CRUDDY (8 page)

HEN VICKY came out of the Washeteria, the Turtle had his arm around me. I was feeling a slight electrocution from it. Normally I do not like for people to touch me, I have a weird problem with it, a doggish problem. When people touch me I want to bite them. I have had this problem since I can remember, and I had been wondering if maybe I’d finally grown out of it, but my jaws rippled when he put his arm around me. It was all I could do to keep my teeth together tight.

Normally I do not like being touched, but I have wanted a boyfriend in my life. I used to think about the ways it would be possible. I read a story where a freaky-looking girl met a blind guy and told him all kinds of lies about what she looked like, like how her eyes were blue instead of brown, which I thought was idiotic of her since the guy wouldn’t know color anyway. I thought of him, the guy in the story, and how I could take him from her with my truthfulness. I thought it could work out between us.

I have liked certain guys at school. Guys that never even look at me. One has a silver front tooth. One is tall and has a face like a deer. One spoke to me once. He said, “Don’t you know it’s rude to clip your nails in public?” And there is Billy the Kid, the DJ on KHR, who I sometimes sneak calls to in the middle of the night. He asks me how old I am. I tell him seventeen. He asks me if I ball. He tells me to call him when I’m eighteen. I request different songs. “House of the Rising Sun” is one of them. I never thought it was a real place but the Turtle said it was and he would take me there and I had to wonder if there would be a red lightbulb.

In my restricted life, the mother has tried to make me afraid of the aimless man, but truthfully I have never been afraid because I never thought I was the aimless man’s type. I did not think he would keep his eyes on me long enough to hunt me. That I would be as noticeable to him as a gray clothespin on a sagging line. In my restricted life it was the mother who I was afraid of. The Turtle had his arm around me, and if she saw that, my life would be over.

Vicky said, “What, are you two together now?”

She was having a hard time unwrapping the cellophane from her cig pack. She was doing it so slowly, concentrating on the red pull-strip and the glinty shine. And then I noticed we all were concentrating on it, leaning our heads over it and watching it intently. It seemed like a miracle item to me. Vicky held the end of the pull-strip and let the top piece of cellophane hang and flutter and we stood there very amazed by it. And I was thinking how we are always surrounded by incredibly beautiful things but we don’t know it, and that from then on I was going to know it, and then I looked up and the Washeteria woman’s freaky head was right next to the window and she was darting little pig eyes at us and moving her lips at us and her beige moles were wiggling and I was screaming very loud and the Turtle and Vicky were pulling me down the street and Vicky told me to shut up because she hates people who scream. This is one thing I can say about Creeper. It makes everything you look at very loud.

We went to a scrudded-out little park that was mostly weed grass and one set of swings and some warped splintered seesaws and the Turtle said he wanted to seesaw with me so I sat down and then watched him walk over to the swings. Vicky laughed. She said, “Suc-kah! Rober-tah!”

The Turtle started swinging. One of his shoes came off. There was aluminum foil inside his shoe and it caught the light and sent a ray into my eye that knocked me over. Then Vicky was laughing very hard and contorting on the grass also. The Turtle said, “Hillbilly Woman. Tell her the story of the Poky Dot lounge, the Violent One missed that part. Tell her what was written on the door.”

“No,” said Vicky. “Tell the part about the money, Roberta. What about the money?”

The Turtle fished his shoe back on. His toes were also very long, unusually long, you could even say disturbingly. He said, “Fuck ALL people of Indiana!” He said, “Indiana people SUCKS SHIT!”

“I don’t get it,” said Vicky. “What? What’s funny?” Because me and the Turtle were laughing very hard. Were we together? It was possible.

The Poky Dot Lounge was what appeared on the horizon an hour or so after the father hung another cig from his lips and said, “Last one.” He balled the cig pack and flung it out the window. In my side mirror I watched it bounce away behind us. Bounce and roll and vanish. We crossed a wide river and then everything changed. There were no more fields, no houses, no trees, not even telephone poles. Even the colors were gone, all of them except brown and gray and the blue of the late-afternoon sky. The world got emptier and emptier until it looked like a brown ocean of dead velvet, just emptiness covered with short dry grasses and low scrub.

We were on a one-lane road and behind us the stirred-up dust hung in the air. Some creatures bolted in the distance, looking like deer, but not deer. The father said, “Give you fifty bucks if you can tell me what them are.”

My head was hurting and I was hungry. I ate what the father ate. Coffee and cigs and aspirin and Old Skull Popper and an ancient vending machine candy bar and the rancid taste was still in my mouth. I was hungry but I felt like if I ate I would heave instantly. My eyes were burning and I had a sensation in my throat like I’d swallowed gulps of sand.

“Give up?” asked the father. “You owe me fifty bucks. Them are pronghorns. Some people are wild about them, but I never could stand the flavor. You know what they mean by gamey? I’ve dressed a few. They say the sausage ain’t bad. Never tried it.”

We rolled on through the plucked world. He huffed his last cig down to the filter and his lips made a little popping sound when he threw it out the window.

He yawned and then I yawned, and he said, “It’s catching.”

He said, “Talk to me, Clyde, ask me some questions. Ask me anything. I’ll always give you a straight answer.”

I said, “Where are we going?”

He said, “Oh, that’s a surprise.”

He said, “Clyde, we are knife people and have always been knife people and people who use guns are pismires. But I want you to know there is a rifle in the car with us. We’re knife people but there’s always exceptions. There could come a situation where we are glad we have it, understand me?”

I nodded even though I didn’t and he smiled and showed his curved yellow-gray teeth. Did I mention I loved the father? At the beginning of the journey I loved him a lot. They say love for a father is natural and nothing can change it. I don’t know about that.

“Shit,” he said. “Out of gas and out of smokes. Better start saying your prayers, Clyde.”

The time ticktocked undisturbed for a few miles and then across the horizon I saw the silhouette of telephone poles and a square shack up on cinder-block legs. The father said, “We’re saved.”

It was painted a faded-out pink. Shaky circles were drawn on in tan and brown. On the door it said,

POKY DOT LOUNGE

NO MINOR

NO LOITER

NO INDIAN

Someone had added an “A” to the end of INDIAN and then wrote “Fuck ALL people of INDIANA. INDIANA people sucks SHIT!!!”

The Turtle was laughing again. He was curling and uncurling himself like a shrimp and laughing hard.

“That’s IT?” said Vicky. “I’m starting to hate you guys.”

“Tell it again,” said the Turtle.

“No,” said Vicky. “The money. Tell me it’s real.”

“It’s real,” I said. “And I want you all to keep acting very normal. Turtle, you need to pick up your stash because it fell out of your pocket and then we should get up very normally and walk very normally away from here because there is a cop watching us.”

The Turtle took off running. He tore across the street and cut down an alley. He was amazingly fast considering his shoes. The cop was in an unmarked car and he wasn’t wearing a uniform but I knew he was a cop, I’m a trained cop spotter, I know their ways. He pulled out rolling slow, keeping his eyes on the Turtle and turning down the same alley.

“Where?” said Vicky. “Where’s a cop?” She was looking in every direction.

I said, “He just left. He just went down the alley after the Turtle. The car that just left. That was a cop.”

“What car?” said Vicky. “I can’t believe how you lie.” She picked up the Turtle’s stash box and wiggled it. “We got it.” She dropped it into her purse and then pulled out a mirror to check her face.

“Roberta, I have a question I really want to ask you but it’s personal to me, OK? But you have to tell me the truth, because I really want a truthful answer. Swear to god, OK? Swear to Jesus?”

“OK,” I said.

She pointed to her missing eyebrow. She said, “Roberta, is this noticeable?”

The first lie I ever told her was right then.

ND BEHIND the Poky Dot Lounge a train came roaring, coal cars filled and packed down into rooftop shapes that can survive the wind. A Northern Pacific, at least a mile long. And I was standing by the car watching it and the father was around the other side taking a pee and then he came up very quiet behind me and he put his arms around me and squeezed me to him and said, “You like trains, little girl?”

And then he screamed, “SON OF A BITCH!” and tried to grab me but I was two steps out of his reach. He clutched at his forearm and shook it, looking at it and then coming at me so fast I couldn’t think to run. He delivered such a slam I saw blue light streaking. I was on the ground and he kicked me.

You remember I mentioned my biting problem.

“GODDAMNED CLEAR TO THE BONE!” He kicked me again. The blood from his arm splattered across the dirt and I was thinking it was adding its molecules, the father’s blood was adding its molecules to the composition of the dirt, I was concentrating on the molecules because I have learned that concentrating on the smallest things can proved a distraction, an escape hole to disappear down. I was concentrating on the molecules and particles and atoms while he kicked me, the spaces between the molecules can be demonstrated by taking a gallon of water and a gallon of rubbing alcohol and pouring them into a two-gallon container and you will see that it will not make two gallons, it will not reach the two-gallon line because—“YOU BIT ME! YOU FUCKING BIT ME!”

Human bites are ferocious with bacteria. They can give you kinds of infections that are hideous, very dangerous, every meat man knows about the danger of bacteria introduced deeply into open wounds and there was only one bottle of Old Skull Popper left and the father was very angry about having to waste the precious drops on sanitizing. I heard him making ow, ow noises as he poured it on.

“What the hell got into you, Clyde?” His voice was calmer. I rolled myself up and felt the stabbing pains in my side. “I could have killed you right then. Don’t put a man in that state, ever. He can’t be held responsible.”

He dripped the clear harsh liquid on the shell-shaped wound. “If it was just one inch over that way I’d be ripping your guts out for a tourniquet. What in the hell got into you?”

I was not able to reveal the true answer. The train wound away into the distance.

“Was it that little squeeze I gave you? You think I want something from you? What the hell do you have that could interest me? You ain’t even female to me.”

But he had said “little girl.” The train was a pinpoint on the horizon that vanished away. I thought that’s what he said but I didn’t feel sure. Ears played tricks. Eyes played tricks. Fingers and hands played all kinds of tricks.

It was true I like trains. I have had a certain problem around trains since I was very little. I have been very attracted to them stopped or moving but especially moving. I have never been able to get close enough to them and while trying I have done things that would make an average person scream. I have laid on my stomach flat and close to the tracks to let the roaring pass over and shake my molecules hard. The exhilaration. The exhilaration. Everything is always easier after the exhilaration.

In my restricted life there has not been much opportunity for the exhilaration. The mother has given me a type of exhilaration by throwing sharp things at me, screaming about the various ways she is going to kill me, but it’s not the same thing at all. I never feel better afterwards. There is never any relief that comes from it except maybe to her.

I can hear the trains from my bedroom window at night, but I have never walked to find them. In my restricted life I have not been allowed to actually go anywhere except school.

I have had nightmares about the coal-car train. The truth of what happened roars back to mind, the father’s flesh gives way between my teeth, his fist knocks me down, his blood splatters across the dirt. Back-splatter. It’s one thing the evidence people look for at the crime scene.

The father broke the door to the Poky Dot Lounge. He needed a cigarette bad. He needed Old Skull Popper, and a tank of gas, but most of all cigarettes, and there could be other things he needed depending on what he found inside.

I was stationed at the door to watch for trouble. The sun went down and the world stood empty. No dust stirred anywhere.

The father said, “Clyde, give me a hand. You see a goddamned light switch anywhere?”

There was a pull string that brought a bare bulb to life. The place smelled hard of pee and the walls were filthy. Someone had gone insane with a spray can, blasting out dripping dots of paint on the rough walls and sagging ceiling. There was a short bar, a couple of stools with cracked vinyl tops, a pool table with a grease spot in the middle the size of a man, and a nasty-looking blanket. And there was a record player. A kid’s record player, the kind that plays 45s. There was one record. Hugo Winterhalter and his orchestra doing “Canadian Sunset.” I switched the record player on and it spun. When I put the needle down the sound of sudden music made the father jump. He said, “Jesus! Give a man some warning!”

It was strange to stand in such a decrepit place listening to the sounds of pianos and violins. The father was getting frustrated. “This place is such a shit hole. Goddamn train bums. I don’t know why I wasted my time beating that front door open because the back door ain’t even attached. Always walk around a place before you bust into it, Clyde. Remember that.”

The father gave up hope of finding anything he could use. He said bums were better scroungers than the civilized man. He said he was surprised the record was still there. He handed it to me. “Want it? Keep it. It’s yours. Shows I don’t got no hard feelings against you, but you try another trick like that and I’ll flay you in six pieces and drag you behind the car.”

He took a last look around the room. “Firetrap. Nobody would miss this place.” The father made a high pile of burnables and threw on a match.

Don’t ever disappoint the father when he needs something. Ever. You see what happened to the Poky Dot Lounge.