Cruddy - Lynda Barry [65]
I moved away and they looked inside.
Pammy said, “What y’think?”
The father said, “I would not have thought it possible.”
Pammy said, “The grandma-ma is a sour little bitch but she is hell on cleaning. I’ll give her that. Cute little place here.” She stepped in and the whole weight of the trailer shifted. “Real cute. I always wanted a trailer. Every since I was a little baby girl.”
She had a plastic cigarette case with a special place for a book of matches. She had a pint of Old Skull Popper. She had a knife and a hunk of special blood sausage left over from the days of the Dead Swede, hand ground and packed in hog intestines. She was wearing tangerine-colored lipstick and when she and the father closed themselves inside the trailer and I was left to wander I found the lipstick tube laying in the dead grass. Orange Pucker was the name of it. I opened it and swirled it up and saw pale tufts of mold growing near the bottom.
The sun was going down and I thought I’d walk over to visit the cattle, to smell them and listen to them chuffing and making low moans. And that is when I found the railroad tracks. My own personal railroad tracks, glinting in the last of the sun’s rays. And far in the distance with its pale eye rolling, I saw my own personal train.
In the night when the moon is large, the world spreads blue in every direction. In the night the creatures in the feedlot are sometimes asleep and sometimes they stand at the edge of the fence watching you with heads nodding, go ahead, go ahead, go ahead.
The line that runs past the Knocking Hammer is freight only. No passengers. The creatures in the feedlot are used to the engine and the racket of ventilated cars. Sometimes the cars are full and sometimes they are empty but it’s a smell that alerts the creatures and stirs them in a terrible way. Trains heading to Rapid City and Kansas City and Chicago. Trains heading to any packinghouse town.
I have heard that certain vibrations can move through bones, move up through the ground and alert your bones. Train vibrations are strong. Vibrations moving though the rails cool and very smooth under my hand.
I crouched low in the sharp dead grass of the berm. I didn’t want the engineer to see me. Sometimes the engineer is observant but mostly at night his mind is in the nowhereness. Drifting and dreaming. The rocking motion and the rolling engine and the hypnotic shine of the headlamp on the tracks. The night train. The night train. There is something different about them, especially when they are all freight and black, black, black. If I do it just right, he’ll never see me, he won’t blow the whistle, maybe he’ll feel it and think a deer or a dog, a deer or a dog, maybe he won’t think anything. Here comes the freight train, here comes the freight train, roaring and screeching and twisting a yellow eye across the blue flatness, lighting up the scribbles of scrub, here it comes here it comes here it comes NOW.
I couldn’t. I wanted to so bad but I couldn’t. My involuntary systems wouldn’t. My involuntary systems threw me flat on the berm with the roaring above me but there was no exhilaration. When the train passed and I rolled onto my back and looked up into the night sky, I knew there was nothing looking back. Twinkle twinkle little star, you are nothing. You have been dead for thousands of years.
Chapter 29
HERE WAS the crunching of tires on the gravel, someone was driving toward the Knocking Hammer with their headlights off. The father and Pammy had already crossed from the trailer to the house, a light came on in Pammy’s chambers, a tiny buckling apartment above the lounge. Her window was open and a curtain fluttered. Music corkscrewed out of a hi-fi. The light went off. There were some cow sounds. And then it was quiet for a long long time until the shadow car rolled out of the blackness.
Two men were inside, two cigarette ends burned. From the deep black alongside the far end of the building came another man with a wheelbarrow.