by LYNDA BARRY
I ordered french fries and a large milk. It was a down time between buses. There weren’t any other customers. The station was small but with very high ceilings that made sounds echo. The hanging lights had the longest pull strings I’d ever seen and there were flies hanging on them, swaying in the weak little breeze made by a dying fan.
The milk was ice-cold and I drank it so fast I got a stabbing headache. I was pushing on my forehead hard with both hands and the waitress’s face got a little bit softer. “Thirsty, huh?” I nodded. “Where you headed?” I shrugged.
“Your uncle said Dentsville. Did I hear him say he was your uncle? You have people out that way?”
I said, “Can I have another milk?”
She put it in front of me and I went for it. I couldn’t put it down. She started laughing when I asked for a third one. She said, “Good lord. I hope you don’t drink your liquor like that!”
I said, “No.”
The man at the sundries counter laughed and then started coughing.
The waitress put the third glass down. She said, “Dentsville. Dentsville. Your uncle military?”
“Navy,” I said.
“Fort Madley then, maybe.” She called over to the fly-swatter man. “Fort Madley, isn’t it? Outside of Dentsville?”
He said, “I believe so.”
The waitress said, “Is it Navy, Fort Madley?”
He said, “Army, I think.”
She looked at me. “You said your uncle’s Navy?”
I nodded. “Down to the last inch of his pecker.”
She covered her mouth and said “Lord!” with the word drawn out. The fly-swatter man was laughing. He said, “Sounds like a Navy man to me.”
“Well,” said the waitress. “My.”
In a lower voice she said, “What happened to your face?” I looked down at my hands. She said, “Where’s your folks at? Where’s your mother?”
I looked up at her, just barely. I said, “Passed away.”
She leaned into the little window to the kitchen and convinced the purple-nosed cook that it wasn’t too late for pancakes.
I had noticed in many stories that it was usually an advantage to have a dead mother. Opportunities came your way that wouldn’t have otherwise. I was starting to think of what it would be like to stick around the bus station. I liked what I saw of the little town. The sun was bright on everything and there was a little park across from the Trailways station where a couple of old guys stared at things from benches. I started thinking about Syd. What life would be like if I were his kid. What it would be like to sit up on the bus station’s silver and red spinning counter chairs and eat a plate of pancakes he bought me because I did so good on my report card. Eat a banana split. Listen to him brag on me to the waitress.
The fly-swatter man let out a snort and popped a fly in mid-flight. It went sailing through the air and skidded on the floor. He said, “You see the size of that bastard!”
“Language,” said the waitress. “Children here.”
“Oh the hell,” said the man.
The fly lay there for a while, and when no one was watching, it left. Where it went to I do not know. It outsmarted all of us.
The waitress was setting paper cones for water into a row of metal holders. She was moving fast. There was a bus due. She tore off my check and told me I had to leave the counter and to pay the fly-swatter man. She didn’t charge me for the pancakes or the extra milks. I had a lot of money left over. I stood looking over the candy and picked out some sour-grape gum, some fireballs, a bag of barbecue potato chips. The fly-swatter man said, “Quite a shiner. How’d you manage that?” And then the people started pouring in. “Fifteen minutes!” shouted the driver. “Fifteen and fifteen only!” He had his own coffee cup and he pushed past the people and slid it onto the counter.
I watched the people shovel food down and listened to their voices bouncing off the ceiling. And then the bus driver shouted the time and they were gone.
The waitress cleared the counter. She looked mad again. She kept looking over at the empty ticket window and pushing her lips together. She flipped a rag over her shoulder and clattered a stack of dirty plates and kicked the swinging door open with her shoe, calling to the fly-swatter man, “Must be nice not to give a damn about anybody but yourself.” The door swung shut behind her. The fly-swatter man grunted.
I went back to looking at the things he had for sale. There was a row of push-button pens hanging on a display string. I kept staring at them.
The fly-swatter man peeled some tobacco crumbs off his lip. He was a sad-looking man. His lower eyelids hung so you could see the insides. There are certain dogs this happens to. They are not born that way but somehow it happens. I noticed too that he had large earlobes with creases in them and strange dentures that looked like wax.
I said, “Can I buy a pen, please?”
He said, “What color?”
He took down the blue pen I asked for. “Also,” I said, “do you got paper?”
“Stationery?”
“Is that your paper?”
He nodded and looked on a shelf behind him. “All I have left is airmail. You want airmail?”
He pushed a flat pale blue box across the glass counter. It was dusty and it had a red loop of ribbon taped around it. On the front of the box was an indented silver drawing of a plane and the trail it left spelled out “Airmail” in the most beautiful longhand.
“Oh,” I said. “It’s so nice.”
He said, “Stamps?”
I nodded.
“How many?”
I said, “I just turned eleven. It was just my birthday.”
“How many stamps?”
“Eleven,” I said. “Because I just turned eleven.” I don’t know why this information made him so gruff. I was thinking maybe he would give me the comment of “Happy Birthday” or, “Congratulations,” or whatever it is people say to kids who just turned eleven.
He laid down my stamps and pushed my change at me and picked up his wet cig and his fly swatter and started staring out the window again.
I said, “Know that fly you hit before?”
He made a short little noise.
I said, “Well, it got away.”
His sad eyes looked me over.
When the father came back through the glass door our bus was just ready to start boarding. He was walking fast and his hair was wet-combed back and he had his usual tall liquor store sacks and he smelled very strong of cigarettes and perfume and a kind of booze I didn’t know. “C’mon, Clyde.” He got our bags and hurried me along, jerking his head toward the bus door and saying, “Go, Clyde.”
The ticket lady came in a few minutes later. She didn’t look at anyone but the father, who never looked back at her once.
The father hunched and stammered and asked the people in line if it would be all right with everyone if I got on first, being as I was an epileptic.
There was a whoosh of the silver door and the high steps were revealed. It was my first time on a bus and it seemed incredibly royal. I paused at the top of the steps and felt the father’s instant shove. “All the way to the back. Move it. Go.”
He let me have the window seat and he slouched low, hit the recliner button, and shut his eyes. I watched the ticket lady searching the passenger windows as the bus pulled out of the station.
Dentsville. On the front of the bus it said DENTSVILLE.
The father poked his head up when we were out of the bus station. I said, “Are we going to Fort Madley?”
He said, “What the hell’s Fort Madley?”
I took out my stationery box and slipped the ribbon off. Inside was pale blue paper, thin enough to see through. The envelopes had the same airplane on them with the same perfect writing behind it. Airmail.
When the father spoke, I jumped.
He said, “What’s that there?”
“Airmail.”
“Airmail? You spent the money I gave you on that? Damn it, Clyde, w
ho in the hell are you planning on writing? Santa Claus?”
I put it away and waited for him to fall asleep.
It was coming toward evening and we were in the open land again and it was good to see it. The colors had done their last flares and were draining away. I was having a hard time looking out the window because the wires and poles were making me dizzy. The constant up and down. When I tried to ignore them they seemed to get even more obvious. Even when I stared straight ahead they were getting into the corner of my eye.
Who was I planning on writing? Who was I planning on writing? The father’s question was bothering me. I looked over at him. He was snoring so slack-jawed and his breath was squidding out horror fumes in my direction. I saw his Navy bridgework that always gave him trouble. His head was tilted away from me. And I will admit I looked at his neck to find it. The light pulsing of the carotid. The involuntary pulsing. As involuntary as my eyes studying it.
There are two kinds of dying for every single person. There is the moment when your personality dies, when the you of you drains away into the air, and then there is the part where your body dies, organ by organ. And then three days later there are the flies.
Dear Jesus,
Hi, how are you? Please excuse my bumpy handwriting but rightnow I am on a bus.
I kept trying to find a way to turn myself so that I couldn’t see the telephone poles or be in the path of the father’s breath. I was feeling dizzy and then very sick and the father was shouting, “WHAT THE—GO TO THE HEAD, DO IT IN THE HEAD! DON’T PUKE ON ME, CLYDE! CLYDE!”
I never did finish my letter to Jesus. I tried for a while but I couldn’t think of anything else to say besides, Have a Good Summer and Stay Crazy.
Chapter 17
WANDERED AROUND after the streetlights came on, wearing Vicky Talluso’s hat and carrying her purse and sending her ESP vibrations even though I was doubtful either of us had ESP. Vicky said she did, but I think she just needed a girl to bring for the brother of Dane, and maybe I looked hard up enough to believe it was a spirit who sent her to me. Was I that hard up? It was possible.
I was walking down hills I’d never walked before and around me the windows of the people’s houses were all jumping with the berserk light of the TV. I doubted that I had ESP because if I had ESP I do not think my life would have turned out the way it did. If I could have seen the unexpected before it got to me first.
I was thinking of the Turtle. His arm around me. What did it mean? Was it meaningful? Vicky never said his name after she got his stash. What mattered was the stash and not the Turtle. I felt in Vicky’s purse. The stash was there. It was there. I could call the cops and say “I have drugs,” and get arrested if I wanted to.
I was wondering was it meaningful, the Turtle’s arm around me, was it? And what was the deal on him? He was such a weird combination of skorkish clothes and vocabulary I didn’t know and then his teeth, which were small but very straight and white and had the little ridge across them that braces leave. He wasn’t from my side of Dunbar Avenue, that was for sure. Did it mean anything, his arm around me? He was interested in my story. He asked me questions. That one question. “Are you wanted?”
I was thinking it would be not so bad to run into him and I did some ESP vibrations to him too but it felt fake. I came to Twenty-third Avenue. I knew where I was again. Now what. Now what.
In Ye Olde Curiosity Shoppe down at the piers along with the bone of the whale penis and the dried-out beef jerky man called Sylvester there were the shrunken heads. It was from the eyebrows and eyelashes you knew they were real. And little downy hairs on the faces. Their mouths and eyelids and nose holes were sewn shut. Someone stitched them like the mother said she was going to stitch me. She was going to sew me shut. It was during one of her furious screaming nights when anything goes. When Julie and I are just supposed to sit on the floor and take it. She wanted us on the floor. I don’t know why. Julie was the one who got her mad. She told the mother we were watching TV and the movie was the Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb and when the mummy walked out I said, “Look, Julie, it’s your dad.”
You should never bring up Julie’s dad to the mother for any reason. She gets the most furious when she remembers all of the ways she’s been ripped off in life. The mother told me she was going to sew me shut for saying that and she got the needle, the right needle that came from the hospital, stainless steel and curved into a half circle with a blade point. It was already threaded. She crouched down and held it up to my face. She said, “This is what I’m going to use.”
I suddenly felt so tired of trying to keep her off of me. I was thinking, I don’t care anymore. Get it over. Get it over with. I crossed Twenty-third and headed home.
East Crawford doesn’t have streetlights. There’s some light that leaks onto the mud road from the lumberyard, and there are people’s porch lights but most are burned out. Ours is. The square front room window had the blue TV light behind the curtains and from a side gap, a shard of light from the mother’s lamp fell jagged on the wooden steps. She was home. The lamp was never on except when she was home. She was home.
My hand was shaking when I put my key in the lock. I kept thinking, Get it over with, who cares, get it over, but the scream-whistle was starting in my ears anyway. I put my key in the lock and twisted it. I knew the mother heard it. I knew right then she was looking up, her posture getting instantly straight, she was waiting for my head to enter her world. But the door would not open.
I pushed and twisted the lock and tried the doorknob and twisted the key again and freaked. She did something to the door. She did something to make sure there was no way I could just walk in. I was going to have to knock. She wanted to make sure she was ready for me. It took a long time to get my hand up. Knock-Knock.
Her lamp switched off. There was a tiny sway to the curtains. And then the door flew open and two claws went into my face.
It was just Julie. The mother wasn’t even home. She wasn’t home when Julie came home from school. “WHERE WERE YOU?” Julie was screaming, we were on the floor tearing at each other. She’s smaller than me but not by much and she is strong and fearless when she’s mad. She was gouging my skin and trying to bite me. She spit and I spit back and I shoved her against the furnace, which made a loud blamming that traveled the ductwork.
She lay on her side making noises like she couldn’t breathe and I was thinking she was faking, what a faker, and then I saw her eyes go wide and I turned to see what she was looking at. The mother was standing in the doorway.
A man stepped into the room behind her. A skinny man with a black suit on. He had a long yellowish face with a lot of folds, old dry hanging folds and a long nose with emerging puffs of nostril hair and spotted sagging lips looking like two bad internal organs with curved rodent teeth bucking out between them. His hair was very blond and obviously a wig. And his eyes were blue. That terrifying pale blue you see on dolls that have eyes that open and shut. His looked like they would shut forever once you knocked him over. His smell was very clean, slight antiseptic mixed with lavender. A rich person’s smell. He was perfect. He was the kind of man the mother had been dreaming of.
“This is Dr. Canning,” said the mother. She was smiling. Her hair was fixed. Her hand gestures were very graceful. She had a new gold bracelet on. She didn’t tell him our names. What she did was flick her fingernails at us and say, “Get upstairs.”
Julie instantly started putting on her pajamas. “You’re dead,” she whispered. “You are killed.” It wasn’t any use to ask Julie not to tell the mother. Begging didn’t work with Julie. Neither did beating her up. She might bust me to the mother and she might not. There was no way to tell.
Her elbow got bent-jammed in her nightgown sleeve hole and she hopped in a circle trying to get it loose. She said, “What’s wrong with your eyes?” She said, “Help me.” And then the nightgown ripped and she started crying. She just fell onto the floor and cried.
The mother’s feet came up the
stairs. I said, “Julie, get up, get up. She’s coming.” But the mother was going to her own room. We heard the padlocks on her door unlocking, we heard some bumping on the other side of the closet. Her suitcase. She was getting her suitcase down. Drawers opened and closed, and then the door padlocks were snapped shut.
Then it was quiet. Perfectly quiet. She was standing outside our door. The mother did this. She made you wait. She made all the freaking gather hard within you and then she made her move. Our door opened about a foot and the mother’s head came in and the mouth of it opened and some words were said and then the head retracted and the door shut. For a million dollars I could not tell you what she said because of the scream-whistle flooding my head. I saw her but all I heard were the scream-whistles blowing my mind out.
The mother and the suitcase went downstairs. The voice of the pancreas-lipped doctor came up the stairs. Then came the sound of the mother’s fizz-laughing, sounding very fake, and her voice calling to us in a merry way, saying Aunt Caroline would be over any minute and for us to be good and mind Aunt Caroline, and the mother would see us next week. The front door closed and then there was just the TV sounds of a very excited person singing about their toothpaste.
“Who’s Aunt Caroline?” said Julie.
We both minorly started to laugh. It was a weird giddiness that sometimes hit us both at the same time when the mother left the house.
“What’s wrong with your eyes, Roberta?”
I got up to look out of the bedroom window, making sure it was real, that she was really gone. I saw the red taillights moving away, leaving cherry red trails suspended in the dark.
In the corroded dresser mirror I saw my pupils were blown. No iris at all. I said, “Let’s go downstairs.”
Chapter 18
E CAME rolling into Dentsville in the middle of the afternoon. I was starving. The father was afraid I’d get sick again so he wouldn’t let me eat anything. All I got to drink were the half-melted ice cubes from the bottom of his spiked pop. It had been a long ride. I slept through a lot of it but the rest of the time I couldn’t really tell you what I did. Stared out the window, mostly. The father didn’t want me to talk to anyone and he said he wasn’t going to talk to anyone either. “L.L.S.S., Clyde. Loose Lips Sink Ships.” Would that have been so bad?