Cruddy - Lynda Barry [70]
It was all true. The father was wearing the Dead Swede’s clothes and cologne and his bolo. He was drinking in the Dead Swede’s bar and sleeping in the Dead Swede’s bed with the Dead Swede’s widow who was feeling the fantastic love flutterations, who was transforming before everyone’s eyes. No one had seen her smile since the days of the Dead Swede. And she was wearing the tiny high heels again. She hadn’t had those out since the night she did the dance that gave the Dead Swede the cardiac.
There were more details about how Pammy was coming along, and the father laid them on me whenever he stopped by the trailer, but most of them I couldn’t hang on to with my gummy brains. At night certain music blared from the Dead Swede’s hi-fi, melodies came through the trailer walls. “The Three Bells” by The Browns. “Come Softly to Me” by The Fleetwoods. Smooth blended singing with no edges, horrifying in its perfection. I was losing my hair. Chunks of hair fell out onto the plastic mattress every time The Browns or The Fleetwoods sang. The music stuck in my mind. Brain congregations singing little parasitic melodies.
The father came and went making different assessments. “The streaks up your arm, see there? There is no way around it. Goddamn. It’s going to have to come off.”
There are certain dangers in homemade booze, and the second jug of Corpse Reviver must not be forgotten. There can be chemistries like firing pins sending perfectly calibered visions, there is such a thing as the bore axis of the mind. The father felt something funny and wonderful when he drank from the Corpse Reviver. He didn’t want to share it. He kept it in the trailer and took a glug whenever he visited. And then he showed up and took several glugs and I saw he had his knife case out. He had his whetstone out.
Time had fallen apart for me. I lost the order of days and nights and conversations. I know the sun was either coming up or going down because I saw the golden rays falling upon the metal-seamed walls. The father said, “It’s got be done, Clyde. I can’t take you to no hospital. You understand that. At least you know I’m the best possible man for the job. Sit up here, drink, again, and one more.”
His worn whetstone was oiled and he was making the motions. The knife he was honing was her, Little Debbie, he said she had just the right sort of point for small-joint separation. I listened to the soft circular whisper of the sharpening and the familiar promise that I would not feel a thing.
The father was strapping my arm down and tying my wrist tightly and jabbering on, he was laying out his Corpse Reviver–fueled plans about how to make the gold mine that was the Knocking Hammer his. He held the jug up to me. “Take a drink, take another. I’ll tell you what, you feel anything? You can take off one of mine. That’s a promise. The only reason I’m putting this rag in your mouth is for just in case. Now, turn your head, Clyde. Look out the window for the sandman.”
The sandman. The sandman. The sandman.
And then the father owed me a finger but he did not want to pay.
I have read enough of Stedman’s Medical Dictionary and other medical books of information to know that cutting half of my finger off was not what saved me. At that point the poisoning was in all of my bloodways. Even if the father had taken my whole arm off it wouldn’t have mattered.
What saved me was a midnight tap on the trailer door and the grandma-ma’s voice. What saved me was a soup she made from the bones of the murdered deer. That, and a few little other things she ran back to get after she saw my situation. A soothing paste she brought for my finger, that smelled like lemon and mint and Clorox, and her delicate stitches in place of the ones made by the father. She used low-test fishing line, she said she found it in the trailer on the day she cleaned the horribleness away. She said she found other things too.
One of the Fanta children sat on the edge of the bed watching me