Cruddy - Lynda Barry [62]
“Yup,” said the sheriff. “He’s a little spooker, just like Fernst.”
I didn’t look at the father even though I felt his eye rays on me. He wanted me to throw him a look, to let him know I was cooperating. The sheriff was adding his own bits and pieces to my story and the father was counting on a good trade-in for it. I could hear him in my pounding head, Look at me Clyde, look up at me.
The sheriff touched my shoulder and my teeth exposed themselves and I fought to put my lips in a smile around them. He said, “Go on inside, son, Pammy’s a natural mother. She’ll know what to do with you.”
The father said, “Go on, Clyde. Don’t be shy.” He was still hoping I would look at him. I didn’t.
I walked though a screen door that was more chicken wire than screen. Flies could come and go as they pleased. My eyes were adjusting to the dimness, I walked a few paces and a voice said, “Freeze!” It was the same lady’s voice. “Don’t take another step, you little shit.”
She was a big pinch-faced woman with hair that was crispy-fried blond, like old doll hair that had been rubbed all day on the sidewalk. Her eyes were squinting mean and she was blowing snorts of cig smoke at me. She said, “Get the hell back outside. Don’t filthify in here.”
I didn’t move. She didn’t insist. She leaned to look out the doorway. “That your old man?”
I nodded.
“Where’s your mother at?” I shrugged.
She heaved the bar rag at me. “Wipe your face. You know what little boys like you grow up to be? Do you, huh? Ask me because I know.”
With my eyes I said, “What?”
She said, “Assholes. Can you spell that?”
Through a row of small rectangular windows along the far wall I saw a tall man carrying chunks of the hacked-apart deer on his shoulders. He was dressed in butcher clothes stiff with blood. The father was saying something that made everybody start wheeze-laughing. Pammy regarded him and I watched something like thinking going on behind her eyes.
I thought my smell glands were dead from all the overload but the bar rag stank so bad it brought them back to life. I wiped my face, thinking honey-up, honey-up to her and felt the transfer of the filthy smell of a horrible thing that never dried out.
Pammy watched the father. “He don’t fool me. Your old man? He don’t fool me at all.”
She had a dead front tooth. A blue front tooth. And when she came from around the side of the bar to get a better look at the father I saw her huge stomach fat folds hanging over pink stretch shorts, hanging flatly like she had been deflated. Her boobs hung flatly too under a pink sleeveless blouse. And her bare legs were a horrible white with knotted humps of veins under the skin looking blue and mold green and twisted. She wore sling-backs with sad little bows sagging at the toe line. She rocked her dead tooth with her thumb and watched every move the father made.
From the ceiling above her hung hundreds of yellowed rolls of flypaper, some ancient, some recent, all looking like horror party decorations and loaded with flies. When one got full, Pammy just got the step stool out and hung another one. They stretched in every direction all the way to the corners. The bar was a horseshoe shape with the open end pointing toward a doorway that opened into a long hall. At the far end a back door to the outside was wide open.
Through the door I could see the butcher man pass one way and then pass the other way and then pass back again, like he was pacing. He was very strange looking, earthworm looking, is the only way I can describe it. His posture was in constant motion, going from question mark to exclamation mark and back again, and all his extremities, including his head, seemed to flatten and retract and then extend and sharpen. He was chomping on something while he paced. Eating something in his wiggling bloody hand. From the colors on the dangling wrapper I was thinking it was a Three Musketeers bar. He stepped up into the hall and I looked away. A door opened and closed and a locking bolt was thrown. The meat saw started up again. That was Fernst.