Cruddy - Lynda Barry [16]
“Is it?”
“TELL ME!”
The Turtle shook his head. “No, Violent One. It is not.”
“What is it then? Will it get me high?”
“It has a name but it will be unfamiliar to you.”
“I know a lot of names,” said Vicky. “You would be amazed.”
The Turtle stood up and brushed off bits of straw from his clothes. “We need to stroll,” he said. “We need to be with the people.”
We pushed ourselves outside and my eyes cramped down hard from the light. The name of the drug was Creeper. The Turtle was right. Vicky Talluso had never heard of it. As we followed him up the embankment she said, “Is it like microdot?”
“It’s not like anything,” said the Turtle.
Vicky hunched her shoulders up and down. “Does it give you rushes?”
The Turtle pulled out the box and offered it to me. “Do you wish to partake, Hillbilly Woman?”
“Why do you call me that?”
“Because you are a hillbilly girl lost in a hillbilly world.”
Vicky Talluso said, “She is! She is!” and started laughing uncontrollably. Then she said, “I’m not feeling it or anything. I just get so excited when I drop. Roberta, you have to drop. She’s never dropped before, Turtle. Come on, Roberta. Didn’t I tell you I was going to get you high?” I held my hand out to the Turtle.
“Yessssssss,” said Vicky Talluso. “Yessssssss.”
Chapter 9
HE FATHER drove with his headlights off for a while. I had no idea how he was staying on the road, it was so black out. A train came up alongside us out of nowhere, barreling hard out of the blackness on the parallel, blasting and screeching and over the noise the father shouted, “Freight cars are empty, that’s why she bounces.” And that sentence got stuck in my head and played awhile. And then the train curved away from us, rattling away into the darkness and it was quiet, just the car sounds and the father sighing now and then and saying “shit” because the radio station was going out of range.
We came to a set of grain silos, giant and white beside the tracks and I was thinking how train tracks were everywhere. Train tracks were where nothing else was. The father circled around the huge silos until he found his way around back to where there was a little wooden office up on stilts. Truck-window height. Behind it was a service area with a water hose attached to a spigot and neatly coiled. “That’s a good hose,” said the father, “and they leave it like that where anybody could take it.” He shook his head. “Farmers. Bless their hearts.”
He got out of the car and the minute his face was turned away I jumped into the backseat. He had the hose going and was getting good pressure by holding his thumb over the end, giving the bumper and the hood a good wash down. It seemed to me the sky was getting lighter. That the night was finally ending. But when I looked again it was just as dark as ever. When the water exploded onto the window next to me I screamed and saw him laugh. Through the cascading water on the window his face looked rubber, looked like it was melting away. He threw down the hose without winding it back up and got in the car.
“What you sitting back there for, Clyde? Don’t be like that. Come on back up here. We just did the world a favor. You know who it was that we hit, don’t you?”
I didn’t say anything. He started the engine and said, “Oh, damn,” and hopped back out to get the Samsonite suitcase. It needed a spray-down too. And I was thinking I should run. Right that second. Just open the door and take off running into the black scrub on the other side of the tracks. Would he come after me? I didn’t know. And then what? What would happen after that? If he caught me or if he didn’t.
Some people cannot forget the location of the jugular and the carotid any more than they could forget the alphabet. After a certain amount of time it’s just burned into your mind like a song on the radio, the vascular system, the skeletal system, all the different cuts; standing rib, Porterhouse, round, eye of round, Delmonico, fillet, strip, skirt, sirloin. The knives you want