Cruddy - Lynda Barry [31]
“Well,” said the waitress. “My.”
In a lower voice she said, “What happened to your face?” I looked down at my hands. She said, “Where’s your folks at? Where’s your mother?”
I looked up at her, just barely. I said, “Passed away.”
She leaned into the little window to the kitchen and convinced the purple-nosed cook that it wasn’t too late for pancakes.
I had noticed in many stories that it was usually an advantage to have a dead mother. Opportunities came your way that wouldn’t have otherwise. I was starting to think of what it would be like to stick around the bus station. I liked what I saw of the little town. The sun was bright on everything and there was a little park across from the Trailways station where a couple of old guys stared at things from benches. I started thinking about Syd. What life would be like if I were his kid. What it would be like to sit up on the bus station’s silver and red spinning counter chairs and eat a plate of pancakes he bought me because I did so good on my report card. Eat a banana split. Listen to him brag on me to the waitress.
The fly-swatter man let out a snort and popped a fly in mid-flight. It went sailing through the air and skidded on the floor. He said, “You see the size of that bastard!”
“Language,” said the waitress. “Children here.”
“Oh the hell,” said the man.
The fly lay there for a while, and when no one was watching, it left. Where it went to I do not know. It outsmarted all of us.
The waitress was setting paper cones for water into a row of metal holders. She was moving fast. There was a bus due. She tore off my check and told me I had to leave the counter and to pay the fly-swatter man. She didn’t charge me for the pancakes or the extra milks. I had a lot of money left over. I stood looking over the candy and picked out some sour-grape gum, some fireballs, a bag of barbecue potato chips. The fly-swatter man said, “Quite a shiner. How’d you manage that?” And then the people started pouring in. “Fifteen minutes!” shouted the driver. “Fifteen and fifteen only!” He had his own coffee cup and he pushed past the people and slid it onto the counter.
I watched the people shovel food down and listened to their voices bouncing off the ceiling. And then the bus driver shouted the time and they were gone.
The waitress cleared the counter. She looked mad again. She kept looking over at the empty ticket window and pushing her lips together. She flipped a rag over her shoulder and clattered a stack of dirty plates and kicked the swinging door open with her shoe, calling to the fly-swatter man, “Must be nice not to give a damn about anybody but yourself.” The door swung shut behind her. The fly-swatter man grunted.
I went back to looking at the things he had for sale. There was a row of push-button pens hanging on a display string. I kept staring at them.
The fly-swatter man peeled some tobacco crumbs off his lip. He was a sad-looking man. His lower eyelids hung so you could see the insides. There are certain dogs this happens to. They are not born that way but somehow it happens. I noticed too that he had large earlobes with creases in them and strange dentures that looked like wax.
I said, “Can I buy a pen, please?”
He said, “What color?”
He took down the blue pen I asked for. “Also,” I said, “do you got paper?”
“Stationery?”
“Is that your paper?”
He nodded and looked on a shelf behind him. “All I have left is airmail. You want airmail?”
He pushed a flat pale blue box across the glass counter. It was dusty and it had a red loop of ribbon taped around it. On the front of the box was an indented silver drawing of a plane and the trail it left spelled out “Airmail” in the most beautiful longhand.
“Oh,” I said. “It’s so nice.”
He said, “Stamps?”
I nodded.
“How many?”
I said, “I just turned eleven. It was just my birthday.”
“How many stamps?”
“Eleven,” I said. “Because I just turned eleven.” I don’t know why this information made him so gruff. I was thinking maybe