Cruddy - Lynda Barry [96]
Vicky hissed and swore at me because I brought her brother and forgot the HeavenScent.
Chapter 50
T WAS morning in the desert and I was awakened by growling and barking and then a yipe. The father kicked Cookie away and yanked me up out of the hidey-hole. “Clyde. You stupid piece of shit.” He snorted. His lips moved a cig from one side of his mouth to the other. He gripped my arm and shoved me down the hillside in front of him. “I put all my goddamn faith in you, Clyde.” His eyeballs were red. All of his eyeball veins looked like they were leaking. His hair was sticking up and a bad smell drifted over him. He grabbed the back of my neck and dug in his fingers. “I got some bad news for you, Clyde.”
We heard music. Both of us heard sudden music so loud that we started and the father released his grip and I tore down the hill.
The music came from the Lair of the Sequined Genius. It was the kind of music people call mood music. Music for the background. It kept playing even when the amplified voice began to speak. “Today on the Sequined Genuis Hour, poetry about irritation.”
The voice of Gy-Rah welcomed listeners to his show. He said, “I will begin with a new poem called ‘My Dark Itching.’ ”
The father headed toward the cave entrance.
“Ray!” Auntie Doris stepped out of the office with a pot of coffee and two cups. “Many a man has been lost in that snarl of caverns. And if it’s Gy-Rah you’re after, he’s not there.”
“I hear the bastard,” said the father. “That’s the Sequined Gonad, ain’t it?”
They both paused to listen to the amplified words. Gy-Rah spoke them slowly and dramatically.
“My dark itching protean
results in terpsicorean
actions dissilient,
mother,
I need my liniment.”
Auntie Doris poured herself some coffee and said, “Burma Shave.”
She lit a cig and looked at the father’s car sitting in the middle of her gloss-top asphalt. She called, “Ray, I think I’m going to kill you. Gy-Rah is going to have to melt it back down for me and he’s not going to like that. Come get your coffee. Gy-Rah will be back after his show is over.”
They drank coffee and Doris talked about her parking lot. She told the father it was her invention, it was a vision-maker. In heat waves created by the desert sun and the black shine of bitumen, entire worlds could be seen.
“I’ll tell you this,” said Doris. “It beats television.”
The father said, “I don’t see nothing.”
“Shit on you, Ray,” said Auntie Doris. “You broke it is why. Has to be smooth. Yesterday I saw a man standing there that had six peckers.”
“Haw,” said the father.
“Haw-haw shit,” said Doris Horace. “Looked like the Powder Monkey.”
Time ticktocked. Gy-Rah read more poems about his itching problem.
I heard the father ask about the suitcase. Auntie Doris said she didn’t know where it was but it was around somewhere, she’d seen it, Gy-Rah had it, he didn’t give a shit about it. She didn’t think there was going to be any trouble except for Gy-Rah feeling so polluted by the father’s visit that it might be a while before he showed himself.
Neither of them said anything about Pammy. I wondered where she was. I wondered how her midnight beauty treatment went.
Doris said, “Goddamn you look like Old Dad, Ray.” Tears spilled from her eyes. “I miss him. I feel like shit whenever I think of what I did to that man.”
“You made it up to him, Doris.”
“I was dazzled by the Powder Monkey. You understand.”
And they talked about the Powder Monkey. A high-wire man named Carl who left the circus in Baraboo to join so many other high-wire men that streamed into the Black Canyon looking for a job on the dam. During the first year of blasting the Powder Monkey was important. After the High Scalers drilled into the rock face the Powder Monkey scrambled across sheer clifs to set the fuses and the dynamite. Carl loved attention and did his work in his circus outfit. Glittering panties that flashed and caught