Cows (2 page)

CHAPTER FIVE

O
utside his building, in the dark. Sodium vapor drained color from the blackened walls of the ruin and Steven found it hard to focus on the crumbling planes. Everything was too bright or too black and the wash of streetlight ocher fritzed his eyes. The place had a shunned look, as though whatever gave personality to a structure had flown in disgust from this one long ago. And, left abandoned in a field of belching, farting, puking factories, the rotting four-story Victorian had grown shuttered and autistic.

Steven paused on the steps and watched the evening trucks blow litter along the empty sidewalk, and wondered where they were going.

In the gloom of the third-floor landing, as he stood at the door of the flat steeling himself against the Hagbeast, he felt the unfriendly air move. Darkness swirled on the stairs then parted and she was walking toward him in slow-motion strides. Lucy—black T-shirt, black leggings, dark hair streaming in some self-generated slipstream. Half Indian, half Jewess. She ran her eyes over his face like a blind woman using her fingers, concerned not to communicate immediately, but to search for possible hostility. Steven stood passive while she picked a piece of ground meat from his hair. She held it on her palm and stared at it.

“I do that at work. It’s my new job.”

She lifted her gaze and looked intently at him.

“When you cut them open do you get to see inside? Do you reach inside and look around?”

Steven shifted his feet. “For what?”

“They live, don’t they? They suffer. Like us. Haven’t you seen the poison inside them? Hard and black and stuck in the intestines? Or under the liver or somewhere else?”

“I just saw guts. Toxins are stored in muscle, anyway. Not in lumps between organs.”

“I’m not talking about toxins. You think I’m talking about sugar and caffeine and all that shit? Fuck, just being alive does it. That and what your parents do to you before you get strong enough to stop them. And even when you can stop them it’s too late. The seed’s there and it grows and grows until it jams all the systems in your body and your mind fucks up. Didn’t you see anything like that?”

She sounded desperate.

“I didn’t really look, maybe there was something.”

Her intensity made Steven uneasy, but she was a woman, a possible source of love, and he didn’t want to disappoint her.

“The only thing I saw up close was the heart. They weigh six pounds, you know. It was still beating when I held it, like it was trying to suck something in. But it stopped in the end.”

Lucy looked suddenly tired. “Our hearts are only two pounds, not much room for love.”

He watched her drift back up the stairs to the fourth floor, watched her brown fingers trail along the bannister and imagined them on his cheek.

***

The flat was cold. The Beast in her gluttonously accumulated blubber did not feel it. Steven went straight to the bathroom, he needed a shit. He could feel it heavy in his guts, squeezing closed the large veins in his groin, making his legs ache. Minute fecal particles would be sifting through the wall of his colon, heading straight for the cells of his face and brain, aging, aging, aging … stealing the future.

He locked the door, squatted, flipped his dick inside the toilet seat, leaned forward and strained. After a moment of pissing and resistance his sphincter relaxed and a foot and a half of gray shit shot out of his ass and left a thick smear on the dry porcelain above the water. Steven twisted to look at it. Although it was large, one end was broken raggedly across and he knew his dump hadn’t been complete. It never was, his body never managed to get rid of all its poison in one go. He wondered if this was what Lucy meant.

He used a lot of newspaper wiping himself.

CHAPTER SIX

I
n his bedroom. Dog scraped across floorboards to snuffle hello. Steven patted him sadly. A dog was such a symbol, it meant so much on TV and in the world outside. It was connected with rambles through sunlit meadows, carefree and laughing, arm in arm with a loosely dressed woman, throwing a ball for a delightfully squealing child to chase. But Dog knew little of sunlight. This wreck of an animal had lived out its life without ever once having escaped the shadows of the flat.

Something heavy lumbered along the passage outside—the Hagbeast emerging from the rear of the flat, snorting her way to the kitchen like a pig rooting its way through a dung heap. He could picture her exactly—head lowered and forward, nostrils wide, spit stranding from her chin to the filthy floral-print material of her breast. And the rear view—a blot of wet menstrual blood sticking the dress to her rolling ass and the backs of her thighs, hunched shoulders, bare mottled calves, swollen like the rest of her. Even through the closed door and the peeling walls he could feel the effluvium of her hate. He wondered if she could feel his, it was just as strong.

It had never been different. From the second she had squirted him from her cunt they had loathed each other. In the littered kitchen, on the table they ate from still, she had pulled him out of the mess between her legs and cursed him. And he, sensing a lifetime of worse to come, had pissed in her eyes.

Steven did not step outside the flat until he was five. By then, though the swelling of his heart at the unimagined largeness of the world told him to run as far and as fast as his little legs would carry him, he was enough aware to understand that he could not survive alone. The Hagbeast was, for the time being, necessary to his existence. But from that moment of glimpsed possibility his child brain started to count the months to maturity and escape. For each year that passed afterward, there was a year just coming that would carry him into self-sufficiency and freedom.

But it didn’t happen like that. By the time thirteen and fourteen and fifteen came (and all the others), even though his hate for the Beast and for his squalid, closeted life had in no way diminished, he found he had somehow left things too late. His five-year-old fearlessness had atrophied to a point where it was impossible for him to contemplate extended periods beyond the walls of the flat. Through the years of his growing the Hagbeast had so leached him of those identifying marks by which the world might possibly have recognized him that escape by simply leaving this place had become a laughable notion.

Steven stayed in his room as long as he could, sitting on the bed, idly stroking Dog while TV images fluttered into the room like whores’ promises. But eventually it came, as he knew it would—the double-tracked horror-movie screech that drew tight the reigns of her proprietorship.

“Steven!”

His skin crawled.

“Steven, dinner’s ready.”

If he waited any longer she would come for him, so he stepped into the hall and trudged to the kitchen. Dog grunted along behind him.

He knew immediately that things had changed, that there had been a shift in attitude. Small things—the way she stood and looked at him, a subtle rearrangement of her fat, even the shape of the blood on the back of her dress—a thousand hints that marked the beginning of a new phase of misery. Steven moved warily to the table and sat down, keeping his eyes on her.

“You didn’t want to keep Mama waiting, did you?”

“I was tired.”

“Of course you were. There.”

She put something in front of him. Steven looked at it in disbelief—part of a sheep’s stomach, steaming in folds that hung over the edge of the plate. It had not been cleaned and undigested vegetable matter speckled the frilly corrugations of its inner surface. He touched it with a finger.

The Beast, already chewing, noticed the movement.

“I know you like this. I made it special so you could have a nice dinner after your first day at work. Go on, start.”

Steven didn’t move and the Hagbeast grinned at him.

“Mmmm. It melts like butter. Hurry up, don’t let it go cold.”

“No.”

“Oh, yummy, yummy, yummy. I’ve cooked you up a treat here. Eat, eat.”

The singsong in her voice worried him, there was a deadliness behind it. Things were escalating.

“I said no. I’m not eating it.”

The Beast put her spoon down slowly. “And just exactly what is wrong with it, Mister Cocksucker?”

“People don’t eat things like this. People don’t cut something out of an animal and put it straight on a plate. It’s not clean.”

The Hagbeast choked on laughter and blew snot and tripe across the table.

“Oh, people. Peeeple. Look at the cunt, such an expert now. Ooo, a whole day out there. You must know everything.”

Steven squeezed his fork until it hurt his hand.

“You’re a fucking idiot, Steven. You think going out there for a day makes you like them? You think you got strong today? Show me how strong you are, cunt. Walk out of here and find somewhere to live … You moron. Without me, without this home I’ve given you, how long would you last?”

He felt his guts liquify. He wanted to scream at her that he could be like them, that one day he would have love and a wife and everything else. But he knew the bitch was right, he couldn’t leave. He had plans. He needed safety in which to copy the lives he saw on TV. The dreams he had of rebuilding himself would be impossible to fulfill without it.

“You get too cocky, you little cunt, and I’ll put you out myself. How would you like that? All those people around you forever and ever and no place to get away from them. Wouldn’t that be fun?”

“No.” It was hard to breathe, his chest felt too tight.

“What was that? Mama didn’t hear you.”

“It wouldn’t be fun.”

“No it wouldn’t, would it? So eat your fucking food.”

Steven cut into the organ on his plate and put some of it in his mouth. It took forever to chew. The rubbery flesh slipped around his teeth and made him heave.

“Yes, yes, that’s a good boy. That’s Mama’s good boy, eating it all up.”

But Steven wasn’t listening. In the middle of a vomitocean of misery he was busy deciding on the meaning of her words.

The flat was hers to take away as she wished. This had always been so, but she had never used its removal as a threat before. So why now? Had the bravery of his first day at work made it plain to her that he had hopes for the future?

If this was so he would have to be careful, the bitch would kill him for sure if she thought he might escape the hell she had spent so long building around him. Perhaps the upscaling in food disgustingness was her first move.

He chewed on and forced the sheep’s belly into his own. The Hagbeast squirmed to unstick her bleeding ass from the chair.

Steven watched TV a long time that night, searching the scattered pixels for some way to armor-plate himself against the Beast. On screen the templates for life were easy to find, but the methods of their construction, as always, remained hidden.

He’d puked his dinner in the corner of the bedroom and Dog had eaten it. Having been inside its master’s body the offal and bile were sacrament to the animal, and their consumption scorched its brain with dreams of becoming man. The air was still sour and the soft membrane behind Steven’s nose burned.

Upstairs Lucy moved, creaking floorboards as she walked from somewhere to somewhere else. Steven imagined what he would see if she was naked and the ceiling was glass.

He probed his guts with stiff fingers to see if he could feel anything hard and poisonous that might be the cause of his abnormality. But all he found were vague outlines of functional meat that made him flash back to swinging cows with veined sacks of organs spilling across their chests.

He stared at the black ceiling, unable to sleep. He heard the rusty sponging of Lucy’s bedsprings and saw himself waiting in a double bed in a wide pine-paneled bedroom filled with birdsong and her just getting in. He felt the compression of the mattress under her weight, the slide of her dark skin against his, the molding to his body … and the relaxation of love.

Then Dog yelped out of a dream and it was quiet upstairs and Steven’s body sagged against its own emptiness.

And the night dragged on.

CHAPTER SEVEN

B
reakfast was bad, it followed dinner’s pattern. The Hagbeast stood over him while he tried to eat, clamping his head in the crook of her arm and forcing the food into his mouth with her fingers when he wasn’t fast enough to please her.

“Did you dream about me last night, Steven?”

She pressed her mouth to his ear and her breath stank. He could hear the spit collecting in the back of her throat.

“I found come on your bed this morning. Dog was going to lick it up, but he didn’t when I came in. It was thin. You need more of Mama’s cooking, that stuff spread on my hand like milk. Mama wants you to be strong, doesn’t she? She wants your come all thick and gooey. Eat up, there’s a good lad, oh that’s a good boy. Swallow it down, that’s right.”

Steven jerked his head free and wiped his face.

“You fucking mad bitch. I didn’t come and I didn’t dream about you.”

“If you say so, but I think Mama knows what she’s talking about.”

The Hagbeast sat opposite him and started on her own food.

“See? I don’t know why you make such a fuss. I eat just the same as you. Whatever my boy eats, I eat. That way we’ll both be strong, won’t we?”

She forced a mouthful of food through the gaps in her teeth, out past her lips in a glistening wad, then sucked it back in and swallowed it.

“You don’t want me strong. You’re killing me with this shit.”

“Oh Steven, please.”

“Look at my skin, it’s gray.”

“All boys have trouble with their skin.”

“I’m twenty-fucking-five.”

The Beast ground her teeth. “I know how old you are. Believe me, I’ve counted the years. I’ve counted them and I’ve seen them fill up with your disgusting habits. Do you know how bad you stink when you take a shit?”

Steven’s rage choked him. He wanted to kill her, he wanted his body to explode and destroy the suffocating little kitchen. But it wouldn’t. It sat there paralyzed by a carefully inbred fear of action against this fat hulk and did nothing. Only his mouth seemed to be working.

“How can you smell anything over that mess between your legs?”

The Hagbeast knocked over the table and stood up, jowls quivering, fists pushing into the fat of her hips.

“You fuck. You shitting fuck. How dare you talk about my blood. My blood is the marker for the wound of your birth. It never healed, Steven, and I let it run so I never forget the horror of that day. You pissed on me, you jackal. I should have killed you then …”

And on and on until Steven broke from the table and ran out of the flat.