CRUDDY (21 page)

HAT THE hell smells so bad?” said the sheriff. “Pammy farted.”

“The hell I did,” said Pammy. “When I fart, you’ll know it.”

“Sheriff’s been drinking Blatz,” said the father.

“What’s wrong with Blatz?”

It was past midnight, and hot. Outside the night insects clicked and whirred and the ones that were too big to get through the wide-gauge screen on the door to the lounge, bashed their heads against it trying. But there were lots of bugs who fit through fine and Pammy watched with some satisfaction when they found the flypaper. “See there? It isn’t just for flies.”

Every time she looked up, I freaked.

The father said, “Why do you keep that meat saw room locked?”

Pammy and the sheriff hesitated. Pammy said, “Mexicans,” and the sheriff said, “We’ve had trouble.”

The father said, “Well, that sure explains it.”

There was an uneasy silence and then the sheriff started in again on me and the spooker home. He had the sign-over papers on the bar.

I’d seen the shadow car three other times. The shadow men rolling in quiet with no headlights on and unloading rigor mortis cargo. I’d seen the rendering man called Mom come and go.

During one of his extended Corpse Reviver trailer visits, the father reached in his pocket and pulled out a gold pocket watch, with four diamonds marking the quarter hours. He said, “Look at this. She gave it to me this morning. She told me, ‘Don’t let Arden see it.’ I said, ‘Why not?’ When I ask questions, she gets French on me.” And what he meant by getting French was that instead of answering him, Pammy started kissing him violently. “It’s effective,” said the father. “I’m thinking her and Arden are running some sort of fence, but some of the shit I stumble across don’t fit.”

For example, the lighter he was using. He handed it to me. It was the familiar steel rectangle with USN engraved on one side. On the other side, it said,
CV HOT PAPAS-PTO-
1944
-SEMPER FI.

“Marines, Clyde,” said the father. “You know what the Hot Papas are? Goddamn ghosts is what they are. White asbestos suits from top to bottom with just a little peephole for the eyes, them are the ones that run into the wreckage and drag your ass out of the fire. Know where I found this? Laying out front in the dirt. And here, look at this.”

He reached in his shirt pocket and handed me a heavy gold ring studded with diamonds. A man’s ring. He said, “She gave me that too. It’d look about right on a pimp, wouldn’t it? Arden ain’t supposed to see that neither.” He glugged on the last of the mindbending Corpse Reviver. He said, “I could drink a bathtub of this, here. It just gets better.”

I turned the ring over in my hands.

“You know why she gave me that, Clyde?”

I shook my head.

“She wants me to marry her.” Glug, glug. Glug, glug. “And I’m thinking of doing it.” And the Corpse Reviver spun his mind into an excited and vicious trance, pinwheels of possibility whirled. He said, “Vegas. That’s the place to do it. It’s so goddamn perfect. I can go by Doris’s motel and get Old Dad’s last suitcase, me and Pammy can get married. This place is in her name, the Dead Swede signed everything over.” His face was dripping sweat and he was turning very red and his lips pulled away from his teeth in an uncontrollable smile that was not a smile, more like something you see on a dead person’s face. Rictus. It’s called rictus.

He was getting emotional, he was talking about Old Dad. He was pointing at the light fixture and saying Old Dad was trying to make him understand. Old Dad guided him to the Knocking Hammer to carry on the tradition that began before man could hardly stand straight and still had ten pounds of hair on his ass. “You know what I could do with a place like this? I could kick the shit out of Chicago. The name Rohbeson would be right up there with Swift, Armour, and Hormel.”

A salty tear rambled down his craggy face. “Old Dad didn’t turn on me, Clyde. A father’s love is eternal. And when I think of how I stood up at his funeral and called him a lying sack of shit—”

I looked up at the light fixture and watched a trapped fly jerk around in the last stages of buzzing itself to death. “Old Dad,” he said. “Please forgive me.” Glug glug. “Old Dad, I swear to you—” Glug glug. More salty tears. Some shaking sobs. And then his arms reaching out for a certain kind of comfort. “Clyde. Clyde. I need you.”

The sheriff had tried to get some comfort from me too. The night the father and Pammy left me to him. The night the sheriff said, “Let me walk you to the trailer, son. It’s pretty dark out there.” He tried to get some comfort and ended up shouting, “OW, OW, YOU SON-OF-A-
BITCH
!” and the father leaned his head out of Pammy’s bedroom window, calling, “He bite you? I warned you.”

And the sheriff had been trying to get me into his car with offers like, “I’ll let you blow the siren, Ee-gore, I got twenty-six candy bars, Ee-gore, I’ll let you shoot my goddamned gun, Ee-gore.”

The father wanted me to keep playing him, but I didn’t know how much longer I could play him without help. I needed Little Debbie but the father’s knife case was locked in the trunk with the suitcases.

“Pammy farted,” said the sheriff.

Pammy said, “Goddamn you, Arden, I did not.”

“There’s no shame in it,” said the father. “I farted once myself, in Korea.”

I was sitting on the floor of the bar playing with a tiddlywinks game the sheriff bought me. Pammy kept telling me to get to bed but I was not about to leave. The grandma-ma had done her part and I had to do mine.

I shot the tiddlywinks, trying to see how many times I could hit Pammy on the back of her legs before she freaked on me. I wanted to distract her from her natural inclination to check the flypaper.

The father and the sheriff were plastered. Pammy was too. She turned and hissed, “You hit me again and I’m going to pull those Dumbo ears right off your head.”

“Oh, now,” the sheriff said. “He’s just playing. Don’t you think he looks cute sitting there?”

“If I
thought,
” said Pammy, “I’d blow the perverted brains out of your head.”

The sheriff started talking up the spooker home again, telling the father how good it would be for me, the father could visit me anytime, and when I learned my vocation, Mom had agreed to let the father be first in line to foster me back.

The father said, “Hey, Arden. You want to see something I learned in the Navy?”

The sheriff said, “Not especially.”

The father set the lighter on the bar, and concentrated on it. He did something quick and one-handed, the lighter flipped into the air and bloomed into flame before he caught it. He said, “How’d I do that, Arden? Want to see it again?” He flipped the lighter so he caught it close to the sheriff’s face and there was a flinch. The reflected flame moved weirdly in the sheriff’s pale eyes.

The father said, “Try and blow it out.”

The sheriff said, “How about if you just shave my ass instead?”

The father leaned in and blew on the flame as hard as he could. It went sideways but didn’t lose strength. Then he slung it hard across the room and it hit the wall, fell, and kept on burning.

“Golly,” said the sheriff. “Ain’t that a thriller.”

The father said, “Get it for me, Clyde.”

It was hot to the touch. I flipped the lid open and shut a few times, liking the action. When I handed it back to the father, he lit a cig and passed the lighter to the sheriff. “See what it says on it?”

The sheriff held it away to get focus. “Let me see. ‘Property. Of. A. Dumb-shit.’”

The father said, “See that there? PTO. Nineteen Forty-four. Know where I found it? For a nickel I’ll tell you.” The sheriff looked up at him.

A train roared by and the booze in the bottles trembled.

The sheriff said, “You going to sign them papers or not? Mom’s got a bed vacant N-O-W and I could take him tonight. Vacancies there don’t last. You drag ass on this and you may not get another chance.”

Above the bar, hanging from one of the rafter ribs, something was attracting certain night insects, carrion feeders. Something about the size of a head was crawling with shimmer-butt flies in ecstasy. It was all I could do to keep myself from looking up. The waxed paper loops and special trusses were about soaked through.

Something fell against the father’s neck, caught in the back of his collar. The father hopped off his stool and swatted it out. It bounced on the floor. “What the hell is that?”

The sheriff leaned down to pick it up and flung it as soon as his hand made contact. “It’s a goddamned EYEBALL!”

Pammy threw the bar rag over it. She stepped on it.There was a sick wet popping sound. They all stared at the bar rag like it was going to move. The sheriff pig-squinted his eyes at the father. “What kind of trick-shit are you trying to pull?”

The father said, “Me?”

Pammy whispered, “It’s the Swede.”

The sheriff snapped. “Don’t start, Pammy. It ain’t the goddamned Swede.”

And that is when the rest of the paper loops gave way.

There were some thin shrieks and violent shouts and a scramble to get to the door and then the three of them were outside half hopping in the gravel.

“Oh shit,” said Pammy. “Oh goddamn, Arden. I told you we should have—”

“Shut it, Pammy.” The sheriff had taken some direct hits and was panic-brushing putrid slime chunks and sopping hair wads off of his shirt. “Oh, Jesus,” he said. “Don’t anybody talk to me for a minute here, I’m next to puking.” And then he roared such a gush that he stumbled backwards.

The father said, “I need a goddamned drink and we left the goddamned Whitley’s in there, Pammy.”

Pammy said, “I’m not going in there.”

The sheriff said, “Shit, I ain’t scared.”

The father said, “I ain’t scared.”

Pammy followed them back inside. A dozen eyeballs lay on the floor in assorted positions. The rotting smell was horrendous.

Pammy whispered the Swede’s name when she saw the carcass on the bar. Out of the gape of its horrible hind end, long pale hair hung dripping with slime.

“It’s a chicken,” the sheriff said. “Some wise ass is playing tricks.” He was looking at the father.

LYDE,” SAID the father, gesturing out the trailer window. “Some day all of this will be yours.”

“Clyde,” said the father, “I signed the papers on you.”

He laid out his plan, drawing pictures with his fingers on the Formica table between us, little strategy maps showing where we were now, where he was going and where I was going and then he drew some lopsided circles about what was going to happen in the future. He said, “You won’t be in there long, when me and Pammy get back from Vegas I’ll come and bust you out, Clyde. Promise.”

I just stared at him. I’d planned to leave with the migrants to pick apples but they were already gone. The grandma-ma was gone. All that was left in the campground was trash and torn tarps. I didn’t see them go. Nobody did. The father said he and Pammy were packed and ready. He said we would look back on this time someday and laugh. When they wrote the book about how the Rohbeson’s meat empire rose again, it would be the first chapter.

His brain was corroding. At the time I thought it was the work of the Corpse Reviver. Making his talking and his thinking so confident and insane. But I think his brain would have corroded anyway because he was a naturally corroded person. There are people like this. There are people like the father everywhere. Now you see them, now you don’t.

When I spoke, he jumped a little. I think he’d forgotten I still could.

I said, “Can I have Little Debbie back?”

He said, “Do you promise to be good?”

I said, “I promise.”

I was so thankful to have her back. I laid low in the scrub feeling her edge in the darkness while I listened to Pammy cursing out Fernst. They were half looking for me. The father and the sheriff had hollered my name a couple of times. I thought of the grandma-ma making the sign of the cross over me the last time I saw her, saying, “Not that this is going to help, but what the hell.”

I could see Pammy upstairs in her chambers, getting ready to fry some potatoes and a couple of hamburgers in her little tiny kitchen. She’d been bragging about cooking all day, she was doing it for the father. She wanted him to know she could.

The father and the sheriff stood out on the porch. The sheriff said, “Think he ran?”

The father said, “Not Clyde. It’s not in him.”

He whooped out my name a couple more times and the sheriff said he was going to check the trailer. It was a moonless night and stars glinted over the Knocking Hammer. I guess it was then when I first noticed I was thinking about killing the father. It’s hard to say when premeditation begins. Laying there in the scrub watching his jug-eared silhouette with Little Debbie in my hand, the idea of killing him seemed very practical. On that night it seemed like a good idea to kill them all. Afterwards I’d take a walk, a stroll in the dark on the railroad tracks with my back to my personal train. I’d take a walk and then explode.

I am also a corroded person. Extremely corroded. I knew Pammy didn’t have a sense of smell. I heard her talking about it. She told the father she doesn’t miss it because she never had it.

Who squirted the lighter fluid all over Pammy’s hamburger meat? Who poured out her corn oil and replaced it with kerosene?