Cruddy - Lynda Barry [58]
He sounded very sincere. I was thinking about the warning words of the Monkey but they shriveled away in the new lushness of touching; I was shaking from it. Looking into his eyes and watching the tiger irises melt away into expanding black.
He took my left hand and examined my finger again, touching the hard-ridged scars. He turned it over and traced the Tiparillo scar. “Tell me. Tell me everything.” And my rushing feelings were strong. When he ran his hands over me I did not flinch. He lifted my shirt and I put my arms up to help him.
I am not a developed person. There has been almost no development. And I thought I would not be able to stand it, being looked at the way he was looking at me, letting his fingers circle my places. He touched the inside of my arm where the words are. He traced the small raised scars spelling out the words, I’m sorry.
He looked at me without blinking. “You did this?”
I nodded.
He said, “You’re perfect.”
There was something I should have told him then, a little bit of information he could have used, but I didn’t want to interrupt the picture he was seeing of me. Or the twining captivation curling in my throat, making me lift my chin until my head fell back. And too there was the sublingual addition of the Windowpane. One hit or two hits. He never told me.
He said, talk. Talk and keep talking and do not stop talking because it was so good that way. Close my eyes and keep talking while he kissed the places, keep talking, keep talking while he touched every part of me.
Chapter 27
HEN WE rolled out of the wet mountains, there was a shock waiting. The land suddenly went flat and dry except for irrigated fields with high jets pulsing, and canals of violently swift water. It was a place of scrubby orchards and reservation Indians and migrant Mexicans and tumbling white trash. And there were miles of stockyards on either side of the potholed road, full of groaning cattle standing together around low muddy hills of feed. And there was a place where you could see it all from a single bar stool. Have you ever heard of a place called the Knocking Hammer?
The father found it in a very cosmic way. He finished the first jug of Corpse Reviver and instead of knocking him down, it made him precise and activated. He was just rattling with expanding action, taking smaller and smaller roads, looking for the right place along the irrigation canal to kill me on. He was so happy to see the canal. Not the culverts, not the corrugated half pipe that carried a bit of water here and there. It was the concrete canal that fascinated him. Dry and empty until the sluice gates opened. He was calmly explaining how perfect it would be because he could kill me right in the concrete ditch itself and when the water came it would gush me and all of the evidence away.
He said he was sorry, but it just wasn’t working out anymore. He wanted me to know it wasn’t anything personal, nothing I did or didn’t do. The problem was the hundred complications a kid couldn’t help but bring along. That, and the possibility of me breaking down and saying something that would put him up shit creek. He said he’d had enough of shit creek. He told me he knew just how to do it, he’d use Sheila and it wouldn’t hurt at all, and he would go to hell for it, if that made me feel any better. And while he laid out his plan I stared out the window with an old sentence he threw out once, repeating in my brain. “Freight cars are