Cruddy - Lynda Barry [17]
I didn’t run. We drove on. From the backseat I watched the back of his neck as the sky began to lighten around it. He was half in the bag. It took more and more glugs of Old Skull Popper to get him there, but the sounds of his words were smudged and he was getting philosophical.
“Used to be a father would never turn on his son. Would never sell the business right from under his own son. Used to be you could count on your old man not to cut your balls off and feed them to the squirrels. You understand what I’m trying to tell you here?” His eyes searched me out in the rearview mirror.
I didn’t think a squirrel would eat a man’s balls. Rats might. I offered him that comment.
“Son. I’m trying to say here that you have to be prepared for the unexpected, because, son, it’s out there.” He tapped on the windshield in front of him and the car swerved slightly. The empty land around us was pale and still in the shadows. “It’s everywhere you look, it’s waiting for you like the goddamned Apaches.”
When he saw me close my eyes he shouted, “You can’t go to sleep on me, Clyde. Talk to me. Ask me anything. You figured out who it was yet?” He meant the lady we ran over. I didn’t answer.
“You got all the pieces. Now put them together. Didn’t that lady strike you as strange? Ugly as a hog and big as sin? Walking in the middle of the night like that? Standing in the middle of nowhere. Think, Clyde. And tell me, whose fat head put that dent in my hood?”
His eyes found mine in the rearview for just a second before I looked away.
“What if I told you it wasn’t a woman? That help you any? It’s not someone you know to remember, exactly. But you heard about him.”
I closed my eyes and the father swerved the car hard on purpose to wake me. “You’re the only thing keeping us on the road, son. You better not fall asleep or we’ll both be crow meat.”
The first fingers of sunlight fell across the horizon. Colors came back. “You forfeit?” asked the father.
I nodded.
“You remember Doolie Bug?”
I shook my head no.
“One of my cousins used to baby-sit you? That crazy son-of-a-bitch? You know that round scar on the top of your hand? Doolie Bug did that with a Tiparillo. I told your mother, I said, ‘DB’s out of his frigging mind, honey, don’t leave our little baby with him.’ But she’s contrary. If I told her DB was a cannibal from the planet Mars she’d throw a birthday party for him just to piss me off.
“Well.” The father laughed and coughed. “It took a while, but I got him for you, Clyde. Better late than never, they say.”
The scar on the back of my hand is real. It is round and has pale marks radiating from the middle because it had to stretch with my growing. A nickel lays in it perfectly. I have laid a cool nickel upon it many times. It is real, but I was not so sure about the story of the father. I know we hit someone and hit them again and I know we left them laying there but it was the cousin part I wasn’t sure about. He told a lot of dead cousin stories. Cousins who got what they deserved. Stingy ones who fell through the ice going after a dropped penny. Snoopy ones who blew their own heads off with a came-upon gun. Stuck-up ones who died on the toilet. He said that one got written up in the newspaper. Stuck-up Cousin Dies on Toilet. Front page. According to the father who could have been a famous singer. Who could have been a movie star. Who could have bought out Armour and Hormel both on what he would have made if Old Dad hadn’t shafted him.
The father was tired of playing by the rules. The father was calling himself Billy Badass, the outlaw that always got in. And I was his partner, his sidekick, Clyde. The Old Skull Popper was really talking to him and we swerved all over the long empty road.
The scar on my hand is real but