Wormfood (3 page)

“Bunch of rich motherfuckers, that’s what I say.” Bert spit again.

Junior turned to me and Bert. He was trying not to grin, but it looked like he had just farted in church and was secretly proud of himself. “We oughta pay our respects. It’s the right thing to do.”

“Yeah, goddamn, it’s only right,” Bert said with a serious tone andtossed the rabbit bag into the back. I glanced around at the empty fields and the dark sky. I didn’t want to get left out here, nearly two miles away from Fat Ernst’s restaurant, so I held my breath and climbed back up into the truck.

Junior jammed his cowboy boot down on the gas and the truck shot out onto Highway 200, gigantic tires singing on the slick asphalt. Within seconds, we had pulled up behind the last car in the procession like a shuddering black caboose finally catching up to the end of a creeping train for the dead.

We followed along for a while, but it didn’t take long for Junior to get sick of the slow pace. He kept fidgeting, squirming around and slapping at the steering wheel. “Hey,” he said finally. “I wonder if Misty’s somewhere up there.”

“Holy shit, you’re right,” Bert said in a rush.

Misty Johnson. Earl’s only child. I’d heard that she was failing her senior year; she’d been working too hard at partying and not enough at school. I was seriously thinking of failing a class just so I could maybe see her at summer school.

“I mean, it’s her goddamn dad’s funeral. She oughta be up there, right?”

Bert nodded so enthusiastically I thought his head might fall off.

“Gonna get me some of that sweetness, oh, you best fucking believe it all right.” Junior slapped the steering wheel again. “I’d makeher gag, you goddamn got that right. Just too damn big for her purty little mouth, yessir.” Junior grabbed at his crotch so violently it looked like he had hurt himself. “Uhhh! Uhhh! Uhhh! That sweet blond hair in my left hand, beer in the other—oh yeah! Yeah!”

“Do it!” Bert shouted.

“I’ll fuck her tonsils out!” Junior yelled at the funeral procession, thrusting his hips against the bottom of the steering wheel. My chest got all hot and tight and I started grinding my teeth together. That son of a bitch. He made me sick, talking about Misty Johnson like that. I wanted to grab the back of Junior’s head and slam his face into the windshield, mash that grin into a thousand pieces.

“Then I’d pull out and come right in her eye, just like that!” Junior howled, using both hands as a visual aid.

“You’d be coming in 3-D.” Bert snorted and collapsed against the door in a fit of herky-jerky giggles.

“Fuck this shit,” Junior said suddenly. “Let’s go say howdy.” He wrenched the wheel to the left and the truck leapt into the oncoming lane. Luckily, there wasn’t any traffic for as far as I could see.

Bert waved to the people in the funeral procession as we gathered speed and passed car after car. I leaned forward slightly and glanced out the window. Most of the drivers, almost always thick ranchers sporting even thicker mustaches and cowboy hats so wide the brims resembled goose wings, glanced over at the truck, then ripped their gazes away to stare fixedly at the cars in front of them.

This pissed the Sawyers off even more. I figured they wanted some kind of reaction: fear, anger, annoyance, anything but the inescapable certainty that they were being ignored. Personally, I was glad people were ignoring the truck. I sure as hell didn’t want anyone knowing that I was with Junior and Bert.

“These stuck-up assholes; what’s that word? Arrogant. That’s it. These fuckers are just goddamn arr-o-gant,” Junior yelled. “Hey, Bert. Climb in back, give these rich fucks a taste of the working man’s life.”

A wide smile split Bert’s gray, peeling face. He popped the passenger door open, swung out, and clambered up the slats of wood. I ducked down a little, slid over, and pulled the door shut. Junior leaned across me and shouted out the open window, “You fuckers think your shit don’t smell?” He shoved his arm past my face, thrusting his fist at the window and extending his middle finger. “Fuck all you cunt lickers!”

We had passed about a dozen or so cars by now; the hearse was maybe thirty or forty cars ahead. I glanced out the back window.

Bert grabbed the plastic bag that contained the rabbit and held it up triumphantly, then plucked a huge knife out of his cowboy boot. It looked like something Rambo would carry. The goddamn blade must have been a foot and a half long. Grinning at me, he jabbed the knife repeatedly into the soft parts of the bag. After carefully wiping the blade clean on his jeans, he slid the knife back into his boot and gave the bag a little shake. It leaked.

Junior hit the horn hard with his fist and “La Cucaracha” suddenly blared out at the world from under the hood. I tried to sink even lower in the seat, holding my right hand up near my face. Junior kept screaming “Cocksuckers!” at the passenger window.

Bert leaned against the wooden slats and began to swing the bag around his head like a lasso, whooping and hollering, “Yeeeeemother-fucking
haaaaaaaaaaaaa
!” Dark spatters of blood suddenly appeared on car roofs, windshields, hoods. Bert kept swinging the bag, sending fresh drops of blood out into the air in long, streaming arcs.

People in the funeral procession suddenly started to pay attention to the Sawyer brothers.

Junior, who was getting tired of leaning across me to tell folks exactly what he thought of them, their cars, their children, their animals, and their bank accounts, finally just said, “Here. You drive.”

I shook my head. “I don’t know how to drive. Sorry.”

“What are you, fucking retarded? It’s easy. Here.” Junior grabbed the back of my neck and yanked me across his lap while sliding underme at the same time. The truck lurched and stuttered. I heard Bert fall against the cab.

In the passenger mirror, I saw the black plastic bag hit a Cadillac’s hood and slide up the windshield, leaving a wide, clotted smear of blood in its wake. The bag bounced off the roof of the Cadillac and sailed into the air, finally splashing into the irrigation ditch that ran parallel to the highway. The ditch carried water from the reservoir down into the valley. At the moment, it was overflowing with muddy water.

Junior said, “It’s easy. Just steer us in a straight line and keep the speed up. That’s the gas pedal.” He pointed at one of the three pedals on the floor. “There’s the brake in the middle and the clutch on the left. If you gotta shift, just push in the clutch. Easy.”

“But—,” I started to say.

“Just drive, you fucking idiot,” Junior hollered, then twisted his upper torso out the passenger window and laughed like a fucking lunatic at the procession, flinging broken shards of glee that danced out into the rain. “Fuck you … fuck you … and you, too, motherfucker!”

I clutched the steering wheel so tightly it hurt. My right foot found the pedal on the far right, just dumb luck that it happened to be the gas pedal. I kept my left foot hovering in midair above the other two pedals, just in case. I was acutely aware of every little shudder and shake of the truck, every dip and crack in the asphalt, every sway and every bounce. I knew how to drive in theory, having spent most of a semester in a drivers ed class. But the reality of sitting behind the wheel of a one-ton truck, a goddamn stick shift no less, was an altogether different experience.

I flinched as the roof groaned and buckled. Bert was climbing up onto the top of the cab, dragging another bleeding bag behind him. I kept driving, keeping the needle frozen between twenty and twenty-five miles an hour. Actually, this driving thing wasn’t so hard. I eased the steering wheel over to the left and the truck drifted over like a dumb, obedient dog. I casually slid the truck back over to the right. This wasn’t rocket science, I decided. I gently pressed down on the gaspedal and, sure enough, the needle slowly climbed up to thirty miles an hour. We were over halfway down the procession by now.

Fresh drops of blood hit the windshield and mingled with the raindrops as Bert swung the new bag around in wide loops. I found the windshield wipers and cleaned off the glass. Much better.
This isn’t so bad
, I thought. In fact, it was kind of fun. I pressed harder on the gas. Thirty-five miles an hour.

Junior, protruding halfway out the passenger window and grandly flipping off the funeral procession with both hands, kept yelling, “Suck my fat fucking cock, you fat fucking cunt lickers!”

I kept my eyes on the highway and hit the gas harder. The faster I got away from the funeral procession, the better. The needle, slower now, tenaciously crept toward the very tall, very thin number forty-five. An escalating whine grew from the front of the truck. I found the clutch, and with a little grinding that made my teeth ache, I managed to shift into fourth gear.

Another black plastic bag landed in the back of a brand-new Ford and burst open like a rotten tomato. Bert seemed to be enjoying his new game. Through the rearview mirror, I watched as he enthusiastically jabbed at another bag. Junior chuckled at his brother. “There goes the quota for the week.”

Up ahead, I could see the junction of Highway 200 and Road DD rapidly approaching. Highway 200 dead-ended in a simple barbed wire fence, closing off the solid bank of the freeway, some three hundred yards beyond the junction. Fat Ernst’s Bar and Grill waited just past Road DD, on the east side of the highway, and I decided I’d head for the parking lot to get past the funeral procession as fast as possible. All I had to do was get to the junction first. I figured the hearse would turn right and head west, going up into the foothills to Earl’s house.

Junior flopped back inside, breathing heavily. “These goddamn rich assholes. Think they know everything. Fuckers.” He started to unbuckle his pants.

I tried again. “I don’t know how to drive. Or stop.”

Junior glanced through the windshield, said, “Looks like you’re doin’ a helluva job to me,” kneeled on the seat, facing me, and jerked his pants down. He stuck his ass out the passenger window and screamed in ecstasy, “Lick my ass! Lick it! Lick it!”

I kept increasing the pressure on the gas, and before long the needle hovered around fifty miles an hour. I had this driving thing down cold. Just fifty yards to go.

It never occurred to me that that the hearse might be turning left, heading to the cemetery, down Road DD to the east.

Now, looking back, I can see everything in slow motion: Junior swinging his ass back and forth out the window; Bert launching bag after bag from the back of the truck; and the goddamn hearse turning left, right in front of me. I stomped down on one of the pedals, hoping it was the brake, and jerked the steering wheel to the left.

But it was too late.

I got a brief flash of the back end of the hearse disappearing under the hood, as if the bull skull were attacking the long gray car, trying to eat the smaller vehicle, simply trying to swallow it whole as groaning, gnashing shrieks of metal filled the air. A shadow flashed across the windshield as Bert belly flopped onto the hood, sliding into the skull. I suddenly felt curiously weightless, until the steering wheel reached out and punched me in the chest.

And then everything got dark, numb, and quiet.

Later, Heck told me what had happened. He’d seen the whole thing from the restaurant; he’d been nursing one of his morning Bloody Marys while Fat Ernst sulked behind the bar. Fat Ernst hadn’t been invited to the funeral and was taking the snub personally.

Heck told me, “That Sawyer truck hit the hearse like it was pissed off. The hearse, man, it didn’t have a chance. Went spinning across the highway and
pow!
It hit the bridge hard, man. Craziest thing I ever saw. “Damn hearse flying, then”—he punched his palm—“right into that bridge. Crunched that back end like steppin’ on a bag of chips. You could just imagine what happened to the coffin inside, man.”

At the time, all I knew was that something was stabbing into my ribs, and for a moment there in the darkness, I got scared that I was wrapped up in black plastic and Bert was jabbing at me with his knife. Then I realized that I was on the floor, wedged against the pedals. Gray light filtered into the cab through the cracked, filthy windshield. I tried to blink the black spots out of my eyes.

The world under Junior’s seat—the clipboard wrapped in plastic, several wrinkled
Hustler
magazines, Junior’s extra pair of jeans, empty beer bottles, fast food wrappers, a dog leash, and a gigantic Maglite—slowly swam into focus. I heard, “You stupid fucking idiot,” and glanced up in time to see Junior’s fist swinging down at me. His knuckles smashed into my forehead, slamming my head into the steering column, and great pinwheeling fireworks exploded behind my ears.

“You owe me, cocksucker. You owe me big-time.” Junior’s pompadour spilled forward and hung in his face. Greasy hair stuck to his tongue as he snarled, “My truck better … Holy fucking Christ.” Junior glared through the windshield. “Where’s the fucking skull?”

He quickly zipped up his jeans and wrenched his buckle tight. “If it’s broke you’re dead.” He thrust his cowboy boot against my chest and shoved me against the pedals. “I’m getting real goddamn irritated here.” He punched the passenger door open and jumped out, “Bert! Where the fuck are you?”

I grabbed the driver’s door handle. The door sprang open and I slid out to the asphalt. I righted myself on my knees and gingerly felt around. No broken bones, just a lot of future bruises. I touched a raw spot above my eye and my finger came away covered in blood. Still, I could move without too much pain.

I grabbed my backpack and limped around the front of the truck. It didn’t seem too badly damaged, thanks to the steel bumper. The bull skull was gone, though. The truck faced roughly west, sitting sideways in the middle of Highway 200, maybe twenty yards south of Road DD. I heard Junior shout, “Goddamnit, Bert! The skull’s broke!”

I cautiously stuck my head around the right headlight and stared back up the highway. The hearse lay sideways, half submerged in the surging water, crumpled against the bridge. A cloud of steam or smoke enveloped most of the accident. I could see enough to notice that the back door hung limply on its hinges. The coffin was gone.