My Year of Meats (34 page)

I turned back, but she was already busy at work, head bent, wrapping little canned cocktail wieners in triangles of Poppin’ Fresh dough. I wasn’t sure I’d heard her right. But then she looked up, looked me straight in the eye.

“Bring the cameraman.”

 

 

The house was quiet when I pulled up the van and parked. Bunny met us at the door; she had recovered her composure and was as garrulous as ever.

“I gave John a sleeping pill,” she offered as we walked down the hallway. “And also a half to Rose. We can tear the house down and they won’t wake up.” We entered a bedroom.

Rose lay under a white four-poster canopy, awash in crisp floral bedding. She was wearing an oversize T-shirt with a “Babes for Beef!” slogan, from the local Cowbelles Auxiliary, emblazoned across the front. Bunny sat down on the side of the bed and patted the place next to her.

“I’m okay now,” she offered as I sat down. “Now that I’ve decided to do this.”

“Bunny, I don’t want to force you....”

“Forget it. I gotta do something. You guys are journalists. Maybe you can figure out a way to help.”

“I’m going to need you to sign releases, you know....”

“Yeah, that’s fine.”

“And I’ll need to interview you about Rose’s condition, like when it started and what the doctor said....”

“I can do that. But let’s just get this part over with first, okay?”

She reached over to her daughter and smoothed a wisp of hair from her forehead, then lifted the T-shirt to reveal her belly and the two concentric arcs of her lower rib cage.

Rose’s skin was still a baby’s, milky white and downy, and underneath this translucent sheath, her rib cage rose and fell with her shallow breathing. The bones were blue and achingly fragile. I thought of the tiny curl of a child inside me, and my heart leapt. I wanted to put my head against this small belly, blow warmth across it, inhale her sweet baby-sour smell. Then Bunny pulled the T-shirt up farther. Naked, Rose was not plump at all. The plumpness was an illusion created by two shockingly full and beautiful breasts, each tipped with a perfect pink nipple. Suzuki, behind me, shuddered. The girl was five years old. She lay on her back with her arms spread and bent upward at the elbows. Her soft little fingers were tangled in the hair on her pillow. The breasts were firm, but they had separated the way breasts do and slid to either side of her thin rib cage, into her armpits. Disturbed, perhaps, by our presence in the room, she arched her back and turned her head toward the light that was shining from the hallway door. Her mouth opened and closed like a little fish’s. She rubbed the hair out of her face with the back of her hand, then her mouth found her thumb and closed around it, and she started sucking.

She was wearing little white cotton underpants, hiked up high over her belly. Bunny stood over her and raised her small hips and drew the underpants down around her thighs. The baby skin continued, smooth and uninterrupted, down over the swell of her belly to her pubic bone, where suddenly, like grotesque graffiti, her skin was defaced by a wiry tangle of hair.

“She’s had some bleeding too,” Bunny said sadly.

I turned on the sun gun and gently panned the beam across the child as Suzuki hoisted the camera and focused. My hand was shaking and I couldn’t make it stop.

“Just...” Bunny tapped Suzuki lightly on the arm. “Please, not her face ...”

And then she dropped her hand to her lap and looked down at her daughter. Her spine, formerly so straight and tall, strong from counterbalancing the weight of her chest, collapsed into itself, and in that instant Bunny looked old and fat.

“Oh, what the hell. It’s not like it’s her fault. And with a body like that, who’s gonna be looking at her face, right?”

Gently she stroked the tendrils from her daughter’s forehead. Her tone, part defeat and part bravado, was filled with the echoes of strip joints and neon, of tinsel and tassels and the hooting of men. All the pain of her own freaky career seemed to hang in the gaps between her words and then spread like an oily wake, wide, in the silence behind them. Suzuki heard the pain and slowly panned the camera to her face.

“Bunny?” My voice sounded harsh even though I was whispering. “I’d like to do the interview now. Tell us about Rose.”

 

 

That night I dreamed it was time to give birth. It was odd, because my stomach was still taut and concave around the hipbones, and Ma laughed and pointed to my chest and said it couldn’t be time since I still didn’t have any
oppai
to feed my baby with, and she handed me some small white pills to make them grow bigger. But I knew she was wrong, because this is America and she just didn’t know, so I went out behind the milking barn where I used to play on my grampa’s farm before he went bankrupt and sold it, and I pulled up my dress and waited. As I stood there with my legs spread, it started to emerge, limb by limb, released, unfolding, until gravity took the mass of it and it fell to the ground with a
thump,
gangly and stillborn, from my stomach. It was wet, a misshapen tangle, but I could see a delicate hoof, a twisted tail, the oversize skull, still fetal blue, with a dead milky eye staring up at me, alive with maggots.

I woke and had to pee, but it was a strange motel and I couldn’t remember where the bathroom was, which sometimes happens on the road in the dark. And I forgot the dream until I had groped my way to the toilet and was sitting there with my elbows on my knees, staring into the blackness, and maybe it was the release of my bladder that brought the birth dream back, but suddenly I remembered it and started to cry. And when I was finished I turned on the light and checked the toilet bowl carefully, but there wasn’t anything there except water and pee.

I went back to bed, shivering, so cold. I wanted to call Sloan, but then I’d have to tell him about the feedroom and the Lutalyse, and it made me sick with shame to think about. So I decided, just tomorrow, just the slaughterhouse, and that’s all. It will be easy after that, no danger, and after this show I will quit, and even though we’ve never talked about it, I’ll make Sloan support me while I grow fat and happy; maybe we’ll move in together somewhere, not Chicago, maybe New York, maybe the country somewhere, where I can grow organic vegetables and learn to pickle things ... and I drifted back off to sleep.

 

 

Mornings had once been filled with a secret joy, but not any longer. Now they were cold and overcast, no place to linger.

The weather had changed overnight, suddenly bleak and autumnal. The wind whipped up the tumbleweed and sent it skittering across the road in front of Gale’s oncoming Dodge. He had come to meet us at the motel to take us to the slaughterhouse. I opted to ride with him in his pickup, while the van with the boys followed behind us. I told Dave what I was planning and asked him to stay close. Now, as we hurtled down a rutted back road, I could see the van in the rearview mirror, swallowed up in the dust.

I turned to face Gale across the wide bench seat in the cab of the pickup.

“Bunny showed me Rose’s breasts last night. You know about that, right?”

I watched his head slowly swivel on his mottled, turtlelike neck. He stared at me, then swiveled back. Maybe he thought that if he didn’t respond I would just disappear.

“Well,” I continued, “then you may already know that she’s also got pubic hair and she’s starting to menstruate. The problem is that this condition almost always coexists with ovarian cysts and often leads to cervical or uterine cancer, which can kill her. I told Bunny. I’m pretty sure it’s estrogen poisoning from the feedlot. There were cases like this in Puerto Rico, where they kept using DES—”

“You still goin’ on about that?” He was trying to sound light. “What is it with you and this DES business, anyway?”

“Gale, I think you’ve got it too. I heard about a case of hormone poisoning in the South where grown men started developing symptoms....”

He drove with both hands, and his knuckles whitened. I thought the steering wheel would snap, but I kept on going.

“Enlarged breasts and elevated vocal—”

He reached across the wide front seat and grabbed my hair and yanked my head to within inches of his face.

“You shut your mouth!” he screamed, spraying me with rage and spittle. “You go spreadin’ these filthy lies around here and I’ll kill you, you fuckin’ bitch, I swear I will.”

His eyes were cold and insanely blue. The truck was veering wildly from side to side.

“I saw you, Gale!” I screamed right back at him. “We have it on tape. You were feeling up her breast, you pervert. I saw it.”

“Shut up
!” Gripping my hair hard in his fist, he shook my head like a dirty onion. Finally he let go, but his voice continued, tightening with rage, spiraling up and up into a high-pitched squeal.

“I never touched her, I swear it! I love that little girl. I wouldn’t ever do that, not ever. And about the other, well, you think you’re so fuckin’ smart, if you got somethin’ to accuse me of doing illegal around here, you just go right ahead and try. You and that whore my daddy’s married to. This here’s ranch country, girl, and we do
what
we want,
when
we want, without no government’s say-so. You got that? Your East Coast politicians can’t say boo out here. We take care of our own. We got our own kinda justice, frontier justice, and don’t you forget it....”

“Are you threatening me?”

His small eyes were fixed on the road ahead and he spoke through gritted teeth. “I’m just tellin’ it like it is. So don’t say I didn’t give you no warning.”

“Right. Got it,” I answered. “Likewise.”

He didn’t answer, but his knuckles stayed white and ready, and my heart stayed pounding in my ears.

We drove the rest of the way in silence. When we got to the slaughterhouse, I climbed down from the Dodge and my knees buckled. Dave saw and came over.

“You all right?” He put his strong, calm hand on my elbow to steady me.

“Yeah. He didn’t take it very well.”

“I figured.”

“Come on. Let’s go do this and get out of here.” I shouldered the heavy knapsack full of batteries and spare tapes. The boys were ready.

We were surrounded by enormous trucks rattling in, backing up, raising dust. It was hard to talk over the noise of the engines and the crack of gunshots, which were not gunshots at all but whips striking hide, and the bellows of pain that followed the whipcracks, and the hooves thundering down metal off-ramps, and the clatter of cattle against the sides of the corral.

The slaughterhouse was a long, low-lying rectangular structure made of cement and cinder block, embellished here and there with curlicues of razor wire and stuck on top with tall smokestacks, like candles, belching a rank steam into the steely gray sky. Sticking out from the side was a pipe like a sewer duct, spewing a viscous, thickened gruel of blood and offal into the tank of a waiting truck. The effluent red sea.

The boys were all business today, silent, bent to the task. Suzuki’s sensory receptors were twitching, and though he was ten feet away and had his back to the duct at that moment, he knew that I wanted the shot and spun around and nailed it. When he lowered the camera we went inside.

The boss was a man named Wilson, a buddy of Gale’s. He met us in the office, a wood-paneled panopticon decorated with a large poster of a young blond Amazon in jungle bikini, who overlooked the meat-cutting operations below. The only plant life in the room was a ratty aspidistra in a green wire plant stand. Wilson stood beside it, sized us up, and shook his head.

“I don’t care who yer workin’ for, I don’t like this one bit. Never woulda agreed if it wasn’t for Gale’s daddy twistin’ my arm an’ sayin’ as it would be a favor to his wife. Said y‘all want to take some pictures to take back home with you to Japan, but I’m damned if I know why. Kill floor’s no place for sightseein’.”

“Well, I’ll tell you now, Wilson,” I shot back. “Folks in Japan are real innerested in seeing all them new and advanced technologies for killin’ comin‘ from the United States of Ameriker....”

Dave trundled by me with the tripod and whacked me in the shin with the pan arm.

“Sorry,” he said, but I got the message and shut up.

“We’ll be real quick,” he said. “Be outta here in no time.”

Wilson still seemed reluctant, but then Gale spoke up from the back of the office, where he’d been talking on the telephone.

“What’s the problem, Wilson? Get ’em suited up and out there. We gotta educate these city folks, show ’em how we murder our animals round here, ain’t that right, Miz Takagi? How we stick it to ’em. That’s what you want, ain’t it? That’s what you been askin’ for....”

Wilson’s eyes narrowed, then he shrugged and walked over to a row of metal lockers. He took out four yellow hard hats, a bundle of bloodstained white lab coats, safety goggles, and four pairs of knee-high rubber galoshes.

“Well, yer gonna need to put these on, now.... An’ I got earplugs if you want ’em.”

He looked at Suzuki. “And you girls with long hair gotta wear a hair net too. We run a sanitary operation here.”

Suzuki looked at the limp net cast in his direction, looked at me, then grimly started tucking his ponytail into it. Dave had been to a slaughterhouse before and had told Oh to bring the rain cover for the camera and garbage bags for other pieces of equipment that shouldn’t get wet. We were ready. Wilson made a phone call, summoning a young employee named Joey, who was still talking on his cell phone as he walked through the door. Wilson directed him to show us around, and he stayed behind with Gale. As we walked down the staircase and away from the office, I looked back up at the wide glass observation window and saw the two of them, their heads perfectly aligned under the jungle girl’s large proffered breasts. They were watching me, and when I turned around they both burst out laughing.