13
One afternoon, while Grazina was napping on the couch, a fresh twenty-three milligrams of Aricept deepening her sleep, Hai went down to the basement to pick out another book. When he surfaced, a paperback of Kawabata’s Snow Country tucked in the waistband of his shorts, he found himself stopping before the kitchen armoire, the drawer opened. There, nestled among old coupon clippings, were three bottles of four-milligram Dilaudids. He had been keeping an eye out for them this whole time and had finally spotted them earlier that morning when searching for Grazina’s reading glasses.
He stood listening to her snore in the next room, the house groaning from the gale blowing off the water, and waited, swaying on his feet, the bottles rocking as if in the hull of a great ship. He was down to nine pills from the first bottle, and this would hold him over the longer stretches at HomeMarket, build him a base from which the hours could be endured. Not unlike the way Wayne nursed his bourbon from his pistol-shaped flask between racks of chicken. I’m no junkie, Hai told himself now. Junkies don’t have control. “I’m in control,” he whispered down at his toes wiggling inside his socks.
On the morning he was discharged from rehab, the rain wouldn’t let up. He hadn’t slept the whole night, and just lay there with his arms on each side in the bleach-scented room while Marlin, the sex addict across from him, snored away. When the walls greyed with dawn, one of the nurses came in and touched his shoulder, her moonlike face hovering in the half dark. He could tell it was Marylyn by her platinum bangs. “Today’s your day, bud,” she whispered. “It’s almost seven. You ready?”
“Can I get one more Werther’s? For luck?”
“Oh gosh. That’s Wanda’s thing,” she frowned. “I don’t have a special thing. That’s why I asked to be the discharger. This is my special thing.”
“It’s cool. I don’t need it.” He held the blanket to his chin, bracing.
“You’re stronger now. And you’ll be stronger tomorrow.” She patted his pillow. “Come on, I have your things in the hall.”
She handed him a plastic bag with the clothes he came in, all folded and laundered. “Go ahead and change in that bathroom there. I’ll be right here.”
He tossed his white pajamas in the biohazard bin under the sink and got dressed. He glimpsed himself in the mirror and saw something like a mannequin in the glass. So thin, so pale, cheeks hollowed out with shadows pooling under his eyes. He hurried up and got out of there.
They passed the unlit rooms where other patients were shivering through night sweats, their eyes roving under dope-sick fever dreams. In the admitting hall, Marylyn fetched his backpack and suitcase from the storage closet. “Everything should be in there, but go on and check just in case.”
“There’s not much anyway.”
She handed him a clipboard with papers to sign, then led him toward the door and buzzed open the security lock. “Now, we know nothing’s perfect. But I always say…” She paused and wrung her hands. “I always say I don’t wanna see you in here again. Even though I know most of you, I mean…most people, they come back, you know. Here, there’s more details in these pamphlets—and the numbers you can call, even if it’s late at night. We’ll always be here if you need us. There’s no shame in giving it another go, alright? Most folks need a few goes anyhoo.”
“Okay.”
“Normally I’d have tea and a Fig Newton for ya, but—”
“Oh, that’ll be nice.”
“No…I mean, it’s all the way in my car, so…” she trailed off in a wilted voice.
“Oh, right. Yeah. That’s okay—” he shrugged.
“Okay.”
“Okay.” He dipped his head, nodding.
They stood looking around, rain dribbling on the asphalt roof above them.
She cocked her head, then put out her hands, palms up.
Not knowing what to do, he waved—which felt insane since they were only inches away from each other.
“No, take my hands,” she said. “We’re gonna pray you out.”
“Pray me out?” he asked, but held her hands anyway, warm and slimy with lotion.
“Dear Father, look down—no, close your eyes or it won’t work. Dear Father, look down and guard this young man and forgive him his trespasses, for we are lambs of Your shepherdship and Your light is the lamp we carry through the darkness of this earthly realm ruled by the devil and his legions. May You lend Your strength to our dear brother here, who has been battered by the devil’s magic, and send him home healed in the merciful good light of Your forgiveness, for they know not what they do. Amen.”
“Amen,” he repeated.
“That’s my grandma’s prayer. She was a preacher,” she said, then added, “You know, you don’t talk much, but I see you.”
He had imagined these nurses would end up hardened from seeing endless hordes of ravaged human forms whose warped faces upon closer inspection often revealed a neighbor or a friend, but Marylyn was tender with him, with herself. This is her special thing, he decided: to send people home—whatever that meant.
“Somebody fetching you?”
“I’m close by,” he said. “I can walk.”
“Alrighty then.” She raised her head as if to urge his to rise also, then turned and headed through the double doors, back to the ward.
He opened his suitcase on the front steps. It was now mid-September, and the scent of summer decaying to mulch, the last spurts of grass growth, and phosphorus and motor oil on the pavement sharpened the wet air. All he had packed for his fraudulent college trip was the brown UPS jacket, a Carhartt hoodie, a couple hardback books, and an extra pair of jeans to give the suitcase some weight in case his mother had the wherewithal to pick it up the day he left. He put the black hoodie over the New Hope T-shirt they gave him, then the jacket over that, but left the jeans and books inside, shut the case, and slid it under a row of bushes by the entrance. He slung the backpack over his shoulder and kept walking.
The cornstalks across the road were a foot taller since he last saw them, but still green at the tips. Their ears, plump and heavy, bowed in the rain. He patted his jacket pockets until he found the half pack of Marlboro Reds his mother gave him before he left. He put one to his lips but, having no lighter, just sucked on it till the rain made it limp, then took it in his mouth, chewed, and swallowed before spitting out the filter. He raised his hood against the wind and pushed on, deeper into East Gladness.
After walking an hour, boots soaked through, he finally passed the post office on Main and crossed the baseball field behind the Salvation Army before reaching the entrance to Welles Village. Initially built in the seventies as a neighborhood of double-unit ranch houses for vets returning from Vietnam, it was now a low-income HUD housing project you had to enter a lottery to get in. He’d lived there long as he could remember but never recalled winning any lottery.
He cut through a backyard littered with spare tires and headed down Risley, where their house was the second to last before the dead end. But as the familiar smoke-stained vinyl clapboards came into view, something took hold and he turned, as if on a track, and crossed another yard, ducking under laundry lines past a vegetable garden of withered stems, a silent chicken coop, then the wheel-less Camaro abandoned on cinder blocks, before approaching a beige duplex browned with dead moss.
His hooded apparition reflected in the kitchen window as he knocked on the glass to the rhythm of “Skunk in the Barnyard.” Through the glass he made out a night-light glowing over a sink full of dirty dishes. Hanging on the wall was a black embroidery stitched in pink letters: How Can I Be Hungry When I’m Full of Family? A figure stepped before it and the words vanished behind a huge white T-shirt.
The window opened and Randy was already grinning, his gold incisor sparkling under the gunmetal sky. The house smelled of sleep and stale coffee. “My man! I got what you need!” Randy called everyone my man. “Trust me do I got what you need.” He pointed at Hai’s face and slapped the side of the window, his dimples deeper than Hai remembered. Randy was the type of guy who slapped everything around him when he talked.
Hai gave him a mock-quizzical look. “You got what I need, right? Then show me the goods, Mr. I’ll-Be-in-the-NBA-by-Twenty-Two.”
Randy leaned over, stuck his big head out the window, so close Hai could smell the Juicy Fruit he was chewing. “Don’t mess with me today, okay? It’s raining, it’s nasty. My mom’s back is acting up. I got what you need—if you need it. Don’t be a punk-ass at my window.”
“I’m fucking with you, Rand. I’m not having the greatest week myself here either, okay?”
“Why, what’s wrong with you? Lose your library card again?” Randy cracked up, always laughing at his own jokes. Last summer, while on a mix of generic Perc and codeine, Hai had a bad trip and knocked on Randy’s window crying hysterically that he’d lost his library card. Randy also liked making fun of him for reading books, since he believed, like a lot of folks in Welles Village, that reading is what schools force you to do, and that by the time you reach eighteen, you should be forever freed from the tyranny of printed words. A nineteen-year-old who still reads must be dumb enough to willingly refuse the wide-open book-free utopia of adulthood.
“I’ll tell you later. Look, I’ll take two oxys and two Cs. They’re still ten a pop?”
“You got it, my main man. We’ll get you right, don’t worry.” He tapped the sill, ducked inside, and disappeared into the back rooms.
Randy was known in Welles Village as the Candy Man. When Hai was a kid, each day after school he’d stop by Randy’s window with the other children and knock to the rhythm of “Skunk in the Barnyard,” which was the code. Randy would pop out with a shoebox full of Jolly Ranchers, Airheads, Fruit Roll-Ups, Welch’s Fruit Snacks, even the fancy Pepperidge Farm Milano cookies he’d buy in bulk from their outlet factory in New Britain. One day, when Hai was in middle school, Randy showed him a new candy. So new, he said, that they didn’t even have wrappers for them yet. “These are special,” Randy cooed. “Don’t you want to be the first to sample them? You can’t get these at any store, my man.” The candy sat in clear plastic, as if held up by air, like a magical force field. Some even had smiley faces or David Bowie lightning bolts printed on them.
Randy returned to the window with the goods. They gave each other a long handshake, inside whose grip the pills and Hai’s two twenties, folded to the size of quarters, were exchanged.
“Just don’t mix ’em this time, okay?” he said with a heavy sigh.
“Okay, Doc. Oh, actually,” Hai shook the pills in his palm, “you got anything to hold these? I lost my film roll at the—” He nodded over his shoulder. “At the other place.”
Randy dipped inside before coming back with a white contact lens case. “These should do. You can keep it too.” He sensed a vague sadness—or was it pity?—in Randy’s eyes. Hai must’ve looked rough standing soaked in the rain with the fucked-up bowl cut he gave himself in the rehab bathroom the night before. “Hey, you remember…” Randy said, scratching his beard. “You remember you used to run up to my window, each day at 3:40, right when the bus let y’all off, shouting my name? ‘Candy Maaaan! Caaaaandy Maaaan!’ You were Elroy’s age, just about.” He nodded toward his son somewhere in the house, then shook his head, deep in a memory while trying to say something. Finally he slapped his chest, sucked on his teeth, and smiled through it. “Fuck it.”
“Sweet Home Alabama” was leaking through a neighbor’s opened window.
“You’ve come a long way too, Rand. Not bad for a guy who couldn’t make a single three-pointer all through high school.”
Randy’s reason for his failed basketball career was that he was a big man who didn’t dunk. And the college scouts, mostly white guys in polo shirts with clipboards, expected him to be a three-point expert, which he sucked at. “It’s all because of guys like Shaq and Shawn Kemp,” he told Hai. “They fucked it up for dudes who finish with finesse!” The taller you are, Randy explained, the harder they expect you to dunk, and since he was a penetrating power forward with a preference for finger rolls, he never made it to the big leagues. Or so it went.
“Well, have you been practicing?” Hai asked, snapping shut the case with the pills inside. “Heard the Celtics could use a Cuban with a beer belly in his late thirties to make layups. With finesse.”
Randy let out a laugh that was all tongue and teeth. “Get the fuck out my yard, little boy.” They smiled before lulling to a deep, awkward quiet, their use for one another exhausted.
As Hai walked away, Randy stopped just before the window closed and pressed his mouth to the crack. “Hey! You gonna be fine, my man! Trust me, okay?”
Without looking back, Hai gave Randy a thumbs-up and kept walking.
He headed to the park to clear his mind, trying to gather the courage to break his mother’s heart again. As far as she knew, he was nearly a month into becoming an MD in Boston.
He was sitting under a slide shaped like a blue hippopotamus, rain pebbling the plastic roof. He had known this park his whole life and, ever since he was little, would sit alone under this very slide and listen to the neighborhood flow past him. He’d stay here for hours some days, listening to people talk in hushed voices in the trees, lighters sparking here and there in the branches, their gasps and cut laughter snagged in the shadows. Once, after a blizzard, tired from making a one-section, enormous snowman by himself, he rested here and saw, at the tree line, a man kneeling in the snow while another man, standing, held on to a branch and searched the sky, saying the Lord’s name over and over. To this day it was the strangest and most graceful prayer he’d ever seen.
The rain started to sound muffled, like it was falling inside a dream. He fingered the lens case in his pocket, then opened it and stared at the four tiny tablets (two blue, two white), a pair in each capsule. The codeine would get him through talking to his mother, would make her crying seem like it’s coming from the basement of the world and not right in front of him. He nudged the pill, the smallest life raft he’d ever known, but finally shut the case. When he slipped it back in his pocket, there was a crinkling sound. Reaching deeper, he found a stray Werther’s from Nurse Wanda. He put the candy in his mouth and sucked, savoring the caramel sweetness. He studied his warped reflection in the gold-foil wrapper. “What do I do, Wanda? I don’t know what to do,” he said, his voice drifting.
It was early evening when he woke. The sky still heavy with clouds but nothing coming down. He flipped open his phone and realized he’d been asleep almost three hours.
He crossed the Little League ball field, his boots sucking mud, and made his way back to the street. Nearing Ma’s duplex, he noticed the living room light was still on and crouched under the window. The lace curtains were drawn but through the diaphanous fabric he managed to peer into the room. His mother was on the couch, her head bent over her phone, in her usual spot. Her body was more upright than before, her shoulders jerking as she texted. Next to her, on the side table, was a lit candle, the expensive kind that cost twenty-six dollars from Yankee Candle, the one you could only get at the mall. Her hair was tied back and clipped with something shiny, her face touched up with rouge, she was in an elegant blue linen dress that hugged her length—none of this she’d ever done when he was home. You don’t need to be beautiful to make other people beautiful, she once told him, sucking on a cigarette and sweating in the back room on her break at the nail salon, her tiny frame engulfed in sweatpants and a Red Sox hoodie.
Now she looked healthy, content even—her gold hoop earrings catching the candlelight as she beamed into her phone. A breeze shifted the curtain and he glimpsed her through the opening. How rare to see one’s mother lost in such unfixed and unknowable contentment, so privately realized through a scarce, snatched freedom. He felt like a voyeur and yet, like a voyeur, could not look away.
How could he do this now? How could he go to the back door and knock—only to have her see him like this? How could he put an end, in a few short steps, to this version of his mother he’d never seen and yet had wanted, his whole life, to witness? And perhaps most sickening, how could he do it a second time?
The night he returned from New York, he had knocked on that very door. How could he have told her then that he had dropped out because Noah had overdosed, like nearly a dozen kids from his high school class, on a bad batch of fent-dope, and that a boy whose face she’d never seen had become the boy whose face he couldn’t forget? That after Noah died, only eight months after bone cancer ate through Bà ngoại’s hip and put her in an urn on the altar, college and books, grades and papers, seemed so minuscule, so exactly as Randy had said: “the driftwood of childhood”? On top of that he owed the school nearly twenty-five thousand dollars for defaulting on his scholarship. That night his mother nearly dissolved in front of him. “What do you mean you owe twenty-five thousand dollars now,” she said, her hand over her mouth as if hearing of murder. “Isn’t college supposed to help us? I don’t understand. How can it bring more debt than we’ve ever had money?”
He just stood there, mouth agape, holding the box of Whitman’s Sampler he had bought from the bus station with the chaotic delusion that it would blunt the blow.
Then, the catastrophe dawning on her, she bit her lip and pointed a finger an inch from his face. “I knew you’d fuck up—just like all the other trash around here. And I know it’s my damn fault too. I chose to raise you in this town when all the other Viets went off to California and Texas. Everybody had the brains to go to better cities, but no, I thought only of my son, not wanting to uproot him again after coming all this way. So I stayed in this snowed-in hellhole.” Her hair clip had come loose and her hair floated about her as she spoke.
“Ma, I tried. But things got tough. Things you won’t understand and—”
“You were always a selfish child. Every time we got McDonald’s you would eat my fries first, even when you had your own!”
“Really. We’re really doing this? I’m a bad person because I was a child eating french fries?”
“It’s a sign. I should’ve known what was to come. And why did I know this would happen? Huh,” she said with a seething smile. “Even Miss Tran said so, you know. That you’d wash ashore like some dead fish. But I told her, ‘Not Hai.’ She said a pillhead won’t last long in that city but I defended you, stupid me. I worked my ass off, fed you and clothed you all these years. For what?”
“I’m sorry your investment didn’t pay off. I didn’t know raising children was like throwing dice at a casino.” They so seldom fought, the tiny apartment too small to hold festering tensions, that both of them were suddenly stricken by the blast radius of their words.
“That’s right.” She wiped her nose. “Curse your mother. That’s what all that learning and wordsmithery did for you, huh? Give you just enough wit to shun your mother but not enough to take you very far outside this house, does it?”
“And what about you? What have you done after twenty years in this fucking country? All of you guys at the nail salon, you tell us kids to go out there and just ‘succeed’ like it’s some random magic trick. But you, you’ve had twenty years to do what?”
“Don’t.” She knew where he was taking her, and she held out both hands as if holding back a boulder. “Enough—”
“You just sit there and scrub rich people’s feet?” he said as his mother tried to turn away.
“Fuck you. I scrub feet so we can have this shitty apartment. You think I like bowing my head to white people like they were gods twenty times a day?”
The sight of her, so small and hurt, so bewildered and broken, sunk him—and in a rare surge of rage, he slammed the chocolates against the wall. His mother let out a yelp, covered her mouth, and ran upstairs.
“I’m sorry. Ma, please, I’m sorry,” he cried after her, then stood with his face in his hands as her door slammed. They wouldn’t speak for weeks, waiting for each other to leave the cramped rooms before passing like strangers on a subway car.
Through the curtain, her whole being now aglow, he watched her put down the phone and pick up the candle with both hands and inhale. Shuddering from this acid shame, he took in this view one last time before turning from the window, and headed back down the road, away from the dead end, until he cut clear through town, until the upper beams of King Philip’s Bridge rose over the outskirts, which led him to stand, only minutes later, under its rail ties, and now he was here, in this house where Grazina was sleeping just a few feet away, and he was still in possession of his one wild and precious life.
The house was settling into its bones, and in between the cracking he heard his heart beating in its cage. Then, out of possession or abandonment, he took one of the bottles and cracked the lid open, placed the little white buoy on his tongue, and swallowed. He paused, thinking, then scooped the remaining three bottles in his arms and hurried back to his room, where he dumped them in the desk drawer and lay watching the ceiling until the darkness spun out around him, covering every distance, and he was warm as a blood cell being swept through the vein of a fallen angel, finally good.
The ashen town streaked across the murky windows of Maureen’s Volkswagen as she yanked the shift into fourth gear and the car jolted down Orchard Street toward mud fields where deflated pumpkins, dusted with December frost and rejected by scavengers, lay strewn over the wasteland. Her Beetle was strung all along the insides with Christmas lights powered by the cigarette fuse. The bulbs were the frosted kind from the eighties and made the car feel both sleazy and cozy at once, an effect that imbued it with a strange yearning. Since it was Sunday during church hours, they had been the only car on the road since crossing the East Gladness town line.
“We’re late,” Russia said from the back, his head pressed against the glass.
“We’ll be there in five.” Maureen pulled the shift and the car rattled without speeding up, lightbulbs clacking the windows.
“You said that half hour ago.”
“Any of those bad boys come through?” she asked Hai, who was scratching a stack of lottery tickets she had handed him a few miles back. “If we score big,” Maureen said, “we can just turn the hell around.”
Behind a line of elms, a pair of steel silos rose up from the muddy hills, their domes gleaming under the overcast. “That’s it,” Russia said. “Wayne said to turn right at the double silos.”
“This better be fucking worth it.” Maureen reached for her flask and swished the whiskey like it was mouthwash, before passing it to Hai.
This time he took an obligatory sip and handed it to Russia. “My dad’s a drunk,” Russia said, shoving it back.
“Guess you’re not that allergic.” Maureen winked at Hai. Warmed by the liquor, she swayed as they turned down a gravel path beyond the silos, the Christmas lights casting a sickly glow over their faces.
The path dipped toward the bottom of a hill where a gravel lot came into view. A few cars were scattered about, mostly pickups with raised axles plastered with mud. Wayne was already waiting when they pulled up. His arms were folded, his mouth lopsided, like someone was yanking it down with their finger. “Looks like we have a grumper today, guys,” Maureen said.
Wayne banged on Maureen’s window with the butt of some tool. Only when she cranked the window down did Hai see the black-bladed machete in Wayne’s grip. “Come on, Maur. I said eleven a.m. You’re all late.” He pointed at an invisible watch on his wrist.
“It’s Sunday. We hit church traffic,” she lied. “You want me to run over little kids on their way to Communion? And the fuck you got a sword for?”
“I told you—we’re working meat today.” His breath vapored in the cold. He had a weeklong beard and his lips were cracked and white at the edges. The acidic wintry air, bleached with ozone and dead grass, mixed with the cut of manure and gasoline, blew into the car, stinging Hai’s eyes. “I’ve been out here since seven a.m.,” Wayne sighed, the curled white hairs on his temples flickering in the wind. “One guy already quit on us.”
Maureen gave Hai this skeptical look, then said to Wayne, “Don’t do this to me, Wayne. I’ve known you what, twenty years?”
“I’ve only been up north eleven years.”
“You told us,” she pointed at him with the flask, “that you needed help packing meat. Why do you need a sword to wrap up pork chops?”
When Wayne didn’t answer, Russia pulled his hoodie over his head and tightened the drawstrings so only his nose showed. “I knew this was gonna be stupid.”
On Friday, while they were closing, Wayne had asked the HomeMarket crew if they were willing to make some extra cash packing meat at a warehouse an hour out east in Coventry. Wayne had been putting in days there to make more on the side during the holidays—and it paid well. A few guys had caught the stomach flu last week and couldn’t make the upcoming Christmas rush. And if they didn’t meet their weekly quota, they’d lose the $1,500 bonus they’d each get at the end of the month. Only Hai, Maureen, and Russia agreed. They already handled raw chicken at the store—how bad could pork be, the other white meat? Since they weren’t officially on the meatpacking payroll, the other workers were going to give the three volunteers a cut from their bonuses, netting $500 each for just a day’s work.
They got out the car, wind biting at their edges.
“You know there’s no corn bread in there, right, guys?” Wayne laughed and pointed with his machete at their black HomeMarket uniforms.
“There’s blood on your fingers.” Hai nodded at the purplish dust around Wayne’s knuckles.
“It’s called pork. Comes from a pig, you know? The one with blood and guts and brains?”
“This is a slaughterhouse, isn’t it?” Hai said.
“It’s an organic farm-to-store pork production facility,” Wayne said through shut eyes.
“Holy fuckers!” Maureen leaned back on the hood. “I’m not stabbing any pigs with a sword, dudes. I’m technically a senior citizen—you know that, right?”
“The way I figure,” Wayne tried, “is this: we split you all up so there’d be a regular butcher with you at each station. Then you could keep things to a minimum—”
“Butcher?” Hai looked away, everything around him awash in greys and browns.
“And what do you mean by station?” said Russia. “How many stations does it take for a pig to die?”
“Fast as you can cut the arteries.”
Maureen didn’t look like she believed him but started struggling with the cap on her flask.
“Here, use mine.” Wayne took from his back pocket a gold flask shaped like a revolver.
“Your six-shooter, nice.” Maureen pointed the gun down her throat and fired multiple shots.
“You can keep it for the day. You’ll need it.”
“It helps my knees. Gets bad during solar flares.”
“The sun hurts your knee?” Russia said, straggling behind.
As they approached the barn’s tractor doors, Maureen holding on to Wayne’s shoulder for support, two men stopped talking to look at the crew in their black uniforms. Wayne tipped his cap and nodded at them. The cold and work had stiffened the men’s clothes to shades of ash, as though they hadn’t been butchering meat but fighting forest fires. One of them, who had an Eastern European accent and wind-pummeled face, raised his hand, clearly high on something. “You got us a squad, Wayne?” he said. “Good man. And look! You even got an Ornamental.” He grinned with the few teeth he had. “Super nice!”
“You mean Oriental.” Wayne turned to Hai. “Right?”
Hai gave Wayne a shove from behind and moved them along, too cold to bother.
The barn was made of concrete blocks topped with a sleek, weatherproof metal roof, which made it look more like a place that produced weapons for a proxy war. Wayne led them inside, where they were immediately engulfed by the odor of fresh urine and the deep iron of spilled blood. On both sides of a narrow corridor made of steel fencing were pens where enormous hogs stood cramped in mass contortions of peachy flesh, their nostrils, the wetness being all that caught the weak light, snorting the hellish air. Some were slumped in piles in far corners, their blistered, straw-flecked stomachs heaving as they breathed, pouted lips leaking brownish fluid and mucus.
The reason they were in pens instead of cages, Wayne explained, was to legally keep the coveted “Free Range” label on the packaging. But they were so crowded you could hear the crackle of their coarse hairs brushing against one another as they struggled to turn around, some crying out in crushed frustration.
“Jesus,” Maureen whispered. “You’re gonna kill all of ’em?”
“By Christmas,” Wayne said, taking off his cap to wipe his brow, sweat turning the dust on his skin to mud.
“This is kinda fucked,” said Russia.
“Kinda?” Hai said, kicking a few strands of hay by his feet.
The pork here was also “organic,” Wayne told them. This meant the pigs were raised on organic corn, which, in the massive quantities they were fed, out of Rubbermaid troughs crusted with sludge, gave them acidosis, fermenting their blood to the point of requiring antibiotics. “I’m not saying I wouldn’t feed it to my family. Shit, these things are huge and full of fat,” Wayne said, looking around. “But it’s not what people think they’re getting.”
These “people” included Linda McMahon—co-founder of WWE—who was currently running as a Republican for a Connecticut Senate seat. She was rumored to have ordered thirty of these hogs for a Christmas fundraiser she was hosting at her mansion in Stamford, where wrestling superstars were supposed to attend. “You know,” said Wayne with a chuckle, “for some reason I can’t imagine the Undertaker sitting down and cutting into a pork chop with a napkin tucked into his leather trench coat.”
“Look,” said Maureen with a serious face. “With my knees, I can’t stab any pigs, not if they’re that big. I can’t get traction, see?” She jabbed her foot in the hay-strewn dirt and exaggerated its slide. Wayne removed his worker’s belt and handed it to Maureen, who cinched it on without asking why.
“See that pouch in the front of your belt there? Those are dog treats, bacon flavored.” Wayne winked. “When one of the guys opens the pen, your job is to lead the hogs to the slaughter tent out back. Use these treats and they’ll follow you, no problem.”
Maureen held up a treat and frowned at it before letting it drop back in the pouch. “I’m gonna need an Altoid for this. Russia, you still got any?”
Russia took an Altoid case from his back pocket and opened it. She shoved a mint in each of her nostrils and inhaled. “Hmm, cinnamon.”
Russia and Hai did the same.
Wayne shook his head at them and started walking. “Pussies.”
With Maureen at the pens, Hai and Russia followed Wayne around the barn. On the other side, hidden from the road, was a long tarp tent the size of a car wash, the sides covered all the way to the ground. It looked like the Civil War hospitals Sony kept talking about. As they approached, a swell of death metal music started filling the air. Hai could make out the Slipknot song once popular in high school as Russia nodded along in vague recognition. Wrapping around the tent’s perimeter was a rust-thick chain-link that prevented hogs from bolting once they realized they were doomed for the chandeliered dinner tables of millionaires. The plastic sign, zip-tied to the chain-link, read Murphy’s free-range pork. A family farm since 1921.
It wasn’t until they got right outside the tent that Hai heard the screaming, more like preteen girls than pigs, but it was too late to stop as Wayne lifted the blue plastic and a waft of blood-soaked air coated his tongue with its metallic burn, as if someone had shoved a handful of pennies in his mouth. This, mixed with the mints in his nostrils, gave him the urge to retch.
“Holy fuck,” he heard Russia say as Wayne closed the tent’s zipper and their eyes adjusted to this underworld.
All along one side were hooks where the hogs were strung up by burly men with mustaches and beer bellies, the scene cast with floodlights clamped to ropes strung across the ceiling. Once the beasts were hung upside down, the machetes went to work, their black, corrosion-resistant blades dividing the air in great whooshes of violence. Wayne grabbed a brown rubber bib from a hook and tied it on, then slipped on thick rubber gloves that went up to his elbows.
The pork was expensive because it didn’t come from the South or the Midwest, like most pork, but right here, in good old apple-pie-on-a-plaid-dining-cloth New England. Another reason was that the “farm” guaranteed the hogs would be “field killed,” suggesting they would die where they roamed happily in lush meadows, their eyes holding the sight of green pastures as they left the earthly plane, when, in fact, their only access to the mud field, whose grass had long disintegrated from the trampling of a thousand hogs killed before them, was a tiny roofless pen on the side of the barn, so small none of the hogs ever used it.
“Here.” Wayne handed Russia and Hai some sort of gun. “Follow me.”
“We’re shooting them?” Hai said, approaching the row of industrial meat hangers. “Wayne, are you serious?”
“It’s more humane this way, kids.” He gave the boys a tired, fatherly look. “What, you think we just stab these things to death? You’d burn your arms out after two or three kills. It’s the twenty-first century, fellas. You shoot everything in the head.”
He opened the small holding pen at the entrance and led one of the hogs out by its plastic collar, then took the gun from Hai’s hand. “It’s just a bolt, not a bullet. A little piece of metal goes into the head and knocks ’em out cold.”
“Sounds like a bulle—Jesus fucking Christ!” Hai jumped back and clutched Russia’s arm as Wayne shot the pig in the forehead. It immediately collapsed, thrashing and screaming in the mud.
“Usually they go out with just one,” Wayne grunted as he jammed a knee on the side of the hog’s face, blood foaming from its mouth now, and shot it again in the same spot. The legs went limp, then jittered as if being electrocuted. Wayne looped a metal wire to its hoof and pressed a button on a nearby machine that pulled the hog up by its legs.
Wayne handed Hai the bolt gun. Then, in one swift gesture, as if striking a match, he cut the pig’s throat. A spray of blood flew over them. Russia looked about wildly, then fixed a ghastly stare at Hai, his mouth half-open, the pig’s blood inside it and dripping down his chin. “Oh fuck, fuck. What do I do, what do I do, what do I do?”
Wayne stepped away from the carcass, grabbed a towel soiled with what looked like motor oil from a bucket on the floor, and wiped at Russia’s face. There was a warm wetness on Hai’s cheek, going up to his temple. Before he could touch his face, Wayne was dabbing his forehead with the towel, so hard he tilted back with each wipe. “You guys’ll get used to it. This stuff’s inside us too, you know. People love eating meat but they don’t have a damn clue what it’s about. It’s alive. That means blood, piss, and shit.” He laughed at his own words, then slapped Hai and Russia hard on their chests. “You’ll both grow a third nut in a few hours—and you can thank me later.”
How many people actually knew how a pig is killed? How much strength, adrenaline, it took—even a sinister kind of charisma? How it felt, weirdly, like combat? Maybe that’s why so many guys drank on the job. Some have nightmares full of hogs, Wayne told them, the screams seeping into their sleep as they reach out to clutch their wives or sweat-soaked pillows in the night. In supermarkets, the meat looks so serene, placid, and calm, like something formed in a studio. Here—among Slipknot and the alloyed blood, breath, and gastric fumes bubbling from gashed esophagi, the grass dyed yellow with stomach viscera, these animals with faces so human, eyelashes blond and thick, so expressive it felt like they should have names, so much so that Hai had to look away as he pulled the trigger—the work was chaos.
He’d shoot, wincing as the hooves pounded the ground, as if the animal were launching itself upward, unaware that the bolt in its brain had most likely ruptured its cerebellum, destroying its motor controls. Then he’d shoot again. “Go, go on. Go on, hurry up,” Hai whispered as Russia, eyes red with tears, pulled back the bolt, Rage Against the Machine now blasting from the stereo set on a cooler filled with Bud Light.
By the fifth or sixth pig, Hai learned to look not at their eyes, opened too wide, stunned at this terrible gun-wielding god suddenly before them, but at the ears, which, examined closely, resembled a piece of fabric flickering in the breeze. That’s it, that’s what he told himself while pulling the trigger: that he was stapling fabric. He was pinning death onto nothing. And it worked. Though he could still hear their torqued and anguished gurgling, which the heavy metal barely drowned out, this gave the killing enough distance for him to keep the line going.
For the next three hours, he and Russia took turns pressing the trigger to the hogs’ foreheads as, one by one, Wayne bled them out a few feet away, the torrent flowing into metal gutters set on the field’s incline to spill, like demonic runoff, into the river. Maureen would pop in once in a while and usher through a hog if the bolt line was moving fast; otherwise the hogs waited outside in the chain-link pen.
After a while Hai had to go out to get some air. The heat from the hogs’ bodies had warmed the tent to the point where their shirts were drenched. The crew in the barn had a separate stereo, and something in Spanish drifted over the field above the cheerful sounds the hogs made as they left the cages, following the dog treats held out before them.
Hai turned toward Maureen. “You not quitting yet, are you?” She was slumped over a huge sow, almost hugging it from behind, supporting herself on its back. Her hair was matted to her face and she was bowled over, like someone about to deliver terrible news from the center of a natural disaster. “It’s gonna be worth it, okay?” Hai offered. “One more hour or so, that’s it. Then we can—”
She stared at him, blank-faced, before lurching forward to release a spray of vomit onto the hog’s back. She reached down and gathered some dead leaves and half-heartedly rubbed the sludge off the animal. She waved Hai off, then wiped her face on her shirtsleeve, removed one of the Altoids from her nose, popped it in her mouth, and hobbled back to the barn.
He felt something in his pocket and realized his phone had been ringing. The whole time he’d forgotten it was there. It was his mom. There were already two missed calls.
“Ma?” he said, trying to smile as he hurried behind a nearby hay bale, out of earshot of the slaughter. “No, no, I’m not in a rush, just…um. Just out and about. I’m breathing hard? Oh, nothing, I’m just running errands. Being productive. You know.” He tried to laugh. “You on break? Right. It usually picks up the week before Christmas, doesn’t it? People need their red and green nails. And you do the best snowflake designs.”
Wayne was coming through. A hog had run out ahead of him and he was struggling to catch it. The animal brushed against Hai and it screamed from the contact. “Hey, man, can you grab him?” Wayne said, reaching for its tail.
Hai covered the receiver and whisper-shouted, “I’m on the phone.”
Another worker appeared, a stout man with tan features. Wayne thrust a bunch of fingers at the man’s face, to which the worker replied with a flurry of signals before they both cornered the hog.
“You know sign language?” Hai said. But Wayne was out of earshot. “What? Oh, nothing. It was just a friend, Ma. Oh, that thing. It was…a pig. We use them for dissection. Um…supposedly their organs are pretty similar to humans’, so the school has them for autopsies and stuff.”
“Oh, poor things,” Ma said. “You should pray for their souls after, okay? Otherwise their spirits will haunt you and shorten your life.” Hai could tell she was standing up from her chair at the salon. “It’s serious. Say a prayer for them, okay? Mr. Vu died after working all those years as an exterminator. He never prayed after killing those mice and croaked from a heart attack.”
“He also had heart disease.”
“Hai, please.”
“Ma, I know. I’ll pray, for sure. I’ll do it, like, seven times.”
“Eight. It’s a more auspicious number.”
“Okay. Hey, I gotta go. They need my help.”
“Go, go. Of course. Call me sometime. Just to tell me if you need anything.”
He hung up and ran over to Wayne. The pig had sauntered toward a shallow pitch of mud and had started rooting around in it, eyes shut and snorting with glee. It looked younger than the rest and probably had no idea its friends and family were being executed. Wayne regarded the pig, his face drooping to the side. Hai reached into his pocket and tossed a handful of dog treats, missing her mouth and landing on her belly, which was streaked with Maureen’s dried vomit. The hog didn’t seem to care. “We’ll be done soon,” Wayne said, catching his breath.
“I’m lying to my mom,” Hai heard himself say.
Wayne peered at him from the corners of his eyes. “That her on the phone?”
“Yeah.”
“I can tell.” He took one of the treats and licked it. “Not bad. Kinda like smoked paprika.”
“You can tell what?”
“That you been lying. By your voice. I’m a dad, remember. Or was. Or whatever. I know the sound of a kid lying out his ass even if I don’t speak Chinese.”
“Vietnamese.”
He popped the dog treat in his mouth and swallowed. “Wow. These are nasty as hell.”
The heavy metal music had stopped. The sound of men’s voices behind them speaking low in the tent. There was a silence in its wake that sounded new. The pig was now resting on its side. “I got a son.” Wayne squinted at Hai and suddenly looked ten years older. “And I can hear it. You boys all sound the same,” he laughed. “We all sound the same.” He nudged Hai’s ribs. “I was you once, young buck. A hundred years ago.”
“What’s your son’s name?”
“Knight. He’s sixteen.” Wayne shook his head as if his son’s age was a rumor he wasn’t willing to believe. “I named him after the knight—you know, in chess? I was high school champ back in North Carolina. The knight was my ace, my right-hand man, and I killed with him. Whoosh!” He made a slicing motion with his hand across his open palm, the pads so puffed and blistered you could no longer see his life lines. “I cut my little L and—boom!—out of nowhere your queen’s all by her lonesome, ready to sing ‘Goodnight, Irene.’ ”
“You gonna see him? I mean, for Christmas and all?”
Wayne was quiet a moment, then bent down and brushed the dog treats off the pig’s stomach as if it looked indecent. “You know, I’ve been cutting up these hogs for three years now. I don’t regret none of it. They were born to die. And I’m just a hammer. Somebody else is using the hammer, I know that. I just don’t know if it’s that dude up there,” he glanced at the sky, slate grey and ambivalent, “or the motherfucker down here.” He jabbed the ground with his boot. “But you see that tree there?” He nodded at a squat yew standing alone between two pastures beyond the silos. “My granddad told me when trees stand on their own, with no other trees around them, their branches grow wild like that. Branches twisted all over the place, like they’re trying to grab at everything and nothing’s around to hold on to.”
“Yeah, I see it.” Hai studied the leafless tree, its branches scattered as if frozen in the midst of waving for help.
“But when they’re in the forest, with their people, you know? They all go straight up, reaching tall as they can. Isn’t that odd? Probably bullshit, to tell the truth—but I believe it.”
Before Hai could answer, Wayne took his wallet out his back pocket and showed him a photo: three black pugs sitting on a front stoop, pink bows on each of their heads. They regard the camera with tilted gazes, their large, orbular eyes preening and hopeful. “These are my babies now. That one with the lazy eye is Lisa, after Left Eye. That one’s Rosie. And this little one, her name’s Bethel, after my nana. They’re everything to me.” He smiled big at the photo, his blood-darkened thumb at the edge. “I don’t have a photo of Knight, though. Not good looking at what you can’t have, ha.” Wayne looked at Hai like a man who knew people’s secrets by heart, a mix of both fuck-you pride and damage.
“We done yet? I’m almost dead.” Maureen came up from behind them. Followed by Russia.
It was time for lunch, Russia told them. The men were dispersing across the pasture. “They went out to grab KFC for everybody.” He grinned with his buckteeth. “That’s gonna hit the spot.” Russia’s arms were covered in blood, and when he saw Hai staring, he added, “The last one was kinda rough. The bolt got jammed after the first shot and I had to reload in between.” He looked scraped out, his eyes sunken and spacey. Hai realized, for the first time, in the smoky light that made Russia’s blue hair tinge silver with sweat, that the boy was handsome—but in the way that reveals itself only after you know a person for a while, the way a doorknob is polished to brilliance with use. Hai now found his buckteeth endearing, a reprieve after three hours of watching the yellow-mangled maws of hogs gritted into their ends.
Maureen took out Wayne’s water gun flask, pointed the nozzle at her mouth, and pulled the trigger several times. Her eyes still closed, she raised her head to the sky and handed it to Wayne, who also shot himself in the mouth. He wiped his lips with his stained shirtsleeves and gave Hai this dismal, deflated look. He opened his mouth a bit, as if to say something, something he had been determined to say for a long while. But just as he was about to speak, a flit of light caught the filling in the dark of his mouth, held there, then was gone, and he turned away.
Hai drained the flask. The valley spanning before them looked totaled and endless.
“Look, it’s snowing,” Maureen whispered. “It’s gonna be a white Christmas. It’s always magical when that happens,” she breathed and shook her head at the brumal light descending over the heather before them.
“Did I ever tell y’all about these hogs?” Wayne half smiled at the pig, now asleep at their feet. “Back in, like, the eighteen-somethings, there was this town called Berkshire.”
“I know where that is,” Hai said.
“No, not that place up north where rich people from New York go camping. I’m talking about Berkshyer. In England. This place had some of the finest pork in the world. And when England was trying to get into Japan—you know, to do missionary shit or whatever—they tried to win over the emperor by giving him these Berkshire hogs. Well,” Wayne licked his lips, “the emperor was so amazed by the flavor of these hogs, so rich with fat, sweet and juicy, he flung his doors wide open. And that’s how Christianity came to Japan. Through pork. That’s why they call them ‘emperor hogs.’ My granddad learned about it when he was over there in the war. His name was Eustice. So they tried to make a breed of them out here in Connecticut.”
“Sounds like a bunch of bull,” said Maureen.
“If being called an emperor meant getting your throat cut in the name of Christ, then you can go ahead and call me a peasant,” Russia said.
“Now the emperor is Linda McMahon.” Hai stared at the hog’s heaving belly.
A truck pulled into the lot. The KFC was here. The men, slumped on hay bundles, lifted their heads from their phones or from cupped hands. On the other side of the tent, on a tractor cart to be pulled to the processing plant down the valley, was a pile of freshly slaughtered hogs, their legs stiffening in the cold as the snow fell onto the hollowed cavities of their bellies, the flakes turning to rain inside the steaming walls of their ribs. Because that’s what happens when you die—the world gets in.
“Look at her. She doesn’t give a fuck,” Russia said, shaking his head at the sleeping hog, snow glittering her back.
Maureen stared at the hog and sighed. “And all the devils besought him, saying, Send us into the swine, that we may enter into them. And forthwith Jesus gave them leave. And the unclean spirits went out, and entered into the swine: and the herd ran violently down a cliff into the sea.”
“My name is Legion and we are many.” Wayne winked at her and smiled.
The three of them must’ve killed almost fifty that afternoon in their station alone (Hai had lost count after eighteen). If Wayne hadn’t been counting on them to get that bonus, Hai would’ve walked right down the road and hitchhiked back to East Gladness soon as he saw their faces. But what could he do? He was part of a team, and that meant something, didn’t it?
He wondered how far the hogs’ souls had traveled by now. He wondered if they’d ever catch up to the human dead, if there was even a difference between them. How silly, he thought, to believe souls go anywhere at all. Why should they? What if they just lay down like this pig here and decided enough was enough? What if the soul is just as tired as the body? Just as worn out from seeing its family get tricked into a tent with dog treats only to come out emptied, soon to be roasted by a political candidate who will spend 50 million dollars on a campaign she’d end up losing anyway? Where’s the soul in that?
Half hour later, Maureen’s sedan will putter through the cobalt hills, all three of them dressed in cutout black garbage bags to keep from soiling the car with their bloody clothes—no one saying a word. Russia will be snoring through his tied-up hoodie, the glass Christmas bulbs clicking against the windows at each turn. In the end, the butchers wouldn’t make the quota anyway; the promised bonus would never come. Out of pity or guilt, Wayne will slip each of them a fifty-dollar bill during their shifts the next week, and each will nod quietly like it’s some secret brotherhood. “A good man. You’re a good man, Wayne,” Maureen will say. And by way of reply Wayne will tap the visor of his cap before turning to carve his chickens in silence.
“I think she knows,” Hai said now, the snow coming on heavy.
“Knows what?” asked Wayne.
“That we murdered her relatives.”
“Don’t say stupid shit,” Maureen said. “The lizards will feel your negative energy. Here, clap instead. When I feel fucked up sometimes, I just start clapping. Like this.”
Maureen clapped. And the blood on her hands, dried from cold, burst into purple clouds, which delighted everyone. And they all started clapping, the puffs of blood blooming before their faces.
“It’s kinda like a gender reveal,” Russia said, chuckling.
“What gender is purple?” Hai asked.
“Means you’re screwed,” Wayne said.
They all looked at him, the man who got them into this mess, and laughed uneasily. They laughed because they knew the blood on their hands wasn’t theirs, and amid the laughter, and the purple dust rising over their heads toward the new year, Hai forgot to pray.
