by LYNDA BARRY
The trooper bounced a look off of me and then back at the father like he should know better than to talk about something like that in front of a little girl.
He said, “Your license said Rohbeson.”
“That’s right.”
“Rohbeson’s Slaughterhouse?”
The father nodded.
“My daddy drove across two counties to get to your place. Said you couldn’t beat Rohbeson’s. Took his deer there every year. Your outfit turned out the best venison sausage I ever tasted. I’m real sorry about your old man.”
“Yeah, well.” The father looked down. “Chicago and all. We couldn’t compete. That’s progress.”
“Your whole operation’s shutting down then?” said the trooper.
“It’s shut down. My old man had it mortgaged to the gizzards.”
“It’s a shame.”
The father nodded. “It is.”
“All right then,” said the trooper. “I don’t need to tell you not to pick up any hitchhikers.”
“Hell no,” said the father, feathering the gas pedal. “I wouldn’t dream.” He waved out a half salute and eased up the clutch. When we curved the next corner he snatched the pop out of my hand and whipped it out the window. His forehead was sweating. He was trying to get a fresh pack of cigs unwrapped but he couldn’t do it. “Help me out here, Clyde.” He tossed the pack to me. “Have one yourself if you want. You earned it. We just about got caught by our short and curlies. Reach under the seat and pull out my medicine. Take a pull. It will put you righter than RC any day. Whooooooo! Son-of-a-BITCH! I about crapped my pants when I saw you back there. Take a pull off that bottle. Go on. Hold your nose when you do it and you won’t taste it so bad. It burns like hell but what comes after is a true reward. I am sure goddamned glad to see you, son.”
And I will admit I was glad to see him too. And I was feeling pretty good with the radio on loud, lighting his cigarettes for him and watching the bugs splat against the windshield while the father raced down the black back roads, singing.
And then in the middle of nowhere on that nowhere road, a woman stepped out of the darkness holding a suitcase. A large woman wearing a head scarf and a bathrobe, setting a suitcase down and waving both of her big hands in the air. The father slammed on the brakes and the car fishtailed her way and slowed to stop and then at the last second the father floored it. He floored it right into her. There was a sick crunching and a thumping and a moment of flesh pressing against the windshield in front of me. A smashed face hitting the glass with horrible features flattened, and then thumps sounding over my head and then nothing. Just silence and a weird weightless feeling all around. A feeling like when you stand up too fast and the spots of light swim around your eyes. The father checked the rearview mirror. He looked at me. “Think I hit her?” He was smiling. He threw the car into reverse and ran over her again. He drove back and forth several times and then jumped out, grabbed the suitcase, and held it up.
“Not a scratch on it, Clyde! It’s a Samsonite! We could do a goddamned commercial!”
Chapter 8
OOOOOOOOO!” THE sound made Vicky jump and mess up my mascara.
“Hooooooooo!”
“What’s that?” she whispered. She grabbed my arm.
“Hooooooooo!” A chill went straight up my back. It was a person for sure and for a second I thought it was someone it could not possibly be unless the dead do truly walk.
“Hoooooo did you killlll?” said the voice.
Vicky’s eyes locked on mine.
“Hooooooooo!” It was coming from behind a stack of targets. Vicky shoved me. “Go see,” she whispered. “Go look.”
I crawled forward a little and poked my head around for a second and then whipped it back. “It’s a guy,” I whispered.
“What kind of guy?”
“I think it’s a hippie.”
Vicky stood up and took a few creeping steps around the stacked bales. I saw her yellow boot swing back and deliver a hard kick.
“OWwwwww!” said the hippie.
“I hate spies,” said Vicky Talluso. “Roberta,” she said. “Get over here.”
He looked very relaxed laying on his back in the straw. He seemed to be somewhere around our age, a little older maybe, and he was looking very much like a typical glue-sniffer dropout. The extreme relaxation of the guy was interesting to me. A very fat fly lifted itself and made a worn-out buzzing sound and flew a lopsided circle around his face. He followed it with his eyes and said, “Not now.”
Vicky said, “He’s wasted.”
She nudged his leg with her boot and it was quite rubberized. Except for the slightest movement of his open hands he was still and I saw he was extremely pale. Dark circles ringed his eyes. His hair was white-blond and longish, looking greasy and clumped together. All of him was looking very white except his eyes, which were black, weirdly black and crowded with fringes of too many white eyelashes. His fingers wiggled a little, and I started thinking of a white moth on its back moving paper-colored legs so slowly.
He was wearing a red-and-white-striped surfer shirt, very large and ugly high-water bell bottoms, tight to just below the knees and then flaring out the wrong way. He didn’t have socks on and his shoes were the most insane pimped-out beige patent leather with scuffed gold buckles and high stacked heels that were worn down to almost sideways. They looked big on him. He saw me staring and said, “These are the Lord’s shoes, Hillbilly Woman. We traded. Now I walk in his shoes and he walks in mine. And guess whose fit better?”
“He’s completely wasted,” said Vicky. “Look at him.” She clawed at her forehead, digging her short fingernails into the bald eyebrow skin above her left eye. It was the reason she was bald there. She clawed at it whenever she was trying to figure out what to do next. And she had such an active life that the hair never had a chance to grow back. The father taught me to watch the hands. Always watch the hands. The hands will tell you everything you need to know.
“Hey. Spy,” said Vicky. “You tripping?” Her voice was too loud for the situation. “You drop? Hey. You. Talk. Answer.”
He didn’t look at her. He kept his black eyes on me. Vicky noticed it. She said, “He’s in love with you, Roberta.”
She meant it as an insult. The guy did not give off normal vibrations and nothing about him was cute, but it made her mad that he was noticing me instead of her. When she said it, he smiled and the sudden alive pinkness of his gums and his wet teeth sent a shock through me and caused an involuntary jerking. Sometimes the autonomic nervous system is called that, the involuntary. And sometimes the passageways are frayed or badly wired. I have certain bare spots and he found one.
Vicky was kneeling beside him, bending over his face while her hands were quick going through his pockets. “Yeah, you’re tripping aren’t you, little hippie man? His pupils are totally blown. Is it acid? Hey. Answer. Is it mesc? What’s your name?” She pointed at me. “You like her? She doesn’t have a boyfriend. Right, Roberta?”
She gave me the olden look. Maybe the oldest of the olden looks. The go-along-with-it point of the eyes. The father would have laughed at her. She was so obvious. She had no style at all. I felt a little disappointed. The father would have bent over laughing.
“Roberta doesn’t have a boyfriend and she loves getting high. Right, Roberta? Are you going to get her high? What’s your name?” Vicky’s fingers worked her way into his bagged-out shirt pocket without trying to hide what she was doing.
“I am the Turtle,” he said. “You know me as the Turtle.”
“Yeah? What’s this?” Vicky pulled out a round flat container with a metal lid. “This your stash?” She shook it and there was a damp scratchy sound.
“Since 1822,” said the Turtle.
“Yeah?” said Vicky.
“It satisfies.”
“What is it, hippie man? Hash?”
The Turtle said, “It’s a new day so let a man come in and do the popcorn,” and then snatched the
container out of her hand before she could pry off the lid.
I thought of a trap-door spider. He moved as quick as that.
“Don’t be so tight,” said Vicky. “I wasn’t doing nothing.”
The Turtle tossed it back to her. He said, “Why don’t ya check it ouuuut and lock it dowwwwn!” Every time he talked he changed his accent. I was getting interested in him.
Vicky sat down and pried off the lid. Inside was a dark flaky substance that looked like hairy mud. She sniffed it and pulled her face back. “Smells like horse piss. What is it, Turtle?”
I sat down next to her. I said, “It’s Copenhagen, Vicky. Chew.”
“What, like hash?” she said. “A kind of hash?”
“No,” I said. “Chew. Tobacco.”
She said, “But it does have, like, hash oil in it, right? Because I have a very sensitive nose. I can tell hash.”
The Turtle propped himself up and did a French accent. “Like, I want shit, man, hey. Will you stone? I want to smoke shit for example. Is it?”
I was getting more and more impressed with him. He reached into the same shirt pocket and pulled out a bent white paper twist. Club-shaped and very fat, which he held out to Vicky.
“Trade ya,” he said. “It’ll talk to ya.” He wiggled the twist and I watched Vicky try to figure out if she was being tricked or not. Vicky looked at me for my opinion. The father would have fallen on the floor laughing.
All three of us held in and exhaled our clouds. The Turtle called it the Ancient Substance, something I’d been hearing about in Health, something featured in the film our 1,000-year-old teacher Mrs. Fields showed us called What Are Drugs? When I started laughing, Vicky said, “What? What?”
I said, “What Are Drugs?” I said, “Getting a trip is groovy, man. I am groovy. I can flyyyyy.” I told them about the movie. About how it started with warped music and a close-up of water that someone was dropping food coloring into and what looked like some little balls of aluminum foil. I told them about the whispering voice. “I am groovy. Getting a trip is groovy.”
“Getting a trip is groovy,” said the Turtle.
“Oh yeah!” said Vicky. “I saw that movie in second period! And it was so fake! And people kept cracking up! And Mrs. Fields turns on the lights and says, ‘Shut up or you have to go to the office!’ And me and these two black guys could not stop laughing and we got sent to the office.” She inhaled another cloud and passed me the twist. I was staring at her. In a pinched back-of-the-throat voice she said, “What?”
I took my inhale. I wondered was she just being a very bold liar or did she really not know I had that class with her. I was sitting two rows behind her. And I knew what she said never happened. Mrs. Fields turned on the lights and told us to shut up but she didn’t send Vicky Talluso to the office. She didn’t send anyone to the office.
“Hillbilly Woman,” The Turtle timed it so that Vicky was on an inhale when he spoke to me. “You must continue your story.”
Vicky blew her cloud out. “What story?”
“The murder,” said the Turtle. “Little Debbie.”
Vicky pulled her head back and looked at me. She said, “What Little Debbie?”
“The Hillbilly Woman killed the people with Little Debbie. I heard her say so.”
“Oh,” said Vicky. “That. She was just bullshitting.”
“Were you?” The Turtle was looking at me and his black eyes were like sucking holes.
“No,” I said.
From the back of her throat Vicky said, “Lie,” and some little wisps of smoke curled around her teeth. She was hogging on the roach and it was burning her fingers. The Turtle tossed her a beat-up cough drops tin with a flip-top lid.
“What’s this?” she said. “Another fake-out?” Vicky shook the box and there was a dry rattle.
“Careful,” said the Turtle. “Don’t bruise them.”
Vicky opened the lid. She sniffed and said, “Chocolate mesc! Is it? Is it? Is it chocolate mesc?”
“Is it?” said the Turtle.
She took out a clear cap filled with what looked like powdered cocoa and held it between her fingers. “It is,” she said. And before the Turtle answered she closed the tin and slipped it into her purse. “I’m keeping it for you, OK, Turtle? You are very wasted, OK? It’s easy to lose things when you are wasted, so I’ll keep it for you.”
He was fast. He was holding the stash box before Vicky could even finish shutting her purse. She moved her hand quickly to her mouth and swallowed the cap. She said, “It’s mesc, right?”
“Is it?”
“TELL ME!”
The Turtle shook his head. “No, Violent One. It is not.”
“What is it then? Will it get me high?”
“It has a name but it will be unfamiliar to you.”
“I know a lot of names,” said Vicky. “You would be amazed.”
The Turtle stood up and brushed off bits of straw from his clothes. “We need to stroll,” he said. “We need to be with the people.”
We pushed ourselves outside and my eyes cramped down hard from the light. The name of the drug was Creeper. The Turtle was right. Vicky Talluso had never heard of it. As we followed him up the embankment she said, “Is it like microdot?”
“It’s not like anything,” said the Turtle.
Vicky hunched her shoulders up and down. “Does it give you rushes?”
The Turtle pulled out the box and offered it to me. “Do you wish to partake, Hillbilly Woman?”
“Why do you call me that?”
“Because you are a hillbilly girl lost in a hillbilly world.”
Vicky Talluso said, “She is! She is!” and started laughing uncontrollably. Then she said, “I’m not feeling it or anything. I just get so excited when I drop. Roberta, you have to drop. She’s never dropped before, Turtle. Come on, Roberta. Didn’t I tell you I was going to get you high?” I held my hand out to the Turtle.
“Yessssssss,” said Vicky Talluso. “Yessssssss.”
Chapter 9
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 thinkin
g 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.