by LYNDA BARRY
Uncle Myronto went berserk. “IT’S NOT A RACETRACK! IT’S NOT A FRIGGING RACETRACK!” He ran inside and in a few seconds I could hear him screaming into the phone.
“WHAT?! HELL YES THIS IS AN EMERGENCY! YOU PEOPLE THINK MY PLACE IS A GODDAMN RACETRACK! WHAT?! NO! HELL NO! DON’T YOU PUT ME ON HOLD! DON’T YOU—GODDAMN IT!”
I heard the Monkey saying, “Whoa, Uncle Myronto, your blood pressure, man. Danger.”
I boosted myself up the side of the Dumpster to retrieve the stash. A rotted-meat smell drifted and the yellow jackets swarmed. I saw what I thought was the top of the can laying low in clotted grease. The Monkey came up behind me and I instantly jumped down. In a low voice he said, “Turtle in there?”
“No,” I said.
“Because he does sometimes hide in there.”
“He got away.”
The Monkey rubbed his face. “I’m so fried. Are you fried? You look fried.”
“I’m very fried.”
“The Turtle burned me. He thinks he can fuck with me. Do you know when he got out? He wouldn’t tell me. He won’t tell me anything.”
“Out?” I said.
“Of Barbara V. Hermann. You know, the home.”
“Oh yes,” I said. “The home.”
He looked at me from the side of his eye. He said, “You don’t know about him do you? I bet you just met him.”
“No.”
“Lie. He ask you to go to New Orleans? That’s his first question to everybody.”
“No.”
“Did he tell you he’s Canadian and he knows Neil Young?”
“No.”
“His parents are rich as fuck, man. They own Channel Three. He won’t tell you that though, because it’s true. They’re looking for him. I’m thinking of turning him in.”
He pulled out a pack of Salems. “Fag cigs, I know. Want?”
I took one and he lit mine and his off the same match. Uncle Myronto was still yelling into the phone. Someone on the other end seemed to be listening.
The Monkey said, “The Turtle does got the good drugs, though. That part’s for real. And he gets the girls, man. Ugly little dude, but he always has the women. He’s always telling me he’s going to get me laid. And I’m always stupid enough to believe him.”
I blew a smoke ring. He said, “Is that girl, that violent girl-whatever, is she real?”
I said, “Vicky?”
He said, “That her name? Because the Turtle never calls anybody by their actual names. Like I don’t even know your name. What is it? Because I know it’s not Hillbilly Woman.”
A yellow jacket did a tight circle by my face and I swatted at it.
The Monkey said, “Don’t, man. That just pisses them off. What’s your name? You know what is super weird about you, and I’m not saying this just because I’m high, OK? Your face, you know, it’s—”
I looked away.
He said, “No, man, listen, it’s good, it’s good, I mean your face is totally fucked up, right? But it is totally amazing, I’m serious. I should be thinking you are like, very ugly, you know, but I am just getting very blown away by you, and like, are you a virgin?”
Chapter 26
URTLE? TURTLE? Turtle?” I whispered to every bush in the vicinity but could not find him. I was thinking I should just try to get cosmic. I should just try to get cosmic like a hippie and expand to the natural flow but that didn’t work either. It was my ear-splitter whistle that did it. The Turtle appeared at the end of an alleyway. I followed him to a garage. He twisted the T-shaped handle. The garage door lifted about two feet and then stopped. I rolled under and the Turtle followed and the door fell shut.
There was one window, clouded with grime and an old car with flat tires. Everything was covered with layers of drifting dirt.
There were peat moss bags stacked against the back wall. We made ourselves comfortable on those. I didn’t know how to tell the Turtle I dumped his stash and how I was too freaked to crawl into the Dumpster to get it back. Turtle wanted to kiss. His breath was rasty, but I noticed I did not mind his arms around me. My biting urge was weak and then weaker and then it was gone. There was some frenching before he pulled away. He said, “I just dropped two hits of Windowpane and I—wait, wait.” He reached in his pocket and unfolded a piece of gold origami paper. He said, “Open your mouth. Lift up your tongue. Sublingual is the way. Sublingual is the only way. I’m in love with you, Hillbilly Woman. You need to be with me.”
He sounded very sincere. I was thinking about the warning words of the Monkey but they shriveled away in the new lushness of touching; I was shaking from it. Looking into his eyes and watching the tiger irises melt away into expanding black.
He took my left hand and examined my finger again, touching the hard-ridged scars. He turned it over and traced the Tiparillo scar. “Tell me. Tell me everything.” And my rushing feelings were strong. When he ran his hands over me I did not flinch. He lifted my shirt and I put my arms up to help him.
I am not a developed person. There has been almost no development. And I thought I would not be able to stand it, being looked at the way he was looking at me, letting his fingers circle my places. He touched the inside of my arm where the words are. He traced the small raised scars spelling out the words, I’m sorry.
He looked at me without blinking. “You did this?”
I nodded.
He said, “You’re perfect.”
There was something I should have told him then, a little bit of information he could have used, but I didn’t want to interrupt the picture he was seeing of me. Or the twining captivation curling in my throat, making me lift my chin until my head fell back. And too there was the sublingual addition of the Windowpane. One hit or two hits. He never told me.
He said, talk. Talk and keep talking and do not stop talking because it was so good that way. Close my eyes and keep talking while he kissed the places, keep talking, keep talking while he touched every part of me.
Chapter 27
HEN WE rolled out of the wet mountains, there was a shock waiting. The land suddenly went flat and dry except for irrigated fields with high jets pulsing, and canals of violently swift water. It was a place of scrubby orchards and reservation Indians and migrant Mexicans and tumbling white trash. And there were miles of stockyards on either side of the potholed road, full of groaning cattle standing together around low muddy hills of feed. And there was a place where you could see it all from a single bar stool. Have you ever heard of a place called the Knocking Hammer?
The father found it in a very cosmic way. He finished the first jug of Corpse Reviver and instead of knocking him down, it made him precise and activated. He was just rattling with expanding action, taking smaller and smaller roads, looking for the right place along the irrigation canal to kill me on. He was so happy to see the canal. Not the culverts, not the corrugated half pipe that carried a bit of water here and there. It was the concrete canal that fascinated him. Dry and empty until the sluice gates opened. He was calmly explaining how perfect it would be because he could kill me right in the concrete ditch itself and when the water came it would gush me and all of the evidence away.
He said he was sorry, but it just wasn’t working out anymore. He wanted me to know it wasn’t anything personal, nothing I did or didn’t do. The problem was the hundred complications a kid couldn’t help but bring along. That, and the possibility of me breaking down and saying something that would put him up shit creek. He said he’d had enough of shit creek. He told me he knew just how to do it, he’d use Sheila and it wouldn’t hurt at all, and he would go to hell for it, if that made me feel any better. And while he laid out his plan I stared out the window with an old sentence he threw out once, repeating in my brain. “Freight cars are empty, that’s why she bounces.”
He followed the concrete canal until he came onto a road that was hardly more than two ruts through the dirt. It took us to land so bare it looked like it had been burned. Beside the road were train trac
ks and beside the train tracks was the dry canal bed. He pulled up close to a low berm, called a berm, a stretch of fortified earth built up from the ground a little so that the train can run free and clear on the flat tracks that disappeared into infinity. And I was remembering how the father told me that anyone could derail a train, a five-year-old could do it with a tablespoon. You just had to be patient. It could take you a couple of months but there wasn’t any magic to it. You just dig away at the berm. Dig it out from under the tracks, dig away and dig away and the day will come when you have pulled away the right number of spoonfuls. It was mathematics. And the one thing your average man does not know about train tracks in a derailment is that they will spear right up through the cars like a knife through a box of animal crackers.
The father opened the second jug of Corpse Reviver and passed it to me. I didn’t want any. In my mind I saw my name added to the list that included Doolie Bug and Uncle Lemuel. That started with Marie Cardall. Or maybe the Leonards boy buried in the foundation. Or maybe it was Old Dad. Or maybe it was that certain ancient monkey. The monkey with the most meat wins.
The father and I crossed over the train tracks. I was wondering if he forgot about Little Debbie or if he remembered Little Debbie and what I was going to do about it either way.
It was full afternoon in the middle of nowhere. We were in plain sight if anyone was looking. Dazzle camouflage. Very Navy. We stood on the edge of the canal together. He told me again that he’d make it easy on me, to lift my chin and let my head fall back and look at the sky, I wasn’t going to notice a thing.
I stabbed my arm backwards and Little Debbie bit into his leg. And then two things happened. Two things came thundering straight for us. The first was the water roar-rushing, it came with such a sudden groan and churning furiousness that it froze the father’s action. And then came the scream-whistle of the black train, a train really hauling, if you have ever seen one hauling, if you have seen them speed when the land is open and the light is good and the track is a straightaway. When the conductor and the engineer just look at each other and say, Why the fuck not?
And the whistle screamed and screamed and screamed because the father parked the car and the trailer so freakishly close to the track, very close to the knife-shiny rails, and the conductor and the engineer were saying, the stupid son of a bitch, the stupid little bastard, the stupid son of a bitch, the stupid little bastard, and I saw the father step back and stumble and his face was very white. It was too fast, too much like falling, everything rushing at him like that. He lost his balance and grabbed on to me, I was thinking we could fall either way, water or train, water or train, and I wished train. Train. I’d rather explode.
But I didn’t explode. And when the last car shot away down the track flying, there was a new element in our situation, someone watching us from the driver’s seat of a car parked alongside ours, and the car had a big yellow star on the door with COUNTY SHERIFF painted in a half circle in black. Behind the wheel, there he was.
He spotted us on the way to the Knocking Hammer for his usual afternoon binger, driving slowly through land so open he always had an excellent view of the local goings-on of nothing, because nothing is what there usually was, so you could say we stuck out.
I said, “Cop. Cop.”
The father hissed me quiet.
The sheriff leaned his head out of his rolled-down window and shouted something our way. I felt Little Debbie get wrenched out of my hand and I felt her sharp point in my back. The sheriff shouted something like what asshole parked his car so close to the track?
The father said, “Wave at him.” Little Debbie gave a little nudge, just a paper-cut nudge.
I waved.
The father called out, “My boy here, he was feeling a little sick. Let him out to puke.”
Barely moving his mouth the father spoke low. “He’s County, Clyde. He’s just half a turd.”
The sheriff got out of his car. You would expect him to be fat. Fat with a gut hanging over his confused pants and a big double-wobble chin and a bullet head with tiny eyes peeping out. But this man was made out of whip wire. Slender and hard looking with eyes barely blue; they were the color of cigarette smoke.
We didn’t have any choice but to shamble back to where he was standing, he was obviously wanting to strike up a conversation, whiffing at the trailer, saying, “Who died? That’d scare the stink off shit. And you two look like you been attacked by the goddamn Mexican ho-dag. Looks like blood, hell, looks like you’re still bleeding there on your leg. What the hell’s going on?”
The father’s hand on my shoulder gave me a squeeze and our new identities rose on this command. It was a freakish sensation to feel them come to life so naturally, to witness the father drain away and the brokenhearted barber from bum-fuck take his place. We walked toward the sheriff and he put a hand to his hip and drew his gun.
Chapter 28
ET US cuT youR MeaT We WiLl DReSs YouR meAt wE WilL bUy YOur MEaT we Will PAy CAsh BeSt PricEs tHE BesT nOnE bEttER cuStoM HousE ButCher hoUSe louNgE gRocERy CamPinG this is what was written on the side of the long sagging building that was part of the Knocking Hammer. It was painted in a variety of letter sizes, smalls and capitals mixed, looking random, looking distracted, looking half out of the bag.
The Knocking Hammer is where the sheriff took us after he looked in the trailer and finished hearing the father’s story, which the father told without ever looking directly at the gun the sheriff kept pointed at him in an almost casual way.
“Milsboro,” said the sheriff. “You’ll have to show me on a map.”
The father said, “If you got a map that shows little pinprick towns, sure.”
“Barber, huh?” said the sheriff. “You take a drink?”
“Oh yes,” said the father. “I’m not going to lie about it.”
They were getting along even though the sheriff kept his gun out for the whole conversation. He had the star and all the father had was a stinking trailer and a mongoloid son. How shitty. That was the sheriff’s comment. How shitty, and what will happen to the boy when he gets older?
They were getting along but they were circling. The father told me later he knew he was in fine shape from the start because he never met a county sheriff yet who wasn’t a lying bastard. “It’s an elected position, Clyde. You scratch his ass and he scratches yours.”
The sheriff was sniffing out potential. Right away the father knew the sheriff was dangling a possibility in front of him because of which questions he asked and which questions he didn’t.
The sheriff said for us to follow him. He knew a place where we could get cleaned up. Get ourselves together. Campground with hookups for the trailer. Bar. Grocery. Whatever we needed. The lady who ran the place was a cousin of his, a widow, Pammy. She took over the whole operation once the Original Swede became the Dead Swede. And she liked new faces and she loved children.
“What they got to drink up that way?” asked the father.
“You heard of Whitley’s?”
“Lead on!”
In the car on the way to the Knocking Hammer the father went over the rules and regulations of being the mongoloid son and I stared out the window and watched the land change like it had a mental illness. Dead and barren became spinach, chard, and cabbage glittering with the pulsing spray from long-wheeled irrigators, and then a dead stockyard with knocked-down fence posts and a collapsed ramp and then a dumping ground for junk cars and raw garbage with turkey buzzards circling overhead and then sudden low orchards, peaches it looked like, with migrants reaching into scraggly trees with dirty pick-sacks slung over their shoulders.
And then it was barren again, looking quite scorched, and then we came to the Knocking Hammer.
The smell from the feedlot was instant and strong. A nose-twister of super-heated cattle pee and the further nose-twister from the cull pile behind the slaughter shack. More turkey buzzards. The sound of a meat saw buzzing. The familiar flies rising up in greeting. It
was a dilapidated operation, small and ratty, but the father’s face lit up when he saw it. He patted the steering wheel and said, “Well, I’ll be a son-of-a-bitch.” He looked over at me but I turned away before our eyes met. He never mentioned what happened at the edge of the canal. For the father it was another world ago. The balance didn’t carry over. He said, “This lady, this Pammy, she likes kids. I want you to honey-up to her, Clyde. And the sheriff too. Come on then.” He got out of the car.
There were some barefoot kids with slept-on hair and dusty legs wearing raggy shorts and tank tops watching us from in front of one of the Knocking Hammer entrances with “Gro STORE” painted above the door. The kids were licking their tongues into the tops of empty Fanta bottles and picking their faces and jumping up onto the sagging porch to try to see into our car. One ran up very close to my window and the sheriff cuffed him. They scattered around the side of the building.
I looked at myself in the wing mirror and saw my eyes looking back through holes in a horrible head, my face was swollen and bruised and there was a pounding pain behind my forehead that was getting louder. The father said, “Quit dragging ass, Clyde.”
There were a couple of cars parked cockeyed out front. The sheriff was late and the regulars who gathered to hear his afternoon wisdom were watching for him. When they heard him haw-hawing so loud outside, they came out of the door marked LOUNGE. They were rubbed-out men. Looking like old hard erasers.
The sheriff was standing at the open trailer door. Around him flocks of new flies were rushing in, attracted by a scent, a new drift of promising molecules. “HAW-HAW!” brayed the sheriff. Then his smile dropped away and he turned to the father, pulled out his gun and said, “You’re under arrest, you bastard.”
The father jerked so slightly, the movement was hardly visible to the human eye. A fly would have noticed it. The compound eye makes even the most minuscule motion seem huge. And I was thinking that maybe the sheriff was part fly because he saw it. He saw it and he kept his hard-faced expression for a few more seconds and then laughed harder. He said to the men, “You see his face! HAW HAW.” He tapped the father with the gun barrel. “Got ya, Milsboro! Haw haw haw!”
