Cruddy - Lynda Barry [2]
In our backyard is a rusted-out oil barrel hooked to the house and a T-pole clothesline with a hole in the metal of the T-pole called a weep-hole. It is there for drainage and ventilation but it also sometimes catches the wind and makes a sad “hoooooo-hoooooooo,” sound, very lonely. And there is also the “hoooooooo-hoooooooo” of the trains passing on the other side of the hill, and once when I was just standing in the backyard I heard the T-pole and the train hooooooo-hoooooooo at the same time and my eyes went instantly wet, for what reason I do not know.
There is no sidewalk on our road. Just mud and mud and mud. The mother says there is something wrong with the ground. It bubbles. Julie says a shrunken man inhabits the mud and she has seen his face rise to the surface and she has seen the whites of his eyeballs opening at her, she has seen his muddy lips and freaky teeth and he tries to speak to her but she always runs inside before he can deliver his message. Julie is not the kind of person who makes things up and she swears it is true about the shrunken man.
I said, “Julie, you are lying.”
She said, “Roberta, I am not.”
I said, “If you are telling the truth then poke this pin into your hand.”
Julie shoved it in all the way to its head. That is her style. And so I have been freaking on the possibility of the existence of the rising shrunken man because the way Julie did that pin thing was so sincere.
East Crawford is a road of trash people. Teeth missing and greasy two-color hair on the women and regular greasy hair on the men and all of the people come in two sizes only, very fat or very skinny. And all of them are hacking and all of them are huffing on cigs constantly. I smoke too at times. So does Julie. It is very hard not to smoke here.
There’s a lot of dead cars parked sideways and some are filled with junk to where it is pressing against the window glass and there is green mold growing on the junk. There are rotten porches and slamming doors and constant yelling inside the houses and constant yelling outside the houses and two doors down there are two little fish-faced girls who just stand in the mud and do contests of who can scream the loudest.
And the people are constantly falling. Falling down all the time. In the yard, in the mud of the road, out of cars, down the steps of the houses, and two nights ago the saggy underwear man next door was on his porch screaming “I AM what I AM and that is ALL I AM and I AM IT !” and then he fell over the side rail and into a bush.
The owner, the landlord of all the houses is Harmong. Mr. Harmong is the cheapest chintziest most pig-lipped tightwad skanked-out lardo king landlord of all time. He weighs sixty million pounds and has to walk with a metal cane with four legs on it just to keep from falling over from his personal fat, which also makes him wheeze and choke and who has face skin that looks like it was rubbed with greasy pink Brillo and who wants the actual cash rent laid in his actual hand on the first day of every month, which is the job the mother makes me do while she locks herself in the bathroom until Mr. Harmong goes away.
The last time he was here he clamped his fingers on my hand tight and stuck his pig lips out and asked me if I was old enough to have a boyfriend. I said no. He said he better not see no coonasses sniffing up after me because he has people watching us. He says he has people watching every last one of us. The saggy underwear man is his chief spy. Always walking the porch in droopy drawers and looking our way.
For the inside of the house there is not much to say. The bottom floor is just one room. There is a kitchen area and a living room area. There is the mother’s TV and the mother’s chair and the mother’s lamp. All new. All fancy. Presents to her from the grateful people at her hospital. The mother is a nurse at Veterans.
There is a very skanky rug in the living room area that Mr. Harmong actually had nailed