Cows Read online

  This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents are a product

  of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to real events or persons,

  living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Published by Akashic Books

  © 1997, 2011 Matthew Stokoe

  Introduction © 2011 Dennis Cooper

  eISBN-13: 978-1-617-75017-5

  ISBN-13: 978-1-936070-70-1

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2010922713

  Little House on the Bowery

  c/o Akashic Books

  PO Box 1456

  New York, NY 10009

  [email protected]

  www.akashicbooks.com

  For Roseanna

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT PAGE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEN

  CHAPTER NINETEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER ONE

  In bed.

  Steven could feel the toxins tumbling slowly through his bloodstream, jagged black particles that rolled in a slow-motion undersea current, gouging soft tissue with their passing. If he closed his eyes in the dark room he could see a science-book photo of his blood map. Blood, not sticky red liquid, but billions of corpuscles all backlit in a fireside glow, jostling for position in a race to the heart that would love them and pump them down to the lungs for that good, good oxygen. The heart wanted them to live and it cheered on its team with the unshakeable, endlessly enduring love of TV parents.

  But riding the backs of his corpuscles, leaping onto them from his stomach wall and through the slick gray coils of his intestines, not giving a shit what his heart wanted, the hard black grit of Mama’s catabolized meals jammed itself into his flesh and fat and gristle.

  On his back in the greasy ruck of bedclothes, he could feel the thousand systems of his body clogging with this filth.

  He turned on his side and looked out at the 3 a.m. city through a single uncurtained window. It didn’t work. In the cold gutted room, on the narrow bed wedged into the grudging protection of a corner, he could still feel his body age.

  He raged at his powerlessness. She forced her mealshit into him day after day and he couldn’t stop her. He wanted to. He wanted to tie her legs apart and take a hammer to her cunt then walk out on to the street and never come back. But he couldn’t.

  In the long nights before sleep the TV had no pity. It showed him how the world was. It showed him how much the people out there had. He’d been outside to see for himself, of course, out into the city and walked around. But it was too frightening to stay out for long. He wasn’t like the people on the streets. They lived so perfectly. They knew exactly what to do to be happy and they did it without even having to think. And the TV beamed their lives into his head as dreams.

  Across the bare floorboards, in a patch of sick orange light, Dog lay sleeping, its paralyzed back legs out stiff like the handles of a wheelbarrow. Steven closed his eyes. At the edges of roads all across the world sodium vapor lamps sizzled away at the night, and in the flat upstairs the new girl moved around and spoke to herself.

  CHAPTER TWO

  In the mornings, if the water ran hot, Steven could stand for hours in the raw concrete of the shower stall. Like sleep it was an escape. The flow of the water soothed him, threw a cover over his emptiness. It was like the few times he had ridden a bus—without doing anything you were doing something, you were moving, and the movement absorbed you. All the headchatter went quiet and you could imagine you had all the things you saw on TV, like love and a ranch in the forest with a horse and a brand-new Jeep and a child and a wife who loved you and would stroke your cheek when you got home so tenderly that you knew she lived only for you and when you walked through the forest or the city a path opened up and you always knew which direction to take and nothing ever jumped out and stopped you or cut you off from life because you were right in there with it, you were part of it all and you didn’t miss out on a thing. And when you looked at the TV it was a mirror.

  But when Steven stepped out to dry himself with a rag, when his feet hit the scummy stone floor in front of the toilet, nothing had ever changed.

  Gargantua. The Hagbeast. The unloving mother bitch cunt stood hulked over a two-burner stove, stirring a pan of rancid pork. The kitchen stank of gas and oil and the caked, dead fish decay that came out between her legs.

  Steven sat at the small unbalanced table and watched Dog drag itself across the sticky linoleum to the shit tray. Its useless hind feet swished sideways with each lurching foreleg step, like the tail of some broken fish. He’d had it from a pup—nine years—and had been there, standing impotent and frozen, when the Hagbeast crippled it with a brick. For no reason at all.

  That day in his teens was confirmation of what he had suspected since birth—that he was incapable of manipulating life as other people did. Unlike them he could have no effect on the web of events that surrounded him, he could bring about no change. Dog had looked up at him not savage or pain-snarly but confused, like how could Steven allow this to happen?

  In those days Dog was young and had not learned how powerless Steven was before the Beast.

  Out in the hall now, the animal shitted a dark turd into a bed of ripped newspaper. Good boy. Snapped in half and still killing itself to please.

  The Hagbeast brought breakfast over.

  “Here, lovey. Mama’s best boy, eat that all up.”

  She sat opposite him and slopped chunks of undercooked meat onto his plate. The oil that soaked it was flecked with something that looked like phlegm.

  “Eat up, eat up. Got to eat Mama’s food that she makes just for you, haven’t we?”

  Steven looked at the sagging face, at the crosshatched pouches of fat and the clogged skin, at the ancient blackheads that had grown with the years, outward like the rings of a tree. The gray hair on her jowls lay flat under the crusted remains of a thousand meals and she had snot on her upper lip. He summoned his courage.

  “I can’t eat this.”

  He prodded the food with his fork, dropping his eyes, wanting to challenge her but unable to bear the terror of her gaze. The Hagbeast sighed and her voice got hard.

  “Every day. Every day the same fucking thing. I made this food with love, Steven, and I want you to eat it.”

  She made a fist around her spoon and shoveled in the slop. Her movements were ponderous and inexorable, as though some highly torqued mechanism revolved beneath the lax obesity of her frame. Fat swung in pleats from her upper arms and she breathed heavily through her nose as she chewed.

  “It’s shit. It isn’t even cooked properly.”

&n
bsp; The Beast spat out a mouthful of food and started to shriek. “Shit! Shit! You ungrateful fuck. People out there would die to eat this.”

  Steven held tight to the leg of the table and pushed his words out like small boats into the storm of her screaming.

  “Food like this kills people.”

  “Eat the fucking food!”

  Her words rang on the filthy tiled walls. In this tight space outside the world their fury silenced the city. She heaved herself upright and stood waiting, daring him to refuse, grunting low in her throat and pressing her teeth together.

  Steven didn’t have the strength to resist further. His fear of the monstrosity before him withered to dust the small store of opposition with which he’d hoped to transform the morning. He speared a piece of the meat with his fork. His stomach rolled, but like every other mealtime he filled his mouth and chewed and swallowed. And kept on doing it until his plate was empty.

  CHAPTER THREE

  On the bus to the meat grinding plant the cereal and fruit-fed faces of the other passengers made him feel haggard and polluted. He wanted to reach out and touch them, to reassure himself that he belonged to an essentially similar world. But he knew he did not, and that if he tried they would telescope backward like some effect on TV.

  He watched them instead. They were so much more real than himself, the air around them was bright with the definition of their existence. He felt himself blurring with the sunlight and the motion of the bus, as if his outline were sand or fine powder.

  There were couples too, together on the slashed seats, and they were the most densely colored of all. Their belonging, their completeness, pushed them out from the background of safety glass and pressed steel, up so close to Steven that he could feel the flow of love between them. These were the ones whose lives got shown on TV. They knew the secrets of the game and they played and never considered losing.

  They were gods from some golden otherworld. They had arms, legs, their faces molded to their emotions as his did, they even aged. But they were beyond him. The air they breathed was not his air and the light that fell on them came from a warmer source than his sun. He longed to imitate them, to share in the mass normality that rolled in cathode waves across the dead nights of his loneliness.

  The bus was almost empty by the time Steven stepped from it into the deathstink at the edge of the city.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The meat plant squatted low in a gritted wasteland of industrial units, hunkered down and curled like a bellyshot animal. Smoke and steam coiled out of pipes in its sides and pools of water in the fractured concrete apron collected a scum of oil and condensing cow fear that reflected the jaundiced sky back at itself.

  Articulated trucks arrived endlessly. They pulled up at the stock pens spewing shit and black exhaust and emptied themselves of cows that farted and mooed and jerked around trying to remember if Mom ever said anything about a place like this. But there wasn’t much time for remembering, the pens were in constant flux, draining at four animals a minute into the plant, through a hole in the wall.

  In the front office they gave him a white coat and a cap and cream rubber boots that looked like tanned gut. It was his first day and he had to be properly dressed.

  There was a lot of noise and people said things to him, but he didn’t speak unless he had to. He was adrift in their world, unsure of his significance, and to open himself to a point where conversation could take place would only have revealed how unlike them he was.

  Cripps led him through office corridors where the air was guilty with knowledge of the killing out back, and as they moved deeper into the plant, further from the administration section, things changed—the temperature fell, there was less light, the staff thinned out and those who remained looked harried and dark-eyed.

  “Pussies.”

  Cripps spat on the carpet-tiled floor.

  “The whole fucking lot. They sign papers and shuffle them around and a ton of meat dies every minute. But not one of those syphilitic cunts has ever had his dick in a cow. They don’t know what it means to slaughter through an eight-hour shift, to kill and keep killing until the death of an animal sings to you of things beyond yourself.”

  Steven followed the foreman, not really listening, too busy sucking in details of the scene around him to match later against the TV—jewels of actual experience to be taken home and gloated over.

  They came to a corrugated-iron wall that stretched thirty feet up to the roof and off to the lost edges of the building. Cripps held open a door and the white light that streamed through blinded Steven and made the men on the other side look like angels in some kind of movie about heaven.

  “This is where things are real.”

  Cripps shoved him into the light.

  Steven stood blinking beside a processing line that curved around three sides of an immense hall. Carcasses, hung from hooks in an overhead conveyor system, swung upside down into the hall through a square of plastic strips at one end. Wet shit slopped down their flanks and blood dripped from their noses into the polished steel gutters that tracked the line. Process hands in bloodstained white coats tended various stations, washing down the heavy dead cows, slitting them open with small circular saws, scraping out guts, skinning, slicing, hacking, boning, dismembering, rendering the once solidly knit animals into chunks of unsupported flesh. The keening of electric knives as they parted skin and meat cut holes in the coarser whine of bone saws and the repeated crumping of a pneumatic skull press.

  Cripps, his hand on Steven’s shoulder, had to shout. “That’s the best part over there, boy. The slaughter room.” He pointed to the curtain of plastic strips that marked the start of the dead cows’ journey. “But we’re starting you off on the grinder.”

  The process hands paid no attention to Steven as he followed Cripps, but he watched them closely, imagining the lives they must go home to after work, all their beautiful wives and children.

  “This is the end of it all.”

  They stopped beside the stainless-steel chute of a machine. From a conveyor-fed work surface Cripps took a slab of beef the size of a small child and heaved it in. Bits of meat sprayed back, but the bulk of it, ground to a pulp of blood and tissue, gouted out the other end into a wheeled hopper. He scooped up a handful and rubbed it through his fingers, standing with his groin pressed to Steven’s hip.

  “Look at it, boy. We haven’t just killed it, we’ve obliterated it.”

  He smelled his fingers.

  “Think whatever made it move is happy now in the fields of the hereafter? You believe in that kind of thing? Forget it. Meat doesn’t have the brains. It just works till it dies or until someone cuts it up.”

  Cripps looked dreamily across the hall at the juddering procession of increasingly disintegrated cattle.

  “Just chuck the shit in as fast as you can.”

  He squeezed the back of Steven’s neck, then strode off toward the slaughter room. Steven watched him go.

  The meat juice stung his hands after a while, but there wasn’t much else to bother Steven. His shoulders ached slightly with the effort of humping the meat but the motion was rhythmic and simple and he lost himself in its mindlessness. He dreamed he was working to provide for a beautiful wife and a baby son. They waited for him at home with two cars in a quiet neighborhood where all the houses had large lawns. They depended on him, and the wife would be wondering how he was doing at work and talking to the son about how much she loved his father, glowing inside with the knowledge that she would never change, that no other man could ever mean anything to her and that she would always live only for Steven. And she had a good body too, and skin like all women had under the warm painting of TV lights—lightly tanned and smooth as silk.

  At one he got a break and wandered around the line. After the cows were skinned and gutted they were decapitated and the heads routed off to the skull press. Gummy operated this machine like a personal weapon, as though the steel pile that slammed down on the dribblin
g heads, splitting cranial vault and exposing brain in a thick spray of colorless liquid, functioned for his satisfaction alone. He groaned and pressed his knees together each time he triggered it.

  Steven looked at the man’s crotch expecting an erection.

  “You starin’ at mah mouth?”

  The words flapped over Gummy’s chin like drool. Steven looked at his mouth—no teeth, lips torn away, the left side of his face an open purple scar that showed gums and leaked spit.

  “You starin’ at mah mouth, ya little bastard? Every new cunt does, and I can see you ain’t no different. Bet you’re just dying to hear how it happened, ain’t ya?”

  Gummy kicked another head into place and hit it dead center. Some of the stuff that came out of it stuck to Steven’s coat. He thought of walking away, but there wasn’t anywhere to go.

  “You wanna watch these cows, I’m tellin’ ya, ya little bastard. I had mah hands holding right on the soft part behind the ears, just where they like it most … God, the skin there is like silk … And I had my lips right up against that mad bovine’s. I could feel the whiskers and the velvet under those whiskers all dark and smelling of hay. So just like always I opened mah own lips and I tasted that cow. I felt its tongue pushing into mah mouth and I pushed back against it—they’re real rough on top, but underneath you never felt anything so smooth. Anyhow, I was licking at that scummy stuff they get on their teeth when the mad fucker pulled back and clamped down on mah mouth and started shaking its head. They had to pry me loose with a crowbar, killed that bastard cow to do it too. By that time mah teeth was gone and mah lips was ripped up so bad they never got found. Like it, ya little bastard? Bet you think it’s a real good story, dontcha, ya little fuck? Well you better remember it. Cows taste like heaven but ya can’t trust ’em a single fuckin’ inch.”