Fat Ernst was dead and so were my escape plans.
Pearl yanked her cane out of his right eye, and forced it down deep into his left eye as well, just for the hell of it, I guess. She paused for a moment, working the cane back and forth, really scrambling Fat Ernst’s brains, back curved, leaning over Fat Ernst like some kind of thin buzzard hunched over a dead squirrel on the highway. She rested and took a moment to catch her breath. The cane in Fat Ernst’s eye socket stood up all by itself.
Pearl took another deep breath, let it out slowly, and jerked the cane out of Fat Ernst’s head. She slammed the cane on the floor, shaking off tiny spatters of blood and bits of meat and shouted, “All right then, boys. Boys! Bert! Get over here, stop screwing around. What the hell’s wrong with you?”
Bert didn’t look up. “I … I can feel it moving … in my arm. It hurts …”
“Quit whining or I’ll give you something to whine about. Now,” Pearl leaned on her cane, swiveling her head around. “You boys peel this place open like an orange. This goddamn cocksucker hid that buckle in here somewheres. I can smell it.”
“What about him?” Junior pointed at me. Everything got tight and frozen inside, down deep under my stomach.
Pearl fixed her staring eye on me. She chuckled. “If Ernst wasn’t gonna tell us, what makes you think he’d tell this little pip-squeak?” She leaned over me, slamming the cane into the floor between my thighs, too damn close to my crotch. “Eh? You know where it is?”
I shook my head enthusiastically. “Fat Ernst never told me anything.” I was hoping that would be enough, and because I couldn’t help them, they’d have to let me go.
Pearl nodded, leaned back. “That’s what I thought. Junior, drag his hide out back, dump him in the water. Let them worms chew on him for a while.”
Blind terror scrabbled up my chest and filled my throat. I opened my mouth, but nothing came out.
“Hey,” Misty said. “Stop picking on him. He’s just the fucking dishwasher. He wouldn’t know anything.”
Pearl whipped her head around and said, “Shut your hole, bitch. This don’t concern you none. You keep quiet or I’ll take care of you myself. And let me tell you, there’s far worse things that can happen to you than just letting my boys loose on you. Things worse than that pretty, empty little head can ever imagine.” She was quiet for a moment, waiting to see if Misty would say anything else.
Please, please, keep quiet, I thought. I’d rather die than see her get hurt. Misty dropped her glare, clasping her hands together. I could see the knuckles grow white.
“Junior,” Pearl said sharply. “You do like I asked now.”
“You got it, Ma,” Junior said, digging around in his jeans for a moment. He pulled out Ray’s key ring, squatting down in front of me. “This’ll teach you not to go around shooting at our truck, you little bastard,” he said and unlocked the handcuff.
“Please,” I whispered, as Junior jerked me to my feet. “Please, wait, I—”
A guttural cry from the corner stopped Junior. The cry started low, then rose to a high-pitched, almost childlike scream. Bert was on his feet, back to the front window, broken arm raised high. His scream reached a fever pitch as he brought the cast down against the table. The dirty plaster cracked with a dull crunch. Bert jerked his right arm up, brought it down a second time. Plaster crumbled off. He smashed his arm down against the table again and again, clawed at the disintegrating plaster. Ragged chunks of the thick plaster were peeled away, revealing a swollen, bulbous upper arm, almost black from the congealed blood inside. Bert stopped to catch his breath and jerked his Rambo knife out of the table.
“You put that—,” Pearl started to say, but before another word made it past her lips, Bert brought the knife around in a tight arc across his chest and sank half of the thirteen-inch blade into his shoulder, just above the cracked top of the cast. It didn’t seem to bother him much, because he yanked it out and jabbed it in again. And again.
“Bert!” Pearl shouted. “You stop that this instant!”
Bert wasn’t listening. He stabbed himself a fourth time, sinking it awful damn deep this time, then worked that handle around, twisting it into the thin meat of his shoulder like he was digging for clams at the beach. Blood cascaded down the black skin and yellow cast. He kept at it like a man possessed.
We all watched, transfixed, nobody moving until finally Pearl snapped out of it and yelled to Junior, “Stop him! Now!”
Junior brought his left elbow up in a swift jab and smashed it into my nose. I fell back into the bar and sank to the floor, my butt landing painfully on the brass bar. Then there was some sort of scuffle between Bert and Junior, but the only thing I really remember clearly was that at some point Bert was on the floor, like me. He slowly pulled something long, flexible, and bloody from his wounded shoulder and held it triumphantly out for his mother and brother to see. He flicked his wrist, flinging the thing away from him, and Junior promptly ground it into the floor with his boot.
Several long seconds of heavy breathing. I heard Junior say, “Too goddamn much blood. He ain’t gonna make it.”
Quiet for a moment. Then Pearl, “Go get my bag.”
The next thing I knew, I was lying on my back on the bar, and Pearl was saying, “Now you hold still,” as she jabbed something cold into the crook of my right arm, at the soft part at the inside of my arm at the elbow. It was some kind of goddamn needle attached to a long stretch of surgical tubing.
The only thing my fogged brain could think of to say was, “Hey, hey, waitaminute … is that thing sterile?”
Pearl gave me her lopsided smile as the yellow tube grew red, starting at my arm and traveling down into Bert’s arm. He was down beneath me, lying on a table that had been shoved against the bar. He looked unconscious or dead. His shoulder was wrapped with the rags that Fat Ernst used to mop up spilled beer on the bar.
“Wait … wait. We don’t even have the same blood type,” I croaked. Of course, I was just guessing, but it seemed like the smart thing to say.
Pearl smiled at me again, and it was clear that she could care less. “Blood is blood,” she whispered, sliding her finger down my forehead. “It don’t matter when life is leaving.” Her touch on my nose left something warm and slimy behind. After a moment, I realized she was marking me, painting something on my face. “Everything you think you know, all your science, all your books and facts and bullshit, it means nothing. Nothing. There are forces out there, powers beyond what is known, out beyond your pathetic nightmares, little boy.”
She turned to Bert after finishing with me, and dipped her finger into a bowl filled with something black. She left a streak of the liquid straight down his bare chest. On either side of the line, she started drawing weird symbols and shapes, mostly around Bert’s heart. “I can read clouds. I can hear what the wind whispers. I can see in the dark.” She dug around in her bag for a moment, pulled out some kind of metal shaft. It glinted in the gray light and I realized it was a goddamn scalpel.
Without hesitating, she bent back over Bert and started tracing the lines with the scalpel. Blood seeped out, ran down his chest. “I can talk to snakes. To wasps. To cockroaches. To worms,” Pearl said proudly. “And I can control blood. Hell, I brought Junior back three times now.” She looked across me to Junior, standing on the other side of the bar. “‘Member that truck? Thought you’d never wake up. Good thing that driver was a big pig of a man, held a lot of blood in all that fat.”
My blood continued to drain down the tube, into Bert.
Pearl started chanting something in her hissing, garbled voice as she cut into Bert, carving, slicing, permanently etching those strange shapes and symbols into his flesh. It sounded a lot like what she had been singing when I had seen her at the burn barrel in her backyard that night we slaughtered the steer. I’m not dying like this, I thought. Not like this, with my blood slowly being siphoned out of me like some asshole sucking gas out of a car’s goddamn gas tank.