CRUDDY (7 page)

LIES ARE messengers. One was on a blade of dead grass right below where I was trying to barf. It was scrutinizing me and I did not like it. I said, “Sometimes I am in the mood for fly scrutinization and sometimes I am not.”

“So be it,” said the Turtle. “Absolutely.”

“New Orleans,” said Vicky Talluso. “Is that serious? Because seriously I could go. Because my philosophy is just, like, screw it, I’m going. Now I don’t feel it. Roberta. You feel it? Were you lying about the cash money?”

I shook my head no.

“No, which?” she said. “No you don’t feel it? No you’re not lying? Which?”

“Both,” I said. My stomach was in ripples and I could smell tripe, fresh and unrinsed and very strong. Memory smells are a problem for me. Actual smells can be difficult, sometimes almost impossible for me to stand. But actual smells are things a person can get away from. The memory smells are impossible to fight. The tripe smells steamed. I started heaving. The fly continued to scrutinize.

Flies have always been part of my life. In the days of Rohbeson’s Slaughterhouse, flies were everywhere, crawling up the walls like living designs. I used to fall asleep looking at them. Thinking about their world. Their society. Did they have kings? Did they steal from each other? My light fixture was black-full with bodies of them. I used to think they had feelings about certain people. People who noticed them. Certain people. Me.

There was a fly in the car with the father and I. I wasn’t sure if he was a slaughterhouse fly or just a middle-of-nowhere fly. One that got in when no one was noticing. And I wondered what it was going to be like for him when he got out again. What would he think when he flew out of the car and didn’t recognize anything or anybody?

Only in a fairy tale could he ever get home again. In fairy tales it happened all the time. It was possible. I was thinking it was really very possible. And while I was thinking this, the father snatched the fly out of the air and mashed him with a gesture so quick I barely saw it. Meat men can do that. They can snatch flies right out of the air.

The father checked on me in the mirror and asked if I was hungry. He said, “I still owe you that hamburger.”

I started throwing up but nothing came.

“Roberta, Roberta,” said Vicky Talluso. “Are you OK? Is that going to happen to me, Turtle? Because really, I cannot throw up. I mean actually physically I cannot throw up.”

The long fingers of the Turtle touched the back of my neck as he gathered my hair away from my face. “It will pass,” he said.

Vicky said, “What if it doesn’t?”

“I’m OK,” I said. “I’m OK.”

“Lay back.” said the Turtle. “Just be cool and feel the peace and be free and feel the love raining down on you and it will pass.”

Vicky said, “If that Creeper-whatever makes me do that? If I start talking about flies and dry barfing? I’m going to seriously kick your face in, Turtle.”

The Turtle was right. It did pass. Like a snake it slithered away out of me, dividing the grass as it went. My head was on the Turtle’s lap and he was looking down at me through his eerie fringes of white eyelashes. He said, “Hillbilly Woman.”

I said, “Turtle.”

Vicky said, “Unless I get a cigarette, I’m going to claw someone’s face off.”

Vicky wanted to go the Washeteria to get cigs. She said the lady there was a troll with a million warts on her face and incredibly sagged-out boobs and she would not give you change but if you had your own change you could buy cigs from her machine without her caring. Vicky was talking very fast and some of her words were warping but I followed her meaning. I walked next to her and the Turtle walked next to me and I noticed he was shorter than I thought.

I was walking in the wrong direction if I ever thought about going home again. I knew the mother was home and she was waiting. She was waiting right by the door. Her shift was night. She was in her white uniform and stockings and shoes. Her hair was in a French twist. She was smoking. She was muttering. Where in the hell was I?

I have lived a restricted life since the mother saw my picture in the newspaper and met the surrounding reporters and felt the flash of the photographers’ bulbs. Our reunion created quite a stir. The reporters wanted to be there when she came to get me. And they were. And the city of Las Vegas was glad to host us. We were given free rooms at the Golden Nugget and all-you-can-eats everywhere we went. At night from the window the lights glittered and glittered and glittered. Julie watched television and sucked her thumb. I watched out the window. What the mother watched I do not know. She left just as it got dark and didn’t come back until just before morning. We passed a week this way and then it was over.

I never told what happened at the Lucky Chief and she never once asked me about it. She told her made-up story on how the father kidnapped me, how he snatched me away from her. And how she was frightened he may return. He was the main suspect in the murders. When she was asked if he seemed capable of such a horrible crime, little glittering tears dropped from her big eyes and she nodded. “Yes. Oh yes. He’s capable. I am so afraid.”

But in the newspaper pictures she doesn’t look afraid at all. She looks happy. And beautiful. Did I mention the mother is beautiful? She is what they call a knockout. A stunner. Drop-dead beautiful.

The pictures are on the wall in the living room area. Just her. No caption. No story. Just her very beautiful face smiling on famously. She was so happy when her picture was in the paper. But now no one was calling, and the mother was squinting at me.

I’m what a person might call a dog. Very much a dog. Guys have actually barked at me and offered me Milk-Bones. My face cells divided into the shape of the father, who even for a man was on the homely side. Jug ears and no chin and a wide nose and hooded eyes. Bad skin. Thin hair. All of it revisited in me by means of somatic mitosis,
Stedman’s Medical Dictionary,
page 954.

I have looked like a boy since the beginning of forever, a pug-ugly one was how the father said it. Unusually ugly. A face strangely shaped. It hit him early in our journey together that I could pass for a mongolian idiot with no problem. That was his name for it. Mongolian Idiot. Also in
Stedman’s,
page 957. The name of the mental condition suggested by my face is real. It’s my epicanthic folds. I have what some people call slant-eye.

He told me how to do it. Be this type of idiot. And he was proud when I first pulled it off. In Moorehead, North Dakota, he took me into a Salvation Army. The clothes the mother threw into the car for me were mostly dresses and he didn’t want me in dresses. The lady at the counter felt so sorry for us she didn’t even charge us.

“Clyde,” said the father as we rolled out of that town, “You are a treasure.”

This story was tumbling out of my mouth as we walked to the Washeteria. It tumbled out in broken chunks and pieces. The Turtle was listening. Vicky wasn’t. She was talking at the same time and her words sounded like scribbles.

I said, “Turtle, I want to go to New Orleans. I can’t go home, I am too late. The mother is waiting and she will kill me, I mean actually kill, and she will blame it on aimless men, she will tell the newspapers it was the aimless men.”

“The aimless men?” said the Turtle. Vicky was buzzing loud in my other ear. Her words were repeating but I could not make the meaning of them come together until she was shouting and what she was shouting was, “DO YOU HAVE A NICKEL? I NEED ONE MORE NICKEL. DO YOU HAVE A NICKEL? HEY, ROBERTA, HEY.”

My saliva was squirting down the insides of my mouth and tasting sweet. The Turtle gave Vicky a nickel and said, “The aimless men?”

And I explained the aimless men, how they are always hiding and waiting for the girl who moves with no purpose. Killer men who would drag me deep into the woods and stab me forty-nine times and cut off my hands and cut off my head and throw my hands into the bushes at Golden Gardens and throw my head off Pier 99 and they would roll the rest of my body down any sewer hole. The mother knows about these men, these killer men because she gets the details from sinister magazines, all of them with
TRUE!
in the title.

“
True Crime,
” said Vicky Talluso. “
True Confessions.
True
Detective.
Those stories are bogus. Very fake. Anything with ‘True’ in the title is a lie.”

I told how the mother says if I do not come directly home after school the aimless men will capture me and strangle me and shoot me in the forehead and tie me to a tree and cover me with gasoline and light me on fire and then have an ax attack to my face.

“See?” said Vicky, and she was indignant. “That’s not even logical! The guy would do the ax part
before
he lit you on fire. Bogus. Clearly. Obviously. Wait out here, because, Roberta, you are very sensitive to drugs and you are freaking out and you don’t even know it and I hate that. Come on, Turtle.” She held the screen door open for him, but the Turtle stayed with me. He stayed right beside me and listened to my spilling story while we leaned on the telephone pole. Through the window the lady watched us. And she was everything Vicky said, the million warts and the saggy boobs. The shadow of the window-painted word W
ASHETERIA
was falling on her face, the “W” was. She was exactly like Vicky described except on her face it wasn’t warts. It was moles. Beige moles, a million of them growing one upon the other.

The Turtle listened to my speeding words and then held up a long finger. “Wait. Tell me one thing,” he said. “Are you wanted?”

HE FATHER never treated me like a kid unless there was someone around. When the father looked at me, I do not know what he saw. Maybe a midget. Maybe an elf. I don’t think it ever entered his mind that I was a kid. He knew it, but he never thought it, and it was what a person thought that mattered. That was the stuff you could twist a dream around.

During our journey he gave me cigarettes, glugs off of Old Skull Popper, bought me coffee and talked to me about the Navy, about things he saw when he was stationed here and there. He mentioned vultures and hornets and some things naked people did under red lightbulbs. He told me he had seen it all and he wasn’t even near forty. “There isn’t a thing left on this earth that can bug my eyes out anymore, and Clyde, for a man my age that’s a tragedy.”

We drove the back roads, sometimes it seemed like we were going in circles, but the father never used a map because the roads he needed to take, the gravel roads shooting pinging rocks and choking dust, were never on them. Where were we going? I wanted to know but I couldn’t ask him. My mouth just wouldn’t move around the words. I was in the front seat again. After the bright daylight came, what happened the night before faded out of me a little. We were miles away from it. I didn’t think about it. Behind us in a cloud of dust a truck was coming fast. The father looked in the rearview mirror and I saw him freak a little. I saw his hands get tight on the steering wheel. The truck swerved around us without slowing down. It pulled a bouncing empty cattle trailer with L
ITTLE
B
ITTY
D
REAM
written on it in custom letters.

“Shit on that,” said the father, and shoved a cig between his lips.

“You know that Marie Cardall, Clyde? That got her arm shot off by them men?”

I told him I thought it was one man.

“See there? Just like the police. They think the same thing. That that one escapee did it. Just because someone thought they saw him in the vicinity with his Elkwood’s on. Hell, any man can run in a prisoner’s coveralls. That don’t take no talent. That escapee was probably halfway to Texas before anybody touched Marie Cardall’s doorknob. Do you know she still don’t lock her doors? Lock your doors, Clyde. Always lock your doors.”

The dash lighter popped out and he held it tilted while he sucked up some fire onto the end of his cig.

“So you figure out who did it yet? Because you know the parties involved. God, Clyde, I’m about laying it at your feet here.”

“Doolie Bug.”

“Yes, the squashed sack of shit had a role in it, that’s sure. But the second man. You know what the second man is doing right now?”

I shook my head.

“Driving this car.”

I sat very still while he unspooled the story. He wanted to tell it so bad. It was just wriggling inside of him.

“Marie Cardall was just begging for it. First time I talked to her about Old Dad delivering a suitcase to her, she told me she never got any kind of suitcase from anyone. I said, ‘His tally book says you got one.’ But she says no. She never saw or heard of any suitcase from Old Dad. I hate it when people lie to me. Don’t you ever lie to me, Clyde.”

He was pointing a square-topped finger at me. It was missing the tip, from the only slip of the knife in his whole career and it only happened because Mrs. Hannis came asking him to grind up some kidneys for her cat, and he hated cats, and he hated Mrs. Hannis, and most of all he hated running kidneys through his grinder because they make a hell of a mess. It was because of Mrs. Hannis he picked up the wrong knife. An unexpected extra inch of blade can make a big difference. A finger’s worth. He was proud that he kept moving like nothing happened. Ground up the kidneys and smiled. Thought about putting a can of ant powder in with them but couldn’t chance tarnishing the reputation his people had built over centuries. Whenever he saw Mrs. Hannis on the street the father always said, “That old goat owes me a finger.”

The father told me how he rode up to Marie Cardall’s place on a bicycle and Doolie Bug was waiting for him in the shadows.

“We get through the door, I throw on the lights and she pops up out of bed looking like Edward G. Robinson in a nightie, she grabs Ardus’s rifle, points at me and says, ‘I don’t got your goddamn money.’

“Now, get logical. If she didn’t have it, why’d she bring it up like that? It’s ugliness, Clyde, to point a rifle at a person and tell them lies at the same time. If you got a rifle you don’t need to lie. I said, ‘Marie, you’ve known me since I was little. Don’t you blow a hole through me.’

“She said, ‘Get out of my house or by god, I will.’

“But she hesitated. Don’t ever, ever hesitate, Clyde. Don’t lie, and don’t ever hesitate. Marie Cardall did both and look what it got her. And the damn suitcase was right under her bed the whole time. I about laughed out loud. I told Doolie Bug, get her car keys. I threw some of her clothes at him and told him to put them on, it came to me right then to do it. Doolie Bug’s so little and ugly, he was shaking like a girl. In the dark he could have been her easy.”

The father told Doolie what road to take, what culvert to dump the car into, how far to walk and exactly where to wait with the suitcase. “I told him, the bend on R1114, right in the exact middle of the bend. I said, ‘DB, I’m relying on you. If you screw this up? I’ll hunt you down and make a vest out of your skin. But if you pull it off, there’s two more suitcases just as full as this one. You help me and it’s straight fifty-fifty between us. Clean. Are we partners? Prove it to me.’

“Stupid bastard. He knew I hated his ass. What in the hell would make him believe I would ever be partners with him? But he wasn’t stopping to think, see. Clyde, you have to stop and think. Doolie Bug believed that just because I handed him the suitcase, I trusted him. And if I trusted him, he could trust me too. Well, shit on that. It wasn’t like he just met me.”

And this is when I first heard it explained, the concept of dazzle camouflage, invented by the Navy and modified by the father, who explained all the variations while booze fumes filled the car and the tires ground dry ruts on back roads getting smaller and smaller. Shooting a woman’s arm off with a hunting rifle was a form of dazzle camouflage if what you were camouflaging were the slits in the jugular and the carotid. With the right knife you could do such great damage. The father said he knew they would concentrate on the arm. It would take them a while to notice the tiny punctures all up and down her.

“What about Doolie Bug?” I asked.

“What
about
Doolie Bug? He’s a smashed sack of shit now, isn’t he? With Marie Cardall’s clothes on and his prints in her car. Case closed. And I did it for you.”

I looked at him squinting into the slanting sunlight.

“I killed him for you, Clyde. No hesitation. When you look down at that Tiparillo scar on your hand, I want you to remember that your old man came through for you. I killed him five times over for you, Clyde. And I’d do it again in a minute. Because that’s the way I feel about you. And I would like to think you feel the same way about me, that you’d do the same thing for me if it ever came down to it. That’s what it means to be partners. Are we partners, Clyde? That is what I need to know before we go a mile farther.” He pushed his foot hard down on the brakes and the tires spat gravel. When you have been rolling for so many hours, stopping the car is always shocking. I have always felt nervous in a suddenly stopped car.

“Look at me, Clyde. Can I count on you?”

I nodded yes.

“You promise to Jesus?”

“Yes.”

“Because he’ll know if you’re lying and that is just as bad as stabbing him in his heart.”

I said, “I’m not lying,” but my voice wasn’t so convincing.

The father said, “I’m going to have to work on you.”