Cruddy - Lynda Barry [10]
The mother said, “What makes you so interested?”
“Hey,” said the father, “I don’t give a damn about Marie Cardall. I’m just making conversation.”
Suspicion was cast on Ardus Cardall because he was bitter about his wife turning him in and testifying against him. Bitter wasn’t the word. And he was a string-puller.
It was Marie Cardall who contacted the police when Ardus came home from work and told her he might have buried the little boy that was lost, the boy the town was turning itself inside out about. He told Marie there was a pretty good chance he buried the Leonards boy alive in concrete while he was pouring the foundation for the new church. He said that by the time he noticed there was nothing he could do. The boy was gone. So he just kept pouring. He told Marie he was just hoping the whole thing would somehow blow over.
“And she turned him in,” said the father.
“She was right to report him,” said the mother.
“Well, Ardus saw it differently.”
“For god’s sake.”
“If you think that she went to court because she gave a damn about that Leonards boy you are ignorant as living hell.”
“Why, then?” snapped the mother.
“Figure it out. It ain’t long division.”
The mother snorted. “No. I guess it ain’t.” Saying “ain’t” with special emphasis.
“Well?” said the father. “Did she make it or not? Is Mrs. Cardall still among us?”
“You tell me.”
“My guess is she pulled through.”
“Ha,” said the mother. “Ha-ha. You’re funny.”
It was that night she shoved me into the backseat of his car and told me not to show my face. It was that night he told her he was leaving on a business trip and would probably be gone for a while.
Chapter 6
ICKY CUT along the top of the embankment, ducking and keeping close to the Cyclone fence that ran through the half-dead pine trees. Different P.E. classes were coming out onto the field. Different gym teachers were blowing black plastic whistles and shouting. Fifth period. First time I ever skipped.
We kept going. The Cyclone fence ran out. We came to the far, far end of the school and then crossed over into where everything was growing wild. The area people called no-man’s-land, because it was between the school and the reservoir. There wasn’t anything there but a decrepit old outbuilding, in a place everybody called the Dip. It was at the bottom of two embankments and the sticker bushes grew high all around. There was no direct path down, but little juvenile delinquent trails zigzagged through the Scotch broom and the disturbing trash you always find in abandoned places along with the drifting smell of human pee.
Vicky went very fast through the paths, not pausing at all when the fly families lifted around her and then settled and then lifted again. It was the beginning of September, still very warm for Cruddy City, but at the bottom of the embankment it was bright and actually hot. There were piles of rabbit evidence, and a pile of someone’s old stiff clothes giving off a close smell, like in a hot secondhand store, and there was the smell of the outbuilding itself. “I have to go bad,” Vicky Talluso said. “Guard me.” She squatted down.
The building was wooden and rotting with a half-falling-in roof. A curved, military-style roof, the kind you see on the buildings at Fort Stilacoomb. There were old NO TRESPASSING signs nailed on it and the paint was peeling off in long green scabs. Along the top near the corroded roof edge were three rows of shiny small-paned windows painted black from the inside and mostly broken. Pigeons flew in and out constantly. On the door someone had carved the words BIG DICK MEL.
Everything was seeming very quiet and the sun was sending down rays that made everything look washed out. Vicky stood back up and looked at me. “You paranoid?”
“No.”
“Because I hate paranoid people. If you are paranoid you better tell me right now.”
“I’m not.”
The door was big, like the door on a barn. It had some rusted link chains across it, but Vicky knew where to pull so that a gap opened up wide enough to push through. “You,