CRUDDY (18 page)

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 hypnotic 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.

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.

I woke up when the shadow of the sheriff passed over my face. He was reaching down, about to lift me, but I crab-scrambled away. He said, “I’m not going to hurt you, Ee-gore, what in the hell are you doing out here? You didn’t sleep out here, did you? Son? A freight train could come and cut you in two as neat as an ax. Let’s go inside. We’ll let Pammy make us breakfast.”

The meat saw was going and the flypaper waved a little when the sheriff opened and propped the door. He’d been trying to walk with his arm around me but I pulled away. The father wouldn’t have liked that but the father wasn’t there.

“PAMMY!” The sheriff stood in the hallway hollering up some stairs. “PAMMY!”

For breakfast I had the terrible red pop and an ancient bag of Fritos. Pammy wanted me to sit on the floor near the screen door and I did it. The sheriff kept looking at her and wiggling his eyebrows up and down and smiling. She leaned with her back against the bar and one arm crossed over her stomach flaps and the other arm moving up to her face with a cigarette in the fingers. She said, “What?”

The sheriff said, “You tell me.”

The father came down the stairs tucking in his shirt. He was barefoot and his hair was sticking up. He nodded to the sheriff. “Morning.”

The sheriff said, “Pajama party?” He wiggled his eyebrows at Pammy again, and she threw the bar rag at him.

They made conversation. Pammy twirled a finger in the father’s hair. I saw her clip-on bow hanging off the side of her head. At one point she smiled, looking like a backyard puff-fungus that had blown out all its spores. My life at the Knocking Hammer had begun.

There was a round of eye-openers. Pammy called the father Mils. The sheriff had introduced him as Milsboro and she thought that was his name. Mils Boro. The sheriff laughed until he got a groin cramp and had to stand up and shake out his leg, but he didn’t correct her.

I forced down the pop and the Fritos, half gagging.

The father held up his cigs to me with a question mark on his face. I shook my head. He held up the bottle they were drinking from. He said, “Breakfast snorty?” I shook my head again. He said, “You ain’t going Episcopalian on me are you?”

A Fanta child burst through the screen door shouting and jumping and pointing toward the canal. There was a commotion of more shouting outside. Pammy said, “Goddamn it.” She shouted, “FERNST! YOU, FERNST! BRING THE POLE HOOK!” The meat saw stopped.

I looked out the door and saw the grandma-ma running fast with her flip-flops in her hand. Pammy said, “Sit your ass back down. This don’t have anything to do with you.”

The father said, “You heard her, Clyde.”

Pammy’s feet came stomp-crunching back across the gravel. She was wet up to her terrible hind end with chunks of mud and unidentifiables clinging to her legs. I heard crying. Wailing.

She dripped a trail across the wooden floor and sat on the stool beside the father. She lit a cig.

“And?” said the sheriff.

She blew a jet of smoke out of the side of her mouth and then turned and gestured to the doorway. “The grandma-ma would like a ride to the orchard. She wants to be the one to notify.”

“Shit,” said the sheriff.

A Fanta child had fallen into the canal.