Carcass Trade (19 page)

I went and stood under a tree. A lanky guy in sunglasses stepped away, as if he didn't want to be seen with me, and then I saw that he was taking pictures.

Jolene and Switchie were lined up for their second try, only about nine contestants so far, when a red bike grumbled onto the game field from the side. The driver was a man with white hair strangled into a ponytail. A sunburned woman stood on the rear footpads and seemed stapled hard onto his shoulders. Her dark gray hair streamed down her back to her halter strap. She was big, not fat; no waist, and the muscles in her legs beneath her white shorts were raw pink spears. Her mouth, when she let out a whoop, would cover a headlight. The guys standing next to me said, “Man, there's one that'll suck 'em down,” and “Shit, Quillard's got it clean.”

A twig fell on my head from the oak tree I was standing under. When I flicked it away, I missed Jolene and Switchie's try but knew she failed when her frustrated shriek carried clear across the lot and the crowd clapped anyway. The guy with the mustard bucket dipped the wienie again for the next duo.

Then came the lady with the mouth and the powerful sunburn. I could read the letters on the driver's shirt this time: Will Work for Beer. As he wove his way forward, I looked at the pair and liked them both for the spirit under the gray hair, and wondered why the guy looked familiar. He was a small man, or was it only compared to her, the woman with the fine big mouth and the guts to ride a Harley when she's fifty?

They passed slowly under the hot dog, the woman rising higher, head back and openmouthed, the crowd cheering her on. In a smooth ride with nary a wobble, she took the wienie off with a perfect bite, and the crowd yelled and
oogahed
on bulb horns. A man sitting on top of one of the food tables held up a sign that read
SHOW US YOUR TITS
. Obligingly, she lifted her halter, the white skin contrasting brightly to the sunburned flesh above, and left the garment there as they rode off.

Monty and his blonde were across the lot, Monty taking off his light blue Western shirt and hanging it in his belt loop. Underneath was his black Ghostriders T-shirt. He looked across the lot at me.

Jolene came over, handcuffs swinging. “You should try the Wienie Bite. It is so cool,” she said, still a yellow film around her mouth.

“I guess I'm just not a player.”

“You better shape up. Monty's going to dump you.”

“Think so?”

“Look at her over there. She's on him.”

“Does he make a habit of it?”

“What? Dumping somebody? Oh yeah.”

“Did you know any of his girlfriends?”

“The last one.”

“Who was that?”

“A girl named Miranda. I don't know most of them. I just hear names. He keeps kind of private.”

I felt my skin flush, took a breath to calm myself, and asked, “What was his problem with the last girlfriend?”

“It's not like I ask him. She was around one week, gone the next. I figured it was because she was kind of stuck-up, you know what I mean? She'd fly right by us, never say hi, kiss my ass, or nothin'. Crap,” she said, scanning the crowd. “I can't see Switchie, can you? He makes me mad sometimes.”

“He ever come on to you?” I asked her, casually as I could, and I wasn't sure why.

“Monty? He's way too old for me.”

“That doesn't answer my question.”

She grinned, chewed on a stick, and said, “If he did, I wouldn't tell you.”

“Why not?”

“You'd be jealous, find a way to get me canned.”

A tall man with a bullhorn came out to give the rules for the next game. Jolene, said, “You coming?” When I said no, she shrugged and went off toward the playing field.

I looked over the herd of Harleys. It was then that I placed the man in the white ponytail and the Will Work for Beer T-shirt; remembered how his mane would look if fluffed at the shoulders instead of tied off, this man people kept calling Quillard. It was the guy Joe and I had seen after the investigation at Blue Jay Campground where the victim wore wire for a necklace. Up there off Ortega Highway, ten miles from the scene. General Lee and his concealed weapon in his crossover holster. What the heck was going on?

Monty left the side of his bike and walked over to me. His blonde partner was talking to one of the referees whose hair was as light and as long as hers. When Monty came near, he turned and looked back at a cluster of people sitting at the edges of the field on camp stools, playing checkers. He said, “These here are your rubbies.”

“Excuse me?”

“Rich urban bikers. Two beers, they think they're outlaws,” he said.

“What are
you
?” I asked.

“A pubbie. Poor urban biker. That's why I'm gonna make you buy me my next beer.”

“Not an outlaw,” I said, pushing it.

Monty stepped away from me, looked me up and down, and said, “You're lookin' pretty outlaw yourself. Whyn't you go one game, long as you're here? Do the haystack.”

I saw the hay pile, a mound about three feet high. One of the referees was holding up a potato. He had two more pressed to his ribs with his left arm. Then he told six women, one of them Jolene and another the bigmouthed woman, that he was hiding the potatoes in the pile. They were to dive in and find them: first prize, second prize, third.

“Asses in the air and women groveling,” I said. “What's fun about that?”

Monty laughed, and when the action started he had me stumbling backward till the tree stopped me, and there he wrapped one hand on the front of my throat and kissed me. The surprise of it left me numb and unmoving. I tasted whiskey.

When we broke, I saw the man called Quillard—his lady butt-up in the hay pile as she swept hay behind her—staring our way.

We had to move because a portable toilet was being brought in. Already a man so loaded down with jangling biker metal that he needed all two hundred forty pounds to carry it was coming toward it.

Another man approached Monty and started talking as though there'd never been a break from a previous conversation. His plume of brown hair swung like a pendulum at the back; bald otherwise. “I'm thinkin' of a bolt-on nitrous but I don't want to blow the cylinders.”

Monty said, “Shit-can the nitrous. Switchie used nitrous, totally fragged his manifold.”

“I'll just have to huff it then,” he said, smiling, shaking his head. “Damn, been a long time since I did any that hippie crack. Hey,” he said with a tilt of the chin in my direction, “she cool?”

Monty turned to me and said, “You cool?”

“I don't know. Am I?”

“She's cool.”

“I need a set of works,” the man said.

Monty shook his head no. “See Switchie.”

“Couple hours I'll be stressing.”

“Ain't my problem, man.”

“Fuck you,” the guy said, but made no move to leave. In fact, he lowered himself and sat on his heels, bouncing there awhile.

“See Switchie.”

“Where's he at? He got any boy?”

“Three percent. Better'n most.”

“My lady needs some too. Is that a pretty knuckle or what?” he said, looking at a bulky yellow bike off to the side, a woman with bare arms standing next to it, hugging herself as if she were cold.

The man got up. Tattoos peeked out his brown leather pants with lacings at the hip. “Hear about Charlie Viveros? He just about got whacked by the South Americans. Had to prove to 'em he lost his load to the DEA. If he hadn't sent the goombahs a newspaper clipping of the bust, he'd be jerky drying on a fence post about now. Dumb shit. He's growing jane right out in his backyard in Van Nuys with a whole load of blow worth a million bucks in the house. I swear I think they're makin' them dumber every day.”

Monty said in his whispery voice, “Why don't you take it on down the road, Wilson?” He didn't say it angry or mean, just a serious suggestion.

The man leaned toward me with drunk green eyes and said, “Watch out for this guy. He farts like a rhino.” Monty hiked his cream-colored boot and gave Wilson a push. Wilson skittered ahead, laughing.

Monty said, “Tell Switchie I'm down the house,” nodding in the direction of the farmhouse we passed on the way to the back field. “Come on,” he said to me, dragging me along with a loose hand on an elbow. “I got to see a man about a pig.”

I asked, “You do that stuff?”

“
That
stuff? You gonna tell me you want some?”

“No. Not me,” I said, matter-of-factly. I just wanted to make sure I wasn't invited to participate.

“Good,” he said.

“I thought you said I was cool.”

“Just 'cause you don't do dope don't make you uncool.”

“What's ‘boy'?”

“Heroin. You mix it with cocaine, make a speedball. It lightens the launch. Coke, that's ‘girl' where he comes from. Hey, you
are
a virgin, aren't you?”

Laid out like that it could have been a pallid torso on an autopsy table, the legs whacked off at the knees in some malicious harvest. But it was a pig and only a pig, the outer meat paler than I would have expected, the exposed abdominal cavity rosy with the colors of resting blood. In the shadows, on a rear table, lay the hog's head in a gray-speckled roasting pan. Its monument of snout pointed upward. Its grand flap of ears draped like Dumbo's over the pan's edges.

Steam rose thinly from a vessel deeper than a bathtub just inside the ax-hewn rails separating us from the slaughter shed. On the water's surface floated short hair and pastel scum, and beneath the tub the ground was sticky with mud splash. Birds chanted in the tree overhead.

Monty and I sat on top of a picnic table facing the shed, which was open on three sides, our feet parked on the weathered bench. We had driven over at the start of the game where women get blindfolded and stumble around to find their partners by the roar of their machines.

The old man Monty came to see sat on the bench by Monty's boot. Long ago the man's face had sagged to slim gourds around the jaw, but his hair was black as could be. Ahead, a Mexican woman wordlessly swept a long knife over a strop, one end of which was nailed to a post. Quietly, the old man said, “I mostly kill just for the family now.”

When a young worker entered the open shed and said something to the woman in Spanish, she paused and swept away graying hair escaped from the knot at the back of her head, then answered. In slow movements she lay her implement down on the table to retie the black rubber apron covering her from neck to knees, the apron flecked with bits of butchered carcass. The boy said something else and nodded, then left to join another worker standing nearby. They went off toward a pen with goats flooding one past another, nervous from new visitors just gotten out of a car.

“Tell my friend how big your family is,” Monty said to the old man.

“A hundred and sixty,” Mr. Avalos said. When he smiled, he showed an empty space among the otherwise large and yellow teeth perfectly uniform in his mouth.

Wow, I said, or something like it, and Monty said, “You've been a busy man. My hat's off to you.” Then he waited awhile and asked, “Paulie in the house?”

“Nope. He ain't arrived yet.” His cane the color of nicotine wavered under his broad brown hand as he spoke. Beside him, shouldering a chicken-wire fence, each green paddle of a beavertail cactus carried the whitened scars of someone's initials, month, day, and year dates carved there too. Carving seemed to be a thing to do in this part of the country, as with Monty's initials in stone.

“I thought I saw Paulie's truck,” Monty said.

“That's my wife's.”

The woman in the shed stacked hog segments on a wire rack in the corner. Then she took a small hose and watered the steel table down.

“How is your wife, Mr. Avalos?”

A terrible bleating issued from off our right where the visitors stepped back for the two young workers to bring a brown goat from the pen.

“That chemo's about to do her in,” Mr. Avalos said, rolling his eyes upward to us. “Next week I'm going to buy her a new truck.”

“That'll be real nice,” Monty said.

He looked ahead. “She says she don't want one.”

“She does,” Monty said. “She just doesn't want you to go to the trouble, feelin' sorry for her.”

Mr. Avalos nodded solemnly.

The goat continued its awful screaming as the two workers hoisted it along toward us, one man hugging the front legs and the other looping his arms around the spindly rear legs so that the poor beast sagged like a hammock and its white belly bulged.

Mr. Avalos looked at me and said, “The goats are the loudest,” then looked away. “The lambs, they just stand there and shiver.”

“Maybe we should be moseying on,” I said to Monty.

“Here comes that one,” Mr. Avalos said, looking over the heads of the workers. He meant Switchie, with Jolene, the two of them coming from the direction of a white structure too small to be a house by today's standards but maybe it was Avalos family headquarters once. His arm completely wrapped around Jolene at the top of her shoulders, Switchie's hand was at her mouth, and as they came close I saw he had a finger between her lips and he was rubbing her gums in a most intrusive and sensual way.

The workers hefted the goat onto a dark wood slab next to the steel table. I felt my breath come quick. I slid off the table and went around to the opposite side, holding my own arms and looking out past the cactus at the dust rising in the back field where the riders were continuing their games.

Monty said, “I think you and Jolene want to see some ducks. Down there by the sheep pen.”

Jolene said, “Nothing doing.”

“Think you're a tough guy, huh?” said Switchie.

“Want to find out?” She gave him a sexy swagger, lowering her eyes. Against white skin, her black hair and leathers made her look like something in a music video, pampered kids pretending to be street hoods.