CRUDDY (12 page)

Lemuel pulled the bottle out of the white sack and whistled low. “Holy Christ,” he said. “Whitley’s. The Gateway.”

“The Gateway.” The father nodded. “Many are called but few can get up afterwards.”

They passed it and glugged and then the father passed it to me and I glugged.

Lemuel looked astonished. “He drink?”

The father said, “If you had brain damage, wouldn’t you?”

Lemuel looked me up and down.

This new booze, this Whitley’s, it was very different. It seemed to evaporate off your tongue as you drank it. I felt it go straight to my legs and I began to sway.

The father pointed at me. “Clyde, lay in the grass before you fall and bust your face again.”

Then it was quiet. Lemuel pulled out a tin of Copenhagen and untwisted the lid. His bottom teeth came spitting out and he took a honking black wad and pushed it into his cupped lower lip. I could feel a funny crackle in the air between them.

Lemuel leaned toward me. He spat a jet and said, “You’re kind of puny, son. Come over here.”

The father flitted his eyes at me. The look. The famous go-along-with-it look. Lemuel patted his knee. “I won’t bite you.”

“Haw!” said the father.

Something about Lemuel put me on alert. When he smiled my stomach twisted. The smell from the trailer was hammering me. In the darkness beneath the trailer I saw a very beat-up-looking cat. One of its eyes was crusty and sunken. It was clawing at the underside, it was trying to find a way up.

I watched the father take out a cig and spend a long time lighting it. He inhaled deep and examined the cig and he exhaled.

He said, “So where’s Sugar Dick?”

“Goddamn it, now,” Lemuel spat, “Don’t start that shit with me.”

“Sugar Dick.” The father blew a smoke ring which hung in the horrible air.

Lemuel said, “I told you when I called you, I want to see this thing straightened out. I told Leonard the same. You think I like being the man in the middle?” Lemuel spat again. “Fuck all.” He picked his bottom denture up off his lap and turned it over in his hand.

“Police involved?” asked the father.

“Hell no,” said Lemuel.

“And the suitcase?”

“There ain’t no suitcase.”

“There ain’t, huh?” The father took a drag and pinched his eyes.

“I told you on the phone. Leonard says there is no suitcase.”

The father scratched the side of his face. “Gee. I wonder where it wandered off to.”

Lemuel pointed to the car and trailer. “There’s your goddamn suitcase right there. How much you think that all cost?”

The father snorted. “That ain’t a tenth of what Old Dad paid out.”

“I heard Old Dad stiffed you,” said Lemuel. “Hell, I’d be mad too. When Leonard showed up here crying the story to me, I didn’t like it a bit. That’s why I called you, you stupid son of a bitch. You got a new car and trailer, full tank, keys are in the ignition. Why do you want to stand there and piss on it?”

“Where is he? Where’s Leonard?” said the father. “He inside?” The father jerked his head toward the doorway and called, “Sugar Dick, you in there?”

Lemuel turned his bottom denture upright and rubbed his dirty thumb across the molars. “Let me tell you something, Leonard said—”

“Shit on Leonard.”

“Shit on
you.
You going to hear me out or not?”

“Sure.” The father glugged some Whitley’s and passed it back. “Lie to me, you fat son of a bitch. Go ahead.”

The father snatched the denture out of Lemuel’s hands and flung it into the play field across the road.

“Aw,” said Lemuel. “Why the hell you have to do that?”

“Go hunt it, Clyde. Go find Uncle Lemuel’s bottom teeth.”

I took my time. Their voices came clearly to me across the road. The story Lemuel told the father went something like this.

Old Dad owed money to Old Man Mottie but Old Man Mottie was dead. Earlis was his grown son and Earlis was a homo, and Earlis tried to cover it up by marrying a lady older than him with huge bags under her eyes and an ass four feet wide. She owned her house and Earlis thought what the hell. Then Earlis met Leonard, who worked at the A&W. He was crazy about Leonard and stories began to spread.

And then the suitcase came.

“You said there wasn’t no suitcase,” said the father. The light was low and his burning cig end was getting a glow to it.

Lemuel hooked his finger into his mouth and flung his chewwad. “Leonard said he was
told
about the suitcase but he never
saw
no suitcase. He thought Earlis was shitting him. I mean, it does sound like a pile of crap, don’t it? Suitcase with money in it delivered to you out of the sky.”

“It didn’t come out of the sky,” said the father.

“That boy find my teeth yet? Call to him again, will you?”

Leonard was in the middle of his shift at the A&W and Earlis comes barreling into the parking lot, shouting to him about going fishing, yelling come on, they were going after muskie, he had some new bait he wanted to try out, and a couple of people busted out laughing. Leonard threw down his hat and jumped into the car. That was the last time either of them were seen.

“
You
seen ’em,” said the father. “You seen Leonard.”

“Seen a shadow of him,” said Lemuel. “Showed up here in the middle of the night, crying like a baby, wouldn’t come in, didn’t want me to come out. Told me the whole story through that blanket. Said he couldn’t stand for me to see his face. Said he had a gun and he was going to blow his own head off if I tried anything.”

“Uh-huh,” said the father, sounding bored.

“You want to hear this or not?”

Leonard said they drove to the next county, bought a car and trailer right off the barely used lot with cash and a trade-in, and then they really did go fishing. Lake Marie. Earlis really did have some new bait he wanted to try out. Red salmon eggs, coffee grounds, and mini-marshmallows cooked together in a frying pan. He invented it, and it worked so good the fish were practically begging to be hooked. And then they celebrated with plenty of hugging and a big bottle of Whitley’s and Leonard was thinking it was love. Some would call it perverted, he knew that, but for him it was true love at last.

“Cornholer,” said the father.

“Goddamn it, man!” said Lemuel. “What do you got for a heart, a cat turd?”

Leonard and Earlis were together all that night and the next. Earlis told Leonard he was wild in love with him, that Leonard meant more than anything in the world to him, but the time had come to move on.

And Leonard said, what the hell did he mean by move on? And Earlis said he was taking Leonard back to the A&W. And Leonard said, “Then what?”

Earlis said, “I’m leaving town.”

Leonard said, “Just like that?”

Earlis said, “I shall never forget you.”

And that’s when Leonard grabbed the gutting knife off the counter and ripped Earlis open clean.

“Gutting knife,” said the father. He blew out a jet of cig smoke and nodded his approval.

Lemuel said, “Leonard didn’t plan to kill him. He ain’t like that. Now,
I’m
like that, and
you’re
like that, but Leonard ain’t like that.”

And Leonard was sorry right afterwards. And Leonard had a nervous breakdown right there and Leonard drove a thousand miles with dead Earlis bouncing around the hot trailer with the piles of muskie until he pulled up to Lemuel’s place in the middle of the night and confessed out the whole story through the blue blanket. Leonard said he was killing himself, and there was nothing anyone could do to stop him. He made Lemuel promise to make sure the car and the trailer went to the rightful man. That was Leonard’s final wish.

“You,” said Lemuel, wiping his eyes. “He wanted you to have it.”

“And?” said the father.

“And what?”

“Well don’t keep me in suspense here, Lemuel,” said the father. “Did that little cornholer blow his brains out or not?”

O-
BER
-TA! RO-
BER
TA!” Julie’s voice was calling me from downstairs. “It’s on! You’re missing it!” The word is maintain. That is what you are supposed to do when you are high and you don’t want anyone to know it. Maintain, maintain, maintain.

“Ro-BERTA! The crawling hand just killed a cow and now all the other cows are freaking out!”

“Cattle,” I said, as I came down the stairs. “Not cows. Cattle.”

“How are you supposed to know, you’re not even watching it.” Julie turned to look at me. “Your nose is still bleeding.”

I said, “So?”

I got Vicky’s purse and pulled out her wallet.
If found, please
return to Vicky Tallusoj.
I was looking at the “j” on the end of her name. Thinking it was silent. And then I thought about different silent letters I knew about and if it was possible to put them all together and spell a silent word. A drop of my blood splashed onto the ID card. It was so red.

“Roberta!” Julie’s head popped up over the back of the couch. She dangled her hand at me and did crawling motions with her fingers and then pointed at the TV. A lady was standing in front of the dead cattle and screaming. She could not stop screaming. I dialed Vicky’s number.

“Who you calling?”

“Nobody.”

“You can’t use the phone in case Mom is trying to call here.”

I said, “She’s not trying to call.”

“You got blood all over your shirt.”

“So?”

The phone rang six times before a man picked it up and started coughing. He didn’t say hello. He just started coughing. I got scared and hung up.

I waited a little bit and then I dialed the number again. Six rings, same man. Hack-coughing violently. This time he talks. In an accent. He says “Goddamn!” which scares me and I hang up again.

“Roberta!” says Julie. “Who are you calling?”

“Nobody.”

I dialed out the number again. This time the man picks up on the second ring. He says, “Goddamn TO YOU!” and then a sound like he’s trying to hang up but instead he drops the phone and I hear another voice yelling in the background. A girl’s voice. The phone gets picked up off the floor and Vicky Tallusoj says, “Hello?” and I hang up again.

I don’t know why I hang up. I didn’t expect to hang up. My finger just automatically pushed the hang-up button when I heard her voice.

Julie said, “Hoooooooo, Roberta?”

I jumped and then yelled at her. “Don’t EVER do that to me!”

“Do what?”

“Say that to me.”

“Say what?” asked Julie. “Who you calling? That?”

“Shut up.”

“Who you calling, Roberta?”

I said, “The time lady.”

“Suck,” said Julie. Her mouth flattened. “Lie.”

For a while I sat on the couch with Julie, sticking napkins with ice cubes in them against my nose, it had to be Vicky, it sounded just like her. I wondered if her nose was also bleeding. If she was also sitting in front of
Nightmare Theater
with blood on her shirt.

“Come ON, Roberta. Your turn.” Julie had been talking but I hadn’t really been listening. Something about how I would kill the unkillable hand. She said she would light it on fire. Many squirts of lighter fluid and then a match and then, “Whooooooosh!” she said. “Whooooooosh!” Incinerated. “You, Roberta. Your turn. How would you do it?”

“Stab it. Stab it and pound the knife in with a rock.”

Julie scratched her nose and looked at me hard. Could she tell? Was it obvious that a second wave of Creeper was starting to wash over me? She said, “You could stab it, but it would still be alive though.”

I said, “It wouldn’t matter. It wouldn’t be going anyplace.”

“But it could still escape and come back after you.”

“Not the way I’d do it, it wouldn’t.”

“I still think burning it.”

I said, “But the bones, Julie. Bones crawl after everybody.”

I was dialing the phone again, sitting on the kitchen floor with the cord stretched down and I was facing the wall and I was making little fingerprint dots on the wall with smears of blood. I counted the rings. I said, “Come on, Vicky. Answer. Answer.”

I did not expect such a hard kick. The back of my eyes tilted out in red explosions from the sudden crack to my back. Julie was standing over me and screaming, “YOU ARE CALLING SOMEBODY! YOU ARE GOING TO LEAVE ME HERE!”

“Hello? Hello? Hello?” said the midget voice from the dropped telephone.

Julie and me were on the floor. She was yanking out chunks of my hair and I was bashing her into the table legs and punching her hard. She started screaming and screaming. I let her go.

She picked up the telephone and shouted, “YOU DIE!” and threw it. She yanked open a drawer and then there was this very weird moment. A weird stretched-out second where everything in the room just expanded. Time expanded. Molecules and the spaces between the molecules expanded. I saw every cell of Julie’s arm making the graceful slow-motion arc, and I had time to notice the mother’s meat knife cutting through the air, every glinting particle of every single molecule coming straight at my face, and I had time to calmly lean to the side and watch it pass my head and tong into the wall.

Julie. Do you know what the father would have said? He would have said you were a natural. He would have said, “Give that girl a Lucky Strike!” He would have pushed his whole pack of cigs at you and passed you his USN lighter.

Watch out for Creeper. Because just when you think it has all drained out of you, just when you are sure your Creeper experience is over, you will suddenly feel the incredible white explosion shoot up your back, and your fingers will stretch out incredibly long and your mouth will gush incredible amounts of joyful saliva and you’ll be hunched over in front of the TV and your hanging drool will look fantastic in the blue jumping light.

And your sister will FREAK. Your sister Julie who just tried to tong a meat knife straight into your face will suddenly FREAK and she will say, “ROBERTA! ROBERTA! WHAT’S WRONG?!” She will FREAK from how you are hunching and stretching out your incredibly long fingers and lifting your lips up and down over your wet teeth and she will keep on FREAKING, even while you speak to her very calmly, saying, “Julie, Julie. Shhhhhhh. Don’t talk. Right now just don’t talk to me.”

And her face will be flickering and it will be wet with streaks of crying and she will say, “Don’t die, Roberta. Don’t die. Please, please don’t die, Roberta.”

And you will smile at her and this will be what makes her scream.