Cruddy - Lynda Barry [51]
Chapter 24
HE FATHER woke me up while it was still dark. He was yawning and said, “Clyde, damn it, I need some help.” And what he needed help with was backing the trailer down the dog-leg. Dog-leg is what you call a road that turns like the logging road did, an angle unexpected. I had the flashlight and I did my best even though in the sharp air of the mountains my mind clearly was telling me again to run. Drop the flashlight and run. I looked up through the branches trying to find the sky. I didn’t see anything. Not even a star. The back-up lights threw their red glow and the father’s face was greenish in the side mirror. I was thinking of what would happen if I did try to run, but I knew it was too late for that. He would never let me go now. And I wondered how bad it would be, really, to die in the forest. To spill out and soak into the fallen pine needles and have it over with.
I ran my tongue along the new gap in my front teeth and remembered the father ramming my face into the dashboard. An inverted “V,” rough and sharp and giving a stabbing pain when cold air hit it. It would hurt to die. It would hurt terribly. I’d seen the father with the animals in the slaughterhouse. I’d seen their heads take the face of the Jesus in agony. I will admit I was terrified.
I got back into the car. The father said, “I am tired as shit. Feel like I didn’t even close my eyes.”
There was a low fog dragging itself through the trees. Fog in motion drifting across the road in the headlights. The father kept yawning and popping his eyes wide and talking about coffee. After a few miles of uphill driving we came to a closed-down gas station and grocery store called Top o’ the Pass. The headlights slid over damp old-fashioned walls made of stacked-together stones covered in green-black moss. There was one gas pump and the hose was ripped off and laying in a lazy curve below it. In the window a handwritten sign said HUNTING LICENSES HERE. A larger one said CLOSED FOR SEASON.
The father said, “Shangri-la.”
He took the final glugs from last bottle of Old Skull Popper. He said, “Gotta find the crapper,” and stumbled around the side of the building. A few seconds later he was back, straddling the trailer hitch and popping open the trunk. He said, “Crapper’s locked.” He found the crowbar and went back around. I heard the wood splintering.
I rolled down the window and the fog dragged itself in and left a chill inside of me that would not depart. The father was gone a very long time.
I fell asleep and woke up and he still wasn’t back. Finally I went looking for him. I found a door that was three-quarters open. I saw the shadow of him on the toilet, leaning against the wall with his head bent in a very weird position. He was snoring.
I considered ways to wake him and in the end I threw a rock. It could have been a smaller rock and I didn’t need to throw it so hard and with such good aim but I was feeling moody.
“Ow! Ow!” I heard him holler but he didn’t see me. I was back in the car looking asleep before he even got his pants up. He came around the side of the building saying, “It’s going to be light soon. We have to haul ass.” He stretched his arms out and yawned. “I’m feeling pretty damn good, considering.” Then he broke the glass on the grocery store door and called me to help him carry out a couple of armloads of provisions.
There wasn’t much to choose from. My flashlight beam moved on piles of mouse evidence. Cobwebs hung from one thing to the next. I opened one of the coolers and a barf-stench clawed out at me, so I shut it. In the end I carried what the father pointed to. All of it seemed dried out and dead. Bulge-top cans here and there.
It started raining again. The road continued downward in gentle looping twists, but even so, the trailer skidded and fishtailed behind us and the father was cursing it between the words of the story he was wanting me to memorize. The story of our new identities. He said, “Jimmy one of them cans for me, Clyde. All of a sudden I’m feeling