Cruddy - Lynda Barry [23]
The father told me how he rode up to Marie Cardall’s place on a bicycle and Doolie Bug was waiting for him in the shadows.
“We get through the door, I throw on the lights and she pops up out of bed looking like Edward G. Robinson in a nightie, she grabs Ardus’s rifle, points at me and says, ‘I don’t got your goddamn money.’
“Now, get logical. If she didn’t have it, why’d she bring it up like that? It’s ugliness, Clyde, to point a rifle at a person and tell them lies at the same time. If you got a rifle you don’t need to lie. I said, ‘Marie, you’ve known me since I was little. Don’t you blow a hole through me.’
“She said, ‘Get out of my house or by god, I will.’
“But she hesitated. Don’t ever, ever hesitate, Clyde. Don’t lie, and don’t ever hesitate. Marie Cardall did both and look what it got her. And the damn suitcase was right under her bed the whole time. I about laughed out loud. I told Doolie Bug, get her car keys. I threw some of her clothes at him and told him to put them on, it came to me right then to do it. Doolie Bug’s so little and ugly, he was shaking like a girl. In the dark he could have been her easy.”
The father told Doolie what road to take, what culvert to dump the car into, how far to walk and exactly where to wait with the suitcase. “I told him, the bend on R1114, right in the exact middle of the bend. I said, ‘DB, I’m relying on you. If you screw this up? I’ll hunt you down and make a vest out of your skin. But if you pull it off, there’s two more suitcases just as full as this one. You help me and it’s straight fifty-fifty between us. Clean. Are we partners? Prove it to me.’
“Stupid bastard. He knew I hated his ass. What in the hell would make him believe I would ever be partners with him? But he wasn’t stopping to think, see. Clyde, you have to stop and think. Doolie Bug believed that just because I handed him the suitcase, I trusted him. And if I trusted him, he could trust me too. Well, shit on that. It wasn’t like he just met me.”
And this is when I first heard it explained, the concept of dazzle camouflage, invented by the Navy and modified by the father, who explained all the variations while booze fumes filled the car and the tires ground dry ruts on back roads getting smaller and smaller. Shooting a woman’s arm off with a hunting rifle was a form of dazzle camouflage if what you were camouflaging were the slits in the jugular and the carotid. With the right knife you could do such great damage. The father said he knew they would concentrate on the arm. It would take them a while to notice the tiny punctures all up and down her.
“What about Doolie Bug?” I asked.
“What about Doolie Bug? He’s a smashed sack of shit now, isn’t he? With Marie Cardall’s clothes on and his prints in her car. Case closed. And I did it for you.”
I looked at him squinting into the slanting sunlight.
“I killed him for you, Clyde. No hesitation. When you look down at that Tiparillo scar on your hand, I want you to remember that your old man came through for you. I killed him five times over for you, Clyde. And I’d do it again in a minute. Because that’s the way I feel about you. And I would like to think you feel the same way about me, that you’d do the same thing for me if it ever came down to it. That’s what it means to be partners. Are we partners, Clyde? That is what I need to know before we go a mile farther.” He pushed his foot hard down on the brakes and the tires spat gravel. When you