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Yank Harold and the Crazy Girlby Don Taylor
As Yank Harold and I observed that summer of 1949, the crazy girl across the street sure could suck the candy canes. Christ! one after another until the juice slobbered and ran out her mouth, over her lips and down her chin to drop pink and thick on her t-shirt and skirts.
Yank had come to town in May to spend the summer. He wrote short stories for the pulp rag Amazing Stories at three cents a word, and needed a place to stay. I had an extra bed- room in my apartment on the second floor, up over Brach's drug-store across the street from the Third Avenue Apartments, where the crazy girl lived with her mother.
One July day Yank and I walked down the stairs to sit on a bench under the drugstore awning. It was late morning and already beastly, jungle hot and humid. I shuffled through the morning paper; Yank smoked and twirled a spoon in a glass of iced tea.
Mr. Brach always brought out iced tea when we came to loaf on his bench under the awning those many times we came down to watch the crazy girl.
“She'll be out anytime now. It's almost 11:30.” Brach said, standing in his doorway. He shook his head and went back inside.
By what perversity will two men, one a pulp mag- azine writer and the other an ex-GI still looking for his place in the after-war world, wait across a street to watch a crazy, eightteen-year old girl come out her building, sit, or lean back against a wall and suck candy canes?
“How do you know she's eighteen; she looks younger?” Ambrose asked.
“Her mother told me. I've been over at their place several times."
She's goddamn good-looking. She ...”
“Not the girl?”
“No, the mother, the mother's good-looking. A peach.” I said. “Haven't seen a man around and I bet she's kinda lonely her daughter be- ing crazy and all ...”
The crazy girl didn't come out at least while we sat under the awning outside Brach's that late morning. Ambrose said it was too hot to sit and wait he would go downtown to see a movie.
He got up and headed for the bus stop. I fold- ed my paper, put it under my arm, and cross- ed the street, intending to go over to the pool hall, a half-block down from the crazy girl's front porch.
I reached the girl's side of the street and step- ped over the curb when I heard a yell,
“Ennn-baagh ... ennn-baagh.” The crazy girl came running out from behind a trash shed standing to the side of her building.
“Ennn-baagh ....” The gibberish came out of a gaping mouth that showed small, spaced teeth and heavy gums. I saw thick candy red and white syrup drooling down her lips. In both her hands she held four red and white, barberpole-striped candy canes, most of them sucked down to slender spikes of hard sugar pocked with tiny, wet holes.
She turned and pointed back toward the trash shed. “Ennn-baagh.” When she turned I saw a run of blood stream out from a two deep gash- es on her neck and disappear inside her blouse, then bleed through, pooling a dirty reddish brown on the green fabric over her heaving right breast.
“Are you hurt?” My voice was louder than it need- ed to have been as people speaking to the handi- capped always do. The girl was standing less than a foot from me with one cane-holding hand on my arm.
“Hurt ...?” I pointed to the fang-like wounds on her neck. She pulled me toward the shed. Her breath was confection and I saw for the first time a pair of light green eyes, long lashes, and perfect skin-- take her mouth away and she was beautiful.
Right then her mother burst out the front door of their building. “Dolly! Are you bothering Mr. Re- naud?”
I knew the comment was apology to me more than admonition to the girl, and I was something less than astonished but more than greatly sur- prised when the girl nodded her head and point- ed to the bloody holes in neck. “Ennn-baagh.”
“She's been hurt, bleeding. She ran out to me from the shed, there.” Now tears fell from the crazy girl's light green eyes.
It was too hot in the movie theater. Yank found a diner with a window cooling unit, ordered ice cream with coffee, and loosed a six by eight notebook out his pocket. “Might as well earn a few bucks.” he muttered.
The great blonde, Gondolla, felt the python's violent squeeze and smelled the stink from out its purple, bloody mouth. Bits of its earlier gorge, the jungle pig, yet clung to its fangs and back teeth. Gondolla ....
Yank took a warm-up when the waitress came to the table with a Pyrex pot.
Gondolla screamed, “Ennn-baagh,” and the serpent buried his fangs in the great blonde's neck. A thick syrup of blood and saliva drooled out of her mouth and the animal constricted, crushing the bones of Gondolla's back.
Forty-six words. Two dollars and nineteen cents. Yank knew he would never get rich.
Yank came in around midnight. I was listening to Midnight Ballroom and Frankie Laine was singing, “That's My Desire.” I was half in a pint of Scotch.
“She come out?” Yank asked and helped himself to the bottle.
“Yeah, she came out, just like always sat on the steps and sucked her candy canes. I was headed over to the pool hall when she started shouting something that sounded like 'Ennnbaagh.' Her mother came out, waved to me, and took her in."
"You wonder what goes on in a crazy girl's mind ... "
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