Wormfood (24 page)

“Okay. I don’t know about all of this, but it’s the best I can figure. I think it started with your dad.” I kept going, telling Misty about the worms that ate into her dad when he was in the ocean, and since he hadn’t been embalmed, nobody’d seen the worms, and it would have never mattered, but he ended up in the ditch on the way to the funeral and the worms had gotten into the irrigation system and had swam off to God knows where, including Slim’s property, and I just kept going, drinking and talking, up to when me and the Sawyer brothers had pulled a dead steer out of the body pit.

“Wait a minute,” Misty said. “You guys stole a fucking dead cow out of my uncle’s pile of dead animals?”

“Well, it was a steer. And it wasn’t so much a pile exactly. More like a big hole in a ravine, all filled with water.”

Misty only nodded, eyes sharp.

I told her about taking it back to the Sawyers’ barn, and all the worms that came out of it, and after that I didn’t know what happened to the meat. Just that the next day Fat Ernst all of a sudden had two boxes of fresh meat.

Misty closed her eyes.

I kept going, words escaping out of my mouth. “Then Heck got sick. I mean, he got
real
sick. And then, uh, he died.” I didn’t tell her he was still out there in the Dumpster. “Slim saw it, watched Heck die, and I think he might have been eating a cheeseburger or something maybe, I don’t really remember. He took off and that’s all I know.”

“And you let him eat it.”

“What?”

“The cheeseburger.”

I didn’t want to mention that I had cooked the goddamn thing and served it up to him as well. “I didn’t know … I really didn’t.” I took another swig from the bottle. “Look, as soon as I figured it out, I came in here this morning and dumped all that meat out. Just grabbed it and dumped it in the Dumpster. It’s gone, gone,
gone
.” I whisked my hands together like I was brushing off some dirt.

Fat Ernst choked on his tequila and coughed hoarsely.

Misty ignored him. “Gone, huh? All I know is that because of you, I’m stuck in here with you three assholes. My father’s body is all fucked up and my uncle is dead now too. Because of you.”

I didn’t know what to say. In a way she was right. No, scratch that. She was right, period. I was reaching out to take another drink of tequila when she punched me, hard. I never even saw it coming. Onesecond, I’m reaching for the bottle; the next, her fist was nothing but a blur as it slammed into my chin. I got a quick flash of the ceiling and then my head smacked into the wall behind me.

She started to cry then, rubbing her knuckles. I guess I deserved to get punched. I hoped it made her feel a little better. Then she kicked me under the table, heel sinking into my balls. I don’t think I deserved
that
.

My world collapsed into tiny folds and misshapen shards until a tidal wave of pain took over completely. White-hot seething agony rocketed up out of my balls into my stomach, my chest, my face, into my skull, then bounced back down and said howdy to everywhere else it hadn’t touched. I couldn’t breathe. Every muscle, every fiber, every nerve suddenly shrieked as if I’d fallen into a boiling cauldron of hurt. I tipped over sideways in the booth, alternately clutching at my groin and drawing my hands back, afraid to touch anything.

I don’t know when Misty got up. I somehow heard our bottle of tequila explode into more bottles somewhere over Fat Ernst’s head. I didn’t care. Everything hurt too goddamn much. I think they started yelling at each other around then, but the only thing I remember clearly at all was the floor rising in a wave as Fat Ernst’s Cadillac suddenly exploded through the floor and wall.

I slid out of the booth involuntarily and hit the floor, still curled up in a fetal position, clutching at my balls, wondering how the white Cadillac had managed to drive itself up into the restaurant. Part of the ceiling crashed down, covering the jukebox, which blurted, “Lord, I’m coming home to you—,” before falling silent. Underneath the building, the wooden six-by-six supports groaned.

I rolled over and gasped for air just in time to see Junior appear in the crack in the front wall, running up the inclined hood of Fat Ernst’s Cadillac. He ducked under the sagging roof, slid down the chrome grille, and landed heavily on the pitched floor. Clutching a lumpy gunnysack to his stomach, he slammed sideways into the bar, sending stools flying.

Ray pushed himself away from the canted bar and went for the Redhawk. He hadn’t quite managed to pull the nine-and-a-half inch barrel clear of the holster when Junior thrust the gunnysack at Ray’s head. It seemed to pop open in the air, falling away from a short length of thin, twisting rope. Junior hit the floor and rolled onto his left shoulder, still moving fluidly, still one continuous explosion of movement since he jumped off of the Cadillac’s hood. The broken nose didn’t seem to slow him down at all.

The patchy brown rope landed in Ray’s face, curling around his head for a brief second, then fell away. Ray cried out once, dragging his pistol away from the holster. I realized the brown rope was a goddamn baby rattlesnake about the same time Ray shot himself in the foot. I felt, more than heard, the powerful report, and saw the front half of Ray’s right foot instantly burst into a thick cloud of red meat.

By this point, Junior had leapt onto the bar and was kicking Fat Ernst in the head. I could only watch all of this through a fog of agony from my spot on the floor. Misty was somewhere behind me, crouching under one of the tables. Fat Ernst slipped off his stool and fell out of sight behind the bar. Junior didn’t quit; he jumped off the bar and landed on Fat Ernst, savagely kicking and punching him the whole time. Ray pitched forward, still clutching his pistol. He hit the floor hard and didn’t move. I wasn’t sure where the snake had slithered off to.

Junior finally decided Fat Ernst had had enough and came around the end of the bar. He winked and blew Misty a kiss, stopped long enough to deliver a solid kick to my stomach. To be honest, I barely felt it. All I know is that I slid back into the wall, the floor got soft and warm, and darkness closed around my head like a wet blanket.

When I opened my eyes, I was lying on the floor in front of the bar. Pain ricocheted through every inch of my body. I tried to sit up, but something yanked me back down. I looked over and discovered that my right wrist had been handcuffed to the brass railing that ran along the bottom of the bar. It must have been Ray’s handcuff. I kept blinking, trying to make sense of my surroundings. The walls and floor had taken on warped, surrealistic angles, like I had fallen into a bad dream. On the floor next to me, I watched some kind of liquid, water or tequila, trickle steadily toward the front door. I realized that the warped angles weren’t my imagination; the walls and the floor were buckled, twisted, and mangled from the impact of the Cadillac.

That didn’t make much sense either, so I tried to move my head slowly to the left. The smashed front end of Fat Ernst’s Cadillac had been forced into the western half of the restaurant. The only thing I could figure was that Junior had hit the back of the Cadillac with his truck, driving it into the building.

I kept blinking and the blurry, dark spots in my vision started to slip away. A large, fuzzy blob directly in front of me swam into focus. It was Fat Ernst. He was tied to one of the dining chairs with barbed wire. His wrists had been bound together behind him at the small of his back. More wire was wrapped around his ankles and the front chair legs. The strands stretched tight against his chest, barbs sunk deep; the two ends must have been twisted together with a pair of pliers. It looked like Fat Ernst was unconscious; his head lolled around on his chest, eyes shut. Actually, I wasn’t quite sure if his eyes were closed or not; it was hard to tell through all the blood on his face. Junior had really gone to town on him.

I kept blinking spots out of my eyes and saw Misty. She was sitting in the booth, back to the window, with the burlap gunnysack covering her head. I hoped the snake wasn’t in it. I couldn’t see her face because of the sack, but I knew she was awake; I could hear soft, strangled sobs and see her chest hitch once in a while. Her hands were tied in front of her with what looked like an extension cord. A flat strip of leather, like some kind of dog leash, trailed down her chest and wrapped around the table column.

Ray lay facedown on the floor near the restrooms, twitching a little once in a while. His face was turning black and puffy

The hood of the Cadillac creaked, and that was when it finally hit me.

We were all in very big trouble.

Junior appeared, carrying a dark bundle of rags on his back. He eased down the chrome grille, gently lowering the tangle of clothes to the tilted floor. The rags produced a cane, and the misshapen bundle lurched up the tilted floor toward Ray. The cane, a knotted and twisted piece of dark, shiny hardwood, thunked into the floor every now and then.

Pearl was here.

And my blood turned to ice water.

Pearl jabbed at Ray with her cane and got a low moan in response. She clucked something, turned toward the bar, and I think she smiled, but it was hard to tell. She wasn’t much fun to look at. If I had to guess, I’d bet that she looked more like Bert than Junior, and I suspected they had two different fathers.

It was downright impossible to know for sure what she had looked like before the accident with the lawnmower. She kept her left arm curled in close to her chest; the limb looked ravaged and useless. It reminded me of the short, tiny arms of a Tyrannosaurus rex. Her head was cocked to the side, like a bird watching a bug, and her greasy, clotted hair started somewhere around the top of the crown of her head, hanging down to the back of her neck in gnarled clumps. I’d seen her before, that night when we brought the dead steer back to the Sawyers’, and I knew she was thin, but I wasn’t prepared for just how little flesh covered her bones. I wondered how she had the strength to even move.

I’d seen her from a distance, even heard her voice up close, but nothing scared me as bad as watching her limp up the inclined floor to me and Fat Ernst.

“See, Ma?” Junior said proudly. “Got everybody tied down just like you told me.” He still had duct tape on his nose, but his eyes were bright and excited.

“Yessssss,” Pearl said, sounding too much like another goddamn rattlesnake as she got closer. “You done good, Junior.” Her body was scary enough, but her face was worse. Like her sons, she didn’t have many teeth left. The left side looked like the doctors had just gathered up all the loose skin—pulling it sideways across the top of her head, keeping it unnaturally tight on the right side of her face, and then stapling and stapling all that extra flesh to her skull in wild, irregular folds. Her jagged right eyebrow was up near the top of her forehead, giving that eye an arched, perpetually surprised look, while the hair of the left eyebrow was gone completely. The flesh around the brow sagged down to the left cheek, leaving nothing but a curving, hollow slit, and the skin on the left side of her face rippled and dribbled down to a chin so sharp I could have sliced tomatoes on it.

The Cadillac creaked again, and Bert appeared in the splintered hole, ducking under the low roof. He looked around, wobbling a little, taking everything in without expression. He’d lost the old tie he had been using as a sling, and now his cast dangled limply down around his hip. He slid down the grille and sat on the bumper. His face, normally a kind of bleached gray color, had lightened even more, taking on the color of the belly of a dead fish. He reminded me of Slim when I was on the fence watching the rancher blow his nose that one last time into the blue handkerchief.

Pearl stopped near Fat Ernst, leaning on her cane. She fixed that staring, round right eye on me, and again I got the skin-crawling feeling that she was somehow looking directly into me, deep into my thoughts, seeing right into my darkest fears. Which, at that point, were probably painfully obvious. I tried to pull my legs in, anything to try and get as far away from her as I could. She smiled again, the left side of her face curling inward, creating all kinds of fun new folds and wrinkles in the ruined flesh.

Junior was happy. “Can I have her now, Ma?”

Something went cold inside of me, something almost worse than Pearl looking at me. I flashed over to Misty. She hadn’t moved.

“First thing’s first, Junior.” Pearl lifted her cane and jabbed it into the back of Fat Ernst’s fleshy skull. “Wake him up.”

Junior edged around the chair until he was directly in front of Fat Ernst, bent down, and spit in Fat Ernst’s face. “Rise and shine, you fat fuck.”

Fat Ernst didn’t move.

Junior clamped Fat Ernst’s nose between his thumb and forefinger, shaking the bigger man’s head. Finally, Fat Ernst opened his mouth, sucking in a halting breath. I could see his eyes open, but just barely, just thin slits that cracked the dried blood. He coughed, deep in his chest.

“That’s right, wakee wakee, little snakee,” Junior said. “Take a good look around, Mr. Tough Guy. Hard way?” Junior laughed, a prickly sound that bounced around the slanted walls and sunken floor. “Hard way my ass, you fat fuck. I’ll show you the fucking hard way.” He slid his fingers into Fat Ernst’s nostrils and yanked. Fat Ernst’s chins jiggled up and out; his fingers popped open, then clenched back intomassive fists. The muscles in his forearms tightened, and I could see the skin around the barbed wire get white, straining around the wires, anchoring the barbs even deeper in his flesh.

“That’s right. Smell the bacon, you puddle of puke. You’re the one who wanted it the hard way.” Junior put his hands on Fat Ernst’s knees and froze, whispering. “We just want the buckle. That’s all. Just give it up, and we’re gone with the wind.”

Fat Ernst didn’t say anything for a moment. When he did, it sounded like wet concrete coated his throat. “This is my place. You best get the fuck out of here before I get pissed.”

Junior just nodded. “I’m gonna ask you one more time. Just once more—that’s it. You answer me, and, hey, we’re outta your hair. You wanna be a tough guy, then it’s gonna have to be the hard way. It’s gonna hurt. It’s gonna hurt bad.” He leaned in even closer, kissed Fat Ernst on the forehead. “Where’s the buckle?”