From this, with golden chopsticks, Yulia fed me mu shu.
When I said mmm, she said, I am your fortune.
* * *
Thus my days in the Hormel plant went. I worked another shift on the drag crew, but as men got sick and were trucked in a slow stream to the infirmary downtown, I got transferred to different details. One the men called “shake-n-bake,” and another was “scrape-n-rake,” a crew whose particular duties I’ll spare you, except to say that sixteen hours on the dumb end of a debloating stick and you’ll be hoping for the infirmary yourself. Of course, a hospital was a surefire place to get sick, but I had “the cough” already, and I couldn’t help fantasizing about clean sheets and sponge baths, about adjustable beds, fresh-cut flowers, and chocolate pudding. I mean, a few weeks on your ass with the flu is not the end of the world. I even imagined that Eggers, Trudy, Dad, Farley, and I would all get sick together, that we’d recline in adjacent beds with thermometers in our mouths, arguing over the motivations of characters in daytime soap operas.
Though we’d started with at least a hundred men, by the fourth night there were only a dozen of us left, all with lousy coughs and low morale. We ate C rations in our cots as men mused to one another in the dark. One man espoused a grand corporate-conspiracy theory behind “this so-called disease,” and he even itemized all the companies that would profit from the hog disaster. A pair of men sank into unbridled nostalgia, trading reveries about vintages of wine they had known, the clarity of water off certain Mediterranean beaches, or the succulence of various cuts of sushi. There were the hopeful, too — strong, grown men nearly paralyzed with hope. Teams of lawyers, the hopeful claimed, were at that moment filing motions of cruel and unusual punishment. As they spoke, calls were being placed from very important people. Writs of pardon were being drafted. Helicopters were en route to whisk them away!
I tried to think of something I could say to these men. I seemed able to endure our hardship better than most, and though I generally thought little of the assembled embezzlers, insider traders, and profiteers, did I not regularly preach that they were people, too? I decided against pointing out the three-legged race they were running with speculation, nostalgia, and hope. I also passed on describing for them the great paradox of life, that for someone truly to reside within you, they must be wholly unavailable, and therefore we were not alone.
Instead, I chose to hit them with the twin fallacies of humanity. Lying back on my cot, arms crossed over my chest, I announced to the dark cutting floor, “It is a common mistake for people to believe they live in times of great change, and it can only be vanity to think your lives, compared with the last several million years of humanity, are of great account. And take heart in the knowledge that only a fool thinks he knows when his life has reached its high and its low.”
A ration can, still wet with fish oil, flew across the room, striking me on the ear.
Chapter Ten
The next morning, we were roused from our cots, and half of us were helped into the infirmary truck while the rest, the last six able-bodied men, were ushered into a white pickup. The truck was driven by a deputy whose name I can’t remember, a stocky guy who wore a military green biohazard mask that covered his nose and mouth with a creepy, snoutlike filtration canister. It was the first person we’d seen wearing any special kind of protection, and we all looked at each other like, What the hell?
We rolled south, through the kind of open country that, on afternoon cruises in the Corvette, made me let the V-8 off its leash. Six of us jostled in back, everyone red-faced and freezing but me in my fire-blacked, blood-matted Clovis coat. Bare tree limbs waved against the sky, and farm implements stood to their ankles in snow. The farms were big on decorative windmills that pumped no water and grand doghouses that housed no dogs. I noticed the cattle were clustering around the barns and stock sheds, a sign of bad weather ahead.
I remember we were just driving along when I saw the first body.
As we headed down some road, it could have been any road, there it was, a human form, face-down in the snow. I did a double take — a man in a red hunting jacket was sprawled in the snow. I turned to the other inmates. They were all huddled together, trying to stay out of the wind. “Did you see that?” I asked. Nobody looked up, though I knew they’d seen a dead man beside the road. How could they miss it? I pounded on the rear window and yelled at the deputy to stop, but he just drove on. That person in the snow had met his end here, alone in this gully, and his family at home would never know what became of him.
You poor bastard, I thought, and on down the road we went.
Soon, we pulled onto a tractor path whose twin, rutted trails were iced over. We fishtailed across a farm demarcated only by the yellow insulators on the cattle fence, and finally the deputy stopped beside a Quonset hut that reeked of chickens. The structure was as big as an aircraft hangar, and you could hear a million chickens in there, gargling away. We got out of the truck, and the deputy handed us all short-handled hoes. The instrument was similar to an adze, with a long curved blade at one end of the handle, and a loop of leather to sling around your wrist at the other.
I looked from the blade to the deputy. It was quiet, save for those chickens. “Surely you don’t expect us to—”
The deputy slammed the tailgate shut. “You should be thanking me,” he said. “Some of those other prisoners — their work hasn’t been so pretty.”
“You mean, less pretty than incinerating hog corpses and hacking live chickens to death?”
The deputy looked me square in the eye. “Yes,” he said.
From the farmhouse, an old man appeared, his mouth wide open, as if he was ready to shout something. He was wearing overalls, and his white hair flopped in the wind. He hailed us with a raised hand, though he was wheezing too hard to speak.
The deputy turned to Bondurant, an inmate I’d dragged hogs with. He was supposed to be an honest-to-God billionaire, self-made through motivational speaking. “Go see what the hell he wants,” the deputy told him.
Bondurant didn’t move. Mind you, this was a guy who hooked pigs in the neck like he’d hooked pigs in the neck before. Bondurant told the deputy, “I know what the old man wants. He wants us to not kill his damn chickens. I don’t want to kill them, either, not with this thing, not without a mask.” He held up the hoe. “Forget chickens. Where’s our masks?”
On the heels of that, another inmate said, “Yeah, where’s our masks? Cheese and rice, I’m an accountant here. I’ve got to have a mask.”
I didn’t want to pull rank or anything, but I had a Ph.D. “Yeah,” I chimed in.
From behind his mask, the deputy said, “There aren’t any masks.”
There was a tense moment. It felt like something bad was about to happen.
Bondurant threw his hoe on the ground. “Well forget these things,” he said. “Let’s just torch that hut and get out of here.”
That’s when the old man walked up. His mouth was wide open. He held a hand out as if to halt us, but the palm was glistening with the brightest, pinkest blood you’ve ever seen. He covered his mouth when a fit of coughing came, then lifted his hand, asking us to stop, please stop, because no matter how hard he moved his lips, the words wouldn’t come out. I took a couple steps toward the old man, till I was close to him. His turning, spectral eyes took me in. Ghostly and wide, his cloudy pupils said, Enough. When he breathed, a mist of brilliant blood spotted my glasses. Warm and pink, it freckled my face.