Cows Read online

  Something flickered at the edge of vision, a shadow in wire mesh. He snapped around to stare at the ventilator behind him, but beyond the grille of steel wire there was only darkness. Before he could slide off his stool to take a closer look the lunch horn sounded and the walkway between him and the wall was suddenly full of men racing to the locker room for sandwiches wrapped in tinfoil by doting wives. So Steven forgot about it and waited for them to pass, and when the process hall was empty he walked around to the gutting trough, an early station not far from the slaughter room.

  The line was still. A cow swung by its heels from the overhead track, going nowhere. Its tongue lolled softly from side to side and strands of saliva traced patterns in the blood of the runoff gutter. Steven reached out to stop it swinging and left his hands on the wide sides of the animal for a moment, feeling ghosts of life in the cooling skin.

  The belly was slit and the sack of guts, not yet removed, had fallen out to hang heavy and mottled against the rib cage. He breathed deeply through his nose, searching for some scent of the grassy, wildflower-strewn field in which this animal must have grazed. But the dusty smell of dung and hide and the fermented, rotted-down stink of the exposed organs blanketed everything and Steven had to close his eyes and force himself to imagine the beauty of where the cow had lived.

  He found a curved gutting knife and used it on the animal. He had to reach inside the abdominal cavity and the unexpected warmth he found there pulsed a brief wave of sympathy through him. But it passed quickly.

  The guts slid over the cow’s stretched neck and landed at his feet with a sound like someone being sick on a tiled floor. He stood there trying to recognize the different parts. The heart and lungs hadn’t come out, of course, they were still fixed within the chest, but the spleen and the kidneys were there. And the enormous liver and, most easily identifiable of all, the tangle of gray-blue intestines weaving slickly about themselves, shiny in the harsh light. Among these landmark organs were smaller, irregularly shaped bits of viscera he couldn’t name.

  There was very little blood. The cows died quickly and trapped most of it in their tissue, a last snatching back of themselves from all the touching hands of man. Dark bile leaked from the ruptured stomachs, though, and a shallow fringe of clear internal mucus collected around the edge of the pile. Steven crouched and examined things—the hollows, the tight bunching of hard yellow fat in the dip of the kidneys, the smooth brown slope of the liver, the pockets of viscous pink glit …

  The mess was incongruous, there on the hard floor, but within itself it was consistent, all of it grown to a single plan. There were no crystalline black accretions jammed into organically curving tissue. It looked like Lucy was wrong, at least as far as cows were concerned. But he had to be sure.

  The touch of the organs when he stuck his hands into them was unpleasant. Instead of the softness he expected, he found them hard with vaguely abrasive surfaces. He rummaged quickly, running his fingers along folds and crevices, poking through valves and into sphincters, probing the insides of those that would admit him.

  Slivers of meat collected under his fingernails and everything made wet sucking noises. He was thorough but he found nothing to comfort Lucy, nothing she could use as proof.

  “Looking for God, boy?”

  Steven jumped and the leathery bag of one of the cow’s ancillary stomachs slipped from around his hand. Cripps stepped forward, smirking, and stirred the entrails with the toe of his boot.

  “Marveling at His creation?”

  “What?”

  “It’s food and shit, boy, that’s all.”

  “I was looking for something …” Steven’s voice trailed off. He was frightened, unsure what Cripps’s reaction would be to his sifting of guts.

  Cripps laughed and put an arm around him. “Then perhaps I can help you.”

  He steered Steven to the slaughter room entrance and paused for a moment outside, savoring some quality in the air. The plastic strip curtain blurred angles and lines and muted the cow noise beyond to a nervous grumble.

  “Come on.”

  Cripps was gentle and they moved into the room.

  Steven had expected a cathedral to death, but the raw concrete cavern seemed squalid and mean despite its yardage. At the back was a holding pen of dull steel, fed from the stockyard outside. The cows here, waiting for the return of the slaughter party, rocked sideways on their hooves, chasing cow lullabies across the dead-eyed plains of their pasts. But Ma’s mud-soft lowing was too far back across those plains to give comfort and the cows were cold.

  From the pen, two barred alleys ran to pneumatic grids the men called grabbers—rigid latticeworks of iron that closed against the sides of a cow and held it immobile. On either side of these there were low railed platforms for the slaughtermen. Above the entrance a winch connected with the overhead conveyor.

  In this place of bovine departures the lighting was dim. Alcoves and juttings, thrown with no seeming purpose along the walls, wrapped small areas of darkness about themselves. At the top of a flight of steps a shelf of stone ran the length of the room, ten feet above the floor—a viewing gallery.

  “Look around you, boy.” Cripps spread his arms. “It’s quiet now, but you can feel the power of the place. Think of the deaths it has seen, the fantasies that have been lived and released in here. God, that smell …”

  Cripps walked along one of the alleys to the holding pen and stroked the forehead of a cow. He raised his voice and the animals shifted uneasily.

  “These are your future, if you have the courage. They grow them in concrete boxes under ultraviolet light, they feed them on pellets of their own dead. These are urban cows, boy, manmade without mystery, and they have a gift for us far more important than meat or leather. It isn’t a gift they like to give, though. Not at all.”

  “What gift?”

  “The experience of killing. Of blowing out their brains and taking away their most precious thing. It smashes the walls you put around yourself, the walls other people put around you to stop you doing what you want. Do you understand me? The things you would do if there was nothing to stop you. Killing is an act of self-realization, it shows a man the truth of his power. And when you know this, boy, the pettiness they try to shackle us with falls away like shit.”

  Cripps threw his arms out like he was on a cross.

  “Killing frees you to live as you should.”

  Out in the hall the horn blasted.

  “Back to your station, boy. Back to where the cows are only meat. But remember what happens in here, remember the secrets that are to be had. And one day soon perhaps we shall see what a little killing can do for you.”

  At the grinder Steven humped meat and dreamed of quick access to the future. Cripps was significantly fucked in the head, no doubt about it, but could it happen like that? Was there something you could do that would make you different than you were? If it was that simple, how easy it would be to deal with the Beast.

  His head swam a little and the mist of blood from the grinder began to irritate him. Lucy with her compacting of unhappiness into removable physical deposits, Cripps and his instant command of life through killing … Such new ideas. Steven had not thought that there might be ways to force happiness into being. It had always seemed a matter of luck, something beyond his control that happened outside in the world. To all the other people.

  He moved about, uncomfortable in the late-afternoon slaughter. Someone was watching him, he could feel it. But he was apart from the other process hands and Cripps had not left the slaughter room since lunch. He looked over his shoulder. In the darkness behind the ventilation grille two softly gazing eyes blinked once then vanished. He jumped from his stool, but it was too late, the space behind the grate was empty. He pressed his head close and from somewhere along the duct’s length heard a sound like lazily trotting hooves.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Dinner looked normal that night—junk out of a can. The Hagbeast ate silently but w
atched him closely. The first mouthful told Steven she had laced the meal with salt. He forced himself to eat without reaction.

  “Is it nice where you work?”

  “No.”

  “When I was a girl I worked on a goose farm. That was bloody work too. They put them upside down in tin cones with holes in the bottom. There was nothing in the sheds but rows and rows of goose heads hanging out of cones. We had to run along with a knife cutting them off and the blood went everywhere. We were always soaked. They looked like cocks, those heads did, with their long necks, lying all bloody on the ground.”

  Steven’s stomach jerked. Her words had no effect on him—he had heard all her stories before he was eight years old, how she used to stick the necks inside herself—but the salt was building with each mouthful and his guts were going to empty sometime soon. He forced more food down to spite her.

  Out in the hall Dog dragged itself up for a shit. Steven flicked back to the Hagbeast.

  “Don’t bother, I’ve heard it.”

  “Oh, well, I’m sorry. I beg your fucking pardon. Mothers are supposed to talk to their children, Steven. Didn’t you know? It’s the only way to teach you things.”

  He laughed in her face.

  “What did you ever teach me?”

  The mother act fell from the Beast like lizard skin and she leaned across the table, grabbing the edges, white-knuckled.

  “You ungrateful fuck. Everything you are has my mark on it.”

  His stomach heaved again as he half stood to meet her, but he wasn’t ready to let go yet. His hatred paralyzed him and for a moment he stopped breathing.

  And then he was much younger, and she was a towering mass in a blue print dress against which he butted without effect, knee-high and weak in a child anger that had no possibility of resolution and ended as it always did by tearing away, shrieking, looking blindly through tears for the cornfields where all the TV kids ran to escape the adult world. Then he was back.

  “And what am I, you demented whore? Something you fucked up so totally it never had a chance to make it into the world. Jesus, it’s as much as I can do to walk down the street.”

  He vomited tiredly onto the table, bracing himself against it with locked arms. The Hagbeast laughed softly and clumped across the room to stand over Dog on the shit tray.

  “The time wasn’t wasted, then.”

  She lifted her skirt and pissed on the whimpering animal.

  In the drifting monochrome wash of the TV, Dog’s coat looked dark and oiled. The hair parted in a rolling wave as Steven dragged a towel back and forth across it, exposing a narrow moving line of white skin and the occasional cluster of fleas. The stink of the Hagbeast’s piss burned acquisitively through the dead air, snouting out strongholds in the damp-spore that blackened the corners of the bedroom, planning to linger. Dog grunted happily under the attention but its eyes held the sad light of betrayal that surfaced with each of the Hagbeast’s cruelties Steven failed to protect it from.

  CHAPTER TEN

  He had been to the fourth floor before. In the endless years of his growing it had been part of a route that led to a temporary escape from the mad bludgeonings of his mother. Up the stairs that were always unlit and creaked fear into a young boy’s legs, along a landing so thick with its own isolation that the shadows must, absolutely must, hide something hideous and fanged that drooled for the blood of a child, to a ladder at the end that you climbed to a square of meshed glass, then out on to the roof, panting and pushing the skylight open and gulping down the gritty air of the city that seemed back then to expand in your lungs and float you up and out into a world not shared by monsters or mother.

  Beyond an immediate ring of desolation, lights glittered and flashed colors out across the world. And the colors were so significant then—each neon shade tugged at him with its promise of a different way to live, each glowing curl of tubeglass was an entire world that would close around you if you stared at it long enough and carry you off on warm purple nights to a place where there was music and people laughed.

  To stand by the railing at the edge of the roof, kicking at loose bricks and dreaming of moving out into those lights, was payment enough for the shrieks and beatings that inevitably greeted his return to the flat.

  But time clawed its way across the lights and they paled. They took on a new meaning that brought no gladness to Steven’s heart. Where they had once been the fuel of dreams, they now became a cankerous reminder that those dreams had not come true. So Steven stopped climbing the ladder at night and began to search instead the less fickle TV screen for ways to the worlds he had seen from the roof.

  Now the fourth floor was different. Forty watts burned over a dusty gray carpet runner and the sepia light showed Steven only a duplicate of his own landing. The haunted infinite darkness he had imagined as a child had been exposed by a weak lightbulb and the passing of time as a deception. It was no longer the mystical, horrored passage to dream-time that had so attracted him in those early years.

  But standing there, silently gathering his courage outside Lucy’s flat, he could not help hoping that it might again become a section on some road to happiness. Not the real happiness that TV so accurately threw across the bareness of his bedroom—he could not hope for that—but an approximation of this ideal, a stockaded copying, built with the only materials at hand, within which his loneliness could be shallowly buried.

  Lucy opened the door, then drifted back and collapsed on a couch. Steven followed her in and sat at one end. The room looked like it had been picked up and shaken. A thousand small objects lay scattered over any surface that would hold them. Some of them were clothes and containers of food, but many were shiny steel and surgical in nature. Small lamps shone yellow in corners and a video played an abdominal operation—close-ups of blood on green medical cloth, tight angles on smeared rubber gloves probing inside a human, low-volume technical commentary.

  “They sell these to people who want to be doctors, to teach them. But I don’t think they look for the right things.”

  Lucy talked without taking her eyes off the screen. The surgeons manipulated organs and she started to shout, jerking forward, squinting. “Look! Did you see that, when he lifted the liver?”

  “What?”

  Lucy rewound with a remote. “There was something under it. Didn’t you see? It was black and shiny. Look.”

  The tape played again and the black thing under the liver was only a cavity filled with blood.

  “Shit.” Lucy slumped back, but she didn’t stop watching. “Why don’t they show it? One day it’ll be there. They’ll forget to hide it and I’ll know just where it is.” Then remembering, turning to face Steven: “Did you look in the cows?”

  “There wasn’t anything.”

  Lucy’s face set. “You didn’t look.”

  “I did. I looked. I moved everything around and I couldn’t see anything except guts.”

  “Did you look inside the organs?”

  “Some of them.”

  “What about the intestines?”

  “How could I? They’re all clogged up with shit.”

  Lucy was angry. “It could have been in there. You should have checked.”

  “There wasn’t anything there.”

  Lucy sucked her teeth in disgust and stopped the video. Steven was worried, he needed to make a connection. This room and its disarray, this girl with tits under her T-shirt and her legs sprawled apart, was the closest he was going to get to a wife and a ranch in the country. He tried to sound sympathetic.

  “How do you know there’s anything there at all?”

  “Because I know how much pus my body churns out. I’ve measured my shit and my piss and my snot and all the other slime that comes out of me. And it doesn’t add up to what being alive pumps into me every fucking day.”

  “If you’re so sure, how come you have to find it in cows or see it on a video?”

  “Because if I know exactly what it looks like and exactly w
here it is, I can find it in me and cut it out.”

  Lucy pushed herself up from the couch and walked over to something on a table that looked like a computer. She fiddled with the console and picked up a thin black flexible rod that was connected to it by a length of wire.

  “Help me look?”

  She pressed a switch and the monitor came to life, showing an unfocused disc of shadows and light that shifted as she moved the black cane through the air. Steven could see a bright light at its tip.

  “It’s an endoscope. It’ll show if there’s anything in my colon, but I need you to help me put it in.”

  “Sure.”

  Lucy pulled off her tights and bent forward, bracing herself against the table, in front of the monitor. Steven smelled shit as he worked lubricant into her ass. Her ring was tight like Dog’s. He couldn’t tell if there was anything sexual in it for her, but they’d got intimate awfully fast and pictures of a future he never expected to see were scrolling up into the present.

  “Push it in slowly. I had a shit before, so it should be clear.”

  Steven eased the probe in. The light glowed through her ass briefly, then it went deeper and the disc on the screen focused. A close tunnel of yellowish gut bulged fatly in from the edge of the picture, its center shadowed, beyond the reach of the light. The probe slid smoothly for a few inches then hit a bend. A head-on view of colon wall filled the disc, so brightly illuminated that the dark veins beneath the surface were visible. Lucy tensed and sucked air.

  “Sorry.”