by Ben Winters
Something was piercing through me, some kind of heat burning the raw layer under the skin. Something I couldn’t then explain and that even now I have trouble transforming from thought into words. But something was happening. A dial was turning.
You can imagine a compass needle twitching to life—the smallest pulse—the barest movement—struggling for north.
Twice a year a group was graduated off the pile and moved inside, and soon enough it was my turn. It was something of an occasion: work halted inside and outside; everybody circled around the flagpoles. The only kind of time like it was church, or when one of us died or when someone was sold.
Mr. Bell came out and walked down the line of us. I think it was nine other boys and three girls who came off the pile along with me. We stood with our chests stuck out. We had on the yellow suits we’d just been issued, and the respirator headgear, those fancy magic face masks that you had to wear on most shifts inside.
The ceremony only took ten minutes after all that—for us to be lined up and for Mr. Bell to kiss us each one time on the top of our heads and tighten the straps of our masks with tender ceremony. And then the buzzer sounded for our very first kill-floor shift, and he said, “All right, y’all, get to it,” and we marched inside.
By the time that first day ended my yellow suit was no longer clean.
“So?” said Castle when he found me in the johns. “You all right?”
“Course I am.”
I didn’t want Castle to know how I really felt after that first long day inside the cutting house. I had been very close all day to vomiting. Not from the work itself, I guess—that first day all I did was throw the lever of the downpuller machine, over and over and over, align the mechanical jaws, press the button, and watch them tug off the cattle hide. One swift motion and the full skin came off, like taking off a shirt. I guess the sight of it, over and over. The glistening black and red of the insides. I don’t know. But I did—I had felt all day on the brink of vomiting, and I still did even then in the johns, but I didn’t want Castle to know that. I didn’t want him to lose his pride in me.
“I’m fine,” I told him, and I smiled weak and watery. When I looked at him I felt like I could see his insides, like his skin’d been pulled away.
“You’ll be all right,” he said, like he hadn’t heard me say I was fine. He put his hand on my shoulder, which made me jump. You didn’t want the Old Man seeing that, talking close and confidential. The Old Man or anyone who might tell him. “What’s next is what matters,” he said.
Sure enough, there was Harbor, looking at Castle’s hand on me, looking at us whispering all together like that.
“What you mean, what’s next?” said Harbor with his hard, slit-face smile.
“You mind your own, how about, son?” said Castle.
“My own what? Everything’s everybody’s.” Harbor smiled. “Right?”
That was one of the mottoes. Everything’s everybody’s. Eyes on the prize. For you and me and Bell’s Farm!
Harbor ignored Castle then and talked right to me. Harbor was between my age and Castle’s age, but he talked just like a grown man. Talked almost like an Old Man, actually, like he was in charge of something. “Your man here talking about what’s next. Lemme tell you what’s next. Today they fit on that mask. Tomorrow you work on the carving line. Then the kill floor. Till they put you on the block or put you in the ground. That’s what’s next.”
Castle shook me awake that night. Not to tell me any words or stories. His big eyes wider than ever but serious. Focused.
“You remember what I told you?”
I blinked. He had told me so many things.
“They not us,” he said, so quiet I could hardly hear him. “Not Harbor, not anyone. Something’ll come for you and me.”
“What?” I said. “What’ll come?”
He wasn’t even making noise anymore. He just mouthed the word. “Opportunity.”
Pretty soon I decided that inside was worse than the pile.
That was punishable, of course: to think of any kind of work as worse or worst or bad. Thoughts Against Good Work. I kept my thoughts to myself. Out on the pile there was some music in the air, kind of: there was the distant rush and honk of the highway; there was the caw of crows and even on occasion the merry chirrup of a songbird. Inside the only sounds were work sounds: the chunk-chunk of the bolt gun and the chug-chug of the ramp, the dull, ignorant lowing of the cows, the buzz and rattle of the hot machines. And the nervous click-clack of boot heels all around you: the Old Men and the guards strolling with their hands on their holsters, the Franklins with their clipboards, the USDA in their lab coats, with their instruments.
I got through it by telling myself Castle’s stories, all the ones he had told me over all those years: the man who slipped into the water and was eaten by a whale and spat out again; the leopard who cannot change his spots; and the one (my favorite one) about the man who built another man from parts he had found, brought him to life with lightning for magic.
Other times I told myself the words. Doing my tasks, again and again and again: cracking skulls, pulling out viscera, carving out tongues by their thick roots. Repeating Castle’s old words from under our blanket together:
Carburetor.
Chicago.
Opportunity.
Six or eight months after I moved in to the cutting floor, Castle shook me awake one night, and I was as mad as I’d ever been.
“Getting too old for this,” I said, grumpy.
“No, love,” he said. “Don’t say that.”
My hands hurt so much. I had been moved from the downpuller onto a straight carving station, and in sleep my hands stayed cramped in the shape that held the knife.
“Too old.”
“I know, dear. I know. But listen. I have to give you something.”
And always, Castle knew what I didn’t know yet, because he had seen it happen with the olders. Soon they would come and read his number out and move him to another cabin. He was the oldest of the younger ones, and soon they’d need the room for the new littlest coming out of the breed lot. He’d go to cabin 9, and after a year, on from there to breeding.
That night while he waited for me to wake and listen, his big eyes were full of tears. I think they were. I wish I could remember.
“I got a secret to give you. You gotta listen. This matters.”
“Huh?”
“You listening?”
I allowed with a shrug that I was.
“We are from the future.”
“Man, what?” That had woken me all the way. “The future? Castle, come on.”
But his face was serious. So, so serious.
“We are from the future, my sweet brother. We are future boys. Okay?” He was talking too loud. He was all worked up. I put my finger across his lips. He brushed it away. “We look like we’re here, with all this, but we’re really somewhere else. In the future we got somewhere else. Some other time.”
“What place you mean?”
“I don’t know, honey. Someplace. Chicago, maybe. Future place.” He had told me stories about that city he got from somewhere. It was a city on the other side of America. Buildings upright and proud. “I’m in Chicago, and I’m eating a hot dog.”
I had to put my cramped hand over my mouth to keep from laughing out loud.
Castle had never eaten any hot dogs, and neither had I, but we knew what they were well enough. There was a dancing hot dog on the trucks that rumbled in and out unceasingly from the loading dock on the north side of the kill house. But for our food we had mostly the loaves, dense and filling. Carrot loaves and sorghum loaves and vanilla loaves for a treat.
“We live in two places at once, you and me.” Castle’s eyes shone with pleasure, with real, true electric pleasure, and I felt it arcing between us like starlight. “You live here, you live there. You live now, you live later. You live in this place, you live in the other place. There’s two of you. Do you understand?�
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I nodded. I wasn’t sure that I did, but I wanted him to know that I did.
Castle held up two fingers in the dark, and from then on that was our sign. Two fingers, raised and spread apart. It meant—you and me—two of us. It meant him and me, but also it meant me and me and it also meant him and him. Me now, me later. Castle now, Castle later.
This place and the other place, here and there, now and later on.
17.
In the morning, in the silence of the waiting room, in the bright light of the small examination room of Dr. Venezia-Karbach, I felt the uneasy and unwelcome sensation of being completely alone in the presence of myself. I had spent so much of my life costumed and posing, turning and turning myself, like changing the channels on a television set, that sometimes when I was caught as I was now, in a silent moment, just waiting, nothing to do but sit and wait and think in a white and airless room, I felt like a blank screen. I felt like a dead television. I was myself. I was nothing. I sat there in the thin paper robe. My ass was freezing on the steel of the table.
The one piece of artwork in Dr. Venezia-Karbach’s office was a framed print of a Norman Rockwell painting, First-Day Jitters: little black girl in a plain white dress, handing up an apple to her pretty black teacher, and both of them looking shy and aw-shucks nervous. That was a famous painting, the first day of class at Little Rock School for Negro Children, 1954, seven years after Arkansas became free, nine months after the Supreme Court ruled that freedom wasn’t enough—there had to be schools. There had to be a chance.
I stared at that schoolteacher now, her wide excited eyes, her worry, the white bows in her hair. I had read some sort of magazine feature about her recently, the real person, about the way the rest of her life had turned out. I tried to remember where I had read it. Tried to remember how she was doing.
“Good morning, Mr. Morton. I understand you’re here for a checkup—is that correct?”
“Yes, Doc, you got it,” I said, snapping right into it. “That’s right.”
“Let’s have a look.”
Dr. Venezia-Karbach was a white woman in her late fifties or early sixties, not unfriendly but not friendly, either. Her hair was short and spiked up, boxy and sexless. On her instructions I removed the robe and sat in my underpants, hands laced in my lap, while she conducted her examination with brisk efficiency. Her fingertips lit on the various regions of my anatomy—torso and limbs, eyes and ears, pulse points and glands. I breathed deeply while she pressed my chest with the cold flat face of the stethoscope. I opened my mouth and said “Ah” and flinched a little while she inspected my throat with the funneled light of the laryngoscope.
She started a chart and asked me some questions. Mr. Kenny Morton, it turned out, was the type of old-fashioned amiable cat who called the doctor Doc, who probably called cops Chief, and who called fat strangers Big Guy. He was the kind of fella who scratched his head with theatrical uncertainty when asked where his previous physician’s practice was located and when his last appointment had taken place. Dr. Venezia-Karbach registered no surprise to hear that Mr. Morton had no insurance or current place of employment.
I imagined for one sharp second Dr. V’s tidy white examination room as the tidy white examination room at the worker-care facility in the western section of the GGSI campus: imagined it splattered with gore, covered with an exuberance of blood. Two dead nurses. Jackdaw on the loose.
Dr. V wrote everything down on her chart and told me that for a man of my age and height and weight I seemed to be in fine shape. When she asked what it was that had brought me to the doctor today, I figured that was enough of that. “Well,” I said, emotion coming hot into my voice, choking me up, “well…” and I slid off the examination table and exploded with need. “That boy!”
“What?” Dr. Venezia-Karbach stepped backward in startlement while I fought back a sob. I advanced across the small room and grasped her roughly by the shoulders. “That boy y’all got!”
There were more graceful ways I could have gone about this. More circumspect methods, more careful. But I was feeling half off the horse that morning. I was feeling like a battering ram, just wanting to shove and smash through this thing. What had Bridge said, in that unwonted casualism—I wanted to get it over with.
“What on earth are you talking about?” said Dr. V, furrowing her brow, playing at confused, putting on a nice show of her own. “What boy?”
“Come on,” I said. “Come on, now. They brought you a boy. The Airlines, a boy, Sunday night. Monday morning?”
“Sir.” Without turning around, Dr. V extended a leg behind her and kicked the door shut.
“The boy!”
“Sir, please.”
I waited for some stammering excuse—what are you talking about, I don’t understand. But it was too late, and she knew it—her eyes had betrayed her, her neat physician’s mask had slipped to reveal not fear, or not just fear, but also the shock of having been discovered. In a fluid gesture she turned around, locked the door, and turned back around. She smoothed her white coat with both hands, adjusted the stethoscope that had been jostled, ran thin fingers through her hair.
“Okay,” she said. “What about him?”
“Well…” What the hell, I figured. “Where’s he at?”
“I do not know, and I could not tell you if I did.” She nodded once, a quick birdlike gesture. “Now, as I’ve said, your checkup shows no areas of concern. Have a good day.”
She unlocked the door and opened it, and I was across the room, reaching past her and pushing it closed again. Dr. V’s shoulders tensed as she turned to face me, the two of us separated by inches. This was a fine line I was walking here. I’m big, even for a man, and she was small, even for a woman, and the room was small and close.
“He’s my brother,” I told her quietly, damn near whispering now.
“What?”
I took two deep breaths. The space between us was ruffled by a drift of warm air from the heating system, riffling Dr. V’s short, spiky hair and making it look like white grass.
“I don’t mean he’s my biological brother; I mean he’s my brother.” It was a southern voice, PB voice, the blood traces of my old real voice tasting like dirt in my mouth. “You know what that means down there? Raised up together, eyes on each other. Family.” I was careful not to say what kind of place it’d been, this plantation or mine or rig where Mr. Morton and Jackdaw had been bound together as boys. The full file was empty on Jackdaw’s history, and I guessed that Barton and company didn’t know any more and that, regardless, they wouldn’t have shared anything with a physician brought in on a freelance basis to tend to him. But this was dangerous territory, and I moved past it quickly.
“We come up together ten years, him and me, but then he gets sold. No warning, no good-bye. That’s how it goes, you know?”
Dr. V was watching me warily, arms crossed, eyes darting back and forth in the small room. I charged on.
“I stay up in Wisconsin. I got people up there. And I been trying to find him all these years, writing letters to manumits from our old place, then with the Internet, you know, everything’s easier and harder, too. I’m looking at forums, typing his name in search engines. Looking for anyone matching his age, description, you know? Saving up my money and all, like somehow I’m gonna put together enough scratch to buy him out.” I looked down, shook my head self-mockingly, as if a poor freedman like Kenny Morton could ever earn enough to buy a man out of slavery. As if there weren’t laws against it. “And then, suddenly, jackpot, you know? A decade of nothing, and then one day, up pops the name! Boy called Jackdaw, gone ghost from some Alabama stitch house. Well, first thing I think is he’s here. He was always talking about Indianapolis. Don’t know how he got it in his head. Don’t know how he even heard of this place. But that was it—I ever get out of here—you know, just talk. Night talk.”
Castle and I, talking under the blanket, telling stories. Imagining made-up futures. Whispering Chicago to
each other. And we did, didn’t we? We did make it out, did we not? Opportunity came—one, two, three, like horseshoes ringing onto the post—and we flew away.
“But so I came up here, and someone down Freedman Town, they told me you the doc who sees to runners, least sometimes.”
Dr. Venezia-Karbach’s eyes flashed, and her arms uncrossed from her chest so she could plant her fists on her hips. She didn’t like that the word was out on her. I had rattled the woman for sure. I stared at her pleadingly, and she looked back, and behind her the 1954 schoolteacher waited for her students to arrive, an unlikely hero in Salvation Army shoes, surrounded by her uncertain future.
“All right. I understand.” The sternness in Dr. V’s eyes softened, and her mouth twisted at the corners. She was keeping her voice firm, but with effort now. Something else was trying to find its way out, pity or empathy or kindness. “And what is it that you want?”
“All I want to do is see him,” I said. “That’s all. Just—before y’all spirit him away. Up north. I just gotta see him one time. I need him to know I never did forget about him.”
And there were tears in my eyes now, of course. Seems like one thing I could always manage was to conjure up some tears into my eyes. I was still nearly naked, just in my underpants, and it only added to the awkward urgency of our exchange, that we bore this relation to each other—doctor and patient, woman and man. “I just want him to know I never let him out of my heart. I never did. I just want to see him and tell him that. That’s all that I want.”
She should have simply said, “I’m sorry.” She should have said there was nothing she could do. I could only imagine the firm instructions she got from Father Barton, the sternness with which his admonitions of silence were delivered. But the ripples were passing over her, the ripples of want. She wanted to help me. She needed to. It was the flip side of the reflexive hatred of Slim and Slim’s fat pal—someone like Dr. V, white and liberal and a child of her era: she wanted and needed for the poor black man in her office, he of humble circumstance and simple hopes, to see that she was not like the sneering bigots and whiphands of the world, that she was a person of conscience. She was different.