Cruddy - Lynda Barry [103]
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?