Cruddy - Lynda Barry [47]
I got back to Lemuel’s and faced the mystery trailer again. The father and Lemuel were still gone and knowing the father, I expected them to stay gone for a while. I started snooping. The keys were in the ignition of the car, just like Lemuel said, I twisted them a half turn and the radio came on to a country station and Ned Miller started singing “From a Jack to a King.”
On the passenger seat was a partly spilled box of Cracker Jacks with the prize still inside and in the glove box there was flashlight.
I breathed through my mouth and stood on a folding chair to reach the trailer window and pointed the flashlight. The first thing I noticed was the way the miniature kitchen looked in the spin-art of blood, dark flung patterns everywhere, fly highways going every direction. The second thing was on the floor.
I can tell you this. A man who has been dead for a week in a hot trailer looks more like a man than you would first expect. The face bloats out giantly and purple-black, and there are textures, horrifying textures, but it’s the mouth that makes you scream. When you see his black crusted lips pulled away from shockingly white teeth, when you see him shining out his special smile, just for you.
I was dead asleep when the car came crawling back up the gravel road. I felt the high beams glide across my eyes and I sat up from my hiding place on the edge of the field. The father drove the car into the folding chairs and there were some metal crunches. He stopped just a few feet from the trailer and the high beams bouncing off of it threw back a strange light on the scene.
The father switched the engine off, leaned across the seat to unlatch the passenger door, and Lemuel poured out rolling.
The father leaned his head on the back of the front seat and stared upwards for a while. He leaned his head on the steering wheel and stared downwards for a while. Then he opened his door quickly and leaned out. There was a sudden waterfall eruption of an intense booze fountain that had many hard pulses and many dramatic splurts before it finally ran out of power. The father pulled himself back into the car, leaned until he fell across the seat, and started snoring.
The car sat like that. Both doors open and the radio static cutting in and out and the headlights attracting bugs. They spun disoriented against the bright trailer, making shadows. The head of Lemuel got miniature tremors and his lips started making disturbing movements, extremely disturbing talking motions and then severe birthing motions and then his dentures did a half roll out of his mouth and into the dirt. The smell coming off of him was flammable.
I was holding Little Debbie. Holding her so tight that my fingers were cramped around her, the cut-diamond pattern of her handle embossed into my palm. I fell back asleep this way and what woke me up in the dimmest rays of morning, the barest gray rays of light upon the damp weedy field, was a soft velvety thing stroking against my lifted head. Stroking and pushing against my cheek, against the corner of my mouth, smelling bad.
I opened my eyes and Lemuel was kneeling over me.
Little Debbie bit him. No hesitation. Little Debbie bit and bit and bit him and if there was shouting, if there was screaming, I didn’t hear it. What I heard was a long tone, faint and endless. And the center of my vision was punched out, gone gray, with a hot light scribbling fire at the edges, melting the world from the center outward like a movie burning up on the screen.
“Didn’t I tell