“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 …