My Year of Meats (31 page)

That’s when we all began to like her. Bunny drove a custom-painted purple Sedan de Ville. It was a comfortable car for her husband, John, to ride in and easy to get in and out of as well. John was less active in running the feedlot these days, but he still liked to keep an eye on what his son was up to, so Bunny would drive him on his rounds every day, a long, sleek purple ship cutting through a sea of milling cattle. We set the camera up on one of the feed towers, and it made a great wide shot for the title sequence. At their various stops Bunny would help John out of the car and into his wheelchair. He spent most of his time in his chair, propelled by Bunny.

“I like it down here,” he cackled, gazing up adoringly at the shelf of breast that shielded his balding head. “Lots of shade.”

Bunny slapped his pate. He pinched her bottom. They had a playful and loving relationship that caused his son, Gale, to shiver with rage. Gale was a pale, flaccid man with a chin that simply receded into the swollen flesh of his neck. A thyroid condition, perhaps. His handshake reminded me of Ueno’s. Cold. Damp. Suspicious.

And then there was Rose. Strange Rose. “She’s shy,” explained Bunny as the little girl clawed her mother’s thigh and buried her face between her legs. She was still just a baby at five, but her eyes were haunted, and there was something about her, not timidity, not just the eyes, that was deeply disturbing. She looked ordinary enough, a plump, pretty child with light-brown ringlets, dressed in puffy smock dresses. Her daddy doted on her, but it was Gale whom she adored. From time to time a flicker of doubt crossed Bunny’s face when she looked at her daughter. There was a secret. I didn’t know what it was, but Gale knew, and he leered at me when he caught me staring at his half-sister.

The Dunn & Son feedlot was a twenty-thousand-head operation located about fifteen miles down the road from Bunny and John’s house, in a shallow bowl of land just shy of the foothills. The Rockies rose up in the distance to the west, but the east was horizontal, an endless expanse of griddle-flat cropland.

From a distance, the feedlot itself looked like an island, an enormous patchwork comprising neatly squared and concentrated beef-to-be. Angus, Brangus, Hereford, Charolais, Limousin, and Simmental, these were breeds, not animals, penned with precision and an eye to slaughter that was antithetical to the randomness of living things. The only aspect of their animal nature that could not be contained by the gridwork was the stench, an aggregate of all the belches and flatulence, the ammonia, methane, and hydrogen sulfide gases exuded with the fecal matter and urine of twenty thousand large-bodied animals. It rose and spread like anarchy on the autumn wind. The closer we came, the stronger it got.

The wooden ranch gate that marked the drive into the feedlot proclaimed:

Gale was waiting for us in the small feedlot office. He was nervous and had taken special care with his appearance. His baby-blue plaid shirt was buttoned tight around the neck, making his reddened wattles bunch up at the collar. He wore a string tie fastened with a big hunk of turquoise. The polyester fabric of his shirt stuck to his sweaty skin, despite the stale, humid air-conditioning in the office. He fidgeted, removing his cowboy hat to run his fingers through his straw-colored hair. He had the jittery blue eyes of a newly farrowed sow, rimmed in pink, with pale, bristle-like lashes. Periodically he puffed out his chest to levitate his gut, a maneuver that gave him enough room to tuck his shirt into the belt below it.

He was to take us on a tour of the feedlot. We would film the operations, and later Bunny, John, and Rose would join us to shoot some family scenes. I was hoping to get most of the feedlot footage on Day One. On Day Two we were scheduled to go to the slaughterhouse. On the morning of Day Three we would shoot Bunny and John’s house and their interior decor, and by the afternoon of Day Three, when Ueno was due to arrive, we would be on to the cooking scenes and the family dining. I thought that the sight of Bunny in an apron, searing bulls’ testicles, would soften Ueno, and he could supervise that scene to his heart’s content. He had approved the show, after all. I just wanted a free hand with the meat production.

Suzuki got set up and Oh pinned the wireless mike on Gale, although I didn’t anticipate getting much usable sound. So far, Gale had been surly and uncooperative, and it seemed he had agreed to this tour only at his father’s insistence. Still, you can’t shoot cows without a cowboy, and I needed Gale because his father was too decrepit.

“Ready?” I tried to give him a reassuring smile, but Gale was growing more distraught by the minute.

“Cheer up. You don’t have to say anything, just show us around. Or ignore us. Pretend we’re not even there.”

But he surprised me. We filmed him leaving the office, then walking along one of the dirt access roads that cut alongside the pens. Suzuki went handheld, tracking backward with Gale, filming him as he walked: I stayed next to Suzuki, with my hand looped through his belt, steadying him and trying to keep him from tripping in a rut. Oh was attached to us by the camera cable, doing his best to record ambiance, mix, and keep up with us. Dave orbited the periphery with the tripod on his shoulder, staying out of the frame. We made a curious constellation, with Gale as our stiff, silent nucleus. Then all of a sudden, with no warning, he looked straight into the camera and started to speak.

“Well, howdy,” he said with a nervous smile. “Uh, I guess I’ll just introduce myself first. I’m Gale Dunn, and this here’s my spread. I’m the one in charge here.”

He had actually scripted his lines and now was going to perform them. Warming to his role, he puffed out his chest and lowered his voice, sounding bass and manly.

“Uh, some guys run their operations from the office, but I’m a hands-on kind of guy, if you know what I mean.”

He shifted his pale gaze from the lens and looked over at me. “I said ‘guy’ twice. Is that okay?”

“Uh ... yeah, fine.” I was astonished. “You’re doing just great. Please go on....”

With a renewed sense of confidence, he looked back at the camera and raised his arms in an awkward sweeping gesture that encompassed the acres of pens surrounding us.

“Like I was sayin‘, I’m in charge of all this here, ever since Dad got remarried to that ... married Bunny. That’s his new wife’s name, but she ain’t my real mother. My real mother died. Ever since Dad got remarried he ain’t too effective ‘round here anymore, so I oversee the operations of the entire lot and personally supervise mixin’ the feeds and the medicines.”

This seemed like a good opportunity to focus the conversation.

“What kind of medication do you give them?”

“When they come in for processin’, we give ’em a prophylactic dose of Aureomycin and then implant ’em with Synovex as a growth supplement.”

“Are you using DES?”

“No; it’s illegal.”

“Did you?”

“Oh yeah. Who didn’t? It’s still the best and cheapest growth enhancer around—”

“Still?”

“No. That ain’t what I meant. I meant if it was still around. Which it ain’t.” He stopped walking and glared at me, his voice rising in pitch and volume. “Wait a minute. What’s goin’ on here? I thought you were workin’ for BEEF-EX. What are you givin’ me the third degree here for?”

“Sorry. Just curious. What’s Synovex?”

“It’s a growth hormone. Perfectly legal. You give the heifers Synovex-H, and the steers get Synovex-S.”

“What’s in it, do you know?”

He looked at me with scorn. “Estradiol, testosterone, and progesterone. All natural.”

My questions seemed to have quenched his enthusiasm for television and he walked along for a while, huffy, ignoring the camera entirely. I didn’t know what had gotten into me; I was normally not so blunt and graceless with my interview questions, but the guy just bugged me. Still, now I’d blown it and needed to lure him back.

It was high noon and the desert sun bore down so hard it dimmed vision and made solid objects wriggle. This kind of heat was odd for October. The dirt was parched and the hot wind buffeted your face with a stench you could taste—the sick-sweet smell of manure, cut with searing fumes of ammonia that rose from the urine-drenched ground by the feed bunkers. Black flies buzzed furiously around us, but Suzuki had given up trying to shoo them away from the lens, concentrating instead on clearing his eyes of the sweat that cut rivulets through the dust on his forehead. Dust was everywhere. It got in your eyes, in your throat. The wind lifted up the dust, twirling it into tight little twisters that danced in and out of the pens. The only sounds were the wind, and the flies buzzing, and the eerie wheeze and rattle of twenty thousand cattle coughing. We stopped by the side of a pen. Gale turned to face us, resting the backs of his elbows casually on the top of the gate and hitching his boot heel around the rung at the bottom. He looked at me. His body language was all about openness, a casual cowboy-nailed-to-the-cross sort of posture, but his eyes were wary. The penned cattle in the background turned to watch. It made a lovely picture. Dave sidled up to me while Suzuki reframed.

“Ask him about feed,” he whispered in my ear.

I looked over at Suzuki, who turned on the camera and gave me a nod and a thumbs-up.

“So, Gale, what kind of feed do you use?”

Gale grinned. “Well now, I was hopin’ you’d ask about that. You East Coast environmental types are always going on about recycling ... well, that’s just what we’re doing here with our exotic feed program and we’re real proud of it. We got recycled cardboard and newspaper. We got by-products from potato chips, breweries, liquor distilleries, sawdust, wood chips. We even got by-products from the slaughterhouse—recycling cattle right back into cattle. Instant protein. Pretty good, huh?”

“That’s cannibalism!”

He looked at me with utter contempt. “They ain’t humans,” he said.

“Wasn’t there a problem with that in England a couple of years back? It caused something—some disease that ate the cows’ brains and made them crazy....”

“Nineteen eighty-seven,” Dave hissed behind me. “It was in nineteen eighty-seven.”

“Wouldn’t know,” said Gale, spitting. “This is America. Never been a problem here....”

“I think it’s illegal,” Dave said. He couldn’t keep quiet.

“Nah, it’s all done local.” I didn’t quite see how this addressed our concerns, but Gale continued without missing a beat.

“It’s a changing field—there’s scientific developments in feed technology happening all over America, all the time. Some guy down at Kansas State I read about has come up with plastic hay. It’s these plastic pellets you can feed the cattle instead of regular hay. Hay’s a bitch, but this plastic stuff—it’s clean, it’s easy to deliver through an automated feed system. Works just as good for roughage and you only need a tenth of a pound compared to four pounds of hay. That’s a forty-to-one ratio. They say it’s a savings of about eleven cents a day per head. And the best thing is they can get back about twenty pounds of it—right out of the cow’s rumen at the slaughterhouse. Make new pellets. Talk about recycling!”

“You feed animals
plastic?”

“And if you like that, well, get this one. Cement. That’s right. Cement dust. High in calcium, and the cows in the tests put on weight thirty percent faster than normal feed, and the meat was more tender and juicy.”

“Who is doing these tests?”

“United States Department of Agriculture. I got one more for you, but you ain’t gonna like it.”

Behind him, dominating the center of the pen, was a towering bulldozed mound, which rose above the sea of cattle. The mound was alive with flies. He pointed to it with his thumb.

“See that?”

“What?”

“Shit.” He grinned as Suzuki racked focus.

“No way ...”

“No shit—I mean, I ain’t kidding. Out one end and in the other. Now, talk about fast turnaround.”

“That’s disgusting.”

“Nope. It’s recycling, only it’s recycling animal by-products. You gotta understand the way feedlots work. The formulated feed we use is real expensive, and the cattle shit out about two-thirds before they even digest it. Now, there’s no reason this manure can’t be recycled into perfectly good feed. There’s this one pig farmer in Kansas who ran his pregnant sows underneath his finishing pens? You know what he saved in feed costs? About ten thousand dollars a year.” His words resonated with awe and he withdrew for a minute into a private reverie, then he shook his head and continued.

“And another thing you East Coast environmentalists are always griping about is organic-waste pollution. Well, you should be real happy, ’cause this pretty much takes care of the problem, don’t it. Feed the animals shit, and it gets rid of the waste at the same time. That’s two birds with one stone.”

The cattle that formed a backdrop did not look happy at all. Suzuki, picking up on the content of the interview, zoomed in on a cow who was raising her tail to defecate. I was proud of him. His English comprehension had improved immensely over the months of shooting. He adjusted his position and grabbed a close-up of a steer, feeding mournfully at the trough.

Just at that moment we heard a car horn in the distance and turned, to see the purple Cadillac barreling toward us, followed by a massive wake of dust. It stopped about ten feet away, but the dust cloud kept on coming. Suzuki cursed and coughed as he shielded the Betacam with his torso, but an odd noise from Gale made him reframe and turn on the camera.

“Ro-o-osie!” Gale squealed.

The purple car was hidden, but out from the center of the billowing cloud came Rose, running. Gale leaned down to greet her and she threw herself into her half-brother’s arms. He swung her up high, tossing her into the air over his head. Her dress ballooned around her little kicking legs as she came to land solidly on his hip.