by Brian Hodge
The phone cold against my ear, I listened to Andre cry, and hiccup, then listened to him tell me about Jamey and the way he’d found him. I’d already said we’d be there as soon as we could before realizing there was nothing we could do, so I hung up and let my ambulatory daze move me over to the window, where I pushed the curtains aside and stood not feeling the chill radiating from the glass and the neighboring buildings.
“Angus?” From behind me. “Angus?” She must’ve called four or five times before I caught on.
“Jamey’s dead,” I told her.
Rachel sat in bed, blinking. “What, again?”
“No, I … I think it’s the real thing this time.”
She drew herself up in the sheets and the sweatshirt that she wore to bed, letting the news sink in, and when she asked how, I didn’t know what to tell her, because Andre hadn’t elaborated and I’d not thought to ask, and I couldn’t very well lie because she’d be seeing for herself in an hour or so.
I really hate looking like I don’t know the score.
*
I grew up with an answer for everything, or so my mother told me, plenty of times, and one of the last things she said to me the last time I visited was, “How on earth did you get so jaded this early in your life?” As if, one, I could summarize, and two, she actually wanted the truth. Her question, I think, her terminology itself, sounded suspiciously like a line from a Soul Asylum song she must’ve overheard my stepbrother playing and probably assumed I related to because everybody her age knows that everybody our age likes all the same things. Homogeneity is very important to her and my stepfather.
When she asked that I remember feeling sorry for her, because unlike now it wasn’t that we never talked, it’s just that we never said anything. If you grew up in our house you could often find yourself in the conversational equivalent of wandering through a museum that had been closed down, all the exhibits gone, so that the only things left to see were the blank walls of empty rooms, and dust. You knew something had been there once, long ago — there had to have been, you could sometimes see outlines where something had stood, where the dust wasn’t as thick — but whatever it was, you could only guess.
So there it hung in the air, her first stab in years at engaging me with something that made me ponder:
“How on earth did you get so jaded this early in your life?”
While I didn’t even think that the label applied, personally, the fact of her using it at all seemed more an admission of defeat than anything, so I felt obligated to reinforce it.
“What you should be asking instead,” I told her, “is why it took me as long as it did.”
I’d been neutral as far as who or what I was referring to, but my mother decided to take it as a personal affront.
“You can’t hurt me,” she said. “So if that’s what you think you’re doing here, you’re very sadly mistaken. You can’t hurt me at all.”
And when she said this, all I could think of was how true it was, and how that might’ve been the problem, because it was the only thing about her that I’d ever really envied.
*
We drove out of Chicago in the frosty autumn chill that grips hardest in those last few hours before dawn, dropping down to the Eisenhower Expressway and heading for the western ‘burbs. Soon the eastbound lanes would begin filling with morning commuters, like plaque in a hardened artery, while the trains that clattered down the center exchanged their seedy and exotic nocturnal cargo for the indistinguishable hordes who belonged to the sun.
Chicago’s western hinterlands are a patchwork quilt. There are stretches where you think you’ve finally seen the last strip mall, and drive over creeks and rivers, past woodlands that have withstood advance since the days of Marquette and Joliet, but then you’ll find yourself coming to the next tacky outpost of doughnut shops and rent-to-owns, and it seems you can never quite put all that polyurethaned civilization behind you. When I was very young I thought the entire country went on this way, the next McDonald’s never more than a reassuring five minutes ahead.
Those suburban woodlands, as you drive past, seem thick and mysterious, like overlooked tracts of ancient soil where the fleet descendants of pre-Columbian fathers might yet be watching with painted eyes. From the air, though, surrounded by ragged webs of asphalt, they mostly look besieged.
Still, it was in one of those brambled thickets where the old slaughterhouse sat enduring its years of obsolescence and neglect.
We found the convenience store where Andre had said he would wait, out of the chill. Rachel and I collected him to the relief of the cashier whose unfamiliarity with shampoo must’ve consigned her to the graveyard shift. But then she scurried to the sandwich island and plucked one of their wretched hot dogs off the weenie-go-round and slapped it in a bun, shyly giving it to him with a fistful of condiments, then backing away before he could attempt to pay for it.
Ever since we were kids, Andre has had that effect on some people. You just want to throw a blanket around his shoulders and give him soup. Everything about Andre is too near the surface, including his cheekbones.
Rachel and I followed behind his car, although certainly we knew the way to the slaughterhouse. The neighborhood houses all sat where they had for years, maybe with skimpy cosmetic changes, but still the same behind them. It’s only when you return to your old neighborhood that you feel the way houses have lives apart from the people who reside in them.
“The human body’s supposed to replace almost every cell in it every seven years,” I said, because it felt too quiet. “You’ve heard of that, right?”
“Yeah. But not all at once,” Rachel said.
“So I can mean it literally, saying I’m not the same person who grew up here.”
Fingers busy, Rachel made a show of subtracting from seven. “Guess that means I still have four to go.”
In the light from a streetlamp she frowned. Rachel’s was one of those rare faces that are enhanced by a tiny frown, her brown eyes filling with concentration or disdain and over them the thick eyebrows nudging toward each other in a way that made her wise and sensual and imperial.
“There’s something about all at once that’d seem better,” she said. “Like shedding a skin? You call in sick to work one day, and lock yourself in the bathroom, and keep flushing for hours, and when you come back out it’s a whole new you.”
“Imagine the plumbing hazards,” I said, which made us laugh because we needed to, because we’d gotten out of bed to go look at the corpse of a friend and decide, I guess, that it really was him, and he really was dead.
It meant two extra blocks’ walk, but we parked in the lot of a church — Lutheran, I think — so some suburban early riser wouldn’t see us disembarking directly in front of his castle and go making xenophobic calls to the police and the N.R.A.
“So you had to first come out here, when, like three o’clock this morning?” I asked.
“Uh huh,” Andre said, “about then.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know, I just … just woke up with this awful hunch.” He wasn’t crying anymore. Had gotten out of his car with a smear of mustard on his cheek from the hot dog, for Rachel to wipe away. “I just had this dream that Jamey was…”
We moved down the street, then over a block, following the new one until the street ended in a cul-de-sac and dissolved into several dozen feet of weedy lot. Behind us, lights were beginning to wink on, off, in bathrooms and kitchens, while ahead of us the woods lay cold and dark, unaffected by that workaday world.
We threaded our way through trees, none of which were very big because none were terribly old by tree standards. Our feet tramped over frosty ground untouched by tires for two decades, although time still hadn’t erased every suggestion of the path where the meat trucks used to roll.
It couldn’t have been more than 600 feet back in, but seemed farther, because the woods had slowly closed in as though keeping a secret. Whatever died back here now would die r
andomly, not systematically, but if it’s true that places soak in memories of the things that happen there, then it’d never been entirely our imagination that around the old slaughterhouse we could sense some wordless animal panic, some imprint left by countless dumb beasts who buckled to their knees as their skulls were crushed by sledgehammers swung with brute factory precision.
It rose out of the trees, pale in the pre-dawn, temple-like but without the carvings and monkeys that could’ve given it true character. Years ago the stoneware and brickwork might have been whitewashed, but had been a colorless gray for so long that I no longer remembered. We followed one of the stark walls back around to a loading bay and through the door that had been sprung for several presidential administrations, and finally had to turn on our flashlights. Wherever the beams fell they landed on peeled paint and abandonment and years of vandalism and heaps of junk so useless it was worthless even as scrap. Step through that door and the aloof vibrancy of the woods fled, to leave you swallowed by silent echoes from some lost decade.
“What a desolate place to die,” Rachel said.
It crossed my mind that Jamey was hardly the first, and that I’d done in my virginity here, too. Atmosphere is a low priority when your hormones are loud and shiny.
Andre led us to him, in one of the middle rooms. As the place had been gutted since its demise, over the years we’d never known exactly what occurred where, but I suspected that the dank sepulchre where Jamey lay with the needle in his vein and rubber tubing loose around his bicep was where saws might’ve whined while tatters of flesh speckled men in slick raincoats.
Everything he’d needed was still there, if not in his arm, then close at hand. Bent spoon, pinch of cotton; the votive candle had burned down to a ring of wax. He lay turned onto one side, his unstuck arm drawn up to pillow his head, nose ring and half-smile still in place.
“And there was this, too,” Andre said as he handed us a slip of paper. “The spoon was on top of it.”
We read: No, it wasn’t an accident this time. No apologies, no mewling, which I respected but kept to myself. Andre didn’t look up to hearing that.
“It’s dated eight days ago?” I said. “Who dates his suicide note to begin with?”
“He always was pretty detail-oriented, for a junkie,” Rachel said.
Andre bristled. “He wasn’t a junkie.”
“Sorry, I guess I was confused by the syringe.”
“Angus, tell her he was no junkie.”
“Far as I know, he never shared a needle in his life,” I told her, from the floor. “He was in control.”
“What are you doing down there?” That frown, that beautiful frown. “You don’t think he’s … still…?”
“Eight days?” I was on all fours on the gritty concrete. Had touched his supple cheeks and now hovered in to sniff. “He doesn’t smell bad. Doesn’t even look like he’s started to decompose.”
“Well, it does feel like a meat locker in here … if you’ll excuse the expression.” Now Rachel was being nasty, seeing if she could make Andre flinch. “Probably it hasn’t warmed up much even on the sunny days, the past week.”
“But look at his color,” I argued, too intrigued to feel much grief, which maybe I wouldn’t have felt regardless. I’ve always had this easy take on death, just part of the natural order and sometimes a smart career move, and if I never could believe in Father, Son, or Holy Ghost, I could still believe in System.
Although for being dead, Jamey had a hue that could be called robust. As Andre squirmed, I peeled aside the jacket Jamey was wearing only on one arm, and his flannel, and his T-shirt, to bare the shoulder he’d been lying on. Blood should’ve pooled there, left the skin as dark as an eggplant. I believed in gravity, too, until now.
“Oh, this is creeping me out,” Rachel said, but leaned over my shoulder without apprehension. When a corpse won’t behave like one, it’s easy to overlook a technicality or two.
Andre groaned and told us we were like two six-year-olds with a dead cat, and turned away with his flash and stole half our light. We looked up when he quit shuffling and flapping his long olive green canvas coat, and left his beam on a wall and what had been spray-painted there. All three of us agreed that Jamey had done it, given the presence of both the can and his trademark A’s, with the horizontal extending past the diagonals, like the anarchy symbol without the circle.
“‘Musica mundana’?” Andre read aloud. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
We couldn’t decide. Lately Jamey had despaired over his own floundering musical aspirations, whatever talent he had on a fast exile to oblivion. He employed a small arsenal of keyboards and samplers and tape decks, collecting the noises that engulfed the city and combining them with those of his own creation into aural collages that nobody could dance to. It still seemed unlikely that he’d call his own work mundane, then misspell everything to boot.
“Looks Latin,” Rachel finally said.
“Nathan would know,” Andre said. “Nathan should be here, and Mae, Mae should be here too, I should’ve called them,” and he set off again for a phone before Rachel and I could persuade him that a few more hours wasn’t going to make any difference.
That Jamey. When he set his mind to it, he always could throw the most interesting parties.
*
Someday when I have a hundred bucks an hour to blow to hear an informed opinion, I think it could be really fun to go to a psychologist and see the reaction I get, admitting that the one constant in my life, at its various stages, seems to be a derelict slaughterhouse.
Of course I remember it from a time before dereliction, still operating but in the process of being driven under by incorporated abattoirs, tottering on its independent legs like a newborn veal. Although it was years before I realized this, that whoever had worked there would’ve been jettisoned toward the unemployment line within a few months of that magical and terrible winter day.
What I best remember is tramping there through the snow with my father, because it was within walking distance of our house and he’d wanted to order a side of beef to lay in stock in the freezer downstairs and knew he could get it for not much over wholesale cost there. I was six, on Christmas vacation from first grade and already tired of the new toys, maybe, but swept up in drama that afternoon as my father and I bundled against the cold and set out like a pair of trappers for the family meat.
We must’ve talked, but what about I can’t recall, except for him teasing me that I’d better not tell any of the meatmen my name because they might mistake me for a cow. Which utterly perplexed me until he explained that my name, my fine Scottish name that he had given me in a fit of nationalistic fervor for a homeland never seen, was shared by a breed of cattle.
Twenty-one years later I still remember the milky gray of the sky and the icy whisper of snowflakes as we stomped and stamped along; the way my father would grab me by my mittened hands and swing me up and over when the drifts got too deep. I knew that day that I must’ve grown older and more able in his eyes, that this would be the first of countless adventures that he and I would have in the coming years.
While my father was deciding how best to apportion our beef into steaks and roasts and ground, I strayed off out of curiosity and boredom, finding myself behind the slaughterhouse, undetected while I watched some squat, grizzled man gnaw at a wet cigar stub and grumble curses as he shoveled up a spill of what I took to be fat ropes. They slipped and slithered and glistened as he chased them, favoring one leg, and left pink smears in the snow while he slung them into an enormous wheeled pail that must’ve overturned. He noticed me finally, and now I sort of knew what the gray ropes really were, and with one fatty loop draped over the rim of the pail, he leaned on it and grinned around his cigar. His teeth were stained, and one eye covered by a gray film.
“Hey little mister,” he said to me. “What’s your name?”
Angus, I nearly told him, but stopped myself in time, because mistaken identity was sure
to get me killed, cut up and shoveled into buckets, so I turned and ran as fast as I could and when my father caught up with me he said we’d better wait a few minutes before going back home, until I quit shivering. From the cold, he thought.
It was the last Christmas our nuclear family would know, and while it probably wasn’t the same evening, in my mind the trip to the slaughterhouse will be forever linked to the shouts between my parents, and later discovering my father behind the house, when I wasn’t supposed to, in his private place inside the tool shed. I watched as he cried and hung his head, and every several moments chopped at wood with a hatchet. There was something so terrible about seeing him in this fallen state that I, while I knew I should’ve, could no more have gone to him than I could’ve run into the arms of that unshaven troll who’d been shoveling guts.
When our beef was ready I went with my father to pick it up, but we took the car this time and it wasn’t the same as on foot, against the elements, and it’s almost the last thing I recall us doing together. He was gone by spring, my stepfather and his own son in place by summer, and by the week I entered second grade I’d already seen my father for the last time, wondering where he’d gone and when he would send for me and clinging to that final Yule as evidence that we’d had one adventure, at least.
It was more than a decade before I did the math, and realized that over that Christmas my mother had been pregnant with Rachel, and must’ve known even then that it wasn’t Dad’s.
Which explains a lot about his mood, as I look back.
*
“‘Music of the world’ is what that means, literally,” Nathan explained. “Symbolically it means ‘music of the spheres.’ Not like harps and organs and trumpets … more the harmony in creation, say, from the planets orbiting. It was part of the medieval world view. To them music theory was like astrophysics.”
We looked at the words again: Musica mundana.