A man wearing a white lab coat and dark plastic glasses reached down quickly and pressed a long tube against the steer's forehead and the animal was dead before the trapdoor dropped out and he rolled down to the big boys.

The big boys were the men who stood next to the conveyor belts. They could have been laying bricks or shoveling coal or making steel or spending eight hours a day, five days a week screwing one nut onto one bolt in some automobile factory, but instead, because of geography or family or desperation or dumb luck, they had wound up at the slaughterhouse, steeling themselves every day so they could go home and tell their friends, "Ahhh, it ain't so bad."

And after awhile, they started believing it themselves, so every day they could come in and stick a dead cow's back legs into a harness to be lifted up a shaft so that they, wrapped around in plastic and apron cocoons, could stick a knife in the cow's throat and rip it open up to the stomach so the steaming blood could pour out onto the floor, pushed by gravity and convulsing dying blood vessels.

Then they cut slowly around the head until it rocked easily and a final cut took it off. They stuck the head on another hook so a machine could rip off the skin with as little effort as a person pulling the plastic off an individually wrapped slice of cheese.

Then the skull would be steamed until the eyes cataracted and the exposed mess turned milky white. Meanwhile, the cow's body moved down to a man with hydraulic scissors who cut off the four hooves and dropped them into a hole in the floor. The carcass then gave up its final few drops of blood.

Further down the line, another big boy reached into the steer's belly and started hauling out the entrails, pulling them toward him like a large pot in a poker game, with both hands, then hurling them down a nearby chute.

Another machine peeled back the body skin until the meat-laden carcass was exposed. The trail then led into the freezer.