by Brian Hodge
Those suburban woodlands, as you drive past, seem thick and mysterious, like overlooked tracts of ancient soil where the fleet descendants of pre-Columbian fathers might yet be watching with painted eyes. From the air, though, surrounded by ragged webs of asphalt, they mostly look besieged.
Still, it was in one of those brambled thickets where the old slaughterhouse sat enduring its years of obsolescence and neglect.
We found the convenience store where Andre had said he would wait, out of the chill. Rachel and I collected him to the relief of the cashier whose unfamiliarity with shampoo must’ve consigned her to the graveyard shift. But then she scurried to the sandwich island and plucked one of their wretched hot dogs off the weenie-go-round and slapped it in a bun, shyly giving it to him with a fistful of condiments, then backing away before he could attempt to pay for it.
Ever since we were kids, Andre has had that effect on some people. You just want to throw a blanket around his shoulders and give him soup. Everything about Andre is too near the surface, including his cheekbones.
Rachel and I followed behind his car, although certainly we knew the way to the slaughterhouse. The neighborhood houses all sat where they had for years, maybe with skimpy cosmetic changes, but still the same behind them. It’s only when you return to your old neighborhood that you feel the way houses have lives apart from the people who reside in them.
“The human body’s supposed to replace almost every cell in it every seven years,” I said, because it felt too quiet. “You’ve heard of that, right?”
“Yeah. But not all at once,” Rachel said.
“So I can mean it literally, saying I’m not the same person who grew up here.”
Fingers busy, Rachel made a show of subtracting from seven. “Guess that means I still have four to go.”
In the light from a streetlamp she frowned. Rachel’s was one of those rare faces that are enhanced by a tiny frown, her brown eyes filling with concentration or disdain and over them the thick eyebrows nudging toward each other in a way that made her wise and sensual and imperial.
“There’s something about all at once that’d seem better,” she said. “Like shedding a skin? You call in sick to work one day, and lock yourself in the bathroom, and keep flushing for hours, and when you come back out it’s a whole new you.”
“Imagine the plumbing hazards,” I said, which made us laugh because we needed to, because we’d gotten out of bed to go look at the corpse of a friend and decide, I guess, that it really was him, and he really was dead.
It meant two extra blocks’ walk, but we parked in the lot of a church — Lutheran, I think — so some suburban early riser wouldn’t see us disembarking directly in front of his castle and go making xenophobic calls to the police and the N.R.A.
“So you had to first come out here, when, like three o’clock this morning?” I asked.
“Uh huh,” Andre said, “about then.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know, I just … just woke up with this awful hunch.” He wasn’t crying anymore. Had gotten out of his car with a smear of mustard on his cheek from the hot dog, for Rachel to wipe away. “I just had this dream that Jamey was…”
We moved down the street, then over a block, following the new one until the street ended in a cul-de-sac and dissolved into several dozen feet of weedy lot. Behind us, lights were beginning to wink on, off, in bathrooms and kitchens, while ahead of us the woods lay cold and dark, unaffected by that workaday world.
We threaded our way through trees, none of which were very big because none were terribly old by tree standards. Our feet tramped over frosty ground untouched by tires for two decades, although time still hadn’t erased every suggestion of the path where the meat trucks used to roll.
It couldn’t have been more than 600 feet back in, but seemed farther, because the woods had slowly closed in as though keeping a secret. Whatever died back here now would die randomly, not systematically, but if it’s true that places soak in memories of the things that happen there, then it’d never been entirely our imagination that around the old slaughterhouse we could sense some wordless animal panic, some imprint left by countless dumb beasts who buckled to their knees as their skulls were crushed by sledgehammers swung with brute factory precision.
It rose out of the trees, pale in the pre-dawn, temple-like but without the carvings and monkeys that could’ve given it true character. Years ago the stoneware and brickwork might have been whitewashed, but had been a colorless gray for so long that I no longer remembered. We followed one of the stark walls back around to a loading bay and through the door that had been sprung for several presidential administrations, and finally had to turn on our flashlights. Wherever the beams fell they landed on peeled paint and abandonment and years of vandalism and heaps of junk so useless it was worthless even as scrap. Step through that door and the aloof vibrancy of the woods fled, to leave you swallowed by silent echoes from some lost decade.
“What a desolate place to die,” Rachel said.
It crossed my mind that Jamey was hardly the first, and that I’d done in my virginity here, too. Atmosphere is a low priority when your hormones are loud and shiny.
Andre led us to him, in one of the middle rooms. As the place had been gutted since its demise, over the years we’d never known exactly what occurred where, but I suspected that the dank sepulchre where Jamey lay with the needle in his vein and rubber tubing loose around his bicep was where saws might’ve whined while tatters of flesh speckled men in slick raincoats.
Everything he’d needed was still there, if not in his arm, then close at hand. Bent spoon, pinch of cotton; the votive candle had burned down to a ring of wax. He lay turned onto one side, his unstuck arm drawn up to pillow his head, nose ring and half-smile still in place.
“And there was this, too,” Andre said as he handed us a slip of paper. “The spoon was on top of it.”
We read: No, it wasn’t an accident this time. No apologies, no mewling, which I respected but kept to myself. Andre didn’t look up to hearing that.
“It’s dated eight days ago?” I said. “Who dates his suicide note to begin with?”
“He always was pretty detail-oriented, for a junkie,” Rachel said.
Andre bristled. “He wasn’t a junkie.”
“Sorry, I guess I was confused by the syringe.”
“Angus, tell her he was no junkie.”
“Far as I know, he never shared a needle in his life,” I told her, from the floor. “He was in control.”
“What are you doing down there?” That frown, that beautiful frown. “You don’t think he’s … still…?”
“Eight days?” I was on all fours on the gritty concrete. Had touched his supple cheeks and now hovered in to sniff. “He doesn’t smell bad. Doesn’t even look like he’s started to decompose.”
“Well, it does feel like a meat locker in here … if you’ll excuse the expression.” Now Rachel was being nasty, seeing if she could make Andre flinch. “Probably it hasn’t warmed up much even on the sunny days, the past week.”
“But look at his color,” I argued, too intrigued to feel much grief, which maybe I wouldn’t have felt regardless. I’ve always had this easy take on death, just part of the natural order and sometimes a smart career move, and if I never could believe in Father, Son, or Holy Ghost, I could still believe in System.
Although for being dead, Jamey had a hue that could be called robust. As Andre squirmed, I peeled aside the jacket Jamey was wearing only on one arm, and his flannel, and his T-shirt, to bare the shoulder he’d been lying on. Blood should’ve pooled there, left the skin as dark as an eggplant. I believed in gravity, too, until now.
“Oh, this is creeping me out,” Rachel said, but leaned over my shoulder without apprehension. When a corpse won’t behave like one, it’s easy to overlook a technicality or two.
Andre groaned and told us we were like two six-year-olds with a dead cat, and turned away with his flash and stole ha
lf our light. We looked up when he quit shuffling and flapping his long olive green canvas coat, and left his beam on a wall and what had been spray-painted there. All three of us agreed that Jamey had done it, given the presence of both the can and his trademark A’s, with the horizontal extending past the diagonals, like the anarchy symbol without the circle.
“‘Musica mundana’?” Andre read aloud. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
We couldn’t decide. Lately Jamey had despaired over his own floundering musical aspirations, whatever talent he had on a fast exile to oblivion. He employed a small arsenal of keyboards and samplers and tape decks, collecting the noises that engulfed the city and combining them with those of his own creation into aural collages that nobody could dance to. It still seemed unlikely that he’d call his own work mundane, then misspell everything to boot.
“Looks Latin,” Rachel finally said.
“Nathan would know,” Andre said. “Nathan should be here, and Mae, Mae should be here too, I should’ve called them,” and he set off again for a phone before Rachel and I could persuade him that a few more hours wasn’t going to make any difference.
That Jamey. When he set his mind to it, he always could throw the most interesting parties.
Someday when I have a hundred bucks an hour to blow to hear an informed opinion, I think it could be really fun to go to a psychologist and see the reaction I get, admitting that the one constant in my life, at its various stages, seems to be a derelict slaughterhouse.
Of course I remember it from a time before dereliction, still operating but in the process of being driven under by incorporated abattoirs, tottering on its independent legs like a newborn veal. Although it was years before I realized this, that whoever had worked there would’ve been jettisoned toward the unemployment line within a few months of that magical and terrible winter day.
What I best remember is tramping there through the snow with my father, because it was within walking distance of our house and he’d wanted to order a side of beef to lay in stock in the freezer downstairs and knew he could get it for not much over wholesale cost there. I was six, on Christmas vacation from first grade and already tired of the new toys, maybe, but swept up in drama that afternoon as my father and I bundled against the cold and set out like a pair of trappers for the family meat.
We must’ve talked, but what about I can’t recall, except for him teasing me that I’d better not tell any of the meatmen my name because they might mistake me for a cow. Which utterly perplexed me until he explained that my name, my fine Scottish name that he had given me in a fit of nationalistic fervor for a homeland never seen, was shared by a breed of cattle.
Twenty-one years later I still remember the milky gray of the sky and the icy whisper of snowflakes as we stomped and stamped along; the way my father would grab me by my mittened hands and swing me up and over when the drifts got too deep. I knew that day that I must’ve grown older and more able in his eyes, that this would be the first of countless adventures that he and I would have in the coming years.
While my father was deciding how best to apportion our beef into steaks and roasts and ground, I strayed off out of curiosity and boredom, finding myself behind the slaughterhouse, undetected while I watched some squat, grizzled man gnaw at a wet cigar stub and grumble curses as he shoveled up a spill of what I took to be fat ropes. They slipped and slithered and glistened as he chased them, favoring one leg, and left pink smears in the snow while he slung them into an enormous wheeled pail that must’ve overturned. He noticed me finally, and now I sort of knew what the gray ropes really were, and with one fatty loop draped over the rim of the pail, he leaned on it and grinned around his cigar. His teeth were stained, and one eye covered by a gray film.
“Hey little mister,” he said to me. “What’s your name?”
Angus, I nearly told him, but stopped myself in time, because mistaken identity was sure to get me killed, cut up and shoveled into buckets, so I turned and ran as fast as I could and when my father caught up with me he said we’d better wait a few minutes before going back home, until I quit shivering. From the cold, he thought.
It was the last Christmas our nuclear family would know, and while it probably wasn’t the same evening, in my mind the trip to the slaughterhouse will be forever linked to the shouts between my parents, and later discovering my father behind the house, when I wasn’t supposed to, in his private place inside the tool shed. I watched as he cried and hung his head, and every several moments chopped at wood with a hatchet. There was something so terrible about seeing him in this fallen state that I, while I knew I should’ve, could no more have gone to him than I could’ve run into the arms of that unshaven troll who’d been shoveling guts.
When our beef was ready I went with my father to pick it up, but we took the car this time and it wasn’t the same as on foot, against the elements, and it’s almost the last thing I recall us doing together. He was gone by spring, my stepfather and his own son in place by summer, and by the week I entered second grade I’d already seen my father for the last time, wondering where he’d gone and when he would send for me and clinging to that final Yule as evidence that we’d had one adventure, at least.
It was more than a decade before I did the math, and realized that over that Christmas my mother had been pregnant with Rachel, and must’ve known even then that it wasn’t Dad’s.
Which explains a lot about his mood, as I look back.
“‘Music of the world’ is what that means, literally,” Nathan explained. “Symbolically it means ‘music of the spheres.’ Not like harps and organs and trumpets … more the harmony in creation, say, from the planets orbiting. It was part of the medieval world view. To them music theory was like astrophysics.”
We looked at the words again: Musica mundana.
“I told him about it once — say a year ago? — one night when we were stoned, but … are you positive he’s been dead eight days?”
“We’re just taking his word on it,” I said.
“Because not decaying I can see, with it so chilly in here. But it’s the blood not pooling I can’t figure. You know … if I didn’t know better … I’d almost be tempted to say what we have on our hands might be an incorruptible.”
“Isn’t that more in the line of Catholic saints?” Andre had to ask, and Nathan said usually, and we looked at that spike still in Jamey’s arm and burst out laughing at the absurdity of it, even Andre, everybody laughing but Mae.
Of the five of us standing over him, Mae was youngest and had known Jamey the least amount of time, but perhaps felt she owed him her life. She’d been panhandling and dumpster-diving when he spotted her along North Clark, and for runaways that’s often the last step before prostitution. Probably Jamey wouldn’t’ve noticed had Mae Pak not been staring at the violin she’d brought all the way from South Korea, by way of Los Angeles, and ceremoniously snipping its strings with wire cutters.
He’d helped her find a job in a music store, and a roommate, but later told me that he’d misunderstood everything that day he first talked to her, thought the business with the violin wasn’t so much despair as low-rent performance art.
So maybe to Mae, Jamey really had been a benefactor, since two years later she’d reached her nineteenth birthday without ever slipping on the fishnets each dusk and heading out to gobble an assortment of occidental penii.
But maybe Mae didn’t yet understand the way, in any group of friends who have some history, you develop a sound idea who will be the first to do certain things, like marry or sprout a tumor, and naturally first to die. I had a reasonable expectation that Jamey would be head of that particular class the day an old needle grew too dull to pop into his arm, and I watched him sharpen it on the scratch-strip of a book of matches, then have to forcibly yank it from the vein because his subprecision work had left a tiny spur of steel that caught his skin like a fishhook.
So the five of us stood clustered inside the slaughterhouse, admitting the obvio
us about Jamey and maybe contemplating personal mortality, the escape clause in our fleshly contracts.
We couldn’t decide what to do with him.
While it seemed clear enough on the surface, once extenuating circumstances were considered the issue became murkier, the most persuasive argument for inaction coming from Jamey himself, as he had left a note, if no guarantee we’d be the ones to find it, and he’d gone to the trouble of coming here in the first place. After all, Rachel said, if he’d simply meant to die and be done with it, he could’ve managed as much in his own crusty bathtub, with far less fuss. Clearly, something about this place had called to him as his mausoleum, guiding his hand as he sprayed Musica mundana for an epitaph, and it wasn’t irony: He’d never even considered a vegetarian lifestyle.
Then there was his refusal to cooperate with putrefaction.
It was Andre who said that if we were planning to leave him, we should at least make it appear that his presence was intended, rather than him just happening to have died where he did.
Mae knelt to slide the needle from his vein and Rachel untied the tourniquet, and when we took him up from the floor we found that he was still flexible without being mushy. Because it seemed a shame to leave him in total darkness we bore him out of the room he’d died in and through a wide iron door that slid back on shrieking rusty rollers, and then another, to relocate him in the grandest room in the slaughterhouse. I felt reasonably sure that this had been the actual killing floor, where mallets met heads, because the ceiling was much higher, and in one area it opened into a short gabled tower, where windows would’ve let in natural lighting for a nice expansive open-air ambience while the brutes swung their mauls. Although the windows had been boarded over, all the boards had weathered apart so that slatted light filtered in.