Free CRUDDY by Lynda Barry

them. I never thought it was a real place but the Turtle said it was and he would take me there and I had to wonder if there would be a red lightbulb.
    In my restricted life, the mother has tried to make me afraid of the aimless man, but truthfully I have never been afraid because I never thought I was the aimless man’s type. I did not think he would keep his eyes on me long enough to hunt me. That I would be as noticeable to him as a gray clothespin on a sagging line. In my restricted life it was the mother who I was afraid of. The Turtle had his arm around me, and if she saw that, my life would be over.
    Vicky said, “What, are you two together now?”
    She was having a hard time unwrapping the cellophane from her cig pack. She was doing it so slowly, concentrating on the red pull-strip and the glinty shine. And then I noticed we all were concentrating on it, leaning our heads over it and watching it intently. It seemed like a miracle item to me. Vicky held the end of the pull-strip and let the top piece of cellophane hang and flutter and we stood there very amazed by it. And I was thinking how we are always surrounded by incredibly beautiful things but we don’t know it, and that from then on I was going to know it, and then I looked up and the Washeteria woman’s freaky head was right next to the window and she was darting little pig eyes at us and moving her lips at us and her beige moles were wiggling and I was screaming very loud and the Turtle and Vicky were pulling me down the street and Vicky told me to shut up because she hates people who scream. This is one thing I can say about Creeper. It makes everything you look at very loud.
    We went to a scrudded-out little park that was mostly weed grass and one set of swings and some warped splintered seesaws and the Turtle said he wanted to seesaw with me so I sat down and then watched him walk over to the swings. Vicky laughed. She said, “Suc-kah! Rober-tah!”
    The Turtle started swinging. One of his shoes came off. There was aluminum foil inside his shoe and it caught the light and sent a ray into my eye that knocked me over. Then Vicky was laughing very hard and contorting on the grass also. The Turtle said, “Hillbilly Woman. Tell her the story of the Poky Dot lounge, the Violent One missed that part. Tell her what was written on the door.”
    “No,” said Vicky. “Tell the part about the money, Roberta. What about the money?”
    The Turtle fished his shoe back on. His toes were also very long, unusually long, you could even say disturbingly. He said, “Fuck ALL people of Indiana!” He said, “Indiana people SUCKS SHIT!”
    “I don’t get it,” said Vicky. “What? What’s funny?” Because me and the Turtle were laughing very hard. Were we together? It was possible.
    The Poky Dot Lounge was what appeared on the horizon an hour or so after the father hung another cig from his lips and said, “Last one.” He balled the cig pack and flung it out the window. In my side mirror I watched it bounce away behind us. Bounce and roll and vanish. We crossed a wide river and then everything changed. There were no more fields, no houses, no trees, not even telephone poles. Even the colors were gone, all of them except brown and gray and the blue of the late-afternoon sky. The world got emptier and emptier until it looked like a brown ocean of dead velvet, just emptiness covered with short dry grasses and low scrub.
    We were on a one-lane road and behind us the stirred-up dust hung in the air. Some creatures bolted in the distance, looking like deer, but not deer. The father said, “Give you fifty bucks if you can tell me what them are.”
    My head was hurting and I was hungry. I ate what the father ate. Coffee and cigs and aspirin and Old Skull Popper and an ancient vending machine candy bar and the rancid taste was still in my mouth. I was hungry but I felt like if I ate I would heave instantly. My eyes were burning and I had a sensation in my throat like