Excerpt six

from Jack's Inferno, chapter 5

I see the greasy smokestack hanging in the sky like congealed fat. The air is thick with the stench of deep-fried...everything. This must be the place.

There's a small building atop a hill of bones, radiantly wrapped in piss-yellow neon with an imposing sign that reads FAT NANCY'S HOUSE OF GRITS in giant glowing letters. Below it in smaller print, but no less proudly displayed, is WORST FOOD IN 7 HELLS.

"Seven hells?" I ask Coal.

"Well, ya got seven continents on the core, all of 'em named Hell. Then ya got your countries and cities and villages and all that crap. They're all named Hell, too. You just gotta go by the zoning districts if you want to tell 'em apart."

"Why don't they just give them different names?"

"Don't really matter where ya land here, everybody says the same thing: aw s**t, I'm in Hell! So it's just easier to call everything Hell."

"Makes sense."

We walk into the diner. It's a redneck freakshow. The florescent ceiling lamps are way too bright. Some people are better suited to dimly lit rooms, out of focus and shrouded in wandering trails of tobacco smoke. These people do not need to be seen in the light. Pasty sagging skin. Blotchy patches of discolored flesh, pinkish-brown here, a reddish-purple bruise there, yellow eyes, yellow teeth. Bloated, wrinkled faces. Angry, ugly stares. A split lip. A glass eye. Oily hair and dirty wrinkled clothes. Open sores. Foaming mouths.

They can smell outsiders a mile away.

We grab a booth in the back under a stuffed and mounted stag's head. Country music plays on the jukebox. It's a slow drunken ballad about wife-beating. Flies are swarming the place. Ants march across the table like a parade. There's a framed certificate on the wall that declares the sanitation grade is a C minus. That seems generous.

Our waitress strolls over to us and slaps two menus on the table. She's an ill-tempered fat hag in her late fifties, maybe early sixties. Tiny devil horns rise just above the hair-spray frozen curls of her permed red hair. Her face is gratuitously caked in makeup, from the tarantula eyelashes right down to the raccoon eye shadow and rosy red cheeks. Red lipstick smeared around the mouth in a heavy-handed scrawl, the way crazy people wear makeup. Like the blood-caked fur of a polar bear's face after the feast of a kill. Her name tag simply reads "eat s**t and die."

"Whaddya want, a******s?"

Coal orders first. "Yeah, lemme get the chicken-fried steak, two sausage biscuits with gravy, bowl a' grits with extra butter and bacon, and uh...piece a' pig's a*s pie. And a bottle a' Jack Daniels."

She scribbles the order on her little notepad and turns to me impatiently.

"What are your specials?" I ask her.

"I got three retarded kids. You gonna order somethin', ya cheap b*****d?"

"Coffee."