I kept kicking the rotten cow corpses away. Something brushed against my hand. Something that wasn’t just floating along the surface. Something that moved on its own.

It wasn’t a maggot; it felt too big. I shrieked and slapped at the water. “There’s something down here!” I screamed.

“Shhhhhh!” Junior hissed. “Shut up!” He angled the light down into the pit, revealing the choppy surface of the water.

I felt a stabbing pain in my right palm and I screamed again, jerking myhand out of the muck. A thin, gray tube was attached to the webbing between my thumb and forefinger. As I watched, the thing undulated, like it was swallowing, and it slid a half inch deeper into my hand. I could feel it inside, squirming, chewing on muscles and tendons. Screaming, I ripped the thing away with my free hand.

“Shut the fuck up!” Junior shouted hoarsely.

The hook bumped my head. I grabbed it, shrieking, “Something bit me!” I wrenched my gaze toward the truck but could see only the dim sky, the flashlight, and Junior’s silhouette. “Up, you stupid motherfucker!”

The hook started to rise. I clung grimly to it, pulling my knees up to my chest. It rotated slowly as it rose, and I was pulled sluggishly away from the surface of the pit, slowly spinning in midair. I blinked slime out of my eyes and glanced down.

The dead steers were gently rolling in the small waves I had created with my kicking. Long, gray things darted about, squirting across the surface between the carcasses.

“Oh, shit,” Junior whispered. I hoped that he had seen whatever those gray things were, but his eyes were fixed on the horizon. “It’s Slim.” He killed the flashlight. “Let’s go, let’s go.”

The hook finally reached the edge of the pit, but I was holding on with both hands so Junior grabbed the back of the truck to give himself some stability, then reached out with his other hand and grabbed the cable. He pulled me toward the edge.

I blindly shot my leg out, dug my shoe into the mud, and lurched toward the truck. I fell hard, gasping for breath. Junior immediately nudged me with the toe of his cowboy boot, keeping an eye on the distant light. “Let’s go. We don’t need Slim out here, nosir.”

I grabbed the trailer hitch and rose to my knees. I looked down into the darkness of the pit and tried to flex my hand. A twisted hole bled slightly in the webbing by my thumb.

Junior kicked me in the butt. “C’mon. Let’s go. Get in the back. Don’t need you stinking up the cab.” I felt myself lifted from behindand thrown into the truck, landing on top of the carcass with a wet, hollow thud. I rolled off the steer and pushed myself back against the cab with my feet. Junior slammed the door and started the truck. I drew my knees up to my chin and kept working at making a fist, over and over, making the wound bleed more and more and more.

The truck lurched up the hill and we rumbled off into the night.

CHAPTER 11

The truck bounced and swayed up the pitted gravel road that led over the low foothills. We were headed down the back end of Road E toward the Sawyer house. I’d never been there, but I knew where the house was. Everybody knew where the house was; everybody knew because it was a place that you stayed away from. Even the mailman refused to come all the way out here. Instead, he dumped the mail into a bucket out on the highway.

Thunder rumbled softly to the west, but the air was dry for the moment. A cool night wind had dried the thick, scummy water on my skin, leaving a filmy, greasy residue behind. The truck jerked violently to the left, plowing through a deep puddle, and I rolled with it, bracing my foot against the wet, matted hair of the carcass for support. The steer lay stiffly on its side, legs jutting straight out, and rocked slightly with the motion of the truck. Then we were over the top of the foothill and shuddering down the other side into the deep hollow where the Sawyer brothers lived. I pulled my eyes away from my bloody hand and twisted around so I could see through the two-inch gap in the wooden slats.

The weak headlights splashed over a tangle of old fig trees that hadnever been pruned. A quagmire of rotten figs blanketed the ground beneath the trees. As we got closer, I heard a low buzzing fade in and out. It took me a moment, but when a wasp landed on the steer and crawled around, I realized what was causing the buzzing. I had never heard or seen wasps out at night before, and it made my skin crawl.

A large, two-story farmhouse loomed up at odd angles into the circle of fig trees. It almost looked like the trees and the house were resting on each other for support. Faded white paint peeled away from the wooden sides in long, ragged strips. The gutters, filled with dirt and leaves and rainwater, had been partially torn away from the house by the summer storms. The whole place reminded me of some blocky gray spider with broken legs, waiting patiently for unsuspecting prey in a half-finished web. The truck bounced past the house and the headlights found the barn.

It squatted on a low hill to the right of the house. Junior swung the truck in a tight circle, oversized tires crunching against the irregular patches of gravel, reversed with a jolt, and backed toward the large sliding doors in the center of the barn. As we swung around I caught a glimpse of the backyard.

Here, the fig trees separated almost reluctantly away from the house and circled around a forest of giant weeds that filled the open space like rioting green wildfire. I could just make out the vague shapes of the corpses of five or six lawnmowers lurking in the tall Johnsongrass. I wondered if they’d died while valiantly trying to cut those weeds, killed in action. Strange plants in cracked ceramic pots hung haphazardly from the wooden beams, spaced unevenly along the sagging eve.

Something was burning in the middle of the backyard. Thick, dark smoke billowed from what looked like a burn barrel. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I saw a small figure next to the barrel, a woman maybe, hunched over a large metal tub. It kind of looked like she was washing clothes or something. The fire sent flickering, leaping shadows against the house and I couldn’t see clearly.

But I knew it was Pearl.

The headlights spilled over onto the fig trees. I kept watching the gaunt, dark figure. The tub looked like it was full of water or some other liquid, and Pearl was holding something under the water with her good arm. The other one, the one that I heard had gotten caught and chewed on by the lawn mower, she kept close to her body, curled around her torso. She wore a shapeless house dress, but I could tell she was thin, I mean, real thin. Her body looked like nothing more than a skeleton loosely wrapped in shredded newspaper. Long, stringy hair hung over her head, obscuring her face.

I was glad, but a little disappointed too, because I had also heard that the lawn mower had gotten hold of her face as well when it jerked her arm into the spinning blade.

Every once in a while her good arm, the one holding whatever it was in the tub, would give a little shiver. Then, finally, she lifted the thing out of the tub. It was some sort of lumpy cloth sack; a white pillowcase trapping a small, dense object. She turned away from me and twisted around to the burn barrel.

The truck stopped with a jerk and as the engine rumbled softly I heard a little moaning kind of chant from the backyard. No real words that I could tell, just a lot of mumbled babbling, but uttered in a low, kind of singsong way. It almost sounded like she wanted to sing louder, but her lungs wouldn’t let her. She reached into the sack and lifted out a dead, wet kitten.

I don’t know if I gasped or swallowed too loud or what. Pearl jerked up her head and stared right at me with her wide right eye. I was still hunched deep in the shadows in the back of the truck and I’m dead certain there’s no way she could have seen me, but, I swear, her eye found mine.