Cruddy - Lynda Barry [66]
There were hissing whispers and car doors opening and the quiet popping of the trunk. And from the trunk something was lifted, a man curled into a ball. Fernst wheeled him into the blackness and the men rolled back into the night.
I woke up when the shadow of the sheriff passed over my face. He was reaching down, about to lift me, but I crab-scrambled away. He said, “I’m not going to hurt you, Ee-gore, what in the hell are you doing out here? You didn’t sleep out here, did you? Son? A freight train could come and cut you in two as neat as an ax. Let’s go inside. We’ll let Pammy make us breakfast.”
The meat saw was going and the flypaper waved a little when the sheriff opened and propped the door. He’d been trying to walk with his arm around me but I pulled away. The father wouldn’t have liked that but the father wasn’t there.
“PAMMY!” The sheriff stood in the hallway hollering up some stairs. “PAMMY!”
For breakfast I had the terrible red pop and an ancient bag of Fritos. Pammy wanted me to sit on the floor near the screen door and I did it. The sheriff kept looking at her and wiggling his eyebrows up and down and smiling. She leaned with her back against the bar and one arm crossed over her stomach flaps and the other arm moving up to her face with a cigarette in the fingers. She said, “What?”
The sheriff said, “You tell me.”
The father came down the stairs tucking in his shirt. He was barefoot and his hair was sticking up. He nodded to the sheriff. “Morning.”
The sheriff said, “Pajama party?” He wiggled his eyebrows at Pammy again, and she threw the bar rag at him.
They made conversation. Pammy twirled a finger in the father’s hair. I saw her clip-on bow hanging off the side of her head. At one point she smiled, looking like a backyard puff-fungus that had blown out all its spores. My life at the Knocking Hammer had begun.
There was a round of eye-openers. Pammy called the father Mils. The sheriff had introduced him as Milsboro and she thought that was his name. Mils Boro. The sheriff laughed until he got a groin cramp and had to stand up and shake out his leg, but he didn’t correct her.
I forced down the pop and the Fritos, half gagging.
The father held up his cigs to me with a question mark on his face. I shook my head. He held up the bottle they were drinking from. He said, “Breakfast snorty?” I shook my head again. He said, “You ain’t going Episcopalian on me are you?”
A Fanta child burst through the screen door shouting and jumping and pointing toward the canal. There was a commotion of more shouting outside. Pammy said, “Goddamn it.” She shouted, “FERNST! YOU, FERNST! BRING THE POLE HOOK!” The meat saw stopped.
I looked out the door and saw the grandma-ma running fast with her flip-flops in her hand. Pammy said, “Sit your ass back down. This don’t have anything to do with you.”
The father said, “You heard her, Clyde.”
Pammy’s feet came stomp-crunching back across the gravel. She was wet up to her terrible hind end with chunks of mud and unidentifiables clinging to her legs. I heard crying. Wailing.
She dripped a trail across the wooden floor and sat on the stool beside the father. She lit a cig.
“And?” said the sheriff.
She blew a jet of smoke out of the side of her mouth and then turned and gestured to the doorway. “The grandma-ma would like a ride to the orchard. She wants to be the one to notify.”
“Shit,” said the sheriff.
A Fanta child had fallen into the canal.
Chapter 30
HE FATHER said, “It ain’t such a bad place to lay low for a while, Clyde. I can think of worse places. And hell. How many kids you know can say they got their own trailer?” He was laying across the plastic-covered mattress with his arms behind his head. I sat on the bench seat at the miniature kitchen table, smoking. The father said, “Want me to teach you smoke rings?” He demonstrated. Told me to practice. He said the more stunts I could do the better off I would be. He said, “Pammy has a stack of cash up there. And I mean a STACK. In her dresser. Why the hell do women hide everything