Cruddy - Lynda Barry [50]
“Julie,” I said. “You got cigs anywhere? I need one. You got one?”
She said something I could barely hear, I saw her lips moving. Fuck you, Roberta. I hate you, Roberta. I wish you were dead. She pulled a blanket over herself and curled up with her back to me and went to sleep. I remembered the cigs of Vicky Talluso. I tried to smoke one but it made me sick.
I showered and dressed and stood in front of the bathroom mirror combing out my wet hair. Looking at myself and trying to decide what I was going to do. Have you ever seen the track a snake leaves in the sand? A skittery track? Bones leave tracks like that when they come back crawling, come tap-tap-tapping dead fingers against your skull from the inside. Earlis was tapping. Lemuel was tapping. Leonard and Doolie Bug were tapping too. My nose had stopped bleeding but my eyes were still blown. Beware of Creeper.
Julie was sleeping when I slipped out the door into the darkness. It was about an hour before daylight. I wasn’t sure where I was going. To Vicky Talluso’s house maybe. Or maybe to the Trailways station. I wore Vicky’s hat and carried her purse and along with her things and the stash box of the Turtle there was a very old friend of mine. The sock monkey named Trina.
I made Trina with the help of the Christian Homes lady who hosed me down in her backyard after the Lucky Chief Motel Massacre. Who wore pink rubber gloves when she threw my bloody clothes straight into the dented metal trash can and who was taking a horrified shower when I fished back into the trash can to retrieve a few things. Little Debbie. A purple cloth Crown Royal bag full of twenties. Trina kept them safe inside of her for five years. It was going to be sad when I tore her head off to get them back out, but Trina knew it was coming.
During my time in the Las Vegas Christian Homes when I was the mystery child who suffered from shock and amnesia, I had a decent life. I had the name of Michelle, the Christians called me Michelle and I enjoyed life as Michelle. I enjoyed making sock monkeys for the Christian Missionaries International Sock Monkey Drive, sock monkeys for disadvantaged children around the world. I enjoyed the Jesus they prayed to, a very different-looking Jesus from the one I was used to. His eyes weren’t shocked-rolled high and his mouth didn’t hang open in agony and no blood was dripping down his face, or from his slash wound or from his various nailed locations. The Christian Homes Jesus was a very comfortable-looking Jesus. A strolling Jesus, in very clean clothes. A clean Jesus for clean, strolling people.
I was happy to make sock monkeys in his honor. I was happy to add my sock monkeys to the pile and watch Lawrence Welk’s floating TV world and eat green beans and scalloped potatoes and ham made in an electric skillet and drink big glasses of milk and snarf down tapioca pudding and hear the reverend list me in the names of people to pray for. It wasn’t the world’s most exciting life but I was admiring of the calm that comes with boringness and plenty. Things were going pretty good until the mother showed up and blabbed out my true identity.
I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror and thought of the comfortable Jesus and the scalloped potatoes. I wondered if any of the international disadvantaged children had discovered the hidden prize I sewed into the head of every sock monkey. Twenty dollars of the father’s money and a little square of paper written with the nine best words of his advice.
Expect the Unexpected.
And whenever possible,
BE the Unexpected.
You could call it a kind of memorial to the man. If I had an extra knife to sew into each one I would have done that too. Disadvantaged children sometimes need them. They sometimes need them very badly. Inside of Trina, wrapped in layers of twenty-dollar bills and raw cotton, Little Debbie waited.
When I left East Crawford in the dark final hour of that night, I didn’t exactly know where I was going. The only thing I knew for certain was that I was never coming back.
I was wrong about