Blind Judgement g-5

by Grif Stockley

Damn. A plant where the workers have to pay for their own tools! At the next station the toenails and more hair on the feet area are removed, and then the actual cutting begins.

  “Watch Tony rip,” Cy says, with obvious pride in his voice.

  “I taught him myself ten years ago, I’ve never seen anybody work with less wasted motion.” Tony is a middle-aged black man with sloping shoulders and arms as long as Scottie Pippen’s, also an Arkansas product. First, he splits the hog, still hanging from the grappling hook, lengthwise.

  As Tony works, Cy explains that at Southern Pride (unlike many other plants), they do not save the lungs, ears, or intestines, because Willie demonstrated to his own satisfaction long ago it wasn’t economical. Tony tosses these items into a bag that makes me nauseated to look at. Then, as the head comes off, I find myself listening more than watching.

  “Some people come direct to the plant and buy hogs’ heads for five and a half bucks, and we sell ‘em to stores. They cook up what we call souse out of it. We make it up ourselves, and you can buy it over the counter. Spreads good on crackers. I’ll give y’all some before you leave.”

  For the first time Dick, standing beside me, grins. It is a promise neither of us would be brokenhearted to see go unfulfilled. Almost directly in front of me is a guy squinting hard at various pig parts.

  He looks as if he dropped a contact lens into them.

  “Who’s that guy?” I ask, noting that the sheriff has grown even more tightlipped than usual though he is watching everything like a hawk. I realize that “some people” means blacks.

  “Harrison-one of the federal inspectors,” Cy says.

  “He’s still kind of an asshole, but it was him that noticed that Doss’s knife was out of place the next morning. If it wasn’t for him, it might not have been checked.” Dick asks, “What’s he doing?” Dressed like everybody else in a white coat and cap, Harrison looks as if he is about to lose his cookies, too.

  Cy points at the pig hanging above us and then to a metal table to our left where four men are busy cutting meat.

  “Before the hog makes it to the table, the inspector checks each one’s parts for abscesses, tumors, signs of disease in general.

  They’ve already checked them in the lot before they go into the plant.”

  Dick suggests that we visit with Harrison, and we walk over to him. Cy introduces us, and it is clear that despite who we are, he is eager to talk.

  “Since they gotta buy their knives in this plant, each man puts his mark on his so nobody will run off with it,” he says in answer to my question about how Class Bledsoe was fingered so quickly.

  “Every afternoon when this plant closes down, I know exactly where every piece of equipment, including knives, is, because I’ve inspected them to make sure it’s all clean. The next morning the sheriff here had me walk with him over every inch of this place. I noticed that Doss-he was the best meat cutter Willie had working-had moved his knife just a little from the night before. Want me to show y’all where it was?”

  “I’d appreciate it,” I say, looking down at Clarence Harrison, who can’t be more than 5‘4”.

  Beaming as if he had solved the murder of John F. Kennedy, he looks in the face exactly like James Carville, the President’s celebrated political guru. We follow him across the floor, and he stops in front of the east wall and points to a small wooden table.

  “Class nearly always kept his knife overnight in a sheath on the center of this table just like so,” he says, pressing the knuckles of his left hand against the wood.

  “When I came through the next morning,” he says, flipping his hand over, “it was upside down and a little over to the side. As soon as I remarked on this. Sheriff, you remember you had a man take pictures of all the knives, where they were and everything.”

  Bonner merely nods. Despite his redneck look, Harrison, it seems clear, respects the sheriff, now that criminal charges have finally been brought.

  It dawns on me that Harrison expects to be considered the hero in this case and testify as the star witness. I doubt seriously he will be willing to harbor any doubts that anyone other than Class was the killer. If that is true, it will be unfortunate.

  He is in an ideal position to observe the social dynamics within the plant. I’ll get back to him later, but I am not hopeful I will get anything.

  Dick asks, “How well did you know Class?”

  “Well, we didn’t socialize, if that’s what you’re getting at,” Harrison says and laughs.

  “Class had a mouth on him, I’ll guarantee you. He was good for one thing-cutting meat and throats. I’ll give him that.”

  We move on and Cy points out the men who are doing various cuts of meat: hams, bacon, ribs, chops. Their knives flashing, they work quickly and steadily. This part of the job doesn’t seem as gross as what I’ve just been witnessing. The hog, alive a few minutes ago, now looks more like what I see in the store. Of course, humans can get used to anything.

  He leads us through a door, and in the hall we see large containers of presumably inedible hog parts.

  “These are hauled off to the rendering plant near Memphis,” Cy says, his voice conversational now that he doesn’t have to shout.

  “They boil this down and make dog food and stuff out of it.” He bends down and picks up a bottle.

  “Before it’s taken off, it has to be denatured, so nobody’ll be tempted to try to sell it for human food.” He unscrews the cap and pours a green liquid over the offal. I feel my gorge rise.

  “I guess some people,” he says, chuckling, “ain’t got out of the habit of eating this shit.”

  I burp into my hands. If it were warm in here, I’d be throwing up.

  Fortunately, Cy opens a door and leads us into a cooler. The frigid air feels good despite the fact that I was not at all warm.

  “It’s ten below in here. One of the many things we don’t have a handle on since Willie died is maintenance. Costs are beginning to eat this plant alive. Willie had it figured out, but we sure as hell don’t.

  There’re not a lot of people who know the refrigeration business around here, and I think we’re getting ripped off. According to Darla, we’re paying a lot more for things now that Willie’s dead.”

  I look around the room and see giant slabs of pork that look like frozen monoliths. Though there is plenty of space, I feel claustrophobic.

  Perhaps, it is the knowledge that it wouldn’t take long to die in here.

  “Do you think Eddie is running things okay?” I ask, curious to see Dick’s reaction.

  Cy folds his arms against his chest.

  “I guess so,” he mumbles. Cy may be a redneck, but he, too, knows that it is the messenger who gets shot.

  He wants to keep his job. Since he is part of management, criticizing it won’t help him.

  We go out and into another room, and see our first female employees in

  the actual operation of the plant. Not unexpectedly, they look a little rough, but one woman, about my age, catches my eye and grins.

  “Fresh meat,” she says, nudging her coworker, a woman at least ten years younger.

  Cy ignores her and explains, “We vacuum pack our sausage. The profit’s back here. You can’t hardly find butchers in supermarkets these days.

  More and more all the grocery stores do is stick it out on the meat racks. This business is changing all the time.”

  Clearly, it is beyond him. The kill floor he can manage, but Cy probably isn’t much help to Eddie on the business end. We follow Cy around the rest of the plant and soon I am hopelessly lost as he shows us more cookers, smokers, a spice room, a kitchen, and the break room.

  Willie’s killer could have tried to hide his body in a dozen places.

  But obviously, it would have been found immediately, so why bother?

  Standing on the lip of the loading dock he points out the trucks and then spits harshly on the concrete. I ask, “Couldn’t his killer have been someone who had never seen the plan
t? All he needed to know was that Willie often worked there by himself after closing time.”

  Though he should be used to it, Cy hugs himself in the damp February air.

  “It had to be somebody who knew the plant,” he says, shaking his head.

  “I’ve been looking for you!”

  We turn and see a woman standing at the door with a clipboard waving at Cy. She, too, is in a white coat and is wearing a cap. Cy takes a long drag on his cigarette and turns his back on her before saying under his breath, “Frieda-she’s the other one. She’s not so bad, anymore.”

  Government inspector, he must mean. Since Cy isn’t budging, she walks toward us, impervious to Cy’s studied indifference. A tall, awkward woman with bad teeth, she is probably used to men being rude to her and affects a professional cheerfulness.

  “You can run, but you can’t hide.”

  When Cy deigns to turn and glare at her, she hands him her clipboard.

  Barely glancing at the paper he is signing, he says, “These are some lawyers, and I guess you know the sheriff by now.”

  Dick nods, and I introduce myself, wondering if Cy remembers my name.

  He is not what I would call a people person.

  “Frieda Blakey,” she says, smiling again.

  “I’ve got an uncle who’s a lawyer. He’s in prison.”

  There is no malice in her tone. Perhaps this is how she bonds with other humans.

  “Great place to find clients,” I say, deciding to humor her.

  Given her reception by Cy, she must have a lonely job.

  “I’ve been telling Kip to keep ‘em spaced,” she says apologetically to Cy.

  “He just blows it off.” “I know,” Cy says, handing her the clipboard back.

  “I’ll talk to him.”

  Frieda stands a little closer than absolutely necessary and says, “You know the difference between a dead lawyer in the road and a dead skunk in the road?”

  “No, what?” I respond, thinking I had heard every lawyer joke told in the last ten years.

  “There are skid marks in front of the skunk!”

  she cackles.

  Dick and I laugh politely. Frieda wants desperately to be liked, and I’ll do my best when I contact her later on.

  Our tour is at an end, and since neither of us is going to interview witnesses with the sheriff breathing down our necks, we return to the office to say goodbye to Eddie. I ask to use the bathroom, and sure

  enough, I can hear the talk in the office through the thin plywood door as plain as day. The secretary could have easily overheard Class on the phone. Dick thanks Eddie for the use of Cy’s time, and we head for the parking lot.

  Dick tells me that he will buy me a cup of coffee at the Delta Star restaurant two doors down by his office, and I follow his Mercedes back into town, wondering what I have learned. Probably nothing other than that if I lose my law license, I don’t want to work in a meat packing plant. I could stand around for an hour at the crime scene and not pick up a damn thing.

  At the Delta Star restaurant next to his office downtown Dick makes me feel better by confessing, “The only thing I learned was that Willie must have felt very comfortable with the person who killed him. What you need to find out is how often someone like Class came up to the front office. Did they come up to use the telephone? If somebody was in the bathroom in the back, could they come up and use the one in the office?

  What I don’t understand is, if the plant closed at two, how is Butterfield going to explain to the jury what Class was doing hanging around after hours? If he had come up front after the plant was shut down instead of going home, wouldn’t that have made Willie suspicious?

  You need to talk to that Darla Tate if you can get anything out of her.

  She’s probably wedded to her story, though.”

  The Delta Star is nicer than the Cotton Boll but not by much. The downtown area is thin, indeed. There are few retail establishments and

  even fewer people on the streets. Though it is half past eleven, there are only two other customers in this cafe. I ask, “Are you going to interview all the workers?”

  Dick tastes his coffee and winces at its bitter flavor.

  “Not if you’re going to. I have such a heavy trial schedule between now and June I don’t see how I can. You’ll share it with me if you learn anything that can help Paul, won’t you?”

  Their arrogance shouldn’t surprise me now.

  “Sure,” I say. Dick expects me to do his work for him because he doesn’t have time. I’ll be happy to oblige him. We talk for a few more minutes, and then I am back on the road to Blackwell County for a deposition in one of my two personal injury cases. I will turn right around and be back over here tomorrow to pick up Angela and drive to the ball game. What will Dick think about me when he learns I have lied to him?

  Gunning the Blazer up to seventy-five, I pretend I don’t really care.

  The next morning I get to Angela’s a little before noon, but as usual she is running behind and comes to the door with a tube of lipstick in her hand.

  “Come on in,” she says, smiling.

  “I’ll be ready in a few minutes.” Even without her face completely made up, she looks good. She is wearing black stockings and a tight gray skirt, and I feel a stab of desire slash through me like a sudden twinge

  of heartburn. Goodness. Does she know what she is stirring up in me? I tell myself to calm down. She is entitled to dress up without me thinking about what she looks like naked. I stand in the kitchen and to still myself contemplate the oak tree just outside her window. I spot two squirrels chasing each other on a branch that almost touches her roof. Probably a male chasing a female. Damn, if that’s what she wants, I don’t have a chance.

  Driving over the desolate flatness of the Delta, we are soon chattering as if we were a pair of old biddies heading out for an afternoon’s shopping in the big city for our grandchildren instead of two healthy heterosexuals enclosed in a small space with a long erotic history between us. As she talks her skirt creeps up an inch on her thigh.

  A scent that reminds me ever so slightly of honeysuckle permeates the space between us in the front seat of the Blazer. As children, my best friend Hannah and I used to pretend we were hummingbirds, rapidly waving our arms and biting off the ends of the flowers on the bush in old Mrs. nectar contained inside. Of course, we had to use our hands to remove the stems to get at the juice, but the image of Hannah’s pixieish face as she waggled her palms up and down beside her head remains an indelible memory. I have never been that innocent in the company of a female again.

  Angela wants to know everything about the case, and I tell her, beginning with my visit with Connie and her mother last Saturday morning after breakfast and ending with my cup of coffee with Dick yesterday.

  “Dick acts like I’m on their payroll,” I say, not without satisfaction.

  “Neither of them has a clue how I feel about Paul.”

  Angela, who has been listening and asking questions with the devoted fascination of a true trial junkie, comments, “Maybe they don’t remember the past exactly the way you do.”

  I swerve to avoid the remains of a possum.

  “Are you saying the Taylors never cheated us, or that Paul never bought up our land at a tax sale?”

  I exclaim, irritated by her dispassionate tone.

  Angela reaches over and pats my leg.

  “I wasn’t there, Gideon. If you say it happened, I believe you.”

  Though her comment reassures me, I begin to wish my memories of the actual events were more concrete. But I was only a kid when my father died, and I was in the Peace Corps when my mother lost her land. It was only when she died that I discovered there were no eighty acres to inherit.

  When I do not respond, Angela says, “There is already so much gossip about us that half the town will be disappointed if we don’t come back married.”

  I chuckle at the thought of it, but the fact that she is willing to tease
is proof that she has been thinking about me.

  “I’ve stirred the pot pretty good, huh “You don’t know the half of it,” she says cryptically, and then adds, “At least this will take some pressure off me. As soon as your husband dies or divorces you, and the pity wears off, a woman, unless she’s old, becomes a pariah in a small town. You’re viewed with fear and loathing by the women and the men suddenly think you’re white trash.”

  This outburst and the vehemence with which it is said is straight from the heart. I now understand better my mother’s words after the funeral that she should have just jumped in the grave with my father. She wasn’t just grieving for the past; she was thinking of her future.

  “Unless you’re old, it must be terrible being a single woman in Bear Creek,” I say, sympathetically.

  Angela shrugs.

  “Maybe it’s the futility of the situation over here that gets us down.

  East Arkansas is probably more like South Africa than anyone cares to admit, but we don’t have a Nelson Mandela to save us.”

  Again, the hyperbole. Yet, in Memphis, less than an hour’s drive east, it is hard to get away from the feeling that racial problems in the Delta are as permanent as the land itself. At the Pyramid, just across the Mississippi River, the coaches and players are almost all black while the crowd is overwhelmingly white. Dan and I have just this week been to see Hoop Dreams, a documentary that follows two black Chicago youths through their high school basketball careers to college. One kid, the less talented of the two, ended up at Arkansas State after

  graduating from a junior college. I left the movie more convinced than ever that big time university athletic programs are poorly disguised professional sports businesses that should pay corporate income taxes.

  Both the Memphis and Arkansas coaches have recently complained loudly and publicly of racism directed against them. Their bitterness stems from some commentators’ past contentions that as coaches they are better recruiters than tacticians. White coaches such as Bobby Knight and Eddie Sutton get praised for their game plans. The implication, the black coaches contend, is that they are too dumb to be astute tacticians. Angela, chewing contentedly on a hot dog before the game begins, asks, “How hard can it be anyway? I’ve never known any coach who I wanted to do brain surgery on me.”