Wormfood (10 page)

The head hit the table at the exact same time Bert dumped the contents of a small cardboard box onto the table. Long butcher knives, hammers, chisels, and meat cleavers clattered across the dark wood as the steer’s head bounced off the table and landed on the floor next to the bathtub.

Junior nodded at the severed head and shouted at me, “Grab it. Toss it in the tub. We’ll boil it down later.” He squeezed the saw’s trigger, sending another spray of bloody mist into the air.

I kept a close eye on the chainsaw and scurried forward, grabbed the steer’s ear, and dragged the head back to a safe distance. The ear felt surprisingly soft and smooth. Without looking at the head, I tried to lift it, but was unprepared for the weight. It must have weighed at least thirty pounds, and the ear slipped through my fingers causing the head to land with a dull thud on the cement floor.

I got a better grip on the ear and dropped the whole thing into the bathtub. Another black explosion of flies burst out of the tub, but they quickly settled back, covering the head. I turned away, not wanting to watch the flies begin their feast.

Bert suddenly shouted, “Think fast, Archie,” and a meat cleaver came shooting across the table toward me.

I jumped out of the way as the cleaver sailed off the table and landed in the coils of barbed wire. Bert giggled. Junior stood back and eyed the steer’s stomach. He hollered at Bert, “Grab that push broom. When I open him up, we can just push all the innards off the table here into the tub.”

I bent down and carefully plucked the cleaver from the barbed wire, turning back just in time to see Junior splitting the steer’s abdomen open. The results were instantaneous.

An ocean of blood and miles of grayish-blue, ropy intestines spilled out onto the table. A surging flood of rotting meat and fluids washed over Junior’s cowboy boots. “Goddamnit,” Junior said. “Shouldn’t have worn my good boots.”

The stench of spoiled flesh and fecal matter slithered up into my nostrils and nested there.
Jesus
, I thought, trying not to gag.
Just when I thought things couldn’t get any worse
.

And then things got worse.

In the swamp of blood and intestines, something moved.

Several somethings moved.

“What the hell!” Junior shouted, jerked his bloody cowboy boot out of the mess and brought it down hard, grinding meat into the table. Ripples in the blood caught my eye, flashes of a pale gray amidst the darker gray of the intestines.

The worms. They twisted and squirmed through the wet meat lying on the table. Flattened gray tubes almost a foot long, covered in a viscous white slime, slid across the table in an eruption of obscene movement. Six short tendrils, or barbels, looking like the fluid antennae of a slug, surrounded the mouth on the bottom of the worm and tested the air. It didn’t look like the worms had eyes, just round lighter patches on either side of their heads.

Junior kept screaming and stomping on the worms in a sort of deranged hillbilly tap dance with a dead steer for a dancing partner. His cowboy boots stuttered and pounded the table in a frantic rhythm. And still the worms kept coming, dozens of them, spilling, squirming, oozing out of the spilled guts.

I gripped the cleaver tightly in my right fist, raised it high, and rushed toward the table. Screaming, I brought it down in a slicing arc, twisting my upper body in the effort. The rusted cleaver easily split one of the closest worms in half and sank into the table.

The slimy gray flesh came apart like wet cardboard. Blood oozed out of the severed ends in slow motion. I yanked on the handle, but the blade stuck fast in the wood. Another worm slid closer and its barbels stretched out, tasted the blade.

“Oh, shit. Shit!” I breathed and yanked again, but the cleaver remained anchored in the table. Then, as if responding to the warmth of living flesh, the worm slid closer to the handle, closer to my hand.

“Shit,” I hissed, grabbed the handle with both hands and wrenched it free. I brought the cleaver down again and again, viciously chopping the worm into three ragged pieces. The severed chunks twitched and undulated slowly, dying reluctantly, like a lizard’s tail.

Bert brought his short-handled sledgehammer to the party and smashed at the worms. Every blow sent a moist cloud of blood into the air. The sounds of harsh grunts, wet
thwacks
, and the idling chain-saw echoed through the barn. I kept hacking away at the worms and the meat, bringing my cleaver down on anything that moved. Junior had taken to holding the chainsaw above his head and jumping on the worms with both feet.

Finally, after several frantic minutes of hacking, stomping, and pounding, it was over. I sucked in great ragged breaths while scanning the finely chopped meat in front of me for any signs of life. I couldn’t tell where the chunks of worms ended and the chunks of intestines began.

“C’mon you little fuckin’ wrigglers,” Bert said in a high, strangled voice and brought his hammer down at random. His pounding rhythm faltered, slowed, and stopped. Junior shut the saw off and in the sudden silence I could hear only the whispering rain hitting the tin roof. Junior nudged the dangling carcass with the tip of the chainsaw, making the steer sway slightly. Nothing else, no other worms, came out of the long, jagged slit. He shoved the steer again. Still nothing.

“See? See?” I asked, still breathing fast. “I told you there was something down there in that pit. I told you.”

Junior ignored me and gingerly pushed the sharp, blood-soaked toe of his cowboy boot through the crushed intestines. “Huh,” he said finally. It wasn’t a question, or even an acknowledgment of me.

“I told you,” I repeated.

“Shut up,” Junior said tiredly, and hawked a thick, wet ball of chewing tobacco into the tub. It didn’t bother the flies much. He dropped the chainsaw into the meat on the table and smoothed out his pompadour with both hands.

I turned my blade sideways, so it was parallel to the surface of the table, and gently slid the edge under a worm. It was dead, but wasn’t as severely sliced and diced as some of the other worms nearby. This one had only been cut in half. I eased the flat cleaver under the worm’s head but couldn’t find the other half. The elastic barbels had shrunk to short nubs in death.

“What are these things?” I asked, more to myself than expecting any answer from the Sawyer brothers.

Junior stared hard at me for a moment, like the way an amused cat might watch a mouse with a broken back struggle across the floor. “Who cares?” He shrugged. “Steer had worms. Big fucking deal.” He half snorted, half chuckled, and spit into the tub again, then squatted on his haunches. He looked me dead in the eye. “Welcome to the farm, city-boy.”

Bert cracked up, his high-pitched hyena laugh bouncing off the tin roof.

Junior smiled. “I bet you think all them hamburgers just come out of a factory someplace far away.” He snapped his fingers. “Something clean like that. Or maybe you just thought there was this magical hamburger tree out there under a sparkling rainbow somewhere. No muss, no fuss.”

I dropped my eyes to the worm and carefully rolled it back andforth on the blade. The mouth was sunk into the flesh under the head; twin rows of tiny, curved teeth came together at the back of the mouth in a
V
shape. I couldn’t figure out how the teeth worked. I looked back up, met Junior’s stare and said, “Yeah, but have you ever seen anything like this?” I held up the cleaver.

Junior never took his eyes off me. “Shit. I’ve seen lots of worms. Worms ain’t nothing.”

I thrust the cleaver closer to Junior’s face, pushing my luck. Then I flashed back to my biology class, trying desperately to remember when we dissected earthworms. “These things aren’t your regular parasites. These things aren’t heartworms, or blood flukes, or goddamn tapeworms, night crawlers, or … or … These things are different!”

Junior still wouldn’t look at the worm. “So what? They might be a little bigger maybe, but so what? It’s not like they’re gonna hurt anything now.” He stood suddenly, looking back to his brother.

“Hey, Bert, you remember that time you had worms? Back when you was in junior high? ’Member? Ma kept telling you, but you just wouldn’t stop playing with the dog shit. You couldn’t keep your hands out of it.”

“Yeah, yeah, I remember.” Bert nodded, grinning hugely in the cold glare of the bare white bulbs. Flecks of fresh blood were drying on his yellow teeth.

“So you got worms. They bother you any? I mean, did they hurt?” Junior asked.

“Nope. Can’t say they did much of anything. The only time I noticed ’em was when I got all cramped up and, boy”—Bert gave a warbling low whistle—“you shoulda seen the toilet. They were everywhere.”

I tipped the cleaver sideways, dumping the severed worm head back onto the table.

“So what happened? How’d you get rid of ‘em?” Junior asked.

“Ma took me to the vet. He gave me some pills.” Bert shrugged. “And that was it. They all came out dead.”

“Yeah, you showed me.” Junior turned back to me and grinned triumphantly.

A few quiet seconds crawled by.

“What are you gonna do with this meat?” I asked quietly, not meeting Junior’s eyes.

But Junior ignored me and asked Bert. “So it wasn’t no big deal, right? I mean, the worms didn’t affect you permanently or nothing.”

Bert thought hard for a moment, wrinkling the flaking, spotted skin on his forehead. He finally shook his head spastically, like a dog trying to shake water out of its ears. “Nope.”

Junior stepped back and kicked the steer, a solid kick that made the thousand pound carcass jump slightly. It gently swayed back and forth. “I dunno. I figure we got two choices here. We can go all pussy and act like a bunch of scared old ladies, and just feed this big bitch here to the hogs. But then …” He swept his gaze back down to me and slowly advanced across the table. “Then we don’t get paid. We don’t get nothin’. On the other hand, we just make sure we kill all these goddamn worms and we keep our mouths shut.”

I tried again. “Where’s this meat going?”

Junior turned back around and kicked the carcass again, harder this time, asking Bert, “You think there’s any more of them in here?”

I raised my voice. “Where’s this meat going?”

“Nah. I’d say we got ’em all,” Bert said.

“That’s what I figure too.”

“What the hell is wrong with you?” I shouted, and slammed the cleaver down on the table. “That steer was sick! There’s something wrong with it! These worms, they—”

“Easy, Archie. Don’t forget, you’re the dog around here.”

I backed away from the table, still clutching the cleaver tightly. “Where’s that meat going?”

Junior sighed, rolled his eyes. “Okay. Okay. If I tell you, you gotta promise not to say nothin’ to nobody. If Fat Ernst found out, hell, he’d have my balls for breakfast.” He lowered his voice.

“Fat Ernst has got some deal where he supplies a little meat to this small outfit that makes cheap, generic dog food. He only does it once in a while. And only when he’s got some extra meat that he can’t sell to customers anymore, ‘cause the meat has gone past the … whaddya call it? The expiration date or something. Better than throwing it away, right?”

I wasn’t sure if I had ever seen Fat Ernst getting rid of anything that happened to age past its expiration date, but I had to admit, it did make sense. It fit Fat Ernst’s do-anything-for-a-buck attitude.

Junior continued. “He wasn’t planning on doing it again for a while, seeing how he was getting low on meat. But since he needs some quick cash, he figured it wouldn’t hurt nobody if me and Bert just picked up a dead steer from Slim. It’s not like that cheap bastard was going to use the meat or anything. So you see? Fat Ernst told us to do it so he could snag a little cash, pay for some booze and better meat and so he could pay you. That’s the only reason, I swear. But don’t tell him I told you, okay?” Junior spread his arms and shrugged.

“It’s up to you. You can either stay all squeamish like some little crybaby and me and Bert, we’ll do the work and get paid, or you can grow some balls and stay with us, get the job done. It’s that simple. Either way, this steer is gonna get butchered. Me and Bert are gonna get paid. That’s all there is to it.” Bert nodded, scrubbing the dried blood off his teeth with his tongue.

Junior looked down at me. “The question is, do you wanna get paid?”

I swallowed, keeping the cleaver tight in my fist. I wanted to tell the Sawyer brothers to go to hell. I wanted to send the cleaver sailing back across the table at Bert. I wanted to walk out of the barn. I wanted to call the police. I wanted to call the health inspectors. I wanted to call somebody, anybody.

But then I remembered Grandma.

If I left now, not only would I not get paid for this job, I probably wouldn’t get any wages at all for the past two weeks. But that wasn’tthe worst that could happen. The worst was that Fat Ernst would happily kick Grandma and me out of the trailer. And then what? Where would we go? Grandma didn’t have the money to move anywhere. Neither one of us had enough money for much of anything.

So I finally looked up, found Junior’s eyes. “Let’s get it over with.”

I tried to tell myself that it didn’t matter if I was there or not. The steer was going to get chopped up for dog food, one way or another.

Junior grinned. “Hell, that’s the spirit.” He ran his hands through his hair again. “Sharpen those knives, Bert. We got us a steer to butcher.”

I closed my eyes. Now that the decision had been made, I felt my mind going numb. I couldn’t feel my fingers curled around the cleaver, couldn’t feel my legs. I just let myself drift somewhere else and turn things over to my body, let it take care of things for a while on autopilot. It was easy.

The night slipped into a soft haze of brief, frozen images. Pushing the mangled intestines and dead worms into the bathtub. Junior jaggedly slicing the thick hide of the steer, splitting it straight down the back. Peeling the hide, exposing the muscles. Blood pooling on the table. The cloying, sickly sweet smell of blood and fresh meat and death. The guttural sound of the chainsaw, engine straining as it chewed through dense meat. One of the thick back legs, severed at the hip, being slammed onto the sticky table in front of me. Raising the cleaver …