Cruddy - Lynda Barry [11]
I hesitated and she saw it. I hesitated even though the father told me a thousand times, DO NOT HESITATE. NEVER, EVER HESITATE. The father said hesitation is for your average man and your average man always loses. Vicky made a tiny move of impatience and it freaked me forward. I squeezed myself into the blackness. It felt like all the light in the world got sucked away.
The smell of the building was thick and rank. It was moist. The smell of rodents and pigeons and rotting straw. I felt the ache of my eyes dilating too fast. In the ancient days of our school, the building was where the maintenance men kept things. It was where the archery bales were stored when people still took archery in gym. The famous story was that the targets got hauled across the field and set in rows and sophomores stood holding bows and sharp arrows waiting for the gym teacher to signal the moment to shoot. And one time a dog wandered onto the field and before the teacher could call it away one of the kids just shot it. And then everyone was running to help the dog and the kid shot another kid and he just kept on shooting until he got tackled. He said he wasn’t a disturbed person. He said he was just a plain normal person that sometimes had to kill people with arrows.
I didn’t know if the story was true or not. There are a million stories that float around a school. But as my eyes adjusted I saw putrid stacks of gray hay with torn bull’s-eye targets still hanging on them.
Vicky found a place to sit. Shafts of light fell down around her from holes in the roof. I saw the familiar glue-sniffer brown paper bags laying around. There were the magazines showing nudeness. Pink flobs of skin and black wiry hair. A leak of sunlight slid across Vicky’s back as she leaned down to look at one closer. Tilting her head at the page like she was trying to read a message in bad handwriting. “Look,” she said. A picture of a man having an interaction with a slime flower fold. “Do you know that Jesus loves him just as much as he loves you and me? Isn’t that cracked? Sit down. I want to give you a transformation. I am so good at transformations.”
In the old days of the father I was in many situations where everything around me was screaming DANGER! DANGER! FREAK OUT AND RUN! but he taught me to go forward. He taught me to remember I was Navy all the way and to go forward without fear. Compared to what I have seen in my life, Vicky Talluso’s world was nothing. But I was out of practice. It had been a long time. I was rusty and all I needed was a little oil. That is what the father would have said before he passed me the flat bottle of Old Skull Popper. “Clyde, you have nothing to fear ’til you run out of beer.”
Mostly he was right. Mostly what looked like a horrifying scene at first turned out to be nothing at all. Like the transformation Vicky wanted to give me. All she meant by it was she wanted to put makeup on me. She said there was no reason for me to go around looking like a skag when I didn’t have to.
She pulled out a pink rattail comb and moved me into a pool of light. “No offense but your hair is horrible. You need to grow it, OK? You will look a lot better with long hair. I am going to do beauty for a living. I just have it in me. I can just look at a person and tell exactly what to do.” The feeling of her combing my hair made a nice sensation in the back of my throat.
She said, “Do you have a boyfriend?”
“No.”
“Did you ever have one?”
“Nuh-uh. No.”
“Well, when I finish this, I know the perfect guy for you. Do you get high? You ever drop before?”
“No.”
“Because you’re against it?”
“I’m not against it.”
“Then because no one ever got you high before, right?”
“Right,” I said.
“God. You are going to be soooooo thankful that you met me. You are going to love me so much after today. You haven’t ever done anything exciting, have you?”
“Partly I have.”
“What?”
“Well, I killed somebody once. A couple people, actually.”
She was snort-laughing. I felt her breath on the back of my neck. It had a scent