Wormfood (11 page)

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

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.”

I waited, afraid that if I said anything, Grandma might stop talking.

She sniffed once and wiped at her nose quickly, saying, “You know how we used to have around twenty pigs back then, along with the goats, right?” I nodded. Grandma looked up at the brilliant stars. “Well, your grandfather, ah, he had a heart attack. That part was true. The thing I didn’t tell you was that it hit him when he was feeding the hogs one day. He collapsed, and … well, the hogs ate most of him before I found him.” She swallowed, and when she continued her voice was thick.

“And the strangest thing was, was the first thing that popped into my head when I saw what was left of him, lying in the mud, all tore up like that, was that dead hog and the blood on the front door all those years ago.”

Grandma coughed a little, a dry, rasping sound that sent a small cloud of sweet-smelling smoke into the still night air. I sat perfectly still, still trying to process the story somehow. It didn’t seem real. The man I had thought was my father for a long time, the man who had taught me everything about guns and shooting, the man I had thought was the toughest man in the world, that man, dead in the mud, ripped open by pigs. It was too much to take in. I couldn’t get my head around it, couldn’t even begin to accept it.

Grandma spoke again, her voice dry as smoke. “So I don’t know if it was her or not, and I don’t know if I ever want to know. But I don’t want you getting anywhere near that family. They’re dangerous. And that Pearl, she’s the most … most evil human being I’ve ever come across. I don’t even know if I’d call her human. I ain’t ashamed to admit that she scares the hell out of me.”

I wanted to say,
You’re goddamn right. She scares the hell out of me too. I saw her kill a kitten tonight and stare right at me in total darkness, and she scared me bad enough I almost pissed my pants
, but instead I just mumbled, “Okay, Grandma, okay. I’ll stay far away from them, I promise.”

We sat in silence for a few moments, watching the stars. I had heard on the news at the bar that another storm front was rolling up the valley, and I wasn’t sure when we might get to see clear skies again.

Finally Grandma spoke up, softer, more gentle this time. “If you don’t mind me saying so, Arch, it smells like you got sidetracked on your way home.”

I shrugged. The last thing I wanted to tell her was about the pit and that I had been at the Sawyer place. “It’s … it’s been a long day,” I said finally.

She tapped her pipe against the steps, knocking the ashes into the wet weeds. “Then why don’t we get you cleaned up a little?” She shook her head, dropping the pipe into a large pocket in her dress. “You sure aren’t going inside smelling like that.”

My knees popped as I found my feet. I reached out to help Grandma stand, but she waved me away.

“Bring that hose over here,” she said. “And while you’re at it, take off those damn shoes. They ain’t fit to scrub out a septic tank. I’ll put ’em out of their misery tomorrow and burn them.”

That sent a tiny, scrabbling shiver up my spine when I thought about the kitten and the burn barrel. But I shoved the image aside, buried it deep as I grabbed the hose and turned the spigot on. The water coming out was cold, but clean. That’s all I cared about. I dragged the hose back over to the steps and handed it to her, keeping the stream aimed at the lawn.

“Now hold still,” Grandma said.

The spray hit my chest and my breath caught in my throat from the sudden shock of the cold water. I pulled off my shirt and flung it to the side. Then I bent down to rip off my shoes. Grandma aimed the spray at the top of my head and for a moment all I could hear was the water hitting my scalp. It didn’t feel so cold anymore.

Later, as I stood dripping on the top steps, Grandma affectionately wrapped a towel around my shoulders. I pulled it together across my chest and met her gaze. “I … I’m just trying to do the right thing,” I said.

She nodded, taking a smaller towel and vigorously drying my hair. “That’s all you can do. And if you ever need any help, you just holler.”

“Thanks, Grandma.”

“Now get in there and take a shower. You need it.”

I wanted to say to hell with it and sleep in a little the next morning, but Grandma knocked softly on the bedroom door around seven and said quietly, “Arch? You up?”

“I’m up, I’m moving,” I said thickly. For a moment, I thought I’d overslept again and was late for work. And right around then everything from the night before came flooding back, collecting into seared images behind my eyes. The pit. Rotting steers. The worm thing trying to eat into my hand. Junior and his chainsaw. Intestines and worms spilling out all over the table. After all that, I wasn’t exactly in a rush to get to work.

“Yeah, I’m up.”

“You think you could thin out the squirrels a little? Little bastards have damn near eaten all of my squash and since the corn’s getting ripe, they’re just going to get worse. I’d keep an eye on things, but I promised Peg I’d take her some tomatoes.”

Peg was Grandma’s closest, well, her only friend really. She lived down the road about a mile and a half, and scratched out a living by raising mean, thin chickens. Once, when Peg chopped the head off of one of the chickens with a wood axe, I swear that headless chicken ran around for a full five minutes before the body realized that the head wasn’t attached and it was supposed to be dead. Even when it finally toppled over, it fought death the whole way, flapping its wings and kicking up a cloud of blood and dust. Grandma was always trading vegetables for eggs and headless, plucked chickens. I figured that half the time, the trading was just an excuse to get together and puff on their dead husbands’ pipes, filling the chicken yard with sweet-smelling blue smoke. Peg couldn’t walk too well, even worse than Grandma, so they always met at her house.

“Sure, Grandma. I got the time.”

“You still going into work?”

“I gotta, Grandma.”

She nodded and gave me a glimmer of a smile. “You take care of yourself.”

“I will.”

Grandma nodded and shut the door.

I slipped out of bed and took another long, hot shower, scrubbing my skin until it was a bright shade of pink. I stayed in there until the water had gone cold, and only then reluctantly climbed out.

Grandma had dug a pair of Grandpa’s old black boots out from somewhere and set them in the hall. There was no sign of my tennis shoes, and I figured it was for the best. Grandpa’s boots were a little big, but with two pairs of socks, the creased leather molded around my feet just fine.

A giant tomato and onion omelet was waiting for me on the counter in the kitchen. After last night, I wasn’t sure if I’d ever be hungry again, but I surprised myself and inhaled the breakfast.

I checked the clock. Seven-thirty. It was time for a few squirrels to meet their maker. I opened the front hall closet. More than two dozen boxes of shells were stacked neatly on the floor next to the encyclopedias. I could remember when the closet was full of Grandpa’s guns: Winchesters, Rugers, Remingtons, a couple of Browning shotguns, a Colt 1911 .45, and even an ancient Model 1885 High Wall single shot. They were all gone, all sold to pay for rent and food. Grandma cried when she had to sell the Highwall rifle, Grandpa’s favorite. That was the only time I ever saw Grandma cry.

All that remained was the Browning .10 gauge shotgun and Grandpa’s Springfield 30.06, the two guns Grandma refused to sell. I grabbed a box of shells and the rifle case. Nestled in threadbare red imitation velvet waited my grandfather’s 30.06. Bolt action, with a five-round clip. Walnut stock. Iron sights, grooved slots of metal at the end of the barrel.

I never liked using scopes. Looking through a scope always made me feel sort of disconnected from the rifle somehow. I felt much more comfortable sighting down the barrel, through the iron sights. It felt as if the rifle and I were working together, instead of screwing a chunk of glass on the top and using that to find your target. You never knew where the scope was aiming; if it was off just a little, you wouldn’t know it, you couldn’t feel it, but by sighting down the barrel, you knew roughly where you were putting the bullet. For long-distance shots, I used a pair of binoculars, just to double-check that the tiny brown blur in the distance was, in fact, a squirrel and not just a knotted root. Shells were too expensive to waste on killing a piece of wood.

The second reason was that using a scope felt too much like cheating.

The term “thirty-aught-six” simply meant that the rifle was a thirty caliber, that is, 308 thousandths of an inch wide, and the aught-six signified the year it was invented—1906. Besides loading her own shotgun shells, Grandma also kept me supplied with plenty of shells for the 30.06, using a 150-grain bullet, propelled by 52 grains of 4064 Dupont powder. This was a deer-hunting load, a huge load to inflict on the squirrels, but Grandma never changed or reduced it. For one thing, that was how Grandpa had set up his loading bench and dies, and Grandma got nostalgic about things like that.