Cruddy - Lynda Barry [71]
Chapter 33
GOT BETTER. And when I was well enough I went looking for the grandma-ma. I found her near the cull pile squatting by the bodies, doing something with a spoon and what it turned out she was doing was digging out a cow eye. She stood up and tilted her head toward a plastic bucket. She said, “Carry it for me?” It was half full of eyeballs and walking flies.
I followed behind her thinking she was going to the campground area but she turned down a little trail zigzagging through thicker scrub and kept walking. She said, “Everybody’s packing up. Apple season’s early. Beats peaches. I’m leaving out of here too.”
She said, “Your daddy has a flat ass. Flattest ass I’ve seen on a man. I don’t like men with flat asses.”
She said, “Do you know what hoo-doo is?”
We came to a shed. Flies swarmed around a set of yellow buckets arranged in a semicircle. I smelled the dip vat fumes.
She said, “Some people think I’m in with that hoo-doo, they come to me for things. I tell them to their faces, you can give me your money and I’ll make you a Custom Creation, but it doesn’t have any powers beyond what’s in the intended’s mind to begin with. But I can make things that will scare the face off a man. Since I was little I liked to make such things. I was raised by an auntie that used to whip me with an extension cord. It started with her.”
She said, “I’ll make one for you if you like.”
There was a loop of string hanging out of the dip vat liquid. She pulled it and up came a headless chicken carcass, its raw wings raised like a marionette. She said, “It doesn’t look like much, but neither does a hand grenade.”
She said, “A man lost his life in that trailer of yours. I know it for a fact. He left behind what no man leaves behind unless he’s dead. You want to see it? I sun-dried it but it will get its shape back once it soaks awhile.”
She pulled out some waxed paper and in the waxed paper was a dried-up thing looking like a very old hot dog with a helmet on.
She watched me looking at it. She said, “You want to help me scare the living hell out of a couple of people? They’re people you know.”
Chapter 34
E WERE up in Vicky’s room. She had a canopy bed with severe dust-chunks hanging. There were bowls and plates of half-eaten crusted food laying around and the drawers of her dresser were half shut with clothes hanging out. Piles of clothes were everywhere. Some had the price tags still on them but they were balled up anyway. There were pictures taped to the walls of models with insane amounts of eye makeup doing pissed-off poses, and there were models who looked like they were flowing free in fields of tall dandelions, and there was a hot pink chipboard sign that said THE SWINGING CHICKS ALL GO JAY JACOBS!!! It was a bus sign. Stolen, obviously. So many things about Vicky were stolen. Even the cross that hung from her neck was shoplifted. She said she was very glad to have her purse back because it was her trained purse, the best shoplifting purse ever made. All she had to do was lean against it a certain way and it opened and then when she leaned back it closed. She was going through it, an unlit cig hanging from her mouth.
She said, “Where’s the stash box?”
She said, “Where’s my lighter?”
She said, “What the fuck is the deal with this sock monkey?”
The super-fine guy stood at the doorway staring at me. Her brother. This was the Stick.
She said, “Get OUT of my ROOM!”
He pointed down at his bare feet. They were on the other side of the threshold. “I’m not in your room, am I?” He was eating from a bag of Oven Joy bread. Just mashing pieces of white bread into his mouth. He said, “What’s wrong with her, Vic?”
Vicky got up, slammed the door, and hooked the lock. She said, “Where’s the stash?” She dug around her bedroom for another lighter and I told her what went down at the Diggy’s Dumpster.
She said, “Is the stash still