CRUDDY (6 page)

HE FATHER drove with his headlights off for a while. I had no idea how he was staying on the road, it was so black out. A train came up alongside us out of nowhere, barreling hard out of the blackness on the parallel, blasting and screeching and over the noise the father shouted, “Freight cars are empty, that’s why she bounces.” And that sentence got stuck in my head and played awhile. And then the train curved away from us, rattling away into the darkness and it was quiet, just the car sounds and the father sighing now and then and saying “shit” because the radio station was going out of range.

We came to a set of grain silos, giant and white beside the tracks and I was thinking how train tracks were everywhere. Train tracks were where nothing else was. The father circled around the huge silos until he found his way around back to where there was a little wooden office up on stilts. Truck-window height. Behind it was a service area with a water hose attached to a spigot and neatly coiled. “That’s a good hose,” said the father, “and they leave it like that where anybody could take it.” He shook his head. “Farmers. Bless their hearts.”

He got out of the car and the minute his face was turned away I jumped into the backseat. He had the hose going and was getting good pressure by holding his thumb over the end, giving the bumper and the hood a good wash down. It seemed to me the sky was getting lighter. That the night was finally ending. But when I looked again it was just as dark as ever. When the water exploded onto the window next to me I screamed and saw him laugh. Through the cascading water on the window his face looked rubber, looked like it was melting away. He threw down the hose without winding it back up and got in the car.

“What you sitting back there for, Clyde? Don’t be like that. Come on back up here. We just did the world a favor. You know who it was that we hit, don’t you?”

I didn’t say anything. He started the engine and said, “Oh, damn,” and hopped back out to get the Samsonite suitcase. It needed a spray-down too. And I was thinking I should run. Right that second. Just open the door and take off running into the black scrub on the other side of the tracks. Would he come after me? I didn’t know. And then what? What would happen after that? If he caught me or if he didn’t.

Some people cannot forget the location of the jugular and the carotid any more than they could forget the alphabet. After a certain amount of time it’s just burned into your mind like a song on the radio, the vascular system, the skeletal system, all the different cuts; standing rib, Porterhouse, round, eye of round, Delmonico, fillet, strip, skirt, sirloin. The knives you want for each. Obviously I am talking the language of meat. Of course I mean cattle. I do not think there is anything that could be called a specific cut on a human being. We have organs in common with cattle, we share many systems of the body, but I am not sure there is such a thing as the Delmonico area in a person.

I didn’t run. We drove on. From the backseat I watched the back of his neck as the sky began to lighten around it. He was half in the bag. It took more and more glugs of Old Skull Popper to get him there, but the sounds of his words were smudged and he was getting philosophical.

“Used to be a father would never turn on his son. Would never sell the business right from under his own son. Used to be you could count on your old man not to cut your balls off and feed them to the squirrels. You understand what I’m trying to tell you here?” His eyes searched me out in the rearview mirror.

I didn’t think a squirrel would eat a man’s balls. Rats might. I offered him that comment.

“Son. I’m trying to say here that you have to be prepared for the unexpected, because, son, it’s out there.” He tapped on the windshield in front of him and the car swerved slightly. The empty land around us was pale and still in the shadows. “It’s everywhere you look, it’s waiting for you like the goddamned Apaches.”

When he saw me close my eyes he shouted, “You can’t go to sleep on me, Clyde. Talk to me. Ask me anything. You figured out who it was yet?” He meant the lady we ran over. I didn’t answer.

“You got all the pieces. Now put them together. Didn’t that lady strike you as strange? Ugly as a hog and big as sin? Walking in the middle of the night like that? Standing in the middle of nowhere. Think, Clyde. And tell me, whose fat head put that dent in my hood?”

His eyes found mine in the rearview for just a second before I looked away.

“What if I told you it wasn’t a woman? That help you any? It’s not someone you know to remember, exactly. But you heard about him.”

I closed my eyes and the father swerved the car hard on purpose to wake me. “You’re the only thing keeping us on the road, son. You better not fall asleep or we’ll both be crow meat.”

The first fingers of sunlight fell across the horizon. Colors came back. “You forfeit?” asked the father.

I nodded.

“You remember Doolie Bug?”

I shook my head no.

“One of my cousins used to baby-sit you? That crazy son-of-a-bitch? You know that round scar on the top of your hand? Doolie Bug did that with a Tiparillo. I told your mother, I said, ‘DB’s out of his frigging mind, honey, don’t leave our little baby with him.’ But she’s contrary. If I told her DB was a cannibal from the planet Mars she’d throw a birthday party for him just to piss me off.

“Well.” The father laughed and coughed. “It took a while, but I got him for you, Clyde. Better late than never, they say.”

The scar on the back of my hand is real. It is round and has pale marks radiating from the middle because it had to stretch with my growing. A nickel lays in it perfectly. I have laid a cool nickel upon it many times. It is real, but I was not so sure about the story of the father. I know we hit someone and hit them again and I know we left them laying there but it was the cousin part I wasn’t sure about. He told a lot of dead cousin stories. Cousins who got what they deserved. Stingy ones who fell through the ice going after a dropped penny. Snoopy ones who blew their own heads off with a came-upon gun. Stuck-up ones who died on the toilet. He said that one got written up in the newspaper.
Stuck-up
Cousin Dies on Toilet.
Front page. According to the father who could have been a famous singer. Who could have been a movie star. Who could have bought out Armour and Hormel both on what he would have made if Old Dad hadn’t shafted him.

The father was tired of playing by the rules. The father was calling himself Billy Badass, the outlaw that always got in. And I was his partner, his sidekick, Clyde. The Old Skull Popper was really talking to him and we swerved all over the long empty road.

The scar on my hand is real but the mother always told me it was him, the father himself who gave it to me.

H ’BERTA, oh little ’Berta,
can’t you hear me calling you
?” The Turtle was singing and his voice was decent. Sometimes high and sometimes hoarse.

The Turtle said, “Would you ladies like to join me in New Orleans? Would you like to experience the malodor of the sad drunk’s urine in Pirate’s Alley? Would you care to gaze upon the House of the Rising Sun? The Great Wesley and I are planning a trip and you would be most welcome. We have nearly everything we need. We have a car and it is quite a car. But we lack a driver.”

Vicky scratched at her eyebrow. “Who’s the Great Wesley?”

I said, “I can drive.”

“Stick?” asked the Turtle.

“Yes.”

“Yesssssssss,” said Vicky Talluso. “Roberta tells another lie.”

“I’ve been driving since I was eleven,” I said.

“Leprosy of the face comes from lying,” said Vicky. “You get leprosy and then your nose falls off.”

We were on the embankment beside the reservoir, leaning and pushing our faces into a high Cyclone fence with our fingers on the chain link. We were there to watch the high jets of water shoot out of the Jefferson Park Reservoir. Water must be kept in motion or the result is stagnation. For creatures it’s blood that must be kept in motion or there is putrefaction. I mentioned this. Vicky stared at me. The Turtle nodded. “Yes,” he said. “Absolutely. Even in the achievement of ataraxy there must be motion.” Vicky stared at him. She was squinting.

The Turtle said, “Leprosy of the face is totally misunderstood. It is not nearly as bad as people think. Leprosy of the mind, however, is a disaster.”

In the distance I heard the three o’clock bell. School was over. It was time to return to East Crawford. To the mother and my life there. To Julie, the evil half-daughter of the crumbling mummy called Dr. Cush, who made no provision for her when he croaked. Who left her nothing, not a Band-Aid, not even a hair ball.

It was different for me. The father left me a fortune. Getting to it was my problem. I knew the way, but I needed transportation. I was tired of the current version of my life. The mother and I, we had serious mental problems with each other but it was her who had the knives. Who screamed that she could cut my throat and Julie’s throat and her own throat and who could stop her from doing it? Who? Who in this world?

I do believe that if she got in the right mood she could slit my throat with no problem. And I think she could do Julie. But I’m pretty sure that when it came to doing herself she’d run out of gas. I mentioned all of this to Vicky and the Turtle and Vicky’s eyes went round.

“A fortune?” she said.

“Yes.”

“Yessssss,” she said. “What kind of fortune? Are you lying? Because if you are lying I am going to get very violent. I get extremely violent when people lie to me. Is it money?”

“Cash money,” I said. “Three suitcases full.”

Vicky snorted but kept her eyes on me. The Turtle didn’t say anything. His thick white eyelashes didn’t even flutter.

I watched the motion of the shooting water, shooting high and white, then gone, then rising again. It’s called pulsing. It happens because of the differences in pressure. Blood shoots for the same reason. You would be surprised by how it can spray. Blood can hit the ceiling and drip back down on you. But usually blood on the ceiling and the walls is secondary. It is from the knife or the ax in fast repeated motion. Back-splattering. Meat people know how to keep it to a minimum but it is still an unavoidable part of the job. I mentioned this too. Vicky said, “You’re sick, Roberta. Is the money real?”

The fountain jets shot up and behind them in the blue sky the clouds were moving fast. The visual combination made me dizzy, and I saw the little bright spots come swimming from the sides of my eyes.

I said, “I need to sit down.”

The Turtle sat down next to me. “Tell me about the dangerous adventures of Little Debbie.”

Vicky said, “You two are perfect for each other. I can’t wait for both of you to get really high and have a conversation because I want to be really high and listen to it because I can’t tell what the fuck either one of you is talking about.”

She had one cigarette left. She lit it with the
USN
lighter. The flame blew sideways in the wind and I smelled the fluid and my fingers itched to take it apart. Slip it out of its metal case and take a dime to the screw at the bottom and open it. I wanted to tilt up the flicker wheel and pull out the red flint. I said, “Can I see your lighter, Vicky?”

She said, “People who lie can’t touch anything of mine.”

The Turtle suggested we move down to a little hollow beside the fence where we would be completely hidden. Vicky got mad. “Once I light a cig I hate to move, OK? I’ll do it this time but next time you’ll know so there will not be an excuse.”

We followed the Turtle a few yards to a hollow in the embankment. Someone had dug a hole under the fence.

“That’s where he went in,” said the Turtle.

“Who?” I said.

“The fellow. The dead fellow.”

Vicky was blowing smoke out of her nostrils and staring up at the tilted razor-wire top that was added to the Cyclone fence after the day the dead man was found in reservoir waters. A man who had been floating in the water supply for some time.

The Turtle said, “I knew him.”

Vicky said, “No one knew him.”

“I did,” said the Turtle. “The Great Wesley did.”

The Turtle said, “The fellow was a homo and this was difficult. His parents were never in the mood for this information. They sent him to the Barbara V. Hermann Home for Adolescent Rest. The Great Wesley and I were so fond of him. We were saddened by the news of his self-inflicted homicide.”

“Suicide,” said Vicky.

“Not at all,” said the Turtle. “It was murder.”

Vicky snorted. “You can’t murder yourself.”

The Turtle shook his head. “If only he had known.”

Vicky said, “I’m not feeling anything. If this Creeper is a burn, Turtle, I’m serious. You do not want to know what I do to people who burn me.”

I leaned my head forward because I felt like I was going to throw up.

Vicky said, “You feeling it, Roberta? You getting the rushes? Look at me. Let me check your eyes.”

But my eyes were normal. Chills came clawing up my back. Was it the rushes? Something was happening. My jaws felt tight. I said, “I heard he was in there for at least five days before they found him. You guys ever wonder how much of the dead guy’s water you drank?”

Vicky made a little heaving sound. She shivered. Was because of the Creeper? I looked over at the Turtle. His face was very calm. His eyes were on the pulsing jets. Who was he? What was his deal?

“I’m having a nic fit,” said Vicky. Her hands were shaking bad.

The Turtle pulled out his Copenhagen and told her how to do it, how to pinch up the tobacco and how wedge it inside her lip. Vicky tried it. Her eyes watered and she started spitting violently. Little black flecks were in all the crevices of her teeth. She was clenching and unclenching her fingers. “I think I’m feeling it. You guys have to guard me, OK? Because I can get insane when I drop. Very insane.”

“Will you come to New Orleans?” said the Turtle. “We have an appointment at Dorothy’s Medallion that the Great Wesley really would like to keep. Have you heard of the place called Dorothy’s Medallion where large women wear small golden bathing suits and squat for the audience? Can either of you dance?”