Cows (6 page)

CHAPTER FIFTEN

T
he door was unlocked and Lucy was up, so Steven walked in and stood behind her as she sat bent over a table. He kissed the back of her neck and looked over her shoulder. Pinned to a wooden block, a lab-bred rat lay on its back, alive, guts open to Lucy’s probing fingers. The rodent’s stretched eyes darted uselessly through a limited range of vision, searching for some way to escape the pain.

Lucy gave up with her fingers, took a scalpel from a clutter of sharp surgical instruments at her side, and began to remove, one by one, the exposed organs. She held each one up to the light and inspected it, then cut it into pieces on the wooden block.

Steven kissed her hair as she worked, running scenes of the future when she would tend to him with the same devotion she now reserved for the small rat organs. He would lie in a large bed under her kisses and plans for life would flutter down about them like rose petals.

When the rat was empty Lucy dropped her scalpel and leaned back against him, too disgusted to support her own weight. He could feel desperation radiate from her.

She put his hands on her breasts, but this was too little protection. She stood for him to hold her and closed her eyes and pressed loose fists to her chin like a baby sleeping.

Steven saw her night’s work on the floor—a pile of hollowed rats and a plastic bucket of guts—and knew that love was coming quickly. Her search for something to cut out of herself was getting frantic.

They fucked in a cold room hung with photographs of surgically opened bodies. Steven looked at them while he pumped. The light in the shots was hard and the exposed organs gleamed under it—dark kidneys and livers and hearts, paler stomachs and bladders, all of them floating in cavities of blood like the makings of some hideous stew. In one of the pictures the incision was stretched so far open it showed a cross section of abdominal wall. The striations of meat and fat made it look like a piece of bacon.

Afterward the concrete-dusted light of morning fell across them. They stared at the ceiling and Lucy’s cunt leaked the ichor of their beginning into dead sheets. Steven thought of the slaughter room, the recoil of the boltgun, blood and come sliding down the sides of a punctured cow, Cripps in his ass. The act of killing.

“I killed a cow yesterday.”

“Were you trying to look inside it?”

“The foreman said it would change me.”

Lucy laughed softly, sliding toward sleep. “It isn’t that easy.”

The sun hauled its broken-backed way higher into the aching slum air, turning the windows dirty yellow. Was he different from yesterday? The Hagbeast had destroyed him at dinner as easily as she always did. Where was the muscle-charging certainty of action Cripps promised? The slaughter room cow-killing had overwhelmed him to the point of unconsciousness and he expected something in return. But all he felt now as he thought of it was a lingering revulsion at its bloodiness.

It got late and he went downstairs to wash the sardine stink off his dick and have a shit. His ass was sore and all he could force out were small dark pellets that stung his ring and lay heavily under the water like a handful of stones.

The Hagbeast wasn’t up and Steven turned circles in the strange freedom of the kitchen, gathering armfuls of joy at this foretaste of her absence. He drank water and felt it clean him. Then he left for the plant.

CHAPTER SIXTEN

T
he bus trapped sunlight that morning, the air in the aisle was hazed with it, and through arabesques of cigarette smoke and the chaos intricacies of floating dust the other passengers seemed less than they had been. Not quite the gods of yesterday.

Steven wondered at the lightness he felt, paranoically fretting he might burst into laughter, right there in front of everyone on the bus, at these first gossamer strokings of happiness—so unused was he to their touch. What brought them? The time with Lucy? The Hagbeast’s first plateful of shit? Or could this elation, this feeling of possibility, be a delayed gift from a dead cow? He flexed his arms, twisting the muscles to see if he was stronger. He couldn’t tell.

Half an hour later, the drifting, window-gazing euphoria of the bus journey evaporated as he entered the process hall. Here things were real again. The weight of the boltgun and the spurts of blood were no longer smooth-edged prefugue memories, but intense and unavoidable occurrences that stuck sharp red fingers of recognition into his head and refused to be ignored.

He walked past the other men with his eyes on the floor, ashamed they might see the mark of the slaughter room on him and know the intimacy of his experience there. He sat by himself at the grinder, staring at the scoured steel work surface, dazzling himself with the million curving scratches that caught light and bent it into a bright flat tangle.

The flow of meat started with the horn and time passed in chunks of bleeding beef. Steven worked hard and tried not to think, because when he did he got confused. He didn’t understand what had happened in the slaughter room. It had frightened him … And yet there had been that flash of happiness on the bus. Now he was frightened again—of the blood and the cutting of holes into cows and the mad, wantonly exposed selfishness of the slaughtermen, and of not knowing what all this had done to him.

When he heard the voice behind him he froze, thinking it was Cripps. But there was too much smoothness to it, too much humid depth for it to belong to the striding, blood-bathed foreman.

The voice called his name again and it came through a lot of throat. Steven twisted quickly on his stool.

Just a white wall and, down near the floor, the ventilation grille. Then movement behind the grille and Steven was on his knees, peering through it, pressing his face against the mesh. In there, in the shadows beyond the spill of light from the hall, the outline of an anvil-shaped head swayed gently. Two eyes blinked limpidly, insolent in their slowness. A dark mass moved forward into the light.

“That Cripps man is going to fuck you up, dude.”

It was a cow. Most of the body was below floor level but Steven could tell it was a full-grown animal. A sienna Guernsey. He looked closely at the flawless sandy curves of forehead and cheek, at the chocolate darkening of the mouth and nostrils, at the badger rings around the eyes. For an absurd second he thought that if he looked hard enough at it the thing might phase back into his head and disappear.

But it was real and it stayed.

“What … ?”

“Yeah, I’m a cow, man. Touch me.”

Steven stuck his fingers through the grille. The cow was a cow, warm and solid.

“Can you handle it?”

Steven nodded, but it didn’t mean anything one way or the other.

“Good. Listen, man, you keep going to the slaughter room with Cripps, you’re gonna get fucked over. You think it’ll help, but it won’t. You got sick last time, learn from that.”

“How do you know?”

“Ah, man, we’re always watching. And we know Cripps. He’s been here forever and this ain’t the first time it’s happened. He told you the slaughtermen weren’t like other men, right? He talked about power and freeing yourself to take whatever you want. And you thought, ‘Shit, that’s just what I need. He’s right, look how different those guys are.’”

“I didn’t know what to think.”

“Yeah, but you wanted it, didn’t you?”

“Who wouldn’t?”

“Sure. But can’t you see it’s a load of shit? Course those guys look different, but it ain’t because they’ve gotten to be better people. Shit, they spend all day chopping us up and raping us, it’d be fucking weird if they didn’t look a little different. But it ain’t magic like Cripps says, no fucking way. What it is, man, is a way to stop yourself feeling, and you need your fucking head read if you think that’s the way to go.”

Steven sat back on his haunches, head gridlocked by a stream of cow words he didn’t want to hear. He wanted the strength Cripps promised, he wanted to change himself into someone on TV, someone who had the guts to get rid of the Hagbeast and build himself a life.

“You might be wrong. How can a cow know what changes a man?”

The cow stamped and rolled its shoulders. “Hey, fuck you, man. You think we’re stupid? We watch those guys outside this place and they ain’t the supermen they think they are, believe me. You don’t want to hear this right now? Okay. But remember what I said, it’s gonna fuck you up. Here comes the Crippster. Later.”

The Guernsey flicked its tail, turned and trotted into darkness. Steven looked over his shoulder and saw Cripps at the far end of the process line, heading his way.

Lumps of meat from the conveyor had built up in a sodden mound next to the grinder and some of them had fallen on the floor. He got up, cold and slow, and started chucking them into the machine. Waiting for the hand on his shoulder.

And it came. Cripps beside him, up against him, hard hand sliding from shoulder to neck, rubbing and squeezing.

“How do you feel, boy? Does yesterday still live within you?”

“I don’t know.”

Cripps laughed. “Don’t be frightened by the sickness. It lessens each time until it ceases to be felt.”

“It doesn’t frighten me. I just want to know what it means.”

“If meaning is what you need, you’ll have ample opportunity to search for it. I’m moving you to a slaughter station.”

Cripps shoved him off the stool and they moved across the floor, Steven flotsam in the bow-wave of Cripps’s will.

This thing with Cripps and death trauma was impossible to evaluate. Cripps said one thing and the cow said another—and his body, when it fugued out and got sick, seemed to agree with the cow. His head, though, was greedy for change and, not knowing the correct path to take, but unable to pass up a chance at happiness, slipped into neutral and waited for the decision to be made for it.

Cripps led him on to a slaughter platform and pressed the butt of a boltgun into his hand. The slaughtermen were peripheral, the world was a grabber and a cow being maneuvered into it. Around him there was nothing else, except the dead feeling that everything now was inevitable and beyond his control. It was going to happen—wholesale slaughter for hours on end. Not yesterday’s single cow, not the separated viewing of cow death pornography, but participation in what Cripps said made these men what they were.

“You remember the feel of the gun. Good. Hold it firmly—this and your cock will raise you from your weakness. Do it, boy. I shall watch for a while.”

Steven blew a hole in the cow’s head, felt the animal’s collapse in his own body and a fine spray of blood on his face.

Gun swings back on its chain and slaughtermen drag the still shivering cow out of the grabber and hook it up to the conveyor. Then back in again, press hard against the next cow’s head and pull the trigger.

He puked over the third cow before he killed it.

Dimly, at his side, he was aware of Cripps wanking. Aware, too, that it was over him and not the dying cows. But it meant little. He was inside himself, watching himself kill and unable to stop. Working faster and faster in sprays and fountains and gouts of blood and brain and slivers of skull and arcing jets of shit. Working fast to burn through the fever, to have it finished. But it wouldn’t end and Cripps spurted come against the side of his leg, and his back and arms ached with the weight of the boltgun and his clothes stuck to him with blood and sweat and his hair was plastered down flat.

The cows kept coming, and each one took something from him: shavings of sensitivity, perception, care. He was being robbed, violated. One of the few parts of himself he wanted to keep was being cauterized into hard scar tissue. Between waves of nausea and desperate silent pleas that the loss not be permanent, the idea crawled in that the cow in the vent had been right. He was scared. But the straight-jacket of events tied him to the platform and kept his hand on the gun.

He began to phase out of perception. He dipped into long troughs of redness where there was nothing but the swaying of his body out over the guardrail and the distant jerk at the end of his arm. During these periods he did not see or hear or taste. He knew only motion and he let it rock him to sleep, into a void where the horror of bovine death became a buffer against itself.

And then he would be back again in the immediacy of it all, feeling every ridge of the gun, seeing individually each hair on the back of the cow’s head, each minute globe of blood as it danced in the air. Then, colors were concentrated, as though the dye of every object was collapsing in on itself, turning dense and hard.

On the last of these awakenings he found himself pressed against the side of a cow, down on the slaughter floor with six other men and Gummy. His dick was in it, through a hole in its hide. It was wet in there and the organs slid around unpredictably. A slaughterman held arms with him.

Gummy was shrieking down at the ass. His face dripped shit and he twitched through some kind of jig as his leathery cock splattered come over the flanks of the animal.

“Now ya know what a cow’s for, dontcha, ya little bastard? Now ya know what old Gummy meant. Thought I was just a fuck with a chewed-up mouth, didn’t ya?” Gummy threw his head back and shouted at the roof, “God Jesus Christ, I love cows!”

No one listened to him.

Cripps was alone, buggering a heifer, watching the slaughtermen through eyes glazed with the exultation of whatever truths he saw opening before him in their sadism.

The men started to make loud mooing noises, shaking their heads and bellowing deep in their chests, bringing their lips into tight O’s. Steven did the same and they all moved faster and the cow’s guts began to slosh.

When he came, spurting into the soggy viscera of the cow, he wanted to scream. He wanted to scream in a white-hot burst words that would burn away this sin he had so greedily allowed himself to participate in. But his lungs were childhood-nightmare-paralyzed as the monster races in from the hole in the wall and heads slavering for the bed and you want to yell but your body just won’t do what you tell it to and you’re gonna die if you don’t make some sort of sound so you arch yourself until only the back of your head and your heels still touch the mattress … but it doesn’t do any good.

So Steven flipped back onto the floor and blacked out.