CRUDDY (13 page)

ND THE father and Lemuel finished the Whitley’s and wanted more Whitley’s and Lemuel needed another can of Copenhagen, and they had gotten jolly and friendly toward each other again, dropping the subject that was on their minds most of all and deciding to go into town.

The father hollered to me through the dusky light. “Clyde! Me and your uncle Lemuel are going to go blow some dust off. You keep an eye on things, you hear me?”

Lemuel finished buttoning a wrinkled shirt and pulled his suspenders up over his shoulders. He said, “How do you know he hears you if he can’t answer you?”

The father hollered, “Toss Uncle Lemuel’s teeth back this way if you hear me.”

From my hiding place in the weeds I gave Lemuel’s bottom teeth the hand grenade throw, and watched them bounce twice and land just under the trailer.

“Oh shit,” said Lemuel, and he grunted a lot when he bent and squatted to reach them and he made an emission very loudly and then he felt under the trailer and the cat bit him.

“SON OF A BITCH! SON OF A BITCH!”

“We’ll be back in a little while, Clyde,” shouted the father to the dead play field. “Don’t wander.” The car with the human teeth bites in the dashboard rolled away down the gravel road.

There was still enough light in the sky to make out the shapes of things. And there was one streetlight that let some light fall onto Lemuel’s scraggly yard. I had some questions in my mind. Was dead Earlis still in the trailer? That was the main one. That was the involuntary one. And that was the one that made me decide to take a walk.

All of what surrounded me that evening in Dentsville is gone. Paved over. The freeway did come through. And there are days when I would like to go to Dentsville and see it, make sure of it, because I was not lying when I told Julie that bones crawl after everybody. And that fire can’t do a thing about it.

I walked down Lemuel’s gravel road toward a train whistle, a loud one. I knew the tracks were close. I followed a steep sidewalk down and down until I came to the edge of a cliff, a sheer cliff that appeared out of nowhere. Trussed up against it was a wooden bridge if a thing that only leads you down and down and down can be called a bridge. It was like a high wooden train trestle that fell down on one side, looking about half a mile long and narrow and rickety with three tight turns to manage before it ended at a flat street.

I stepped onto it and the smell of creosote flooded my nose and it was a relief to smell it. It drove all the ghost smells away for a while.

It was the highest thing I’d ever been on. The drop was about two hundred feet straight down and when a scavenger truck came bumping onto the planks the whole bridge rattled. I saw the man in the truck leaning into his seat. He went slow and the boards beneath him groaned.

Underneath the bridge were the tracks. Bums were in the scrub below, moving in the shadows of vapor lights on high poles. Little bum encampments were farther up the cliff side, with cardboard and old blankets piled up against side-growing trees. Little fires were burning. There were guys sitting on the ground wearing hats and smoking.

The train that whistled me over to the bridge was clacking away into the distance but another one was coming. The headlamp twisting and the
ting, ting, ting.
A couple of guys stood and brushed their pants off. When the train came alongside them they took a few quick steps and jumped on easy and graceful. I spent a long time there, just watching the trains come and go. Enjoying my view of them from so high up. Watching the bums. Gripping the wooden guardrail when the whistles blew and the passing trains shook the bridge into nearly swaying. Exhilaration. Exhilaration is the word.

I got back to Lemuel’s and faced the mystery trailer again. The father and Lemuel were still gone and knowing the father, I expected them to stay gone for a while. I started snooping. The keys were in the ignition of the car, just like Lemuel said, I twisted them a half turn and the radio came on to a country station and Ned Miller started singing “From a Jack to a King.”

On the passenger seat was a partly spilled box of Cracker Jacks with the prize still inside and in the glove box there was flashlight.

I breathed through my mouth and stood on a folding chair to reach the trailer window and pointed the flashlight. The first thing I noticed was the way the miniature kitchen looked in the spin-art of blood, dark flung patterns everywhere, fly highways going every direction. The second thing was on the floor.

I can tell you this. A man who has been dead for a week in a hot trailer looks more like a man than you would first expect. The face bloats out giantly and purple-black, and there are textures, horrifying textures, but it’s the mouth that makes you scream. When you see his black crusted lips pulled away from shockingly white teeth, when you see him shining out his special smile, just for you.

I was dead asleep when the car came crawling back up the gravel road. I felt the high beams glide across my eyes and I sat up from my hiding place on the edge of the field. The father drove the car into the folding chairs and there were some metal crunches. He stopped just a few feet from the trailer and the high beams bouncing off of it threw back a strange light on the scene.

The father switched the engine off, leaned across the seat to unlatch the passenger door, and Lemuel poured out rolling.

The father leaned his head on the back of the front seat and stared upwards for a while. He leaned his head on the steering wheel and stared downwards for a while. Then he opened his door quickly and leaned out. There was a sudden waterfall eruption of an intense booze fountain that had many hard pulses and many dramatic splurts before it finally ran out of power. The father pulled himself back into the car, leaned until he fell across the seat, and started snoring.

The car sat like that. Both doors open and the radio static cutting in and out and the headlights attracting bugs. They spun disoriented against the bright trailer, making shadows. The head of Lemuel got miniature tremors and his lips started making disturbing movements, extremely disturbing talking motions and then severe birthing motions and then his dentures did a half roll out of his mouth and into the dirt. The smell coming off of him was flammable.

I was holding Little Debbie. Holding her so tight that my fingers were cramped around her, the cut-diamond pattern of her handle embossed into my palm. I fell back asleep this way and what woke me up in the dimmest rays of morning, the barest gray rays of light upon the damp weedy field, was a soft velvety thing stroking against my lifted head. Stroking and pushing against my cheek, against the corner of my mouth, smelling bad.

I opened my eyes and Lemuel was kneeling over me.

Little Debbie bit him. No hesitation. Little Debbie bit and bit and bit him and if there was shouting, if there was screaming, I didn’t hear it. What I heard was a long tone, faint and endless. And the center of my vision was punched out, gone gray, with a hot light scribbling fire at the edges, melting the world from the center outward like a movie burning up on the screen.

“Didn’t I tell you?” said the father. “Didn’t I tell you you’d know when it was time to use Little Debbie? You’re a natural, Clyde. Have a Lucky Strike. Hell, darling, take the whole pack. You earned it.”

There is a saying about Jesus. That he will forgive anyone for anything. Anything at all.

Do you know the song by Brenda Lee?

“
I’m sor-ry...so sor-ry...please ac-cept...my a-pol-o-gy.
”

The father was singing it in a jigging cadence as he dragged the blue blanket containing the rotted Earlis out of the trailer and into the shack of Lemuel, singing it jaunty, and leaving a trail of horrible liquid behind him. He had a handkerchief doused in Aqua Velva tied over his nose. His singing was muffled, but it was on key. I think the maddest people in this world are the ones who could have been stars, could have serenaded all people so famously with voices lifting up from spinning gold records. There were so many good things that should have happened to the father. He wasn’t your average man. He wasn’t meant to live in an average world.

Dead Lemuel was already in the shack. The blue blanket came for him first. The father stood over him smoking a cig. He said, “Jesus, Clyde. You bled him out like a hog. I couldn’t have done better.” Dead Lemuel received a few last wet crunching kicks and some advice about lying to someone as superior as the father. Because Lemuel had been lying. The suitcase was inside the shack and so was dead Leonard, who didn’t blow his brains out after all. His throat was cut.

“See what a shit world we live in, Clyde?” The father took a fortifying glug of Whitley’s. “Brother against brother, father against son. Fuck all.”

The father bounced back into the trailer and came out with a gray jug of cookstove kerosene. He said, “Hop in the car, sunshine, we got places to go. This will only take a minute.”

He disappeared inside the shack and there was the splashing and the distinctive smell of kerosene. I waited for the WHOOMP and the WHOOSH, but all I heard was “Burn you son-of-a-bitch. Take. Take. Shit. Come on.” Kerosene can be hard to get going. You’d think you could just throw a match on it and you’d have it made. But it can be a stubborn accelerant. The key is a little Whitley’s. BLAM! The doorway glowed bright and the father came leaping out.

The pink and black car with bite marks in the dash got the same treatment. And I was thinking of the teeth that made them. They looked like the teeth of a child. Someone’s baby teeth marks melting in the flames.

It started to rain.

“This one’s going to blow,” said the father, gunning the engine and we were down the road when it did. I looked over my shoulder and watched the brightness through the wet rear window. It started to pour. It was Sunday morning.

“Goddamn!” said the reeking father. “It couldn’t go more professional than that. Whole damn street will be on fire before someone calls it in. Fire department won’t give a shit. There ain’t nothing to save. They’ll watch it. Keep it from spreading. Eat candy bars and shoot the shit. But no one is going to go sniffing around back there and if they do? Know what they’ll find? A goddamn three-way! Haw! We got us a nice car here, Clyde. The future’s looking bright, Clyde.” And he went on like that, giddy like that, trying to wipe the steam off the windshield with his filthy hands, rolling down his window, letting the creosote smell curl delicate tendrils into the car and that became stronger and then flooded the air, and as the father tried to find the defroster knob the car slid onto the wet boards of the wooden bridge.

“What the—OH SHIT!” The father hit the brakes and the trailer fishtailed and pushed us farther down. When he was able to stop he tried to back up but the planks were slick and the trailer was too heavy. I heard the oncoming roaring, the
ting-ting-ting
of the approaching bell, not the whistle yet, the whistle would come in a moment, a clear screaming that would shake the world apart.

We were up so high. Up so very high on such a rickety slick bridge. The father’s paralyzed hands were white on the steering wheel. The yellow eye of the train rolled toward us. The bridge was already vibrating. I counted it down.
Five, four, three,
and when the whistle bellowed the father screamed, and the train pounded and screeched and shook at the legs of the bridge like it was going to pull it down.

There are times when a situation is not funny at all. Times when it would be very rude to laugh, but I could not help it. I didn’t want to be laughing, but my puppet head would not stop. It was the sound of the father’s screaming. Have you ever heard a man scream before? Sounding exactly like a girl?

“You BITCH!” He had me by the head and he was screaming, “YOU THINK THIS IS FUNNY? YOU FUCKING STUPID BITCH!” He punched me very hard then and my teeth hit the dash knobs and broke a short upside-down “V” into my front teeth. I tried to get out of the car but he had my arm and he yanktwisted me back. In a very even voice he said, “I’m going to kill you, Clyde.” But when we made it to the bottom of the bridge I was still alive.

Dentsville is a maze, a tangle of curving streets and hills and sudden dead ends. When it’s raining and you are pulling a trailer and you are feeling excitable it is a hard place to get out of. Very hard. The father kept trying to go south but he kept getting turned around. Finally he said, “East, then. East. Fuck it.”

And soon we were at the edge of the city, rain pouring hard and wipers on high, blood dripping from my nose onto my arms, me not doing anything about it. The road was straight and empty and our tires swished loud, running alongside a junkyard that went on forever behind a fence made of spot-welded tire rims, some of them painted to spell out A
NDERSONS
A
NDERSONS
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EED
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AVE
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A
NDERSONS
A
NDERSONS
A
NDERSONS
.