So, Mike thinks, staring back at her, trying to sound confident in his head — deep-voiced, like Drais. We find ourselves at a crossroads. The question is, what’s he willing to gamble? What happens if he chucks the thing, wipes it from memory, and she does the same — and he still ends up as a redundancy, a little red mark in the SitcoBVM ledger, just a severance package away from starting over again? Kara’s been crystal clear on this point: lose the job, lose her. Lose everything. Become a loser. He’s not naive about the allure of his platinum cards.
Fuck it, he thinks in the Drais voice. You want to get to the top of the food chain, you’d better learn how to chew.
Mike Stevens, junior VP of marketing for the Pancho’s Restaurant Division of SitcoBVM, gives the Mexican girl one last glance, then lifts his eyes up to the bovine face of Vaca Loca on the backlit menu behind the counter and recites in his head, as benediction and penance, the hallowed names of Pancho’s trademarked product line: Azteca BurgerTM, Bandito BurritoTM, Torero ChickenTM, Taco FantasticoTM, Bordertown Chili FriesTM, amen. He picks up the sandwich and sinks his teeth down through the whole girth of it as hard as he can, taking a huge bite, snapping through bone, pumping his jaw up and down until the fragment of finger he’s torn off has been ground into oblivion, and, making sure she’s still watching, swallows with only a barely perceptible flinch. The rest he wraps up and shoves into his satchel, the fate of his career congealing in its blasphemed, mustardy innards. He takes a huge swig of cola and leaves his tray on the table when he gets up to go, a scattering of too-crisp fries cast like divining bones across the translucent paper of the promotional mat.
3. “You’re fucking kidding me, right? Fucking kidding me.”
Carl Drais stares at the soggy pile of dogshit besmirching his oak desk and tries to process the story this lesser minion sitting across from him has just disgorged.
“No sir,” says the minion, Mike something-or-other. “No joke, I’m afraid.”
“Afraid is the right word, son. Do you have any idea what you’re telling me?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Do you understand, not just the health code violations that have been perpetrated here, the potential billions in lawsuits, but also how personally fucking disgusted I am at what you’ve done?”
“I only had the company’s best interests in mind, sir.”
Carl Drais puts his hands together and leans back in his chair, a move he’s practised hundreds of times.
“And I presume you can explain exactly how this particular bit of personal deviance will benefit a multinational conglomerate like SitcoBVM?”
“Well, sir,” says minion Mike, “I think it’s all a matter of perspective. It was easy to see what a disaster this could turn into for the company —”
“Keen observation!”
“But with a little creativity, it occurred to me that we might be looking at an opportunity here.”
Carl frowns, folding his thick brows into an arachnoid ridge. “What I’m looking at is a half-masticated cheeseburger with a fucking zombie finger wedged between the pickles, and a lunatic cannibal shitbag telling me he’s eaten half of it in the name of shareholder gains!”
Carl counts out the seconds of silence, watching minion Mike tremble in his chair, smelling the sour sweat leaking from his armpits. He needs the fear. If he doesn’t break this man thoroughly — if he lets on too early that he is, in fact, intrigued — things could easily go haywire, as in bankruptcy for the corporation, as in jail time, contraband cigarettes, dropped soap and death by pruno. No idea is anathema to Carl if he can see the money — and there’s something here, for sure. Why not? When you know what the fucking beef farms look like, this isn’t a stretch at all. It just might be the game-changer. The thing they remember him for. Put his name up there with Ray Kroc and Dave Thomas and the goddamn A&W bear. He has to retain total control, though, complete mastery of the situation, or he runs a major risk of turning into a scapegoat for a board of directors that would charbroil their own mothers to save their hides, if anyone were to find out that Pancho’s has been accidentally serving up anonymous human appendages in its Buenos Combos. To work, this has to look intentional.
Eight . . . nine . . . ten . . . Tick-tick. Spidery seconds. He lets them crawl all over minion Mike, get into his ears. Get him primed to do anything Carl wants.
“Now,” says Carl. “The first thing is, why should I even believe you? How do I know you’re not here to set me up somehow? You come in here making a claim like this, you’d better be ready to back it up without question.”
“But the burger, sir —”
“Came out of your cheap man-purse, and could be fake as a silicone tit, for all I know. If I’m inferring correctly, here, it’s going to take a more persuasive display of your commitment to the campaign to get me to agree to even poke it with a sterilized ten-foot pole. Brand loyalty starts with the executive, son. You want to sell this thing? You want to convince me it’s not just the whim of some deranged pervert? You want to push this kind of radical product on Pancho’s ever-fickle customer base? You have to prove to me you can love it, first and foremost.”
Carl watches minion Mike’s face turn pale as bleached flour.
“So,” Carl says, leaning in, glancing down at the tepid mass of dry beef, modified corn syrup, wilted vegetables, and human biology nestled in a manger of cheese-caked Pancho’s parchment. “Have another bite.”
Carl Drais watches his soon-to-be-slightly-less-minor minion absorb the request, digest the inevitable, and steel himself for round two. Truth is, there’s so much salt on those goddamn burgers that you could throw a nuclear cow turd on top and most people would never taste the difference. The real challenge will be marketing, and of course convincing the FDA yahoos, but such is the fast food business. That’s what Carl Drais has been doing his whole life.
In less than a year, he’ll be out, southward bound, blowing his fat retirement package on mojitos and ahi steaks and fishing gear for his Caribbean yacht, Delilah. And won’t that be grand. Mona yapping in his ear about what a schmuck he is. Floating around the goddamn sea like a sick crustacean, to be gobbled up as chum by bigger, younger fish. Waiting out his palsied years for whatever blood-pressure-related sideswipe to send him plunging over the side of the boat, convulsing, fresh feed for the barracudas. Another stock CEO down; we’ll let you know when we put up the memorial plaque next to the shitter and dredge the bones from the ocean floor to cremate and blend into the refried bean mix.
Wouldn’t it be great, just once, to really shake things up? Do something people will remember? Really change things? Hasn’t he, Carl Drais, earned the right to be something more than just another stray corn kernel passed through the corporate bowel, to be flushed away into obscurity? Truth is, he’d give up every penny in his accounts if he knew it would mean the name Carl Drais made its way into textbooks across the country. Because what good will all the money be, if no one remembers him?
When minion Mike chomps down on the sandwich, looking only slightly paler at actually eating the thing than he did at the suggestion of eating it, Carl knows he’s got something he can work with. He watches, silent as a big cat, as Mike chews, his face cycling through the stages of guilt, shame, denial, and acceptance with each roll of the fleshy slurry around his tongue. And when Mike finally swallows, an almost convincing look of greasy satisfaction on his face, Carl smiles.
“Well,” he says. “I must say, you look like you quite enjoyed that.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Listen, Mike — what was your last name again?”
“Stevens, sir.”
“Listen, Mike. I must say, on witnessing your unbridled commitment to this new product, I’m warming to it. I’m thinking we may have something here.”
Mike Stevens’s eyes light up, all the lingering disgust melted away in a ping of hope and newly stoked ambition, and Carl Drais knows that he’s got him. Now it’s just the final touch, the conspiratorial about-face, a
nd he’ll have Stevens ready to eat an entire bucket’s worth of deep-fried baby fingers at the flick of his lapel.
“Of course, I’m going to want some time to digest it all. So I’ll ask that you leave me now, to see where I can get with it. But, on the way out, you’ll want to tell Sheena to order you up some new business cards. If you’re going to be handling an account this, let’s say, touchy, we’ll need you to have access to resources beyond what junior VP clearance allows for.” Carl smiles again, spider brows relaxed into a pair of friendly salt-and-pepper caterpillars.
“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”
“And Mike?”
“Yes sir.”
“I’ll need you for another meeting tomorrow. After that, you take yourself a bit of a vacation. Maui, or Antigua. Somewhere nice.”
“Yes, sir.”
When Stevens is gone, Carl Drais picks up the half-eaten sandwich from his desk, a tidbit of finger the length of a thimble still plugged in among the oozing condiments. He waves the burger under his nose, taking in its musk — coaxing, from amid the scents of grease and onion and vinegar, the rarefied aura, the decadent essence that can reveal to him the secret of how to introduce this, his newest baby, to a hungry world.
4. They told her not to worry, but mierda is she worried. Worry is a primary ingredient in Rosa’s life, but this is worse than the usual kind, the one she gets when burly white men look at her too hard or whenever she passes a policeman on the street. This is sick worry, you-know-what-you-did worry. You-got-yourself-into-some-kind-of-serious-shit worry. You’ve-been-caught worry. Why else would she be here in the waiting room of SitcoBVM headquarters, told flat out that her presence was not optional? Why else would she be waiting for a meeting with the CEO, a guy she’d never heard of before the company reps showed up at her door telling her that he was “a man of national importance”? Why else would they even have bothered to track down her address, which she’s never given the company because her manager pays her under the table in cash? It’s not even a paycheque, Rosa. It’s an envelope he hands to you at the end of the week on your way out the door. Paycheques are for real people. Legal people.
Diego coos and dribbles on her shoulder. She wonders why she bothered putting on the red dress, the only good one she owns, when she knows it’s just going to get covered in spit-up. It’s bad enough that Valentina’s working and she has to carry Diego with her into the lion’s den; she had to go and put on lipstick, too. Who gets dressed up to be arrested? But that leads her back to the question that confuses her most, the one that always wedges itself between her and the heavy prison door she keeps imagining swinging in to bang shut over the rest of her life: Why didn’t they just send the police to her house? Why bring someone like her into their fancy glass-walled offices?
The receptionist’s phone buzzes and she picks it up and nods twice, looking in Rosa’s direction, saying “Hmm, yessir.” She hangs up and smiles at Rosa.
“Mr. Drais will see you now.”
Rosa puts a hand on the back of Diego’s little head and stands up. What can she do? Run? Running is what got her here. On shaky legs, she carries her son past the big wooden reception desk that reminds her of a coffin, and walks through the huge doors into the office of Carl Drais, CEO.
“Good afternoon,” says the figure standing behind the desk, a tall man with hair like polished grey bone. She looks over into the corner and sees another guy, and when she recognizes him as the one from Pancho’s, the one who ate the bad sandwich, she has to blink hard and steady herself to keep from fainting and dropping Diego onto the hardwood.
“Rosa, correct? Rosa Garcia. We’ve been learning a lot about you.”
His smile is a cheese-grater buffed to a perfect shine. The other man sits in the corner, dead still.
“Please don’t be alarmed,” says Carl Drais in a honey-smoked tone. “Mr. Stevens and I realize what you’re probably thinking, but I assure you, we have no intention of reprimanding you, or exploiting your, let us say, documentational circumstances. In fact” — he pauses and comes around the desk, and Rosa reflexively hugs Diego to her chest — “what we’d like to do is offer you an opportunity.”
Now his hand is on her shoulder. If he touches Diego, she’ll rip at his throat, scratch and bite him bloody, tear him piece by piece until the other one brains her from behind with a paperweight, or just reaches in and touches the barrel of his silenced pistol to her temple to bury a bullet in her skull, like they do in Mafia movies. But Carl Drais’s hand stays resting on her upper arm, giving the gentlest squeeze.
“We think you may have, however inadvertently, pointed toward a bold new direction for the Pancho’s restaurant chain.”
He runs his fingers down her arm to her hand, and he lifts it, his palm cool and dry against her hot, damp one, until it hovers, flat and brown and trembling between them. She’s shaking, holding Diego close enough to her that he fuses to her skin, so that there’s no way they can tear him from her, with all of it running through her head again: the desert and the dogs and the paycheque and the finger and the night retching in guilt and terror afterward, the men coming to her door, the red dress, the waiting room, and now here, with Carl Drais, which could be worst of all.
“With the right product testing and market research, and of course the small challenge of navigating a few outdated regulations with our friends at the FDA, we believe we might be looking at the next flagship Pancho’s sandwich. Still in the earliest stages of development, of course — but for the moment, we’re thinking of calling it ‘The Dream.’ Good, right?”
The one who ate it, Mr. Stevens, stands and walks over to them and looks her in the eyes while he fiddles with his tie. He’s younger, and there’s something in his own eyes that’s not quite fear, not quite nervousness, but a kind of retreat, as though he’s pulling back into himself, withdrawing into the flesh and muscle of his big, solid Midwestern body.
“But of course, all of this is only possible with your full cooperation,” says Carl Drais. “We can make sure you’re well taken care of — take away any question of your right to belong in this nation of ours, give you a permanent position in the company — but you also must understand that the privilege of liberty, so to speak, does not come without a certain sacrifice.”
Carl Drais lifts her hand up right close to his face, and for a second she thinks he might kiss her fingers, but he just wafts them under his nose, inhaling deeply.
“So what do you think, Rosa?” he says. “How would you like to be more than just a Wrapper?
Mr. Stevens clears his throat. Diego coughs spittle. Rosa swallows, opens her mouth, blinks. She’s remembering the first time she ever ate a Pancho’s burger, the day Valentina moved in and they treated themselves to a couple of Pequeño Combos. The way they’d touched their burgers together in a makeshift toast, wrinkled their noses as they chewed the first bites, feeling the salt tingling on their tongues, the limp pickles squeaking between their teeth. How they’d laughed, almost rejoicing in the luxury of throwing away half their lunches. Shaking their heads, saying, what a country. What a country, this.
The Last Ham
He was a colourful character who was not accepted by the establishment because he fought against privilege and for the little guy. My plan is to be more successful than he was.
— Rob Ford
1. The pig carcass hung from a thick wooden beam, spinning at the end of a rope trussed around its trotters, shafts of light from the gaps in the barn walls dancing like cracked player piano keys across its pale, hairless girth. A tendril of blood drizzled from the slice in its neck into the bucket underneath, pushing yet more blood over the bucket’s rim into a pool on the dirt floor that now framed the crumpled body of Ted Kersey like a scarlet peacock’s fan. As a whole, the tableau suggested some obscene ritual sacrifice, the work of a brutal priest who placed the same value on the souls of men as on those of swine for the butchering.
This was what Helen Kersey found when she walked into
the barn to tell Ted she was back from the grocery store and that dinner would be ready in twenty minutes, and given the nature of the scene, it’s hardly surprising that her first instinct was not to call an ambulance, but to run into the house and telephone Sister Mary Beth Boultbee of St. Ignatius Catholic Church to ask her, between choking sobs, what sort of God would allow this kind of indignity to happen to a decent man.
“The Lord’s plan has some strange twists and turns,” said the Sister. “But we must have faith in His word and His wisdom, cruel though it may seem.”
Questions hovered around Ted Kersey’s death like scavenging gulls. There were the clinical facts: Ted had died of a massive cardiac event that occurred while he was slaughtering the fattest hog of the season for Bedford’s Annual Easter Picnic and Church Auction. The hospital records listed him as DOA, official pronouncement at 7:32 p.m. Most everything else to do with the incident was subject to controversy. Speculation ran from the practical to the occult. Had the attack been brought on by the physical strain of killing the pig? Was this usually a job Ted did alone, or had queer circumstances left him without assistance? Did he die in tandem with the beast, as he ran the blade across its throat? Or had the attack come moments later, triggered by the release of the animal’s blood, as though it had poisoned the very air Ted breathed? Had the pig been possessed by some demonic spirit? Why had this blasphemy happened to Ted Kersey? Why now?
After being bandied about in church and on the walkways of Bedford’s tiny main street for a few days, most of these questions were shrugged off as mysteries beyond the ken of the town’s average folk. “God knows the answers, and that’s enough,” said Sister Mary Beth, when a reporter from the Dufferin Free Muskrat asked her whether or not this turn of events would cast a pall over the beloved annual picnic.
Yet there were questions that refused to go away, and it was these that came to taint the air of Dufferin County for a few strange weeks with the delirious haze of a high fever and the queasy stink of rotten meat.
Different Beasts Page 11