“I never heard of that, John.”
“Well, Velma, as an ordinary citizen you probably wouldn’t have. But the upshot was that when they had no USDA inspectors breathing down their necks, most of the slaughterhouses doubled their line speed, and that meant there was much more risk of contamination. I mean if you can imagine a dead cow hanging up by its heels and a guy cutting its stomach open, and then heaving out its intestines by hand, which they still do, that’s a very skilled job, and if a gutter makes one mistake floop! everything goes everywhere, blood, guts, dirt, manure, and that happens to one in five cattle. Twenty percent.”
“Oh, my God.”
“Oh, it’s worse than that, Velma. These days, with SIS-C, meat-packers can get away with processing far more diseased cattle. I’ve seen cows coming into the slaughterhouse with abscesses and tapeworms and measles. The beef scraps they ship out for hamburgers are all mixed up with manure, hair, insects, metal filings, urine and vomit.”
“You’re making me feel nauseous, John. I had a hamburger for supper last night.”
“Make it your last, Velma. It’s not just the contamination, it’s the quality of the beef they use. Most of the cattle they slaughter for hamburgers are old dairy cattle, because they’re cheap and their meat isn’t too fatty. But they’re full of antibiotics and they’re often infected with E. coli and salmonella. You take just one hamburger, that’s not the meat from a single animal, that’s mixed-up meat from dozens or even hundreds of different cows, and it only takes one diseased cow to contaminate thirty-two thousand pounds of ground beef.”
“That’s like a horror story, John.”
“You’re too right, Velma.”
“But this bullet, John. Where would this bullet come from?”
“That’s what I want to know, Velma. I can’t take it to the health people because then I’d lose my job and if I lose my job I can’t pay for my automobile to be repaired and Nils Guttormsen is going to impound it and I’ll never get back to Baton Rouge unless I fucking walk and it’s two thousand three hundred and seven miles.”
“That far, hunh?”
“That far.”
“Why don’t you show it to Eddie Bertilson?”
“What?”
“The bullet. Why don’t you show it to Eddie Bertilson. Bertilson’s Sporting Guns and Ammo, over on Orchard Street? He’ll tell you where it came from.”
“You think so?”
“I know so. He knows everything about guns and ammo. He used to be married to my cousin Patricia.”
“You’re a star, Velma. I’ll go do that. When I come back, maybe you and I could have some dinner together and then I’ll make wild energetic love to you.”
“No.”
“No?”
“I like you, John, but no.”
“Oh.”
* * *
Eddie Bertilson was one of those extreme pains-in-the-ass-like people who note down the tailfin numbers of military aircraft in Turkey and get themselves arrested for espionage. But I have to admit that he knew everything possible about guns and ammo and when he took a look at that bullet he knew directly what it was.
He was small and bald with dark-tinted glasses and hair growing out of his ears, and a Grateful Dead T-shirt with greasy finger-wipes on it. He screwed this jeweler’s eyeglass into his socket and turned the bullet this way and that.
“Where’d you find this?” he wanted to know.
“Do I have to tell you?”
“No, you don’t, because I can tell you where you found it. You found it amongst the memorabilia of a Viet Nam vet.”
“Did I?” The gun store was small and poky and smelled of oil. There were all kinds of hunting rifles arranged in cabinets behind the counter, not to mention pictures of anything that a visitor to Calais may want to kill: woodcock, ruffed grouse, black duck, mallard, blue-wing and green-wing teal.
“This is a 7.92 Gewehr Patrone 98 slug which was the standard ammunition of the Maschinengewehr 34 machine-gun designed by Louis Stange for the German Army in 1934. After the Second World War it was used by the Czechs, the French, the Israelis and the Biafrans, and a few turned up in Viet Nam, stolen from the French.”
“It’s a machine-gun bullet?”
“That’s right,” said Eddie, dropping it back in the palm of my hand with great satisfaction at his own expertise.
“So you wouldn’t use this to kill, say, a cow?”
“No. Unlikely.”
* * *
The next morning Chip a nd I opened the restaurant as usual and by 8 a.m. we were packed to the windows. Just before 9 a bl ack panel van drew up outsid e and two guys in white caps and overalls climbed out. They came down the sid e alley to the kitchen door and
knocked.
“Delivery from St. Croix Meats,” said one of them. He was a stocky guy with a walrus moustache and a deep diagonal scar across his mouth, as if he had been told to shut up by somebody with a machete.
“Sure,” said Chip, and opened up the freezer for him. He and his pal brought in a dozen cardboard boxes labeled Hamburger Patties.
“Always get your hamburgers from the same company?” I asked Chip.
“St. Croix, sure. Mr. Le Renges is the owner.”
“Ah.” No wonder Mr. Le Renges hadn’t wanted to talk to his supplier about the bullet: his supplier was him. I bent my head sideways so that I could read the address. US Route 1, Robbinstown.
* * *
It was a brilliantly sunny afternoon and the woods around Calais were all golden and crimson and rusty-colored. Velma drove us down US 1 with Frank and Nancy Sinatra singing Something Stupid on the radio.
“I don’t know why you’re doing this, John. I mean, who cares if somebody found a bullet in their hamburger?”
“I care, Velma. Do you think I’m going to be able to live out the rest of my life without finding out how an American cow got hit by a Viet Cong machine-gun?”
It took us almost an hour to find St. Croix Meats because the building was way in back of an industrial park—a big gray rectangular place with six or seven black panel vans parked outside it and no signs outside. The only reason I knew that we had come to the right place was because I saw Mr. Le Renges walking across the yard outside with the biggest ugliest dog that I had ever seen in my life. I’m not a dog expert but I suddenly realized who had been advertising in The Quoddy Whirlpool for somebody to walk their Presa Canario.
“What are you going to do now?” Velma asked me. There was a security guard on the gate and there was no way that a 289-pound man in a flappy white raincoat was going to be able to tippy-toe his way in without being noticed.
Just then, however, I saw the guy with the scar who had delivered our hamburgers that morning. He climbed into one of the black vans, started it up, and maneuvered it out of the yard.
“Follow that van,” I asked Velma.
“What for, John?”
“I want to see where it goes, that’s all.”
“This is not much of a date, John.”
“I’ll make it up to you, I promise.”
“Dinner and wild energetic love?”
“We could skip the dinner if you’re not hungry.”
* * *
We followed the van for nearly two-and-a-half hours, until it began to grow dark. I was baffled by the route it took. First of all it stopped at a small medical center in Pembroke. Then it went to a veterinarian just outside of Mathias. It circled back toward Calais, visiting two small dairy farms, before calling last of all at the rear entrance of Calais Memorial Hospital, back in town.
It wasn’t always possible for us to see what was happening, but at one of the dairy farms we saw the van drivers carrying cattle carcasses out of the outbuildings, and at the Memorial Hospital we saw them pushing out large wheeled containers, rather like laundry-hampers.
Velma said, “I have to get back to work now. My shift starts at six.”
“I don’t understand this, Velma,” I said. “They were
carrying dead cattle out of those farms, but USDA regulations state that cattle have to be processed no more than two hours after they’ve been slaughtered. After that time, bacteria multiply so much that they’re almost impossible to get rid of.”
“So Mr. Le Renges is using rotten beef for his hamburgers?”
“Looks like it. But what else? I can understand rotten beef. Dozens of slaughterhouses use rotten beef. But why did the van call at the hospital? And the veterinarian?”
Velma stopped the car outside the motel and stared at me. “Oh, you’re not serious.”
“I have to take a look inside that meatpacking plant, Velma.”
“You’re sure you haven’t bitten off more than you can chew?”
“Very apt phrase, Velma.”
* * *
My energy levels were beginning to decline again so I treated myself to a fried shrimp sandwich and a couple of Molson’s with a small triangular diet-sized piece of pecan pie to follow. Then I walked around to the hospital and went to the rear entrance where the van from St. Croix Meats had parked. A hospital porter with greasy hair and squinty eyes and glasses was standing out back taking a smoke.
“How’s it going, feller?” I asked him.
“Okay. Anything I can do for you?”
“Maybe, I’ve been looking for a friend of mine. Old drinking buddy from way back.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Somebody told me he’s been working around here, driving a van.
Said they’d seen him here at the hospital.”
The greasy-haired porter blew smoke out of his nostrils. “We get vans in and out of here all day.”
“This guy’s got a scar, right across his mouth. You couldn’t miss him.”
“Oh you mean the guy from BioGlean?”
“BioGlean?”
“Sure. They collect, like, surgical waste, and get rid of it.”
“What’s that, ‘surgical waste’?”
“Well, you know. Somebody has their leg amputated, somebody has their arm cut off. Aborted fetuses, stuff like that. You’d be amazed how much stuff a busy hospital has to get rid of.”
“I thought they incinerated it.”
“They used to, but BioGlean kind of specializes, and I guess it’s cheaper than running an incinerator night and day. They even go round auto shops and take bits of bodies out of car wrecks. You don’t realize, do you, that the cops won’t do it, and that the mechanics don’t want to do it, so I guess somebody has to.”
He paused, and then he said, “What’s your name? Next time your buddy calls by, I’ll tell him that you were looking for him.”
“Ralph Waldo Emerson. I’m staying at the Chandler House on Chandler.”
“Okay … Ralph Waldo Emerson. Funny, that. Name kind of rings a bell.”
* * *
I borrowed Velma’s car and drove back out to Robbinstown. I parked in the shadow of a large computer warehouse. St. Croix Meats was surrounded by a high fence topped with razor-wire and the front yard was brightly floodlit. A uniformed security guard sat in a small booth by the gate, reading The Quoddy Whirlpool. With any luck, it would send him to sleep, and I would be able to walk right past him.
I waited for over an hour, but there didn’t seem to be any way for me to sneak inside. All the lights were on, and now and then I saw workers in hard hats and long rubber aprons walking in and out of the building. Maybe this was the time for me to give up trying to play detective and call the police.
The outside temperature was sinking deeper and deeper and I was beginning to feel cold and cramped in Velma’s little Volkswagen. After a while I had to climb out and stretch my legs. I walked as near to the main gate as I could without being seen, and stood next to a skinny maple tree. I felt like an elephant trying to hide behind a lamppost. The security guard was still awake. Maybe he was reading an exciting article about the sudden drop in cod prices.
I had almost decided to call it a night when I heard a car approaching along the road behind me. I managed to hide most of me behind the tree, and Mr. Le Renges drove past, and up to the front gate. At first I thought somebody was sitting in his Lexus with him, but then I realized it was that huge ugly Presa Canario. It looked like a cross between a Great Dane and a hound from hell, and it was bigger than he was. It turned its head and I saw its eyes reflected scarlet. It was like being stared at by Satan, believe me.
The security guard came out to open the gate, and for a moment he and Mr. Le Renges chatted to each other, their breath smoking in the frosty evening air. I thought of crouching down and trying to make my way into the slaughterhouse behind Mr. Le Renges’ car, but there was no chance that I could do it without being spotted.
“Everything okay, Vernon?”
“Silent like the grave, Mr. Le Renges.”
“That’s what I like to hear, Vernon. How’s that daughter of yours, Louise? Got over her autism yet?”
“Not exactly, Mr. Le Renges. Doctors say it’s going to take some time.”
Mr. Le Renges was still talking when one of his big black vans came burbling up the road and stopped behind his Lexus. Its driver waited patiently. After all, Mr. Le Renges was the boss. I hesitated for a moment and then I sidestepped out from behind my skinny little tree and circled around the back of the van. There was a wide aluminum step below the rear doors, and two door-handles that I could cling on to.
“You are out of your cotton-picking mind,” I told me. But, still, I climbed up onto the step, as easy as I could. You don’t jump onto the back of a van when you’re as heavy as me, not unless you want the driver to bounce up and hit his head on the roof.
Mr. Le Renges seemed to go on talking forever, but at last he gave the security guard a wave and drove forward into the yard, and the van followed him. I pressed myself close to the rear doors, in the hope that I wouldn’t be quite so obtrusive, but the security guard went back into his booth and shook open his paper and didn’t even glance my way.
A man in a bloodied white coat and a hardhat came out of the slaughterhouse building and opened the car door for Mr. Le Renges. They spoke for a moment and then Mr. Le Renges went inside the building himself. The man in the bloodied white coat opened the car’s passenger door and let his enormous dog jump out. The dog salaciously sniffed at the blood before the man took hold of its leash. He went walking off with it—or, rather, the dog went walking off with him, its claws scrabbling on the blacktop.
* * *
I pushed my way in through the side door that I had seen all the cutters and gutters walking in and out of. Inside there was a long corridor with a wet tiled floor, and then an open door which led to a changing-room and a toilet. Rows of white hard-hats were hanging on hooks, as well as rubber aprons and rubber boots. There was an overwhelming smell of stale blood and disinfectant.
Two booted feet were visible underneath the door of the toilet stall, and clouds of cigarette smoke were rising up above it.
“Only two more hours, thank Christ,” said a disembodied voice.
“See the playoff?” I responded, as I took off my raincoat and hung it up.
“Yeah, what a goddamn fiasco. They ought to can that Kershinsky.”
I put on a heavy rubber apron and just about managed to tie it up at the back. Then I sat down and tugged on a pair of boots.
“You going to watch the New Brunswick game?” asked the disembodied voice.
“I don’t know. I’ve got a hot date that day.”
There was a pause, and more smoke rose up, and then the voice said, “Who is that? Is that you, Stemmens?”
I left the changing-room without answering. I squeaked back along the corridor in my rubber boots and went through to the main slaughterhouse building.
You don’t even want to imagine what it was like in there. A high, echoing, brightly-lit building with a production line clanking and rattling, mincers grinding and roaring, and thirty or forty cutters in aprons and hard hats boning and chopping and trimming. The noise and the stench
of blood were overwhelming, and for a moment I just stood there with my hand pressed over my mouth and nose, with that fried shrimp sandwich churning in my stomach as if the shrimp were still alive.
The black vans were backed up to one end of the production line, and men were heaving out the meat that they had been gleaning during the day. They were dumping it straight onto the killing floor where normally the live cattle would be stunned and killed—heaps and heaps of it, a tangle of sagging cattle and human arms and legs, along with glistening strings of intestines and globs of fat and things that looked like run-over dogs and knackered donkeys, except it was all so mixedup and disgusting that I couldn’t be sure what it all was. It was flesh, that was all that mattered. The cutters were boning it and cutting it into scraps, and the scraps were being dumped into giant stainless-steel machines and ground by giant augers into a pale-pink pulp. The pulp was seasoned with salt and pepper and dried onions and spices. Then it was mechanically pressed into patties, and covered with cling-film, and run through a metal-detector, and frozen. All ready to be served up sizzling-hot for somebody’s breakfast.
“Jesus,” I said, out loud.
“You talking to me?” said a voice right next to me. “You talking to me?”
I turned around. It was Mr. Le Renges. He had a look on his face like he’d just walked into a washroom door without opening it.
“What the fuck are you doing here?” he demanded.
“I have to cook this stuff, Mr. Le Renges. I have to serve it to people. I thought I ought to find out what was in it.”
He didn’t say anything at first. He looked to the left and he looked to the right, and it was like he was doing everything he could to control his temper. Eventually he sniffed sharply up his right nostril and said, “It’s all the same. Don’t you get that?”
“Excuse me? What’s all the same?”
“Meat, wherever it comes from. Human legs are the same as cow’s legs, or pig’s legs, or goat’s legs. For Christ’s sake, it’s all protein.”
Necro Files: Two Decades of Extreme Horror Page 25