Jeff Jacobson - Wormfood

“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 …

And eventually everything, the sight of raw meat, the sounds, the smells, everything, faded away into a fine red mist.

CHAPTER 13

I rode in the back of the truck again, braced up near the cab, wedged in between two large coolers that held the meat, because Junior was worried that I might get the cab dirty. My clothes were still wet, and my arms were covered in dried, sticky blood up to my elbows.

I grabbed my tacky elbows and held my arms close, ignoring the blood. I didn’t want to think about the meat in those coolers. Not tonight, not tomorrow night, not ever. I wasn’t paying attention to where we were, and wasn’t prepared when the truck slid to a stop on the rain-slicked pavement. The coolers slammed into the cab.

Junior started pounding on the back window. “Let’s go, dickhead. This ain’t a goddamn taxi.”

I pushed myself awkwardly to my feet, using the coolers for support and gingerly inched toward the back of the truck, joints stiff and aching from the cool night wind. Suddenly, the truck lurched forward a couple of feet and I stumbled forward, almost going to my knees. The engine sounded like a pit bull strangling itself on a fraying leash. I could hear Bert cackle and Junior pounded on the back window again. I grabbed the steel bar and jumped out.

The truck pulled away immediately. Bert stuck his upper body out of the passenger window, waving his cast wildly. “See ya tomorrow, Archie!” I hope not , I thought. As the night swallowed the red taillights, I headed up the driveway.

The clouds had rolled on and the rain had finally died, leaving lakes of shallow, wide puddles that filled the long driveway. I walked out across a sea of stars, heading for Grandma’s trailer, each footstep shattering the sky and sending expanding ripples of rolling stars into the darkness.

And before I realized it, I was home.

A faint blue light flickered in the windows. Grandma must be still up, watching television. I hoped she wasn’t waiting on me. I didn’t know what time it was, only that it was late, real late.

I crouched at the end of the driveway, near a corner of the garden, and plunged my arms into one of the puddles. I scraped most of the blood off my arms, but I wondered how I was going to get cleaned up enough to even go inside so I could take a shower.

When I got closer to the trailer, a match flared in the darkness near the back door. The orange flicker illuminated Grandma’s face, sending tiny brown shadows dancing across her wrinkles. She was sitting on the top step, lighting her pipe.

“Howdy, pilgrim.” She smiled, gray smoke curling out of the upraised corners of her mouth. It was an old joke. The Duke had been Grandpa’s favorite.

“Hey, Grandma.” I sat heavily on the bottom step, rested my arms across my knees and let my head fall on my forearms. The exhaustion suddenly caught up with me, making my muscles feel like they were filled with the little steel pellets that Grandma loaded into her shotgun shells, and I seriously considered sleeping out on the wooden stairs.

Grandma spoke, her voice low and solid behind me. “I’ve been wondering about you. Sounded like them Sawyers.”

I took a long, deep breath and let it out slowly through my nose. I didn’t know what to say. Where could I start? I felt ashamed, for some reason I couldn’t put my finger on.

I could smell the pipe smoke before she spoke again. “I’m just gonna say this once. That family, them Sawyers, they’re about the worst bunch of inbred mistakes this town’s ever seen.”

Grandma was silent for a moment, then said almost too quietly for me to hear, “I used to know the mother. Pearl Sawyer. We went to high school together. We, ah … Well, see, your granddad, he was quite the ladies’ man back then. He saw a lot of girls, including me and Pearl. She fell for him just as hard as I did. And she was awful good-looking back in them days and wasn’t shy about getting to know a boy up close and personal, if you know what I mean.”

I twisted around and sat sideways on the steps, watching Grandma. She stared out above my head at the dark patch of garden, a midnight sentinel standing guard over her beloved tomatoes. “Never held it against him, though. I guess he had his fling with Pearl before he started coming around to see me. But when he broke it off with her to get serious with me, Pearl took it kind of hard. She was downright pissed, you could say. But she left us alone for the most part, and I thought that was that. But not too long after me and your grandfather got married, he found a dead hog on our front lawn one morning. Some sort of message had been written on the front door in the hog’s blood. I never could understand what it said, but your grandfather just laughed, said Pearl was trying to scare him with some kind of a curse. Said she was just jealous, nothing to worry about. It worked kind of, I guess, scared me a little, but he told me not to worry, and as the years went by, I had other things to worry about, like the Depression and him going off to war, and eventually I just forgot about the whole thing.”

Grandma struck another match and relit her pipe. Then she shook out the match and carefully placed it on the splintered step beside her. “Never thought about it again until he died. I never told you the truth, Arch, about how your grandfather died. You were just too young, and I didn’t think it would do any good.”