Carcass Trade

by Noreen Ayres

  Monty left the side of his bike and walked over to me. His blonde partner was talking to one of the referees whose hair was as light and as long as hers. When Monty came near, he turned and looked back at a cluster of people sitting at the edges of the field on camp stools, playing checkers. He said, “These here are your rubbies.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Rich urban bikers. Two beers, they think they’re outlaws,” he said.

  “What are you?” I asked.

  “A pubbie. Poor urban biker. That’s why I’m gonna make you buy me my next beer.”

  “Not an outlaw,” I said, pushing it.

  Monty stepped away from me, looked me up and down, and said, “You’re lookin’ pretty outlaw yourself. Whyn’t you go one game, long as you’re here? Do the haystack.”

  I saw the hay pile, a mound about three feet high. One of the referees was holding up a potato. He had two more pressed to his ribs with his left arm. Then he told six women, one of them Jolene and another the bigmouthed woman, that he was hiding the potatoes in the pile. They were to dive in and find them: first prize, second prize, third.

  “Asses in the air and women groveling,” I said. “What’s fun about that?”

  Monty laughed, and when the action started he had me stumbling backward till the tree stopped me, and there he wrapped one hand on the front of my throat and kissed me. The surprise of it left me numb and unmoving. I tasted whiskey.

  When we broke, I saw the man called Quillard—his lady butt-up in the hay pile as she swept hay behind her—staring our way.

  We had to move because a portable toilet was being brought in. Already a man so loaded down with jangling biker metal that he needed all two hundred forty pounds to carry it was coming toward it.

  Another man approached Monty and started talking as though there’d never been a break from a previous conversation. His plume of brown hair swung like a pendulum at the back; bald otherwise. “I’m thinkin’ of a bolt-on nitrous but I don’t want to blow the cylinders.”

  Monty said, “Shit-can the nitrous. Switchie used nitrous, totally fragged his manifold.”

  “I’ll just have to huff it then,” he said, smiling, shaking his head. “Damn, been a long time since I did any that hippie crack. Hey,” he said with a tilt of the chin in my direction, “she cool?”

  Monty turned to me and said, “You cool?”

  “I don’t know. Am I?”

  “She’s cool.”

  “I need a set of works,” the man said.

  Monty shook his head no. “See Switchie.”

  “Couple hours I’ll be stressing.”

  “Ain’t my problem, man.”

  “Fuck you,” the guy said, but made no move to leave. In fact, he lowered himself and sat on his heels, bouncing there awhile.

  “See Switchie.”

  “Where’s he at? He got any boy?”

  “Three percent. Better’n most.”

  “My lady needs some too. Is that a pretty knuckle or what?” he said, looking at a bulky yellow bike off to the side, a woman with bare arms standing next to it, hugging herself as if she were cold.

  The man got up. Tattoos peeked out his brown leather pants with lacings at the hip. “Hear about Charlie Viveros? He just about got whacked by the South Americans. Had to prove to ’em he lost his load to the DEA. If he hadn’t sent the goombahs a newspaper clipping of the bust, he’d be jerky drying on a fence post about now. Dumb shit. He’s growing jane right out in his backyard in Van Nuys with a whole load of blow worth a million bucks in the house. I swear I think they’re makin’ them dumber every day.”

  Monty said in his whispery voice, “Why don’t you take it on down the road, Wilson?” He didn’t say it angry or mean, just a serious suggestion.

  The man leaned toward me with drunk green eyes and said, “Watch out for this guy. He farts like a rhino.” Monty hiked his cream-colored boot and gave Wilson a push. Wilson skittered ahead, laughing.

  Monty said, “Tell Switchie I’m down the house,” nodding in the direction of the farmhouse we passed on the way to the back field. “Come on,” he said to me, dragging me along with a loose hand on an elbow. “I got to see a man about a pig.”

  I asked, “You do that stuff?”

  “That stuff? You gonna tell me you want some?”

  “No. Not me,” I said, matter-of-factly. I just wanted to make sure I wasn’t invited to participate.

  “Good,” he said.

  “I thought you said I was cool.”

  “Just ’cause you don’t do dope don’t make you uncool.”

  “What’s ‘boy’?”

  “Heroin. You mix it with cocaine, make a speedball. It lightens the launch. Coke, that’s ‘girl’ where he comes from. Hey, you are a virgin, aren’t you?”

  20

  Laid out like that it could have been a pallid torso on an autopsy table, the legs whacked off at the knees in some malicious harvest. But it was a pig and only a pig, the outer meat paler than I would have expected, the exposed abdominal cavity rosy with the colors of resting blood. In the shadows, on a rear table, lay the hog’s head in a gray-speckled roasting pan. Its monument of snout pointed upward. Its grand flap of ears draped like Dumbo’s over the pan’s edges.

  Steam rose thinly from a vessel deeper than a bathtub just inside the ax-hewn rails separating us from the slaughter shed. On the water’s surface floated short hair and pastel scum, and beneath the tub the ground was sticky with mud splash. Birds chanted in the tree overhead.

  Monty and I sat on top of a picnic table facing the shed, which was open on three sides, our feet parked on the weathered bench. We had driven over at the start of the game where women get blindfolded and stumble around to find their partners by the roar of their machines.

  The old man Monty came to see sat on the bench by Monty’s boot. Long ago the man’s face had sagged to slim gourds around the jaw, but his hair was black as could be. Ahead, a Mexican woman wordlessly swept a long knife over a strop, one end of which was nailed to a post. Quietly, the old man said, “I mostly kill just for the family now.”

  When a young worker entered the open shed and said something to the woman in Spanish, she paused and swept away graying hair escaped from the knot at the back of her head, then answered. In slow movements she lay her implement down on the table to retie the black rubber apron covering her from neck to knees, the apron flecked with bits of butchered carcass. The boy said something else and nodded, then left to join another worker standing nearby. They went off toward a pen with goats flooding one past another, nervous from new visitors just gotten out of a car.

  “Tell my friend how big your family is,” Monty said to the old man.

  “A hundred and sixty,” Mr. Avalos said. When he smiled, he showed an empty space among the otherwise large and yellow teeth perfectly uniform in his mouth.

  Wow, I said, or something like it, and Monty said, “You’ve been a busy man. My hat’s off to you.” Then he waited awhile and asked, “Paulie in the house?”

  “Nope. He ain’t arrived yet.” His cane the color of nicotine wavered under his broad brown hand as he spoke. Beside him, shouldering a chicken-wire fence, each green paddle of a beavertail cactus carried the whitened scars of someone’s initials, month, day, and year dates carved there too. Carving seemed to be a thing to do in this part of the country, as with Monty’s initials in stone.

  “I thought I saw Paulie’s truck,” Monty said.

  “That’s my wife’s.”

  The woman in the shed stacked hog segments on a wire rack in the corner. Then she took a small hose and watered the steel table down.

  “How is your wife, Mr. Avalos?”

  A terrible bleating issued from off our right where the visitors stepped back for the two young workers to bring a brown goat from the pen.

  “That chemo’s about to do her in,” Mr. Avalos said, rolling his eyes upward to us. “Next week I’m going to buy her a new truck.”

  “That’
ll be real nice,” Monty said.

  He looked ahead. “She says she don’t want one.”

  “She does,” Monty said. “She just doesn’t want you to go to the trouble, feelin’ sorry for her.”

  Mr. Avalos nodded solemnly.

  The goat continued its awful screaming as the two workers hoisted it along toward us, one man hugging the front legs and the other looping his arms around the spindly rear legs so that the poor beast sagged like a hammock and its white belly bulged.

  Mr. Avalos looked at me and said, “The goats are the loudest,” then looked away. “The lambs, they just stand there and shiver.”

  “Maybe we should be moseying on,” I said to Monty.

  “Here comes that one,” Mr. Avalos said, looking over the heads of the workers. He meant Switchie, with Jolene, the two of them coming from the direction of a white structure too small to be a house by today’s standards but maybe it was Avalos family headquarters once. His arm completely wrapped around Jolene at the top of her shoulders, Switchie’s hand was at her mouth, and as they came close I saw he had a finger between her lips and he was rubbing her gums in a most intrusive and sensual way.

  The workers hefted the goat onto a dark wood slab next to the steel table. I felt my breath come quick. I slid off the table and went around to the opposite side, holding my own arms and looking out past the cactus at the dust rising in the back field where the riders were continuing their games.

  Monty said, “I think you and Jolene want to see some ducks. Down there by the sheep pen.”

  Jolene said, “Nothing doing.”

  “Think you’re a tough guy, huh?” said Switchie.

  “Want to find out?” She gave him a sexy swagger, lowering her eyes. Against white skin, her black hair and leathers made her look like something in a music video, pampered kids pretending to be street hoods.

  She moved toward Mr. Avalos with a hand out to offer a handshake. “You’re Paulie’s father? I’m Jolene.” His eyes moved quickly to her and back without turning his head. Mr. Avalos didn’t let go of his cane. Jolene’s hand dropped. She stepped back and hitched herself up on the tabletop next to Monty, where I’d been sitting. I was looking over the head of Mr. Avalos, and Switchie had moved to my right, his viewpoint between the shoulders of Monty and Jolene. He had his shades on and chewed gum in tight munches. “Is it going to be real grody, boss?” Jolene asked.

  “Guess you’ll soon find out.” He said this as the woman in the apron handed the long, half-inch-wide knife to the worker whose left hand clutched the goat’s ear at the stem, the goat eerily quiet now. Its eyes bulged. I thought, Oh fuck, and looked up into the branches of the tree. A high, pitiful scream issued from the goat, and when I looked, its rear legs were lurching, trying to gain purchase while the worker grasped wildly. The man holding the head arched back farther, nearly bringing the animal off the slab.

  As the other man caught the legs again, I thought, Leave me to my lowly clerking in a crime lab, counting icepick holes in a dead man’s shirt. It may be gruesome, but it’s over, not about to be over, but over, ready for reports and labels and whatever eventual justice courts could apply.

  The woman in the shed retrieved the fallen long knife from the ground and handed it to the young man wresting the goat’s head, while Switchie molded his blond hair into shape and put the comb in his back pocket. “Pop,” he said, as the worker set the point of the knife to the animal’s neck just below the ear, and I heard a grunt from Jolene.

  The knife went in. The goat twitched ever so slightly. Then its mouth came open as the burgundy flow began its curve over the neat white fur and descended down the neck. Quickly the woman slid a bucket under. I looked into the beast’s eyes, brown and wide with wonder, and counted in my head: One thousand, two thousand, go to meet your maker. Soon the worker at the rear could release the goat’s legs and reach for the bucket from the woman to hold it for the forty seconds it took for the animal to go entirely slack. I held on the animal’s eyes expecting to see a fading there, but the gleam gave up no secrets, and I do not know if my own stare accompanied him ill or well into that darkness.

  Jolene got down, brushing her pants, and glanced my way as if it were all my fault. She told Switchie come on, let’s go see the lambs, and he looked at Monty and sneered and said he’d see him later.

  Mr. Avalos walked alongside Monty as we went toward what I now understood was the Campana Rancho, the Avalos home. A big bell, a campana, was poised on the road in front between wood uprights. At the side of the house, a small gray burro tethered to a tree brayed a sucking, honking complaint, and geese at the edge of a pond stretched their long necks, flapped wings, and echoed as well they could his sound.

  It did not seem his huge son Paulie could be this short man’s issue, for Mr. Avalos’s black pants hung on his hips like tired canvas and the pant legs that were too long folded onto his shoes and carried rims of dust from the yards. He said, “I don’t like that fella much.”

  “Switchie? Paulie says he can run about anythin’. Graders, skip loaders, dumps. I came to see if Paulie’s gonna finish my pit this week. You know?”

  Mr. Avalos shook his head. Behind us, I heard Switchie’s bike start up and saw him and Jolene head in a wide circle back to the games.

  In a while Monty said, “I think I got a clogged intake valve.”

  “Rotten egg smell?” the old man asked.

  “A little.”

  “Pay attention to it. Hydrogen sulfide will paralyze your sense of smell. You won’t even smell it if you got a bad leak. It’ll kill you.”

  “That’s another reason I’d like Paulie to stop by. Help me check it out.”

  “Paulie dumped that Cat, you know,” Mr. Avalos said, moving his cane with each step but not touching the ground with it. “He had slope boards on it and he dumped it anyway. His shoulder’s still not right. He can only lift his arm to here.” He demonstrated.

  “I hate to say it, but maybe he needs to go a little lighter on the sauce, Mr. Avalos.”

  “I don’t know what Paulie needs. Maybe better company,” he said. And then glanced up and said, “Not you.”

  Monty stopped, as if done escorting. “We’ll be goin’ along now, Mr. Avalos. Y’all take care.”

  “You’re going to eat some barbecue, aren’t you?”

  “Sure. Wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

  The old man gave a quick nod as he was moving away, but his gaze turned to the field behind his ranch where the sound of motorcycles droned in the distance.

  We rode back to the field, only farther on, to a portion with low rises and shallow dips and gutter corrugations both nature and bike had carved. The scent of alfalfa and animal pens was still with us. More people had arrived. A new herd of parked Harleys sat near half a dozen dirt bikes in one small camp where women in torn shorts mingled with each other and fat-bellied men sat in beach chairs next to portable coolers. A boom box was blasting out the rhythms of “The Hillbilly Rock.”

  This seemed like a different crowd from the ones before, yet when we dismounted, it was near the woman in red we’d seen earlier, the one who should by all laws of anatomy have grabbed the wienie in one gulp. Someone called her Marge and I believed I knew it all along, the name so fit her you could imagine no other. I looked for the man named Quillard. He was not with her or in the near crowd, but with just the reminder of him already I had a renewed sense of unease.

  Unloading Monty’s saddlebags, I hauled cans and candy bars over to an unclaimed piece of box cardboard to sit on at the trailing edge of the assembling area. When Monty came over to lay bags of beef jerky and two apples beside me, another man was with him, carrying a long-neck beer, grinning gaily, and telling Monty, “You got to keep the shiny side up, you stupid bastard.” He looked at me, and said, “Tell this Jap-scrap jockey the way you win is you keep the shiny side up.” The panther reaching high on his biceps flexed and seemed to want to crawl up the black cap sleeve of his shirt. The man’s skin was
the color of tea with a red sheen on it and his brown hair rolled in high waves, and he had one of the happiest, drunkest faces I’d seen in a while.

  I said, “Are you racing?”

  “Only my heart when I see pretty ladies.”

  “Don’t mind Jason,” Monty said. “He’s missin’ a few shingles off the roof.” He offered Jason a strip of jerky and then tore at one himself. A call to positions brought Monty to his feet. He said to Jason, “Get your ass out there and ride, man.”

  “Hell, I’d spill a trike,” Jason said happily, lifting his beer can for evidence. “Go on. Take mine.” Monty laughed and headed to the dirt bikes, looking back once and winking at me. Jason took a guzzle, and with smiling eyes said to me, “The old fuckup can still hammer the best steel in Riverside County, I’ll give him that. You ever see his work?”

  “Uh-huh,” I said.

  “Fuckin’ artist.”

  “Yeah man,” I said, sipping from a beer myself now. It was my first, and I’d make it my last for the day, but the sun was getting pretty hot and all this time I didn’t know Monty had it in his saddlebags. When I heard the announcer, I left Jason to guard the cardboard and candy bars, and moved closer to the starting line. Monty was on a yellow bike in a second tier of seven, each tier having the field to themselves, and so the time he spent waiting for the first bikes to finish and spill around the drums at the end of the track was filled with revving and checking and eyeing his nearby competition. He was third off at the flag, but he took the lead in no time, flying over the grades like a man set free of family and all obligation.

  I watched the races for twenty minutes before I realized they were more of same, more of same, Monty taking first or Monty taking second. The beer was gone where all beer goes quicker than any other beverage, and soon I was standing on my tiptoes looking for the Porta Potti.

  Making my way through the crowd, I saw the lady with seventy-two teeth walking away from where the action was. She went down a slope toward a four-foot-high orange plant cluster called sticky monkey flower and a sycamore starter no higher. I looked around again for the toilet. It was some distance off, at the original game site, and had a line of three people in front of it. So I followed the woman, calling, “Looking for a Porta Potti?”