CRUDDY

by LYNDA BARRY

  I kept my part of the deal. I didn’t say a word. The father had some long pulls off of a new bottle of Old Skull Popper and then got a fat lady to stand in the aisle and try to dance with him. The back of the bus was the party section. A lot of smoking and booze fumes. The father was the star like he was always the star in a group of drinking people. The star, the mayor, the president. Even I could not help admiring him in my own mongolian idiot way.

  People in the front of the bus turned irritated heads toward us but the driver was on our side. He had a face like a leather-covered skull and while he and the father were sneaking fortifying glugs during rest stops the driver said this run was his last. After that, he just did not give a damn. Dentsville was on one end of the map and his wife was on the other. And he wanted to keep it that way. He told the father he was chucking it all. Retirement, pension, free bus rides for life, all of it down the hole.

  “We must be married to the same woman,” said the father.

  “Cheers,” said the driver. “Hell.”

  In the Dentsville bus station it smelled nose-burningly strong of disinfectant and people, too many people. The waiting chairs were the dip-plastic kind, orange and blue alternating and there was someone in every seat except one that had creeping gunk on it. The lights were fluorescent and flickering and made the people look greenish. The cafe was separate, in a different room altogether, and through the glass I could see that it was packed too.

  “OK, Clyde, listen up here.” The father stowed our bags. He looked bad and so did I. The swelling on my face was down but the bruises were turning greenish-black. It was dramatic. The father said, “Don’t clean up. The worse you look the better for where we’re going.”

  I said, “Where?”

  He said, “I ever mention your uncle Lemuel to you?”

  I shook my head.

  He said, “That’s because he’s a worthless piece of shit. And he’s not your uncle either.”

  We were standing on the sidewalk. The father was tucking a fresh pack of cigs into his pocket and looking up and down the street, trying to get a fix on where he was. The sky was gray and the air was cool and had an edge to it that I couldn’t identify. It wasn’t unpleasant but it was distinctive and it got me curious.

  Across the street was a bar called The Golden Egg. The father’s eyes lit up when he saw it. “This ain’t like back home, Clyde. I can’t bring you with me. I need a couple of hours.” He slipped his watch off. Its face was scuffed and it had a pinching silver band. There was old blood dried in the cracks and crevices. “Here. You come back at five. Five on the dot, got it? Say it back to me in Navy. What time are you going to be back here?”

  “Seventeen hundred hours,” I said.

  He pulled ten dollars out of his wallet. “Don’t go wasting this on that shit you bought last time. Now go. L.L.S.S. Navy all the way.”

  I headed down the street and then turned to see him slip through the black-glass door of the Golden Egg.

  I decided my direction by that cool-air smell, fresh and weirdish and coming strong from down the street. I headed into the downtown of Dentsville.

  It wasn’t such a happy city. People were mainly hunched and staring downward and the buildings were tall but empty looking, like whatever was happening had already passed and wasn’t coming back.

  A guy with teeny eyes and huge eyebrows was blasting aggressive music on a crooked trumpet and kicking a coffee can at his feet that had rocks and change in it. He got pissed when no one dropped money in and blow-gunned notes at the back of their heads. I watched for a while and then I crossed the street. There were some ladies in pastel chiffon scarves who peered at me with too much curiosity at a corner where I waited for the light, so I bolted and jumped in the way of a bus. It wasn’t anywhere near hitting me, but the driver blasted his horn and mouthed furious words anyway. Dodging a bus is nothing. Not after you get good at dodging trains. And I was very good at that.

  The air smell was more powerful, it wasn’t a good smell, not like flowers or food, and it wasn’t a rotting smell either. It was complicated, it had many parts, and one of the parts was a core of coldness, if coldness has a smell. To me it does.

  At the next corner the smell was knocked to the side by a different smell, doughnuts, slightly rancid but plentiful. The doughnut shop was on a corner of a street that turned very bummy and skruddy with trash and there were little movie houses with faded pictures that displayed ladies bending and squatting with black tape across their eyes and naked boobs. The pictures were warped and greenish and of course there were the dried-out dead flies laying below them. Flies die in so many lonely places. Across the street from the doughnut shop was a two-story neon clown holding a sign that said AMUSEMENTS! but the windows on that building had the boob ladies also.

  There were sailors everywhere. Tons of them dressed in white with little caps and black hanging ties, going in and out of the shops and walking close together and laughing. And I was a little bit dazzled by their actualness, their pure Navyness, their handsomeness, and I was thinking it would be a Navy man I married. Only a Navy man. Navy all the way.

  And then two of them came up to me. One said, “You got a friend? Will you do two-sies?” The other said, “Shit, Quiver, he ain’t even ten!” Horrible waves of nasty booze smells came off of them and one had blood on his teeth. I turned and went into the doughnut shop.

  If in your mind a doughnut shop is a clean place with a clean paper-hatted man behind the counter and displays of innocent doughnuts and pots of coffee and good cold milk, well, this place was not like that. Not anything like it. There were people on gummy stools slumping and freaking in slow motion over the sticky counters. No-teeth people smoking, and scary teenagers also smoking, some girls with too much makeup and some boys with scars on their faces and hanging hair. And behind the counter the man was little and harassed looking and his apron was filthy with something that could not come from doughnuts and when he saw me he said “What?” and his voice was harsh. It was hot in the doughnut shop. Super-heated rancid grease air blasting out of vents with dust tentacles waving. “What?” he said again, and rapped on the counter when I looked away.

  Behind the swinging half-door to the back there was a loud commotion going on. Someone was yelling “Fuck you, motherfucker, no, uh-uh, it ain’t going to be like that, I ain’t playing no games, motherfucker, no.”

  There were flies on the doughnuts walking free. The counterman turned his head toward the shouting and then said, “Blooma!” and a big man who had been staring out the window looked up. The counterman tilted his head toward the shouting and the swinging door flew open and a little matchstick person with a greasy ski jacket came stumbling out backwards yanking on a fur coat that someone else I couldn’t see was trying to yank back.

  The counterman lifted his eyes and said, “Blooma!” again, and the big guy whose sagging belly was hanging exposed under his shirt, sighed, and got up and walked toward the matchstick man. He had a bulging fat roll on the back of his neck and he looked bored even when he pulled out his sticking knife. When the matchstick guy saw it, he let go of the coat and put his hands up. He said, “Hey! Ain’t no need for Bo-bo! It’s cool! We cool! Shit. Get Bo-bo off my back, motherfucker, and we cool.”

  The big man followed him back through the swinging door.

  Hardly anyone in the doughnut shop was even looking up. The counterman’s eyes came back to me and landed on the father’s watch. He reached his hand out for it and said, “Two dollars. What else you got?”

  A few blocks farther down the streets were still ratty, but empty. The odd smell was very strong, and all of its parts had increased. The alluring part and the repulsing part and the cold core that seemed to make the colors around me sharpen. There was a buzzing inside of me, nerves buzzing, and I was thinking it would be good to have something to eat, it didn’t matter what it was, and I saw a laundromat and I was thinking that would be a good place to sit, get a candy bar out of the vending machine and
listen to the sounds of clothes washing and drying. It would be good for the buzzing, which was making me grind my teeth.

  The Laundromat door opened an inch and then stuck and I had to push very hard to get it to go wide enough to let me in. It was empty. There were gumballs in the gumball machine that were bleached two-toned from facing the sun, and a rubber tree plant next to the window that had been dead for a few years. There was the buzzing of tube lights and a higher-pitched sound coming from a clock that was broken but still trying to move, the red secondhand stuck but jerking anyway. Cigarette burns were melted into the chairs and tabletops.

  I was looking at the candy bar machine and thinking how rank all of it probably was, how it was weird to see a Sir Goober candy bar next to Salvo laundry soap because the soap was mixed in with the candy. I put my money in and counted the red pull knobs carefully so I would get the Sir Goober and I pulled that knob. The Salvo package landed in the tray.

  “Shit,” I said. “Fuck.” I didn’t normally swear, but I was in the mood to try it out. “Fucking piece of shit,” I said. A sharp voice said, “HEY!”

  There was a person in the room. A woman who was very large sitting in a chair I swear she wasn’t sitting in before. She had a greasy pageboy haircut and smeared glasses and she was wearing a change apron. When our eyes met she pointed at the hand-lettered sign above her.

  THE TEN COMMANDMENTS OF THIS ESTABLISHMENT

  1. NO sitting or STANDing or LOITERING on Laundry Tables

  2. NO eating of Food on Laundry TABLEs NO Wet Drinks

  3. If Attendant is Absent DO NOT ask The TAstee Chicken King For Change as the Tastee Chicken King wants it known there will be NO CHANGE for LAUNDRY

  4. We are NOT responsible for ANY Injury Loss or Damage

  5. Pay Phone for Patrons ONLY do NOT tie up PHONE

  6. NO arguments just Take It Outside

  7. NO Toilet available for any Reason

  8. Do NOT ask the TAstee Chicken King to use its Toilet As the Toilet of the Tastee Chicken King is Reserved For The Tastee Chicken King Only

  9. NO Dying is Permitted in ANY Machine

  10. No FOUL language this IS A CHRISTIAN Establishment WE CALL POLICE!!!!!

  The lady watched me read all the rules. She tapped number ten significantly.

  I said, “You spelled ‘dyeing’ wrong. On number nine. Unless you mean actually die in your washing machine.”

  She said, “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Dead people in your washing machines.”

  “Get the hell out of here.”

  I held up the Salvo. “I wanted a Sir Goober.”

  She said, “Cram it up your ass.”

  I figured out where the cool smell was coming from. It was coming from a thing called The Sound. The Dentsville Sound. Along one side of Dentsville was a body of water, an inlet of salt water coming in from the ocean. There was land on both sides, so it wasn’t the ocean, but I was thinking that must be what the ocean would smell like. It had a tide like the ocean and the tide was low and I saw exposed barnacles and clusters of pinched-looking shells, deep blue-black in color. And varieties of seaweed hanging off of things and floating in the water with cigarette butts and pieces of Styrofoam and striped drinking straws. There were dark shapes moving especially deep, I couldn’t tell what they were. Possibly fish. But I was thinking of the movie The Creature, and I was thinking how now that I saw the kind of water he hung around in, I understood him better. And then I saw a jellyfish. Whitish, nearly transparent, the first one of my life. I marked it in my brain. Today I saw a jellyfish. Today I saw a jellyfish.

  I stood near a ferry dock and kept breathing the air in, I could not get enough of that kind of air. The smell of french fries made me look up. There was an outdoor stand where people were buying paper baskets of fish and chips and cups of clam chowder. I had heard of clam chowder. Sometimes people ate it in books. But I didn’t know what it was and it did not sound good to me. I got in line and watched the two worker guys, teenagers. The one who waited on me had brown skin and full lips and tilted-up black eyes. He wore his paper hat pushed so far forward the point came down to between his eyebrows.

  He said, “What you want?”

  I said, “French fries.”

  He picked up the tongs. “What size?”

  “Large.”

  He lifted a paper basket off a stack. “What to drink?”

  “Milk.”

  “No milk.”

  I said, “No milk?”

  He pointed at the board behind him. “We got Coke, Sprite, Root beer, Orange—HEY, DONITA! HEY!” He started waving frantically and cupping his hands around his mouth. “DONITA! HEY! YOU DON’T SEE ME?”

  A girl with dark piled-up hair and a lime green minidress was getting into a car. She waved back and called, “I see you, Romel.”

  The other worker guy nudged him. He said, “Maybe she see you, but what do she see?”

  Romel said, “A stud.”

  “Shit,” said the other worker guy. “You ain’t going to get none of that. In your dreams maybe.”

  I said, “Orange, please. And that girl should go out with you.”

  “Awwww,” said Romel, and he was smiling big. “See there?” He tap-slapped the other guy. “You hear what little man say? Say it again.”

  “That girl should go out with you.”

  “Haaaa!” said Romel, and the other worker guy laughed. “Because I’m a stud, ain’t it? She look at me and see a stud! Put some extra fries up for little man. Little man, you all right. Who beat you in the face like that? I’ll kick the shit out of him if you tell me to. You want me to? Where he at?”

  I took my fries to some picnic tables near the water. Seagulls swooped around and I threw a fry, wanting to see how a bird would get it out of the water, but a seagull caught it in midair. I threw a couple more and the birds came swarming. I noticed I was feeling decent. Very decent. I walked to a place with a lot of tall totem poles in front of it. And that’s where I found it. YE OLDE CURIOSITY SHOPPE. GIFTS. ODDITIES. SOUVENIRS.

  Beside the front door was the bone with the sign underneath it that said WHALE PENIS.

  I said the words very softly. I pushed open the door and a bell above me rang.

  Chapter 19

  RAINS. TRAINS in the day are nice but trains in the darkness are another kind of creature. It is a form of tripping to stand on the railroad tracks beside a slaughterhouse in the darkness. To wait in the pitch-blackness with your eyes closed for as long as you can stand as the roaring gets closer and crashes all around you. The groaning vibrations and the metal screeches and the bell going ting, ting, ting.

  To stay on the tracks with your eyes closed after the twisting bright headlight hits your face, turning the insides of your eyelids white, it will be any second, any second, the mighty engine blasting and its shocking sharp ray of blinding light and then the whistle screaming and you jump, flying to the side, rolling in the stickery weeds and laying flat while the black wind rushes over you. This is what I used to do in the good old days.

  “Hey,” said Julie. “Want to know what’s on Nightmare Theater tonight?” She was sitting on the couch eating a second bowl of cereal. I was in the mother’s chair smoking one of Vicky Talluso’s cigarettes and holding the USN lighter, running my thumbnail across the engraving.

  I was wearing Vicky Talluso’s hat, and I will admit, some of her makeup. And I had looked through her wallet. And I knew what her address was. And I knew what her phone number was. And the Turtle’s stash box was still there. And I was blowing smoke rings and wondering what to do about all of it.

  “Let me have one,” said Julie, reaching her hand out for the cig pack.

  “They’re not mine.”

  “Well, you took one. So I can have one.”

  “Except she’s not your friend. She’s my friend.”

  “Who?” said Julie.

  I said, “What’s on Nightmare Theater?”

  She said, “Giv
e me a cigarette.”

  I tossed one to her and she caught it and got up and lit it off of the stove. I had a lighter but she didn’t want the lighter. She wanted to almost burn her face off instead. I kind of understood that.

  Then we were both blowing smoke rings. In my restricted life I have had a lot of time to practice and so has Julie. If there was ever a smoke-ring championship we could possibly win it. If we ever had a mantel, there could be a trophy on it.

  “I like that hat,” said Julie between drags.

  “It’s not mine.”

  “Obviously. And your face is dripping blood. It just started. Your nose.” She touched her upper lip. “Both nostrils. Never seen that before except on TV. Know what the movie is tonight? It’s one you like.”

  It was just a nosebleed. I ran some napkins under cold water and then tipped my head back and held them there.

  Julie said, “It’s that hand movie. That outer-space hand one where it has an eyeball on the back and dragging guts are hanging out of it. Remember that one?”

  The saggy underwear man started shouting next door. “I am what I am and I am IT!” Julie peeped at him through the side window. “He’s just walking back and forth again.”

  My nose kept bleeding. The sound effects for Nightmare Theater started, the wind blowing and the wolves howling and breaking glass and screams and eerie high-voiced singing with no words. The vampire rose out of his plywood coffin and said “Good Evening,” and while he announced the night’s presentation, I noticed an extension cord running behind one of the plywood gravestones, and I noticed he was standing on a floor that looked linoleum and that his shoes looked Sears, and I was wondering how I could not have noticed this before, I was pointing it out to Julie and she said, “Shut up, OK? He’s talking.”