Wormfood (15 page)

“Why not?” I whispered back, afraid to speak louder.

“Well, let’s just say we’ve all heard the stories,” Fat Ernst said, rolling back on his stool. “As far as I can tell, people started talking when she wasforced to retire from the DMV. It was the supervisor, remember? John Halkin, I think. Poor goddamn stupid bastard. He shoulda known,” Fat Ernst said. “He’s the one that fired her. Well, the story goes that he didn’t
fire
her, he had to … let her … go. She hit retirement age, you know? Not too long after that little talk, the supervisor’s house gets all
infested
with flies. I mean to tell you, flies were coming out of the fucking woodwork. They were flying out of the goddamn refrigerator, the air conditioning vents, the bathtub drain, the kitchen sink, closets, dresser drawers, electric sockets, cracks in the floor, you know, between the wall and the floor, everywhere.”

A creeping, itching feeling crawled up my back and into my hair. It was all I could do not to twist my arm around and furiously scratch at my back. Fat Ernst stared out the front window, watching the rain. “And no matter what the hell this poor bastard tries, nothing works, you know? Nothing. Poisons, chemical bombs, flypaper, a fucking flyswatter—you name it, nothing worked. The flies just kept coming. Finally, he tries to sell the damn property. But every time somebody comes to check out the house, the damn flies drive ’em off.” Fat Ernst took a heavy breath, slapping his hands and clasping his fingers together between his knees.

He shook his head. “Finally, this dumb sonofabitch tries to burn his own house down and collect on the insurance. Well, he got caught, convicted, and got sent off to the Monroe County Jail. Had to give up his life, his family, all because of this one woman. Far as I know, he’s still there.”

“So … it was just that one guy, right?” I asked.

“Hell, no. After that, Pearl found an old lawnmower somewhere and started mowing lawns in the summer. At first, I think folks hired her out of pity, this old woman scrabbling for a little change, trying to raise them two wild boys. And for a few years, from what I heard, she did a halfway decent job, mowing lawns with this old, I mean old, rattling lawnmower, driving from job to job in that shitty El Camino. Evenwhen Pearl couldn’t manage to pull the starter cord on the mower anymore, somebody’d start it for her, and she’d push it around the streets, going from one lawn to the next without turning it off. I’m telling you flat out, this bit—” Fat Ernst stopped suddenly, then said quickly, “this—ah—
she
refused to even kill the engine while she was pouring gas in the damn thing.”

Heck nodded to both of us. “I saw her pushing that lawnmower down the street while it was still running. I just remember praying that nobody got too close.”

I thought about the five or six rusted lawnmowers in the Sawyer Brothers’ backyard.

Fat Ernst kept talking, more to Heck than me, but I didn’t care. “And then her eyes started going. Or maybe she just stopped giving a damn. People got different opinions, but the fact is, people started finding their flower beds, gardens, bushes, everything mowed down to something like three inches. I saw a couple of them yards. You should’ve seen it. Then I heard that garden hoses were getting all sliced and chopped by that fucking machine. Sometimes, freshly cut grass got …
accidentally
dumped into swimming pools. And once in a while, the family cat or some small dog would disappear. Oh, yeah. I heard all about it.”

Fat Ernst took a long look around his restaurant. “But it wasn’t just the lawnmower.” His gaze settled on Heck. “Remember what happened to Harry Knight?”

Heck shrugged. “Just that he died a few years back. Some kind of disease, wasted away in the hospital or something.”

Fat Ernst flicked his glance at me for a second, saying, “Harry used to be the vet around here. Ed took over the business after he died. Anyways”—he looked back to Heck—“I’m driving to work one day and I see Harry’s truck and the Sawyer truck stopped, side by side, middle of the road. So I figure they’re just talking, right? I pull up behind the Sawyers’ truck, figuring they’d pull out of the way. Butnobody moves. I can’t see into the Sawyers’ truck, but I can see Harry through his windshield. He’s madder’nhell, shouting at ‘em. Then he stops, all of a sudden.”

Fat Ernst drew back and looked at us, serious as brain cancer. “Then this … this arm, I guess, kind of reaches out of the Sawyers’ window. Can’t explain it exactly. It was just there—one second it’s not, and the next it’s just fucking
there
. And it ain’t Junior or Bert’s arm. No way. It looked like one of them arms you might see on an Ethiopian or some poor starving bastard like that. It was that skinny. But see, the weird part is, I just thought it looked too long at first. That arm was so skinny, it took me a minute to figure out that it was holding a stick.”

“A stick?” Heck asked.

“Yeah, you know, a fucking stick.” Fat Ernst shrugged. “Now, I know that it’s Pearl’s arm, and I don’t wanna know why she’s pointing this at Harry. See, I was ready to start pounding on the damn horn, get ’em moving out of the way so I can get to work, but lemme tell you, I saw that goddamn bony arm and I froze. Harry, he sees this stick being jabbed at him, he changes his tune real quick. He takes off, doesn’t look at me, doesn’t wave, nothing. I don’t know what the hell happened there, and like I said, I don’t wanna know. All I know is that a couple of days later, Harry is in the hospital.”

Fat Ernst lowered his voice. “I heard from Ray later that Harry couldn’t keep anything in him. Nothing. He’d eat and eat and eat, but it would just run right through him. I mean, didn’t take but ten, fifteen minutes. You could even see that he liked his steak rare. Like shit through a goddamn goose. Spent two days in the john before his wife called the ambulance. Doctors never did figure it out. He died four or five days later. Anything they put in him, any food, any liquids, any injections or anything, just kept leaking out of his ass.” He nodded, staring at us. “Like I said, that Pearl isn’t a woman you fuck with. No, sir. She’s got … she can do
things
, and that’s a good enough excuse for me to stay the hell away from her.”

Slim came in around noon, shaking rainwater off his hat and stomping mud all over the place. I silently ground my teeth and had a nightmarish flash that I would be working at Fat Ernst’s until I was an old man, still mopping that goddamn floor while a steady stream of guys in muddy boots kept wandering in and out. Before the door had even closed, I threw the dirty rag in my gray bin and was heading for the kitchen to grab the mop.

“Afternoon, Slim.” Fat Ernst said, tearing his gaze away from the television. “How you doing?”

Slim nodded at Fat Ernst and stiffly eased himself down at the bar, setting his hat on the stool between him and Heck. Heck sat slumped over on his stool and stared at his drink. Slim rubbed his eyes tiredly. “Wife’s off taking care of the sister-in-law, so I’ll take one of those cheeseburgers if you got any left.”

“That’s something we always got plenty of. Just picked up some this morning, as a matter of fact,” Fat Ernst rumbled enthusiastically. “Hey,” he said sharply as I reached the kitchen doors. “Fix Slim up a cheeseburger. You know how he likes it.”

“Make sure those fries are extra crispy,” Slim said, still massaging his forehead. He stopped for a second to point at me and said, “And plenty of onions.”

I nodded, surprised that Fat Ernst didn’t want me to mop the floor immediately. I ducked into the kitchen, set the bin on the counter next to the sink, and washed my hands. Cooking wasn’t much of an art at Fat Ernst’s, despite what he liked to tell people. Food was either fried on the griddle or boiled in oil. That was it. I opened the fridge and surveyed the contents as I dried my hands. Two Popov Vodka cardboard boxes were sitting on the top shelf. They were new, so I peered inside. In the first box, I could see the meat that Fat Ernst had just bought, wrapped in butcher paper. Words like “Flank” and “Sirloin” and “Rump Roast” were scrawled across the white paper in black grease pencil. The second box held the hamburgers.

Fat Ernst took a lot of pride in his burgers. He made them about once a week, placing the raw patties in a box lined with aluminum foil so all he had to do was slap those suckers on the grill. He’d dump the ground beef in a large mixing bowl, adding ingredients like bread crumbs, garlic, a couple of eggs, some finely chopped onions, a little barbecue sauce, and maybe a few spices if he had any. All that would get churned together, and then he’d form the patties.

I made sure the stove was on and dropped a burger on the long, flat griddle, where it started sizzling immediately. Then I grabbed a bag of frozen french fries from the freezer and dumped them in a pot of oil on the top of the stove. And that was it.

Slim came in only about every two or three weeks, but he ordered the same thing every time. Cheeseburger. American cheese. With bacon. We didn’t have any bacon this time, so I didn’t worry about it. Plenty of ketchup. Mayonnaise on the buns, not on the meat itself. Just a touch of mustard. Tomatoes. Four sweet pickles. Lettuce. Relish. Onions—lots and lots of onions. You couldn’t put too many onions on Slim’s cheeseburger. Once, when he told me, “and I mean
aton
of onions” and shook his finger at me for about the hundredth time, I piled damn near an entire red onion on that cheeseburger. There was more onion than meat on it. I leaned up against the door, listening. I heard Slim tell Fat Ernst, “Kid finally got it right with the onions. You give him this,” and I heard something dry slide across the bar.

I never saw a tip the whole time I worked for Fat Ernst.

I flipped the burger over and grabbed the bag of hamburger buns and Grandma’s vegetables from the fridge. Fat Ernst had refused to pay for them because they were all smashed up, but he still wanted to use them. I cut up the onion and crushed tomato as best I could and prepped the buns. By then, the hamburger patty was nearly done so I dropped a slice of American cheese on it and collected the fries. They were crispy enough, I decided. I scraped the burger off the griddle and dropped it on the bun, piled everything up on top of it, dumped the fries on the plate and carried it out to Slim.

“’Bout time,” Fat Ernst said, not taking his eyes off the television. As I set the plate down in front of Slim, Heck exploded in a fit of liquid coughing. He grabbed the edge of the bar to brace himself as his body shook and trembled.

“Goddamnit, Heck!” Fat Ernst barked, scowling as he wiped off his arm with a rag. Slim moved his plate over a little and took a bite out of his cheeseburger.

Heck shakily reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a pack of Marlboros. His eyes had narrowed into slits, his mouth hung open, and deep, guttural sounds bubbled underneath his rasping breath. He fumbled with the lighter and dropped it on the bar.

Slim snapped, “Do you mind? I’m trying to eat here and you gotta light up a cigarette. You want me to come over to your place and spit in your food when you’re trying to eat? It’s the same goddamn thing.” Slim shook his head and took another bite.

If Heck heard Slim, it didn’t look like it registered. It didn’t look like he was hearing much of anything, actually. He left the lighter on the bar and put the cigarette next to it. His fingers trembled.

I glanced up at the television. A guy in a garish sweater was standing in front of a satellite-fed weather map. A large swirl of white static loomed off the coast while the guy grinned like an idiot and swept his arm across northern California, demonstrating the path of the storm.

Heck grabbed his beer and tilted his head back.

“I’m goddamn sick of this fucking rain,” Fat Ernst told the television.

Slim nodded in agreement and crunched his onions.

Heck dropped his head back down, holding his beer out to the side. A thin rope of spit trailed out of his mouth to the bottle. As I watched, the rope broke and drool ran down Heck’s chin. It was clear at first, but as more drool slowly oozed out of the corner of Heck’s mouth, it got thicker and yellow. Then it got red.

“You feeling okay, Heck?” I asked.

Heck dropped the beer bottle and I heard it clunk and roll away on the wood floor.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” Fat Ernst shouted at Heck. Fat Ernst turned to me, “Clean it up. Now.”

Heck started to shiver. He slipped off the back of his stool, swayed for a moment holding his potbelly, then lurched off toward the restroom. Fat Ernst shouted after him, “You better not make a mess this time, you old fart.”

Heck fell into the restroom, and a second later, the toe-curling sounds of wet, violent retching filled the restaurant.

“Oh, that’s fucking great!” Fat Ernst shouted and threw the rag at the television.

“Good God,” Slim said and put his burger back on the plate, eyeing it with disgust.

Fat Ernst swiveled around on his stool and pointed a pudgy finger at me. “You. You go clean it up. Right fucking now. When I get in there later I swear to God I better be able to eat off that toilet and it better smell like a fucking mountain meadow or I will rip your tongue out and use it to wipe my ass. Am I making myself clear here?”

I nodded and darted into the kitchen to get my trusty mop. I didn’t look at either Fat Ernst or Slim as I scurried back around the bar to the restroom. When I got there, the door had swung shut. I stopped, bucket in one hand, mop in the other, suddenly unsure of what to do. I set the bucket on the floor and knocked timidly. “Heck? Heck? You okay? I’m gonna come in, okay?”

The door swung open easily with a slight groan from the hinges. The sink was off to my immediate left, the chipped and stained urinal hanging off the wall next to it, and the metal sheet of the stall closed off the back wall, hiding the toilet from the rest of the small bathroom. I could see Heck’s boots in the gap under the metal wall.

I stepped inside, saying, “Hey, Heck? You okay?” I left the mop and the bucket near the sink and reluctantly stuck my head around the stall. The first thing I noticed was the blood. It was all over the place. It was splattered across the toilet, across the water tank, across the walls. Across Heck.