Wormfood, page 2
Grandma didn’t wave back.
CHAPTER 2
The truck hit the narrow blacktop strip of Road E backward hard enough that my head cracked into the compound bow hanging in the back of the cab. Junior wrenched the huge steering wheel around, stomped on the brakes, and shifted savagely into first gear, slamming the gearshift into my thigh.
I readjusted my backpack on my lap and tried to slide over a little on the tattered seat, but not too much. I didn’t want to get any closer to Bert; I was afraid of catching fleas, or maybe even something worse. I just tried to hold my breath and focus on the dancing hula girl stuck to the dashboard. Actually, the figure wasn’t dancing so much as shaking spastically in the vibrating, shivering truck.
We headed west, passing waist-high cornfields and grazing land so green it looked nearly black under the dark, oppressive sky. The town of Whitewood lay to the south at the mouth of a little sliver of a nearly forgotten valley, shaped like a crooked finger that curved up into the high mountain desolation in the northeastern corner of California’s vast Sacramento Valley. The town existed in a gray zone, in the hazy border between the long, agriculturally rich Sacramento Valley and theunforgiving volcanic mountains. Mount Shasta loomed over the town to the northwest, and Mount Lassen waited quietly behind the hills to the southeast.
The business district ran for about three blocks, lined with empty, boarded-up buildings, ending in the town’s only stoplight. It hung suspended from a cable stretched across the street, and high winds killed the light every few weeks. A couple of gas stations, a hardware store, and a poorly stocked grocery store were scattered along the eastern edge of town as if pulled like magnets to the rush of the freeway. The largest structure in town would probably be the high school football bleachers.
Junior casually scratched his balls with his left hand and yawned. He always wore jeans that were two sizes too small. I guess he figured he was showing off his package, but every once in a while he’d drop down on a barstool at Fat Ernst’s and I’d hear that quick rip, like a gasp of relief from the jeans. Split jeans never slowed Junior down much; he always kept an extra pair in the truck.
His finger stabbed at the filthy windshield, pointing at the road ahead. “You see what I see?” he asked in a happy, lilting voice.
A jackrabbit hopped tentatively out of the weeds under a barbed wire fence and out onto the asphalt about thirty yards up the road, near the intersection where Road E crossed over Highway 200. The rabbit’s ears twitched once; then it froze.
“Go get it,” Bert said in a rush, under his breath. Like cats stalking a bug, neither brother moved a muscle for several seconds. Junior flicked the headlights. Once. Twice. He eased off the gas and we coasted quietly for a moment. He cautiously shifted down, still coasting. Junior flicked the headlights one more time, then popped the clutch and the truck shot forward as if stung by a wasp. The rabbit never moved.
A quiet thump.
The brakes squealed and I damn near lost a few teeth kissing the hula girl.
“Goddamn!” Junior shouted. “You see that? Goddamn!” Thetruck slid to a stop at the edge of Highway 200 in a cloud of exhaust and melted rubber.
Junior pulled a clipboard wrapped in a plastic grocery bag from under the seat. He made a neat little check mark on the paper. Blurry snake tattoos slithered up his arms. The clipboard was carefully placed back into the bag and returned to its spot under the seat. “And there’s our fucking quota for the week.”
One of the Sawyer brothers’ jobs was driving around, picking up roadkill for the county. They’d collect anything dead off the highways. Rabbits, possums, skunks, squirrels, raccoons, cats, dogs; anything, as long as it was dead or dying, always trying to reach the quota early in the week, in order to take advantage of more free time. That way, they could work for Fat Ernst earning money for odd jobs here and there, like tearing down the barn, unclogging sump pumps, or digging out septic tanks.
In addition, Junior and Bert ran the only hide and tallow business in Whitewood. They’d haul dead livestock back to their place, way back up Road E, past Grandma’s trailer, past where the pavement ended up in the hills. Usually they would collect dead cattle, but sometimes sheep and hogs as well, boiling the carcasses down into glue or dog food. The Sawyer family used to own a legitimate slaughterhouse and sold meat all over the place, but it didn’t surprise anybody when they got shut down one day by the health inspector.
Later, the health inspector disappeared.
Stories and rumors and hushed whispers floated through the bars and grocery store about it. Most of these stories were about Pearl Sawyer, Bert and Junior’s mother. She’d been around for as long as anyone could remember, living in that same house. I had never seen her. Supposedly, she never left the house anymore. Not since her own accident with the lawnmower.
Junior kicked his door open and jumped to the pavement. Bert did the same. I climbed out too, if for nothing else than to get some freshair. Thunder crackled far off to the west, far enough that I thought it might be a while before the full force of the storm reached us, but the clouds above were slipping across the sky and tumbling over each other at a frightening speed. The air smelled brilliantly clean, almost sweet.
Junior grabbed a snow shovel from the back of the truck, sauntered over and yelled, “Thank you!” down at the dead rabbit.
Faded stickers were plastered along the truck’s rear bumper. “Gun Control Is Hitting What You Aim At,” and “I Love Animals—THEY’RE DELICIOUS.” Rickety slats of wood enclosed the truck bed and a large steel beam jutted out from the back of the truck. Several black plastic garbage bags lay clustered around the base of the beam near the cab. They looked plump. Full.
I got closer and saw that the rabbit was just a bloody patch of light brown fur. Long ears lay flat against the wet pavement. One vacant eye stared up into space, unmindful of the falling rain. Bert grabbed an empty garbage bag from the back and whipped it open.
I thought I heard a low, mechanical hum, but the rain smothered the sound before I could tell what it was.
Junior slid the shovel under the dead rabbit with a thick, grating sound, and Bert held the bag open as his brother tilted the snow shovel sideways and dropped the lump of fur inside. The rabbit hit the bottom of the black plastic like a sock full of sand. The low sound came again, and this time it got louder.
We all turned and stared in silence as a very long, very gray hearse rolled slowly past the front of the truck, heading south, down the highway toward town. A long line of cars, mostly Cadillacs with a few late-model pickups mixed in, wound slowly out of the hills, solemnly following the hearse. Little orange flags, hanging wet and limp in the rain, adorned the hood of each vehicle.
It was Earl Johnson’s funeral procession.
Earl Johnson was, well, had been the richest rancher around White-wood. He owned nearly three thousand acres in the northeastern end of the valley, stretching up into the foothills around the reservoir.
The cars continued to stream slowly past us; California’s elite ranchers were in town to pay their respects. I guessed it didn’t matter if anybody had actually liked the man. He had had plenty of money and power, and his funeral was the social event of the year.
I was kind of ashamed, but part of me was glad he was dead. Last year, I’d applied for a job at his ranch. Well, it was more of a contract position. I’d heard that Earl was looking for somebody to kill coyotes. So I walked out to his house with Grandpa’s 30.06 and found Earl out near the dog pens.
I explained that I’d had considerable experience with the rifle and I’d be more than happy to kill some coyotes. If he wanted, I was prepared for a demonstration and had already picked out my target, a knothole in a stump, maybe an inch in diameter, just over two hundred yards out in the field, with the creek bank as a backdrop for safety. I pointed it out, pulled the rifle up, and fired, all in less than three seconds, blowing the knothole out the back of the stump. But that son of a bitch had just laughed in my face, told me to get the hell off his property and to come back when I’d grown a pair. Turned out he held a grudge against my grandfather and wasn’t about to hire me anyways.
I wasn’t the only one who wouldn’t miss him.
“Fucking cheap bastard,” Junior snapped.
Bert hawked up a large ball of phlegm and spit nearly fifteen feet at the funeral procession.
Junior viciously flung the snow shovel into the back of the truck and stalked toward the highway. “Who the fuck do these people think they are?” he yelled at the passing cars.
“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.
CHAPTER 3
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-fuckinghaaaaaaaaaaaaa!” 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.
