How We Play the Game in Salt Lake and Other Stories

by M. Shayne Bell

  We’d hung dim red lights over the table where Sam and I sat to do our cutting. After we turned on the freezer and adjusted the nitrogen pump, we turned off the other lights in the freeze-shack and the help came out. Sam and I had twelve help following us around just then. We’d had as many as thirty. They’d take turns feeding nicoji bodies down the hole on top of the freezer till the weights registered five pounds and a red light started flashing; then they’d jump from the stool and reach their leathery little hands around Sam and me very carefully, very quietly — holding their breath, almost — and snatch the piles of heads, tails, and legs. They didn’t like the guts as much as the hard parts. We could hear them munching and chittering in the corners all night every night we worked the freeze-shack. By morning they’d be sick from eating so much.

  “Slow down,” Sam said. “Leg.” He pointed with his pocketknife to a bit of leg I’d left on the nicoji I’d just cut. The company inspectors had opened a package from our last shipment and found a tiny bit of chitinous leg. They docked half our money for that. You couldn’t train the help to reject a nicoji that still had part of a leg or tail — they liked the stuff — so you had to make sure yourself. Some teams had so much trouble with the inspectors that they worked together, one team to cut, the other to inspect what had been cut. Sam and I weren’t that good yet, hadn’t started making enough money to be in danger of paying off Vattani and buying a ticket home.

  One of the help started parading around the freeze-shack rattling the two peach pits we kept in a can. I got up and took the can away from him and hung it back on its nail. Sam and I’d each gotten a peach our first Thanksgiving out but didn’t plant the pits. It was too hot here, though when we were going to get someplace on this planet cool enough to plant peaches I didn’t know.

  “I got a letter,” Sam said when I sat back down.

  I looked up. I hadn’t, again. Even Loryn hadn’t written for seven months.

  “My family got the nicoji I sent for Christmas,” Sam said.

  It was soon Christmas, and the company would ship nicoji at reduced rates to our families so they would think we were making lots of money and were all right — sent the packages with company versions of our letters.

  “Think Vattani got his camera fixed?” I asked.

  Sam shrugged. Vattani had had a camera our first year out, and Sam and I cleaned up, rented clothes in Vattani’s store to dress up in, and had our pictures taken to send home — we’d sat in the back of Vattani’s store in rented clothes holding up handfuls of nicoji we’d caught ourselves. The company’d loved it. We’d been out two months.

  Sam started sucking his finger. “Something bit me,” he said.

  “No nicoji,” I said.

  He nodded. He stirred the pile of nicoji in front of him with his knife. One started crawling away, and Sam stabbed it and held it up on the end of his blade — a nicoji shark: a carnivore that had evolved into looking like a nicoji. It had been in heaven, trapped in that sack with thousands of nicoji, and it was fat. Sam flicked it to the ground. One of the help stomped it with his heel to make sure it couldn’t bite, then started tossing it in the air. He’d throw it so hard it would hit the ceiling and slam back down on the dirt.

  Another help started squealing and jumping up and down — the freezer was out of plastic to wrap nicoji in. I ran for some plastic while Sam turned off the freezer and made the help stop pushing nicoji down the chute. I brought back three boxes, loaded one in the freezer, and we started up again. You couldn’t train the help to go after plastic.

  “Got enough plastic?” Sam asked.

  “Most of last month’s,” I said.

  Sam laughed. It was another way the company kept us. We had to pay rent on the freezers and go to Vattani’s store for plastic and liquid nitrogen and company-approved disinfected water to mist the nicoji with.

  Sam started humming the tune the company played on its ads back home — “Make a million; Eat nicoji. Spend a million; Beat the times” — and the rain started: a few drops hit the tin roof of our freeze-shack like bullets, then a downpour came in an explosion of sound that made me remember Javanese rock concerts. The help covered their ears and ran under crates, sacks, and our chairs, chittering loudly, trying to be heard over the rain. But the rain could fall for hours and Sam and I had a deadline to beat, so I kept cutting nicoji and Sam stood up to feed nicoji to the freezer.

  The help quit chittering, suddenly.

  I looked up. Sam looked up, and then we heard a pounding on the door. I ran to open it, and Sam switched off the freezer.

  It was Raimundo, wet to the skin. He stepped just inside the door, brushing water from his arms, his pants dripping on the dirt floor. I pushed the door shut.

  “I owe you,” Raimundo said to me. “I’ve come to pay you back for helping me with my teeth.”

  I didn’t know if he meant he was going to beat me up for the pain I’d caused him, or what. He walked to where Sam sat, and I followed. “Turn on the freezer,” he said. He wanted noise. I thought the rain made enough noise, but Raimundo wanted more. Sam turned on the freezer.

  “A new company’s set up base on the mesão,” he said.

  We just stared. The mesão was a huge mesa rising out of the pântano two weeks south of us — solid land to build on, but days away from nicoji marshes, we were told, and out of our concession anyway. The company had its concession only till scientists decided whether the help were sentient or merely imitative, and it could keep its part of this world only if the help weren’t sentient. I wondered if the coming of this second company meant ours had finally bought off the scientists and had their “decision.”

  “The new company’s Brazilian registry and will buy your contracts and give you citizenship. It pays well. Its town has cinemas, more stores than one, good doctors, and women.”

  “How do you know?” I asked.

  “I met one of their teams in the pântano. They had new equipment — prods that shocked nicoji out of the mud before the tide.”

  “And they told you this — about the cinemas and the women?”

  “Do I look like a fantasist? Do I look like my brain is full of lagarto poison?”

  I looked at Sam.

  “Manoel and I are poling south to this new company. I spit on American Nicoji for keeping me here three years and letting my teeth rot.”

  He spat on the floor. I hoped, for his sake, that there was a new company with a dentist. “Come, too,” Raimundo said. “You won’t need your insurance, then.”

  Sam laughed.

  “Do you still have your insurance?”

  I nodded. The option to buy life insurance from firms not owned by the company was the one real benefit the company-controlled union allowed us. Sam and I had named each other the beneficiary of our policies.

  “So if Sam dies, you get to go home?” Raimundo laughed, asking me.

  “And vice versa,” I said.

  “Aren’t you afraid he will kill you in the night?” Raimundo asked Sam, pointing his thumb at me.

  Sam smiled.

  “If they let you go home,” Raimundo said.

  Everybody wondered if they’d really let us go home, where we could talk and dry up their supply of workers. I knew only one guy who’d left: Ben Silva. He’d scrimped and saved and one day made enough from a catch to pay off Vattani and buy a one-way ticket halfway home. That was good enough for him. They’d made him wait three days before letting him up to the ship, and he sat the whole time on the steps of the company house, afraid they’d leave him if he wasn’t ready the minute they called. He hadn’t bought another thing, not even food, worried he wouldn’t have enough money for something he touched that they’d charge him for and that they’d cancel his ticket before he could borrow money to pay off Vattani again. Sam and I took him some food on the second day. He said he’d write us a letter and say, “The nicoji here tastes like duck liver,” which would really mean he’d made it home in one piece, alive. We never got a letter.<
br />
  “Will you come?”

  I looked at Sam. We were both thinking the same things. We’d been Americans all our lives, and it might be fun to be Brazis for a while — the average person had three different citizenships in his lifetime because of company transfers. We even spoke a little Portuguese. But getting American Nicoji to sell our contracts was the problem. If it wouldn’t, we’d be in big trouble when we got back here. And if we broke contract and stayed with the new company anyway, we’d have to stay with them forever no matter what they were like. Breaking contract would ruin our work records. Only renegade corporations would hire us after that. It was also nearly hurricane season, and we usually stayed close to the company town then. Besides, Raimundo had been quick and free with his story, and we’d learned not to trust anyone who was easy with information. Our first month out, an older team had given Sam and me directions to a nicoji hole they knew about, and we’d followed their directions to one of the worst holes in the pântano. I wondered if Raimundo was setting up an elaborate joke on me to get even.

  “Does this company have a station?” I asked.

  “Claro que sim, Jake — of course.”

  “Why haven’t we seen it in the night sky?”

  “They positioned it a few degrees below the horizon. American Nicoji already had the spot above us.”

  Sam and I just looked at him.

  “The new company pays experienced guys more — they located so close to us, on the very edge of our concession, to draw us all off to work for them.”

  I looked down and scuffed my right shoe on the ground.

  “Oh, I get it,” Raimundo said. “Don’t trust me. Don’t come with someone who’s had the way pointed out to him. But when I do not come back from the pântano, think of what I said and head for the south edge of the mesão. We’ll party in the new town.”

  He kicked a nicoji tail to the help crouched under my chair. “Ten cents less per package, this ship,” he said. He turned and walked to the door. I let him out and watched him run under the eaves of our house and up the street, splashing through the rain and mud.

  “Vattani said five cents less,” I told Sam.

  If Raimundo’s story were true it meant a way out — a new company that would buy our contracts gave us a place to start over. If it paid a fair price for nicoji, Sam and I could earn passage home someday.

  We got back to work. Most of the help crawled out from under the sacks and boxes and chairs after the rain stopped. I wasn’t paying much attention to anything but my thoughts — just automatically cutting off nicoji heads, legs, and tails; gutting the bodies and rinsing them; stacking the bodies to one side and sliding the hard parts to another; thinking of movie theaters and dentists — when one of the help started screaming. Sam switched off the freezer, and I jumped up. The help stuffing nicoji down the chute had his hand caught, had probably dropped a nicoji down the chute after the red light started flashing and tried to grab it back. I ran to his side, and he quit screaming once he could see that Sam and I knew what had happened to him. He was shaking so bad the stool he stood on shook, and when I leaned against him to look down the chute, he rubbed his head on my shoulder.

  “Hand’s caught in the wrapper, Sam, and bleeding.”

  Sam ran for the alcohol. I flipped the wrapper setting to retract and pulled back the wrapper’s arms. The help flipped out his hand and jumped down from the stool. Before he could run away, I grabbed him and pulled the melted plastic from his hand. Sam came and dumped alcohol over the cuts. The help howled. I smeared on an antibacterial cream that must have felt good because he calmed down while I bandaged his hand. Sam started cleaning the freezer. Two of the help’s fingers were broken, and he’d have bad bruises. I made little splints for his fingers and sent him off with four uncut nicoji in his good hand.

  We worked till half past midnight, then put on our insulated gloves, boxed up our packages of nicoji, and carried them to the inspectors. Sam and I were the last team in line. Eloise Hansdatter was just ahead of us, gun strapped to her leg, careful to watch us walk up, make sure who we were. The few women up here had to be careful. She was telling a team of Brazis about a scam of lagarto that had crawled onto the lower branches of the tree she was sleeping in. “Poison was rank on their breath,” she said. “I started to hallucinate just breathing the fumes — saw talkative naked men all around me in the trees. I had to kill the lagarto just to make the men shut up.” The Brazis laughed. I smiled at Sam. Eloise worked alone and would not stop talking when she was in town because for weeks at a time she had no one to talk to but herself. Even so, you had to like her.

  “Freeze all your nicoji?” she asked Sam and me.

  Sam laughed.

  “Thought not,” she said. “Me either — which made my help happy: they know I’ll give them what’s left when I’m out of here.”

  She didn’t mean just out of the company house — she meant out of the town. Eloise never slept here. She’d take out her raft, drift down different bayous, and spend the night guarded by her help.

  The company had strung one light bulb over the door, and the guys standing in the light were swatting bugs. Something dropped into my hair and crawled inside my shirt and down my back. I started squirming, and it started biting. “Something’s biting my back, Sam!” I said.

  He got behind me, shoved his boxes against my back, and smashed whatever was biting me. “Why did they put up this light?” I asked. No one had ever kept a light outside before.

  “My help couldn’t stand it,” Eloise said. “They’re off in the shadows. When it’s my turn to go in, I’ll have to go get my boxes from them.” She’d worked with the same group of help ever since she’d come up, and they always carried her boxes to the company house for her. They were jealous little devils that would hiss at you if you sat too close to Eloise and throw trash at you if you stayed too long in the freeze-shack she ran with two of the other female teams. But they only treated you that nice if Eloise actually let them know she didn’t mind that you were there. If she did mind, or if the help thought she was in any danger, watch out. Just before Sam and I came up, two guys tried to jump Eloise, and her help practically bit them to death before she could pull the help off and keep them off — one of the guys had an eye chewed right out of its socket and he’d had to start wearing a patch. For her sake, I was glad Eloise had her help. Guys talked about poisoning them so they could have a little fun with Eloise, but no one ever tried it.

  Agulhas, tiny bugs with eight needle-sharp suckers spaced evenly on their bellies, started swarming over our feet and crawling up our legs. Eloise tried to keep them brushed off her legs and ours, but she couldn’t do it — there were too many bugs. That was it for me. “Turn out the light!” I yelled. Other guys and Eloise started shouting the same thing.

  A company boy shoved out through the door. “Shut up!” he yelled.

  “The light’s attracting bugs,” I yelled back.

  “Then complain to your union rep when he comes next month. He insisted you guys needed this light.”

  The union rep hadn’t asked us about putting a light outside in the dark.

  “Think of this as your bonus for being last in line,” company boy said. “More bugs to swat.” He laughed and turned to walk inside.

  “Just turn it out!” I yelled.

  “And what will we tell your union?” He swatted his neck, looked at his hand, and rubbed it on his pants.

  “Tell the guys in there to hurry,” Eloise said.

  “Oh, you want me to tell the inspectors they’re too slow? You want them to hurry and maybe not figure the right price for your nicoji but at least get you inside and out of the bugs?”

  Nobody said a word to that.

  Sam and I finally got inside and onto a bench where we swatted the agulhas on our legs and sat with our cold boxes steaming beside us on the bench and under our feet. I pulled off my shirt and had Sam try to see what bit me at first, but he’d smashed it so bad he couldn’t tell wha
t it was. He brushed off my back, and I shook out my shirt and put it back on.

  A company boy walked up and down the aisle in front of us, leering, swinging his billy club onto the palm of his hand. The company boys needed clubs. The company house saw trouble.

  “Next.”

  We set our boxes on the counter. The inspectors took them to a table and tore into one, tossing random packages of nicoji onto scales and then into a microwave. They cut open the thawed packages, and nicoji juice spurted out over the inspectors’ plastic aprons. One fat inspector kept shoving our raw nicoji in his mouth four at a time, chewing and swallowing. He started into another box.

  “Hey!” I yelled. “That’s one already.”

  He jerked his thumb in my direction. “You guys get the special treatment after last time.”

  Sam grabbed my arm. I could hear the company boy walking up behind us, slapping his club onto his palm. I wanted to shove the club down his throat, but I knew better than to try it. The inspectors had our nicoji.

  They tore open packages from each box. When they finished, the fat inspector stuffed his mouth full of our nicoji again, counted the packages left whole, thought for a minute, then sputtered a price. A different inspector keyed the money into our account and printed out a receipt. Sam put it in his shirt pocket. We turned to leave.

  “This way, farm boys.”

  Company boy stood in front of us, pointing down a hallway with his club. Farm boys? At least I’d had a job before coming up here — at least I hadn’t been a thieving street thug.

  “Yeah,” I said, and I started to brush by. I always walked out the front door.

  He grabbed my shirt collar. “You hard of hearing? I said this way.” He tried to shove me in the direction he wanted me to go. Six more company boys ran up. Before I could do anything, Sam grabbed my arm and pulled me down the hall. The company boys followed. I shoved Sam away from me, mad that he’d stopped me, even though I knew fights only got us trips to the correction field and made us poorer after we’d paid for damages and the company boys’ medical bills.