CRUDDY

by LYNDA BARRY

  “True Crime,” said Vicky Talluso. “True Confessions. True Detective. Those stories are bogus. Very fake. Anything with ‘True’ in the title is a lie.”

  I told how the mother says if I do not come directly home after school the aimless men will capture me and strangle me and shoot me in the forehead and tie me to a tree and cover me with gasoline and light me on fire and then have an ax attack to my face.

  “See?” said Vicky, and she was indignant. “That’s not even logical! The guy would do the ax part before he lit you on fire. Bogus. Clearly. Obviously. Wait out here, because, Roberta, you are very sensitive to drugs and you are freaking out and you don’t even know it and I hate that. Come on, Turtle.” She held the screen door open for him, but the Turtle stayed with me. He stayed right beside me and listened to my spilling story while we leaned on the telephone pole. Through the window the lady watched us. And she was everything Vicky said, the million warts and the saggy boobs. The shadow of the window-painted word WASHETERIA was falling on her face, the “W” was. She was exactly like Vicky described except on her face it wasn’t warts. It was moles. Beige moles, a million of them growing one upon the other.

  The Turtle listened to my speeding words and then held up a long finger. “Wait. Tell me one thing,” he said. “Are you wanted?”

  Chapter 12

  HE FATHER never treated me like a kid unless there was someone around. When the father looked at me, I do not know what he saw. Maybe a midget. Maybe an elf. I don’t think it ever entered his mind that I was a kid. He knew it, but he never thought it, and it was what a person thought that mattered. That was the stuff you could twist a dream around.

  During our journey he gave me cigarettes, glugs off of Old Skull Popper, bought me coffee and talked to me about the Navy, about things he saw when he was stationed here and there. He mentioned vultures and hornets and some things naked people did under red lightbulbs. He told me he had seen it all and he wasn’t even near forty. “There isn’t a thing left on this earth that can bug my eyes out anymore, and Clyde, for a man my age that’s a tragedy.”

  We drove the back roads, sometimes it seemed like we were going in circles, but the father never used a map because the roads he needed to take, the gravel roads shooting pinging rocks and choking dust, were never on them. Where were we going? I wanted to know but I couldn’t ask him. My mouth just wouldn’t move around the words. I was in the front seat again. After the bright daylight came, what happened the night before faded out of me a little. We were miles away from it. I didn’t think about it. Behind us in a cloud of dust a truck was coming fast. The father looked in the rearview mirror and I saw him freak a little. I saw his hands get tight on the steering wheel. The truck swerved around us without slowing down. It pulled a bouncing empty cattle trailer with LITTLE BITTY DREAM written on it in custom letters.

  “Shit on that,” said the father, and shoved a cig between his lips.

  “You know that Marie Cardall, Clyde? That got her arm shot off by them men?”

  I told him I thought it was one man.

  “See there? Just like the police. They think the same thing. That that one escapee did it. Just because someone thought they saw him in the vicinity with his Elkwood’s on. Hell, any man can run in a prisoner’s coveralls. That don’t take no talent. That escapee was probably halfway to Texas before anybody touched Marie Cardall’s doorknob. Do you know she still don’t lock her doors? Lock your doors, Clyde. Always lock your doors.”

  The dash lighter popped out and he held it tilted while he sucked up some fire onto the end of his cig.

  “So you figure out who did it yet? Because you know the parties involved. God, Clyde, I’m about laying it at your feet here.”

  “Doolie Bug.”

  “Yes, the squashed sack of shit had a role in it, that’s sure. But the second man. You know what the second man is doing right now?”

  I shook my head.

  “Driving this car.”

  I sat very still while he unspooled the story. He wanted to tell it so bad. It was just wriggling inside of him.

  “Marie Cardall was just begging for it. First time I talked to her about Old Dad delivering a suitcase to her, she told me she never got any kind of suitcase from anyone. I said, ‘His tally book says you got one.’ But she says no. She never saw or heard of any suitcase from Old Dad. I hate it when people lie to me. Don’t you ever lie to me, Clyde.”

  He was pointing a square-topped finger at me. It was missing the tip, from the only slip of the knife in his whole career and it only happened because Mrs. Hannis came asking him to grind up some kidneys for her cat, and he hated cats, and he hated Mrs. Hannis, and most of all he hated running kidneys through his grinder because they make a hell of a mess. It was because of Mrs. Hannis he picked up the wrong knife. An unexpected extra inch of blade can make a big difference. A finger’s worth. He was proud that he kept moving like nothing happened. Ground up the kidneys and smiled. Thought about putting a can of ant powder in with them but couldn’t chance tarnishing the reputation his people had built over centuries. Whenever he saw Mrs. Hannis on the street the father always said, “That old goat owes me a finger.”

  The father told me how he rode up to Marie Cardall’s place on a bicycle and Doolie Bug was waiting for him in the shadows.

  “We get through the door, I throw on the lights and she pops up out of bed looking like Edward G. Robinson in a nightie, she grabs Ardus’s rifle, points at me and says, ‘I don’t got your goddamn money.’

  “Now, get logical. If she didn’t have it, why’d she bring it up like that? It’s ugliness, Clyde, to point a rifle at a person and tell them lies at the same time. If you got a rifle you don’t need to lie. I said, ‘Marie, you’ve known me since I was little. Don’t you blow a hole through me.’

  “She said, ‘Get out of my house or by god, I will.’

  “But she hesitated. Don’t ever, ever hesitate, Clyde. Don’t lie, and don’t ever hesitate. Marie Cardall did both and look what it got her. And the damn suitcase was right under her bed the whole time. I about laughed out loud. I told Doolie Bug, get her car keys. I threw some of her clothes at him and told him to put them on, it came to me right then to do it. Doolie Bug’s so little and ugly, he was shaking like a girl. In the dark he could have been her easy.”

  The father told Doolie what road to take, what culvert to dump the car into, how far to walk and exactly where to wait with the suitcase. “I told him, the bend on R1114, right in the exact middle of the bend. I said, ‘DB, I’m relying on you. If you screw this up? I’ll hunt you down and make a vest out of your skin. But if you pull it off, there’s two more suitcases just as full as this one. You help me and it’s straight fifty-fifty between us. Clean. Are we partners? Prove it to me.’

  “Stupid bastard. He knew I hated his ass. What in the hell would make him believe I would ever be partners with him? But he wasn’t stopping to think, see. Clyde, you have to stop and think. Doolie Bug believed that just because I handed him the suitcase, I trusted him. And if I trusted him, he could trust me too. Well, shit on that. It wasn’t like he just met me.”

  And this is when I first heard it explained, the concept of dazzle camouflage, invented by the Navy and modified by the father, who explained all the variations while booze fumes filled the car and the tires ground dry ruts on back roads getting smaller and smaller. Shooting a woman’s arm off with a hunting rifle was a form of dazzle camouflage if what you were camouflaging were the slits in the jugular and the carotid. With the right knife you could do such great damage. The father said he knew they would concentrate on the arm. It would take them a while to notice the tiny punctures all up and down her.

  “What about Doolie Bug?” I asked.

  “What about Doolie Bug? He’s a smashed sack of shit now, isn’t he? With Marie Cardall’s clothes on and his prints in her car. Case closed. And I did it for you.”

  I looked at him squinting into the slanting sunlight.

  “
I killed him for you, Clyde. No hesitation. When you look down at that Tiparillo scar on your hand, I want you to remember that your old man came through for you. I killed him five times over for you, Clyde. And I’d do it again in a minute. Because that’s the way I feel about you. And I would like to think you feel the same way about me, that you’d do the same thing for me if it ever came down to it. That’s what it means to be partners. Are we partners, Clyde? That is what I need to know before we go a mile farther.” He pushed his foot hard down on the brakes and the tires spat gravel. When you have been rolling for so many hours, stopping the car is always shocking. I have always felt nervous in a suddenly stopped car.

  “Look at me, Clyde. Can I count on you?”

  I nodded yes.

  “You promise to Jesus?”

  “Yes.”

  “Because he’ll know if you’re lying and that is just as bad as stabbing him in his heart.”

  I said, “I’m not lying,” but my voice wasn’t so convincing.

  The father said, “I’m going to have to work on you.”

  Chapter 13

  HEN VICKY came out of the Washeteria, the Turtle had his arm around me. I was feeling a slight electrocution from it. Normally I do not like for people to touch me, I have a weird problem with it, a doggish problem. When people touch me I want to bite them. I have had this problem since I can remember, and I had been wondering if maybe I’d finally grown out of it, but my jaws rippled when he put his arm around me. It was all I could do to keep my teeth together tight.

  Normally I do not like being touched, but I have wanted a boyfriend in my life. I used to think about the ways it would be possible. I read a story where a freaky-looking girl met a blind guy and told him all kinds of lies about what she looked like, like how her eyes were blue instead of brown, which I thought was idiotic of her since the guy wouldn’t know color anyway. I thought of him, the guy in the story, and how I could take him from her with my truthfulness. I thought it could work out between us.

  I have liked certain guys at school. Guys that never even look at me. One has a silver front tooth. One is tall and has a face like a deer. One spoke to me once. He said, “Don’t you know it’s rude to clip your nails in public?” And there is Billy the Kid, the DJ on KHR, who I sometimes sneak calls to in the middle of the night. He asks me how old I am. I tell him seventeen. He asks me if I ball. He tells me to call him when I’m eighteen. I request different songs. “House of the Rising Sun” is one of them. I never thought it was a real place but the Turtle said it was and he would take me there and I had to wonder if there would be a red lightbulb.

  In my restricted life, the mother has tried to make me afraid of the aimless man, but truthfully I have never been afraid because I never thought I was the aimless man’s type. I did not think he would keep his eyes on me long enough to hunt me. That I would be as noticeable to him as a gray clothespin on a sagging line. In my restricted life it was the mother who I was afraid of. The Turtle had his arm around me, and if she saw that, my life would be over.

  Vicky said, “What, are you two together now?”

  She was having a hard time unwrapping the cellophane from her cig pack. She was doing it so slowly, concentrating on the red pull-strip and the glinty shine. And then I noticed we all were concentrating on it, leaning our heads over it and watching it intently. It seemed like a miracle item to me. Vicky held the end of the pull-strip and let the top piece of cellophane hang and flutter and we stood there very amazed by it. And I was thinking how we are always surrounded by incredibly beautiful things but we don’t know it, and that from then on I was going to know it, and then I looked up and the Washeteria woman’s freaky head was right next to the window and she was darting little pig eyes at us and moving her lips at us and her beige moles were wiggling and I was screaming very loud and the Turtle and Vicky were pulling me down the street and Vicky told me to shut up because she hates people who scream. This is one thing I can say about Creeper. It makes everything you look at very loud.

  We went to a scrudded-out little park that was mostly weed grass and one set of swings and some warped splintered seesaws and the Turtle said he wanted to seesaw with me so I sat down and then watched him walk over to the swings. Vicky laughed. She said, “Suc-kah! Rober-tah!”

  The Turtle started swinging. One of his shoes came off. There was aluminum foil inside his shoe and it caught the light and sent a ray into my eye that knocked me over. Then Vicky was laughing very hard and contorting on the grass also. The Turtle said, “Hillbilly Woman. Tell her the story of the Poky Dot lounge, the Violent One missed that part. Tell her what was written on the door.”

  “No,” said Vicky. “Tell the part about the money, Roberta. What about the money?”

  The Turtle fished his shoe back on. His toes were also very long, unusually long, you could even say disturbingly. He said, “Fuck ALL people of Indiana!” He said, “Indiana people SUCKS SHIT!”

  “I don’t get it,” said Vicky. “What? What’s funny?” Because me and the Turtle were laughing very hard. Were we together? It was possible.

  The Poky Dot Lounge was what appeared on the horizon an hour or so after the father hung another cig from his lips and said, “Last one.” He balled the cig pack and flung it out the window. In my side mirror I watched it bounce away behind us. Bounce and roll and vanish. We crossed a wide river and then everything changed. There were no more fields, no houses, no trees, not even telephone poles. Even the colors were gone, all of them except brown and gray and the blue of the late-afternoon sky. The world got emptier and emptier until it looked like a brown ocean of dead velvet, just emptiness covered with short dry grasses and low scrub.

  We were on a one-lane road and behind us the stirred-up dust hung in the air. Some creatures bolted in the distance, looking like deer, but not deer. The father said, “Give you fifty bucks if you can tell me what them are.”

  My head was hurting and I was hungry. I ate what the father ate. Coffee and cigs and aspirin and Old Skull Popper and an ancient vending machine candy bar and the rancid taste was still in my mouth. I was hungry but I felt like if I ate I would heave instantly. My eyes were burning and I had a sensation in my throat like I’d swallowed gulps of sand.

  “Give up?” asked the father. “You owe me fifty bucks. Them are pronghorns. Some people are wild about them, but I never could stand the flavor. You know what they mean by gamey? I’ve dressed a few. They say the sausage ain’t bad. Never tried it.”

  We rolled on through the plucked world. He huffed his last cig down to the filter and his lips made a little popping sound when he threw it out the window.

  He yawned and then I yawned, and he said, “It’s catching.”

  He said, “Talk to me, Clyde, ask me some questions. Ask me anything. I’ll always give you a straight answer.”

  I said, “Where are we going?”

  He said, “Oh, that’s a surprise.”

  He said, “Clyde, we are knife people and have always been knife people and people who use guns are pismires. But I want you to know there is a rifle in the car with us. We’re knife people but there’s always exceptions. There could come a situation where we are glad we have it, understand me?”

  I nodded even though I didn’t and he smiled and showed his curved yellow-gray teeth. Did I mention I loved the father? At the beginning of the journey I loved him a lot. They say love for a father is natural and nothing can change it. I don’t know about that.

  “Shit,” he said. “Out of gas and out of smokes. Better start saying your prayers, Clyde.”

  The time ticktocked undisturbed for a few miles and then across the horizon I saw the silhouette of telephone poles and a square shack up on cinder-block legs. The father said, “We’re saved.”

  It was painted a faded-out pink. Shaky circles were drawn on in tan and brown. On the door it said,

  POKY DOT LOUNGE

  NO MINOR

  NO LOITER

  NO INDIAN

  Som
eone had added an “A” to the end of INDIAN and then wrote “Fuck ALL people of INDIANA. INDIANA people sucks SHIT!!!”

  The Turtle was laughing again. He was curling and uncurling himself like a shrimp and laughing hard.

  “That’s IT?” said Vicky. “I’m starting to hate you guys.”

  “Tell it again,” said the Turtle.

  “No,” said Vicky. “The money. Tell me it’s real.”

  “It’s real,” I said. “And I want you all to keep acting very normal. Turtle, you need to pick up your stash because it fell out of your pocket and then we should get up very normally and walk very normally away from here because there is a cop watching us.”

  The Turtle took off running. He tore across the street and cut down an alley. He was amazingly fast considering his shoes. The cop was in an unmarked car and he wasn’t wearing a uniform but I knew he was a cop, I’m a trained cop spotter, I know their ways. He pulled out rolling slow, keeping his eyes on the Turtle and turning down the same alley.

  “Where?” said Vicky. “Where’s a cop?” She was looking in every direction.

  I said, “He just left. He just went down the alley after the Turtle. The car that just left. That was a cop.”

  “What car?” said Vicky. “I can’t believe how you lie.” She picked up the Turtle’s stash box and wiggled it. “We got it.” She dropped it into her purse and then pulled out a mirror to check her face.

  “Roberta, I have a question I really want to ask you but it’s personal to me, OK? But you have to tell me the truth, because I really want a truthful answer. Swear to god, OK? Swear to Jesus?”