My Year of Meats (33 page)

At the motel, we unloaded quickly. I was desperate for a shower, for sleep, for even just a short nap. We were due back at the ranch at five to shoot Bunny serving cocktails, still there was time. But as I shouldered my knapsack and headed toward my room, Suzuki stopped me.

“Suzuki ... what?” I turned, about to snap, but then I saw his face. And Oh’s, behind him.

“Gomen, ne ... ,”
he said. “Sorry. I know you are tired. But there is something I think you must see.”

“Can’t it wait? Until tonight after we finish?”

Suzuki and Oh exchanged a quick look.

“No,” Suzuki said.

“I will cue up the tape,” said Oh. “If you would like to take a shower.”

The hot water revived me, washed off the dirt, which ran in soapy rivulets down my legs, spiraling into the drain between my bare feet. But as I watched, it occurred to me that the heat of the water, by opening my pores, might increase the osmosis of any poison that remained on my skin. Panicked, I twisted the shower knobs and gasped as the water turned icy. I stood there shivering. For the first time, I think I was aware of the danger I’d walked into, the effect it might have on the baby. I needed to make a choice. I could continue with the shoot or abandon it right here, turn it over to Suzuki to finish, or call Kenji down from New York to take over. I rubbed my stomach, stupidly, as if that would help, and cried a little, then got out of the shower and dried myself off. My teeth would not stop chattering.

We gathered in Oh’s room. He had cued the last half of the interview with Gale. It looked great: awkward and grandiose, Gale leaned against the rail of the cattle pen, gesturing expansively around him. I started to feel a little better.

“How did you know to ask him about feed?” I asked Dave. “It seems to be his little hobby.”

Dave grinned. “When we were in the office I saw that he had all these copies of
Feed Sense
and
Feed Stuffs
and
Food Chemical News
all neatly cataloged on the shelf, and when I pulled one out I saw he’d tagged articles like he was seriously studying them. It seemed like a good bet he’d have something interesting to say.”

The interview was over and Gale was leaning with his back to the pen and behind him the cautious cattle were drawing closer in a line, doleful and curious, when suddenly a swish pan triggered by a squeal of joy caught little Rose running from the middle of the dust cloud. She leapt into Gale’s arms and he swung her up and tossed her high, and the camera followed her arc so that for a moment it looked as though she would just keep on flying up into the bright blue sky. But then she came down and landed on Gale’s broad hip and behind them the cattle scattered.

Suzuki had lingered for a moment on this shot of the two of them, then slowly framed in on Rose. She buried her face in the softness of Gale’s neck, but met the encroaching gaze of the camera and stared back into its depth. Suzuki kept zooming.in, so close you could see the crosshatched texture of Gale’s sunburned skin. Rose just stared, unblinking. It wasn’t a look of particular intelligence, but once more, something struck me about the girl.

“She’s odd, so weird-looking ... ,” I said, and realized I was whispering.

Again, we had all fallen silent, drawn by the camera as it slowly passed across the little girl’s face and down her body. Gale had wrapped his thick arm around her. His forearm supported her back and his hand held her in place, tight around her stomach, partially hidden in the folds of her dress. The camera paused there, studying this image, taking it in with a long, steady gaze, when suddenly it tipped, as though an unexpected shift in gravity had rocked the world.

“Oh God,” said Dave in a low voice. I looked at him. He was staring at the screen, so I looked back too, but it was the same frame as before—the man’s callused hand clasping the little girl’s body.

“What ... ?” I asked. “What is it?”

“She’s ... precocious,” Dave said, and it sounded like a dirty secret, a cruel joke that I still didn’t get. Rose was hardly precocious. Slow, perhaps even dumb ...

“No, not her personality,” said Dave, shaking his head impatiently. “Her development. Here.” He clasped his hands to his chest.

“Oppai ga aruyo,”
said Suzuki, pointing at the monitor. “Look. Right there. See? I noticed it when I was shooting. I wanted to show you. She has breasts.”

His finger tapped the screen where he had zoomed in further to Rose’s chest. There, resting on the callused edge of her half-brother’s hand, was a pronounced swelling, which had looked like bunched fabric at first but now, up close, had the weight and heft of a woman’s breast. Underneath the white smock dress, pulled tight by Gale’s hand, you could see the shape of the enlarged areola and the outline of her nipple.

“It’s premature thelarche,” said Dave. “I read about cases in Puerto Rico. Precocious puberty. These little girls with estrogen poisoning. They thought it was some kind of growth stimulants in meat or milk or poultry. I think they suspected DES. You asked Gale about it, so I guess you know about DES?”

I nodded.

“Yeah,” he continued. “Well, it’s still easy to get down there. Some of the girls were just babies, like a year old, with almost fully developed breasts. Some of them were even boys.”

“What happened?”

“Nothing much. There was this one doctor who tried to get the FDA to do tests, which ended up half-assed and inconclusive. But the media attention was enough to scare off the farmers from using the drugs, and after a while the symptoms just slowly regressed when the kids stopped eating the contaminated foods. But not before a lot of them developed cysts in their ovaries ... and of course there’s the danger of cancer too.”

“Do you think it’s in the meat, then?” I asked, still looking at Rose.

“It’s gotta be that feedroom, something she picks up there ...”

“The popsicles ...”

“Or just the dust from her fingers. What I’m wondering is, do you think Bunny knows?”

I thought about it. “She must. Look at the way she dresses her, in those loose clothes....”

“The brother knows too,” said Suzuki. “Look.”

We all stared at the screen. Suzuki was holding the tight shot of Gale’s hand, and after a moment, the large thumb started to move, slowly, surreptitiously, up and down, underneath his sister’s breast.

“God,” said Dave. “He’s fondling her.”

Suzuki coughed. Oh turned away from the screen and started to re-coil the camera cables one by one, even though they didn’t need it. His cables were never knotted or kinked. He always kept them perfectly wrapped and secured them with little-girls’ hair elastics, the kind with pastel plastic balls on the ends. I looked back at the television. Suzuki widened out to a two-shot and something occurred to me.

“You know, I don’t think Gale knows what causes it. In fact, I think he’s got a dose himself. Look at him. I thought it was just a barrel chest, but now I’m not so sure. And his voice, it sounds like it’s changing. He had to strain today to keep it low, but as soon as he got upset it went up about an octave and started to crack.”

The tape ran out and cut to static. We sat there for a moment, watching, then Oh got up and ejected the tape and slipped it into its plastic case, and like the moving parts of a heavy machine, we gathered up the camera equipment and filed out to the sweltering van. A TV shoot is like a tank, I sometimes felt, rolling over anything that lies in the path of its inexorable forward momentum.

“What are you going to do?” Dave asked as we drove down the frontage road, away from the motel.

I looked out the window. We were passing a large construction site, where bulldozers had dug a gaping crater in the ground. The site was empty now; the workday was over. A red, white, and blue sign, standing next to the mobile office trailer, read “Future Home of Wal-Mart.” Beyond the pit, the fields stretched away into the distance.

“I’m going to talk to her,” I said.

Bunny and Rose came to greet us at the door in matching white cotton dresses with cinched waists and wide ruffles around the neckline. Bunny’s was quite low-cut, to offer up her cleavage, but Rose’s was cut high and prim. They led us out to the patio, where John sat by a low bar, scaled to the height of his wheelchair. He waved a bottle of Jack Daniel’s over his head when he saw us.

“Just in time, just in time,” he hollered. “I’m servin’ bourbon and bourbon. Take your pick.”

Behind me I could hear Suzuki gulp. I declined for all of us, and then relented: we’d shoot the cocktail scene quickly, I promised, then the boys could have a drink. They needed it. Suzuki and Oh sprang to a grim sort of attention, and within minutes they had the camera cabled up, balances set, and were tracking backward in front of Bunny as she proudly carried a large silver platter of piping-hot Pigs-in-a-Blanket from the kitchen. She set them on the coffee table next to John. Rose climbed up on her daddy’s lap and fed him a plump wiener, skewered on the tip of a toothpick and wrapped in a crusty twirl of golden dough.

“She’s gonna be a regular little heartbreaker,” John cackled as she waggled another sausage coyly in front of him. “Just like her mama.”

He fed her a sip of bourbon from his glass, watered down now with melted ice, and she screwed up her face and shook her curls, then begged for more. Hand on the zoom, Suzuki hunkered down to get a close-up of the two, as John traded her a sip for a sausage.

We filmed a quick setup of the three of them—All-American ranch family spends a happy time together at the end of a long, hard day—then I called it a wrap and John made drinks for the boys. When Bunny went back to the kitchen to fetch some hot hors d’oeuvres, I followed her.

“I have to tell you something.”

I know what denial looks like, and what it feels like too. It’s a mercurial flicker of recognition in the eye, quickly blanketed with a vagueness that infuses the body like sluggish blood. It is opaque. Murky. Like wading through a swampy dream that drags at your limbs, and no matter how hard you try, you can’t move forward. I know this feeling because I make television and try to walk through it on a daily basis. It feeds on convention, cowers behind etiquette, and the only way to deal with it is with a blunt frontal attack.

“Bunny, I think Rose is sick.”

Her look was quick and sharp before she turned her back to me. She slipped her hand into a black-and-white oven mitt shaped like a cow’s head and bent down to open the oven.

“I think she’s received some sort of hormone poisoning, probably from the drugs around the feedlot, and that’s why she’s got breasts. There’s a name for it. It’s called premature thelarche.”

Bunny extracted a hot baking tray of Pigs-in-a-Blanket, set them carefully on top of the stove, then turned to face me.

“She takes after me, you know, in the breast department,” she said. She looked ruefully down at her own chest and sort of pushed at it with the nose of the cow mitt. Her tanned skin was the texture of an old mushroom, dotted with beads of sweat that clung in the cleavage. It was hot by the oven and I was sweating too. “John says I should be proud ... ,” she added.

“He knows?”

“Well, sort of.” She took off the mitt and started scraping the pastries away from the tin with a metal spatula. “About her breasts, anyway ... But he’s so old, you know? Like, maybe there’s not much difference between five and fifteen from where he stands....”

“What is it, Bunny? Is there something else ... other than the breasts?”

She piled the pastries onto a platter. “The doctor’s a good friend of John’s, you know? But he’s an old guy too. Said he’d never seen anything like it. But even he doesn’t know about ...” She stopped again and looked out onto the patio. Little Rose was turning pirouettes and squealing with delight as she danced in a circle from her daddy to Suzuki to Oh and finally to Dave, popping the sausage pastries into their mouths, one by one. John was clapping, egging her on. The boys sat with hunched shoulders and frozen smiles while Rose spun round and round.

“It’s none of your business, you know,” Bunny informed me, handing me the platter.

“I know,” I said. I took the platter and turned toward the porch, then stopped. “Well, actually, no, Bunny. That’s not true. It is and it isn’t.”

She gave me a long, cool stare.

“I had a kind of estrogen poisoning too. Different—I got it from my mother—but, well, it screwed me up inside. I had a growth, like a cancer, on my cervix. And my uterus is deformed. These things are dangerous, Bunny.”

I waited, watching her, but her gaze drifted, looked right past me onto the porch, just staring like she hadn’t heard a word I said, so I gave up. Balancing the tray of Pigs-in-a-Blanket, I got as far as opening the sliding patio door when her voice behind me, so low I could barely hear it, made me stop.

“Come back tonight,” she said. “After eleven. After they’re asleep.”