Tats (32 page)

All this getting hit upside the head can’t be too good for my brain. I open my eyes to slits and don’t see anything but a wash of colors that don’t make sense. At least my nose is unclogged and I can breathe through it again. Except when I do, I am overwhelmed by a god-awful smell.

“Chicken shit,” I utter. “I smell chicken shit.”

“We’re in some kind of old vacant chicken factory,” Vivian replies.

“We must be in Arkansas.”

I blink my eyes hard a couple of times until I can see pretty good. Vivian’s right. Chicken roosts are everywhere. Old feathers scattered about. It looks like I slept through a giant pillow fight.

Vivian helps me get to my feet. We both still have our hands tied, but now they’re retied in front of us. I’m so shaky I have to lean against her in order to stay upright.

“They retied our hands,” I say.

“I told them to do it so we could pee. Impossible to squat with our hands behind us,” she whispers.

I throw her a weird look.

“It worked, didn’t it?”

“Where are they?” I ask.

“Right here,” Prince Charles says, stepping out of the shadows of a chicken roost scaffold. “The other chaps are outside digging your graves.”

I stumble toward him a few steps, just to test this guy’s mettle when he doesn’t have his muscle flanking him. “Why don’t you and I settle this,” I say. “Just us. Man to man.”

Prince Charles laughs in a relaxed kind of way like he’s not nervous or scared at all. Like he’s done this type of thing before. I get goosebumps up and down my arms and my nipples harden. Not in a good way either.

He unbuttons his jacket, reaches inside, pulls out a good-size gun and aims it right at my head, smiling all the while.

“You think you’re big just ’cause you got a gun?” I ask in the calmest voice I can muster while he’s pointing a fuckin’ cannon at my face. “Let’s see how big a man you are without it.”

“Lee...back down,” Vivian warns.

“He’s a pansy,” I retort. “He’s one of those British fags who can’t get it up without a fluffer.”

P.C. glares at me, but swings his gun to Vivian. “Last time, Vivian dearest. Where’s the money?”

“I told you. I spent it,” she answers.

“Where?” he asks.

“WalMart,” she smiles sweetly.

He raises the gun and points the business end at me. He walks toward me like he’s Cagney in
The Public Enemy
. He presses the gun hard against my temple and smiles with his crooked fucking teeth and I actually throw up a little in my mouth. This is one cold mother.

“Vivian,” he scolds. “Tell me where you’ve hidden my money or I’ll be forced to shoot your lezzie girlfriend.”

“How’d you know she was a lesbian? How come everybody but me can tell she’s a lesbian?” Vivian asks, throwing her bound hands in the air.

“This is what you left me for?” P.C. asks, pressing the gun even harder against my head. “A dyke in some Hell’s Angels gang?”

“You’ve been watching too much American TV,” I say. “I’m not in a gang.”

He continues, “You steal my money and leave me for this?” He traces the gun down my neck and across my chest, stopping it right at my left tit. “A dirty, ugly woman who dresses like a man?”

“She’s not all
that
ugly,” Vivian says.

I hope she’s just buying time and doesn’t really mean that.

“Did you have sex with her?” he asks me. “Have you been fucking my Vivian?”

I don’t know how to answer that question. I could tell the truth, but he’d probably shoot me on the spot. I could lie and say no, but he’d probably shoot me anyway. I try answering by not answering.

“Depends on who you ask,” I say.

“What does that mean?” he asks, perplexed.

“Some people, who shall remain nameless, thinks if there’s not a penis involved...” I ramble, “...then it isn’t really sex...”

I see headlights blink off in the distance. P.C. and Vivian don’t see them because their backs are to the front windows. I hope it’s somebody, anybody, coming this way. The headlights disappear and my hope for rescue along with them.

I continue my time-wasting ramble, “...that it’s just more like heavy petting which doesn’t really count. ’Cause of the no penis thing. Kinda like how, say you, for instance, could get a blow job from a really tall, black transvestite, but you wouldn’t consider yourself homosexual or that it was really sex because you—”

He shoves the barrel of the gun in my mouth and yells, “Enough!”

I try to talk around the gun, “Iknoyheefyou.”

“What?” he asks, removing the gun and placing it under my chin instead.

“I said, I know why she left you.”

“Why is that?”

“I saw you naked, remember? My dick’s bigger than yours.”

He flinches just the tiniest bit. Good. I hit a nerve.

“Is it just you? Or do all Englishmen have tiny uncircumsized dicks?” Where is my courage coming from anyway? I remind myself that there’s a thin line between stupidity and courage. Oh, well, I shrug and pile on more stupid, “I’ve seen bigger dicks on infants.”

Headlights again. Motorcycle headlights? This time they’re closer.

“Is the rumor true?” I ask. “Do all Englishmen sit down to pee?”

He pokes me hard with the gun and I stumble back a step. He closes in on me again, pressing the length of his body against mine. “I should fuck you,” he hisses into my face. “And make Vivian watch.”

“I’ve already seen her do that once,” Vivian says loudly. “And, believe me, it’s not pretty.”

P.C. turns his head to look at her. In that split second, I seize my only chance. I bring my bound hands up, swiping the gun away and at the same time I bring one knee up right into his crotch with all the oomph I have.

He doubles over and crashes to the floor, grabbing me by my belt and taking me down with him. The gun falls about twenty feet away. Now we’re both wrestling on the ground trying to get to the gun first. Vivian is in the mix, scrambling too.

P.C. and I both get a hand on the gun at the same time. Unfortunately, his hands are untied and he hits me across the face with one of them and comes up with the gun pointed right at me with the other.

We both jump to our feet, me much clumsier than him. He holds his balls with his left hand and has the gun trained on me with his right. Vivian has been thrown backward and is lying to my side with her skirt twisted high. My first thought is that she should’ve been wearing pants because miniskirts just aren’t proper kidnapping and hostage attire. My second thought is that P.C. is now in a rage and is definitely going to kill me.

“Where’s the bloody money?” he screams.

“You kill me,” I say without inflection, “and I’ll never be able to tell you where it is.”

“Then I’ll kill her,” he says, moving his aim down and to my side.

I hear the thunder of motorcycle engines and time freezes solid. P.C. is too smart to look behind him, but I see panic register behind his eyes. He jerks his gaze to Vivian and one side of his mouth twitches. “Goodbye, dearie,” he says to her.

I see his intention before he even finishes saying goodbye. I react entirely by instinct and dive headfirst in front of Vivian a split second before he pulls the trigger.

My head dive sends me rolling and I end up about ten feet from where I began and on my back. I look down to see a rose blooming across my chest. Damn. My new white linen shirt. The pain is suffocating and I can’t breathe right. Getting shot hurts way more than the movies make it out.

I try to say something, I don’t even know what I’m going to say, but all that comes out is a gurgle deep in my throat. From somewhere beyond my tunnel vision, I hear gunshots and yelling, but I can’t sit up to help.

I offer up a silent prayer and hope all those Baptists are right about there being a God: Dear God, please don’t let him kill Vivian. God, I know I haven’t talked to you in a long time, maybe never really, but please God if you’re there and you’re listening, don’t let him kill Vivian.

From out of the darkness, Vivian crawls on her hands and knees over to me and I’m so relieved to see her face looking down at me that I cry. I start to sob big ol’ tears and I want to reach out and grab her, hug her, but my arms just don’t want to move.

Vivian hovers over me and when I see the sheer horror on her face, I realize how bad off I am. She presses her hands on my chest and presses and presses...

“You’re going to get all bloody,” I think I manage to say.

Vivian’s face is just inches from mine and she’s crying real tears too. “Don’t die on me, Lee. Don’t you dare fucking die.”

Then from out of nowhere Chopper’s face appears beside Vivian’s. “Stay with us, Lee. Keep your eyes open and don’t go to sleep. An ambulance is on the way.”

“Chopper...” I gasp.

Chopper takes off his cut and wads it up behind my head. “Hang on, girl. Don’t go anywhere, just hang on.”

“I’m so sleepy,” I say.

“Listen to me, Lee,” Chopper begins. “You can’t die now. You’re a fighter, remember?”

Vivian rips open my shirt. She strips her own shirt off over her head and wads it up. She presses her shirt hard against my chest.

“Keep talking to her,” Vivian says to Chopper. “Keep talking and don’t stop.”

Chopper takes my chin in his hands and points my face back to his. “Lee...I want you to know something. I know you’ve been through three kinds of hell. But the thing is, you went through it. And because you did, there’s lotsa kids out there who don’t have to go through the same thing. We need you to stick with us, okay? Your work’s not done. Not by far.”

“Shit, Chopper...” I say. “Don’t cry.”

He actually laughs a little. I look over to Vivian and lift my hand to her face. I place my palm on her cheek. She’s so beautiful. Even when her makeup’s all smeared and stuff. I drop my hand and watch her tears mingle with the bloody hand print I’ve left on her cheek.

“Viv...?”

“Uh-huh,” she breathes.

“Remember...what I said earlier? About just wanting to be your friend?”

“Uh-huh,” she says.

“I didn’t mean it.” And then I don’t know if I tell her I love her or I just think it. I’m too tired to know the difference. My eyelids are too heavy...

“Open your eyes, Lee,” Vivian sobs. “Look at me! Don’t leave me, dammit!”

But I’ve never been so sleepy in my life.

Chapter Eighteen

I’m flying. I don’t have any wings and I don’t even have to flap my arms. I soar above the rooftops and church steeples. Tulsa sure has a lot of church steeples. The air is warm against my face and I can fly anywhere I want with just a tilt of my head. I zip through clouds, which aren’t nearly as solid as they seem from the ground. I nosedive down to a city park and circle the treetops, watching the children laugh and play. I zoom down a highway, passing all the cars in the passing lane.

I fly low over my childhood neighborhood. I see me, a nine-year-old wild child, riding a bicycle. I see a young Delia parked in her car down the street watching me. She’s crying. When I pass her on the bicycle, she starts her car and drives away, swiping at her eyes.

I fly a few blocks over to my childhood house and get there just in time to see it surrounded by police cars and an ambulance. A gurney is wheeled out of the house with a sheet-covered body on it. It’s loaded into the ambulance and it pulls away without its siren on. Two female police officers come out of the house escorting a tall, skinny girl with wild hair and wilder eyes. They load her into the back of their police car and drive away.

I follow the police car for a ways, knowing I can’t do anything to stop it, but following it anyway. We pass by a cemetery and I stop. I see a handful of people standing before a gravestone marked
Margaret Hammond
.

It begins to rain and I fly to the opposite side of the cemetery to an open gravesite encircled by a lot of people. Vivian stands in the rain apart from the rest of the crowd. She’s surrounded by so much pain and loneliness that nobody can get near her. I see myself standing under a tent wearing a leather jacket and motorcycle boots. Vivian flicks her cigarette away. She laughs out loud and walks over to me. There’s a spark or a current or something that happens as we stand side by side. It’s like a blue electric field of energy swallows us,
enlivens
us.

Next, I fly to Delia’s house and find her sitting on her back veranda. She’s wearing a fuzzy robe and no makeup and her hair is a mess. She’s crying into her hands. Chopper walks out onto the porch and wraps his arms around her. She cries into his shoulder and he holds her tight.

I fly to St. Francis hospital and see Vivian outside on a concrete bench. She shivers against the cold wind. She sits in a tiny pool of sunshine and looks lonely and sad. People pass by and nod hello, but she doesn’t see them.

I fly up to the hospital’s second story and hover there, looking in one of the windows. I see myself laying in a bed. Machines and tubes and cords are everywhere. I am very pale and very still. One of the machines beeps with each one of my body’s heartbeats while another machine does all the breathing for me. I hope to God nobody accidentally trips on one of those cords and unplugs it.

I bang on the window, trying to wake myself up. I bang and bang and bang, but it’s no use.

Vivian walks into the room just then. She pauses at the foot of my bed and watches my body for a moment. Then she does the sweetest thing. She walks around to the side of the bed and kisses me lightly on the forehead.

She sits in a chair beside the bed and watches my body. I float through the windowpane and settle down next to Vivian. I know she can’t see me or hear me, but I hold her hand anyway. We both watch my body try to breathe on its own.

Hours, weeks, days, seconds, Time is one big ball rolling into itself. I open my eyes and sometimes I catch glimpses of Delia or Chopper, sometimes it’s a woman or a man in white, mostly I see Vivian’s face staring intently at me. My eyes close immediately after opening them.

I open my eyes and this time I manage to keep them open. The sun is bright and hot through the window. White is everywhere and blinding. I have tubes hooked up in every orifice in my body and some man-made holes too. My whole body is one big, dull ache. My lips are dry and stuck together.