Cruddy - Lynda Barry [21]
But in the newspaper pictures she doesn’t look afraid at all. She looks happy. And beautiful. Did I mention the mother is beautiful? She is what they call a knockout. A stunner. Drop-dead beautiful.
The pictures are on the wall in the living room area. Just her. No caption. No story. Just her very beautiful face smiling on famously. She was so happy when her picture was in the paper. But now no one was calling, and the mother was squinting at me.
I’m what a person might call a dog. Very much a dog. Guys have actually barked at me and offered me Milk-Bones. My face cells divided into the shape of the father, who even for a man was on the homely side. Jug ears and no chin and a wide nose and hooded eyes. Bad skin. Thin hair. All of it revisited in me by means of somatic mitosis, Stedman’s Medical Dictionary, page 954.
I have looked like a boy since the beginning of forever, a pug-ugly one was how the father said it. Unusually ugly. A face strangely shaped. It hit him early in our journey together that I could pass for a mongolian idiot with no problem. That was his name for it. Mongolian Idiot. Also in Stedman’s, page 957. The name of the mental condition suggested by my face is real. It’s my epicanthic folds. I have what some people call slant-eye.
He told me how to do it. Be this type of idiot. And he was proud when I first pulled it off. In Moorehead, North Dakota, he took me into a Salvation Army. The clothes the mother threw into the car for me were mostly dresses and he didn’t want me in dresses. The lady at the counter felt so sorry for us she didn’t even charge us.
“Clyde,” said the father as we rolled out of that town, “You are a treasure.”
This story was tumbling out of my mouth as we walked to the Washeteria. It tumbled out in broken chunks and pieces. The Turtle was listening. Vicky wasn’t. She was talking at the same time and her words sounded like scribbles.
I said, “Turtle, I want to go to New Orleans. I can’t go home, I am too late. The mother is waiting and she will kill me, I mean actually kill, and she will blame it on aimless men, she will tell the newspapers it was the aimless men.”
“The aimless men?” said the Turtle. Vicky was buzzing loud in my other ear. Her words were repeating but I could not make the meaning of them come together until she was shouting and what she was shouting was, “DO YOU HAVE A NICKEL? I NEED ONE MORE NICKEL. DO YOU HAVE A NICKEL? HEY, ROBERTA, HEY.”
My saliva was squirting down the insides of my mouth and tasting sweet. The Turtle gave Vicky a nickel and said, “The aimless men?”
And I explained the aimless men, how they are always hiding and waiting for the girl who moves with no purpose. Killer men who would drag me deep into the woods and stab me forty-nine times and cut off my hands and cut off my head and throw my hands into the bushes at Golden Gardens and throw my head off Pier 99 and they would roll the rest of my body down any sewer hole. The mother knows about these men, these killer men because she gets the details from sinister magazines, all of them with TRUE! in the title.
“True Crime,” said Vicky Talluso. “True Confessions. True Detective. Those stories are bogus. Very fake. Anything with ‘True’ in the title is a lie.”
I told how the mother says if I do not come directly home after school the aimless men will capture me and strangle me and shoot me in the forehead and tie me to a tree and cover me with gasoline and light me on fire and then have an ax attack to my face.
“See?” said Vicky, and she was indignant. “That’s not even logical! The guy would do the ax part before he lit you on fire. Bogus. Clearly. Obviously. Wait out here, because, Roberta, you are very sensitive