Jeff Jacobson - Wormfood

The pressure around my throat suddenly vanished as Junior released me and grabbed at his own throat. I caught a quick flash of Misty’s face over his right shoulder. Her jaw was set, eyes on fire. She had that leash wrapped around Junior’s neck and was doing her best to choke the life out of him.

Pearl’s cane cracked through the sky into Misty’s skull. Misty dropped to the loading dock, but she didn’t let go of the leash. Junior arched his back, clawing at the leather. Pearl brought her cane down again, viciously striking Misty in the jaw. Misty let go then, rolling into a ball, covering her head with her arms. Pearl whipped the cane over her shoulder, bringing it down in a whistling arc, smacking into Misty’s body. It reminded me of Junior hitting the crowbar in the coffin. She kept hitting Misty, again and again, cracking that cane into Misty’s arms and head and hands.

Before I could react, Junior grabbed a fistful of my hair and twisted, almost rolling me off the plank. He pulled me sideways and shoved my head down toward the black water. Worms rose out of the surface, reaching, straining for my skin as if they were steel shavings drawn to a magnet.

“Don’t kill him yet. We need his blood,” I heard Pearl yell, then saw her lopsided, leering face under Junior’s arm, watching me with her bright right eye. She held the cane in her right hand, buckle in her left. “And his liver.”

Junior rolled me back onto the plank and squeezed my throat again. The gray sky got darker. I heard Junior’s harsh breathing coming down a long, winding tunnel. And then—almost at the other end of the tunnel—I heard Grandma’s voice.

“That’s enough fun for today. You best let go of my grandson.”

CHAPTER 32

Junior jerked his head around. Under his arm, past Pearl’s hunched figure, I saw Grandma’s short, squat frame filling the back doorway of the restaurant. She wore her giant straw hat and Grandpa’s thick neoprene fishing waders up to her ample waist. The .10 gauge rested comfortably on her walker. For a second, I wondered how she’d made it through the worms, but then I realized the waders had protected her.

Junior squinted down at me and didn’t move.

“Maybe you didn’t hear me,” Grandma said, casually bringing up the side-by-side barrels of her shotgun. “I swear to the good Lord, I’m gonna scatter your innards to hell and back.” She paused. “I mean it, son.”

Pearl started to say something, but Grandma wasn’t in the mood and squeezed the trigger. The blast disintegrated the bottom five inches of Pearl’s cane and drove a hole the size of a grapefruit through the loading dock. Grandma rode the recoil, letting the gun rock and buck in her hands, and when the gun smoke cleared, the barrels were aimed at Junior’s head.

Pearl stared down at her feet. “You … you shot me.”

Junior instantly let go of my throat and scooted backward onto the loading dock, asking, “Ma? Ma? You okay, Ma?”

I sucked in a giant breath, coughed like hell, and almost rolled off the plank into the open Dumpster. I remembered that my leg had been dangling in the water and jerked it out with a splash. I couldn’t feel whether any worms were eating into my leg; I couldn’t seem to focus my eyes. Everything had gone numb except the inside of my throat and lungs. Each breath felt like I was swallowing gulps of lava.

“Arch? How you doing?” Grandma asked.

“I’m here,” I said, and my voice sounded hollow and scratchy. “Thanks.”

“What’s all over your face?” Grandma asked me, but kept her eyes and shotgun on Pearl and Junior.

“I dunno,” I said, crawling off the plank. “She marked my face for some kind of something.” I watched Pearl’s expression closely, feeling guilty, like I’d just crossed a line by admitting that Pearl had tried to kill me. “They wanted my blood.”

“You people are goddamn lucky you didn’t hurt my grandson or this girl any worse,” Grandma said, her tone calm and controlled, but a deaf guy could have heard the hatred seeping through the spaces between each word.

Junior ignored her. He kneeled before Pearl, inspecting her feet. “Jesus, Ma,” he nearly sobbed, “You been shot.” Pearl stood still, bracing herself with her good arm on Junior’s head, staring at Grandma. Junior wiped at Pearl’s shoes with trembling fingers. A dozen tiny round bubbles of blood, no bigger than peas, kept rising up at the top of the leather after each sweep of Junior’s hand.

“Don’t you worry about that none,” Pearl said to her son, never taking her eyes off Grandma. “It don’t hurt.”

I knelt over Misty as thunder growled out across the valley. Her left arm rested across her chest and I flinched when I saw her hand. The fingers stuck out in all directions, mangled, as if she’d stuck her hand in a fan belt. Blood ran down her temple. Her bottom lip hadbeen split, and one eye was nearly black, swollen shut. Her other eye was closed. At least her breathing was slow and steady.

“I been waiting a long time now,” Grandma said quietly, watching Pearl carefully. “Kept watching the town, ever since the day you dumped that blood all over the sidewalk in front of the butcher’s. That’s when I knew. Been praying I’d find you like this one day.”

Pearl drew her cracked lips back from her decayed teeth in a defiant, tight smile. “You shoulda prayed that you’d never see me ever again, you shriveled teat. When I get tired of you and your chicken-shit little grandson here, you’re gonna pray for death instead.” Pearl raised the blasted, splintered end of her cane until it pointed at Grandma’s torso, where the waders stopped, just under Grandma’s large breasts.

“Pearl,” Grandma said with a tired smile, “you couldn’t scare a goddamn chipmunk away.”

“You’d be surprised at what I could scare away. Got your grandson shaking in them old boots.” Pearl fingered her cane, stroking it slowly, obscenely. “I can still smell Bill in ’em.”

Grandma exhaled sharply. “I ain’t here to talk about my husband. He’s gone.” She coughed. A tiny trickle of blood ran from her right nostril and collected on her bottom lip.

Pearl’s smile got wider and her eye got brighter. The cane quivered. “In some ways, maybe. Maybe not. Dead? Yeah, he’s dead. Gone?” She shook her head slightly. “Naw. He ain’t gone. Not by a long shot. He still … lingers. Like them boots. He’s still around, you just gotta know how to listen.” Pearl paused a moment, giving all of us a chance to listen as the rain softly hit the surface of the floodwater, the roof, the loading dock. “He talks to me now. And sometimes, when the wind is just right, I can still hear his screams. Screaming out there in the dark. Cryin’ for you, for anybody, to come and save him. Course, toward the end, he doesn’t get many words out, as such. Just starts in with them screams. Sounds like a goddamn helpless old woman. It feels … well, it helps me sleep, listening to him out there, out there in that hog pen, just screaming, screaming.”

“Don’t push it,” Grandma said, easing the shotgun up to Pearl’s head. More blood slipped from Grandma’s chin, dripping onto her sundress.

“Go ahead and shoot me then, if you think you can. You don’t have the balls, you worthless old bitch. You should have let him go. He would have been happier with me. And he knows that now. I would have satisfied him, showed him what a real woman could do.”

Grandma smiled thinly and licked her lips. Her tongue smeared the blood, making it look like she’d applied a serious shade of lipstick. She said, “He wanted a real woman; that’s why he chose me. Not some goddamn skinny sideshow freak. He married me, remember?”