Cows (3 page)

CHAPTER EIGHT

T
he men in line stood around smoking and drinking coffee out of plastic cups, breath steaming in the refrigerated air of the processing hall. They joked and talked about women, squeezed their balls, draped arms across friends’ shoulders. Even killing time, they were more alive than Steven ever expected to be.

He sat on his stool at the grinding station waiting for the shift to begin. There was no one near him so he stared at the ventilation grilles set into the walls down near the floor and wondered what it was like behind them. Over at the skull press Gummy dripped oil onto moving parts.

Two minutes before horn time six men in spotless white overalls marched purposefully across the hall and through the hanging plastic strips of the slaughter room entrance. They moved with a vigorous precision and they shared nothing with the other process hands. They were lords, apart and above, the forces of the world meant nothing to them. Steven tracked them until he felt a calloused hand on the back of his neck.

“Slaughter party.”

He twisted to find Cripps behind him, staring wistfully after the men.

“God, what beauty …” He looked hard at Steven. “They are the genesis. They create what the rest of you only work with. They know themselves, boy. They looked inside and weren’t afraid to drag out what they found. What would you find inside yourself, I wonder?”

The hand on his neck moved to rub his shoulders.

“We all have it, that dark core. It makes us men. And if we examine it, if we can bear to hold it up to ourselves and acknowledge it as our own, then it makes us more than men. The slaughter room is where we become complete, boy.”

Cripps gave him a final squeeze and walked off, straight-backed and clear-eyed. The horn sounded. Cups and butts hit the floor. Process hands moved to their stations and dead cows started to swing through the plastic strips.

Steven ground meat all morning, absorbed in the speed and power of the grinder. The machine blasted out its meaty pulp with such force that it stuck to the sides of the hopper and he tried to slow it down by overloading it with the heaviest, toughest chunks of beef. It didn’t work, all differences of size and texture became uniform under the spinning discs and spiked rollers.

By midday the fascination had worn thin and Steven was on auto, twisting from the waist to grab the meat, jerking it up, letting momentum carry it at the end of his arms into the mouth of the grinder, then twisting at the waist again, starting a reverse arc for more meat … and humping it up and dumping it in.

His gaze wandered over the mechanized carnage of the line, lingering on hands slicing with electric knives, on the bodies falling swiftly to bits. The fact that organs were piled into carts and limbs sheered from carcasses did not revolt him so much as make him aware of his own mortality. How easily he could suffer, at any time of day, some accident that would burst him or crush him or mangle him before he ever got a chance at happiness. And if not an accident, then the Hagbeast’s poisoning. He was sure that last night she had passed some pinnacle of restraint and was now coasting toward a time when he would lie cold and stiff across the kitchen table, the remains of a last incrementally fatal meal squashed against his chest.

Something flickered at the edge of vision, a shadow in wire mesh. He snapped around to stare at the ventilator behind him, but beyond the grille of steel wire there was only darkness. Before he could slide off his stool to take a closer look the lunch horn sounded and the walkway between him and the wall was suddenly full of men racing to the locker room for sandwiches wrapped in tinfoil by doting wives. So Steven forgot about it and waited for them to pass, and when the process hall was empty he walked around to the gutting trough, an early station not far from the slaughter room.

The line was still. A cow swung by its heels from the overhead track, going nowhere. Its tongue lolled softly from side to side and strands of saliva traced patterns in the blood of the runoff gutter. Steven reached out to stop it swinging and left his hands on the wide sides of the animal for a moment, feeling ghosts of life in the cooling skin.

The belly was slit and the sack of guts, not yet removed, had fallen out to hang heavy and mottled against the rib cage. He breathed deeply through his nose, searching for some scent of the grassy, wildflower-strewn field in which this animal must have grazed. But the dusty smell of dung and hide and the fermented, rotted-down stink of the exposed organs blanketed everything and Steven had to close his eyes and force himself to imagine the beauty of where the cow had lived.

He found a curved gutting knife and used it on the animal. He had to reach inside the abdominal cavity and the unexpected warmth he found there pulsed a brief wave of sympathy through him. But it passed quickly.

The guts slid over the cow’s stretched neck and landed at his feet with a sound like someone being sick on a tiled floor. He stood there trying to recognize the different parts. The heart and lungs hadn’t come out, of course, they were still fixed within the chest, but the spleen and the kidneys were there. And the enormous liver and, most easily identifiable of all, the tangle of gray-blue intestines weaving slickly about themselves, shiny in the harsh light. Among these landmark organs were smaller, irregularly shaped bits of viscera he couldn’t name.

There was very little blood. The cows died quickly and trapped most of it in their tissue, a last snatching back of themselves from all the touching hands of man. Dark bile leaked from the ruptured stomachs, though, and a shallow fringe of clear internal mucus collected around the edge of the pile. Steven crouched and examined things—the hollows, the tight bunching of hard yellow fat in the dip of the kidneys, the smooth brown slope of the liver, the pockets of viscous pink glit …

The mess was incongruous, there on the hard floor, but within itself it was consistent, all of it grown to a single plan. There were no crystalline black accretions jammed into organically curving tissue. It looked like Lucy was wrong, at least as far as cows were concerned. But he had to be sure.

The touch of the organs when he stuck his hands into them was unpleasant. Instead of the softness he expected, he found them hard with vaguely abrasive surfaces. He rummaged quickly, running his fingers along folds and crevices, poking through valves and into sphincters, probing the insides of those that would admit him.

Slivers of meat collected under his fingernails and everything made wet sucking noises. He was thorough but he found nothing to comfort Lucy, nothing she could use as proof.

“Looking for God, boy?”

Steven jumped and the leathery bag of one of the cow’s ancillary stomachs slipped from around his hand. Cripps stepped forward, smirking, and stirred the entrails with the toe of his boot.

“Marveling at His creation?”

“What?”

“It’s food and shit, boy, that’s all.”

“I was looking for something …” Steven’s voice trailed off. He was frightened, unsure what Cripps’s reaction would be to his sifting of guts.

Cripps laughed and put an arm around him. “Then perhaps I can help you.”

He steered Steven to the slaughter room entrance and paused for a moment outside, savoring some quality in the air. The plastic strip curtain blurred angles and lines and muted the cow noise beyond to a nervous grumble.

“Come on.”

Cripps was gentle and they moved into the room.

Steven had expected a cathedral to death, but the raw concrete cavern seemed squalid and mean despite its yardage. At the back was a holding pen of dull steel, fed from the stockyard outside. The cows here, waiting for the return of the slaughter party, rocked sideways on their hooves, chasing cow lullabies across the dead-eyed plains of their pasts. But Ma’s mud-soft lowing was too far back across those plains to give comfort and the cows were cold.

From the pen, two barred alleys ran to pneumatic grids the men called grabbers—rigid latticeworks of iron that closed against the sides of a cow and held it immobile. On either side of these there were low railed platforms for the slaughtermen. Above the entrance a winch connected with the overhead conveyor.

In this place of bovine departures the lighting was dim. Alcoves and juttings, thrown with no seeming purpose along the walls, wrapped small areas of darkness about themselves. At the top of a flight of steps a shelf of stone ran the length of the room, ten feet above the floor—a viewing gallery.

“Look around you, boy.” Cripps spread his arms. “It’s quiet now, but you can feel the power of the place. Think of the deaths it has seen, the fantasies that have been lived and released in here. God, that smell …”

Cripps walked along one of the alleys to the holding pen and stroked the forehead of a cow. He raised his voice and the animals shifted uneasily.

“These are your future, if you have the courage. They grow them in concrete boxes under ultraviolet light, they feed them on pellets of their own dead. These are urban cows, boy, manmade without mystery, and they have a gift for us far more important than meat or leather. It isn’t a gift they like to give, though. Not at all.”

“What gift?”

“The experience of killing. Of blowing out their brains and taking away their most precious thing. It smashes the walls you put around yourself, the walls other people put around you to stop you doing what you want. Do you understand me? The things you would do if there was nothing to stop you. Killing is an act of self-realization, it shows a man the truth of his power. And when you know this, boy, the pettiness they try to shackle us with falls away like shit.”

Cripps threw his arms out like he was on a cross.

“Killing frees you to live as you should.”

Out in the hall the horn blasted.

“Back to your station, boy. Back to where the cows are only meat. But remember what happens in here, remember the secrets that are to be had. And one day soon perhaps we shall see what a little killing can do for you.”

At the grinder Steven humped meat and dreamed of quick access to the future. Cripps was significantly fucked in the head, no doubt about it, but could it happen like that? Was there something you could do that would make you different than you were? If it was that simple, how easy it would be to deal with the Beast.

His head swam a little and the mist of blood from the grinder began to irritate him. Lucy with her compacting of unhappiness into removable physical deposits, Cripps and his instant command of life through killing … Such new ideas. Steven had not thought that there might be ways to force happiness into being. It had always seemed a matter of luck, something beyond his control that happened outside in the world. To all the other people.

He moved about, uncomfortable in the late-afternoon slaughter. Someone was watching him, he could feel it. But he was apart from the other process hands and Cripps had not left the slaughter room since lunch. He looked over his shoulder. In the darkness behind the ventilation grille two softly gazing eyes blinked once then vanished. He jumped from his stool, but it was too late, the space behind the grate was empty. He pressed his head close and from somewhere along the duct’s length heard a sound like lazily trotting hooves.

CHAPTER NINE

D
inner looked normal that night—junk out of a can. The Hagbeast ate silently but watched him closely. The first mouthful told Steven she had laced the meal with salt. He forced himself to eat without reaction.

“Is it nice where you work?”

“No.”

“When I was a girl I worked on a goose farm. That was bloody work too. They put them upside down in tin cones with holes in the bottom. There was nothing in the sheds but rows and rows of goose heads hanging out of cones. We had to run along with a knife cutting them off and the blood went everywhere. We were always soaked. They looked like cocks, those heads did, with their long necks, lying all bloody on the ground.”

Steven’s stomach jerked. Her words had no effect on him—he had heard all her stories before he was eight years old, how she used to stick the necks inside herself—but the salt was building with each mouthful and his guts were going to empty sometime soon. He forced more food down to spite her.

Out in the hall Dog dragged itself up for a shit. Steven flicked back to the Hagbeast.

“Don’t bother, I’ve heard it.”

“Oh, well, I’m sorry. I beg your fucking pardon. Mothers are supposed to talk to their children, Steven. Didn’t you know? It’s the only way to teach you things.”

He laughed in her face.

“What did you ever teach me?”

The mother act fell from the Beast like lizard skin and she leaned across the table, grabbing the edges, white-knuckled.

“You ungrateful fuck. Everything you are has my mark on it.”

His stomach heaved again as he half stood to meet her, but he wasn’t ready to let go yet. His hatred paralyzed him and for a moment he stopped breathing.

And then he was much younger, and she was a towering mass in a blue print dress against which he butted without effect, knee-high and weak in a child anger that had no possibility of resolution and ended as it always did by tearing away, shrieking, looking blindly through tears for the cornfields where all the TV kids ran to escape the adult world. Then he was back.

“And what am I, you demented whore? Something you fucked up so totally it never had a chance to make it into the world. Jesus, it’s as much as I can do to walk down the street.”

He vomited tiredly onto the table, bracing himself against it with locked arms. The Hagbeast laughed softly and clumped across the room to stand over Dog on the shit tray.

“The time wasn’t wasted, then.”

She lifted her skirt and pissed on the whimpering animal.

In the drifting monochrome wash of the TV, Dog’s coat looked dark and oiled. The hair parted in a rolling wave as Steven dragged a towel back and forth across it, exposing a narrow moving line of white skin and the occasional cluster of fleas. The stink of the Hagbeast’s piss burned acquisitively through the dead air, snouting out strongholds in the damp-spore that blackened the corners of the bedroom, planning to linger. Dog grunted happily under the attention but its eyes held the sad light of betrayal that surfaced with each of the Hagbeast’s cruelties Steven failed to protect it from.