Later, the health inspector disappeared.
Stories and rumors and hushed whispers floated through the bars and grocery store about it. Most of these stories were about Pearl Sawyer, Bert and Junior’s mother. She’d been around for as long as anyone could remember, living in that same house. I had never seen her. Supposedly, she never left the house anymore. Not since her own accident with the lawnmower.
Junior kicked his door open and jumped to the pavement. Bert did the same. I climbed out too, if for nothing else than to get some freshair. Thunder crackled far off to the west, far enough that I thought it might be a while before the full force of the storm reached us, but the clouds above were slipping across the sky and tumbling over each other at a frightening speed. The air smelled brilliantly clean, almost sweet.
Junior grabbed a snow shovel from the back of the truck, sauntered over and yelled, “Thank you!” down at the dead rabbit.
Faded stickers were plastered along the truck’s rear bumper. “Gun Control Is Hitting What You Aim At,” and “I Love Animals—THEY’RE DELICIOUS.” Rickety slats of wood enclosed the truck bed and a large steel beam jutted out from the back of the truck. Several black plastic garbage bags lay clustered around the base of the beam near the cab. They looked plump. Full.
I got closer and saw that the rabbit was just a bloody patch of light brown fur. Long ears lay flat against the wet pavement. One vacant eye stared up into space, unmindful of the falling rain. Bert grabbed an empty garbage bag from the back and whipped it open.
I thought I heard a low, mechanical hum, but the rain smothered the sound before I could tell what it was.
Junior slid the shovel under the dead rabbit with a thick, grating sound, and Bert held the bag open as his brother tilted the snow shovel sideways and dropped the lump of fur inside. The rabbit hit the bottom of the black plastic like a sock full of sand. The low sound came again, and this time it got louder.
We all turned and stared in silence as a very long, very gray hearse rolled slowly past the front of the truck, heading south, down the highway toward town. A long line of cars, mostly Cadillacs with a few late-model pickups mixed in, wound slowly out of the hills, solemnly following the hearse. Little orange flags, hanging wet and limp in the rain, adorned the hood of each vehicle.
It was Earl Johnson’s funeral procession.
Earl Johnson was, well, had been the richest rancher around White-wood. He owned nearly three thousand acres in the northeastern end of the valley, stretching up into the foothills around the reservoir.
The cars continued to stream slowly past us; California’s elite ranchers were in town to pay their respects. I guessed it didn’t matter if anybody had actually liked the man. He had had plenty of money and power, and his funeral was the social event of the year.
I was kind of ashamed, but part of me was glad he was dead. Last year, I’d applied for a job at his ranch. Well, it was more of a contract position. I’d heard that Earl was looking for somebody to kill coyotes. So I walked out to his house with Grandpa’s 30.06 and found Earl out near the dog pens.
I explained that I’d had considerable experience with the rifle and I’d be more than happy to kill some coyotes. If he wanted, I was prepared for a demonstration and had already picked out my target, a knothole in a stump, maybe an inch in diameter, just over two hundred yards out in the field, with the creek bank as a backdrop for safety. I pointed it out, pulled the rifle up, and fired, all in less than three seconds, blowing the knothole out the back of the stump. But that son of a bitch had just laughed in my face, told me to get the hell off his property and to come back when I’d grown a pair. Turned out he held a grudge against my grandfather and wasn’t about to hire me anyways.
I wasn’t the only one who wouldn’t miss him.
“Fucking cheap bastard,” Junior snapped.
Bert hawked up a large ball of phlegm and spit nearly fifteen feet at the funeral procession.
Junior viciously flung the snow shovel into the back of the truck and stalked toward the highway. “Who the fuck do these people think they are?” he yelled at the passing cars.
“Bunch of rich motherfuckers, that’s what I say.” Bert spit again.
Junior turned to me and Bert. He was trying not to grin, but it looked like he had just farted in church and was secretly proud of himself. “We oughta pay our respects. It’s the right thing to do.”
“Yeah, goddamn, it’s only right,” Bert said with a serious tone andtossed the rabbit bag into the back. I glanced around at the empty fields and the dark sky. I didn’t want to get left out here, nearly two miles away from Fat Ernst’s restaurant, so I held my breath and climbed back up into the truck.
CHAPTER 3
Junior jammed his cowboy boot down on the gas and the truck shot out onto Highway 200, gigantic tires singing on the slick asphalt. Within seconds, we had pulled up behind the last car in the procession like a shuddering black caboose finally catching up to the end of a creeping train for the dead.
We followed along for a while, but it didn’t take long for Junior to get sick of the slow pace. He kept fidgeting, squirming around and slapping at the steering wheel. “Hey,” he said finally. “I wonder if Misty’s somewhere up there.”
“Holy shit, you’re right,” Bert said in a rush.
Misty Johnson. Earl’s only child. I’d heard that she was failing her senior year; she’d been working too hard at partying and not enough at school. I was seriously thinking of failing a class just so I could maybe see her at summer school.
“I mean, it’s her goddamn dad’s funeral. She oughta be up there, right?”
Bert nodded so enthusiastically I thought his head might fall off.
“Gonna get me some of that sweetness, oh, you best fucking believe it all right.” Junior slapped the steering wheel again. “I’d makeher gag, you goddamn got that right. Just too damn big for her purty little mouth, yessir.” Junior grabbed at his crotch so violently it looked like he had hurt himself. “Uhhh! Uhhh! Uhhh! That sweet blond hair in my left hand, beer in the other—oh yeah! Yeah!”
“Do it!” Bert shouted.
“I’ll fuck her tonsils out!” Junior yelled at the funeral procession, thrusting his hips against the bottom of the steering wheel. My chest got all hot and tight and I started grinding my teeth together. That son of a bitch. He made me sick, talking about Misty Johnson like that. I wanted to grab the back of Junior’s head and slam his face into the windshield, mash that grin into a thousand pieces.
“Then I’d pull out and come right in her eye, just like that!” Junior howled, using both hands as a visual aid.
“You’d be coming in 3-D.” Bert snorted and collapsed against the door in a fit of herky-jerky giggles.
“Fuck this shit,” Junior said suddenly. “Let’s go say howdy.” He wrenched the wheel to the left and the truck leapt into the oncoming lane. Luckily, there wasn’t any traffic for as far as I could see.
Bert waved to the people in the funeral procession as we gathered speed and passed car after car. I leaned forward slightly and glanced out the window. Most of the drivers, almost always thick ranchers sporting even thicker mustaches and cowboy hats so wide the brims resembled goose wings, glanced over at the truck, then ripped their gazes away to stare fixedly at the cars in front of them.