Jeff Jacobson - Wormfood

I’d heard about Earl’s belt buckle a few times in the bar. I guess he’d won CAA Cowboy of the Year a few years ago, and as a prize they’d given him a giant silver and gold belt buckle. The gold had been sculpted into a relief showing a cowboy and his horse crossing a mountain meadow at night. Dozens of small diamonds had been set into the silver sky, representing stars. Way I heard it, the buckle wasn’t cheap, not by a long shot.

Heck nodded. “That’s what they said, man.”

“Jesus,” Fat Ernst repeated. Both men touched their own large belt buckles, but I didn’t know if it was just to reassure themselves that their own buckles were still there, or if it was out of sympathy, like Catholics making the sign of the cross. Fat Ernst grunted. “I’ll bet Slim ain’t too happy about not getting his hands on that buckle.”

“What the hell is that?” Heck asked.

I saw something roll over in the water. It looked kind of long, cylindrical, and gray, like a small hose or something. But the water kept surging around, and it was gone before I got a good look at it.

“I reckon part of the lower intestine,” Fat Ernst said knowingly. “I heard he’d been down on the bottom for something like two weeks. So Hutson couldn’t embalm Earl. Read that they can’t do it to bodies that have been in salt water too long.”

Pieces of the corpse were starting to float down the smaller ditch, toward the foothills. “Guess he wants to go home,” Fat Ernst said hoarsely, trying not to laugh. Heck snorted, covering his mouth.

“Did you see what happened?” Misty asked me.

I was suddenly painfully aware of the blood on my forehead, collecting and clotting into a stiff scab in my eyebrow. “I, uh, no … not really.”

Fat Ernst didn’t know what to say either. “Ah … we … uh, were real sorry to hear about the loss of your father.”

Misty gave a quick nod, keeping her eyes on the ditch.

One of the farmers came over, took a look and screwed up his face like he’d just bitten into a rotten lemon. “Dear Lord … You think we should try and maybe … I don’t know, maybe try and collect him? For later, I mean … to be buried?”

“Shit, I dunno,” Fat Ernst said. “I’d say just wait. You can get all the parts later on, downstream, if need be.” The man nodded, looking relieved. Suddenly, Fat Ernst noticed me. “What the hell are you doing?”

I looked at my shoes. “Uhh … nothing.”

“Exactly. Get into gear and get to work. You ain’t getting paid to stand around and gawk.”

I nodded and stepped away from the edge of the ditch. It was time to get to work. As I walked across the highway through the gentle rain toward the spinning neon sign, I glanced back and saw Misty watching me. I turned around and kept moving. I heard Fat Ernst tell Heck, “Just can’t get decent help these days.” Then, quieter. “Swear to God, that boy is dumber than a box of dirt.”

CHAPTER 6

Fat Ernst had big plans for his restaurant. He had it built next to where he knew they were putting in the freeway. Actually, he bought up a lot of land where he thought they might build the freeway, just in case. That’s how he owned the land where Grandma and I lived. Paid off one of the county commissioners to make sure they put an off-ramp next to the restaurant, so folks going down the freeway could pull off nice and easy, spend some money, have some food. But before they could get around to planning the on-and off-ramps, the commissioner had a heart attack. The next guy who got put in charge just happened to be part owner in a gas station farther south down the freeway, on Highway 14. So the off-ramp never got put in next to the restaurant. They didn’t even bother to build an overpass, just killed Highway 200 right there.

Well, that pissed Fat Ernst off so much he showed up at the next city council meeting, ranting and shouting about how the council was nothing but a bunch of commie motherfuckers.

The next day, a county health inspector showed up at the restaurant. Closed Fat Ernst down. Fifty-three counts of health violations. Fat Ernst didn’t have much of a choice; he had to comply. Spent even more money, got the restaurant fixed up enough to where he could reopen.

Then somebody else came out a week later, cited him because he didn’t have any designated handicapped parking. And this was back in the days when nobody gave a shit about wheelchair access. They must have really searched the books to find that law. Fat Ernst had to put up a handicapped parking sign, right next to the front stairs. All that did was to make him mad enough that he parked his bone white Cadillac there every day in a sort of protest.

The restaurant was built in the midst of cornfields, on about an acre of land mostly covered in cheap gravel. Fat Ernst wanted plenty of parking space, in anticipation of all the customers he figured would be eating there, but it only made the place seem even more isolated and empty. He never bothered to resurface the lot, and so after a few years passed it looked like some sort of bombed-out no-man’s-land, with giant craters all over the place. When the rains came, the lot was one giant lake of mud.

I trudged across this lake and didn’t even bother to try and keep my feet dry. Mud seeped into my tennis shoes and I could feel the silt and grit working its way between my toes. I glanced back over my shoulder at the intersection.

Everyone was still gathered around the ditch, but nobody seemed to be doing anything except talking and pointing at the water once in a while. I couldn’t see Slim, but he’d gotten the engine of his Cadillac started; it rose higher and higher every few seconds before dropping back into idle.

I shook my head and walked up the five warped wooden steps to the restaurant. The building sat about two feet above the ground, resting on six-by-six wooden stilts that were sunk into concrete blocks. Two large windows flanked the front door. Beneath the left window there was a sign Fat Ernst had hung and never bothered to take down. After about five years, the thing had gotten so tattered and frayed you could hardly read it. It read something like “ Whitewood’s Biggest Party—Every Saturday Night!” But nobody ever really showed up.

Above the front door was another sign. This one had the words carved into a large, flat chunk of wood. It read “NO WEAPONS ALLOWED” in old-fashioned block letters, as if the place were some sort of saloon in the old West. I kicked open the front door and slammed it behind me.

The restaurant didn’t look much better on the inside. Six tables, covered in peeling Formica, were evenly spaced out in the front half of the building. Dead pheasants and ducks had been awkwardly mounted on the walls between the occasional neon beer sign around the dining room. The dusty eyes of three ragged, moth-eaten buck heads followed me as I wound my way through the tables.

The restrooms were off to my right, on the south side of the building, just past the jukebox. An unbalanced pool table sat near the jukebox, with wood wedges jammed under the legs. Directly in front of me was the bar. It ran nearly the entire length of the building, stretching from the door to the restrooms all the way to the kitchen doors on my left.

I banged through these swinging doors, unzipping my backpack. The kitchen was crammed into a narrow sliver of a room directly behind the bar. Everything was set up in one long row: first the stove, then the silver counter, adjacent to the sink, and finally the wheezing refrigerator.

The kitchen didn’t have any windows. Smudged yellow light came from two bare bulbs that hung from the cobwebbed rafters. I twisted the hot water handle and let the water warm up a little before cupping my hands and splashing it on my face. Soap would have been even better, but there wasn’t any. Finally, I just stuck my head under the faucet and let the warm water run across my forehead for a while.