Jeff Jacobson - Wormfood

“Wanna go for a ride?”

My heart stopped. “Uhh … A ride?”

She sat back, pulling her body into the truck, then held up a rifle. For the briefest second, I found that I could tear my eyes off her breasts and focus on the rifle. It looked expensive. But then she stuck her head back out the window and thrust that chest at me again, and I forgot all about the rifle. My gaze slid right back into place, like a couple magnets were pulling at my eyes.

“I just got this,” she said, holding the rifle out to me, “but I can’t figure out how to sight it in. I saw you shoot once before, out at my house, for my dad, and thought you could help me.”

I bent over and slipped through the strands of barbed wire, and walked up to the truck, forcing myself to look only at the rifle. Like its owner, the weapon was beautiful.

It had the basic shape of an ordinary rifle, with a Mannlicher stock, meaning the forestock extended out to the end of the barrel, but I had never seen anything like it. It had a bolt action, with a painstakingly checkered stock, made from a kind of dark, almost black, hardwood that I couldn’t place. Misty held the rifle out to me and I took it with a kind of holy reverence. I recognized only one of the words etched along the barrel. Anschütz.

“That’s gorgeous,” I whispered. “This is an Anschütz rifle.” I didn’t even know that they made hunting rifles. As far as I knew, they made the most accurate target rifles in the world. The name is known as The Rifle of Champions. I mean, if you cared about precision and accuracy at all, then these rifles were the absolute best. Damn nearevery Olympic shooter in the world used an Anschütz. It even had a Zeiss scope. Unbelievable. It was expensive, all right. “This is one hell of a rifle,” I managed to mumble, handing it up to Misty. “It’s beautiful.”

She shrugged. “It’s some German thing, the only thing Dad ever bought that wasn’t American made. Said that since the caliber was small enough for me to handle, he wanted me to have it. But it needs to be sighted in. What do you say?”

I thought about it, wondering what the price would be for getting to work late once again. It didn’t take long for me to decide that whatever the punishment was, it wasn’t going to stop me from taking a ride with Misty and getting to shoot that rifle. It wasn’t just a gun; that was a work of art. I nodded. “Sure. Let’s do it.”

She grinned at me and winked. Actually winked. My heart started hammering at my rib cage again and I walked around the front of the truck, praying that I wouldn’t get a sudden, unmistakable hard-on, which is what happened most of the time when I thought about Misty.

I set my jaw tight, coming up with an emergency plan. If I felt any stirring down there, I would force myself to think about the toilet at Fat Ernst’s. That would be enough to kill any desire in anybody.

Misty put my 30.06 into the gun rack in the back window with the Anschütz. As I lifted myself up and into the seat, she turned the engine over, saying, “I know just the place.”

That got my attention, because I figured we’d simply go over to her father’s ranch, out into the hills. But if we weren’t going to her place … where could we go? Fat Ernst’s toilet!—Fat Ernst’s toilet, I reminded myself.

Misty cranked the radio dial up and some god-awful modern country music filled the cab. At least it wasn’t “Sweet Home Alabama.” She jerked the truck into gear and stomped on the gas. I held on to the armrest tight, trying not to make it look obvious.

She didn’t say much during the ride, just bobbed her head along with the inane music, hair-sprayed blond hair jittering slightly. That was okay. I didn’t know what the hell to say anyway. Instead, I triedto keep an eye on where we were, stealing sidelong glances at her tight jeans. After a while, I figured I’d better say something, and stammered out, “Sorry to hear about your dad.” I winced, realizing I had just repeated the same goddamn thing that Fat Ernst had said. “I, uh, lost my dad too.”

Misty shrugged. “Thanks. It’s okay.” She barely slowed down when she hit the highway and headed east, up into the hills toward the reservoir. She said, “I keep wondering if I’m supposed to feel worse. Dad wasn’t … he had a good heart in there somewhere, maybe sometimes. But I didn’t like how he treated Mom.” She glanced sideways and gave me a cold smile. “And ever since I started seeing boys, me and Dad never got along at all.”

The truck followed the highway farther up into the foothills, up past the long, straight bank the Army engineers had built to contain the Split Rock reservoir. Then she steered the Dodge onto a narrow dirt road that ran parallel to Stony Creek for a ways before it opened out into a huge gravel pit. I’d never been here, but I realized exactly where we were. The Quarry.

The Quarry was part of an abandoned sand and gravel plant that had stood at the edge of Stony Creek. When they had exhausted the supply, the company moved on, taking over a place farther downstream, leaving behind over three acres of wide, empty craters. This was where the juniors and seniors at the high school came to party every Friday and Saturday night, a place that was whispered about in the halls by the younger, less-than-cool kids. I’d heard a lot of stories about this place, exaggerated tales of drunken fights and urgent backseat sex. The Quarry had seemed, to me at least, about as far away as the surface of the moon.

And here I was. With the one and only Misty Johnson, no less. Misty had been the star of many of the stories, but I couldn’t think about that now. I’d save those thoughts for later.

The Dodge slid to a stop in a surge of gravel near the entrance and Misty killed the engine. She pointed at a pile of rusted oil barrels at thefar end of the crater, over a hundred yards away. “Go set up some beer cans on those. We’ll use ’em for targets.”

I was about to ask where the beer cans were when I looked down. Dozens of empty beer cans and bottles lay scattered across the gravel like wounded soldiers after a terrible battle. I climbed out and had a sudden flash of irritation at being ordered around like a servant, but what was I going to do about it? Absolutely nothing. I collected five empty, sticky Budweiser cans and held them against my chest as I jogged through the puddles and mud toward the pile of barrels like an obedient puppy.

I pulled one of the barrels down, rolling it against several that were standing upright. Then I set the cans up, propping them one by one up against the barrels behind the barrel lying on its side. This way, I could track the path of the bullets by wherever they left holes in the barrels around the cans.

When I got back, Misty already had the rifle loaded, bracing it casually on her hip.

I skirted around a blackened fire pit and felt something stick to the bottom of Grandpa’s boot. I twisted my ankle around and reached down to pull off whatever it was, when I saw it, twisted and semitransparent, wedged into the waffled sole. I flinched, jerking my hand away.

For a heart-stopping second, I thought it was one of the worms. Then I figured out what it was, even though I’d never seen one before. A condom. Used, by the look of it. My stomach rolled and dropped somewhere down between my feet. A hot, tight feeling crawled over me, scary and exciting at the same time. I looked up and Misty winked at me again. I shrugged and tried to grin back, scraping off the condom on the gravel.

“So, what do we do first?” she asked.

“Well, we need to brace the rifle, get it steady, find out where it’s shooting.” I looked at the truck. It was too high; we couldn’t brace the rifle across the hood. “You got a blanket, or something like that?” I asked. “We’re gonna have to lie down.”