CRUDDY (30 page)

OOKIE. WHERE was she? Had he killed her? He was that kind of person. The father was very much that kind of person. But he was also the kind of person who would not kill her if she was still useful.

I didn’t mean to fall asleep. I did not expect the crashing to come so hard. I closed my eyes and when I opened them again the morning had come.

My heart was pounding hard. I prayed she was still alive. I prayed I wasn’t too late. When I got to the parking lot, Gy-Rah’s truck was gone. The broadcasting equipment the father had hurled out the night before lay in glinting pieces and trailing wires. I scanned for the father. Was he waiting for me? Was he hiding behind a rock and taking aim?

Pammy was at the concrete picnic table with her head down on her arms. Around her were many empty booze bottles. Poor Pammy. Her head was so scalded. The shriveled fuzz of hair was so pathetic. There were broken bottles around her feet. I remembered her miserable wobbling the night before. I was feeling sadness for her, which made me wish some happiness for her. And then I saw the flies.

A great black cloud of flies buzzing and ringing her neck and turning the ground beneath her into a living carpet. They were on her legs and they covered the sheeting blood on her chest. Her throat had been cut.

The office door was open. I whispered, “Cookie? Cookie?” There was a blood trail through the door to the couch. A blood-soaked towel and scissors and part of a ripped sheet and full ashtrays and highball glasses laying on a sick green carpet. The walls and low ceiling were spackle-shot, very bumpy with little glitters glinting. The curtains were shut. I whispered, “Cookie? Auntie Doris?”

In the bedroom. In the bedroom. The blood on the ceiling and the blood on the walls, back-splatter, back-splatter in welts, smeared hand marks streaking downward. The lamp knocked over, the bed rolled cock-eyed. On the rug I saw Sheila. Sister to Little Debbie. I saw Sheila and beside her I saw a thumb.

And then I saw the hand it came from. Auntie Doris was on the other side of the bed. Her blank eyes were open and she was curled up like a child.

From the parking lot came the sound of the bad muffler, the engine rattle, and the speaker sound. The father’s voice amplified, “Clyde, Clyde. You miss me, son? I sure miss you.”

I froze. The gun was in the car. I picked up Sheila. The father said, “Where are you, son?” Cookie yelped. “I have your little doggie here.” The engine stopped. “Come out, come out, wherever you are,” There was a scuffle and the father said, “You stupid bitch. Hold still.” He was talking to Gy-Rah.

I stepped out of the office to see the father standing behind him with a knife pressed to his throat. Gy-Rah’s eyes were rolling like a cow’s.

The father said, “Clyde. Clyde. Look at him. Old Dad sneaks off to Nevada, dinks Doris three times and
this
is what she poops out. Old Dad leaves me with nothing, and sends a third of his fortune to this. There’s no god, Clyde. Remember that.”

Cookie ran. Cookie disappeared into one of a thousand hidey-holes and I was glad for her. I was hoping that she would not come out again until the father was gone. Truly gone for all time.

“You Navy, Clyde? Are you?”

I held Sheila behind me. I nodded.

“
Say
it, goddamn you.”

“I’m Navy.”

“You’re Navy
what
?”

“I’m Navy,
sir.
”

“Then we don’t need this pussy anymore.”

Gy-Rah was able to walk quite a distance with his throat cut. The father had time to tap out a cig and light it before Gy-Rah went down like a dropped marionette.

The father gestured all around. His eyes were red-rimmed and dull. He gestured to Pammy and the office and to Gy-Rah’s last writhings. He gestured to his split pant leg with white rag bandages wrapped beneath it. He said, “Can you believe this world of shit?”

He was stiff-leg walking to the car. He got in on the passenger side. “Here it is.” He lifted the gun. “Here’s what that son-of-a-bitching sniper used on me, Clyde, ain’t it? Run up to the table and get a bottle of Whitley’s. This morning has been a bitch and I could sure use a drink. Fish around in that pile of shit I yanked out of the truck, see if you can’t find a couple of cables and harnesses. Do you know that little bastard had the goddamn gall to offer me a blow job? And do you know I had the goddamn gall to take him up on it? Speed it up, Clyde. It’s getting hot and we got a long day ahead of us.” He flipped down the visor and looked at himself in the mirror. “Got a goddamn pimple. Hurts like shit, too.”

He gave the directions and I drove. Little Debbie and Sheila were snuggled together beneath my shirt. The father was humming and drinking and smoking and yawning. He said, “Stop the car, son.” He held the gun against the side of my face. He said, “Give me your knife, son.”

I reached for Little Debbie and he said, “Don’t try it, son. Just hand her over.” He took her from me and kissed the blade. “She’s such a pretty little girl.”

The road got steeper. The father kept the gun on me. “GodDAMN I am tired.” He kept yawning and popping his eyes. “When all this is over, I’m going to take a nice nap. That little faggot surprised me. Do you know he told me he had six peckers?” The father held up a splayed hand and the thumb on his gun hand. “Six! Told me he was some kind of wonder of nature. I said, ‘Well let me have a look.’ Only two of them were worth anything. Turn here. Turn here. Yes, I see the sign, if I don’t give a shit about it, you don’t either. You Navy, Clyde? Because right now I need a goddamned commando.”

The road we followed was so rocky that I had to drive very slow. It wound up and up and up. The father made some melting-brain comments about keeping the car in motion, keeping the momentum going on the impossible road winding so steeply between boulders.

He drained the Whitley’s fast. “Stop,” he said. “Stop here. Here.”

He asked me again if we were partners and I said we were. He told me to get the cables and he kept the gun on me. When I turned my back, BLAM! He shot the gun off very close to my head. I smelled the burning. “Goddamn snipers are everywhere, aren’t they, Clyde?”

We climbed the rest of the way, going slow because of the father’s bad leg. He was sweating hard in the face. We were up very high and it was getting to him. He sat down. “This is as far as I go, son.” Beside him was a rusted iron U-bolt embedded into the rock. The father pinged the gun barrel against it. “History, Clyde. This here? The boys who built the great dam put these in. The Powder Monkey himself did this one. They didn’t have no banks nearby during the construction, a lot of shifty little shits were crawling all over and waiting to rob you. Haywire blasted his safe-hole on the other side of this rock. Hung over the edge and made himself a Wells Fargo. Gy-Rah got me this far but the shit didn’t bring no cables. You follow me, Clyde? These rings are going to hold your cable. Gy-Rah said the suitcase was there, just a twenty yards down from the edge. Wish I had a drink to offer you before you go.”

He told me to thread the cable through the parallel U-bolts. Told me he’d anchor them good for me, that no one could beat a Navy man when it came to knots. All I had to do was fasten the harness around me and work the drop-pulley to lower myself down.

He said, “Go on now, son. That’s right. You see Hoover Dam yet? She’s supposed to be goddamn spectacular.”

My legs were shaking. The cables were stiff and there were complications of leather straps looking ancient and crumbled. I will admit I was freaking badly, I will admit I looked back to see the tipping glint of the waving of the gun. The father looked bad. Greenish and thin and his hair stood up. He was laying on his stomach. The height had gotten to him.

I crawled to the top edge and looked over. I was surprised to see that the U-bolts continued over a descending platform. It was still a long way to the real edge. I dropped the cables over.

In the distance I saw the dam, her high white wall holding back the unnatural lake, unnaturally blue water glinting in such a dead world.

The father shouted, “Clyde? How’s it going?” He pulled the cable and felt the resistance.

“Clyde? You got it? Tug if you got it.”

Nothing happened. He yanked on the cable but it wouldn’t budge. There was an echo that faded fast every time he shouted my name. I wondered how long it would be before he decided to climb up to the edge. I’d have one chance. There could be no hesitation. Sheila was ready. Sheila had no problem with the idea of turning against him.

He swore. He spat. He kept yanking on the cable. The sun burned down on him. He hollered and hollered. Finally he began his upward crawl, clinging to the cable that would not budge because I tangled them bad through the U-bolts. Jamming every hook and pulley and strap in an impossible snarl.

Fear is cumulative. It rises to a breaking point and then a person freezes. “Clyde! Goddamn it!”

I crouched just under the ledge with my back flattened against the rock wall. A few pebbles came tumbling over when he got to the edge. And then I saw his jug-eared shadow. By the time he realized what happened it was all over. He tried to say some gurgley last words but I couldn’t really make them out. It’s hard to enunciate with a slashed windpipe.

ES,” SAID the Great Wesley. “The son shall bathe his hands in parent’s blood, and in one act be both unjust and good.” He nodded. “Burma Shave.”

“Yes,” said the Turtle.

“The money,” said Vicky. “What about the money?”

“It’s still there,” I said. “Where?”

The Stick rolled up onto his side and lay back down. He said, “Cop. Cop. There’s a cop.”

The white car was pulled over and I saw the yellow county star on the side. A big-bellied man was walking around the Jaguar. Vicky was backing away into the scrub. With a bored and irritated expression the man in tan and brown signaled for us to come down the embankment. He called us hippies. I started laughing.

I had so many thoughts right then. Ideas on what to do scattered in a thousand directions, what could I do to keep it rolling, keep the motion going. I thought of the Stick’s question. “Do you think we have a chance?” And suddenly I thought, Yes! Yes! But the sound of the splash behind me changed everything. Wesley went over the canal edge, hit the rushing water, and was carried away so fast. I jumped up running alongside the canal and it seemed like he was waving to me, shouting some encouraging words to me but I couldn’t hear what they were because the Turtle was screaming, “Wait for me! My dear, dear Wesley! Wait! Wait!” and he ran so fast, chasing after the shape of the disappearing Wesley, but he was not fast enough. I saw him slip out of his shoes and jump in.

The cop hopped back in his car and took off. I was sure he was going for help but no one ever came. In a certain way it didn’t surprise me. I know things about cops. About fathers. About the world.

I ran to get the Turtle’s shoes. It seems strange to me now when I think of how convinced I was that he would need them. How convinced I was that I would see them both again. But they were never found. Not by us. Not by anybody. There is a part of me hoping that maybe they made it. Made it to wherever people like us finally go.

We were at the Yakima bus station, Vicky was slurping down a strawberry milk shake that she would later be very sorry she ordered. I bought the tickets back to Cruddy City with my sock monkey money. We left the sleek car on a side street with an empty gas tank and the keys in the ignition. I was thinking about how close we were to the Knocking Hammer. How it would have been nothing to drive on a mile farther and lay my eyes on it again, something I had been wanting to do and planning to do for so long. Take the whole journey again, re-trace the trail of the father to the very cliff edge. But the urge had drained away.

The Stick was ill. He was having trouble moving, but he told me there was nothing wrong with him. And I believed him. I believed him completely. The father spoke the truth when he said that people lie and lie and lie. Even the best people do, sometimes.

I said, “You want me to get you some aspirin?”

Vicky said, “He can’t have aspirin.”

I said, “Why not?”

The Stick said, “Shut up, Vicky.”

She shrugged. “Fine with me.”

The Stick said, “So you cut his throat?”

I nodded.

“And you know for sure he’s dead?”

“He’s dead.”

“Didn’t you stay to make sure?”

“I got bored.”

“Bullshit,” said Vicky. “None of it ever happened. It’s all bullshit. Nobody would leave that much money behind. How much did you say it was?”

“Thousands. Thousands and thousands.”

“Such bullshit.”

Our bus boarded. The doors whooshed open and we climbed on. I carried the shoes of the Turtle and the robe of the Great Wesley. “To the back,” I said. “All the way back.”

Vicky wanted to hold the Turtle’s shoes and I was very surprised when she cried a little over them. I couldn’t cry. The Stick got the window seat. He leaned back and said, “And then what?”

The flat landscape moved behind him, looking oddly fake. “And then what happened?” He closed his eyes.

And then what happened was I made my way back to the car and I started shaking very violently and it was a long time before I could drive and it was very hard to drive once I could and I made it back to the Lucky Chief and I threw up and hollered for Cookie and I kept hollering for Cookie and I popped the trunk and took a handful of money out of one of the suitcases and then I dragged both of the Samsonites into the cavern, deep, deep, deep into the cavern and I hollered and hollered for Cookie and I heard her barking and she came running and she was wagging her tail very hard and I picked her up and kissed her and we walked into the sunlight. The End.

“The END?” said Vicky.

“The End,” I said.

“What a fucked-up bullshit waste-of-time story! God, Roberta! I could slap you right now.”

“You could,” I said. “But it would be a terrible idea.”

She was picking at the Turtle’s shoes. At the silver foil around the insole. She pulled it away and found a rectangle of origami paper. Inside were two perforated sheets. A miniature deck of cards printed on each. “It’s blotter,” she said. “It’s actual blotter.” There were two more sheets in the other shoe. There were 127 hits of blotter in all.

And after a moment there were only 121. She took three hits and gave me three hits. I snuck one to the Stick.

The bus bounced, Vicky got carsick, the strawberry milk shake found its way to the floor. She took three more hits. When we got to Cruddy City we were so blasted we could hardly maintain enough to get the 7 Dunbar bus home. The Stick said he was feeling better, that in fact he was feeling perfect. Vicky wanted to go home. None of us could think of a better idea. She walked very fast and we fell behind and the Stick put his arm around me. He said, “I’m a bleeder. Did Vicky tell you? I’m a bleeder.” But I didn’t know it was a situation. A condition. I just thought it was a thing you say when you are very high, like I’m an eater or I’m a breather. And we were so very high. All the streetlights shot rays at us and the cars left trails for us. All the ugly things around us looked beautiful. I missed the Turtle and the Great Wesley very much right then.

The Stick said, “My real name isn’t the Stick. My real name is—” He said something unpronounceable. Something that sounded slightly like “the Stick,” but had more letters in silent combinations. I tried to repeat it and he laughed.

He said, “I have a crush on you, Roberta.”

I told him my name was no longer Roberta. I told him my name was Junior Bizarre and Vicky heard this and she fell on the grass laughing and having contortions and it took us a very long time to make our way to the hedges that surrounded the Tallusoj house.

He stopped at the broken front gate. I could tell that even in his blasted condition that he was thinking about Susie. He hadn’t told Vicky. He said, “Vicky, Vicky. Um—um, Susie—”

Vicky said, “Fuck Susie. I’m sick of Susie.”

She bounced up the porch ahead of us. The TV light was jumping in the window. The green porch light was on. He looked at me. Did we leave the TV on? Did we? I thought we turned it off.

Vicky shoved open the door.

“SHIT AND GODDAMN! THE INTERRUPTION! MY PROGRAM!”

The resurrected Susie lay back in his flowered bathrobe with his vulnerables spreading. He had a plastic tumbler of Whitley’s in one hand and a Swisher Sweet in the other.

“Fuck off, Susie,” said Vicky. “Cover yourself up.”

“SHIT AND GODDAMN! I HAVE TO GET ORGANIZED!”

Later, in the attic, in the candlelight, the Stick and I lay together having some revelations.

He said, “I do still piss the bed.”

I said, “I killed a lot of people.”

He ran his finger over the inside of my arm and said the words spelled in scars.

I’m sorry.

He said, “Can I see your knife? Can I see Little Debbie? Is that what you used to do this?”

I handed her over.

He said, “What happened to Sheila?”

“She’s with the father. If he fell, she is at the bottom. If he dried out like beef jerky, she is still his companion. Before I left I shoved her in pretty hard.”

He ran his fingers over the raised letters again.

“You did this.”

I nodded.

“
Are
you sorry?”

“No.”

And we were quiet. And I crawled to the oval window. I was looking into the sky, I was wanting to find a satellite for him. I was thinking there had to be one tumbling somewhere above us. I didn’t see him do it. Make the deep silent slices upwards from his wrists. “I’m a bleeder,” he said, “I’m a bleeder, I’m a bleeder.” But I didn’t know what he meant until it was too late.

And I know I was screaming and I know I was scrambling after him out of the window and along the dormer ledge but I cannot say if he jumped or he fell. It seemed like he did neither. To me it seemed as if he took a calm step into thin air.

And so the ambulance came and so the cops came and I was very hysterical and Vicky was very hysterical and so we were all taken to Emergency and so the mother was contacted and came in screaming with her neck cords sticking out shouting she would kill me she would kill me she was absolutely going to kill me and so I shouted back that she should do it, I didn’t care and so she was restrained and so I was restrained and so the cops asked me questions and so Vicky yelled from the next cubicle Don’t Narc Me Out, Roberta! Don’t! Don’t! Don’t!

And so we were kept overnight for observation and so the surgery man came in to say, “I’m afraid we struck out, I’m afraid he did not make it. He did not make it. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” And so the Stick was gone.

And so Susie was taken away and so Vicky was taken to a foster home, which she busted out of immediately. And so she called me said would I meet her, would I go with her because it turns out Neil Young is playing at the Hec Edmondson pavilion and it’s festival seating and if we get there before the sun comes up we will be the first in line and then we will be in the front row when he sings “Cinnamon Girl.”

And so that is what I am about to do right now. Sneak out and meet Vicky by the Diggy’s Dumpster. And then tomorrow night, after the concert she promised she will come with me to the train tracks. And she promised she will give me the little push I need unless something happens and she gets together with Neil Young.

And so if you are reading this, if you are holding this book in your hands right now it means my plan worked completely, I am gone. I am gone. I got my happy ending.

And so whoever you are, if you want the money, you can have it. My description of the location is decent and followable. But watch out for Dreamland. Beware of the Air Force. Stay Navy all the way.

That is all.

This is the End.

I dedicate this book to my sister, Julie.