A young deputy approached the guys from our truck. He was one of Sheriff Dan’s boys, and I could tell he’d been itching for a juicy emergency like this all of his nineteen years. He lined us up, then handed each of us a “drag stick,” which was just a wooden pole with a steel hook on the end. His tone was so serious and considered that he’d certainly copied it, from church or a movie perhaps. He asked, “Who here is a leader of men?”
He appraised us a moment, then stepped in front of me.
Was he crazy? I shook my head no.
One of the other inmates stepped forward.
“I’m a vice-president for Merrill Lynch,” he announced.
The deputy gave him an approving, paternal smile. “You’re just the man we’re looking for,” the deputy said. He handed the VP a metallic, flame-retardant suit and began leading him toward the pig fires, where conveyor belts were lifting twenty hogs a minute up to the blaze. I never saw the VP again.
I was placed on a “drag crew,” which meant that several times an hour a semi trailer of pigs would back into the yard, at which point Sheriff Dan’s boys would shoot all the hogs, sometimes by walking among them, often by firing through the slats of the flatbed. Shell casings bounced off the guard rails as hogs inside skittered and slipped in their own blood. It took far too many bullets, in my opinion. When the deputies were done, we lowly inmates would climb into the trailers and drag the hogs, one at a time, to a loader bucket poised at the back of the flatbed, which would hoist the hogs high and drive them to the conveyor belts. Was more grisly work ever conceived? Was a grimmer plan ever undertaken? Certainly, but none I’d ever seen firsthand. Wounded hogs writhed and shuddered under the spell of death, and even hogs who’d lost their brains pedaled their hooves in slow circles, like blind newborn puppies.
When the wind shifted, it would rain black oil that coated everything with creosote. Offal froze to your boots. When a bullet struck the casing of a hog skull, a shimmy of dust would lift, and the animal’s head would buck, thickly, as if it were nodding ye-e-s or no-o-o. The pop of the police pistol and the knock of bullet meeting bone are different sounds. “Knock” is the only word I can use. Think of a single, hard rap on a hollow-core door. That knock of death, higher-pitched than you’d think, had a knotty lack of resonance, and the sound seemed to emanate from the animal’s entire skeleton, as if the shock wave clacked through all the bone sockets.
Despite all this, I can’t say I truly questioned the project. All those hogs were bound for awful fates anyway, I figured, and this kind of animal control had become routine: Earlier that year, ten thousand white-tails had been culled from New England to arrest the spread of deer ticks infected with Lyme disease. Then there was the mass poisoning of central-African bison to prevent the spread of rinderpest. And doves and pigeons all along the Eastern Seaboard had been thinned to stem the West Nile virus, which incubated in birds before being spread by mosquitoes. The CDC even claimed to have invented an avian virus that would kill infected birds.
Only once on this first day did I near the area where the men in silver suits toiled. We’d just dragged another truck, and when the loader driver backed away, a wounded hog went wild in the bucket. I rode along in case the pig made a break for it. Bucket raised to block the intense heat, we drove the load to the conveyor belt’s hopper, and only in the moment when the bucket lowered and the hogs spilled into the hopper’s paddle wheels could the blaze itself be directly seen. Still-bleeding hogs tumbled wholesale into the pyre, their bodies landing on the bloated bellies of the blackening hogs below. Ribs by the thousands glowed like sticks of light. Most hogs burned inside out, flames spewing from open mouths, and when their intestinal cavities burst, organs spat segmented and steaming, unfurling like rubber hose.
At the end of the day, our faces were black. When the last tractor-trailer rig backed out, we were ready to get back to Club Fed, where we intended to fight for the showers, eat like mules, and drop into slumberous dreams that this nightmarish day had never taken place. I didn’t have time for any of this slaughtering business. I still hadn’t prepared for my broadcast. Yulia was expecting my phone call. We had chorus practice to go to — opening night was less than two weeks away!
But no trucks came to pick us up. Instead, we were led into Hormel’s main rendering floor, where cots lined the dormant disassembly line. Since all the hogs went straight to incineration, the room was a ghost town, dark and cold, reeking of antiseptics. My cot was between the gut carts and the giant autoclave that sterilized all the knives. On the wall above me was a display case that contained a cartoon drawing of a cross-eyed hog trying to eat a shopping cart, below which was mounted an assortment of the curiosities discovered inside porcine gullets: several spark plugs, tin cans, the remains of many shoes. There were jars of nails, and ball bearings and a surprising amount of glass. The oddities went on and on, as did the cartoons, and I felt truly awful for the poor pigs — condemned from birth, slaughtered wholesale, then subject to postmortem ridicule. Didn’t anyone know that the boar was one of the few animals that the Clovis couldn’t eradicate? No animal, it seems, was safe from the Clovis, not horses, sloths, llamas, camels, capybaras, prong-horns, or even pampatheres. Only two large mammals escaped the Clovis’ eradication frenzy — the bison survived because of sheer numbers, and the boar exists today because it is savagely smart and beyond formidable when aroused.
Here we were asked to sleep, and sleep was what I wanted, achromatic and comatose. We were fed little tins of army rations, food that stood oily and stiff on my plastic fork, and then I lay back on my canvas cot, in a room full of men on canvas cots, only to stare wide-eyed at the metal roof. It wasn’t that the ghosts of ten million hogs kept me awake. It was the opposite: I felt a total absence of life.
And who could sleep with hot bone chips raining down on the tin sheeting above? What human would slumber with smoking pig teeth bouncing off the windows, let alone the pock-pock of semi-automatic gunfire coming from town? When a pyre would surge, it shook the steel girders, setting aswing the butchering gear hanging above me. Pneumatic saws rocked from bright-yellow air hoses, and chains of hooks tinkled and winked as they swung in the dark. Then there was the coughing. The soot and smoke had played hell with my bronchial passageways, and I lay there wheezing, clearing my throat, pretending, like everyone else, that I didn’t have “it,” this illness we were attempting to stanch.
What I did was this: I closed my eyes and traveled a great distance. I emptied my mind until all was white. Moving through this white, I came upon a house made of crystal. Inside, the air was warm and steamy. Crickets played a simple melody. Here, too, were many metal instruments, but these all shared growth as their purpose. There was a copper watering can, dimpled on its surface. Brass tanks held nutrients. Hand shovels and rakes hung shiny from hooks on the wall, and a pair of silver pruning snips sat closed-mouthed on a bench. And, of course, there was green. I parted tendrils and fronds, trailers and vines, heading deeper into a room diffuse with glowing light. Condensation dripped like tonic from panes of warm glass. The smell of loam, thick and fecund, rose from the shelves of plants. In the back of the room, shrouded by ivy, was Yulia. She wore only her white sable hat, and she’d been waiting for me. When I neared, she held aloft a Chinese takeout box, one side stenciled red with a large-combed rooster, the other bearing a golden fish, recumbent in a pagoda pond.