I sensed Fat Ernst tensing up behind the bar, but he didn’t seem as important as he used to. “I, uh, I don’t know.”
“Take another drink.”
I didn’t know if I could handle another drink. But I took another sip, a small one. Misty grabbed the bottle, took a few swallows herself. Over at the bar, I could hear Fat Ernst mumble something as he produced another tequila bottle. He unscrewed it, took a long drink, and pushed it over to Ray.
Echoing Fat Ernst, Misty slid the bottle back to me. I took it and drank a solid gulp without being asked. It seared the inside of my throat as it went down, all desert heat and piss, exploding like a soft bomb when it hit my stomach, sending drops of liquid shrapnel into my blood. The room got warm all of a sudden.
“Now,” Misty said in a low voice, so Fat Ernst and Ray couldn’t hear her, “you tell me what happened.”
I started to say, “Well, Slim got these worms in him,” but realized that wouldn’t explain much of anything. I took another drink, and the room got hotter. But I felt okay. In fact, I felt better than okay. Not great, but certainly not as bad as I had been. I thought about it for a moment, then decided the best place to start was at the beginning. I pushed the bottle back to Misty. She drank, then pushed it right back to me. I took another deep swallow and started talking.
“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.
CHAPTER 28
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.