CRUDDY (10 page)

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.

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.”

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?

I kept my part of the deal. I didn’t say a word. The father had some long pulls off of a new bottle of Old Skull Popper and then got a fat lady to stand in the aisle and try to dance with him. The back of the bus was the party section. A lot of smoking and booze fumes. The father was the star like he was always the star in a group of drinking people. The star, the mayor, the president. Even I could not help admiring him in my own mongolian idiot way.

People in the front of the bus turned irritated heads toward us but the driver was on our side. He had a face like a leather-covered skull and while he and the father were sneaking fortifying glugs during rest stops the driver said this run was his last. After that, he just did not give a damn. Dentsville was on one end of the map and his wife was on the other. And he wanted to keep it that way. He told the father he was chucking it all. Retirement, pension, free bus rides for life, all of it down the hole.

“We must be married to the same woman,” said the father.

“Cheers,” said the driver. “Hell.”

In the Dentsville bus station it smelled nose-burningly strong of disinfectant and people, too many people. The waiting chairs were the dip-plastic kind, orange and blue alternating and there was someone in every seat except one that had creeping gunk on it. The lights were fluorescent and flickering and made the people look greenish. The cafe was separate, in a different room altogether, and through the glass I could see that it was packed too.

“OK, Clyde, listen up here.” The father stowed our bags. He looked bad and so did I. The swelling on my face was down but the bruises were turning greenish-black. It was dramatic. The father said, “Don’t clean up. The worse you look the better for where we’re going.”

I said, “Where?”

He said, “I ever mention your uncle Lemuel to you?”

I shook my head.

He said, “That’s because he’s a worthless piece of shit. And he’s not your uncle either.”

We were standing on the sidewalk. The father was tucking a fresh pack of cigs into his pocket and looking up and down the street, trying to get a fix on where he was. The sky was gray and the air was cool and had an edge to it that I couldn’t identify. It wasn’t unpleasant but it was distinctive and it got me curious.

Across the street was a bar called The Golden Egg. The father’s eyes lit up when he saw it. “This ain’t like back home, Clyde. I can’t bring you with me. I need a couple of hours.” He slipped his watch off. Its face was scuffed and it had a pinching silver band. There was old blood dried in the cracks and crevices. “Here. You come back at five. Five on the dot, got it? Say it back to me in Navy. What time are you going to be back here?”

“Seventeen hundred hours,” I said.

He pulled ten dollars out of his wallet. “Don’t go wasting this on that shit you bought last time. Now go. L.L.S.S. Navy all the way.”

I headed down the street and then turned to see him slip through the black-glass door of the Golden Egg.

I decided my direction by that cool-air smell, fresh and weirdish and coming strong from down the street. I headed into the downtown of Dentsville.

It wasn’t such a happy city. People were mainly hunched and staring downward and the buildings were tall but empty looking, like whatever was happening had already passed and wasn’t coming back.

A guy with teeny eyes and huge eyebrows was blasting aggressive music on a crooked trumpet and kicking a coffee can at his feet that had rocks and change in it. He got pissed when no one dropped money in and blow-gunned notes at the back of their heads. I watched for a while and then I crossed the street. There were some ladies in pastel chiffon scarves who peered at me with too much curiosity at a corner where I waited for the light, so I bolted and jumped in the way of a bus. It wasn’t anywhere near hitting me, but the driver blasted his horn and mouthed furious words anyway. Dodging a bus is nothing. Not after you get good at dodging trains. And I was very good at that.

The air smell was more powerful, it wasn’t a good smell, not like flowers or food, and it wasn’t a rotting smell either. It was complicated, it had many parts, and one of the parts was a core of coldness, if coldness has a smell. To me it does.

At the next corner the smell was knocked to the side by a different smell, doughnuts, slightly rancid but plentiful. The doughnut shop was on a corner of a street that turned very bummy and skruddy with trash and there were little movie houses with faded pictures that displayed ladies bending and squatting with black tape across their eyes and naked boobs. The pictures were warped and greenish and of course there were the dried-out dead flies laying below them. Flies die in so many lonely places. Across the street from the doughnut shop was a two-story neon clown holding a sign that said A
MUSEMENTS
! but the windows on that building had the boob ladies also.

There were sailors everywhere. Tons of them dressed in white with little caps and black hanging ties, going in and out of the shops and walking close together and laughing. And I was a little bit dazzled by their actualness, their pure Navyness, their handsomeness, and I was thinking it would be a Navy man I married. Only a Navy man. Navy all the way.

And then two of them came up to me. One said, “You got a friend? Will you do two-sies?” The other said, “Shit, Quiver, he ain’t even ten!” Horrible waves of nasty booze smells came off of them and one had blood on his teeth. I turned and went into the doughnut shop.

If in your mind a doughnut shop is a clean place with a clean paper-hatted man behind the counter and displays of innocent doughnuts and pots of coffee and good cold milk, well, this place was not like that. Not anything like it. There were people on gummy stools slumping and freaking in slow motion over the sticky counters. No-teeth people smoking, and scary teenagers also smoking, some girls with too much makeup and some boys with scars on their faces and hanging hair. And behind the counter the man was little and harassed looking and his apron was filthy with something that could not come from doughnuts and when he saw me he said “What?” and his voice was harsh. It was hot in the doughnut shop. Super-heated rancid grease air blasting out of vents with dust tentacles waving. “What?” he said again, and rapped on the counter when I looked away.

Behind the swinging half-door to the back there was a loud commotion going on. Someone was yelling “Fuck you, motherfucker, no, uh-uh, it ain’t going to be like that, I ain’t playing no games, motherfucker, no.”

There were flies on the doughnuts walking free. The counterman turned his head toward the shouting and then said, “Blooma!” and a big man who had been staring out the window looked up. The counterman tilted his head toward the shouting and the swinging door flew open and a little matchstick person with a greasy ski jacket came stumbling out backwards yanking on a fur coat that someone else I couldn’t see was trying to yank back.

The counterman lifted his eyes and said, “Blooma!” again, and the big guy whose sagging belly was hanging exposed under his shirt, sighed, and got up and walked toward the matchstick man. He had a bulging fat roll on the back of his neck and he looked bored even when he pulled out his sticking knife. When the matchstick guy saw it, he let go of the coat and put his hands up. He said, “Hey! Ain’t no need for Bo-bo! It’s cool! We cool! Shit. Get Bo-bo off my back, motherfucker, and we cool.”

The big man followed him back through the swinging door.

Hardly anyone in the doughnut shop was even looking up. The counterman’s eyes came back to me and landed on the father’s watch. He reached his hand out for it and said, “Two dollars. What else you got?”

A few blocks farther down the streets were still ratty, but empty. The odd smell was very strong, and all of its parts had increased. The alluring part and the repulsing part and the cold core that seemed to make the colors around me sharpen. There was a buzzing inside of me, nerves buzzing, and I was thinking it would be good to have something to eat, it didn’t matter what it was, and I saw a laundromat and I was thinking that would be a good place to sit, get a candy bar out of the vending machine and listen to the sounds of clothes washing and drying. It would be good for the buzzing, which was making me grind my teeth.

The Laundromat door opened an inch and then stuck and I had to push very hard to get it to go wide enough to let me in. It was empty. There were gumballs in the gumball machine that were bleached two-toned from facing the sun, and a rubber tree plant next to the window that had been dead for a few years. There was the buzzing of tube lights and a higher-pitched sound coming from a clock that was broken but still trying to move, the red secondhand stuck but jerking anyway. Cigarette burns were melted into the chairs and tabletops.

I was looking at the candy bar machine and thinking how rank all of it probably was, how it was weird to see a Sir Goober candy bar next to Salvo laundry soap because the soap was mixed in with the candy. I put my money in and counted the red pull knobs carefully so I would get the Sir Goober and I pulled that knob. The Salvo package landed in the tray.

“Shit,” I said. “Fuck.” I didn’t normally swear, but I was in the mood to try it out. “Fucking piece of shit,” I said. A sharp voice said, “HEY!”

There was a person in the room. A woman who was very large sitting in a chair I swear she wasn’t sitting in before. She had a greasy pageboy haircut and smeared glasses and she was wearing a change apron. When our eyes met she pointed at the hand-lettered sign above her.

THE TEN COMMANDMENTS OF THIS ESTABLISHMENT

1. NO sitting or STANDing or LOITERING on Laundry Tables

2. NO eating of Food on Laundry TABLEs NO Wet Drinks

3. If Attendant is Absent DO NOT ask The TAstee Chicken King For Change as the Tastee Chicken King wants it known there will be NO CHANGE for LAUNDRY

4. We are NOT responsible for ANY Injury Loss or Damage

5. Pay Phone for Patrons ONLY do NOT tie up PHONE

6. NO arguments just Take It Outside

7. NO Toilet available for any Reason

8. Do NOT ask the TAstee Chicken King to use its Toilet As the Toilet of the Tastee Chicken King is Reserved For The Tastee Chicken King Only

9. NO Dying is Permitted in ANY Machine

10. No FOUL language this IS A CHRISTIAN Establishment WE CALL POLICE!!!!!

The lady watched me read all the rules. She tapped number ten significantly.

I said, “You spelled ‘dyeing’ wrong. On number nine. Unless you mean actually die in your washing machine.”

She said, “What the hell are you talking about?”

“Dead people in your washing machines.”

“Get the hell out of here.”

I held up the Salvo. “I wanted a Sir Goober.”

She said, “Cram it up your ass.”

I figured out where the cool smell was coming from. It was coming from a thing called The Sound. The Dentsville Sound. Along one side of Dentsville was a body of water, an inlet of salt water coming in from the ocean. There was land on both sides, so it wasn’t the ocean, but I was thinking that must be what the ocean would smell like. It had a tide like the ocean and the tide was low and I saw exposed barnacles and clusters of pinched-looking shells, deep blue-black in color. And varieties of seaweed hanging off of things and floating in the water with cigarette butts and pieces of Styrofoam and striped drinking straws. There were dark shapes moving especially deep, I couldn’t tell what they were. Possibly fish. But I was thinking of the movie
The Creature,
and I was thinking how now that I saw the kind of water he hung around in, I understood him better. And then I saw a jellyfish. Whitish, nearly transparent, the first one of my life. I marked it in my brain.
Today I saw a jellyfish. Today I saw a jellyfish.

I stood near a ferry dock and kept breathing the air in, I could not get enough of that kind of air. The smell of french fries made me look up. There was an outdoor stand where people were buying paper baskets of fish and chips and cups of clam chowder. I had heard of clam chowder. Sometimes people ate it in books. But I didn’t know what it was and it did not sound good to me. I got in line and watched the two worker guys, teenagers. The one who waited on me had brown skin and full lips and tilted-up black eyes. He wore his paper hat pushed so far forward the point came down to between his eyebrows.