My Year of Meats

by Ruth L. Ozeki

  “You deserve worse than this for lying to your husband,” he hissed into her ear. “You think I’m stupid?” He lifted her by the shoulders and pounded her against the floor, over and over. “You think I don’t know you’d started again? That I couldn’t smell you bleeding?” Then, just as he was about to ejaculate, he pulled out. “You think I don’t know when you are in heat ... ?” he whispered, inserting his penis into her vagina now. “So you want to be a lesbian? You want to have a baby but not a man? Well, here ...” He pulled out, then thrust himself into her as hard as he could. “Tell this to that bitch Takagi.” He ejaculated, then collapsed on top of her.

  Akiko lay perfectly still, eyes glued shut, crushed into the tatami by his smothering weight. Her heartbeat deafened her. Slowly the pain began to punch through, like an erratic pulse at points across her body—a dull throb here, a searing tear there. His breath was hot against her neck, his ribs pressing into her backbone as his sleep deepened. She wanted to touch herself, cry, cry out, but she was afraid to move. Hold still, she thought, a little longer—because the worst thing in the world at this point would be to wake him and then have to make conversation.

  He started to snore. Gingerly she shifted her body to one side and little by little managed to inch out from beneath him. Her legs felt sticky and she smelled blood. She reached her hand down. But it couldn’t be. She’d just finished her period two weeks earlier. She got to her feet, collected her pajama bottoms, then limped to the bathroom.

  The fluorescent light was like a blow to her face. The blood was bright and smeared along the insides of her legs. She sat down on the toilet and started to pee, when a sudden shock of nauseating pain in her anus made her gasp, and she realized the blood was coming from there. She took a deep breath, then washed herself gingerly, flinching with the pain. Turning off the light in the bathroom, she groped her way into the kitchen. On the way, she found her husband’s jacket in a tangle on the floor. She picked it up, straightened it, and extracted his wallet from the breast pocket. She looked inside. Then she went to the telephone.

  JANE

  “Is this Miss Takagi, please?”

  The call had been forwarded to my office. I picked it up, desperately hoping it wasn’t Suzie Flowers.

  “Yes, speaking ...”

  “Takagi-san ... ?”

  “Hai ... sumimasen ga, donata-sama?” I’d switched to Japanese, but I had no idea who it was on the other end. The whispery voice sounded as though it were coming from a coffin, way underground.

  “Akiko desu. Ueno Akiko desu.”

  “Ueno-san? Doshitano desuka? Are you all right? What time is it there?”

  “It’s three in the morning. I’m all right.”

  “Did you get my fax?”

  “... Yes. Yes, I got it.”

  “I can barely hear you. What’s the matter? Is your husband there? Can he hear you?”

  “He’s asleep. It’s okay. He’s drunk and sleeping. He won’t wake up.” She paused and swallowed. “He found it.”

  “Found it? Found what? Oh no—my fax?”

  “Yes. I’d put it between the pages of the English dictionary. He is so vain, you know, about his English? He never looks up any words. I thought it would be safe. But this time there was a word he didn’t understand, from your fax to him on bad meats? I think it was ‘unsavory.’ ”

  “Akiko-san, I’m so sorry. What happened?”

  “He became very angry.”

  “Did he hit you?”

  “Yes. A little. It’s all right.”

  “You must—”

  “No. The reason I am calling is not that. The reason I am calling is because he has instructed me to pack a suitcase for him with clothing for a trip. He did not tell me where he is going, but I looked into his wallet and found his ticket. He will be leaving on Friday. He is going to Colorado.”

  10.

  The Gods-Absent Month

  SHŌNACON

  On the Day After a Fierce Autumn Wind

  On the day after a fierce autumn wind everything moves one deeply. The garden is in a pitiful state with all the bamboo and lattice fences knocked over and lying next to each other on the ground. It is bad enough if the branches of one of the great trees have been broken by the wind; but it is a really painful surprise to find that the tree itself has fallen down and is now lying flat over the bushclover and the valerians.

  JANE

  Colorado is one of the most beautiful states in the country. I love driving from east to west across the vast Great Plains, through Denver and straight up into the mountains, still so young and assertive with their jaggedy upward thrustings, then over the Continental Divide to hook up with the Colorado River and to follow it past the Glenwood Dam and on into the plateau. The westernmost town of any size is Grand Junction, once a thriving uranium production center in the years following WWII. When the mines closed, the Atomic Energy Commission allowed the radioactive mill tailings to be used in over six thousand housing structures and school foundations. Now Grand Junction is a center for fruit production—a rich riparian zone, the countryside bursts with iridescent peaches, sweet pears, luscious cherries, and glowing apples. The old river valley is cupped on either side by wildly eroded sandstone cliffs, like worn hands with fingers softly folded. Gradually these buttes and outcroppings subside even further, flattening into the gray clay deserts of eastern Utah, where ancient seas hid dinosaur bone and prehistoric fossil.

  Before going to an area, I would read all about it, keeping track on a map of scenic spots, places of interest, as well as all military and atomic installations.

  In Colorado Springs, the North American Air Defense Command established the Ent Air Force Base in 1957. In 1966, inside Cheyenne Mountain, they opened a new combat operations center.

  Just outside Denver was the Rocky Flats plutonium plant. It was closed in 1989 after two major fires and numerous accidents and leaks led to charges that the plant had seriously contaminated the surrounding countryside, causing a significant rise in cancers among Denver area residents and a veritable plague of mutations, deformations, reproductive disorders, and death among farm animals.

  I kept track of these places even before our arrest in Montana. On the way to Fly, Oregon, driving through southwest Washington State, we had unwittingly stumbled across the border of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Hanford site. I don’t remember what we were after—possibly the perfect sunset, or the inflorescence of a rare northern desert cactus—but when we came to the barbed wire and a sign said “Department of Energy—Keep Out,” how was I supposed to know that we’d reached the perimeter of the 570-mile nuclear city that produced the plutonium for “Fat Man,” the bomb that leveled Nagasaki? Later, as we were passing through the adjacent town of Sunnyside, I happened to ask our waitress at a diner about the facility, and she raised her eyes and whistled.

  “You went in there?” she said. “Ooh, that’s a no-no.”

  Hanford was one of three atomic cities hastily constructed in 1943 to produce plutonium for the Manhattan Project. Over the next twenty-five years, massive clouds of radioactive iodine, ruthenium, caesium, and other materials were routinely released over people, animals, food, and water for hundreds of miles. In the 1950s, it was discovered that the radioactive iodine had contaminated local dairy cattle, their milk, and all the children who drank it. As the incidence of thyroid cancer grew, the farmers in the surrounding areas—“downwinders,” they’re called—began to wear turtlenecks to hide their scars. It was the fashion, the waitress told me.

  When I recounted this story to the boys later on in the bar, Suzuki’s narrow eyes widened. He’d had relatives in Nagasaki, all of whom had died.

  We were lucky we didn’t get busted. These sites are hazardous, and I’m not even talking about the environmental fallout. They are well and jealously guarded by men who make a Rodney Dwayne Peairs, the Louisiana butcher who shot the Japanese exchange student, look reasonable and benign. Paradoxically, they have conserved thes
e desolate parts of the country. Often these landscapes hide underground bunkers, but on the surface they are rich with flora and fauna that have flourished, protected from families with fat-tired recreational vehicles, grazing cattle, and other ruminants.

  We drove through Colorado in our fifteen-passenger Ford production van, past towns called Cope, Hygiene, and Last Chance. For this trip, it was the eastern part of the state that I was interested in. Early explorers called it the “great American desert,” mile upon softly undulating mile, breathtaking and beautiful. Of course, it looks nothing like it once looked, when the first settlers came. The vistas, unbroken then and alive with grasses, are now cropped and divided into finite parcels whose neat right angles reassure their surveyors and owners while ignoring the subtle contours of the land. The fences stretch forever.

  “You see that?” Dave, my local driver, interrupted my plains-induced reverie. He pointed to an immense field we’d been passing for several minutes or maybe hours. It looked like all the others, stubbly hacked wheat stalks in neat rows as far as the eye could see. It made me dizzy, like a bad moire pattern on a videotape, and the back of my eyeballs ached. I squinted, trying to see what, in particular, he was pointing to.

  “What?”

  “There. The way wheat’s been planted up that hillock, with the rows perpendicular, up and down the side?”

  “Oh ... Yeah?”

  “Bad. Very bad.”

  “Why?”

  “Erosion.” He shook his head morosely.

  Dave was an agricultural student at Colorado State University. His last name was Schultz, and he looked remarkably like a baby version of Sergeant Schultz on Hogan’s Heroes, with an enormous breadth of chest and calm hands like sun-warmed rocks, made for comforting large terror-stricken animals. Suzuki and Oh liked him because he talked slowly and didn’t use a lot of words.

  One of the first things I ask a prospective driver is whether or not he likes to talk. Then I ask him what he knows about. Dave said, “Nope” and “Farms.” I hired him on the spot.

  Dave gave me the facts about farms:

  The United States has lost one-third of its topsoil since colonial times—so much damage in such a short history. Six to seven billion tons of eroded soil, about 85 percent, are directly attributable to livestock grazing and unsustainable methods of farming feed crops for cattle. In 1988, more than 1.5 million acres in Colorado alone were damaged by wind erosion during the worst drought and heat wave since the 1950s.

  “I remember it. I was on my dad’s farm,” said Dave. “I was just a kid then.”

  “Dave ... 1988? That was just a couple of years ago.”

  “Yup.”

  Drought and heat waves happen, Dave explained. Erosion didn’t have to. Not like this.

  “You know what we have here?” Dave asked, an hour or so later.

  “No, what?”

  “A Crisis. A National Crisis.”

  “A national crisis?”

  “Yup. Nobody sees it yet, but that’s what it is, for sure.”

  “Dave, what are you talking about?”

  He turned his head and stared at me, disbelieving, for a long time, so long that I started to get nervous, the Ford was rocketing down this country road, and Dave, though behind the wheel, wasn’t watching at all. Finally he shook his head and turned to face forward again.

  “Desertification,” he pronounced glumly. He had more than his share of profound German melancholy, which seemed at odds with his sunny blond, pink face. He’d wanted to enter the Beef Science Program at the university and had written a paper on the effects of cattle on soil erosion. The paper was called “The Planet of the Ungulates,” and it started out from the point of view of a Martian botanist who is circling the planet Earth in his spaceship, making a report on the creatures he sees below, only he’s made a terrible mistake because he thinks that Earth is ruled by these large-bodied hoofed mathematicians who own small multicolored two-footed slaves; the slaves work from morning to night to feed their masters and to fabricate over the land their vast intricate geometries. Of course, the Martian never gets to see the inside of a slaughterhouse. But then again, who does?

  Dave’s professor failed him on “The Planet of the Ungulates,” suggesting that he might be better off in the humanities rather than in agricultural sciences. As a result, he was taking a semester off, which was why he was free in October to work for us. He was thinking of dropping out entirely. Dave was not so popular at school because of his “take on things.” This depressed him. So did his landscape.

  Cattle are destroying the West, he told me, and whenever we passed a grazing herd, I could hear him groan. According to a 1991 United Nations report, 85 percent of U.S. Western rangeland, nearly 685 million acres, is degraded. There are between two and three million cattle allowed to graze on hundreds of millions of acres of public land in eleven Western states. Public land, Dave said, shaking his head.

  “I read this thing by a guy in a magazine once,” Dave said.

  “Oh, well, that sure sounds interesting....” Sarcasm, I figured, would be lost on Dave Schultz.

  “Yup,” he continued blandly, then gave me a dirty look. “It was an article in Audubon magazine. The guy was Philip Fradkin. Anyway, what he said was: ‘The impact of countless hooves and mouths over the years has done more to alter the type of vegetation and land forms of the West than all the water projects, strip mines, power plants, freeways and sub-division developments combined.’”

  “Wow.” I took out my notebook to copy it down. Dave was odd, but I was impressed. “Tell me, Dave, did you happen to ... I mean, did you memorize that?”

  “Yup.”

  “How come?”

  “I dunno. Guess I musta thought it was neat.”

  We drove in silence for another mile or two.

  “Did you know seventy percent of all U.S. grain is used for livestock?” Dave suddenly burst forth again. His big hands clutched the steering wheel and he stared straight ahead, as though struggling to control some powerful emotion.

  “And with all the tractors and machinery, it ends up taking the equivalent of one gallon of gas to make one pound of grain-fed U.S. beef?

  “And do you know that the average American family of four eats more than two hundred sixty pounds of meat in a year? That’s two hundred sixty gallons of fuel, which accounts for two point five tons of carbon dioxide going into the atmosphere and adding to global warming....

  “And that’s not even taking into account that every McDonald’s Quarter Pounder represents fifty-five square feet of South American rain forest, destroyed forever, which of course affects global warming as well....”

  “No kidding.” I was writing it all down. He looked over and gave me a smug grin.

  “Nope.... Are you at all interested in methane gas emissions?”

  Okay, so he’d lied about not liking to talk. I could forgive him, because Dave was obsessed.

  “Ready?” he continued. “Scientists estimate that some sixty million tons of methane gas are emitted as belches and flatulence by the world’s one point three billion cattle and other ruminant livestock each year. Methane is one of the four global warming gases, each molecule trapping twenty-five times as much solar heat as a molecule of carbon dioxide.” He finished on a triumphant note, then sighed, and his powerful shoulders sank.

  “This is great!” I said, scribbling wildly. I was excited. I had the beginnings of a solid Documentary Interlude that I could work into the Bunny Dunn Show. “Go on....”

  “I just don’t know,” he said sadly, as though the sight of my enthusiasm had somehow quenched his. “All these figures, but who cares? So what? It doesn’t help one bit. Nobody is going to do anything about it, and then slowly, bit by bit, it will be too late.”

  “I really wish you hadn’t said that.” I put my notebook away and stared out the window.

  Too late. Until Dave said that, I’d been feeling lucky. After Akiko’s call, I had rounded up Suzuki and Oh, calle
d the travel agent, and phoned Bunny and then Dave to tell them we’d be on the next plane to Denver. Next I called my obstetrician—I was due for a second ultrasound, as I was approaching the twenty-week mark, but he said it was fine to postpone for a week, until after the shoot. He asked how I was feeling and I told him just fine, which was true. In fact, I’d never felt better physically; although my belly was rounding out, it still wasn’t really visible under my clothes and wasn’t getting in my way at all. And emotionally I was oddly calm. And happy. And we had a four-day head start on Ueno. Somehow everything seemed to be falling into place.

  AKIKO

  Akiko stood in the bathroom with her bottom to the mirror, bent in half, peering over her shoulder. She drew her underpants slowly down around her knees. Two days later, and her rectum was still bleeding. She looked at it now. Little flakes of black crusted blood stuck to the insides of her buttocks, and as she watched, a trickle of bright-red blood oozed from the center. Like a bleeding eye, she thought. She studied it, twisting her body to get a better view. Then she lunged toward the toilet. Tripped up by her underpants, she fell to her knees and vomited repeatedly.

  Life is bloody, she thought, wiping her mouth. I don’t mind, because it can’t be helped.

  She got up and shuffled to the sink. She gargled some water from the tap to rinse out the sour taste, then sat down on the toilet. She stuck a fresh sanitary napkin to her underpants and waited. The worst was this terror of bowel movements. It hurt so much. She’d stopped eating almost entirely, hoping to avoid them until she healed, but it hadn’t worked. She still had to go. She sat, shoulders clenched to her ears, fingers laced in prayer. Her knees trembled in anticipation of the pain. Instead she felt a sudden flooding sensation. She got up from the toilet seat. Her eyes went starry, and the world went black. She stood there for a moment, like a cartoon character who gets socked in the nose and sent reeling round and round while all the pretty little birds twitter, then her knees buckled and the floor disappeared altogether.