking soul!”

She drops to her knees, puts her hands behind her head and keens long and hard. I reach down, grab a handful of her tit (just because I can) and point my Bible to heaven, saying, “God, please help this heathen woman. Rid her of her slutty, sinful ways! Everybody! Lay hands on this woman and invite the Spirit into her wicked fucking body!”

The crowd converges on the woman, touching her body anywhere and everywhere at the same time as she writhes and moans under their caresses.

“Praise Cheeses!” I give her one last good bop on the head with the Bible and run out the front door.

***

I run for two blocks but don’t see the hearse. I stop for breath, bend over with my hands on my knees and the hearse screeches up alongside the sidewalk. The passenger door pops open, I dive inside and Viv takes off before I even get my door shut.

“How’d it go?” Vivian asks like I had just been taking a Sunday stroll in the park.

“Those Pentecostals aren’t as repressed as you’d think. I left them in an orgy of flesh. It was like opening Pandora’s box.”

She laughs.

“I just hope God has a sense of humor,” I add.

“Honey, She put testicles on the outside of men’s bodies. You can’t tell me She isn’t laughing about that one.”

“Yeah, I hope you know how She plans to get us to Vegas in a high-profile hearse that we just stole and are stuck in downtown traffic. The cops are gonna catch us before we even get out of the city limits.”

“Watch this,” she says, flipping on the hearse’s headlights.

Immediately, the car in front of us pulls over to the right side of the road. Then the car in front of it pulls over. And the one in front of it. The cars in the left lane pull over also. Within two minutes all the traffic on the road is parted like the Red Sea and we have a clear shot all the way to the land of milk and honey.

“Wave,” Vivian commands.

“Huh?”

She smiles broadly and secure that she can’t be seen behind the hearse’s dark-tinted windows, she waves at a beige van pulled over to the right.

I wave at the Goodfellas who are scowling as we drive by.

We’re in our own private little funeral procession heading to the promised land.

***

We only stop for food and to pee. Vivian stole a map and according to her we only have six more hours until Vegas. I stole a bag of Doritos. We’re living high on the hog.

I’m driving now, and Vivian has her head in my lap. She’s munching on chips and making greasy footprints on the passenger window, tap dancing to an old Suzi Quatro tune I found on the radio.

We have six more hours of boring highway and nothing to do but look at passing cacti and sand.

I’m bored.

My grandmother always used to tell me, “Only the boring are bored.” The first six years of my life I spent summer vacations at my grandma’s farm just outside Tahlequah, and the first time I ever complained of boredom she took me noodling.

We stood knee-deep in Welling Creek with our pants rolled up above our knees. We were right under the rusty old bridge. Cars passed over the top of us and made clank-clank noises as the bridge groaned under their weight.

“Noodling ain’t for the faint of heart,” Grandma said between nips off her flask. “I know fully-growed men who’re too scared to noodle.”

“I ain’t scared,” I said and puffed out my chest to prove it.

“There’s a thin line ’tween stupidity and courage,” she warned. “Just ask ol’ Nubby.”

“Who’s Nubby?”

“Man who lives down the creek a ways. He lost three fingers to noodlin’.”

Okay. Maybe I am a little bit scared.

“What’m I supposed to do?” I asked.

“Roll up your sleeves,” she said. “Stick your hand in the water along the bank, and I wouldn’t use my favorite hand if’n I was you. Stick your hand in the water along them rocks and feel around. Find yourself a little catfish cave ’tween them rocks. Then stick your hand in the hole and wiggle your fingers about.”

“That’s all?”

“Yeah, that’s all. Just keep wiggling your fingers ’til somethin’ big happens,” she said, stowing her flask into her back pocket.

“What big’s gonna happen?”

“A big old catfish is gonna bite your hand.” she smiled.

“Bite it off?”

“Not if you’re quick enough. Soon as you feel it strike, curve your fingers up like a fish hook and hold on tight. The secret part is to curve your fingers up like a hook. Then toss him outta the water.”

I nodded and stuck my left arm in the water. I found a wet, dark hole, stuck my fingers in and started wiggling them about. A fish nipped. Nipped again. I curved my fingers up like a fish hook and he clamped his jaw down hard. I jerked my hand out of the water and flung the catfish up onto the bank.

I caught three catfish that day and still had all my fingers intact when we had the fish fry that night.