Cruddy - Lynda Barry [74]
A salty tear rambled down his craggy face. “Old Dad didn’t turn on me, Clyde. A father’s love is eternal. And when I think of how I stood up at his funeral and called him a lying sack of shit—”
I looked up at the light fixture and watched a trapped fly jerk around in the last stages of buzzing itself to death. “Old Dad,” he said. “Please forgive me.” Glug glug. “Old Dad, I swear to you—” Glug glug. More salty tears. Some shaking sobs. And then his arms reaching out for a certain kind of comfort. “Clyde. Clyde. I need you.”
The sheriff had tried to get some comfort from me too. The night the father and Pammy left me to him. The night the sheriff said, “Let me walk you to the trailer, son. It’s pretty dark out there.” He tried to get some comfort and ended up shouting, “OW, OW, YOU SON-OF-A-BITCH!” and the father leaned his head out of Pammy’s bedroom window, calling, “He bite you? I warned you.”
And the sheriff had been trying to get me into his car with offers like, “I’ll let you blow the siren, Ee-gore, I got twenty-six candy bars, Ee-gore, I’ll let you shoot my goddamned gun, Ee-gore.”
The father wanted me to keep playing him, but I didn’t know how much longer I could play him without help. I needed Little Debbie but the father’s knife case was locked in the trunk with the suitcases.
“Pammy farted,” said the sheriff.
Pammy said, “Goddamn you, Arden, I did not.”
“There’s no shame in it,” said the father. “I farted once myself, in Korea.”
I was sitting on the floor of the bar playing with a tiddlywinks game the sheriff bought me. Pammy kept telling me to get to bed but I was not about to leave. The grandma-ma had done her part and I had to do mine.
I shot the tiddlywinks, trying to see how many times I could hit Pammy on the back of her legs before she freaked on me. I wanted to distract her from her natural inclination to check the flypaper.
The father and the sheriff were plastered. Pammy was too. She turned and hissed, “You hit me again and I’m going to pull those Dumbo ears right off your head.”
“Oh, now,” the sheriff said. “He’s just playing. Don’t you think he looks cute sitting there?”
“If I thought,” said Pammy, “I’d blow the perverted brains out of your head.”
The sheriff started talking up the spooker home again, telling the father how good it would be for me, the father could visit me anytime, and when I learned my vocation, Mom had agreed to let the father be first in line to foster me back.
The father said, “Hey, Arden. You want to see something I learned in the Navy?”
The sheriff said, “Not especially.”
The father set the lighter on the bar, and concentrated on it. He did something quick and one-handed, the lighter flipped into the air and bloomed into flame before he caught it. He said, “How’d I do that, Arden? Want to see it again?” He flipped the lighter so he caught it close to the sheriff’s face and there was a flinch. The reflected flame moved weirdly in the sheriff’s pale eyes.
The father said, “Try and blow it out.”
The sheriff said, “How about if you just shave my ass instead?”
The father leaned in and blew on the flame as hard as he could. It went sideways but didn’t lose strength. Then he slung it hard across the room and it hit the wall, fell, and kept on burning.
“Golly,” said the sheriff. “Ain’t that a thriller.”
The father said, “Get it for me, Clyde.”
It was hot to the touch. I flipped the lid open and shut a few times, liking the action. When I handed it back to the father, he lit a cig and passed the lighter to the sheriff. “See what it says on it?”
The sheriff held it away to get focus. “Let me see. ‘Property. Of. A. Dumb-shit.’”
The father said, “See that there? PTO. Nineteen Forty-four. Know where I found it? For a nickel I’ll tell you.” The sheriff looked up at him.
A train roared by and the booze in the bottles trembled.
The sheriff said, “You going to sign them papers or not? Mom’s