Cruddy - Lynda Barry [60]
I waved.
The father called out, “My boy here, he was feeling a little sick. Let him out to puke.”
Barely moving his mouth the father spoke low. “He’s County, Clyde. He’s just half a turd.”
The sheriff got out of his car. You would expect him to be fat. Fat with a gut hanging over his confused pants and a big double-wobble chin and a bullet head with tiny eyes peeping out. But this man was made out of whip wire. Slender and hard looking with eyes barely blue; they were the color of cigarette smoke.
We didn’t have any choice but to shamble back to where he was standing, he was obviously wanting to strike up a conversation, whiffing at the trailer, saying, “Who died? That’d scare the stink off shit. And you two look like you been attacked by the goddamn Mexican ho-dag. Looks like blood, hell, looks like you’re still bleeding there on your leg. What the hell’s going on?”
The father’s hand on my shoulder gave me a squeeze and our new identities rose on this command. It was a freakish sensation to feel them come to life so naturally, to witness the father drain away and the brokenhearted barber from bum-fuck take his place. We walked toward the sheriff and he put a hand to his hip and drew his gun.
Chapter 28
ET US cuT youR MeaT We WiLl DReSs YouR meAt wE WilL bUy YOur MEaT we Will PAy CAsh BeSt PricEs tHE BesT nOnE bEttER cuStoM HousE ButCher hoUSe louNgE gRocERy CamPinG this is what was written on the side of the long sagging building that was part of the Knocking Hammer. It was painted in a variety of letter sizes, smalls and capitals mixed, looking random, looking distracted, looking half out of the bag.
The Knocking Hammer is where the sheriff took us after he looked in the trailer and finished hearing the father’s story, which the father told without ever looking directly at the gun the sheriff kept pointed at him in an almost casual way.
“Milsboro,” said the sheriff. “You’ll have to show me on a map.”
The father said, “If you got a map that shows little pinprick towns, sure.”
“Barber, huh?” said the sheriff. “You take a drink?”
“Oh yes,” said the father. “I’m not going to lie about it.”
They were getting along even though the sheriff kept his gun out for the whole conversation. He had the star and all the father had was a stinking trailer and a mongoloid son. How shitty. That was the sheriff’s comment. How shitty, and what will happen to the boy when he gets older?
They were getting along but they were circling. The father told me later he knew he was in fine shape from the start because he never met a county sheriff yet who wasn’t a lying bastard. “It’s an elected position, Clyde. You scratch his ass and he scratches yours.”
The sheriff was sniffing out potential. Right away the father knew the sheriff was dangling a possibility in front of him because of which questions he asked and which questions he didn’t.
The sheriff said for us to follow him. He knew a place where we could get cleaned up. Get ourselves together. Campground with hookups for the trailer. Bar. Grocery. Whatever we needed. The lady who ran the place was a cousin of his, a widow, Pammy. She took over the whole operation once the Original Swede became the Dead Swede. And she liked new faces and she loved children.
“What they got to drink up that way?” asked the father.
“You heard of Whitley’s?”
“Lead on!”
In the car on the way to the Knocking Hammer the father went over the rules and regulations of being the mongoloid son and I stared out the window and watched the land change like it had a mental illness. Dead and barren became spinach, chard, and cabbage glittering with the pulsing spray from long-wheeled irrigators, and then a dead stockyard with knocked-down fence posts and a collapsed ramp and then a dumping ground for junk cars and raw garbage with turkey buzzards circling overhead and then sudden low orchards, peaches it looked like, with migrants reaching into scraggly trees with dirty pick-sacks slung over their shoulders.
And then it was barren again, looking