Jeff Jacobson - Wormfood

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.