Cruddy - Lynda Barry [83]
Pammy released a very relaxed emission and I got out of the car. The father straggle-ran a few more steps when he saw the car door open and made more panic sounds. He looked very bad in the hard light. He was thin and slope-shouldered and scared. And I have to say it was not a bad feeling to realize what he was scared of was me. Me appearing so suddenly in my Night of the Living Dead aspect.
After a while he hollered, “Clyde, Clyde, is that really you?”
He said, “GODDAMN YOU, CLYDE! SCARED THE LIVING SHIT OUT OF ME! THOUGHT YOU WERE A SON OF A BITCHING ZOMBIE! ABOUT GIVE ME A HEART ATTACK! GODDAMN YOU TO HELL, CLYDE! GIVE A MAN SOME WARNING!”
He said, “All that blood. Where you cut? You’re cut somewheres, show me.”
He said, “Son of a bitch, Clyde. If it ain’t yours, whose blood is it?”
I never said any actual words to the father. I made my disturbing noises combined with various nods and shakes of the head and just let him make up his own story. He figured that after the sheriff dropped me off at the rendering plant, I got loose from Mom and hid in the bleed-out room, until I made it to the road and hitched a ride with some Mexicans.
He said, “Missed me that bad, huh? I bet Mom and the sheriff are going apeshit looking for you.”
We rolled on, the father following the wires to a place where we could get some gas and he could get some smokes and I could wash up. He kept looking at me in the rearview. He called me one tough buzzard but he seemed unsettled. He asked me to search out a fresh bottle of Whitley’s for him. He invited me to take a glug. What a strange strange kind of booze. Sharpens the edges of all things, but dulls the centers.
“I saw that blood on you, see, and I thought you were some kind of goddamned I don’t know what. When I seen it was you I thought Arden had cut your throat and meant to pin it on me. Got me nervous there for a minute. Haw. Haw-haw. Almost had me there, Clyde. I’m glad you decided to sign back on. Partners, right? Goddamn partners all the way. Fifty-fifty from here on out.”
We came to a half-dead town. Half dead, half palsied, with a boarded-up main street and crooked telephone poles with wires hanging. The gas station had one pump and the gas man didn’t say a word to us. The father told him to fill it and asked where the bathroom was. He jerked his thumb toward the back. I scrounged some clothes out of the pile and went around the back of the station to a tack-on shed with a horrifying toilet and just a trickle of water coming out of the faucet. I washed off what I could, rewrapped the Ace bandage around my middle, tucked in Little Debbie, and left my bloody clothes on the floor.
When I got in the car, the father said, “He look familiar to you, Clyde? Fellow pumping the gas? He strike you as familiar in any way? Looks like Earlis, doesn’t he?” I didn’t know what Earlis looked like alive but the face on him dead has never left my mind. The smile in the middle of the black rot of his face. Rictus.
I looked at the man. He sat in filthy coveralls on a cast-off kitchen chair just staring straight ahead and sucking his bottom lip in and out. Is that what Earlis had looked like?
The father leaned his head out the window and said, “Hey! Which way’s Vegas?” The lip-sucking man didn’t look at the father but he said something out loud. The father cupped his ear. “I didn’t catch that.”
He turned his horrible eyes onto the father. “There’s a man in my belly wants your company, son.”
The father floored it and Pammy’s head lolled and bounced hard as we curbed the corner. “GodDAMN!” He was scared. “Strange shit lately. A lot.” He kept checking the rearview. He was wearing down.
The time had