CRUDDY

by LYNDA BARRY

  There was more conversation but it was getting too mumbly for me to follow it. Voices low, making deals, making plans. The sheriff saying, “So you in or out, Earlis?”

  The father saying, “ I’m in.”

  I heard their footsteps coming down the hall. The sheriff saying, “You got a strong stomach?” and then the sound of the lock and the sliding bolt.

  The sheriff rapped out some knocks. He said, “If you’re by the door, Ee-gore, you better back up.”

  In a low voice the sheriff said, “You ready?”

  The father said, “I was born ready.”

  The sheriff pushed the door open. He said, “Goddamn it, Ee-gore, you switched the light on.”

  What I saw before my vision disintegrated was a double sink, very deep, a metal table with a drainage trough around it, heavy hooks for hanging, and a job someone left in the middle of. And the job’s head was severed from its body and the head didn’t have a face or a lower jaw. It had a horseshoe of human teeth, and some of the teeth had gold fillings. And that was what I stared at until something like ash began to fall inside of my eyes, an obscuring gray ash, a blinding that comes. An incineration of vision.

  I heard the father and the sheriff. Words, words, words, and someone was walking me outside, fingers pinching tight around my arm, a voice whispering, “Be good, Clyde. We struck gold, Clyde. See you next week, Clyde.”

  And then I was in the sheriff’s car, in the grated-off backseat. From the sticky upholstery came an old puke smell very strong. I could smell Old Skull Popper, I could hear the sheriff sucking down long pulls from a bottle. I felt for Little Debbie. She was there.

  The sheriff said, “Ee-gore, right now you need a friend in the worst way, don’t you?”

  We were on a dirt road, possibly a field road. There was the fragrance of hops. If you know the smell of fields of hops at night. It can be a calming smell. A very kind smell. I heard the hissing of the irrigation devices. The stutter of the water jets. A spray welted hard across the roof and the sheriff rolled up his window. He turned onto a smaller wheel rut path and then he stopped the car.

  It was a hot night but he wanted the windows up. Sound travels so easily over flat fields. But even with the windows shut I could still smell the hops, and I fought to hold on to that smell, to concentrate on it. The molecules of it. The sheriff took another pull off the bottle and got out of the car. The back car door opened and he squeezed himself in. He said, “We can make this easy or we can make this hard. If you try to bite me, you won’t have a mouth left. Understood?”

  He wanted me to take a drink. He passed me the bottle. I took a glug and passed it back. I wanted him to know I was being cooperative. There was the sound of him unbuckling his belt, and the unzipping and the rearrangement of pants. He put his hand on the back of my neck and pushed my head downward. I didn’t resist. I didn’t hesitate. Never hesitate. Move fast, follow through, let the blade do the work.

  My first swipe was a reach-around. Little Debbie was so sharp I didn’t know I truly cut him. I felt something like a knife passing through a hard-boiled egg but that was all.

  The sheriff froze in the shock of it, and in that instant I took my second swipe. The neck, always the neck in one motion, get the carotid, the jugular, the windpipe if possible, then GO! GET! Jump away from his grabbing hands, jump out of the car flying because he has a gun, insane pop-pop fire power giving flashes brief and bright, the smell of hops of hops of hops and then the smell of the wet earth itself.

  His car engine revved, he was driving wild, I looked up to see his headlights swinging through the blackness, and then a sick crunching and everything stopped. His taillights were high and uneven. He was in the culvert. He had driven into the culvert.

  The dome light weakly illuminated his body laying strange, half in the car and half out, his face down, the red draining slow into the corrugated half pipe.

  I followed the culvert back to the main canal, stopping once to wash his blood off my face. I was looking for the train tracks. I was praying for the train tracks. And I cannot describe the relief I felt when I heard the distant roaring and saw the beam from the twisting yellow eye of the night train.

  Chapter 40

  ICKY’S BACK,” said the Stick. Through the oval window frame I saw her cross over a pale pool of a streetlight, throwing a shadow first one way and then the other. She was walking like a successful person and I knew she’d gotten the stash. The Stick said, “You still want to drop, right? You still want to trip with me, right?”

  I did.

  We climbed out onto the ledge and made our way back through the Stick’s bedroom window. Vicky was in the hallway calling my name. When she saw me she held up a Diggy’s paper bag bloomed over with grease stains and shook it. “I called Dane. He said we should come over at eleven. He says for me to bring you for sure. I’m going to do the most incredible transformation on you, Roberta. You will not have one inch of skag left after I’m done.”

  She noticed the Stick in the shadowed doorway behind me. She said, “No one is talking to you. No one is interested in you.” Vicky pulled me into her bedroom and locked the door.

  “You need a cig, Roberta. You need a cig and I especially need a cig because I did something. And now you need to do it.” And what she’d done was dropped two caps of Creeper as soon as she got the stash back.

  She pointed at Trina. “What’s the deal with that thing? Are you giving it to me? Because if you are I don’t want it. Sock monkeys freak me out. You need to know that about me. Sock monkeys can make me very violent. You need to make sure there are no sock monkeys ever around me when I’m high. You going to drop? Because I think you need to drop. Two this time.”

  I could smell the rank grease of the Dumpster. Vicky fished out two caps. I told her I needed water to swallow them. She said, “In the bathroom,” and got busy setting up the vanity, called a vanity, with three mirrors and a low curved top and little drawers crammed with shoplifted makeup. She said, “Wait, wait a sec. You need to take a shower, OK? And you need different clothes.” She started digging through her closet and pulled out a sleeveless yellow minidress covered with chocolate-colored flowers.

  I said, “I can’t wear sleeveless.”

  “Yes you can.”

  “It has to be long sleeves.”

  And we argued for a while. She never asked me why I wanted long sleeves and I didn’t know what I would say if she did. Maybe she wouldn’t even notice my scars. She hadn’t noticed my finger situation or my nose and teeth. Vicky wasn’t the kind of person who looked hard at anything. Her eyes flitted and kept flitting except when they came to a mirror.

  Finally she found a dress for me. It was crimson crushed velvet, with half-ratty white trim of some kind of fur, looking very lady Santa Claus. There were accessories. A bra was one of them. And two pairs of socks was the other. And the socks were for the bra. Because I was too flat for the dress otherwise. And she did not know why I was taking the sock monkey with me to the bathroom. What was I going to need it for?

  “I’m going to get rid of her for you,” was my answer.

  “Don’t try to flush her, OK? Because our toilet clogs very easy.”

  I tapped lightly on the Stick’s door and whispered his name. I reached my hand out and showed him the caps. “You’re cool,” he said. “Very cool.” We took them.

  I showered fast and kept the water running while I took Trina apart, loosening the stitching at her neck. Taking apart the seams that ran up the insides of both her legs, and peeling her inside out over the raw cotton. My heart was pounding. In my head, pictures very vivid were displaying themselves, the day I made Trina, trying to make her as ugly as possible so no one would want her but me. The Christian Homes lady picking her up and looking disappointed. Trina was too stiff. Who could hug such a stiff sock monkey? Why did I choose two different buttons for eyes? And the stitched mouth line was sideways. She told me I should take Trina apart and do her over. I made mentally disturbed no
ises that made her hand Trina back. Who could hug such a stiff sock monkey? I could. And I have every night since then.

  I peeled away the cotton batting. My hands were shaking at the thought of seeing her again. Little Debbie. My savior.

  Under the batting was my Ace bandage, stained and slightly powdery. There is a thing people say about elastic. That it has memory and that it can lose its memory. The Ace bandage was expanded and could not shrink back down. The tiny elastic threads had crumbled.

  Under the bandage was the Crown Royal bag and inside the bag was the money. I had stomach jolts when I saw it. In the time of the father I became very used to seeing wads and wads of cash. But it had been a long time since my eyes saw so many twenty-dollar bills. Five hundred dollars worth tightly rolled around Little Debbie’s flexible leather sheath.

  What would she look like? I’d taken the steps every knife person knows about. I’d oiled her and wrapped an oiled piece of cloth around her blade and folded a piece of waxed paper around that before I put her into her sheath. I did not want to see rust on her. I prayed not to see the tiniest bit of rust on her.

  She gleamed. Seeing her made my eyes wet. The father was right, I am a knife person. Knife-loving blood circulates within me. There is a symbol for infinity, a line that describes a sideways figure eight. X marks the spot in the center. X marks the spot of recirculation. That is where you should plunge the knife to stop the blood of time past from infecting the blood of time future. I held her. It would be so easy. Slicing up from the wrist toward the inside of the elbow.

  According to the mother, all emergency room doctors hate people who cut short-ways across the wrists. It’s a secret not well known outside of hospitals, that all medical workers despise the people who cut and fail. Even the ambulance drivers can’t stand them. It was the mother who showed me the way to do it. Who said water will keep the blood flowing. That very warm water was the best, not because it was more comfortable, but because cold water would constrict the vessels and water that is too hot would be hard to stay in. These are not the only instructions the mother has given me on how to cut one side of time away from the other. She has seen the inside of my arm, she has read the keloid letters and she actually believes the carved words of apology are for her. I didn’t disabuse her of this notion, called disabuse when you let someone know they are incredibly wrong, even hilariously wrong. I could tell she was flattered.

  “RoBERta!” Vicky was banging on the door and then twisting the doorknob. I turned the water off. “RoBERta, come ON! Open!”

  “One sec,” I said.

  “Open the door. I have to pee so bad.”

  “One sec!”

  And so I had to move very quickly. And so behind the toilet went the deflated body of Trina. And so the money and sheathed Little Debbie were tucked in at the center of the bra, the crushed velvet Santa Claus outfit was in place. I opened the door.

  Vicky pushed past me and sat on the toilet. I started to leave and she said, “Prude. Can’t you be in the same room as a person who is peeing?”

  I stepped into the hall and saw the Stick standing in his bedroom doorway. He looked at my dress and drew a backwards question mark in the air with his finger.

  I drew an exclamation mark.

  He started laughing and Vicky heard him. “Don’t talk to him, Roberta! You need to keep away from him.” The toilet flushed and the Stick stepped back into the darkness of his room.

  Vicky sat me in front of the vanity. I noticed a weird burning smell, kind of an electrical melting smell. Vicky had her hot curlers plugged in. She had two bottles of Sun In and she planned to use both of them on me.

  “Normally you spray this on, OK? Normally you spray this on and go in the sun and you magically get highlights. But I have to do my own method. I swear I am going to have my own salon someday.”

  She bunched the towel around my neck and poured. Rivulets of Sun In spilled down either side of my nose. The smell was harsh and it stung. I said, “Ow! Ow! My eyes!”

  Vicky said, “Keep them shut.”

  She combed my hair hard and rolled in the first hot curler. It was spiked and molten and it branded my scalp. “OW, VICKY!”

  “Quit being a baby. This is only going to take a—GET OUT OF HERE!”

  The Stick’s voice. “What are you doing to her?”

  “SHUT UP AND GET OUT!”

  From downstairs, “SHIT AND GODDAMN! MY PROGRAM!”

  The Stick said, “You’re pissing off Susie. His show is on.”

  The theme music of Rat Patrol came shooting up the stairs at full volume.

  The Stick said, “How long does it take to work?”

  Vicky thought he was talking about the Sun In. She said, “Roberta already has a boyfriend.”

  The Stick said, “I mean before I feel it?”

  And then the truth came out and Vicky whapped me hard on the side of the head and some of the curlers flew off. “YOU GAVE HIM DRUGS?!!”

  The Stick said, “How long?”

  I said, “Any minute now.”

  Chapter 41

  ND SO I crossed through the dark field of fragrant hops with the sheriff’s blood sticky on my shirt in the hot night air, and there were about a million bugs hitting me in the face as I crossed to the berm. I was there when the train roared up on me, shot by just above me. Exhilaration. Distraction. When a train is passing a few inches above your head you can’t really think about anything else and there are times when a clear head is something I am most thankful for.

  And when the train is gone, there is a kind of silence called a ringing silence. Something like the negative shape of sound. People call it a ringing but this word isn’t quite right. I think it’s more like the sound you hear when you are drowning, when water encloses you and keeps air away from you and sound moves differently to reach your ears. Would drowning be so bad? The canal was right on the other side of the tracks. How bad would it be to wrestle for a few minutes and then be done?

  This ringing, this high-pitched sound was something I heard during my fever. My fever time in the trailer. The father told me to look for the sandman. Told me if it hurt at all I could cut a finger from his hand. He made so many promises to me.

  I didn’t know how far I was from the Knocking Hammer. I only knew to keep the canal on my right as I walked the tracks. There was a hot wind and the insects were plentiful and loud, and these things comforted me as I made my way back to the father with Little Debbie in my hand.

  It wasn’t very long before the drifting smell of the cull pile came my way. It wasn’t very long before I was in the shadows of the Knocking Hammer again, watching the father bouncing back and forth between the car and the lounge with armloads of things he was going to need on his trip. Clothes, booze, cigs.

  Pammy snored in the front seat. She was in a muscle relaxer dreamworld. Her head lay tilted on the seat back and her fat arm protruded from the passenger window like she was giving blood.

  And a little farther off, the shape that was Fernst rested in its final heap. I felt bad about Fernst. Very bad. I wanted to cover him with something but there wasn’t time. The father was almost done packing.

  I lay hidden in the backseat as he drove the dark road away from the Knocking Hammer. I heard the slosh of booze and the satisfied inhale of a cig and the words of congratulations he spoke. He said, “I got barbed-wire balls and a cock of steel. Goddamn. I sure do.”

  I didn’t mean to fall asleep. I actually thought falling asleep would never be possible for me again. But after all exhilaration comes the crashing. Wakefulness breaks apart.

  And then it was light out and the father was panic-screaming and the car was weaving all over the road and the sun was bright bright bright and hot on my face. The father slammed the brakes on and jumped out of the car. I sat up and watched the dust clouds fly around his feet. He bent over and did some dry heaves. He was staring at the car.

  Pammy was snort-snoring and her head had vibrated its way over to the open window
. Around us the land was gray and empty, dust and flatness. Some low weeds covered with stickers. I caught sight of my face in the rearview mirror. My hair was stiff with dried blood. It was caked around my nose and streaked on my neck. My shirt was covered with the brown stiffness. Blood was caked on my hands, on my fingernails.

  Pammy released a very relaxed emission and I got out of the car. The father straggle-ran a few more steps when he saw the car door open and made more panic sounds. He looked very bad in the hard light. He was thin and slope-shouldered and scared. And I have to say it was not a bad feeling to realize what he was scared of was me. Me appearing so suddenly in my Night of the Living Dead aspect.

  After a while he hollered, “Clyde, Clyde, is that really you?”

  He said, “GODDAMN YOU, CLYDE! SCARED THE LIVING SHIT OUT OF ME! THOUGHT YOU WERE A SON OF A BITCHING ZOMBIE! ABOUT GIVE ME A HEART ATTACK! GODDAMN YOU TO HELL, CLYDE! GIVE A MAN SOME WARNING!”

  He said, “All that blood. Where you cut? You’re cut somewheres, show me.”

  He said, “Son of a bitch, Clyde. If it ain’t yours, whose blood is it?”

  I never said any actual words to the father. I made my disturbing noises combined with various nods and shakes of the head and just let him make up his own story. He figured that after the sheriff dropped me off at the rendering plant, I got loose from Mom and hid in the bleed-out room, until I made it to the road and hitched a ride with some Mexicans.

  He said, “Missed me that bad, huh? I bet Mom and the sheriff are going apeshit looking for you.”

  We rolled on, the father following the wires to a place where we could get some gas and he could get some smokes and I could wash up. He kept looking at me in the rearview. He called me one tough buzzard but he seemed unsettled. He asked me to search out a fresh bottle of Whitley’s for him. He invited me to take a glug. What a strange strange kind of booze. Sharpens the edges of all things, but dulls the centers.