Tats Too (17 page)

“And you two are…” Mikey pauses, thinking hard, then smiles, “Tits and Tats.”

“Which one of us is which?” I deadpan.

Everyone has a good laugh at that. I even smile a little. I share my smile with Vivian, but she doesn’t look nearly as amused as the rest of us.

Mikey holds two fingers up in the air and Anything jumps into action, pulling a soggy cigarette out from between her sweaty tits and lighting it. She sucks hard on it once to get it going good, then places it between Mikey’s fingers.

Mikey takes a deep drag and blows the smoke right into my face. I hold my breath and do my best to not flinch. This is what I call the macho-preening dance. I saw it in prison a million times. The two enemies square off and walk big circles around the other, puffing out their chests like banty roosters, trying to outbluff their opponent.

I think my best move would be to skip the dance, land my best punch right in Mikey’s gut, hope like hell she falls over, jump on the bike with Viv swinging her big-ass purse and try to get the hell out of here. I figure we have about a tenth percent of half a chance of making a clean getaway.

Thank God, I’m saved by the sound of a Harley engine sputtering down the highway toward us. We all turn our heads and watch it come our way. The motor coughs and misses about every fourth beat, forcing black smoke signals out its pipes.

The rider pulls the bike up right behind us and the pipes emit a couple of death gurgles before it finally takes its last breath. The rider gets off, pulls off her brain bucket and hangs it over the sissy bar. It’s the same woman I saw at the gas station yesterday. The one who poisoned her bike with ethanol-laced gas.

Long, black hair flows around her shoulders as she walks over to join us. She has all the stereotypical Indian features and they’re in all the right places, too, because she’s a vision in her deerskin fringed boots, tight pants and leather vest. She has long legs that go all the way from her ass to the ground. Most people do, I know, but her ass sits particularly high up there.

And her tits aren’t bad either. I think I’ll name them Tonto and Scout.

“This’s Poke,” Mikey says.

Poke barely glances at me, but takes a long cool drink of Vivian.

Vivian tosses her hair over her shoulder and inflates her tits in Poke’s direction, (how does she do that?), letting her eyes caress every inch of Poke’s body. “I bet I know how you got that name,” she says.

“It’s short for Pocahontas,” Poke answers.

“Oops.” Vivian smiles seductively. “I was wrong.”

They share a small laugh, and that’s when the ugly, green J-word gets all up on its hind legs and bites me in the ass. I try not to show it because I’m thinking maybe Vivian has a plan. Maybe Vivian is just flirting with her so we can get out of this potential mess we’re in.

Maybe Vivian really does want her.

Maybe Vivian is going to try and fuck her just to show me she can, like how she fucked whoever else when I wasn’t looking.

“They call me Tits,” Vivian says, thrusting her namesakes right under Poke’s chin.

“I bet I know how you got that name,” Poke says with a small grin that makes me want to poke her right in the puss. And, I don’t mean that in a good way either.

I shoulder my way in between the two of them, making sure to block Vivian and her girls behind me. “Looks to me like you got some bike trouble,” I say, nice enough.

“And it looks to me like you got some lady trouble,” she responds not-so-nice.

“There’s no trouble. The bitch knows who she belongs to,” I say with authority I don’t feel in the least.

Vivian grabs me by the back of my pants and yanks so hard I almost fall on my ass. I swipe at her hand, but she grabs me again, this time by the front of my pants and pulls me about twenty feet away from the gang.

“What the fuck?” I spit at her.

I hear them all laughing at me behind my back and it pisses me off even more. “What the fuck are you doing?” I say harder and lower.

“What the fuck are
you
doing?” she says back. “
Belong
to you?”

“You’re goddamn right you belong to me. And you’re over there handing her your tits on a silver fucking platter.”

“She was flirting with
me
,” she says.

“And you were practically fucking her with your eyes.”

“What about Magilla Gorilla over there fondling me? You didn’t say shit about that. And then you give me orders and call me your bitch.”

“You
are
my bitch,” I say. “As far as they’re—”

“I’m not your fucking bitch!” she shouts.

“Sshhhh!” I warn.

“Don’t sshhhh me!”

I lower my voice and snarl, “Just back off the Indian, okay? She’s still pissed off about the whole buying Manhattan for twenty-four dollars thing, and she wants to get even by fucking my bitch.”

“Nu-uh,” Vivian says, slapping me in the chest. “You did not just go there.”

“Just don’t even think about flirting with her,” I order.

“You can’t tell me what to think. And you sure as shit can’t tell me what to do. I’ll eye-fuck whoever I want to eye-fuck.”

“You’re saying you want to fuck her?” I ask incredulously.

“I’m saying I’m not your bitch and I’m not anybody’s bitch, so you back the hell off, Lee.”

I hold my chin up high and look down my nose at her. “That’s right, Viv. You just go ahead and do it with anybody you want to. Because, obviously, that’s what you’ve been doing all along anyway.”

“I have not,” she says. “I have not been with anybody except you since the first time we did it.”

“Explain the whole pregnancy thing then,” I say, crossing my arms and raising my eyebrows. “I’m waiting.”

“All those women on Jerry Springer said it happened to them, so I’m not the only one. Sperm can get up there in your tubes and lay dormant for months, years even,” she hisses.

“Oh. Well, then…if Jerry Springer says it can happen—” I nod too many times. “Who am I to question?”

“I don’t know why I thought you were different,” she says with fake melancholy. “You’re just like any other man. Worse even.”

“You know what? Fine. Pocahontas can have you. I’m tired of your shit. Go get poked by Poke if you want. Go poke them all.”

“Fine. Poke you, too.”

“You’ve always poked whoever you wanted anyway. Maybe next time you’ll make sure he’s wearing a fucking rubber.” I flinch right after I say that because I’m preconditioned for Vivian slapping me whenever I say something smart-ass.

But she doesn’t slap me. Instead, she says really low, “You know, I’m glad this is happening. I get to see who you really are before I waste my whole life on you.”

She stomps off, and I turn my back on her like I don’t care.

She’ll turn around and come back in just a second.

She’s just trying to show me who’s boss.

Any second now.

She’s just trying to scare me.

She’ll change her mind any second now.

“Let’s go,” I hear Vivian say. “You can show me the real reason they call you Poke.”

She’s not coming back.

I hate her. I swear to God above, I hate her. I don’t want to ever see her again. I hope she rides off with them and gets poked a hundred different ways from here to next Sunday.

I walk farther into the desert like I’m the one doing the leaving and not her. I just walk farther out in the sand, the middle of nofuckingwhere, like I have an appointment that I’m late for.

Four motorcycle engines roar to life and I keep walking until they’re far down the highway and I don’t hear them anymore. Only then do I turn around.

Fuck me.

My bike is gone.

They took my bike and left me with that suckass Harley that wheezes.

I flop down flat on my back on top of the scorching sand and stare at the white ball of sun and let the heat sizzle its way through my withered insides.

I’d cry if I wasn’t afraid of getting dehydrated.

Desert Survival Guide
, a how-to book by Lee Hammond.
Chapter One, page one. To survive in a desert climate one must first know the terrain.

From the relative safety of my prone desert-floor position, I lift my head and look around at the terrain. Sand. Cacti. Weird, scraggly shrubs. One lonely highway.

Next, you must take inventory of what you possess in the way of equipment and/or tools.

I feel my pockets. There’s my trusty Maltese cross pocketknife. Fifty dollars in folding money and about seventy- six cents in coins. I have on pants, socks, big shoes, boxers, sports bra and button shirt. There’s a dead Harley nearby. I can salvage parts of it to use as makeshift tools. Things are looking pretty good.

Most important is the psychology of survival. You must calibrate
your will to survive and what you are willing to do in order to survive against your emotional limitations. This is known as your survival ratio.

Hmmm. I reckon I’d do almost anything. I’d kill a rattlesnake and eat it raw. I’d drink my own urine. I can’t think up anything I wouldn’t do except maybe eat spiders. I don’t really want to do that. Emotionally? Fuck emotions, I’m being nothing but rational here.

I bet I have a survival ratio in the high 90’s.

The desert in and of itself is not a dangerous place. The desert kills fewer than 100 people each year. However, hundreds more perish on the desert from its number one killer: Panic.

There are four important steps to remaining calm and not allowing Panic to become deadly.

#1: Acceptance. Do not cry (that’s a waste of precious hydration). Do not wail at the sky above (waste of energy). Do not curse God and the Universe with thoughts of killing Vivian and extracting revenge on Poke or vice versa (waste of time). Simply accept your fate and move on.

I accept that I’m stuck in the middle of the desert with nobody around for miles and miles and vultures are circling overhead. That’s a fact.

#2: Consider all options.

Options? I guess my options are that I could lie here and die and be ripped apart by vultures, or I could get my ass up and walk.

#3: Decide on a plan and stick to it no matter what.

Okay. I’m going to go through Poke’s saddlebags looking for anything helpful, then I’m going to stroll down the middle of the highway and hope somebody comes along and rescues me. If they don’t, I’ll walk the rest of the way to Albuquerque.

I find a bottle of water in the saddlebags and drink it down. I keep the bottle just in case I need to pee in it and drink that later.

#4: Try not to go insane. Insanity inspires panic and panic kills.

To keep my mind active and too busy to flirt with insanity, I decide to sing every show tune I’ve ever heard. But I just sing inside my head because I know that opening my mouth will cause me to dehydrate quicker.

I start with the musical
Oklahoma,
because when you grow up in Oklahoma you’ve heard the songs 500 million times by the age of ten, and you know them all by heart whether you like the show or not.

I walk. Down the highway. I walk and sing in my head down the highway.

In my head, I sing a lot like Doris Day. When I was a little kid I used to practice singing like her because I wanted to grow up to be Doris Day with her virginal good looks and her wholesome take on life. Until one day I found out that her real name is Doris Ann Kappelhoff and she’s not a virgin, in fact she was married four times and not to Rock Hudson either. That’s when I decided I didn’t want to
be
Doris Day, I wanted to be
with
Doris Day.

I’m on my fourth encore of
Que Sera Sera
when I realize it’s dark and those weird lights in front of me aren’t spotlights from a hovering UFO, but are actually headlights coming from behind. I turn around and jump up and down and wave my arms at the two approaching light beams.