A Slaughterhouse
by Michael Lesy
For two weeks after I got home, I kept asking myself how creatures like
Little Eddie and the blond who killed his sex partners managed to do what
they did and still remain human. The closest I came to an understanding
was a three-hundred-year-old quote from Hobbes about life being "solitary,
poor, nasty, brutish, and short." That described what I'd seen, but still
left the question hanging. I decided I'd have to leave it there unless I
was willing to go back to Florida.
In the meantime, I had an appointment in Omaha with a man named Lee
McTier, the operations director of a packinghouse. I'd discovered McTier
after days of blundering telephone calls to one packing company after
another, every conversation eventually reduced to a monologue, where I
groped for words while the man on the other end waited until I'd shut up
long enough for him to say no. By the time I called McTier, I'd learned to
say "beef kill" instead of "slaughterhouse" and "kill floor" instead of
"pit." All that, plus the assurance I wasn't a vegetarian or an
animal-rights activist, must have helped. "Sure, what the hell," said
McTier. "We've got nothing to hide. We've got USDA inspectors up the ass;
we've got a company that comes in every day and scrubs the place down with
germicides: the floor's so goddamn clean you can eat off it. You want to
know what we do, I'll tell you. You want to see, it's no problem. You
ought to know, 'cause if we didn't do what we do you wouldn't eat. Come up
and we'll talk." I'd been to Omaha once before, to interview the surviving
relatives of a lunatic recluse who'd spent the last fifteen years of his
life taking sixty thousand pictures of New York City. When I'd been there
then, I'd ordered steak and eggs once for breakfast and been served a
sizzling three-quarter-pound filet crowned with a pat of melted butter as
if it were a stack of wheat cakes. If I was going to find out how and why
men routinely killed other large mammals for food, I'd find out in Omaha.
McTier said Mondays and Tuesdays were the plant's busiest days. His
offices were on the eighth floor of the Livestock Exchange Building in the
middle of the stockyards. "You meet me at eight o'clock Monday morning and
I'll buy you a cup of coffee," he said.
I flew into town Sunday morning, found a room in a Best Western, and
asked the clerk for directions to the stockyards. He looked at me the way
a kindhearted New Yorker might look at a Chinaman who'd asked the way to
Central Park. When I saw the place from the expressway, I pulled off onto
the shoulder of the exit ramp, stopped the car, and looked. From sixty
feet in the air, half a mile away, the yards looked like a gigantic
honeycomb laid flat on the ground, its grid of corrals forming a huge
quadrant, perhaps a mile long and half a mile wide, divided into smaller
quadrants by narrow roads closed off by cattle gates, all overlaid by an
elevated network of wooden crosswalks connected by stairs to the roads and
corrals below. At the outer edge of this plane of rectangles, rose the
Livestock Exchange Building, only twelve stories high, but--because it was
the only vertical in a shabby landscape of low wooden horizontals--it
looked like a massive tower, sharply outlined, made of bricks the color of
dried blood ornamented with limestone.
I drove down the exit ramp and turned onto a bridge that ran along the
outer edge of the yards, straight to the Exchange. Its doors were of glass
and polished bronze, set beneath limestone arches that rose two stories
high, carved, ornamented, and columned as if framing the portals of an
eleventh-century cathedral. Outdoor loudspeakers, fixed to the facade high
above the entrance, broadcast easy-listening music just loud enough to
form a cone of melody twenty feet around the doors. The calls and cries of
unseen beasts occasionally broke through the music, their squeals and
grunts sounding like the cries of gigantic infants lolling in some distant
nursery. The air smelled of cow shit, pig shit, and hay.
I walked through an orchestral arrangement of "Rocky Mountain High"
into the lobby. The only light came from the screen of a video game that
glowed in a corner. The floor was of black marble, worn, pitted, and
gouged, inlaid with ceramic tiles that framed large squares of yellow
stone the color of buttermilk. To the right, next to a column, was a
replica of a covered chuck-wagon bearing the motto: 1884-1984 OMAHA
STOCKYARDS. To the left was a coffee-shop that sold canes used as cattle
prods, and coin banks shaped like black Angus bulls. To the right, taped
to another column, was a color poster of an attractive young family
standing, laughing, next to a big plate of lean beef, cooked carrots, and
sliced kiwi fruit. "BEEF GETS YOU GOING / Beef Gives You Strength" was the
slogan. Underneath was a Xeroxed memo that described how the poster, used
"in conjunction with radio and TV spots as a point of purchase theme in
22,000 supermarkets in 12 states," had produced "a i6% increase in beef
tonnage (1492 lbs. per store) in an 11 city test." Along a wall was a row
of elevators with semicircles of numbers above each door. One of them
would carry me to McTier's office the next morning. I stood listening to
the video game play like a hurdy-gurdy, then I walked out into the light.
At five o'clock the next morning, I woke up twisted in the sheets from
a bad dream. In the dream, I'd arrived at the stockyards late for my
appointment. I rushed in and took the elevator to McTier's office. I
hurried down the corridor, looking for his number. The hallway was wide,
faced with cream-colored marble, lined with dark wooden doors inset with
panels of frosted glass. I noticed the doors were ajar. As I walked, some
opened behind me and men in bloody smocks came out and looked at me. "Are
you the sucker looking for McTier?" they called. "You're late. You're
late, sucker." Then, in front of me down the hall, another door opened and
a man dragged out a huge bag full of dead dogs. The bag was made of white
plastic that had been stuffed so full and stretched so thin that it had
become almost transparent, like an amniotic sac. So many dogs had been
stuffed into it that I could see not just the outline of their muzzles and
haunches but the color of their hair. I made out a black-and-white German
shepherd, a black Labrador, and a rust-colored English spaniel. The man
dragged the bag after him as if it were a huge sack of cold cooked
macaroni. I watched him and thought, "Goddamn it! Why are they killing
dogs? They're supposed to be killing cattle. Why do they have to kill
dogs?" Then I woke up. I turned on the light and untangled myself. "You
went back to the lab where you'd worked where they'd killed the dogs," I
thought. "Now you're in a place where they do it on a bigger scale. This
time it's worse, but this time you can see through it. Don't look away.
Look at the memory. Look at this world. See it for what it is. This is the
lowest point of the journey. Begin here, then rise."
McTier's reception room looked like a law firm's. A secretary led me
down a gray-carpeted hallway, past a glass-walled room of men wearing
shirts and ties sitting in front of video terminals, talking into
telephone headsets. "Lee'll be off the phone in a minute. Can I get you
some coffee?" She led me into a blue-draped conference room, set out a cup
and saucer, a cream pitcher shaped like a cow, and a carafe of fresh
coffee, then left me. A half hour later, a blond man with a broken nose
stuck his head in the door. "Mike?" he said. "Mr. McTier?" He shook my
hand. "Call me 'O.K.' Come on in." I followed him into his office,
teak-paneled, gold-carpeted, a leather couch and chairs on one side, a
conference table on the other, his desk in between. It was 8:30 in the
morning, but he was dressed for golf. He was somewhere between fifty and
sixty years old, lean and tanned, a man who would have looked as good
dressed in Levi's, riding a horse, as in a golf cardigan. He
smiled--white, perfect teeth. "What can I do you for?" "Well, Mr. McTier..." "Call me O.K.,
inlike." "All right. O.K.," I said and explained
things. "No problem," he said. "You can go where you want, see what you
want, just don't name the company. Deal?" "Deal," I said. He leaned
forward and we shook again. "In this business, a man's hand is good
enough; a man breaks his word and he's finished. Now, what can I tell
you?" "To start with, I'm curious about that room of guys wearing ties and
headsets back there." "That's sales. They're talking to restaurant chains
and supermarkets. We deal in 'fat cattle,' known as USDA Choice. We kill
one-and-a-half-year-old steers and young heifers who haven't had more than
one calf, most often one; they're in the same shape as a nineteen-year-old
girl who hasn't been knocked up." He grinned at me. "We don't kill cows.
Other companies kill cows; they sell to the big hamburger chains." I
looked surprised. "You didn't know that? As soon as old Daisy stops giving
milk, she turns into a cheeseburger. Yes, sir. Now, what was I saying?"
"You were saying something about young heifers." He nodded. "We kill
one-and-a-half-year-old steers and heifers and sell them to places like
Kroger and Winn Dixie. That's who those guys were talking to back there."
"What kind of money's involved?" He laughed. "A lot for a little," he
said. "An animal comes in at eleven hundred pounds. At birth, he weighed a
hundred; most everything else is three to six months on the feed lot. You
go down to Amarillo, take a plane and look down, you see five to ten
million animals in a fifty-mile radius getting fattened up. A single
lot'll have a quarter million head. For USDA Choice, we pay $700 a head,
about sixty to sixty-one cents a pound. Dressed out, gutted, no head, no
legs, no organs, that animal weighs seven hundred to eight hundred pounds.
If we're lucky, we make eighty-five cents a head after we pay the help and
the government." "That's all?" I said. "That's nothing." He smiled and
nodded. "It's a living. The only way to make it in this business is volume
and export. The only trouble is, we have tremendous overcapacity.
Occidental Petroleum bought Iowa Beef Packing years ago; now Iowa Beef
runs two lines, sixteen hours a day; each line kills 380 an hour. We're
talking six thousand kills a day. Compared with them, we're very modest.
Modest is one line, two shifts, sixteen hours a day, 110 an hour." I must
have looked surprised again. "Don't get excited," he said. "The numbers
are deceiving. Iowa Beef can run six thousand; we can run 1,760, but it
doesn't matter because no one in the U.S. is eating red meat anymore. In
ten years, there's been a 14 percent increase in population and only a 7
percent increase in beef consumption." I remember the smiling family with
the kiwi fruit in the lobby. "So what do you do?" I asked. "What you do,"
he said, "is export. You sell the livers to the French and Germans, the
tripe to the Italians, and to the Japanese..." McTier leaned forward and
smiled as if he'd been waiting for this. "You know what we sell the
Japanese?" "No, O.K. I don't." "We sell them assholes. They eat assholes.
Rectums. We boil'em, box'em, and ship'em. I got twenty-five guys in the
plant, that's all they do. And you know what else?" McTier propped his
elbows on his desk and rubbed his hands together. "This Japanese buyer
comes to me. He says he's very satisfied with our rectums, very good
quality, very consistent. But--he's interested in something else, in
addition." "Which is?" I asked. "Uteruses," said McTier. "Uteruses?" I
asked back. "Yeah, uteruses. I say, 'How very interesting, Mr. Tagawa. How
do you prepare them?' 'We barbecue them,' he says. 'That's strange,' I
say. 'In this country, we eat them raw.'" McTier let out a laugh and
slapped his desk. "That's great, isn't it, pussies and assholes, but I
tell you, without them, we'd be up shit's creek. Everything we can sell,
we sell. You ever heard of calf fries?" he asked. "No, I haven't," I said.
I wasn't sure I wanted to. "They're very popular in Texas, considered
delicacies. They serve 'em as an appetizer, deep-fried, with cocktail
sauce. Up North, no one'll eat 'em but the blacks." "What are they?" I
asked. I could feel it coming. "Balls," he said. "Testicles." He looked at
my face and laughed. "What's the matter? You said you weren't a
vegetarian." "That's true. I guess there's no accounting for taste. You
mind if I change the subject?" He laughed again. "I want to ask you about
the people who work for you. Who are they?" McTier folded his hands on his
desk. "Everyone in this office who has any responsibility started on the
kill floor. I started there, I took my two sons there when they were five.
During high school, that's where they worked, every summer. They used to
bring home the eyeballs and prop 'em up on the shelf of the refrigerator
to scare their mom. You know what they are now?" he asked. I was about to
say brain surgeons but I caught myself. "No, what?" I asked. "Electrical
engineers," he said. "The kill floor's the place to start. The work never
hurt anyone, but no one wants to do it anymore. We still have a few
whites, and we have some blacks, but the blacks aren't worth shit: they
think Monday's part of the weekend. Now we have Mexicans and Vietnamese.
It's a buyer's market. I have 125 men in that plant, and there're ten
applicants for every opening. Pay used to be $12 an hour, unskilled, on
the line; now it's $6, and skilled is $8.25. The Mexicans are good with
knives; they like knives; the Vietnamese do anything you tell 'em, good
steady workers. Alcohol used to be a problem, now it's dope. My guess is
80 percent are high on something, but things take care of themselves: you
can't get too high or you'll cut off something that belongs to you."
McTier leaned back and looked over my head. "I've got a conference call
in five minutes. You can listen to me talk prices, or I can get Dwight in
here, and he'll take you over to the plant. What's your pleasure?" I would
have preferred if he'd used another other word, but I chose the plant.
"One more question, though," I said. "Save it. When you're done, Dwight'll
bring you back and we can talk more." "Fine," I said, "but I wanted to ask
you about the music." "What music?" he said. "The music outside the front
door." "That? That's for people who come in from the yard. It's a signal
they're back in civilization. I used to run a plant in Minnesota; I used
to play classical music for the animals before they went up the chute.
They'd be all spooked; no one could explain it. Some people said they
could smell the blood of the kill; some people said it was because they
had no depth perception, to them dark shadows looked like deep holes.
They'd be skittish, but the music calmed them down." I wondered if McTier
had ever heard of Orpheus. I wondered if he'd ever heard of Auschwitz, I
was thinking about asking him, when Dwight walked in and shook my hand.
"Hey, all right," he said. He looked down at my trail boots. "Looks like
you're going camping. Let's head out." McTier nodded and we left the
office.
Dwight was another blond, thick, and beefy, somewhere in his twenties,
wearing Western boots and a down vest. In Georgia, he would have qualified
as a good old boy; in Omaha, he was probably known to his friends as a
shitkicker, I figured we were headed for his pickup, but instead we
climbed into his LTD. "What do you do, Dwight?" I asked. "I'm a buyer." He
spoke in a flat voice. "I buy maybe forty thousand head a year." We drove
out over the bridge. Look at that yard," he said. "How many you guess are
out there?" I looked out the window. 'I don't know, Dwight. How many?"
"Maybe three thousand, and this is the busiest day of the week. The yard's
dying. I hear in Chicago, on a Monday, there used to be forty-five
thousand. Now Chicago's gone and Omaha's not long, and you know why?" I
nodded, no. "Guys like me. We go out and talk to the farmer, cut out the
commission agent; the farmer sells directly to the company. We truck 'em
in, fifty bead at a time, right to the plant." What do you buy, Dwight?"
"Good-looking Holsteins, black Angus, Baldies, Chardonettes. If they got a
nice fat ass and a good size brisket, they're mine." "Dwight, I'm sorry,
but all this is new to me. What's a brisket?" He grinned. "Breast meat,
from the neck down, between the forelegs, that's brisket." He turned left,
swerved to avoid a cattle truck lumbering up the middle of the road; we
drove downhill, under a railway bridge, into a long cul-de-sac.
I didn't know what I'd expected, maybe a tall chimney belching black
smoke, maybe a gate with a wrought-iron motto arched above it, maybe the
sounds of a string quartet or a light opera carried by the wind. What I
saw was a low, block-long, narrow building made of cinder blocks that had
once been painted white, cars parked along it, pens at one end. Dwight
began looking for a place to park. "Dwight, do you mind if I look at the
animals first?" "No problem." He pulled up alongside the corrals and I
climbed out. There were thirty steers, wedged in a tight circle, up
against the fence, standing nose to nose, their breathing loud, moist, and
rhythmic, their tails turded to the world, their heads to each other,
broad, powerful creatures, their smell rising like heat from a building
after sundown. Thirty-five hundred years ago, Egyptians believed cows were
incarnations of Isis; three thousand years ago, the priests of Solomon's
Temple used the ashes of a red heifer to purify themselves after contact
with the dead, Long ago, Cretans danced with bulls; the Minotaur ruled the
Labyrinth; and bull effigies stood everywhere in the Aryan city of
Mohenjo-Daro. In India even now, Lord Krishna, God of Gods, is said to
pass eternity happily tending a herd of sacred cows that graze on his home
planet at the center of the universe. In Omaha, though, cows were bought
by guys like Dwight and left to stand in the mud. The air smelled like
hickory smoke, part shit and sawdust, part hay and blood. Dwight drove
around to the other side of the building, still hunting for a parking
space. The wind tasted like beef jerky. This was going to be a hard one, I
thought, the lowest kind of death, the most common, the most ordinary, the
death we give to creatures under our control. This was the base from which
all other dyings ascended. Dwight walked by and I followed him up the
steps of the building.
There was no reception room, just more steps up to a landing, then
dark, narrow corridors to the left and right, and straight ahead a broader
one, brightly lit, painted white, that led through a steel door fitted
with safety glass into the plant itself. The door slammed open, and a big
Mexican with long black hair braided into pigtails decorated with red
ribbons, wearing a white bard bat, bloody white boots, and a bloody white
smock, flounced in out of a cloud of steam, looked straight at Dwight and
me, gave us a coy little wave, and pivoted left out of sight. "Faggot,"
said Dwight. "Come on in the office and get yourself something to wear." I
followed him down the corridor to the right into a room where a sad-faced,
middle-aged white man in overalls sat alone at a steel folding table,
spooning pinto beans into his mouth from a thermos. He looked up. "Hey,
Bradley, gettin' any?" called Dwight. Bradley looked down at his pinto
beans and went back to his meal. "Find yourself a coat and a hard hat and
meet me outside." The only hard hat I could find perched on my head like
an egg; all the coats on the rack were too short. According to the posted
regulations, Dwight should have issued me a pair of ear protectors, but
since he didn't need them, he decided neither did I. He opened the steel
door, and I followed him into the plant.
I took a step and skidded. Steam clouded my glasses. The air was filled
with the clatter of chains and hoists; men shouted; animals bellowed;
klaxons blew; animate and inanimate, human and inhuman, everything sounded
at once, thumping, clanking, grinding, and whining. To the left, I could
see carcasses swaying, suspended from chains. Dwight walked in a
bent-shouldered crouch; I followed, wiping my glasses, looking up and
down, as afraid of slipping as of colliding with something hanging from
above. Everywhere, there was steam, hot water, and a bright film of blood.
Pockets of air smelled of fresh blood, singed hair, sawed bone, and shit.
Off to one side, twenty-five men, standing shoulder to shoulder, dressed
in splattered white coats, each holding a small circular electrical saw,
were shaving off the animals' hides, each man making a single set of
gestures that were added to by the man beside him, until the hides slipped
down around the carcasses like heavy, wet blankets. To their right, a
single man rode up and down on the platform of a small open elevator,
holding a huge electrically driven chain saw that cut straight down the
animals' spines, slicing them in half. Lines of men in soiled tunics stood
in front of lines of heads stuck on moving armatures or stood beside
conveyor belts splayed with organs, each holding a chrome-plated hook or a
steel sharpening shank in one band, and a knife in the other, either a
broad-bladed, curved skinner, or a straight, sharp, pointed boner, all of
them making their cuts and slices, then rapidly sharpening their blades
and repeating the gestures, their faces slack, their eyes dull and steady.
Any minute, I thought, they'll try their knives on each other. Dwight put
his mouth to my ear and shouted, "You want to see the kill?" I nodded. He
gestured and I followed, ducking and slipping between a line of swaying
carcasses, up a short flight of stairs to a concrete platform where a man
stood looking down at an empty concrete chute three feet below him. "This
is it," shouted Dwight. "He's the knocker. Stay out of the way. I'll be
back." He turned and left; the knocker nodded; I backed up against a side
wall and watched. Suddenly a man shouted, "Come on, you son-of-a-bitch,
move it, move it!" The knocker lunged to the left, grabbed an overhead
lever, and opened the door to the chute as three steers, single file,
thundered in, nose to asshole, bellowing, kicking, and rearing. As the
first one slammed into the far end of the chute and the last one rose up
onto the haunches of the one in the middle, the knocker released the
lever, and the door through which the three had been driven closed behind
them like a guillotine.
Until twenty years ago, knockers had been called knockers because they
swung hammers; heavyweight boxers came out of the packinghouses of Chicago
with right hands that could kill. Now the industry had switched to air
guns. As the animals kicked and raged, the knocker turned and pulled the
gun toward him, the weapon shaped like a caulking gun without a tip,
suspended from an overhead pulley, counterweighted, connected to a long
yellow air hose. One hand around the weapon's cylinder, one hand around
its lever, the knocker leaned down, bent at the waist above the animals'
heads. He killed first the last one in line, the one nearest him, so that
the two in front, who couldn't turn around, couldn't back up. The gun had
a hard rubber ring around its muzzle. He pushed the ring down onto the
middle of the animal's forehead and squeezed the lever. A charge of air
drove a three-inch-long, solid-steel rod into the animal's brain. The gun
pumped, thumped, and recoiled, the animal dropped and shuddered; the rod
retracted, and the knocker leaned down toward the middle one as the one
behind it collapsed. He knocked the second one as he did the first, but
the third, who'd been the leader, was farthest from him and harder to
reach. This one he knocked in the back, not the front, of the skull, but
one blow wasn't enough. The animal reared back in pain and rage, and the
knocker hit him again, this time on his crown. By now the other two had
fallen on their knees, panting and trembling, their heads back, their
tongues lolling, the broad muscles of their backs in spasm. Finally the
last one collapsed and the knocker turned and mashed a red lift button
with his thumb. Outside, the herder began yelling again at the next three,
"Come on, come on, move it, goddamn it, move it."
The whole left side of the chute, a thirty-foot section of stainless
steel, groaned and rose up on chains, and the three animals, still
twitching, but more dead than alive, slid sideways three feet down a
concrete slope into a pit whose floor and walls were thick with a mash of
blood, urine, and mud. There in the pit danced another man called the
shackler who hooked a heavy steel chain with a wheel at one end around the
left rear leg of each animal. With one hand he held the shackle; with the
other, he pushed a button and pulled down a chain with a hook at one end
that descended from the ceiling, thirty feet above his head. The knocker
on the platform was already in the middle of his next kill; the animals in
the pit were still kicking and twitching: the shackler slipped the hook of
each chain onto the wheel of each shackle and then pressed a lift button.
As the knocker finished off the next three and slid them down the slope
toward the shackler, the others rose, one at a time, twirling slowly, nose
down to the ceiling, where the wheels of their shackles dropped into the
moving links of an overhead trolley track. Thirty seconds before, they'd
stood on their feet; now they hung thirty feet in the air, head down, one
leg up, stretched eighteen feet from hoof to nose. The one in the middle
trembled like a plucked string; the one to the left shivered as if it had
a chill; the one to the right swayed back and forth like a pendulum. The
shackler looked up, afraid that that third one might slip out of its chain
and fall on him. The overhead trolley clanked, jerked, and slammed them,
one at a time, into a bloody wall, as the track turned ninety degrees and
carried them twelve feet to the first stop of the disassembly line.
Three men in body-length yellow rubber aprons slimed and runneled with
blood stood on a raised honeycombed steel platform, waiting for the
animals. Each of the men had a narrow, sharp, pointed knife in his hand.
As the animals passed in front of them, their heads level with the men's
waists, the men reached forward tentatively, knife in hand, afraid the
animals still had enough life in them to arch and kick them in the chest
or face. As the animals drew in front of them, each man darted forward and
made a slit that ran upwards from the softest part of the animal's throat
to the beginning of the animal's breastbone. Then, at arm's length, head
back, each man reached in and flicked open the animal's jugular. At that
very instant, before the man could withdraw his hand, dark blood, black to
the light, gushed out of the animal, not in a steady stream like water
from a broken hose, but in separate single bursts, as if a big bucket had
been filled, then emptied, filled, then emptied, filled, then emptied. The
blood looked black as engine oil as it burst out, but as it fell on the
men and poured through the holes of the platform where they stood, and
spread on the floor beneath them, and ran down a storm drain into a
cooling tank in the basement, light bounced off it, and for the first time
I saw its true color. It was crimson red, brighter than a candy apple,
shinier than the finish on a fast car, much more alluring than the reddest
lipstick. I stared at it and stared at it as more animals collapsed under
the knocker and more animals slid toward the shackler and more animals
rose toward the ceiling like nightmare hippos in a Disney film. I kept
looking at the blood, amazed at its color, amazed at its beauty. "Hey!"
shouted Dwight. "You seen enough?" I jerked around and looked at him so
dazed he yelled at me again. I nodded and followed him out.
"Something the matter?" McTier said when I walked back into his office.
I sat down on the couch against the wall. "You all right?" I didn't want
to tell him; I didn't know how. "What happened?" "Dwight showed me the
kill, O.K. I was"--I didn't know the words --"deeply moved." "Are you
upset?" "I don't know if I can say this right, but I want to ask you
something." "Shoot," he said. "O.K., when you started out, when you were
young, did the kill bother you? Did it ever bother your sons?" McTier
stood up, walked around his desk, sat on the edge of it. "I didn't think
any more of it than if I went out to the garden and pulled up a carrot. We
raised those animals. They were bred, born, and grown to be slaughtered.
They were born to die to feed us. Like a crop, like corn or cabbage or
wheat. We harvest them." "What about the kill, the steel bolt in the
brain? The ones I saw didn't like it, Would you?" McTier stood up and
looked down at me. "Who the hell knows? What difference does it make? When
you're dead, you're dead. When the rod goes in your brain"--he snapped his
fingers --"that's it, lights out, adios, you're gone. You don't feel
anything. Even if you do, for a second, how the hell do I know; I've never
asked; no steer's ever told me." He sat down on the edge of the desk
again. "You don't look so good. Why don't you take it easy, go back to
your motel, take the afternoon off; we can talk tomorrow. You're coming
back, aren't you?" I stood up. "You bet. I didn't come all the way up to
Omaha just to go home. I'll see you tomorrow." We shook hands and I left.
I don't remember what they were playing when I walked out the front door.
I don't remember much of the drive back to the motel. I didn't notice much
of anything, good, bad, or otherwise, until I got back to my room and
started to take off my clothes. I noticed my shirt smelled as if it'd hung
in a smokehouse, I looked down at my pants: the cuffs were spotted with
blood and spackled with little flecks of fat. I looked at my boots: the
cleats were clotted with pieces of fat. The boots I couldn't throw away:
I'd have to clean them. The clothes I put in the garbage, Then I took a
shower. I washed once, climbed out, and dried off. I sniffed my skin. I
climbed back in and washed again. Then I turned off the lights, lay down
and let the covers settle on me. I woke up three hours later and turned on
the TV.
It was the last twenty minutes of A Night to Remember, about the
sinking of the Titanic. As I watched, the deck up-ended. Beautiful women
in evening gowns, pretty little girls in party dresses, handsome men in
dinner jackets, they all skidded screaming down the deck, tumbling over
the side, sucked down in a whirlpool as the ship slipped out of sight into
the night sea. I watched, and as I watched I realized something: the
manner in which a creature meets its death could either degrade its nature
or confirm it. Just as the passengers were transformed into terrified
creatures, sliding and skittering down a slope, no different than the
crockery and furniture that crashed past them, so the animals at the plant
were transformed from creatures, once sacred, equivalent to forces of
nature, into helpless beasts, driven up a chute, trapped in a narrow
defile, and then punched in the skull to meet a production quota by a man
they couldn't see. The steers hadn't died; they'd been exterminated, and
because they'd been exterminated, they'd been transformed at the moment of
their deaths into beasts. The kill had trapped them, reduced them, and
made them helpless. Men in tuxedos tumbling down the deck, and steers
driven into blind alleys, they were all the same--living creatures, made
helpless, their natures denied. The idea was obvious, but the facts
weren't. McTier had talked about carrots, but I'd seen cattle; I'd seen
them, heard them, and smelled them. I had one more day to understand how
men who killed animals could do what they did.
I called McTier the next morning and asked if I could go straight to
the plant. "I figured you might want to do that. Ask for Bradley; he's the
foreman; he's worked for packinghouses for forty years; he'll take care of
you. Call me later if you want. Otherwise, good luck." Bradley I
remembered: he was the sad-eyed man sitting eating pinto beans. When I
arrived at the plant, I found him in the same room, sitting at the same
steel table, keying figures into an adding machine. I told him McTier had
sent me and he straightened up. "Weren't you the fella with Dwight?" he
asked. "That's me. Dwight ran me through here, but I can't say I
understand things." Bradley stood up and gave me a tired smile. He could
have been Dwight thirty years later, gray, nearly bald, his body soft,
spread-out inside a pair of bib overalls. Come on, then," he said. "Let's
get you fixed up." He led me to a supply room and unlocked the door.
"Gotta keep things in here; they'll steal anything, scrub pads, sharpening
rods, you name it. What's your shoe size?" He handed me a new pair of
rubber boots, a clean, full-length white coat, a hard hat that fitted, and
a pair of earplugs on a lanyard. Then he took me out to the plant and led
me from place to place like a worn-out, kindly tour guide. The earplugs
deadened the noise. The confusion of steam, carcasses, and men was
patiently explained, step by step. All that remained was the kill. Bradley
led me up to it and pointed at the knocker. "That's Zeke," be said. "He's
a good boy, has a good hand; he's got some personal problems, but I told
him if he can lay off the booze he's looking at eight and a quarter an
hour, steady as she goes." Bradley sounded like an old coach talking about
a rookie. He gave me a sad little smile and left. Zeke nodded and mouthed
a hello. I leaned up against the wall. "This is the place where it
happens," I thought. "Not in the plant. Here they die, Zeke's the killer."
Bradley had been kinder to me than Dwight. I was better protected than
before. I pushed in my earplugs. I'd stay and watch as long as I could.
This was the meanest death. If I could bear it, then, wherever I went
afterward, I'd know the difference between something evil and something
good.
Outside, the herder yelled, and suddenly the steers charged through the
door, heads down, ears back; the herder shouting; Zeke shouting, an
electric prod in one hand, the door lever in the other. The door slammed
down; the animals banged, bellowed, and kicked; Zeke reached for his gun
and bent at the waist; the animals twisted and jerked away; the gun went
wump-phump and recoiled, wump-phump and recoiled; Zeke swore; the animals
dropped. Zeke shouted down to the shackler, the shackler looked up and
stepped forward; the side of the chute rose and the animals slid down.
Outside, the herder yelled again, as the shackler looped the first animal
and sent it straight up in the air, head down, tongue down, like the stem
of a divining rod pointed into the earth; the animals rising to the
ceiling then, one at a time, slamming into the wall while the gun thumped
and the next three fell to their knees, just as the first ones reached the
blood-letters, who danced forward and back like fencers. The blood arced
out and splashed down; Zeke shouted to the shackler and the shackler
shouted to Zeke; the side of the chute rose as the chains descended from
the ceiling. The herder yelled and the air filled with the rattle of
chains and the whine of the bone-cutters' saws as the time-driven,
death-driven ballet of the men and beasts passed in front of me. I looked
across at the blood-letters again, mesmerized by the color of the blood as
it splashed over them. "Redder than a kiss" I thought, "it's so fucking
red..." I would have stared at it longer, but I heard Zeke shout in alarm.
I looked and saw him jerk back and his hard hat fly off as one of the
steers rose almost straight up on its hind legs, rearing out of the chute,
bellowing, outraged, trying to escape, climbing onto the back of the
animal in front of it. "You goddamn son-of-a-bitch," Zeke shouted, as his
hard hat bounced, clattering past me, and he lunged at the animal and
killed it with his air gun. The animal fell backward onto the one behind
it. I reached down and picked up the hard bat. Zeke reached for it with
one hand while he punched the chute button with the other. The inside of
the hat was wet and cold with sweat. I banded it to him and be grinned.
The herder started shouting again; the animals galloped up the ramp; Zeke
spun to open the door, then he looked back at me, pulled down the air gun
on its pulley, and shoved it at me. "Go on," he yelled. The animals
slammed against the side of the chute. "Go ahead," he shouted. I didn't
hesitate; I didn't give it a thought. Maybe it had been the hard hat as it
skittered across the floor, me picking it up and feeling the sweat. Maybe
it had been the beauty of the blood or the time/motion dance of the kill.
Maybe it had been the earplugs and the new rubber boots or Bradley's
explanations and Zeke's grin. Whatever had done it, I grabbed the gun,
leaned down, and pressed it against the skull of the steer closest to me.
The animal tossed its head to shake it loose. Its skull was as broad as my
forearm, brown, muddy, and hard as stone. I leaned down, and as my weight
balanced against the strength of the steer's neck, I squeezed the lever.
The gun bounced up and back. The steer dropped away as if the ground had
opened under it. "Nothing to it," I thought. "As easy as hitting pop flies
to the outfield." Zeke grinned and nodded. "Go for it," he whooped. I
leaned over to knock the second one. "Sweet-fucking-Jesus," I thought, and
straightened up and shoved the gun back at him. "It's all yours," I
shouted. Then I turned and found the door and went out into the air. "What
the fuck did you just do?? 'Pop flies to the outfield'?? You just killed a
steer." I took a breath and leaned up against the wall of the building. I
started laughing, but the laugh turned into a tremble. "I'll have to tell
McTier," I thought. I felt as if I bad the chills. "All he has to do is
charge admission to guys like me. Five days in the office at a desk,
getting shafted, then going home and getting ignored, and McTier could
charge me $30 for thirty minutes every Saturday morning. I could put on
boots and a hard hat and hit a few. Instead of telling my boss to fuck
himself and my wife to eat shit, I could go to the plant and knock 'em in
the head. McTier could meet his expenses, I could get my rocks off, and
nobody but some animals would get hurt. McTier could make up his
shortfall; people like me could blow off steam, and someone would have
roast beef for dinner. I smiled, then I stopped: I remembered the
conversation I'd bad in the Hilton with Schultz, the homicide detective.
"We're all murderers," he'd said. And I'd said, "Not me." "Not me," I'd
said, and he'd looked at me as if I was crazy. He was right. I'd just done
it. They were animals, but if killing them wasn't murder, what was?
Unless, of course, it was genocide: dead Jews, dead dogs, dead steers. I'd
always assumed I'd be a victim, not a participant. Schultz said I'd be
back. He'd smiled. "You like that stuff," he said. I'd always thought
killing was something other people did. I was wrong; Schultz was right, I
needed to tell him. I'd have to leave town and head south. I stood there
until I stopped shaking. Then I turned in my gear and caught a plane.
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