Cruddy - Lynda Barry [46]
And your sister will FREAK. Your sister Julie who just tried to tong a meat knife straight into your face will suddenly FREAK and she will say, “ROBERTA! ROBERTA! WHAT’S WRONG?!” She will FREAK from how you are hunching and stretching out your incredibly long fingers and lifting your lips up and down over your wet teeth and she will keep on FREAKING, even while you speak to her very calmly, saying, “Julie, Julie. Shhhhhhh. Don’t talk. Right now just don’t talk to me.”
And her face will be flickering and it will be wet with streaks of crying and she will say, “Don’t die, Roberta. Don’t die. Please, please don’t die, Roberta.”
And you will smile at her and this will be what makes her scream.
Chapter 22
ND THE father and Lemuel finished the Whitley’s and wanted more Whitley’s and Lemuel needed another can of Copenhagen, and they had gotten jolly and friendly toward each other again, dropping the subject that was on their minds most of all and deciding to go into town.
The father hollered to me through the dusky light. “Clyde! Me and your uncle Lemuel are going to go blow some dust off. You keep an eye on things, you hear me?”
Lemuel finished buttoning a wrinkled shirt and pulled his suspenders up over his shoulders. He said, “How do you know he hears you if he can’t answer you?”
The father hollered, “Toss Uncle Lemuel’s teeth back this way if you hear me.”
From my hiding place in the weeds I gave Lemuel’s bottom teeth the hand grenade throw, and watched them bounce twice and land just under the trailer.
“Oh shit,” said Lemuel, and he grunted a lot when he bent and squatted to reach them and he made an emission very loudly and then he felt under the trailer and the cat bit him.
“SON OF A BITCH! SON OF A BITCH!”
“We’ll be back in a little while, Clyde,” shouted the father to the dead play field. “Don’t wander.” The car with the human teeth bites in the dashboard rolled away down the gravel road.
There was still enough light in the sky to make out the shapes of things. And there was one streetlight that let some light fall onto Lemuel’s scraggly yard. I had some questions in my mind. Was dead Earlis still in the trailer? That was the main one. That was the involuntary one. And that was the one that made me decide to take a walk.
All of what surrounded me that evening in Dentsville is gone. Paved over. The freeway did come through. And there are days when I would like to go to Dentsville and see it, make sure of it, because I was not lying when I told Julie that bones crawl after everybody. And that fire can’t do a thing about it.
I walked down Lemuel’s gravel road toward a train whistle, a loud one. I knew the tracks were close. I followed a steep sidewalk down and down until I came to the edge of a cliff, a sheer cliff that appeared out of nowhere. Trussed up against it was a wooden bridge if a thing that only leads you down and down and down can be called a bridge. It was like a high wooden train trestle that fell down on one side, looking about half a mile long and narrow and rickety with three tight turns to manage before it ended at a flat street.
I stepped onto it and the smell of creosote flooded my nose and it was a relief to smell it. It drove all the ghost smells away for a while.
It was the highest thing I’d ever been on. The drop was about two hundred feet straight down and when a scavenger truck came bumping onto the planks the whole bridge rattled. I saw the man in the truck leaning into his seat. He went slow and the boards beneath him groaned.
Underneath the bridge were the tracks. Bums were in the scrub below, moving in the shadows of vapor lights on high poles. Little bum encampments were farther up the cliff side, with cardboard and old blankets piled up against side-growing trees. Little fires were burning. There were guys sitting on the ground wearing hats and smoking.
The train that whistled