Wormfood (9 page)

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

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.

She dropped that kitten in the burn barrel.

I flinched, jerking back against the dead steer. The dampness from the wet hide started soaking my T-shirt again, but I didn’t care. Compared to that woman, I’d hug a dead steer any day.

Junior shouted something and Bert gave a high, ragged cackle The passenger door opened. Bert jumped out, half humming, half breathing the theme to
Hawaii Five-O
, and opened the barn’s sliding doors.

The large slabs of warped and buckled wooden planks rolled away from each other in a grinding squeal of protest, revealing total darkness. It looked like a deep, gaping maw had suddenly opened in the wall and was about to swallow the truck whole.

As the truck backed into the darkness, the fear tumor reemerged, slithering sluggishly up my spine. Junior hit the brakes and the inside of the barn was bathed in a dim, red light. Five bare lightbulbs, unevenly spaced along a frayed cord that stretched the length of the barn, flickered to life. The light forced the darkness back into the crevices and corners of the yawning space, where it waited impatiently in deep shadows.

The first thing I noticed was the meat hooks. Two rows of them. They hung from a series of rafters, dangling just above a huge, thick wooden table. The truck backed into the barn until the trailer hitch disappeared under the table and the engine died.

I dropped my gaze from the hooks and let it roam around the mountains of junk that filled the barn. Off to my right were mounds of thrift store clothing, piled haphazardly on several old couches. The couches looked wounded, hemorrhaging white stuffing. There was junk everywhere—heaps of dining tables and chairs, at least two dismantled motorcycles, mountains of firewood, a thirteen-foot aluminum boat, cardboard boxes, camping gear, toys, crumbling bricks, sacks of cement mix—and sprinkled over everything like confetti were beer cans and empty whiskey bottles.

I heard Bert rummaging around through several piles of cardboard boxes at the far end of the barn, and listened as Junior climbed out of the truck, but it all sounded hollow and faint, like the sounds were coming out of a cheap AM radio. A terrible weight settled across my limbs, as if gravity had increased and was anchoring me to the bed of the truck.

Although I felt my body slowly crumbling into total exhaustion, I didn’t have to be asked twice when Junior jumped into the back of the truck with a chainsaw and yelled, “Move it or lose it, fuckhead.”

He yanked the starter cord and a high-pitched, chittering whine chewed through the quiet of the barn. A noxious cloud of exhaust, a mixture of gasoline and motor oil from the two-stroke engine, filled the air.

I pushed myself to my feet with my good hand and edged around the other side of the carcass. Junior grabbed the steel hook in the steer’s neck. I heard the hook come free even over the roar of the chainsaw; a wet, squelching sound that reminded me of when I yanked my shoes out of the mud in Fat Ernst’s parking lot.

Junior slung the hook and the cable over the wooden slats on the side of the truck. Wielding the chainsaw in one hand, he casually lopped off the steer’s back legs at the knees. The engine barely changed pitch as the spinning teeth easily chewed through the thin muscles and bone. The two severed legs, each about a foot in length, clattered to the truck bed like a couple of small chunks of firewood. I turned away, fighting the nausea that suddenly filled my body as if something inside had broken open and the contents were leaking out.

I ignored the hole in my hand for a moment and grabbed the side of the truck, jumping to the cement floor. It was covered in some sort of black, gummy substance that made my shoes stick to the cement. Bert was still at the other end of the barn, digging through boxes and bobbing his head in time to the music only he could hear.

Junior rested the chainsaw on his left hip. He shouted at me over the roar of the chainsaw, “Hey, zipperhead.”

I didn’t look up. I placed both palms flat on the table and leaned over, fighting to breathe evenly though my mouth. If I threw up in the Sawyer brothers’ barn there was no telling what they might do.

“Hey!” Junior shouted again, then revved the saw three quick times to get my attention. “It ain’t break time, Archie. We got some butcherin’ to get to, you hear me?”

I nodded and finally looked up.

“Drag that old tub over here,” he yelled, pointing the chainsaw at an ancient bathtub with claw feet. It was wedged between a stack of bald tires and a tangled mound of barbed wire. “Toss them forelegs in there. We’ll dump everything else in there, too.” He killed the saw, and in the sudden silence I could hear Bert still half singing the tune from
Hawaii Five-O
. Junior continued, “No sense in letting good meat go to waste. The hogs are gonna think Christmas came early this year.”

I walked slowly to the bathtub. The bare bulbs behind me sent a long, distorted shadow across the tub and I couldn’t see what was inside. I didn’t care what the hell was inside of it; all I wanted was to get home, to get to the shower, to scrub the slime of the pit off, to boil my skin until I felt clean, and then to sleep for a week. I didn’t want to think about what the Sawyer brothers were going to do with the meat. It didn’t matter. Getting away from these lunatics was the only thing that did matter. And that meant the faster they finished with the steer, the faster I could get home.

So I grabbed the cold, pitted edge without looking inside and pulled. The tub jerked forward, claws scraping the grime on the cement floor. An angry explosion of flies rose into the air from the tub, swarming about my head, and crawled through my hair, across my face, into my ears. I jumped back, swinging wildly at the buzzing black static that surrounded me.

When the cloud of flies had settled back into the tub, I took two careful steps forward and peered inside. The porcelain was covered with a thick coat of what looked like dark rust, and I realized with a fresh surge of nausea that it was dried blood. I swallowed, waved away several flies, and grabbed the tub again.

As I dragged it toward the table, Junior forced the steel hook with the cable through the two narrow bones in each of the steer’s back legs. He had looped the cable through a series of pulleys hanging from the ceiling near the rest of the dangling meat hooks, and in this way could hoist the thousand-pound steer up over the table. He yanked on the hook, grunting with the effort, testing the strength of the tendons.

But the hook held and Junior seemed satisfied. He started the winch and we watched as the carcass, lifted by the hook pinning both of the back legs together, slowly rose off the truck’s bed. The front hooves slid back off the truck and onto the table, leaving trails of mud and slime. The bones in the hips popped and snapped as the full weight of the body hung from the hook, but the tendons and muscles held. Junior smiled and patted the ribs affectionately as he followed the steer off the truck and onto the table. “Good steer,” he said and shifted his snuff from one cheek to the other. “Good strong steer.” He nodded at me, “You got us a good one.” I almost felt proud.

The steer dangled stiffly. Junior circled the carcass and patted it affectionately, like it was a big, sleeping dog. “Bert,” he said, “you gonna get those knives out or you just gonna keep jerkin’ off all night?”

“Holy shit!” Bert exclaimed, freezing with a sudden, electrifying realization. “I broke my arm,” he said as if he had just noticed. “How’m I gonna … What …” He let his voice trail off, horrified at the thought of life without masturbation. He tilted his head to the side, almost resting it on his right shoulder, considering other possibilities. “You ever try it with your left hand?” he asked Junior.

Junior ignored him, concentrating on the steer. He smoothed out his pompadour with both hands, rotating his hips ever so slightly, dancing in slow motion with the carcass, seducing it. He pulled off his shirt and tossed it into the back of the truck. The center of his chest was full of scars; the pattern almost looked like the design of a star or sun, but I couldn’t figure out what kind of injury could have caused them.

Bert wouldn’t give up. “You ever try with your left hand, Archie?” he asked, shoving his left hand down the front of his pants and trying it out.

I shoved the bathtub closer to the table.

Junior shuffled around the steer and caressed it. He said very evenly, almost quietly to his brother, “Quit fucking around and get those knives over here. It’s time to get down to business.” He patted the carcass one more time and bent down to grab the chainsaw. It started on the first pull.

I took a step back.

Junior looked up and grinned. “Wanna see something neat?” he shouted over the roar.

I shook my head.

Junior solidly planted his feet shoulder-width apart, one foot on the table, one foot on the back of the truck. He raised the saw, right hand on the handle, finger on the trigger. His left hand gripped on the cross bar and turned the saw sideways. He hit the trigger once. Twice.

I took another step backward.

Junior sank the screaming teeth into the steer’s neck, just above the ears. The high-pitched whine dropped into a growl. A fine mist of blood and tissue sprayed straight out from the saw. The steer’s head began to slowly separate from the neck, splitting a deep valley into the flesh.