by LYNDA BARRY
The father saw the men with eyes and ears open for a show. It was just a show. The sheriff called them over to have a look inside the trailer. He jerked his thumb at the father. “Do you know this joker tried to sell a county sheriff deer meat off-season?” And I watched the sheriff lie and the father follow.
The sheriff said, “And look at how he fixed it up for me. Don’t it just look mouthwatering?”
More haw-haws. The father played to the sheriff. He said, “Now where’s this Pammy?”
“Ho!” said the sheriff. “You’ll know her when you see her. Somebody call to Fernst. Somebody call Fernst to help with this mess.”
One of the men loped back inside. I heard him holler “Fernst? Fernst?”
A woman’s voice shouted, “What do you want with him? Don’t you go in there. He’s on the job! Goddamn you, get your dried-up ass back on the other side of the bar. Who wants him?”
There was some low-voiced conversation and then the man loped back out and the sound of the meat saw stopped. The sheriff said, “You go on inside, son. You tell Pammy I said for her to give you a red soda pop.”
“Well,” said the father. “He don’t exactly talk.”
The sheriff said, “Oh, shit, that’s right.” He looked at the men and said, “Mongolian idiot. Genuine.”
“Boy’s pretty busted up,” said one.
The sheriff said, “Faller’s disease. Brain troubles. Thrashing spasms.” He talked like he’d known about me for years. “He’ll never get beyond the mental age of five.”
“Like Fernst,” said one of the men.
“Yup,” said the sheriff. “He’s a little spooker, just like Fernst.”
I didn’t look at the father even though I felt his eye rays on me. He wanted me to throw him a look, to let him know I was cooperating. The sheriff was adding his own bits and pieces to my story and the father was counting on a good trade-in for it. I could hear him in my pounding head, Look at me Clyde, look up at me.
The sheriff touched my shoulder and my teeth exposed themselves and I fought to put my lips in a smile around them. He said, “Go on inside, son, Pammy’s a natural mother. She’ll know what to do with you.”
The father said, “Go on, Clyde. Don’t be shy.” He was still hoping I would look at him. I didn’t.
I walked though a screen door that was more chicken wire than screen. Flies could come and go as they pleased. My eyes were adjusting to the dimness, I walked a few paces and a voice said, “Freeze!” It was the same lady’s voice. “Don’t take another step, you little shit.”
She was a big pinch-faced woman with hair that was crispy-fried blond, like old doll hair that had been rubbed all day on the sidewalk. Her eyes were squinting mean and she was blowing snorts of cig smoke at me. She said, “Get the hell back outside. Don’t filthify in here.”
I didn’t move. She didn’t insist. She leaned to look out the doorway. “That your old man?”
I nodded.
“Where’s your mother at?” I shrugged.
She heaved the bar rag at me. “Wipe your face. You know what little boys like you grow up to be? Do you, huh? Ask me because I know.”
With my eyes I said, “What?”
She said, “Assholes. Can you spell that?”
Through a row of small rectangular windows along the far wall I saw a tall man carrying chunks of the hacked-apart deer on his shoulders. He was dressed in butcher clothes stiff with blood. The father was saying something that made everybody start wheeze-laughing. Pammy regarded him and I watched something like thinking going on behind her eyes.
I thought my smell glands were dead from all the overload but the bar rag stank so bad it brought them back to life. I wiped my face, thinking honey-up, honey-up to her and felt the transfer of the filthy smell of a horrible thing that never dried out.
Pammy watched the father. “He don’t fool me. Your old man? He don’t fool me at all.”
She had a dead front tooth. A blue front tooth. And when she came from around the side of the bar to get a better look at the father I saw her huge stomach fat folds hanging over pink stretch shorts, hanging flatly like she had been deflated. Her boobs hung flatly too under a pink sleeveless blouse. And her bare legs were a horrible white with knotted humps of veins under the skin looking blue and mold green and twisted. She wore sling-backs with sad little bows sagging at the toe line. She rocked her dead tooth with her thumb and watched every move the father made.
From the ceiling above her hung hundreds of yellowed rolls of flypaper, some ancient, some recent, all looking like horror party decorations and loaded with flies. When one got full, Pammy just got the step stool out and hung another one. They stretched in every direction all the way to the corners. The bar was a horseshoe shape with the open end pointing toward a doorway that opened into a long hall. At the far end a back door to the outside was wide open.
Through the door I could see the butcher man pass one way and then pass the other way and then pass back again, like he was pacing. He was very strange looking, earthworm looking, is the only way I can describe it. His posture was in constant motion, going from question mark to exclamation mark and back again, and all his extremities, including his head, seemed to flatten and retract and then extend and sharpen. He was chomping on something while he paced. Eating something in his wiggling bloody hand. From the colors on the dangling wrapper I was thinking it was a Three Musketeers bar. He stepped up into the hall and I looked away. A door opened and closed and a locking bolt was thrown. The meat saw started up again. That was Fernst. And he didn’t talk either except when he went, “Hoooo-hoooo.”
Hanging on a wall behind the liquor bottle display was a calendar. In big letters it said DON’T MONKEY AROUND. ASK FOR WHITLEY’S! Underneath was a picture of a chimpanzee dressed in a nurse’s uniform and holding a huge hypodermic needle. She was sticking her lips out. The caption said, WHO ORDERED A SHOT?
The sheriff stepped up and spoke to Pammy through the screen. “You think we could get Grandma-ma to clean out this trailer?” Pammy started to open the door and the sheriff said, “You don’t want to look. It’ll make you puke, I guarantee it.”
Pammy said, “I’ve never puked in my life.”
The sheriff said, “Well, this could be your lucky day.”
And they talked about it some more and a dusty Fanta child was sent with a message to Grandma-ma that there was fresh deer meat waiting if she wanted to earn it. The sheriff called, “And you tell her Pammy’ll throw in a couple pounds of tripe if she’s fast about it.”
Pammy said, “The hell I will.”
The sheriff said, “What do you think of Clyde?”
Pammy said, “Who?”
The sheriff nodded his head at me. “His name’s Clyde. I think a red pop and a bag of chips would put him right. That sound good to you, Clyde? He don’t talk.”
Pammy said, “What brand of shit are you trying to stir up here, Arden?”
The sheriff said, “Well, that depends on you.”
The father and the men came in and rounds were poured. I never got the red pop and chips. I didn’t care. What I wanted was a cigarette. I noticed the father pinching at his thigh. Trying to keep some blood-stopping pressure where Little Debbie got him. I went over and did a Helen Keller tug at his arm. I made my fingers into a scissoring “V” and met his eyes with sincerity.
“Naw,” said one of the men. “He don’t smoke!”
“Oh yes,” said the father, tapping out a cig for me. “Keep an eye on your smokes and your lighters. He can be quick.”
He lit it for me and I gave him the same clear-eyed look of cooperation. The man said, “Now all he needs is a shot to go with it, haw-haw.”
The father said, “He’ll drink you under the table, I ain’t shitting.” He handed his shot of Whitley’s to me and I downed it, stuck my lips out and knocked the glass against the bar for more. Everybody laughed. I was honeying-up. I wanted the father to believe that.
The sheriff
tilted his head at me. “He’s so damn ugly he’s cute. You know who he reminds me of? That little humped over Ee-gore from that movie, what the hell was it, that horror one? Come on over here, Ee-gore.”
The father said, “He bites.”
“Haw,” said the sheriff.
“I’m telling you,” the father said. “He bit our minister in the gonad one time. Talk about embarrassment.”
HAW HAW HAW
The sheriff swept his hand over his privates. “Mine are so big he’d never get a grip.”
HAW HAW HAW
Pammy kept her eyes on the father. She refilled his shot glass without him making a move toward it. The father lifted it and nodded a thanks to her and held her eye while he drank it down.
Behind the Knocking Hammer was the campground and it was divided into two parts. One had hookups and one was primitive. The hookup section was where they unhitched the trailer and propped it steady with cement blocks. The primitive section was farther back past the scrub hedge and it was all migrants. Pammy said she didn’t give a damn where they camped as long as they paid their five dollars a week and stayed out of her line of vision.
The father said we might as well clean up and the sheriff showed us to the shower stalls and stood around and lingered, acting like he wanted to stay, but the father told him I was hellishly shy and finally he left.
The stalls had warped plywood doors and no hot water. The wooden floor turned slippery slick when the water hit it. The father soaped up on his side and then threw the soap over the top to me. Some of the dusty kids were circling. They closed in and an eyeball came peeping on the father’s side and he popped out naked and dangling. “I’ll kill you little fuckers! Get away from here!”
He pulled my door open and pointed a finger at me and then pointed to his leg, to where I stuck in Little Debbie. He made half of a laugh noise but he wasn’t smiling. He went back to his stall.
After the shower the father felt like a new man. He walked up to find Pammy to see if she had a needle and some thread. When she asked him what for, he told her he was such a dumb-ass he stabbed himself in the leg trying to open a can of beans and she got out a big first-aid kit and offered to stitch the father herself. So he sat on a chair with his pants down and a bottle of Whitley’s to take some of the sting out and she kneeled on the floor and made serviceman-sized stitches.
I had a cut too. I got bit on the finger when Big Girl slipped during the gutting of the deer. It was deep but not horrible, only about half inch long, but it was a crossways cut on the joint right below my fingernail and it wouldn’t stay closed. It was a little swollen and there was a little bit of throbbing, but I wasn’t thinking too much about it. There were other things to think about. Like where was Little Debbie?
The Knocking Hammer had a dip vat for the cattle, called a dip vat because it’s what the cattle land in after they are taken up a ramp and shock-prodded to jump. The vat is full of strong liquid, insect killer, and it has to be deep enough for the steer to be completely submerged for a few seconds before it makes it across the vat to the ridged ramp where it can climb out. The Knocking Hammer had a dip vat but it hadn’t been used for a while. The liquid bug killer was still there, although evaporated down to a certain soupiness and this was what the grandma-ma used to clean the trailer. She sent a dusty Fanta child running with a yellow plastic bucket through the barbed wire of the stockyard fence. He came back carrying it two-handed and it was sloshing on his legs.
The grandma-ma took another bucket and stretched an old T-shirt over it and poured the liquid slow to strain it. The Fanta children bent and watched the black gushball of hair and dead insects forming. She pulled up the T-shirt and squeezed around the wad to wring it dry. And then she dropped it in the empty bucket and told the Fanta children to leave it alone.
She was a tiny woman wearing old clothes that were too big for her and too warm for the weather. A sweater over a shirt over a dress over some pants and then just a pair of fifty-cent flip-flops. I was surprised by her feet. They were so delicately shaped. She wore her thinning hair knotted at the back of her neck and a blue farmer’s handkerchief tied like a headband with the knot on top. She kept untying it and retying it, trying to get it tight.
I sat watching her go in and out of the trailer, and every once in a while she’d look up and show me her teeth. They were strange teeth, like fish teeth, pointy and unevenly spaced and the way she showed them off made me laugh a little bit and she seemed to like this.
While she cleaned, the Fanta children ran around the bucket with the horror wad in it, daring each other to touch it until they got bored. Then they dragged each other around on a big piece of cardboard for a while and one of them kept shouting “Ho-ho-ho.”
When the grandma-ma finished, she gathered her rags and her buckets and she was eyeballing me hard. She had found something in the trailer besides the smaller chunks of deer and the putrid mound of muskie. She dropped it into the bucket with the deadly macaroon and called to the children to help her carry the seeping newspaper-wrapped packages of deer meat Fernst set out on the back steps for her. I watched them disappear behind the scrub hedges, walking in the direction of the primitive area.
The dip vat fumes coming off the trailer were so strong, flies that tried to land were dropping off the sides. I looked in through the door and was amazed by the cleanliness.
Pammy and the father came down the back steps and I noticed he was wearing clothes I never saw before. Out of style but looking new. And Pammy had a little velvet bow clipped into her sad version of hair, and there were curling emissions of a perfume preceding her that did immediate combat with the fumes radiating off the trailer.
I moved away and they looked inside.
Pammy said, “What y’think?”
The father said, “I would not have thought it possible.”
Pammy said, “The grandma-ma is a sour little bitch but she is hell on cleaning. I’ll give her that. Cute little place here.” She stepped in and the whole weight of the trailer shifted. “Real cute. I always wanted a trailer. Every since I was a little baby girl.”
She had a plastic cigarette case with a special place for a book of matches. She had a pint of Old Skull Popper. She had a knife and a hunk of special blood sausage left over from the days of the Dead Swede, hand ground and packed in hog intestines. She was wearing tangerine-colored lipstick and when she and the father closed themselves inside the trailer and I was left to wander I found the lipstick tube laying in the dead grass. Orange Pucker was the name of it. I opened it and swirled it up and saw pale tufts of mold growing near the bottom.
The sun was going down and I thought I’d walk over to visit the cattle, to smell them and listen to them chuffing and making low moans. And that is when I found the railroad tracks. My own personal railroad tracks, glinting in the last of the sun’s rays. And far in the distance with its pale eye rolling, I saw my own personal train.
In the night when the moon is large, the world spreads blue in every direction. In the night the creatures in the feedlot are sometimes asleep and sometimes they stand at the edge of the fence watching you with heads nodding, go ahead, go ahead, go ahead.
The line that runs past the Knocking Hammer is freight only. No passengers. The creatures in the feedlot are used to the engine and the racket of ventilated cars. Sometimes the cars are full and sometimes they are empty but it’s a smell that alerts the creatures and stirs them in a terrible way. Trains heading to Rapid City and Kansas City and Chicago. Trains heading to any packinghouse town.
I have heard that certain vibrations can move through bones, move up through the ground and alert your bones. Train vibrations are strong. Vibrations moving though the rails cool and very smooth under my hand.
I crouched low in the sharp dead grass of the berm. I didn’t want the engineer to see me. Sometimes the engineer is observant but mostly at night his mind is in the nowhereness. Drifting and dreaming. The rocking motion and the rolling engine and the hypnoti
c shine of the headlamp on the tracks. The night train. The night train. There is something different about them, especially when they are all freight and black, black, black. If I do it just right, he’ll never see me, he won’t blow the whistle, maybe he’ll feel it and think a deer or a dog, a deer or a dog, maybe he won’t think anything. Here comes the freight train, here comes the freight train, roaring and screeching and twisting a yellow eye across the blue flatness, lighting up the scribbles of scrub, here it comes here it comes here it comes NOW.
I couldn’t. I wanted to so bad but I couldn’t. My involuntary systems wouldn’t. My involuntary systems threw me flat on the berm with the roaring above me but there was no exhilaration. When the train passed and I rolled onto my back and looked up into the night sky, I knew there was nothing looking back. Twinkle twinkle little star, you are nothing. You have been dead for thousands of years.
Chapter 29
HERE WAS the crunching of tires on the gravel, someone was driving toward the Knocking Hammer with their headlights off. The father and Pammy had already crossed from the trailer to the house, a light came on in Pammy’s chambers, a tiny buckling apartment above the lounge. Her window was open and a curtain fluttered. Music corkscrewed out of a hi-fi. The light went off. There were some cow sounds. And then it was quiet for a long long time until the shadow car rolled out of the blackness.
Two men were inside, two cigarette ends burned. From the deep black alongside the far end of the building came another man with a wheelbarrow. It was the spooker. It was Fernst.
There were hissing whispers and car doors opening and the quiet popping of the trunk. And from the trunk something was lifted, a man curled into a ball. Fernst wheeled him into the blackness and the men rolled back into the night.