CRUDDY

by LYNDA BARRY

  Lemuel hooked his finger into his mouth and flung his chewwad. “Leonard said he was told about the suitcase but he never saw no suitcase. He thought Earlis was shitting him. I mean, it does sound like a pile of crap, don’t it? Suitcase with money in it delivered to you out of the sky.”

  “It didn’t come out of the sky,” said the father.

  “That boy find my teeth yet? Call to him again, will you?”

  Leonard was in the middle of his shift at the A&W and Earlis comes barreling into the parking lot, shouting to him about going fishing, yelling come on, they were going after muskie, he had some new bait he wanted to try out, and a couple of people busted out laughing. Leonard threw down his hat and jumped into the car. That was the last time either of them were seen.

  “You seen ’em,” said the father. “You seen Leonard.”

  “Seen a shadow of him,” said Lemuel. “Showed up here in the middle of the night, crying like a baby, wouldn’t come in, didn’t want me to come out. Told me the whole story through that blanket. Said he couldn’t stand for me to see his face. Said he had a gun and he was going to blow his own head off if I tried anything.”

  “Uh-huh,” said the father, sounding bored.

  “You want to hear this or not?”

  Leonard said they drove to the next county, bought a car and trailer right off the barely used lot with cash and a trade-in, and then they really did go fishing. Lake Marie. Earlis really did have some new bait he wanted to try out. Red salmon eggs, coffee grounds, and mini-marshmallows cooked together in a frying pan. He invented it, and it worked so good the fish were practically begging to be hooked. And then they celebrated with plenty of hugging and a big bottle of Whitley’s and Leonard was thinking it was love. Some would call it perverted, he knew that, but for him it was true love at last.

  “Cornholer,” said the father.

  “Goddamn it, man!” said Lemuel. “What do you got for a heart, a cat turd?”

  Leonard and Earlis were together all that night and the next. Earlis told Leonard he was wild in love with him, that Leonard meant more than anything in the world to him, but the time had come to move on.

  And Leonard said, what the hell did he mean by move on? And Earlis said he was taking Leonard back to the A&W. And Leonard said, “Then what?”

  Earlis said, “I’m leaving town.”

  Leonard said, “Just like that?”

  Earlis said, “I shall never forget you.”

  And that’s when Leonard grabbed the gutting knife off the counter and ripped Earlis open clean.

  “Gutting knife,” said the father. He blew out a jet of cig smoke and nodded his approval.

  Lemuel said, “Leonard didn’t plan to kill him. He ain’t like that. Now, I’m like that, and you’re like that, but Leonard ain’t like that.”

  And Leonard was sorry right afterwards. And Leonard had a nervous breakdown right there and Leonard drove a thousand miles with dead Earlis bouncing around the hot trailer with the piles of muskie until he pulled up to Lemuel’s place in the middle of the night and confessed out the whole story through the blue blanket. Leonard said he was killing himself, and there was nothing anyone could do to stop him. He made Lemuel promise to make sure the car and the trailer went to the rightful man. That was Leonard’s final wish.

  “You,” said Lemuel, wiping his eyes. “He wanted you to have it.”

  “And?” said the father.

  “And what?”

  “Well don’t keep me in suspense here, Lemuel,” said the father. “Did that little cornholer blow his brains out or not?”

  Chapter 21

  O-BER-TA! RO-BERTA!” Julie’s voice was calling me from downstairs. “It’s on! You’re missing it!” The word is maintain. That is what you are supposed to do when you are high and you don’t want anyone to know it. Maintain, maintain, maintain.

  “Ro-BERTA! The crawling hand just killed a cow and now all the other cows are freaking out!”

  “Cattle,” I said, as I came down the stairs. “Not cows. Cattle.”

  “How are you supposed to know, you’re not even watching it.” Julie turned to look at me. “Your nose is still bleeding.”

  I said, “So?”

  I got Vicky’s purse and pulled out her wallet. If found, please return to Vicky Tallusoj. I was looking at the “j” on the end of her name. Thinking it was silent. And then I thought about different silent letters I knew about and if it was possible to put them all together and spell a silent word. A drop of my blood splashed onto the ID card. It was so red.

  “Roberta!” Julie’s head popped up over the back of the couch. She dangled her hand at me and did crawling motions with her fingers and then pointed at the TV. A lady was standing in front of the dead cattle and screaming. She could not stop screaming. I dialed Vicky’s number.

  “Who you calling?”

  “Nobody.”

  “You can’t use the phone in case Mom is trying to call here.”

  I said, “She’s not trying to call.”

  “You got blood all over your shirt.”

  “So?”

  The phone rang six times before a man picked it up and started coughing. He didn’t say hello. He just started coughing. I got scared and hung up.

  I waited a little bit and then I dialed the number again. Six rings, same man. Hack-coughing violently. This time he talks. In an accent. He says “Goddamn!” which scares me and I hang up again.

  “Roberta!” says Julie. “Who are you calling?”

  “Nobody.”

  I dialed out the number again. This time the man picks up on the second ring. He says, “Goddamn TO YOU!” and then a sound like he’s trying to hang up but instead he drops the phone and I hear another voice yelling in the background. A girl’s voice. The phone gets picked up off the floor and Vicky Tallusoj says, “Hello?” and I hang up again.

  I don’t know why I hang up. I didn’t expect to hang up. My finger just automatically pushed the hang-up button when I heard her voice.

  Julie said, “Hoooooooo, Roberta?”

  I jumped and then yelled at her. “Don’t EVER do that to me!”

  “Do what?”

  “Say that to me.”

  “Say what?” asked Julie. “Who you calling? That?”

  “Shut up.”

  “Who you calling, Roberta?”

  I said, “The time lady.”

  “Suck,” said Julie. Her mouth flattened. “Lie.”

  For a while I sat on the couch with Julie, sticking napkins with ice cubes in them against my nose, it had to be Vicky, it sounded just like her. I wondered if her nose was also bleeding. If she was also sitting in front of Nightmare Theater with blood on her shirt.

  “Come ON, Roberta. Your turn.” Julie had been talking but I hadn’t really been listening. Something about how I would kill the unkillable hand. She said she would light it on fire. Many squirts of lighter fluid and then a match and then, “Whooooooosh!” she said. “Whooooooosh!” Incinerated. “You, Roberta. Your turn. How would you do it?”

  “Stab it. Stab it and pound the knife in with a rock.”

  Julie scratched her nose and looked at me hard. Could she tell? Was it obvious that a second wave of Creeper was starting to wash over me? She said, “You could stab it, but it would still be alive though.”

  I said, “It wouldn’t matter. It wouldn’t be going anyplace.”

  “But it could still escape and come back after you.”

  “Not the way I’d do it, it wouldn’t.”

  “I still think burning it.”

  I said, “But the bones, Julie. Bones crawl after everybody.”

  I was dialing the phone again, sitting on the kitchen floor with the cord stretched down and I was facing the wall and I was making little fingerprint dots on the wall with smears of blood. I counted the rings. I said, “Come on, Vicky. Answer. Answer.”

  I did not expect such a hard kick. The back of my eyes tilted out in red explosions from the sudden crack to
my back. Julie was standing over me and screaming, “YOU ARE CALLING SOMEBODY! YOU ARE GOING TO LEAVE ME HERE!”

  “Hello? Hello? Hello?” said the midget voice from the dropped telephone.

  Julie and me were on the floor. She was yanking out chunks of my hair and I was bashing her into the table legs and punching her hard. She started screaming and screaming. I let her go.

  She picked up the telephone and shouted, “YOU DIE!” and threw it. She yanked open a drawer and then there was this very weird moment. A weird stretched-out second where everything in the room just expanded. Time expanded. Molecules and the spaces between the molecules expanded. I saw every cell of Julie’s arm making the graceful slow-motion arc, and I had time to notice the mother’s meat knife cutting through the air, every glinting particle of every single molecule coming straight at my face, and I had time to calmly lean to the side and watch it pass my head and tong into the wall.

  Julie. Do you know what the father would have said? He would have said you were a natural. He would have said, “Give that girl a Lucky Strike!” He would have pushed his whole pack of cigs at you and passed you his USN lighter.

  Watch out for Creeper. Because just when you think it has all drained out of you, just when you are sure your Creeper experience is over, you will suddenly feel the incredible white explosion shoot up your back, and your fingers will stretch out incredibly long and your mouth will gush incredible amounts of joyful saliva and you’ll be hunched over in front of the TV and your hanging drool will look fantastic in the blue jumping light.

  And your sister will FREAK. Your sister Julie who just tried to tong a meat knife straight into your face will suddenly FREAK and she will say, “ROBERTA! ROBERTA! WHAT’S WRONG?!” She will FREAK from how you are hunching and stretching out your incredibly long fingers and lifting your lips up and down over your wet teeth and she will keep on FREAKING, even while you speak to her very calmly, saying, “Julie, Julie. Shhhhhhh. Don’t talk. Right now just don’t talk to me.”

  And her face will be flickering and it will be wet with streaks of crying and she will say, “Don’t die, Roberta. Don’t die. Please, please don’t die, Roberta.”

  And you will smile at her and this will be what makes her scream.

  Chapter 22

  ND THE father and Lemuel finished the Whitley’s and wanted more Whitley’s and Lemuel needed another can of Copenhagen, and they had gotten jolly and friendly toward each other again, dropping the subject that was on their minds most of all and deciding to go into town.

  The father hollered to me through the dusky light. “Clyde! Me and your uncle Lemuel are going to go blow some dust off. You keep an eye on things, you hear me?”

  Lemuel finished buttoning a wrinkled shirt and pulled his suspenders up over his shoulders. He said, “How do you know he hears you if he can’t answer you?”

  The father hollered, “Toss Uncle Lemuel’s teeth back this way if you hear me.”

  From my hiding place in the weeds I gave Lemuel’s bottom teeth the hand grenade throw, and watched them bounce twice and land just under the trailer.

  “Oh shit,” said Lemuel, and he grunted a lot when he bent and squatted to reach them and he made an emission very loudly and then he felt under the trailer and the cat bit him.

  “SON OF A BITCH! SON OF A BITCH!”

  “We’ll be back in a little while, Clyde,” shouted the father to the dead play field. “Don’t wander.” The car with the human teeth bites in the dashboard rolled away down the gravel road.

  There was still enough light in the sky to make out the shapes of things. And there was one streetlight that let some light fall onto Lemuel’s scraggly yard. I had some questions in my mind. Was dead Earlis still in the trailer? That was the main one. That was the involuntary one. And that was the one that made me decide to take a walk.

  All of what surrounded me that evening in Dentsville is gone. Paved over. The freeway did come through. And there are days when I would like to go to Dentsville and see it, make sure of it, because I was not lying when I told Julie that bones crawl after everybody. And that fire can’t do a thing about it.

  I walked down Lemuel’s gravel road toward a train whistle, a loud one. I knew the tracks were close. I followed a steep sidewalk down and down until I came to the edge of a cliff, a sheer cliff that appeared out of nowhere. Trussed up against it was a wooden bridge if a thing that only leads you down and down and down can be called a bridge. It was like a high wooden train trestle that fell down on one side, looking about half a mile long and narrow and rickety with three tight turns to manage before it ended at a flat street.

  I stepped onto it and the smell of creosote flooded my nose and it was a relief to smell it. It drove all the ghost smells away for a while.

  It was the highest thing I’d ever been on. The drop was about two hundred feet straight down and when a scavenger truck came bumping onto the planks the whole bridge rattled. I saw the man in the truck leaning into his seat. He went slow and the boards beneath him groaned.

  Underneath the bridge were the tracks. Bums were in the scrub below, moving in the shadows of vapor lights on high poles. Little bum encampments were farther up the cliff side, with cardboard and old blankets piled up against side-growing trees. Little fires were burning. There were guys sitting on the ground wearing hats and smoking.

  The train that whistled me over to the bridge was clacking away into the distance but another one was coming. The headlamp twisting and the ting, ting, ting. A couple of guys stood and brushed their pants off. When the train came alongside them they took a few quick steps and jumped on easy and graceful. I spent a long time there, just watching the trains come and go. Enjoying my view of them from so high up. Watching the bums. Gripping the wooden guardrail when the whistles blew and the passing trains shook the bridge into nearly swaying. Exhilaration. Exhilaration is the word.

  I got back to Lemuel’s and faced the mystery trailer again. The father and Lemuel were still gone and knowing the father, I expected them to stay gone for a while. I started snooping. The keys were in the ignition of the car, just like Lemuel said, I twisted them a half turn and the radio came on to a country station and Ned Miller started singing “From a Jack to a King.”

  On the passenger seat was a partly spilled box of Cracker Jacks with the prize still inside and in the glove box there was flashlight.

  I breathed through my mouth and stood on a folding chair to reach the trailer window and pointed the flashlight. The first thing I noticed was the way the miniature kitchen looked in the spin-art of blood, dark flung patterns everywhere, fly highways going every direction. The second thing was on the floor.

  I can tell you this. A man who has been dead for a week in a hot trailer looks more like a man than you would first expect. The face bloats out giantly and purple-black, and there are textures, horrifying textures, but it’s the mouth that makes you scream. When you see his black crusted lips pulled away from shockingly white teeth, when you see him shining out his special smile, just for you.

  I was dead asleep when the car came crawling back up the gravel road. I felt the high beams glide across my eyes and I sat up from my hiding place on the edge of the field. The father drove the car into the folding chairs and there were some metal crunches. He stopped just a few feet from the trailer and the high beams bouncing off of it threw back a strange light on the scene.

  The father switched the engine off, leaned across the seat to unlatch the passenger door, and Lemuel poured out rolling.

  The father leaned his head on the back of the front seat and stared upwards for a while. He leaned his head on the steering wheel and stared downwards for a while. Then he opened his door quickly and leaned out. There was a sudden waterfall eruption of an intense booze fountain that had many hard pulses and many dramatic splurts before it finally ran out of power. The father pulled himself back into the car, leaned until he fell across the seat, and started snoring.

  The car sat like that. Both door
s open and the radio static cutting in and out and the headlights attracting bugs. They spun disoriented against the bright trailer, making shadows. The head of Lemuel got miniature tremors and his lips started making disturbing movements, extremely disturbing talking motions and then severe birthing motions and then his dentures did a half roll out of his mouth and into the dirt. The smell coming off of him was flammable.

  I was holding Little Debbie. Holding her so tight that my fingers were cramped around her, the cut-diamond pattern of her handle embossed into my palm. I fell back asleep this way and what woke me up in the dimmest rays of morning, the barest gray rays of light upon the damp weedy field, was a soft velvety thing stroking against my lifted head. Stroking and pushing against my cheek, against the corner of my mouth, smelling bad.

  I opened my eyes and Lemuel was kneeling over me.

  Little Debbie bit him. No hesitation. Little Debbie bit and bit and bit him and if there was shouting, if there was screaming, I didn’t hear it. What I heard was a long tone, faint and endless. And the center of my vision was punched out, gone gray, with a hot light scribbling fire at the edges, melting the world from the center outward like a movie burning up on the screen.

  “Didn’t I tell you?” said the father. “Didn’t I tell you you’d know when it was time to use Little Debbie? You’re a natural, Clyde. Have a Lucky Strike. Hell, darling, take the whole pack. You earned it.”

  There is a saying about Jesus. That he will forgive anyone for anything. Anything at all.

  Do you know the song by Brenda Lee?

  “I’m sor-ry...so sor-ry...please ac-cept...my a-pol-o-gy.”

  The father was singing it in a jigging cadence as he dragged the blue blanket containing the rotted Earlis out of the trailer and into the shack of Lemuel, singing it jaunty, and leaving a trail of horrible liquid behind him. He had a handkerchief doused in Aqua Velva tied over his nose. His singing was muffled, but it was on key. I think the maddest people in this world are the ones who could have been stars, could have serenaded all people so famously with voices lifting up from spinning gold records. There were so many good things that should have happened to the father. He wasn’t your average man. He wasn’t meant to live in an average world.