by Edie Meidav
So one day the whole family, Lili, Ros, the mom, the little brother, all just skipped town and almost my life but not really. Because still the subject of Lili comes up with one of us. Say there’s something happening with some Spanish pop star or someone comes into the donut shop where I make egg sandwiches for some of my little brothers and the early-morning workers I went to school with, and for whatever reason they get the itch to bring up the thing to stick me with like, hey, what do you think Lili is doing now?
And then they go on wondering or say how they had a crush on her but they always end by saying the thing which is that it was my fault, right, and I need to tell them it’s not even funny anymore, not relevant. And they say something like how really if I hadn’t pushed her to have that huge party none of her bad family stuff would have happened. And I say I don’t want to hear it anymore. I don’t tell them how sometimes it hits me too, remembering Lili’s smile or how she rocked that bunny. Once an old crush of mine comes in the store and the topic comes up but I shush him until he gets annoyed and says I always like leaving things out. And I say, hey, don’t you like donuts because the missing part is what makes it sweet? His eyes say I’m wrong so I say nothing, just serve him up his order in the wax paper bag and leave out the biggest truth, how blame can basically embalm you for life.
BEEF
We take advantage of that friendliness that Southerners are supposed to have, you know, the gentleman thing. What happens is I come up close to the door, press my nose up to the glass everyone has out here, and one of these people comes to the door, could be an old lady, could be a guy, doesn’t matter, I start talking real fast, snowing it over them, which is why guys call me the Tongue, as in you want something, get the Tongue. Meat, beef, I’ve got a lot, I say, I’ll give it to you, it hurts me, cost me three hundred but I’ll give it to you for one hundred fifty, I’m almost shouting, I’ll give it to you—and behind me the other guys are holding these black cardboard boxes we use and our van is puffing steam, our van also painted black, paint so thick we can’t even use the rear lock and have to open it from the inside.
And if the people who open the door raise objections like: I don’t have room in my freezer, I tell them, look, I’ve known freezers in my time and people don’t know how to use them, no need to get namby-pamby on anyone, and I sort of shoulder it past them to the kitchen and start arranging things better, because one thing people don’t know how to use is space and one American thing we know for sure is space.
I start shoving in the beef, packages of sirloin and T-bone and all that, racks and hamburger patties, and I’m opening up the box and hefting stuff in there, and if they say they want to keep the box in case of returns I tell them no worries, it’s fine, I’ll recycle, I’ve got everything flat before they say lickety and before they say split they find themselves whipping out a pen and writing out a checkaroo for one hundred and fifty buckarupees and if they don’t, it’s essentially highway robbery, because now we’ve got all our beef in their freezer, unpackaged, and possession is nine-tenths of the law, what can they do and anyway we’re gone before they think better.
And hey, it’s not like we’re taking anything from them, they get to have beef for a month of Sundays, sauce it up anyway they like, some people would die to eat beef, and okay it’s not that prissy stuff, none of that pure free-range cock-and-bull stuff, that grain-eating mushmush, this is real cow slaughter. We’re talking choose your cut and take it between your jaws, bloody or barbecued or what have you.
This is what the lone cattle farmer has to do in our time. I mean, I’m not that guy but I’m hired by a guy who works with a guy who works with that guy, one local guy who’d never let me use his name but I feel for him, I do, and anyway when I got out of the hoosgaw after those domestic incidents what other jobs were open to me, I mean it wasn’t like some national company was going to hire me to drive a brown truck delivering parcels or anyone would trust me decorating their cakes or whatever pissant job people find when they need to get by. If my mom weren’t sick I wouldn’t be doing this beef racket, because that’s what it is, a racket, who we fooling here, but money is money and truth is, it’s sort of fun, the choice of a house, the way you zero in like a detective, circling.
Trick is you look for markers that someone isn’t really comfortable in his skin, like maybe you see someone with one of those cutesy mailboxes that show they’re living out here because they think it’s quaint, not someone throwing their trash out unbagged on their lawn but someone poking a rake at leaves as if he just the day before got introduced to the whole idea. Usually someone wearing jeans a little too tight. Once you’re done spotting, don’t move in right away, wait a while and come back in an hour, you have your guys with you, and the thing depends on speed which means that after a good take, inside the truck, you are high as kites, pure adrenaline without any guilt to tug it down, because after all didn’t you just sell a decent product at decent markdown?
The only other job I’ve been able to get is working for the campaigns, I mean, at night, going around and removing signs the other guy has put up, people know me around here, in the electioneering scheme of things they don’t call me Tongue, they call me Steam because I get away so fast, as in: you need a job done, you call Steam. Only the new people get shocked, usually Northerners drifted south because their cities have turned into habitats for rats living on one another, prime targets who don’t understand the way we do things.
Just for the record, the way you collect election signs is you stack them on a corner at night and then come back an hour later. No one really notices. All these endeavors depend on patience. You got to wait that hour before you scoop up the other guy’s signs and then go drive to the river and throw them in the water so that even if anyone dreams of using them, they would look waterlogged and who’s going to vote for someone whose signs are mildewed? It’s a message you should kick yourself out of the race, right? And the river’s always better than going to the county dump, because any fool can dig up signs from the dump.
When I was in Basra I was called Steam for a whole nother reason. I was in Basra but back in Bentonville, where I lived for a little bit just out of high school, I had Cherilyn waiting for me. Cherilyn I’d met when she auditioned for the kind of place where bartenders dance and sing on top of the bar and she hadn’t made it, they’d told her she was tops in the personality department but wouldn’t help sales that much and so she was sitting curbside outside the bar, crying just before Friday happy hour, a girl whose cheeks were so fresh you felt you got the first bite out of an apple, if you know what I mean, while she felt I understood her troubles and why getting this bar job meant so much. All the other guys in my unit were jealous about Cherilyn, whose mom had gotten her wallet photo retouched so that no matter how many times I took it out of my kit, Cherilyn stayed one of the world’s hot apples.
The bad thing happened two days before our little Basra Christmas and basically I was eating some turkey soup out of a can when we hear this explosion and everyone goes down, I mean even my can gets knocked out of my hand, all I have left is the spoon in my hand and that’s the dumb luck of a survivor. The only guys who didn’t buy the farm that second were me and the corporal about fifty yards away pulling down his pup. That one-night recon ended up some kind of life sentence because in the bargain I lost everybody but the corporal who was no big friend of mine though the moment did bond us, especially after we had to haul one of my buddies to the medevac that came too late because how can anyone get there in time to keep anything flowing?
The soup incident is why I got a purple heart, though it didn’t take bravery on my part, just the dumb luck I have, the way they gave me a heart making up for all those other lost hearts, which is also why I got to see this head-shrink now because some wires got crossed, I mean who wouldn’t need help? Like say you stared down the mouth of a nuclear reactor, wouldn’t you think you could use a little help? Not everyone gets blown up and just has his stupid soup spoon left i
n his hands.
Which probably in a roundabout way explains how I got into the beef racket, the whole thing with my buddies and then Cherilyn walking out—we had a few incidents, cops called, all that, but really she walked because I didn’t hang on her every word and mostly because she fell in love with some boy-toy prisoner friend of mine who only thought about lifting weights so he could update his photo on the prisoner website at the same time he was legally changing his name to Dream Big—all that just did a number on me, and when I got out for good, my friend Tony suggested I help him in a new business venture with guaranteed profit each month, he kept saying, right when I was ripe for anything guaranteed since prayer wasn’t doing the trick and also it had gotten too depressing staying at home with ma all the time waiting for the veteran’s check to thud in with all the other mail asking us to go buy things on the cheap. And I wasn’t ready to start calling anyone Your Honor again. You can see why meat made sense.
So what happens is I’ve stocked the beef in someone’s freezer and even got them to the point of sale, that’s what it’s about, you get them to use their pen and sign the check and put it in your hand and any objections they raise along the way you have all your answers ready like little soldiers, you keep saying, okay, I understand, just before you get yourself out the door. Vanished like the shine on Christmas decorations the day after the tree’s down when it doesn’t really matter if people hoped to get something they actually wanted.
This is not evil. If it were evil, I’d be a liar or someone would’ve stopped me already, because I’m not such a big guy, a fact I got reminded of a thousand times a day in the hoosgaw. It’s just my bald head makes me look taller or tougher, I can’t stop shaving it since I got home from Iraq, so though Cherilyn used to say I had super-kind eyes or at least did until the day she stopped, it’s probably my eyes that draw them in and my shiny head what keeps people from slamming and locking the door in my face.
And you’d think that even after we leave they’d stop the check but they never do, probably stand a long while in the kitchen shaking their heads, trying to figure themselves out. Probably feel too foolish to want to explain it to Tanya at the bank, as in, Tanya, please stop my check because I just got taken in by the Beef Boys, the name we incorporated, the name we ask them to use, and Tanya wouldn’t help them out either, being that Tanya understands everyone out here does what he’s got to do. Especially because out here we got God country on our side, that’s what we call it days when you see dads standing with sons around the back of a flatbed, unloading a two-hundred-pound deer hulk, everyone struck dumb by the fact that they get to live and hunt however they please.
People ask okay did something happen in Iraq that made you go into this line of business and usually I don’t talk about the soup spoon moment, it’s too much a tearjerker, so I can’t think of anything else except about the next morning, which meant it was Christmas Eve when we were crossing this little bay which I won’t name because it was supposed to be a no-fly zone but our fuel supply was low. We see this little action hero sort of gasping somewhere out in the water, and I was not myself that day, there with Johnny who’d been pressed into flight—though as corporal all he’d ever done was go to some military academy and get shipped out young, barely knew how to man a copter and so much younger than I was, a fact I never let him forget, but on this day I was trying to eject something out of my throat—I said let’s go down, Johnny, that hero may be one of our men, which I didn’t really think, but how can you explain days when you’re not yourself?
Everyone has them, I’m good as the next guy. Still we get closer and I see the hero’s not on our side, not at all, he has one of these superlong mullet beards, as we called them, a mullet what we called both the long bad haircut from all those 1970s bands and those trainers of young minds taught to battle us.
Like the guy might as well be one of their priests but something’s hitting me, maybe because Christmas is the next day and we all should’ve been home two months prior or I don’t know, I’ve gone soft on account of the soup spoon incident the day before. We scoop Mullet up in our copter and we’re supposed to be heading to Basra to pick up some replenishment of medical supplies which have run low given our events, plus the fact that we’ve been bunkered in Bazookistan for two and a half months. And there Mullet is in the helicopter with us, spitting up water and smelling like something just dragged through major sewage, if you know what I mean, probably soiled all the way through.
The problem is he doesn’t speak much English and the Arabic rattling in my head is not useful, stuff like koos emuk, which means your mother’s private parts! And other choice words which I won’t share because who knows why, but certain things stick better than all the how are yous and please turn around and raise your hands over your heads we had drilled in us for a day during pre-op. I can’t help it, my head’s not sorted for languages, but at least I remember one or two choice elements.
So the guy’s gasping in our copter and I hit on something we could do for him to give him back some dignity, I go digging in my rucksack and I pull it out, it’s a little mushed, but it’s still okay, this hoagie like we used to call it back in training camp near Philly, and true the meat is mushed and drippy but still prime USDA, sent in a Hugs from Home package filled with diaper wipes and graham cookies when what most guys really want are magazines and beef, even when ladies and beef both come freeze-dried.
And the guy at first looks happy when he sees the puffy part of the bread, skinny as a bird and hungrier, because everyone understands basic human things as I’ve learned, whether it’s hunger or self-defense, but he’s saying something we can’t understand, muttering a kind of question, so we’re just smiling and saying aiwa and lae almost at the same time, yes and no, words even I can remember though neither of us in that moment remembers much else.
So what he does is take a bite and chew and it only takes him a half-second before he spits it out and says something which I think might be the word for infidels but could just as easily be the word for disgusting, and that does it, I mean I’ve had it, what with the soup thing with my buddies only the day before and here I am sharing my last KP with him when we have a three-hour flight at least to get to Basra, me with my blood sugar low and him with the nerve to spit food out because it’s not cut to his liking or whatever because maybe the animal suffered and I’m all like who doesn’t suffer and does that mean you reject someone’s courtesy? I say not.
So I say: Let’s drop him.
Just like that, let’s drop him.
Plus the corporal doesn’t even bat an eye, he’s all like aye-aye sir, kind of roasting my bones because I’m a private but I don’t care, he’s with me on the dropping-Mullet idea. So we’re over some compound, I can’t tell what it is, one of their secret government installations that are everywhere on the maps like empty rectangles with squares jostling around inside, and we just do it, we force Mullet out, we drop him inside one of those cement blocks, maybe everyone has fled, maybe he gets locked inside, who knows, these guys can be super-crafty and have subterranean tunnels like moles. And Mullet can’t believe we’re doing it to him, I can still see his narrow longbeard face looking up right before we pull away, shielding his eyes from the wind of the copter blades but still shouting at us. Okay, so even after I say Mullet will figure out a way to escape because he has Allah on his side, the corporal seems too rattled to even crack a smile. When Mullet really deserved something, treating us with such inhospitality when there we were trying to rescue him, plus I shared my last sandwich and the best thing he could think to do was call us infidels?
Which is all kind of a tangent but maybe it explains why I got so bothered last Saturday when we came to this prissy kind of door, the kind with painted bird boxes in front of it, as if our birds here don’t have any place to go find shelter, and the guy who shows up at the door shows me one of those concerned pasty Northern city-folk am-I-doing-it-right, still-a-foreigner-here faces. He actually has paint stripe
s on his clothes, so I figure he must be one of those gentleman artsy painters because there is no way in freezing buck county the guy is a house painter, or at least I for sure would never let him touch one of my walls, inside or outside.
His wife just vanishes like an aroma which means I see her white ankles disappearing up the stairs, probably out of fear of the evangelicals who run rampant in these parts and who you got to guard against because they’ll talk your ear off for a million months of Sundays and never let you get down to business, almost putting our company out of business because now some people don’t even answer their doors.
But this is one pasty-looking mother staring at me, and he starts trying to out-egg me, you know, talking some breed of stuff about how he doesn’t need beef, doesn’t even eat it, being one more of these blue-veined vegetarians starting to infest our land, and I’m smiling at him like I can’t believe this, like whatever he does in bed would be nothing I’d ever want to even look at, I mean I’m not about to insult him since you never jinx sales, first thing you learn, because anyway I’m not in the intimidation racket, just into the speech-and-speed thing. Then he starts asking questions and for whatever reason it’s not like I have good answers which means I’m starting to get a little pissy, things not going with the plan, and for whatever reason our copter comes back to me and when he says, what are you fighting about? I try not to lose it and say I’m not fighting, that was before, and when he asks, is the world black-and-white, I say, whatever you say, which is right when this painter smiles in some way that makes him seem twice as crazy. He starts taking the beef, just ripping open the packages and throwing beef onto these massive iron skillets he has, I’m not kidding, frying up our goods in his kitchen which is painted all these godforsaken colors, aqua or pumpkin or who knows, cooking it up, and I would’ve left but the guy’s wife is quicker than she looked, she came back smiling herself, smelling of vanilla perfume but basically using surprise tactics that made this vet look bad, because she got me tied me to their kitchen chair with two extension cords which I can’t undo. Must have had a brother in the Boy Scouts or what have you.