Cruddy - Lynda Barry [64]
After the shower the father felt like a new man. He walked up to find Pammy to see if she had a needle and some thread. When she asked him what for, he told her he was such a dumb-ass he stabbed himself in the leg trying to open a can of beans and she got out a big first-aid kit and offered to stitch the father herself. So he sat on a chair with his pants down and a bottle of Whitley’s to take some of the sting out and she kneeled on the floor and made serviceman-sized stitches.
I had a cut too. I got bit on the finger when Big Girl slipped during the gutting of the deer. It was deep but not horrible, only about half inch long, but it was a crossways cut on the joint right below my fingernail and it wouldn’t stay closed. It was a little swollen and there was a little bit of throbbing, but I wasn’t thinking too much about it. There were other things to think about. Like where was Little Debbie?
The Knocking Hammer had a dip vat for the cattle, called a dip vat because it’s what the cattle land in after they are taken up a ramp and shock-prodded to jump. The vat is full of strong liquid, insect killer, and it has to be deep enough for the steer to be completely submerged for a few seconds before it makes it across the vat to the ridged ramp where it can climb out. The Knocking Hammer had a dip vat but it hadn’t been used for a while. The liquid bug killer was still there, although evaporated down to a certain soupiness and this was what the grandma-ma used to clean the trailer. She sent a dusty Fanta child running with a yellow plastic bucket through the barbed wire of the stockyard fence. He came back carrying it two-handed and it was sloshing on his legs.
The grandma-ma took another bucket and stretched an old T-shirt over it and poured the liquid slow to strain it. The Fanta children bent and watched the black gushball of hair and dead insects forming. She pulled up the T-shirt and squeezed around the wad to wring it dry. And then she dropped it in the empty bucket and told the Fanta children to leave it alone.
She was a tiny woman wearing old clothes that were too big for her and too warm for the weather. A sweater over a shirt over a dress over some pants and then just a pair of fifty-cent flip-flops. I was surprised by her feet. They were so delicately shaped. She wore her thinning hair knotted at the back of her neck and a blue farmer’s handkerchief tied like a headband with the knot on top. She kept untying it and retying it, trying to get it tight.
I sat watching her go in and out of the trailer, and every once in a while she’d look up and show me her teeth. They were strange teeth, like fish teeth, pointy and unevenly spaced and the way she showed them off made me laugh a little bit and she seemed to like this.
While she cleaned, the Fanta children ran around the bucket with the horror wad in it, daring each other to touch it until they got bored. Then they dragged each other around on a big piece of cardboard for a while and one of them kept shouting “Ho-ho-ho.”
When the grandma-ma finished, she gathered her rags and her buckets and she was eyeballing me hard. She had found something in the trailer besides the smaller chunks of deer and the putrid mound of muskie. She dropped it into the bucket with the deadly macaroon and called to the children to help her carry the seeping newspaper-wrapped packages of deer meat Fernst set out on the back steps for her. I watched them disappear behind the scrub hedges, walking in the direction of the primitive area.
The dip vat fumes coming off the trailer were so strong, flies that tried to land were dropping off the sides. I looked in through the door and was amazed by the cleanliness.
Pammy and the father came down the back steps and I noticed he was wearing clothes I never saw before. Out of style but looking new. And Pammy had a little velvet bow clipped into her sad version of hair, and there were curling emissions of a perfume