CRUDDY (17 page)

ET US cuT youR MeaT We WiLl DReSs YouR meAt wE WilL bUy YOur MEaT we Will PAy CAsh BeSt PricEs tHE BesT nOnE bEttER cuStoM HousE ButCher hoUSe louNgE gRocERy CamPinG this is what was written on the side of the long sagging building that was part of the Knocking Hammer. It was painted in a variety of letter sizes, smalls and capitals mixed, looking random, looking distracted, looking half out of the bag.

The Knocking Hammer is where the sheriff took us after he looked in the trailer and finished hearing the father’s story, which the father told without ever looking directly at the gun the sheriff kept pointed at him in an almost casual way.

“Milsboro,” said the sheriff. “You’ll have to show me on a map.”

The father said, “If you got a map that shows little pinprick towns, sure.”

“Barber, huh?” said the sheriff. “You take a drink?”

“Oh yes,” said the father. “I’m not going to lie about it.”

They were getting along even though the sheriff kept his gun out for the whole conversation. He had the star and all the father had was a stinking trailer and a mongoloid son. How shitty. That was the sheriff’s comment. How shitty, and what will happen to the boy when he gets older?

They were getting along but they were circling. The father told me later he knew he was in fine shape from the start because he never met a county sheriff yet who wasn’t a lying bastard. “It’s an elected position, Clyde. You scratch his ass and he scratches yours.”

The sheriff was sniffing out potential. Right away the father knew the sheriff was dangling a possibility in front of him because of which questions he asked and which questions he didn’t.

The sheriff said for us to follow him. He knew a place where we could get cleaned up. Get ourselves together. Campground with hookups for the trailer. Bar. Grocery. Whatever we needed. The lady who ran the place was a cousin of his, a widow, Pammy. She took over the whole operation once the Original Swede became the Dead Swede. And she liked new faces and she loved children.

“What they got to drink up that way?” asked the father.

“You heard of Whitley’s?”

“Lead on!”

In the car on the way to the Knocking Hammer the father went over the rules and regulations of being the mongoloid son and I stared out the window and watched the land change like it had a mental illness. Dead and barren became spinach, chard, and cabbage glittering with the pulsing spray from long-wheeled irrigators, and then a dead stockyard with knocked-down fence posts and a collapsed ramp and then a dumping ground for junk cars and raw garbage with turkey buzzards circling overhead and then sudden low orchards, peaches it looked like, with migrants reaching into scraggly trees with dirty pick-sacks slung over their shoulders.

And then it was barren again, looking quite scorched, and then we came to the Knocking Hammer.

The smell from the feedlot was instant and strong. A nose-twister of super-heated cattle pee and the further nose-twister from the cull pile behind the slaughter shack. More turkey buzzards. The sound of a meat saw buzzing. The familiar flies rising up in greeting. It was a dilapidated operation, small and ratty, but the father’s face lit up when he saw it. He patted the steering wheel and said, “Well, I’ll be a son-of-a-bitch.” He looked over at me but I turned away before our eyes met. He never mentioned what happened at the edge of the canal. For the father it was another world ago. The balance didn’t carry over. He said, “This lady, this Pammy, she likes kids. I want you to honey-up to her, Clyde. And the sheriff too. Come on then.” He got out of the car.

There were some barefoot kids with slept-on hair and dusty legs wearing raggy shorts and tank tops watching us from in front of one of the Knocking Hammer entrances with “Gro S
TORE
” painted above the door. The kids were licking their tongues into the tops of empty Fanta bottles and picking their faces and jumping up onto the sagging porch to try to see into our car. One ran up very close to my window and the sheriff cuffed him. They scattered around the side of the building.

I looked at myself in the wing mirror and saw my eyes looking back through holes in a horrible head, my face was swollen and bruised and there was a pounding pain behind my forehead that was getting louder. The father said, “Quit dragging ass, Clyde.”

There were a couple of cars parked cockeyed out front. The sheriff was late and the regulars who gathered to hear his afternoon wisdom were watching for him. When they heard him haw-hawing so loud outside, they came out of the door marked L
OUNGE
. They were rubbed-out men. Looking like old hard erasers.

The sheriff was standing at the open trailer door. Around him flocks of new flies were rushing in, attracted by a scent, a new drift of promising molecules. “HAW-HAW!” brayed the sheriff. Then his smile dropped away and he turned to the father, pulled out his gun and said, “You’re under arrest, you bastard.”

The father jerked so slightly, the movement was hardly visible to the human eye. A fly would have noticed it. The compound eye makes even the most minuscule motion seem huge. And I was thinking that maybe the sheriff was part fly because he saw it. He saw it and he kept his hard-faced expression for a few more seconds and then laughed harder. He said to the men, “You see his face! HAW HAW.” He tapped the father with the gun barrel. “Got ya, Milsboro! Haw haw haw!”

The father saw the men with eyes and ears open for a show. It was just a show. The sheriff called them over to have a look inside the trailer. He jerked his thumb at the father. “Do you know this joker tried to sell a county sheriff deer meat off-season?” And I watched the sheriff lie and the father follow.

The sheriff said, “And look at how he fixed it up for me. Don’t it just look mouthwatering?”

More haw-haws. The father played to the sheriff. He said, “Now where’s this Pammy?”

“Ho!” said the sheriff. “You’ll know her when you see her. Somebody call to Fernst. Somebody call Fernst to help with this mess.”

One of the men loped back inside. I heard him holler “Fernst? Fernst?”

A woman’s voice shouted, “What do you want with him? Don’t you go in there. He’s on the job! Goddamn you, get your dried-up ass back on the other side of the bar. Who wants him?”

There was some low-voiced conversation and then the man loped back out and the sound of the meat saw stopped. The sheriff said, “You go on inside, son. You tell Pammy I said for her to give you a red soda pop.”

“Well,” said the father. “He don’t exactly talk.”

The sheriff said, “Oh, shit, that’s right.” He looked at the men and said, “Mongolian idiot. Genuine.”

“Boy’s pretty busted up,” said one.

The sheriff said, “Faller’s disease. Brain troubles. Thrashing spasms.” He talked like he’d known about me for years. “He’ll never get beyond the mental age of five.”

“Like Fernst,” said one of the men.

“Yup,” said the sheriff. “He’s a little spooker, just like Fernst.”

I didn’t look at the father even though I felt his eye rays on me. He wanted me to throw him a look, to let him know I was cooperating. The sheriff was adding his own bits and pieces to my story and the father was counting on a good trade-in for it. I could hear him in my pounding head,
Look at me Clyde, look up at m
e.

The sheriff touched my shoulder and my teeth exposed themselves and I fought to put my lips in a smile around them. He said, “Go on inside, son, Pammy’s a natural mother. She’ll know what to do with you.”

The father said, “Go on, Clyde. Don’t be shy.” He was still hoping I would look at him. I didn’t.

I walked though a screen door that was more chicken wire than screen. Flies could come and go as they pleased. My eyes were adjusting to the dimness, I walked a few paces and a voice said, “Freeze!” It was the same lady’s voice. “Don’t take another step, you little shit.”

She was a big pinch-faced woman with hair that was crispy-fried blond, like old doll hair that had been rubbed all day on the sidewalk. Her eyes were squinting mean and she was blowing snorts of cig smoke at me. She said, “Get the hell back outside. Don’t filthify in here.”

I didn’t move. She didn’t insist. She leaned to look out the doorway. “That your old man?”

I nodded.

“Where’s your mother at?” I shrugged.

She heaved the bar rag at me. “Wipe your face. You know what little boys like you grow up to be? Do you, huh? Ask me because I know.”

With my eyes I said, “What?”

She said, “Assholes. Can you spell that?”

Through a row of small rectangular windows along the far wall I saw a tall man carrying chunks of the hacked-apart deer on his shoulders. He was dressed in butcher clothes stiff with blood. The father was saying something that made everybody start wheeze-laughing. Pammy regarded him and I watched something like thinking going on behind her eyes.

I thought my smell glands were dead from all the overload but the bar rag stank so bad it brought them back to life. I wiped my face, thinking honey-up, honey-up to her and felt the transfer of the filthy smell of a horrible thing that never dried out.

Pammy watched the father. “He don’t fool me. Your old man? He don’t fool me at all.”

She had a dead front tooth. A blue front tooth. And when she came from around the side of the bar to get a better look at the father I saw her huge stomach fat folds hanging over pink stretch shorts, hanging flatly like she had been deflated. Her boobs hung flatly too under a pink sleeveless blouse. And her bare legs were a horrible white with knotted humps of veins under the skin looking blue and mold green and twisted. She wore sling-backs with sad little bows sagging at the toe line. She rocked her dead tooth with her thumb and watched every move the father made.

From the ceiling above her hung hundreds of yellowed rolls of flypaper, some ancient, some recent, all looking like horror party decorations and loaded with flies. When one got full, Pammy just got the step stool out and hung another one. They stretched in every direction all the way to the corners. The bar was a horseshoe shape with the open end pointing toward a doorway that opened into a long hall. At the far end a back door to the outside was wide open.

Through the door I could see the butcher man pass one way and then pass the other way and then pass back again, like he was pacing. He was very strange looking, earthworm looking, is the only way I can describe it. His posture was in constant motion, going from question mark to exclamation mark and back again, and all his extremities, including his head, seemed to flatten and retract and then extend and sharpen. He was chomping on something while he paced. Eating something in his wiggling bloody hand. From the colors on the dangling wrapper I was thinking it was a Three Musketeers bar. He stepped up into the hall and I looked away. A door opened and closed and a locking bolt was thrown. The meat saw started up again. That was Fernst. And he didn’t talk either except when he went, “Hoooo-hoooo.”

Hanging on a wall behind the liquor bottle display was a calendar. In big letters it said D
ON’T
M
ONKEY
A
ROUND
. A
SK
F
OR
W
HITLEY’S
! Underneath was a picture of a chimpanzee dressed in a nurse’s uniform and holding a huge hypodermic needle. She was sticking her lips out. The caption said, W
HO
O
RDERED
A S
HOT
?

The sheriff stepped up and spoke to Pammy through the screen. “You think we could get Grandma-ma to clean out this trailer?” Pammy started to open the door and the sheriff said, “You don’t want to look. It’ll make you puke, I guarantee it.”

Pammy said, “I’ve never puked in my life.”

The sheriff said, “Well, this could be your lucky day.”

And they talked about it some more and a dusty Fanta child was sent with a message to Grandma-ma that there was fresh deer meat waiting if she wanted to earn it. The sheriff called, “And you tell her Pammy’ll throw in a couple pounds of tripe if she’s fast about it.”

Pammy said, “The hell I will.”

The sheriff said, “What do you think of Clyde?”

Pammy said, “Who?”

The sheriff nodded his head at me. “His name’s Clyde. I think a red pop and a bag of chips would put him right. That sound good to you, Clyde? He don’t talk.”

Pammy said, “What brand of shit are you trying to stir up here, Arden?”