Cruddy - Lynda Barry [43]
Lemuel leaned toward me. He spat a jet and said, “You’re kind of puny, son. Come over here.”
The father flitted his eyes at me. The look. The famous go-along-with-it look. Lemuel patted his knee. “I won’t bite you.”
“Haw!” said the father.
Something about Lemuel put me on alert. When he smiled my stomach twisted. The smell from the trailer was hammering me. In the darkness beneath the trailer I saw a very beat-up-looking cat. One of its eyes was crusty and sunken. It was clawing at the underside, it was trying to find a way up.
I watched the father take out a cig and spend a long time lighting it. He inhaled deep and examined the cig and he exhaled.
He said, “So where’s Sugar Dick?”
“Goddamn it, now,” Lemuel spat, “Don’t start that shit with me.”
“Sugar Dick.” The father blew a smoke ring which hung in the horrible air.
Lemuel said, “I told you when I called you, I want to see this thing straightened out. I told Leonard the same. You think I like being the man in the middle?” Lemuel spat again. “Fuck all.” He picked his bottom denture up off his lap and turned it over in his hand.
“Police involved?” asked the father.
“Hell no,” said Lemuel.
“And the suitcase?”
“There ain’t no suitcase.”
“There ain’t, huh?” The father took a drag and pinched his eyes.
“I told you on the phone. Leonard says there is no suitcase.”
The father scratched the side of his face. “Gee. I wonder where it wandered off to.”
Lemuel pointed to the car and trailer. “There’s your goddamn suitcase right there. How much you think that all cost?”
The father snorted. “That ain’t a tenth of what Old Dad paid out.”
“I heard Old Dad stiffed you,” said Lemuel. “Hell, I’d be mad too. When Leonard showed up here crying the story to me, I didn’t like it a bit. That’s why I called you, you stupid son of a bitch. You got a new car and trailer, full tank, keys are in the ignition. Why do you want to stand there and piss on it?”
“Where is he? Where’s Leonard?” said the father. “He inside?” The father jerked his head toward the doorway and called, “Sugar Dick, you in there?”
Lemuel turned his bottom denture upright and rubbed his dirty thumb across the molars. “Let me tell you something, Leonard said—”
“Shit on Leonard.”
“Shit on you. You going to hear me out or not?”
“Sure.” The father glugged some Whitley’s and passed it back. “Lie to me, you fat son of a bitch. Go ahead.”
The father snatched the denture out of Lemuel’s hands and flung it into the play field across the road.
“Aw,” said Lemuel. “Why the hell you have to do that?”
“Go hunt it, Clyde. Go find Uncle Lemuel’s bottom teeth.”
I took my time. Their voices came clearly to me across the road. The story Lemuel told the father went something like this.
Old Dad owed money to Old Man Mottie but Old Man Mottie was dead. Earlis was his grown son and Earlis was a homo, and Earlis tried to cover it up by marrying a lady older than him with huge bags under her eyes and an ass four feet wide. She owned her house and Earlis thought what the hell. Then Earlis met Leonard, who worked at the A&W. He was crazy about Leonard and stories began to spread.
And then the suitcase came.
“You said there wasn’t no suitcase,” said the father. The light was low and his burning cig end was getting a glow to it.
Lemuel hooked his finger into his mouth and flung his chewwad. “Leonard said he was told about the suitcase but he never saw no suitcase. He thought Earlis was shitting him. I mean, it does sound like a pile of crap, don’t it? Suitcase with money in it delivered to you out of the sky.”
“It didn’t come out of the sky,” said the father.
“That boy find my teeth yet? Call to him again, will you?”
Leonard was in the middle of his shift at the A&W and Earlis comes barreling into the parking lot, shouting to him about going fishing, yelling come on, they were going after muskie, he had some new bait he wanted to try out, and a couple of people busted out laughing. Leonard threw down his hat and jumped into the car. That was the last time either