Carcass Trade (20 page)

She moved toward Mr. Avalos with a hand out to offer a handshake. “You're Paulie's father? I'm Jolene.” His eyes moved quickly to her and back without turning his head. Mr. Avalos didn't let go of his cane. Jolene's hand dropped. She stepped back and hitched herself up on the tabletop next to Monty, where I'd been sitting. I was looking over the head of Mr. Avalos, and Switchie had moved to my right, his viewpoint between the shoulders of Monty and Jolene. He had his shades on and chewed gum in tight munches. “Is it going to be real grody, boss?” Jolene asked.

“Guess you'll soon find out.” He said this as the woman in the apron handed the long, half-inch-wide knife to the worker whose left hand clutched the goat's ear at the stem, the goat eerily quiet now. Its eyes bulged. I thought, Oh fuck, and looked up into the branches of the tree. A high, pitiful scream issued from the goat, and when I looked, its rear legs were lurching, trying to gain purchase while the worker grasped wildly. The man holding the head arched back farther, nearly bringing the animal off the slab.

As the other man caught the legs again, I thought, Leave me to my lowly clerking in a crime lab, counting icepick holes in a dead man's shirt. It may be gruesome, but it's over, not
about
to be over, but over, ready for reports and labels and whatever eventual justice courts could apply.

The woman in the shed retrieved the fallen long knife from the ground and handed it to the young man wresting the goat's head, while Switchie molded his blond hair into shape and put the comb in his back pocket. “Pop,” he said, as the worker set the point of the knife to the animal's neck just below the ear, and I heard a grunt from Jolene.

The knife went in. The goat twitched ever so slightly. Then its mouth came open as the burgundy flow began its curve over the neat white fur and descended down the neck. Quickly the woman slid a bucket under. I looked into the beast's eyes, brown and wide with wonder, and counted in my head: One thousand, two thousand, go to meet your maker. Soon the worker at the rear could release the goat's legs and reach for the bucket from the woman to hold it for the forty seconds it took for the animal to go entirely slack. I held on the animal's eyes expecting to see a fading there, but the gleam gave up no secrets, and I do not know if my own stare accompanied him ill or well into that darkness.

Jolene got down, brushing her pants, and glanced my way as if it were all my fault. She told Switchie come on, let's go see the lambs, and he looked at Monty and sneered and said he'd see him later.

Mr. Avalos walked alongside Monty as we went toward what I now understood was the Campana Rancho, the Avalos home. A big bell, a
campana
, was poised on the road in front between wood uprights. At the side of the house, a small gray burro tethered to a tree brayed a sucking, honking complaint, and geese at the edge of a pond stretched their long necks, flapped wings, and echoed as well they could his sound.

It did not seem his huge son Paulie could be this short man's issue, for Mr. Avalos's black pants hung on his hips like tired canvas and the pant legs that were too long folded onto his shoes and carried rims of dust from the yards. He said, “I don't like that fella much.”

“Switchie? Paulie says he can run about anythin'. Graders, skip loaders, dumps. I came to see if Paulie's gonna finish my pit this week. You know?”

Mr. Avalos shook his head. Behind us, I heard Switchie's bike start up and saw him and Jolene head in a wide circle back to the games.

In a while Monty said, “I think I got a clogged intake valve.”

“Rotten egg smell?” the old man asked.

“A little.”

“Pay attention to it. Hydrogen sulfide will paralyze your sense of smell. You won't even smell it if you got a bad leak. It'll kill you.”

“That's another reason I'd like Paulie to stop by. Help me check it out.”

“Paulie dumped that Cat, you know,” Mr. Avalos said, moving his cane with each step but not touching the ground with it. “He had slope boards on it and he dumped it anyway. His shoulder's still not right. He can only lift his arm to here.” He demonstrated.

“I hate to say it, but maybe he needs to go a little lighter on the sauce, Mr. Avalos.”

“I don't know what Paulie needs. Maybe better company,” he said. And then glanced up and said, “Not you.”

Monty stopped, as if done escorting. “We'll be goin' along now, Mr. Avalos. Y'all take care.”

“You're going to eat some barbecue, aren't you?”

“Sure. Wouldn't miss it for the world.”

The old man gave a quick nod as he was moving away, but his gaze turned to the field behind his ranch where the sound of motorcycles droned in the distance.

We rode back to the field, only farther on, to a portion with low rises and shallow dips and gutter corrugations both nature and bike had carved. The scent of alfalfa and animal pens was still with us. More people had arrived. A new herd of parked Harleys sat near half a dozen dirt bikes in one small camp where women in torn shorts mingled with each other and fat-bellied men sat in beach chairs next to portable coolers. A boom box was blasting out the rhythms of “The Hillbilly Rock.”

This seemed like a different crowd from the ones before, yet when we dismounted, it was near the woman in red we'd seen earlier, the one who should by all laws of anatomy have grabbed the wienie in one gulp. Someone called her Marge and I believed I knew it all along, the name so fit her you could imagine no other. I looked for the man named Quillard. He was not with her or in the near crowd, but with just the reminder of him already I had a renewed sense of unease.

Unloading Monty's saddlebags, I hauled cans and candy bars over to an unclaimed piece of box cardboard to sit on at the trailing edge of the assembling area. When Monty came over to lay bags of beef jerky and two apples beside me, another man was with him, carrying a long-neck beer, grinning gaily, and telling Monty, “You got to keep the shiny side
up
, you stupid bastard.” He looked at me, and said, “Tell this Jap-scrap jockey the way you win is you keep the shiny side
up.
” The panther reaching high on his biceps flexed and seemed to want to crawl up the black cap sleeve of his shirt. The man's skin was the color of tea with a red sheen on it and his brown hair rolled in high waves, and he had one of the happiest, drunkest faces I'd seen in a while.

I said, “Are you racing?”

“Only my heart when I see pretty ladies.”

“Don't mind Jason,” Monty said. “He's missin' a few shingles off the roof.” He offered Jason a strip of jerky and then tore at one himself. A call to positions brought Monty to his feet. He said to Jason, “Get your ass out there and ride, man.”

“Hell, I'd spill a trike,” Jason said happily, lifting his beer can for evidence. “Go on. Take mine.” Monty laughed and headed to the dirt bikes, looking back once and winking at me. Jason took a guzzle, and with smiling eyes said to me, “The old fuckup can still hammer the best steel in Riverside County, I'll give him that. You ever see his work?”

“Uh-huh,” I said.

“Fuckin' artist.”

“Yeah man,” I said, sipping from a beer myself now. It was my first, and I'd make it my last for the day, but the sun was getting pretty hot and all this time I didn't know Monty had it in his saddlebags. When I heard the announcer, I left Jason to guard the cardboard and candy bars, and moved closer to the starting line. Monty was on a yellow bike in a second tier of seven, each tier having the field to themselves, and so the time he spent waiting for the first bikes to finish and spill around the drums at the end of the track was filled with revving and checking and eyeing his nearby competition. He was third off at the flag, but he took the lead in no time, flying over the grades like a man set free of family and all obligation.

I watched the races for twenty minutes before I realized they were more of same, more of same, Monty taking first or Monty taking second. The beer was gone where all beer goes quicker than any other beverage, and soon I was standing on my tiptoes looking for the Porta Potti.

Making my way through the crowd, I saw the lady with seventy-two teeth walking away from where the action was. She went down a slope toward a four-foot-high orange plant cluster called sticky monkey flower and a sycamore starter no higher. I looked around again for the toilet. It was some distance off, at the original game site, and had a line of three people in front of it. So I followed the woman, calling, “Looking for a Porta Potti?”

Her gray ponytail flicked around and she smiled widely. “How'd you guess?”

“Me too. I don't want to wait in line. You go on, if you want, I'll stand guard.”

“Don't be taking my picture, now.”

“Then what'll I have to bribe you with?” I said, and turned and framed my hands at the freeway off in the distance. I thought of Doug Forster snapping pictures off in Carbon Canyon all around Miranda Robertson's charred car.

High cloud cover was drifting in. When it cut off the sun, the air was a lot cooler.

From where I stood I could see the back of the Avalos farm and the white geese strolling. I framed my hands again for a picture that would not take. I noticed for the first time a flat-roofed storage shed hunkered at the far end of the covered pens, the door of the shed slung open.

“Say, you wouldn't have any Kleenex?” Marge called.

“‘Fraid not,” I said. Then: “I've got a lot of lint in my pocket.”

She laughed and said, “I don't think that'll work,” then was quiet behind the brush for a while, until I asked, “Where's your friend?”

“Quillard? The shrimp?” She came out stirring her waistband with both thumbs. “Isn't he cute? I knew him three weeks before I realized he was short.” Then she winked and said, “I saw him first.”

I said, heading toward the tree screen myself, “Jeez, am I really going to pee out here in front of God and everybody?”

“He's the only one won't be surprised,” Marge said. “Need some lint?”

“Don't think so,” I called, thinking of how I could be friends with this woman easy. Thinking about how she and Quillard fit.

“Watch out for poison oak,” she called back. “Indians used to eat it to desensitize themselves so they could work with the branches, you know, make baskets. But I don't think you want to be the first woman on record to try for whatever cure for whatever ails you in that direction. That location, I mean.”

“Good advice,” I said, and did indeed look around for red leaves. In back of the young sycamore I got busy, and while I was, I asked, “What does he do, your friend?”

“He's unemployed. Aerospace laid him off.”

“A lot of that going around. What do you do?”

“I'm a potter. Out by Claremont College. My own shop.” When I was coming back up the slope, I stopped for a moment and watched the clouds acrobatting. Marge was watching too. “It can't rain,” she said.

Brushing yellow deerweed off me, I looked back over my left shoulder and saw the storage shed door down by the animal pens buck open farther and some little commotion go on at the opening, with, it seemed, boots and legs and shirtbacks struggling to emerge. The sounds of bikes at start-off again dulled my hearing, but I thought I heard a human protest, or perhaps an argument at the shed. And I thought I saw the man with the silver hair, Quillard, shoot out backward and jerk back in.

I said, “Your friend is in the shed down there.”

“Quillard? What shed? Quillard Satterlee wouldn't be in any shed. He's got claustrophobia. He won't even come in my potting house and it's got a great big wide old door I hardly ever close.”

“I thought that was him.”

“Uh-uh. Not him.” Her sunburn looked so raw I wondered how she could still be smiling. Making small talk, we headed back to the assembly. But, curious about what I saw, when we drifted apart in the crowd, I swung back around toward the slope to have a second look at the shed. The door was closed by now, but I looked at the long animal stables, and the puffs of beige sheep in the open pen beyond them, and decided I needed a walk and a break from people. On the other side of the ranch house, near where the goat was tethered and the geese still bopped about, smoke was rising from a huge barbecue. The cool air and a new breeze felt exhilarating as I tramped over dried grasses in my silly blue boots with white flame insets. I was a million miles away from the lab, and just as many away from Monty and his minions.

I came to the first stable and was drawn in by little grunts. On either side of a dirt walkway were sties, the first one holding maybe twenty piglets all squished up near the automatic feeder, wasps circling at the water tube. A pig condo. It had a smell powerful enough to make me hold my breath. Farther down, though, among the dozing red and black hulks with giant ears over their eyes, there wasn't much smell at all. Their pens were clean, only muddy along a sort of ditch where faucets dripped; thinking back to the first one, I guessed kids were pigs all over.

Crossing over to the second building, I looked ahead to my original destination, the shed, and saw no one. I stopped to stare at a boar worthy in his slit-eyed nap of at least one Kodak moment. I falsely framed, clicked my tongue like a shutter; he winked, and seemed to be grinning. But farther down the walkway, the pigs seemed restless. Maybe these were perturbed by the revving dirt bikes and Harleys or even by the change in weather. Maybe, like Monty's pigs, they were in breeding season, and I shouldn't be disturbing them. I proceeded toward the end to leave.

Nearer the exit, all of them were up and huffing. Some were chattering their teeth the way my guinea pig does when I make too much fuss stirring up his pine shavings. They stood stiff-legged, bristles raised on their necks like dogs. Their tails were whipping, and their lips were curled over their tusks in an evil grin. From the mouths of two black boars came low barking sounds. Foam dripped. They turned quickly at my approach, skewering me with a red-eyed stare. As I quickened my step, I wondered if the sideboards would hold against single-minded, pork-barreled purpose.