The hood of the Cadillac creaked, and that was when it finally hit me.

We were all in very big trouble.

Junior appeared, carrying a dark bundle of rags on his back. He eased down the chrome grille, gently lowering the tangle of clothes to the tilted floor. The rags produced a cane, and the misshapen bundle lurched up the tilted floor toward Ray. The cane, a knotted and twisted piece of dark, shiny hardwood, thunked into the floor every now and then.

Pearl was here.

And my blood turned to ice water.

Pearl jabbed at Ray with her cane and got a low moan in response. She clucked something, turned toward the bar, and I think she smiled, but it was hard to tell. She wasn’t much fun to look at. If I had to guess, I’d bet that she looked more like Bert than Junior, and I suspected they had two different fathers.

It was downright impossible to know for sure what she had looked like before the accident with the lawnmower. She kept her left arm curled in close to her chest; the limb looked ravaged and useless. It reminded me of the short, tiny arms of a Tyrannosaurus rex. Her head was cocked to the side, like a bird watching a bug, and her greasy, clotted hair started somewhere around the top of the crown of her head, hanging down to the back of her neck in gnarled clumps. I’d seen her before, that night when we brought the dead steer back to the Sawyers’, and I knew she was thin, but I wasn’t prepared for just how little flesh covered her bones. I wondered how she had the strength to even move.

I’d seen her from a distance, even heard her voice up close, but nothing scared me as bad as watching her limp up the inclined floor to me and Fat Ernst.

“See, Ma?” Junior said proudly. “Got everybody tied down just like you told me.” He still had duct tape on his nose, but his eyes were bright and excited.

“Yessssss,” Pearl said, sounding too much like another goddamn rattlesnake as she got closer. “You done good, Junior.” Her body was scary enough, but her face was worse. Like her sons, she didn’t have many teeth left. The left side looked like the doctors had just gathered up all the loose skin—pulling it sideways across the top of her head, keeping it unnaturally tight on the right side of her face, and then stapling and stapling all that extra flesh to her skull in wild, irregular folds. Her jagged right eyebrow was up near the top of her forehead, giving that eye an arched, perpetually surprised look, while the hair of the left eyebrow was gone completely. The flesh around the brow sagged down to the left cheek, leaving nothing but a curving, hollow slit, and the skin on the left side of her face rippled and dribbled down to a chin so sharp I could have sliced tomatoes on it.

The Cadillac creaked again, and Bert appeared in the splintered hole, ducking under the low roof. He looked around, wobbling a little, taking everything in without expression. He’d lost the old tie he had been using as a sling, and now his cast dangled limply down around his hip. He slid down the grille and sat on the bumper. His face, normally a kind of bleached gray color, had lightened even more, taking on the color of the belly of a dead fish. He reminded me of Slim when I was on the fence watching the rancher blow his nose that one last time into the blue handkerchief.

Pearl stopped near Fat Ernst, leaning on her cane. She fixed that staring, round right eye on me, and again I got the skin-crawling feeling that she was somehow looking directly into me, deep into my thoughts, seeing right into my darkest fears. Which, at that point, were probably painfully obvious. I tried to pull my legs in, anything to try and get as far away from her as I could. She smiled again, the left side of her face curling inward, creating all kinds of fun new folds and wrinkles in the ruined flesh.

Junior was happy. “Can I have her now, Ma?”

Something went cold inside of me, something almost worse than Pearl looking at me. I flashed over to Misty. She hadn’t moved.

“First thing’s first, Junior.” Pearl lifted her cane and jabbed it into the back of Fat Ernst’s fleshy skull. “Wake him up.”

Junior edged around the chair until he was directly in front of Fat Ernst, bent down, and spit in Fat Ernst’s face. “Rise and shine, you fat fuck.”

Fat Ernst didn’t move.

Junior clamped Fat Ernst’s nose between his thumb and forefinger, shaking the bigger man’s head. Finally, Fat Ernst opened his mouth, sucking in a halting breath. I could see his eyes open, but just barely, just thin slits that cracked the dried blood. He coughed, deep in his chest.

“That’s right, wakee wakee, little snakee,” Junior said. “Take a good look around, Mr. Tough Guy. Hard way?” Junior laughed, a prickly sound that bounced around the slanted walls and sunken floor. “Hard way my ass, you fat fuck. I’ll show you the fucking hard way.” He slid his fingers into Fat Ernst’s nostrils and yanked. Fat Ernst’s chins jiggled up and out; his fingers popped open, then clenched back intomassive fists. The muscles in his forearms tightened, and I could see the skin around the barbed wire get white, straining around the wires, anchoring the barbs even deeper in his flesh.

“That’s right. Smell the bacon, you puddle of puke. You’re the one who wanted it the hard way.” Junior put his hands on Fat Ernst’s knees and froze, whispering. “We just want the buckle. That’s all. Just give it up, and we’re gone with the wind.”

Fat Ernst didn’t say anything for a moment. When he did, it sounded like wet concrete coated his throat. “This is my place. You best get the fuck out of here before I get pissed.”

Junior just nodded. “I’m gonna ask you one more time. Just once more—that’s it. You answer me, and, hey, we’re outta your hair. You wanna be a tough guy, then it’s gonna have to be the hard way. It’s gonna hurt. It’s gonna hurt bad.” He leaned in even closer, kissed Fat Ernst on the forehead. “Where’s the buckle?”

“Get fucked,” Fat Ernst replied.

Junior patted Fat Ernst’s flattop. He smiled, and it seemed genuine. “I warned you,” he said simply, then stepped back, shrugging at his mother. Pearl limped forward, clomping around Fat Ernst’s chair, slamming the cane into the floor with a disquieting rhythm. Fat Ernst managed to raise his head. I could tell that he flinched when he saw her face, even though he tried to hide it.

Pearl shook her head slightly, looking like a god-awful ugly vulture tearing a piece of gristle out of a dead squirrel. Even though he was wired to a chair, her knifelike chin only came up to his flattop. Fat Ernst had his head down, breathing heavily through his mouth. Pearl jammed the bottom of her cane into the soft folds of his throat, forcing his chins up. She regarded him for several quiet seconds with her right eye, then said to Junior, “Me and him got some talking to get done. You go play. Have fun.”

Junior started shaking like a puppy that didn’t want to piss on the floor. “You sure you don’t want some help, Ma? I can help. I can get him talking.”

The left side of Pearl’s face curled into itself again, and she shook her head. “No, it’s okay. This here calls for a woman’s touch,” she said, watching Fat Ernst the whole time.

Fat Ernst didn’t like the sound of that. I saw his fist clenching again, but he did a good job of keeping his face still. But I didn’t care about him. Pearl could feed him to the worms for all I gave a damn.

Misty was the one that I was worried about.

Junior sauntered over to the booth, saying, “Got me a date.” He pulled the sack off Misty’s head and said, “Wanna dance?”

A piece of me snapped, deep inside my chest. “Leave her alone, you fucking—”

The cane came out of nowhere and cracked into the left side of my skull, knocking me sideways, smashing my head into the floor. Pearl whispered in my ear, “Now you watch your tongue around my boys. I don’t put up with none of that filthy talk. Especially from a Stanton like you.” The cane settled softly on my left temple, increasing slowly but steadily in pressure, until it felt like someone was standing on top of a railroad spike, driving it into my head. Pearl’s warbled, calm voice came again, “Speak again and I’ll have Junior cut out your tongue.”